Deer Hunting She Wants The D Shirt

Shara McCallum: Memory has often been a spur for me as a poet, not so much in a narrative sense but in the way a spark a feeling or image often leads me to a poem. I’m curious about why we remember what we do and how our memories come to define us, as individuals and as groups of people organized around such social concepts as nation, race, etc. Equally, if not more so, I’m interested in why certain parts of the past (private and public) are forgotten or deliberately covered up. But I think your question is really, What does memory have to do with myth for me?—which is a great question and much harder to answer. When I was writing the poems you mention I don’t think I was conscious of wanting to recast my memories as myths, but I have always loved myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and storytelling itself. I see myth as a way we can widen our gaze as people—helping us to see past our own, personal experiences and to recognize that others have also had these same lives, these same foibles and failings and joys our ego keeps insisting are unique to us. In some sense recasting my mother (who is already transformed by becoming a figure and not the real woman once I put her into the poem) as these mythical characters was my way of trying not only to see my “real” mother and the figure of the mother in the poem more fully but also to refract ideas of womanhood and motherhood through multiple characters at once

Deer Hunting She Wants The D Shirt

TM: What was the most challenging poem for you to write in This Strange Land? Why?SM: It’s a toss-up: either the long sequence that opens the book—“Dear History”—whose poems/parts I wrote and rewrote for eight years, working to get the different voices and threads of personal and public histories to occupy the same plane; or the collage poem, “From the Book of Mothers” which was composed (as all of my collage poems have been) out of scraps from my notebooks, which I then typed into a file, and quite literally cut-up into slips of paper that I arranged and rearranged on the floor, to see what the poem would be. What both the long sequence and long poem share in common, I suppose, is the idea of arrangement as crucial to their expression. They also reflect my desire to get at a larger story or idea or truth by employing multiple voices, points of view, and tonalities—things I’m attracted to as a writer. The other reasons these poems—and this book as a whole—were so difficult for me was that many of the poems began before I became a mother, and were largely coming out of one subject (Jamaica in the 1970s as I was growing up in it), and then my writing was disrupted in every sense—thematically, aesthetically, and practically—by motherhood and the upending of self that resulted. When I understood that this rupture had to become the subject of some of the poems, that’s when I began to understand how to write and finish “From the Book of Mothers,” perhaps most obviously, but others like the “Dear History” sequence as well, if less obviously.