Letting Myself Be Led

Pádraig Ó Tuama's delightful invitation, and a brand new, exclusive to Substack poem

My grandparents, Joseph and Vivian Lauricella, on their wedding day, June 8, 1946. Before leaving to serve in the Pacific with the Navy in WWII, he promised to marry her if she waited for him. They teach me patience every day.

I have been receiving Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound Substack newsletter for a while now, and each edition feels like such an anchor as it arrives in my inbox, which, despite the pressures of digital minimalism culture, is never zero.

This week’s newsletter was a wonderful introduction to a new-to-me poetry form, the pantoum, from Malaysia. Pádraig offers:

“Begin by thinking of a single object that means something important to you. I’m hoping you choose something that has deep meaning for you. A blanket. A watch. A bunch of letters held together by twine. These objects carry meaning, and the plain description of them can often be a carrier — the “objective correlative” TS Eliot called it — of emotional weight.”

The instructions continue, inviting readers to respond to the following eight prompts, after which he shares the different order that these prompts will eventually be arranged in (and repeated and adjusted) to create the poem:

“1. Where you got the item

2. Where you keep it

3. What others say about it

4. A secret only it knows

5. A description of it

6. How others see it

7. A particular time you reached for it

8. What it means to you”

I have been meaning to do this exercise all week but have become lost in the thicket that is mid-October, and so, didn’t find myself composing my responses and arranging my poem according to his instructions (which you can find in the original post of his, here) until quite crammed into an aisle seat on a rush hour green line train in Boston yesterday afternoon (not the first time that the intersection of poetry and passenger trains have met for me).

I was completely delighted with the process of being led through my memory, trying my best to really see the object I chose as if for the first time. I’ve never really taken a poetry class or creative writing course, and something about being given free reign to respond to the prompts, while at the same time being offered guidance on the arrangement of them, felt sturdy and grounding.

Below is the pantoum poem I crafted on the train about my Grandma Vivian’s 25th silver wedding anniversary ring that my grandpa, whom we called Papa, gave her for that occasion. Papa died at 84, and when my Grandma Vivian died just short of her 99th birthday, I was astonished to learn that she had bequeathed the ring to me. I wear it every day.