As part of the 2021 Dear Poet project, students around the country and the world wrote letters to Beth Ann Fennelly in response to a video of her reading her poem “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding” aloud. Beth Ann Fennelly wrote letters back to four of these students; their letters and her replies are included below.
Beth Ann Fennelly also wrote a response to all of the participants of this year's Dear Poet project.
Dear Readers of “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,”
When I was asked to contribute a poem to this project, I had a hard time choosing which poem to pick. Eventually I went with this poem from my first book because I wrote it when I was not too much older than you are now—I was twenty-two. Some of you asked if the poem is autobiographical, and it sure is. I’m very close with my former college roommates, and one of them, Carmen, got married during my first year of graduate school. I was working as a teaching assistant, making $8,000 a year, which is to say, I was broke. Actually, that’s a lie. At that point, you’d have to give me money for me to be broke. Anyway, Carmen asked me to write a poem for her wedding, which was such a sweet gesture—she’s always supported my writing habit and in college would listen patiently while I read her whatever I was working on, which had probably been composed through a scrim of tears, fueled by red wine and filched cigarettes, after some boy had broken my heart. Which is to say: bad. I was bad. But dear sweet affirming Carmen never did a thing but encourage me. God, I love her.
So when she asked me to write her a poem, I wanted to, if for no other reason than it could serve in place of a wedding present, which I couldn’t afford to buy her.
So I tried. I really did. But the type of poem that is appropriate to read at a wedding is optimistic and celebratory. And those feelings were nowhere to be found in my wrung-out heart, because my parents were getting divorced after twenty-nine years of marriage. In most ways, I’m lucky to have had so many years with a stable family; by the time my folks got divorced, I was already living on my own, so there was less physical and emotional disruption to my life than if I was a child who had to swap houses every weekend, or get involved in a nasty custody battle, etc. But my ability to believe in unending love, my hope for my own future of marital bliss—erased completely. If people married almost thirty years can still stop loving each other, does love even exist?
So I told Carmen I couldn’t write her a poem.
Instead I wrote “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,” secretly. I didn’t show it to her until much later.
And I didn’t give her a wedding gift, either, not even a generic set of steak knives, like I threatened—I couldn’t afford to.
But this story has a few important updates.
I mentioned above that I was a few months into my graduate degree, an MFA I was earning at the University of Arkansas. And I had already made a few good friends. One of them, a sweet guy named Tommy, made me feel so comfortable that I started sharing my work with him. He listened to my poems as kindly as Carmen. And we became friends, then good friends, then best friends, and we still are. Tommy is my husband of twenty-three years, and we have three kids, and we still like each other about 98.6% of the time. So maybe that’s one reason I have a soft spot for “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding,”—it was written in this narrow window in which there already was a Tommy, though he was not yet MY Tommy. Ahead of me: love, the big love. As it is, I hope, ahead of you.
The second update is this: years later, the St. Louis public transportation system printed some poems on posters for their buses, and they chose my poem. So for her fifteenth anniversary, Carmen received a copy of the poem at last, in the form of a framed poster, which hangs in her house in South Bend.
Oh, and I even gave her a set of steak knives, for reals.
Thank you, all of you, for reading my poem and writing to me. These days of no hugs, no interaction with strangers, all smiles hidden behind masks—these days can be a bit lonely-making. Your letters—I read them all, and was de-lonelied, profoundly. Words chosen with care and written with a desire to be honest can do that, can build a human connection that helps with the lonelies. This I know. And you do, too, or you wouldn’t have written me.
With the hope that somehow the universe will bring us the chance to meet (somehow, somewhere) in person,
Beth Ann Fennelly,
Oxford, MS
Poet Laureate of Mississippi, 2016-2021
Beth Ann Fennelly reads "Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding" for Dear Poet 2021.
Dear Ms. Beth Ann Fennelly,
My name is Celeste, I am sixteen years old, and I attend Cherokee High School as a sophomore. Your poem "Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding” resonated with me as a teen trying to figure out what a “relationship” and “love” really is to me. Your ability to shift moods so quickly and effectively immediately stood out. One moment you are explaining the sticky glow in the dark stars you still have on your ceiling as an adult and then the next you exclaim, “[You’ve] listened to the songs / of the galaxy.” It was just so eloquently written that I have trouble putting it into words.
Off the bat, it was extremely refreshing to hear an adult say they didn’t know all the answers, especially about love. From my experience it is too often portrayed that there comes a time when you’re “older” that you suddenly realize the meaning of love and its complexities and the keys to the universe are handed to you somehow. As a result of this I’ve grown this irrational fear that I’ll be the one exception. That I’ll be the one exception who doesn’t find their true love and have someone to grow old with. But, in your poem I feel a sense of solace in knowing that I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what it all means. Essentially, “I would rather / give you your third set of steak knives / than tell you what I know” feels like the story of my life. And I’m the generation who’s going to need to know all the answers; “How do you propose we save our planet from burning to a crisp? Oh, sorry my bad...finish your math homework first.” Also, I love how slightly bitter you are at the bride of this wedding you are going to. She’s the one getting married yet asks you to write a speech about love is such a funny concept to me. The line, “You ask me for a poem about love / in place of a wedding present, trying to save me / money“ while it lightens the mood I love your ending theme of how ultimately, “miniature and breakable” we as humans are.
I find it ironic that your entire poem is about not knowing answers but, I have some questions I would love to ask you. What did you end up saying at Carmen's wedding? Were there any challenges you faced when writing this poem or afterwards? How do you not let your art affect your mental health since you're constantly tapping into emotions both good and bad? How can you differentiate between when to take criticism of your work and when to be confident in what you’ve made despite others not understanding its meaning? I’ve been making short films and getting feedback from professors and peers. I recently showed a short film to my class for which I was very proud of and excited to share with others. But afterwards I got heavily criticized by the professors on multiple aspects of it while also having two of my peers message me saying it was the best film they’ve seen throughout the entirety of the course. While I agreed with some of the professor's negative evaluation of the piece it has since rubbed me the wrong way, leaving me with conflicting emotions about criticism vs. confidence.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my letter Ms. Ann Fennelly. I look forward to hearing from you soon and I can’t wait to read more of your work!
Sincerely,
Celeste
Dear Celeste,
Thank you for writing me about your reaction to my poem. Your response seemed so honest, and I love the questions you asked because they seem like ones you really crave an answer to. I kind of wish we were talking about your questions face to face, over a coffee—but who knows, I think it’s sometimes harder to be honest about your fears when you’re face to face, so it’s also nice to exchange letters.
I love what you said about how young people are made to feel that they know nothing and when they’re older will they know what love is and have “the keys to the universe” handed to them somehow. Wow, I totally remember feeling powerless simply because I was young. I remember, for example, that while my family was very conservative, Catholic, and Republican, I somehow came out of the womb leaning the other direction. And sometimes my father would tease me about my opinions. I don’t think he meant to belittle or condescend to me, but that’s how it ended up feeling. For example, he would say things like “If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you don’t have a heart; if you’re not conservative when you’re old, you don’t have a head.” I saw then that the authority he possessed simply due to being older could be a kind of bludgeon that rendered me impotent simply because I’d never catch up, age-wise. I’ve tried to remember how bad that feels to be dismissed and invalidated, and I’ve tried to find a way to let my own children feel their way toward opinions and stances, even when they are not the ones I’d choose for them. I remember when my daughter was eight, and swam in a neighbor’s pond, and must have seen something on the internet that scared her, because they next thing that happened was that she became convinced that she was dying of a brain eating amoeba. I knew whatever she’d read on the internet wasn’t true, and I wanted to rid her of her fear, but I didn’t want to do it by making fun of her. Her suffering was real. She wasn’t faking. She avoided all water, had a hard time sleeping, and was terrified because she believed she was dying. I tried to validate her very real emotions while leading her away from the false source of her terror.
In your letter, Celeste, you say that it was refreshing to hear an adult say she didn’t have all the answers about love but you still have some questions about other things. Not only do I not have all the answers about love—I don’t have all the answers to your question about when/where to take criticism, either! The experience you shared about making a short film that was praised by some peers but criticized by your professors, leaving you “with conflicting emotions about criticism vs. confidence”—this is an experience I’m VERY familiar with, and still sometimes suffer from. All I can say is—criticism gets easier to take the more you take it. When I first started sharing my poems in class during a college workshop, I was so emotionally devastated by criticism—after all, the only people who’d read my poems before that were my mom, and Carmen, both of whom thought I was great! Sometimes after my poetry workshop, I’d come home and cry. And once or twice, shamefully, I didn’t even make it home before the tears began plopping onto the page before me. But as I stuck with it, the criticism began to become more useful simply because I heard so much of it that I toughened up a bit. And after a while, I began to discern good, useful criticism from boorish or lazy criticism, simply because the good stuff “sounded” right. Like perhaps I’d secretly half-wondered if the end of my poem was a little pat, and then someone would say, “The end of this poem struck me as sentimental and predictable,” and part of me would think ouch at the same time part of me was nodding my head, recognizing the truth I’d kept from myself. So, Celeste, keep wading through the opinions on your work and soon you’ll not have to feel every criticism is a wave that could drag your under.
I bet you’re a good filmmaker. I would like to see one of your films one day. Then, maybe, I can write you a fan letter.
Fondly,
Beth Ann
Dear Beth Ann Fennelly:
My name is Grace and I am a freshman at Woodstock Union High School in Woodstock, Vermont. I am writing to you about your poem “A Poem Not to be Read at Your Wedding” as a part of an assignment for Ms. Fountain’s English I class. I was drawn to your poem because I really love the idea of making a poem about what you want to say but can’t. I remember my Dad and I were talking one night about how movies and TV shows give people the wrong impression about how an event is supposed to go and this poem reminded me of that conversation. If I am being completely honest, I’m not really that big of a poem lover, but I really enjoyed your poem because there was a little bit of humor involved and it was very honest.
I particularly liked the line “For three nights I’ve lain under glow-in-the-dark stars I’ve stuck to the ceiling over my bed. I’ve listened to the songs of the galaxy” because it reminded me of a picnic under the stars. I really like how you added that from the perspective of the stars we are just little objects that are breakable and useless. That to me is a very good comparison because I feel like many times people say “event of the year” or “you can’t miss this” but is it really that important? This poem really does show that there is so much more to the world than the big party or event and that things are not always what they seem or as exciting as people say.
I find this poem very fascinating because it is such a different perspective, I have never really read or thought about a poem like this before. A type of event that stood out to me when I was reading this poem was a family dinner. When I hear the words “A big family dinner” I picture people laughing and talking about what is new in their lives, children running around and a huge feast that could feed five times the people there. Well family dinners don’t go like that or rarely ever do. The truth is that the “Big family dinner” that everyone is so excited about is just a bunch of people, who rarely take the time to visit each other, try and make small talk and put on fake smiles while trying to laugh at someone's funny joke. I think that it is awful that we have such high expectations, because when things don’t go exactly how we expected or what we thought was going to happen, we can get really mad and ruin a still perfectly good family dinner.
When I first read your poem I didn't do the audio version, so when I read your poem in my head I thought that it was very sarcastic. This poem made me laugh the first time I read it because I thought that it was really funny. Then I listened to the video of you reading the poem and I realized that it was more of a wise poem trying to give a lesson to the people getting married. It was absolutely incredible to me about how this poem can have two completely different tones and I really enjoyed it. I really liked how it was a very sarcastic or humorous poem in my head, but I loved that when I heard you read the poem I got this whole different feeling of it being very serious.
I wonder what caused you to write this poem? Did a person actually ask you to write a poem for their wedding and you created this poem instead? I wonder about these things because this sounds like a poem that you could write in the moment when someone asked you to write a poem about their wedding.
Thank you for writing this poem. Like I said at the beginning of this letter, I am not a big poem person but this was a poem that I could really relate to and I really enjoyed reading.
Sincerely,
Grace
Dear Grace,
Thank you so much for taking the time to write me about my poem. My favorite part of your letter was when you wrote about reading my poem on the page first and coming to one understanding of it, and then watching the video and coming to a different understanding after hearing the audio. What you describe happens to me a lot, too, and it really reinforces for me that poetry should be heard; that poetry takes place when the air is rising through the windpipe and reaching the ear of another human. I think we forget that sometimes because writing and reading poetry seem solitary—but that’s a rather recent phenomenon, historically. Poetry is about community, even one made of just a single reader and a single listener, and the gift of the poem is best received through sound, through human connection.
When I was a girl I wanted to be an actress. I was really terrible. (My Mom has about 40 fraying VHS tapes if you need proof). (Fun Fact: I was in Mary Poppins with Vince Vaughn when I was in grade school). It took me a long time to understand that I shouldn’t be on stage in the role of actor, but what drew me to the stage was the delicious mouth-feel of words tumbling about, and that’s something that’s stuck with me, and is perhaps why I love to read my work for others. I also like to read aloud the work of other poets; even when I’m reading a favorite book of poetry home alone, I read it aloud to see how the poems taste and sound. I’ve learned a lot from that practice. Plath stipulated her late poems be read aloud—only when I began reading them aloud did I realize that “Daddy” is funny. Later I would read a letter the poet John Berryman, at the age of twenty-two, wrote his mother on how he came to “hear” Yeats’s “A Prayer for Old Age,” at last: “Like most of his poems, it should be read aloud a hundred times—sometimes only after weeks have I understood an intonation.” I’ve learned that the longer I’ve known a poem, the more often I’ve read it, even memorizing it, the more shifts and nuances I hear in it, and the more subtle and complex my understanding becomes. I’ve come to think of all poetry as a musical score for one instrument, an instrument that’s forged of human air.
Anyway, you claim that you’re “not a big poem person,” and I know you’re a freshman, so maybe you haven’t yet read Plath or Berryman, but I think you’d like them. Also, as you appreciate the difference between the way poets communicate on the page versus on the stage, maybe you would enjoy trying the Poetry Out Loud recitation contest? I bet your teacher, Ms. Fountain (what a great name! She led you to the fountain of knowledge! Drink deep, don’t just gargle!) knows about this program. Students memorize and recite poems, and the state winners get to compete in a big competition in Washington, D.C.! When my daughter was a junior in high school, she was the Mississippi state champion, and I got to go to D.C. with her. I took a video of her recitation, but it’s so poorly filmed can’t show it to anyone: I was weeping so hard as she recited that my phone is jumping all over the place.
Good luck to you, Grace. I’m so glad you connected with my poem.
Warmly,
Beth Ann
Dear Beth Ann Fennelly,
I am going to be brutally honest with you twice as a preface to my letter: The first thing I need to admit is that I found myself reading the 20 poems of the “Dear Poet” selection only because of an assignment in my AP Literature class. We have been studying poetry of all types throughout the year and the latest assignment was to choose a poem from the 20 on poets.org and write a letter to the poet, of course submitting the letter to my teacher as well. My second admission is that I had a distaste for poetry in the beginning months of the school year. I enjoyed it more than math or science, but I found it rather confusing and consequently, found poetry units less engaging than novel units in English class. As the year comes to a close, however, I have reevaluated my position on poetry. I now can comprehend the complexities of older poetry where a man describes a woman in such elaborate detail you would think her to be a goddess, but the poems that I fell in love with are the more simple, modern poems. The poems that, for the first time since Kindergarten, pushed literature to second place in my list of favorite things to study, are the poems like yours.
My name is Anni. I am a Texas High School Senior who is, admittedly, a bit snarky (although my mother would say I’m sweet) and who loved your poem “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding”. While I was reading through the 20 poems, yours immediately stood out to me. It was perfect. A little bit funny, a little bit sarcastic, and dancing across the boundary between cynical and harsh without turning into the latter. I enjoyed the contrast between the lightness of the diction and the heaviness of the themes. You wrote about love and its fleeting nature without making the reader feel weighed down and discouraged from any future romantic commitments. Your warning of love was hidden in this short sonnet refusing to write a poem about love for a friend’s wedding. The writing is unique, alluding to a past trauma involving love or just the simple fact that love doesn't deserve its own poem, seeing as we are all just specks of dust in the universe. Captivated by the lack of detail and explanation, I read and re-read your poem attempting to find why you wrote this sonnet instead of a sappy love poem for your friend Carmen. It would have been easy to produce a simple love poem, Heaven knows there are plenty of examples out in the realm of creative writing already. But you did not. You chose, instead to recognize the vastness of the world and comparatively, love’s insignificance.
“Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding” was my favorite, although I cannot relate to it. I am 17 years old and know nothing of love. No one my age really does. The frontal lobes of our brains aren’t even fully developed, so how can we be expected to understand concepts as intricate and delicate as love? To me, love is a daunting idea. Giving myself to one person for the rest of my life seems incomprehensible at my young age, but your poem helped. It is comforting to know that adults such as yourself don’t have love figured out either. That even as I grow older, love will always be too big a concept to fully understand, much less articulate into the form of a poem.
Although this started out as an assignment for my class, Mrs. Fennelly, I am truly glad I got to read your poem and discover your other poetry. “Ode to Butter” is another one of my new favorites. I can relate to it as I, too, was raised in a private, Christian school and it seems, suffered some of the same consequences of that style of upbringing, but this letter is not about the shared experiences of our teenage years, it is about my looking to you and your poetry and
your unique outlook on love for an odd sense of comfort. So I will conclude this letter by thanking you. Thank you for writing “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding”. Thank you for not giving in and writing another sappy love poem. Thank you for being a strong, female poet and writing poetry that girls like me can read and enjoy. Thank you for helping spark a new interest in my life, one I hope to carry throughout my college career and to adulthood. Thank you.
Blessings,
Anni
Dear Anni,
I’m so happy that you got a chance to study “more simple, modern poems,” and glad that that my poem was one of them. (Yay for your AP Lit teacher!). It sounds like you and I have a bit in common, actually—you know from my poem “Butter” that you referenced, Anni, that I went to an all-girls, Catholic high school. Like you in your private, Christian school, I wasn’t exposed to vibrant contemporary poetry written by people alive and kicking. Instead, we were given poems designed to instill ladylike values--demure, religious, snorrendous verse, chased with a whiff of mothballs. We were introduced to one Emily Dickinson poem, and it’s surely her most coy:
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
Only much later would I find for myself her poems of wildness, despair, and ambition. So, regarding poetry, I, too disliked it. But in college I had my first creative writing workshop and was exposed to my first contemporary poems. For me it was Denise Duhamel’s poem “Bulimia” that shocked me into realizing that poetry didn’t have to be ladylike, that it could speak a truth I recognized, that it would be relevant to my life. That poem, and that creative writing workshop (thanks, Prof. John Matthias) changed everything I thought I knew about what poetry is. And you’ve already discovered that in high school! #winning.
You wrote something else in your letter that caught my eye—you noticed that my poem is secretly a sonnet! I don’t announce it as such, and I don’t think anyone has to notice that to enjoy the poem. And in fact dedicated sonneteers might disagree with my claim, as my poem is free verse. But because I adore sonnets I’ve read a lot of them and my choice of fourteen lines wasn’t accidental. My kinda-sorta-sonnet was my way of furthering my theme, because it was an attempt to play off the traditional love sonnet, which can snap to a tidy close, especially if it ends with the English rhyming couplet. I love sonnets like that but they tend to convey a neatness to love that might be belied by reality, at least to me at the time when I wrote that. I wanted my sonnet to have an error message in its coding.
Anni, the five sentences of thanks you wrote at the end of your letter made me feel so good. You claim to be a snarky person—if you are, snarky is my new favorite kind of person. Thank you.
From Mississippi to Texas,
Beth Ann
Dear Beth Ann Fennelly,
Hello, my name is Mackenzie and I’m a Sophomore at Biddeford High School in Maine. I'm writing to you in regards to your piece, “Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding”. I am doing this for a school project, being completely honest I chose your poem at random. Sure, I had an idea of which poems on our class list I didn’t want to pick, but I'm not a fan of poetry so it was hard for me to connect and find a piece that interested me. After I read through your poem multiple times and pushed my heavily biased view of poetry aside I realized A: poetry is not my enemy and B: I related to your poem.
As a teenage girl the idea of love and marriage is one of the things that has repeatedly been force-fed to me through the media and society since I was a kid; however, being a child of divorced parents has torn down the joyful facade that clouds marriage. I enjoyed your poem because the way I interpreted it was similar to how I see marriage. To me, marriage is just a way for people to feel secure in their relationships, and I feel your poem also expressed the same doubts in marriage. My favorite lines of the poem are also the lines I relate to the most, “I’ve listened to the songs of the galaxy. Well, Carmen, I would rather give you your third set of steak knives than tell you what I know.” The first line to me means that you have seen or maybe felt the effects of a bad marriage and you have chosen to adhere to those warning signs. I think my parents’ divorce would be my “songs of the galaxy”, I’ve seen how a bad marriage affected them and how it affected me. I knew my parents were going to get divorced so it wasn’t a surprise. It was their fighting that affected me the most, the people that were supposed to love each other the most in the world didn’t, which was weird for me to see. I liked the second line because I felt it added some humor to the poem, and I love steak. I don’t talk about my parents’ divorce very much, and if I do I usually make jokes about it. Personally, I believe it's better to let people laugh with you about a situation than have them feel bad for you.
Furthermore that same line placed a lot of imagery in my head, “I’ve listened to the songs of the galaxy.” This line could be understood in a million ways; it holds a lot of symbolism. I’ve already talked about one of my interpretations of it, and although this may sound bizarre this line makes me think of Marvel movies. My parents could barely stand being in the same house together let alone sitting at the same table for over an hour, so oftentimes I would see a movie with only one of them. I remember the first Marvel movie I watched was Guardians of the Galaxy, I was with my mom and I did not want to go at all. Despite this I absolutely loved the movie, so much so I asked my dad if we could go see it together. I was obsessed with this movie, I loved the soundtrack, the characters, the actors, everything about it. From then on I got to see all the Marvel movies twice in theaters, which I was definitely not complaining about. My Dad and I don’t agree on much but the soundtrack to this movie was also something we could put on and enjoy together. This line to me means to be very cautious when in love, and reminds me of listening to songs from a movie about space criminals fighting a purple and blue dude with my Dad. Quite the contrast, but that is something I am learning to enjoy about poetry because one line could make you think of a million things.
Your poem made me think, feel, and imagine many things. One line that really stuck out to me was, “For three nights I’ve lain under glow-in-the-dark stars I’ve stuck to the ceiling over my bed.” This line overall makes me think of my childhood since recently I’ve been noticing how little of it my peers and I have left. More specifically it reminds me of my childhood best friend's room. She had the glow-in-the-dark stars above her bed too, I remember counting them as I fell asleep in her room during sleepovers. However, just like the stars above her bed, our friendship faded. There is a certain heartache you get when you realize you have said goodbye to who you used to be and to those who made you who you were. Despite the constant longing I feel to be as careless as a child again I am growing happy with who I am.
Originally I had some questions about this poem and some lines and what they mean to you, but while writing my first paragraph and referencing your poem repeatedly I have come up with even more. First I would like to ask, is this written from your point of view? If so, what are your feelings towards marriage and how has marriage changed you? Another question I have is about the last line, I had no idea what a Pinto was till I read your story, was there any reason behind the decision to include this car in your story? You mention stars twice in this short poem so what is their purpose in this story? In the beginning when they are first mentioned they seem to help give guidance and at the end, they are portrayed as something that sees people as weak.
While writing this letter I have found a new appreciation for poetry. Your poem is something I unexpectedly related to and found comfort in. I remember complaining to my mom about poetry just the other night and how I wished poems would just say what they meant. I think this is now my favorite part about poetry, I love how the lack of directness has allowed me to think about a wide range of things. The ideas just kept coming and coming which wouldn’t have happened without your amazing poem. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this letter and I hope you have been safe and healthy through this pandemic.
Sincerely,
Mackenzie
Dear Mackenzie,
Your letter really moved me, and also made me smile. I like the way you write about your life and experiences. And I like that you wrote that you’ve often complained about poetry and wished “poems would just say what they meant,” though now you’ve changed your mind, which is very cool. To be honest, I sympathize with that sentiment—it does seem, to someone new to poetry, that poets are just burying their meaning under a lot of excess verbiage and fancy phrasing. This is why Plato said poets belong in one of the rings of hell—because they engage in linguistic frippery, decorating and obfuscating their meaning with metaphors and sequins. Well, I love me some sequins. But in truth my goal, and the goal of many poets I know, is to say things as simply as possible, and in as few words as possible. Mathematicians claim that two different people solving a math proof can both end up with the correct answer, but even though they are both “right,” if one person needed fewer steps to get there, took less room solving the equation, that person’s answer is more “elegant.” I think elegance is the same with poetry—the goal is to say a complex thing in as short a space as possible. As Einstein said: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” So in this situation, I needed some of the details, like the glow-in-the-dark stars and the Pinto, to establish a setting that already felt a bit provisional or vulnerable, to underscore the vulnerability of love. (To answer your question, I chose the Pinto because it was a cheaply made car, already a bit of a relic when I was growing up in the 80s/90s).
As you seem to have guessed, I’m also the child of divorced parents, though my parents got divorced when I was in my early 20s and I had already moved out, which made things less wrenching than for you. I loved your story of seeing the Marvel movies twice, and think this seems to show you’re a very resilient person, in that you found the one small silver lining to a terrible situation. That and the fact that you seem to have a very philosophical and mature reaction regarding growing distant from your childhood friend and losing her. I have also lost a childhood friend for no clear reason, at least none that I could pinpoint, just she kind of dropped me and I found it very confusing and painful and I suppose still do. My friendships are very important to me and losing a friend was terrible, especially without knowing why she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. Your stance of being determined to grow happy with who you are—I think that will serve you well your whole life. Oh—and another of my college roommates/BFFs lives in Maine not far from you! You two should hang out! But then I’d be jealous.
The last thing I wanted to address is your question: “how has marriage changed you?” The reason I want to address this is I hope my answer might give you a little comfort, because if you’ve seen a marriage break down up close you begin to doubt love can last and marriage can be healthy. But despite my fears and doubts I did meet someone. In fact, by the time I wrote this poem I’d already met him, but we were just friends at first. Gradually I began to trust him, and shared my poems with him, and shared stories of my life, and he shared with me, too. Now we’ve been married 23 years, and I still feel happy when I wake up next to him.
Mackenzie, I hope you find someone who appreciates your thoughtfulness and honesty, and loves Marvel Movies, making jokes and eating steak.
Keep reading poems and being awesome,
Beth Ann