#435 Backstory of the Poem “A husband abandons his wife to the noted female paleontologist in order to continue his tour of the continent” from the poetry collection PICTURING by Jory Mickelson, published by End of Line Press on January 22, 2025

 ABOVE MIDDLE:  Jory Mickelson giving a poetry reading.  January of 2025.

Click on the link to purchase PICTURING from End of Line Press.

https://endlinepress.com/Picturing-by-Jory-Mickelson

 Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?

I attended the Desert Rat Writing Residency in Palm Desert in June of 2022. While there, I was working on a new collection of poems about visual art, queer history, and how much of LGBTQIA+ history has been erased from the historical record in regards it art.

https://desertratresidency.com/

https://lgbtqhistory.org/lgbt-rights-timeline-in-american-history/

BELOW:  Jory Mickelson in 2022

One day at the residency, it was 116 F outside and I needed to find an indoor activity that day. I ended up watching the 2020 romantic drama Ammonite, directed by Francie Lee. The film’s plot centers on Mary Anning, an acclaimed but overlooked paleontologist, and a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea by her husband. They develop an intense relationship. It is set in the 1840s. So, while I was watching the film, I took notes on what struck me—images, ideas, sounds, details. I sometimes do this as a way to slow down and study a piece of film, even documentaries, to use later in my work. I had to shut the blinds because the sun was so bright that day.

Click or copy/paste the below link to view the trailer of Ammonite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnHM9Ff0BvQ

Click or copy/paste the below link to read the Esquire interview of Francie Lee

https://www.esquire.com/uk/

culture/film/a35923243/the-full-on

-film-making-of-francis-lee-ammonite/

In the evening when it had cooled off some, I went to dinner at a fabulous restaurant by myself. At the table, between courses, I was reading A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain. It is a lush book, and several of the phrases seemed to echo the scenes in the movie. They coalesced together into a first draft of this poem, originally titled “The Wind Again.” At dinner I took notes, and then I came back to the residency and started to put the pieces together.

Click or copy/paste the below link to purchase A Horse at Night: On Writing from New York Review Books

https://www.nyrb.com/products/a-horse-at-night

Click or copy/paste to view Amina Cain’s website

https://aminacain.com/

Photo Credit: Polly Antonia Barrowman (BELOW FAR RIGHT)

Click to view the website of Polly Antonia Barrowman

https://www.pollyantoniaphotography.com/

At some point, the draft was a single block of text. In the fall, I shared the poem with my writing group. I don’t remember if the break in the text, turning it into two stanzas happened before I showed it to them, or afterward. The breaking of the poem into two pieces felt key, there was a second movement happening and the break is an attempt to capture that.

The final form of the poem came much later, when I was working with the editor Michael V. Smith on my new book Picturing for End of the Line Press in 2024. He said, “I don’t get it.”

He struggled with figuring out who the speaker of the poem was, along with the question of the “her.” Was her a woman or the sea?

Click or copy/paste the below link to view Michael V Smith’s website

https://www.michaelvsmith.com/

 The title of the poem started out as a flippant attempt on my part to explain the context that the editor and reader might need to find some grounding as they entered the poem. But then I thought of other poets I admire who have very long poem titles. Foremost in my mind is the poet Kelli Russell Agodon and her poem “Everyone Is Acting as if We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home.” What an amazing title! I figured if she could make such a gutsy move in a poem, I might try my hand at it as well.

Click or copy/paste the below link to read “Everyone Is Acting as if We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home” published by Nation Magazine on September 10, 2019.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/

everyone-is-acting-as-if-were-not-temporary-

and-i-am-falling-apart-in-the-privacy-of-my-own-home/

Click or copy/paste the below link to view Kelli Russell Agodon’s website

https://agodon.com/index.html

Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version?  And can you share them with us?

The first half of the poem really changed. When it was still called, “The wind again” the poem began in a different place. The poem begins with wind and sea water, which were ever-present in the film. Again, it isn’t much to ground the reader in other than the sensation of the elements.

The revised version of the poem with the longer title begins elsewhere. The speaker is immediately present in the poem. Also, one slight change that reflects the new title is that in the original poem, the speaker says, “Of her, / I took no notice…” In the final draft, the speaker says, “Of his / wife, I took no notice…” The husband’s presence is still intruding in the first half of the poem. The abstract “her” in the first draft, is in someway defined or caught between the husband and the female paleontologist in the final version.

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?

This is a great question. Because this poem coalesced around images and phrases, rather than a clear line of argument or reasoning, I think that the take away might be more abstract as well. I would like the reader to realize, that in many ways, love or at least desire is primordial if not elemental to everything on earth. (Or at sea, or in the air.) This might be what the line, “…Surely there are older / forms for this, because are animals beautifully / made.”

Yet, we as a species are excel at denying, repressing, or making up complex rules about which desires may be expressed and how. Also, which kinds of longing must be done away with entirely.

This is why the speaker in the poem, in the second half, says something like “Nothing must come of this, I tell her.” Even as Mary and Charlotte are carrying out their passionate love affair in the film

 Ammonite, we as viewers know how things will end. It’s 1840 and there is no world present then, in which two women can love one another openly and be esteemed as a couple publicly.

I want a reader to realize that even though desire and attraction are elemental, we so often come up short, so often limit these things in our daily lives. I would rather the world be like the chorus’ lyrics in the Three Dog Night song “Joy to the world,” Joy to the world / All the boys and girls / Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea /Joy to you and me  but we aren’t there yet.

Click or copy/paste the below link to view the website of Three Dog Night

https://www.threedognight.com/

Click or copy/paste the below link to view Three Dog Night perform “Joy to the World.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9uoq9gfeL0

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why?

It wrecked me a little bit. I was thinking about people I had loved in the past and people who had loved me. How I still thought about former relationships, even though they didn’t last or had failed in some way. It was satisfying to me that those loves were still swimming around inside my mind, even though some of those people are long gone from my life—who I haven’t seen or spoken to in decades. Even many of the details of those relationships fade over time. The impression of them lasts beyond what they used to mean to me.

The speaker in the poem hopes the same is true for her in her lover’s mind. Whatever their time together meant, she hopes that emotional resonance of it lasts beyond the details of who she was in that moment. Our love and our desire have the ability to shape and transform us, even if the object of that desire—the individual themselves—does not go forward with us.

Click or copy/paste the below link to view the website of Jory Mickelson.

https://jorymickelson.com/