Scrap by Scrap: Turning History into Poems

by Jeannine Atkins

“Over here,” I said, pulling two friends past shelves of books to Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters. My book looked splendidly fresh in blue covers. At that moment I forgot it had been about ten years since I conceived of the collection, after stumbling into the realization that the famous mothers were all born in 1867. I spent a year or so reading biographies and old letters, noting what overlapped in the lives and what was different. I developed these notes into fact-based fiction for children. After this manuscript was returned to me with I’m-sorry letters, I put it away for a few years, then brought it back out when I realized what most interested me was the push and pull between the daughters and mothers, between love and independence. I wanted to show not only the courage of the writers, entrepreneurs, and scientists, but also the sidesteps, steps back, and costs of success.

This made it look less like a book for children and more like one for teens, or at least those old enough to question the wonderfulness of their own mothers. I happened to be living with such a girl when I began mining my prose for fragments to reshape. Watching my daughter get ready to leave home, and remembering my own flights and returns, worked its way into poetry, which honors mystery as much as explanation.

While I’ve long written poems for my own pleasure, I’ve usually been more pulled toward story. But brevity has power. So does switching genres. I tried to keep a taut narrative thread as I lifted my pen from the paper, whether or not I’d reached the edge of the paper. My attention hovered before landing, too, as I arranged words that evoked colors, textures, and heft. I often think first with pictures, then translate what I see in my mind into language. I’ve published ten books written in sentences, but all of those declarations, questions, and exclamations were wrangled into shape. Subjects followed by verbs don’t naturally form in my mind. Composing poetry, I paid less attention to grammar and more to how the words sounded next to each other. Instead of looking for prepositions and conjunctions to hold everything together, I considered what would fit on a line. My aim was for each line of verse to carry some weight, while breaking the lines at places where readers might teeter. I hoped the sense of being momentarily off-balance would keep them moving to the end.

In Borrowed Names, most of the poems are built around what we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. These may evoke not only a surface, but what might be beneath; not only the present, but a past and future. Reading about how the first house Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in as a young bride burned to the ground, I wanted to know exactly what she managed to carry out. Lists make my heart beat hard. Learning that the writing desk her young husband built was lined with green felt was important to me. So was knowing that the first drafts of her books about little houses were hand-written in orange notebooks that cost a nickel.

When researching how Madam C. J. Walker mixed ingredients to improve the health of her hair, creating a formula that would make her fortune, I conjured the scents of beeswax, coconut oil, and rose hips that went into her pot. I reflected on the importance of water in her life, from the years when she hauled laundry tubs near the Mississippi River, to time spent washing customers’ hair, to sitting quietly on the porch of her mansion with a view of the Hudson River.

Both Marie Curie and her second daughter, Eve, wrote memoirs, and while I cared about triumphs in physics, I was also excited to hear about the butterfly nets Marie gave her two daughters. I was happy she told us they were green.

I read widely, the way someone might rummage through boxes of old magazines, letters, and yellowing book reports to make a collage. I noted dates of events, then tore and trimmed whatever distracted or didn’t reveal enough. I write many drafts because, like a collage artist, I need to see everything on the table before I can assess whether it’s needed or not. Borrowed Names is structured through sections about three different mother-daughter pairs, but I’ll refer to just the part about Marie Curie and her daughter, Irène, for an example of how I moved from research to poetry. Of course I read biographies, but I also browsed travel and history sections of libraries for pictures of things that might be taken for granted by someone who wrote at the time. I scouted out books with pictures of the houses and apartments where the Curies lived, and the streets they might have seen from the windows. Then I imagined the sounds of horses and carriages on cobblestones. I wanted to know what shapes of bread were usual, what sorts of soup people preferred. What styles of shoes and hats were in or out of fashion? I looked for natural history books to find out what species of butterflies might have flown in Paris at the turn of the century. And I watched the way butterflies flit among my own Massachusetts perennials and ferns, thinking of words for the ways they sky-sailed and landed.

Of course reading and wondering takes time, which can be tedious or fun, frustrating or gleeful tripping into discovery. It is often all of the above. I usually did my word-wrangling in the mornings and researched in the afternoons. On good days, reading on the couch pried up ideas that led me to sit up again and write. I shuttled between my impulse to build a portrait and understanding that what’s not told can leave an impression, too. Sometimes a biographer, sometimes a poet, I built scenes, but held back to let readers find their own ways through. I don’t want readers to feel as if they’re colliding into thick stacks of information, but rather brushing what’s common and tangible. Coats turn to prickly branches and wooden planks and mothballs become snow as children step through a wardrobe into Narnia: I’m not using details to build portals to magic lands, but I hope readers feel as if they’re touching a past that is both familiar and unlike what they’ve known before.

To introduce the Curie family, here’s how I began one late but not final draft:

Butterflies and Wasps

On a blanket in a meadow outside Paris,
the broken end of a baguette turns crusty.
Soft yellow cheese puddles into black currants and plums.
Wasps claim a dab of gooseberry jam.

Regarde, Irène’s mother says. Look closer.
The wasp, perhaps sated, or dizzy with sugar,
flies to the earth, digs, thrusting strong slender legs, spewing dirt.
Irène’s mother, whom she calls Mé, approves
of the wasp’s hard work. She admires
the perfect spaces of its papery home,
the nest’s elegant geometry and physics. …

After I sent the manuscript to my editor at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, one of Reka Simonsen’s astute observations was that this section began a bit slowly. I’d heard that from my critique group, too, and thought I’d tightened the pace. Apparently not enough. In my next draft, I cut the poem set in the park, moved ahead a few years, and began with the day that Pierre Curie died.

Run

Ducking as if under rain,
Irène scrambles beside her mother,
who drops one arm to lift her little sister.
Eve squeals and kicks, missing the ground.
Their mother’s other arm curves, an umbrella
over Irène until they reach the garden next door.
…
Mé’s eyes are gray as the tree trunks in forests
of fairy tales she refuses to tell. …

Here I aimed to show Marie Curie’s taste for facts, even as, we’ll soon see, she’s putting off telling her children about how Pierre had just been struck by a horse-pulled carriage. Then I brought in the green net and butterflies I’d plundered from poems I’d cut. The wasps and their papery nest went into a folder with other phrases that may someday find their place (doubtful, but the thought is a consolation). I couldn’t afford space for many insects, and butterflies could appear more than once, leaving echoes. I knew that Marie Curie encouraged her children to hunt for butterflies and let them go after they’d been observed. What I didn’t know, and what I gave myself license to make up, was how the child might feel as butterflies disappeared back into the sky. I can’t be certain if anyone noticed the shadow of a butterfly at Marie Curie’s funeral, but I knew the service was held in spring, and wildflowers bloomed in a nearby meadow, so it was likely butterflies fluttered, pollinated, cast shadows, and provided me with an image to unite the early and last poems.

The book ends with Irène, now grown and a scientist like her mother, placing nets into the hands of her own children. She remembers how her parents once stood side by side, gazing into bowls of radium casting a blue light. It’s a memory only Irène Curie could have. But a daughter standing in a cemetery, looking at her shoes, is ordinary enough. So is the way Irène found letters saved in a candy box tied with thin ribbon, even if most daughters’ letters don’t hold math equations posed by their mothers.

In Borrowed Names, you’ll find the Curies’ spare kitchen table, where physics problems were scribbled beneath grocery lists. Another section takes you to Louisiana, where potatoes were peeled on a table that would later hold chopped burdock root, rose hips, and elder flowers to mix and smooth onto hair. A red-checkered cloth covered the table in the Wilder farmhouse.

Writing these poems, I lingered with the images the way I once turned over old greeting cards, cotton handkerchiefs, tangled necklaces, and mismatched earrings in my mother’s top bureau drawer, looking for clues about who she was. Now that my daughter is twenty-one and lives across the country, I sometimes wonder in a similar way as I straighten books, clothing, colored pencils, and photographs Emily left behind. What will she find in my words and bureau drawers one day? What will connect and what push us apart? There’s so much I’ll never know, but I put what I touch and see into words because that changes everything. Poetry reminds us that questions are as crucial as answers.

Please visit the Macmillan site to read excerpts from Borrowed Names
http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage.aspx?isbn=9780805089349#Excerpt

Or read my blog at http://jeannineatkins.livejournal.com/

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