Author’s Note: The Poetry Postmortem is where I take a poem I or someone else wrote and I discuss it in a non-workshop way. I am of the opinion that academics and critics have a tendency to suck the life out of poetry. They talk of “critical eyes”, but they are blind to the heart of a poem.
I went through a period of extreme stress for the first five months of 2022, so I didn’t write very much. After I moved house (the cause of the stress), I had a breakdown. I eventually got myself together in the summer, and this was the first poem I wrote.
I didn’t really have a solid idea in mind, but at that point in time, I had a short fuse. I was beginning to build a resilience against people picking on me. I have been quite the pushover in previous years, but not anymore.
I talk of society as an egg, and how “…I was formed from the yolk”. I thought this was an interesting metaphor to use, and as an extension of society, it symbolises life.
There is a distance in this poem, as demonstrated by the line: “Mother grew my bones and guts in her cauldron belly.” My choice of using “Mother” instead of “Mum” is an intentional choice. The process of growing a baby is a form of magic in a sense, so using the word “cauldron” brings this idea to the forefront.
As the poem goes on, there is a lot of eluding to fire through words such as “atom,” “spark,” and the very direct “fire”. The line, “I play with fire, and I save myself from this obscene jelly,” is a reference to the author Mark Fisher. In his book, The Weird and the Eerie. I occasionally sprinkle references to things throughout my poetry.
What I also often do is take a situation and reimagine it through verse. This poem reimagines a relationship as though it happened. The person in question died before it could, so this is my way of immortalising people.
I express my feelings through hyper-specific metaphors such as, “I found it hard to breathe within the rapture of skeletal misery”. There is a mixture of simple and complex language that I use in this verse. I think this gives the best of both worlds.
If we take a look at the themes expressed, there are notes of existentialism and the Gothic. I am very much a big fan of the darkness in life. Ultimately, this is what shows up the most in the poem. Every feeling is conveyed through the lens of mysticism.
Again, I wasn’t sure of what the poem was going for, but given the context, I was struggling with my personal identity. I was also very depressed, so all of these elements contributed to how the poem came to be.
If anything is to be said about this poem, it can be through the final line: “Seven jagged pieces, vertically persistent in their feline ambivalence.” The use of seven would make one think of the Bible, and in some ways it does. The number seven is prevalent in numerology. It is associated with intuition and creativity, and is ruled by the planet Ketu.
Concluding, the process of trying to disassemble your own poetry is not as easy as one might think. I work on 90% intuition. When I write a poem, it comes from a sudden moment. I don’t plan anything. All I can do is provide you with the context of my feelings at the time of writing the poem, and hope that it provides some valuable insight into the mind of Courtenay Schembri Gray.
Mother Cauldron was published by JMWW, and it is also featured in my poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street.
Courtney, there's a lot of stuff going on in this poem. It's an expressionistic, surrealistic, kaleidoscope of compressed emotions of grief, hopelessness, despair emblazoned with such colorful phrases that would even make great stand alone lines like you'd see in an Instagram poem. It reminds me of Plath, Rimbaud, Mina Loy (I think you'd like her work if you're not familiar with it.); and your post mortem I think does a great job of deconstructing it for us to get a peek behind the curtain at your creative soul. I do something similar with my "origin stories" when I can get around to doing them. I also vibe with your creative process about working on intuition, that the poem comes on "all of a sudden." I kind of work the same way in that I spill my guts out on the page, then, if I think there's anything worth developing/editing, I'll clean it up, refine it, etc. But yes, for me, it starts with a thought and goes from there. "The bathroom mirror breaks apart like chocolate..." Wow!...Hope this comment didn't "suck the life" out of your poem, but added to it in some way.