#440 Backstory of the Poem “Daughter, Driving at Night” from the poetry collection WINTER SHARP WITH APPLES by Annette Sisson published by Terrapin Books.
#440 Backstory of the Poem “Daughter, Driving at Night” from the poetry collection WINTER SHARP WITH APPLES by Annette Sisson published by Terrapin Books.
https://www.terrapinbooks.com/store/p70/sisson.html
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?
This poem was much longer originally, and it took me many months to pare it down to what was essential. In the early forms, it was more encompassing. I included where my daughter was that night (an extra on the filming of the TV show Nashville) and the fact that it was my birthday—it was a big deal that she was not home to help me celebrate. It took me a long time to realize that these details delayed getting to the extraordinarily mysterious experience I had that night: Hearing my daughter scream and cry desperately in her car because she was so lost, this even though she was 15 miles away from home so I couldn’t have “heard” her in the usual way.
For some time, I felt that the poem just wasn’t quite right, wasn’t quite ready, though it was close, and though I knew I wanted to persist in working on this poem because the experience of being connected to my daughter in this mystical way was so compelling to me—the metaphysics of it all, beyond either of our ability to comprehend in rational ways, but we figured out (when she made it home) that the moment when she was pulled over on the side of the road screaming and crying was the same moment the sound of a girl screaming outside the house pulled me from my bed, where I was reading, to investigate the calamity.
I abandoned this poem several times, but finally, after enough time had passed, I realized that I needed to lose many of the details I had included that were factually true but were not serving the poem well.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.
I like to write in the passenger seat of a moving car. I watch the clouds and the landscape roll by, and somehow that frees my mind and lets it drift from image to memory to image to thought to words. Anyway, that is where this poem began—on a yellow legal pad in the front passenger seat of a black Prius, somewhere between Nashville, TN and Indianapolis, IN.
What month and year did you start writing this poem?
The event the poem is based on was in 2012. I started writing this poem sometime in the autumn of 2020.
BELOW: Annette in December 2012; and in November 2020
https://www.eduardoccorral.com
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?
Unfortunately, I didn’t save all the drafts and revisions of this poem (I often do, so that’s too bad)—so I don’t have the actual lines that were excised from the poem. But as I mentioned in #1 above, I had included a lot of details in the poem about my daughter being absent on my birthday and even about the different scenes she was part of in the TV show. I knew about the scenes because she called and texted to tell me about them over the course of the day and evening. (This was an all-day shoot that lasted very late into the night.)
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?
I hope readers will ponder their own relationships with loved ones and marvel at the emotional connections that cannot be accounted for through rational explanations.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why?
The ending was the most emotional part for me to write because it is absolutely true and also wholly inexplicable. To me, the last sentence of the poem is an emblem of the ineffable love that, if you are fortunate, can be shared between a mother and daughter.
The poem was published in Willawaw Journal on September 20, 2023.
