In two weeks, I'm to teach a class on "Writing Poetry That Matters." It boils down to "write poetry that is honest, that says something, that you care about."
In about 5-6 weeks, it will be Kingdom Arts and Sciences Festival, with the annual Duke Gyrth Oldcastle Memorial Poetry Smackdown. And the entry poem's theme this year is "home." Nothing immediately jumped to mind, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice what I'll be preaching in class.
I had two threads to pull here: what home means to me, and what period verse form would be best to express what it means. Anglo-Saxon alliterative is my preferred form, but I can work in others.
"Home" in Anglo-Saxon Verse
Most famously, Anglo-Saxon poets sing of the hall-joys: music, song, drink, warmth, friends. These are sometimes compared favorably to the cold and wet of a sea-voyage (The Seafarer) or a subterranean cavern (The Wife's Lament), and unfavorably to the joys of Heaven (The Seafarer, if I remember correctly). They are inverted when discussing Grendel and his mother, the outcasts whose dwelling places are the marshes and meres (Beowulf).
What is home to me?
The obvious approach would be to write up the SCA as the hall, and its fellowship as hall-joys. Except I wasn't feeling it. I do love the SCA, and I do remember that feeling of home-coming when I first joined, but there's a coziness and ease that 'home' ought to have that my time in the SCA doesn't. Upon reflection, I think it's just being around people in general. You have to watch how to talk, how you act, what you say, from angles that aren't always obvious to me. I have to make sure I'm being adequately Peer-like, which means paying close attention to other people's needs and wants. It's tiring. It's good work, no mistake, but it's work for me. It is not a relaxed 'home' sensation.
Well, what about mundane home? We were lucky enough as children to travel once or twice a year, to places that were not relatives' homes, and my parents generally encouraged us to call whatever place we were staying "home." Home is where your pillow and underwear are. I wondered if maybe there'd be some Spanish picaresque form that would be helpful for capturing this sort of wanderer's sense of home.
Then, a few days later (yesterday), I went for a walk in the snow. It was quiet and peaceful. I had no to-do list, no chores, no one who needed anything from me, and I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders. This was home. I could just be, here, outside and alone, even if the wind stung my cheeks and made me turn my back into the wind.
I compared it mentally to my actual home, with my actual family in it. I love the house and the family, but they are not sources of rest. Even leisure activities in the house involve voices - voices in books, on screens, words words words that chatter and chatter ceaselessly. (I am the sort of reader who hears each word in her head.) Only outside, with its open spaces, invited the kind of rest I was looking for in home.
Bringing the inspiration back to the form
This actually locked right in. The poem will tell of a woman's search for home. We will meet her on the ship bringing her to her new husband and kin. She reaches the hall, but as its mistress, she is responsible for ensuring her husband's men are kept harmoniously, working constantly to soothe tempers and smooth ruffled feathers. Retreating to her own cottage, she finds it full of more obligations, domestic chores like spinning and child-rearing. When she leaves the cottage and goes to the wild mere, she finally feels the release and peace of "home."
It starts off period-ish enough; the ending is wildly modern. Old English poetry reinforced community values, and those emphatically did not include "running off to the mere to become a semi-aquatic monster." A more period poem would have the woman looking to Heaven for her true home, perhaps in death or in a nunnery.
Traps
It's easy to run into a bunch of "wild woman" cliches here. "Aw, the suburban white-collar worker thinks she loves nature, how cute." It's really more "Nature makes my anxiety shut up." So I think I'll want to lean into themes of peace, quiet, solitude, calm, and serenity, rather than freedom, release, wild, untamed.
The sea-voyage idea for the start is possibly too much added length for not enough added oomph; I will likely draft that bit and see how it goes.
