Structural Relevance: A Poetry Cycle in Response to My Great-Grandmother’s Voice (Creative writing/research essay for MAIS 621) 

The discovery of my great-grandmother Marjorie’s book of poetry worked its way into another MA-IS project. One of the requirements for MAIS 621 (Narrative Possibilities) was to maintain a daily writing practice. I experimented with personal reflection, which comes naturally to me, and then I surprised myself by writing daily poems in response to Marjorie’s poems and life. As I started to brainstorm my final project for the course, I looked at the pile of poems I had written and realized I had some sort of series.  

The practice was an exercise in asking questions without expecting a response. For my final project, I explored how poetry can be a practice of ancestral veneration and discovery. The nonlinear and metaphorical language of poetry made it possible for creative relationships to bloom beyond daily reality. 

“I have found that poetry allows one to connect with the beloved dead in the realm of the imagination,” I wrote. “It doesn’t matter whether we can literally communicate with the dead. While I wrote poems for my great-grandmother who has been dead for 85 years, I didn’t wait for signs from her or hold seances in my basement.” 

This poetry project helped me tend to Marjorie’s spirit and explore aspects of my ancestry beyond the confines of my rational mind. It was also a process of “restorying” (Knudson-Martin, 1995), to look at the narrative that Marjorie left behind and attempt to craft something from it. My poems were both a response to and a reworking of her narrative. 

While I was working on this project, I excavated an extraordinary piece of Marjorie’s life from my basement archives: the journals she wrote during the last seven years of her life. I felt like I was guided to discover them, hidden at the bottom of a box of notebooks and letters. I noted the differences between her poems, which were focused on faith, nature, and family, and her journals, in which she detailed the minutiae of her daily life and documented her health. 

The journals didn’t make it into any of my poems, but they did give me insight into Marjorie’s life. They also formed the basis of another research project, which I explore in my final artifact. 

References (APA 7 style) 

Knudson-Martin, C. (1995). Wild (powerful) women: Restorying gender patterns. Contemporary Family Therapy: An International Journal, 17(1), 93–107.