Joanna Boulter wrote:
> I did one once as Myra Hindley in prison. For those who don't know,
> she was one of the infamous "Moors Murderers", who along with Ian
> Brady tortured and killed several children, back in the 1960s.
>
> It wasn't a successful poem, per se, but I never managed to figure out
> why or how.
>
> But there is this compulsion, not so much to excuse, as to understand
> if we can.
>
> joanna
I'm paying particular and extended attention to these comments from
everyone who's spoken because...God will strike me for my hubris...I
feel as though this one is somehow important. There has been a strain
in me for years of being someone else. This is the first time since
1992 I've tried to be a woman. Lynndie England grabbed me from the
minute I saw that picture of her with her kid. The kid made his mother
real.
In 1993 I cooked up a, yes, dramatic monologue. It was one of several I
wrote over a long weekend. One was Henry Stanley. The other was Harry
Kendall Thaw, the maniac who shot the architect and pedophile Stanford
White in the face on June 25, 1906. He did so in Madison Square Garden
in front of a crowd. White had "taken the virginity" of Evelyn Nesbit,
Thaw's wife, when she was 15, after White had gotten her drunk and/or
drugged. After two trials, money prevailed and Thaw was acquitted as
insane. Actually, he probably was. As it is I'm a bit appalled even
now at how much of Thaw I "got."
The poem clunks. It's like really overcooked Robert Browning. Yet it's
still interesting...I kept tying up with malcontents, or making them. I
did better with Henry Stanley since I had to totally invent him. "How
ya gonna get 'em back to New York after they've seen the jungle?"
The one I wanted to write I couldn't. It scared me. Back in the late
1980s, some man who'd been denied visitation rights with his kid
kidnapped his son, took him to a motel room in California, soaked him in
an accellerant, and set him afire. It was an unspeakable "If I can't
have you nobody can" gesture. But the boy didn't die. He spent years
in the hospital receiving skin grafts. He looked like an Amish doll.
There was news footage when he came out of the hospital, and my younger
son--about the same age--saw the footage and freaked. "Why would his
father do that?" I think for a moment he was afraid of ME. I tried to
explain from no knowledge whatsoever that love can become so strong that
it can twist and can make you hurt people. I guess I got it right.
I tried to write a monologue from inside the father. I fought with it
for months. I quit. Maybe I was lucky. I told myself I wasn't nuts
enough to see inside that guy's head. But I believe now that I was
afraid that if I succeeded, I would not be able to get out of that
maniac's mind. This is of course bilge. The poem I wrote was emphatic
in terms of the man and compassionate toward my son's terror. It's not
AWful, it's just not what I need to do there.
I also want to write from inside the Columbine kids, Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold. Recreate them. One mind or two or one? I was those
kids when I was in Junior High School. I lacked only a companion in
misery and access to weapons. I can't say I exactly went "right on!"
when I heard what they did, but I could start to understand what might
have pushed them to both vengeance and self-annihilation...the same impulse.
What a collection..."Ken's Deviants." It would probably be published in
some Ruppert Murdoch publication. Well, reworking them will keep my
warm on cold nights.
ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
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