Girl Finds Power / Learning from Elders poem + Revision Notes

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit the ever-enthusiastic-for-poetry-and-life Mona Voelkel for Roundup.

me and mom at a quilt show
 photo booth :)

I've been thinking this week about the woman who've most influenced me in my life: my mother, of course. My paternal grandmother, Grandma Dykes, who taught me about love and cooking and gardening; my maternal grandmother, Grandma Oslund, who was a chemist and a librarian long before women regularly held those positions...and she was also a wizard with a needle and stayed actively involved in community leadership right up until her death; my mother-in-law Bobbie Nell Holcomb Latham who was a southern "steel magnolia" through and through, and taught me about hospitality, southern cooking, fashion, home decor, shopping, self-care, family traditions, and family business; and a host of other woman who've mentored me in one way or another. 

The one that popped into my head while writing this week's ArtSpeak: WOMEN poem is Jana Lile, the mother of the girls I babysat regularly for quite a few years. Not only was Jana a loving mother, but she modeled for me all the things women can do while raising a family. It was her attitude more than anything. She made my world bigger and helped me find my power—a process that continues to this day! So this one's for you, Jana! (I've also left a few process/revision notes below!)

Riding with Aunt Jana

Jana prepping for the 1991 bridal shower
she threw for me. :)

In a world of no
and can’t
it’s Aunt Jana
who reins the carriage
down an open road
lined with giant trees

As we bump along,
the horse’s tail
swishes yes yes
steady hooves clop
you can
you will

And the trees
bend before me

- Irene Latham

Lucky me, I was able to spend time lately with poets through Inked Voices. In those sessions, the need/desire for revision strategies came up again and again. With that in mind, I wanted to share some of my revisions on this poem:

When I started this poem, it had a placeholder name "Polly." Likely because we've been re-watching Peaky Blinders, and one of the powerhouse women characters is named Polly. But then I remembered Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly, and I wanted to change the name. "Jana" was first to pop up for me, so there you go!

I didn't want this poem to have a lot of punctuation, so I used stanza breaks to act as sentence enders and then went back and added capital letters at the start of each stanza to help convey the "sentence" more easily for readers.

The first draft had a different ending, but I decided it was too on-the-nose (about child realizing she might rein a cart someday). Poems should show more and tell less-- and use images. That's what makes it magic! And this poem is, ultimately, about the magical moment of empowerment. And that's when the image for the last stanza came to me. Only it first came as "bend down before me." But you know and I know that we don't really need "down" for the reader to get the image, so I cut that word.

Another word choice thing: I originally had "tall" trees in the first stanza. But when I added the magic in the last stanza, I wanted it to be a more magical descriptor. Thus "giant."

Please let me know if this is useful, and I may include such notes in the future!