Miss American Pie
Jim Simmerman’s “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” from THE PRACTICE OF POETRY, edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell
I’ve loved this book The Practice of Poetry for so long. There are at least two copies somewhere in my cottage, probably because I was traveling and needed to carry one with me.
I’d been thinking of a poem, “Miss American Pie,” that I wrote from one of the exercises in this book. Not the poem exactly, but the situation of the poem. It was almost twenty years ago that a surgeon told me I had a 50% chance of ovarian cancer and a ball inside me the size of an orange.
I wrote the poem after my surgery. After the haze of painkillers wore off, unable to do much of anything. My friend, the writer Terry Ann Thaxton made a sign-up sheet for friends to bring me meals, visit, do laundry. Almost everyone I’ve ever known in Orlando came to the top floor of my pink apartment on Lake Ivanhoe and brought me food. The writer Jeanne Leiby went to the pharmacy for my pain pills, the writer Robley Wilson drove me to my doctor’s appointment, as did the writer Susan Hubbard. Lots of writers visited. Bethany Bower came with her small twins who made me a bracelet from loose buttons and string they found on a bookcase (I still have it). Bethany also filled in for me at my job as director of grants administration at the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida. My ex-boyfriend did my laundry. Terry actually moved in for the first two weeks to take care of me. I’m so grateful for everyone who visited, helped me. I was lucky. No cancer. Amazing friends.
I had time on my hands. Eight weeks recovery.
When I opened The Practice of Poetry to Jim Simmerman’s “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” I didn’t think of it as a great way to access my subconscious, I was just excited to see what would happen, for example:
(1) Begin the poem with a metaphor
(4) Use one example of synesthesia
(6) Contradict something you’ve said earlier in the poem
(9) Use an example of false cause-effect logic
(13) Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person
(15) Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
You can find the entire exercise, along with Jim Simmerman’s discussion of how this exercise worked with his students in The Practice of Poetry. He did the assignment himself, and created this joy of a poem, “Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More,” published by Poetry, and the title poem of his fourth collection. (He was also a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1984-85, and I loved learning he’d lived in a place I love.) I don’t see how anyone could read his poem and not want to try writing their own version.
In fact, one hundred poets from across the country wrote poems following Jim Simmerman’s exercise, and they were published in an anthology, Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen, 2004)!!
Here is Simmerman’s poem from his own exercise:
Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More
Morning comes on like a wink in the dark.
It’s me it’s winking at.
Mock light lolls in the boughs of the pines.
Dead air numbs my hands.
A bluejay jabbers like nobody’s business.
Woodsmoke comes spelunking my nostrils
and tastes like burned toast where it rests on my tongue.
Morning tastes the way a rock felt
kissing me on the eye:
a kiss thrown by Randy Shellhourse
on the Jacksonville, Arkansas, Little League field
because we were that bored in 1965.
We weren’t that bored in 1965.
Dogs ran amuck in the yards of the poor,
and music spilled out of every window
though none of us could dance.
None of us could do the Frug, the Dirty Dog
because we were small and wore small hats.
Moon go away, I don’t love you no more
was the only song we knew by heart.
The dull crayons of sex and meanness
scribbled all over our thoughts.
We were about as happy as headstones.
We fell through the sidewalk
and changed color at night.
Little Darry was there to scuff through it all,
So that today, tomorrow, the day after that
he will walk backward among the orphaned trees
and toy rocks that lead him
nowhere I could ever track,
till he’s so far away, so lost
I’ll have to forget him to know where he’s gone.
la grave poullet du soi rest toujours avec moi –
even as the sky opens for business,
even as the shadows kick off their shoes,
even as this torrent of clean morning light
comes flooding down and over it all.
I invite you to write your own!
Here is the poem I wrote in the pink apartment in Orlando, not dying, my friends around me, including Jim Simmerman who I did not know, but who felt like a friend guiding my way to this poem (also available here: Miss American Pie (uab.edu)) and in Five Kingdoms, Anhinga Press, 2010.
Miss American Pie
The silk inside me was scooped out, not to wind
around my lungs. One little moon ovary, a bead
swollen to an orange, removed, bye bye
miss american pie. Afterwards, it was a slumber
celebration, the Atlantic in the distance.
C’est la guerre, everyone had been afraid of the C
word, killing my son, the quiet of it. At the oncologist’s
office, the women in their scarves had made me cry,
the daughters tired, and the woman on the TV
crying because she’s given a chance to sing.
The lost ovary travels a back street, self-luminous,
hello hello. I leaned into a six-foot campfire,
a light tower, fog bell, as if I were myself
and a painting of myself in his arms, ice to ice,
the glacial edge of the island that is all one watchfulness,
one rest. An electrical field of piled carpet light like
Jesus in Mexico, Africa, Haiti, with braids and the glow
where glow comes from. But I didn’t lean, he leaned,
the entry into. I was beat, cut up, but baby, if your tea
is drunk, it’s still hot. Never a day without a boat
in the strung town of east. But I heard, I am loved, words
curving shadow on a sunned house, and I floated in
the dark, in light, Kelle Kel very uncrowded.
Henry Beston said, it is not good to be too much alone
and listened to the outer ocean, like Nana who loved
the marsh, the ocean come to visit. My doctor saying
not to waste any time. To get cracking. Fool around.
(Five Kingdoms, Anhinga Press, 2010, originally published in PoemMemoirStory)
There is one spot left in my Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet memoir workshop, “Obsession, Memory, & Image,” held October 7-11, 2024, 6-8 pm EST via Zoom!
I’m also excited to read with Airea D. Matthews, Emily Nemens, and Nova Ren Suma for the Fine Arts Work Center’s 24PearlStreet reading series, Wilder Words, on Thursday, October 3, 6 PM EST. I hope you can join us!
I’m grateful to have new poems in the September/October issue of The American Poetry Review, a triptych of nonfiction in Virginia Quarterly Review, and a short story in the new issue of Craft, if you’d like to take a look.
Thank you so much for reading and subscribing.
Kelle