Charles P. Ries reviews
FINISHING LINES
By: Ellaraine Lockie
32 Poems / 47 Pages / $5
Snark Publishing
637 W Hwy 50 #119
O'Fallon, IL 62269
Since being bitten (badly) by the muse six years ago, Ellaraine Lockie has received
eight Pushcart nominations for her poetry. She accumulated over sixty poetry
awards by the end of her first year of actively submitting work. Her first published
chapbook entitled MIDLIFE MUSE won the Poetry Forum's annual chapbook
contest in 2000. And if that doesn't get your attention, she has received over two
hundred awards in poetry since launching herself into the great poetry super highway
just six years ago. But before you go and take a flying leap off a tall building and
break all your pencils you should know that while she is new to poetry, she is not
new to writing.
She told me about her jump into poetry, 'I previously had written in other genres
(and still do)--nonfiction, magazine articles and children's picture books. Seven years
ago I had not read a poem since high school, except for the occasional one I came
across in children's literature. I thought I hated poetry; I thought it had to rhyme.
Then one day an old friend sent me some of his poems and wanted my opinion.
I liked them, but they didn't rhyme. So I called my children's writing mentors for
advice. When they told me about free verse, I became obsessed with writing it and
with getting it published. This happened at a tough time in my life, and poetry became
my salvation. I just jumped in and started writing like crazy, unaware of what other
poets were writing. I entered the poems in contests before submitting to editors,
knowing that I needed something in cover letters to entice editors into reading my
work carefully.' If she needed verification that she was on the right track, she
certainly got it.
Lockie's fourth book of poetry, FINISHING LINES, reflects her refined grasp of language
and form. I wasn't surprised to learn that Lockie was a chronic re-writer, for not much
in any of these poems seems extraneous. She told me, "I re-write constantly. I re-write
until every word is the perfect word for what I want to say at the time. I re-write until
I am in love with the poem. My theory is that if I don't love it, how can I expect anyone
else to even like it? I often continue re-writing after a poem has been published.
It's an evolution.' Her careful hand is seen in THE WHIPPING WOMAN:
The woman I hire to daughter my mother
makes bi-weekly visits to the dementia ward
Lies down beside the near-still waters
Accepts the mouth kisses wet with drool
From where gravelly words
dribble down washed-out gullies
Like a whipping boy she bears the brunt
of each face-to-face flagellation
that my rawhide flesh refuses
And for twenty dollars an hour I purchase
like contraposition of a professional mourner
Substitution for services I can't supply
Lockie told me that, FINISHING LINES focuses on the endings of things - people,
animals, places, relationships, seasons of life; and death is of course the ultimate ending.
I'm fascinated with endings. We all deal with small ones on a daily basis--the ending of a
day, for instance. Then as we reach middle age, we increasingly have to cope with endings.
Things, animate and inanimate alike, just wear out. It seemed to me to be a universal topic
for a poetry collection. Many endings create beginnings, and this intrigues me too. I allude
to, or straight-out address, this aspect in many of the poems here. It's a cycle. Thus, the
foreword T. S. Elliot quote, 'In the beginning is my end.'
This theme is most clearly visible in Lockie's poem LIBERATION. Here is an excerpt,
I hatch slowly
Each day cracking
lost wonders
Ice cream and oatmeal
for breakfast
English for Chinese neighbors
Lunch with an editor
An afternoon rest home visit
A cat-in-heat night
Hello sunshine!
I'm 54 years old
at Disneyland
With the rest of my life
to take rides
I follow famous sisters
through Tomorrow Land
At 60 Colette opened
a beauty salon in Paris
Jackie O became a book editor
Margaret Mead said
The most creative force in the
world is a menopausal woman
with zest
You haven't seen anything yet
Margaret Mead.
If I had anything less than glowing to say about this collection,
it would be Lockie's overuse of alliteration. I knew it wasn't an accident
and wondered if it was a result of her work on children's books. Here
is what she told me, 'Alliteration is one of my favorite poetic devices,
yes, and my use of it is purposeful. I like the musicality it creates,
especially when reading out loud. Also, I often use it to achieve continuity
between lines. You're right though--too much alliteration gives the
same kind of sing-songy effect that rhyme can cause. But I guess
'too much' differs from reader to reader. I'm careful not to let alliteration
get in the way of what I want to say--another possible pitfall the device
shares with rhyme. Whereas picture book writing isn't responsible for
my use of alliteration, it is responsible for the structure of almost all my
poetry. In fact, I call this structure 'Picture Book Poetry', and teach a
workshop on it.'
Technique is written all over these poems and while my tastes lean
toward less developed work, I found Lockie never left me wondering
what she was trying to say. Her narratives never became secret code.
But beyond using precise language, she also structures her lines with
complete intention. She does not use commas and periods, and I asked
what she was trying to accomplish by this. Here is what she told me,
'I didn't do away with commas and periods; I never used them in poems
(except for prose poems). They defeat my main purpose for writing poetry,
and that is to be completely free when I write. Punctuating in poems makes
me feel like I'm in poetry prison. Also, putting a period or comma at the end
of a line seems a little redundant to me. The line break already signals a
slight pause. I use capitalization at the beginning of a line to signify that
an extra pause is needed before beginning that line (like for a period), and
this makes sense to me. I use a fair number of sentence fragments so if I
punctuated prose-properly, my poems would all be littered with commas.
Also, writing without end-of-line punctuation forces me to work harder on
clarity and syntax. Poetry has never completely followed the rules of prose
anyway. Look at all those capital letters at the beginning of each line. I think
that's useless and out of date.'
So indeed (and thank God), Lockie did not just drop out of the heavens
unformed and begin to write great poetry; she'd spent a life time acquiring
her taste for language. But, still, I wondered how long she'd been writing
and where did she get that great name of hers. Perhaps everything is
revealed in her reply, "An elderly poet in a black beret whom I met at my
first poets' reading in Berkeley, asked me the same question. I told him that
my given name was Ella Loraine, but that my mother's first name was also
Ella and that I didn't like not having my own name. So in the second grade,
I combined my two names into Ellaraine, wrote it on the top of a school
assignment and announced to the teacher and classmates that it was to be
my name from then on. The Berkeley poet said, 'My dear, you are not
a beginning poet; you have been a poet since the second grade, because
that's what poets do: they condense in a creative way.'
I would have to agree, and say that while Lockie has been writing 'poetry'
for a short time, she has been a work in progress her entire life – and it shows.
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