Poetry Postcard 35: A Confession

E. STUART HARDY (BORN 1870) FROM

THE STORY OF THE FIVE REBELLIOUS DOLLS, C. 1910.

DARLING & COMPANY POSTCARD, donated by Patricia VanAmburg.

What is up with these dolls? They look cranky, stressed out. I tried to do some research on their story, to find a copy of this children's book, but I didn't have much luck. I was stuck.

Should the poem for this card focus on the dolls? Maybe the child to whom the rebellious dolls belong. I couldn't settle on the right voice.

Then, I found my personal connection to the drama unfolding in this scene. When I inserted my long-ago self into the story, the poem came together.

Rebellion

When my child was at last asleep,

a soldier doll in thumb-sized bearskin hat

marched to me across the nursery floor
I’d walked all night. He raised

his toothpick sword, entreated me to flee

with his band of fed-up dolls

as if I were a tangle-haired Parisian girl.

I wanted to run. I did.

I was a peg doll, out of joint,

the fine suit of clothes I came with−

gone, hat crumpled. I froze

and so they left me, traveled the world.

Sometimes, they still send

a postcard home, addressed

to Big Bad Momma.

Laura Shovan

The book's cover. The poem was almost about its author,
E. Nesbit, best known for The Railway Children.
 Her biography is worth reading, even on Wikipedia.

A big help -- guest blogger Charles Rammelkamp. A few weeks back, Charles shared postcards from his twin, who often addresses his greetings to “Bad Feller” and “Bad One.” I borrowed that title for the poem’s final line.

A few of the poems in my 44 Postcard Project have been autobiographical. In poetry, really in all writing, I shy away from that term. Is “Rebellion” a true reflection of my life, when my children were small? Even during nursing strikes and the dreaded Coxsackie virus, I never hallucinated or imagined dolls coming to life and telling me to escape.

And yet, there is truth in the poem. Parenting can be a challenge. When the babies (now the teens) have a particularly awful day, there is that momentary flash of “What would life have been like if...?”

Speaking of postcards and the Truth with a capital T, check out writer Michael Kimball’s postcard project.

Michael Kimball's latest book.

“MichaelKimball writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)” was featured on Little Patuxent Review’s blog last summer. Kimball told LPR's Ilse Munro, “It taps into something human and humane, and I continue to be amazed by what people tell me.

Kimball interviews people and writes up their stories, a process he called “intense and intimate.” The project has become a blog and will soon be a book.

Pre-order from Amazon.

Writing Exercise (Grades 3 and up):

Try Postcard Life Stories with your students (with sensitivity to pairings).

Skills:

• interview techniques and active listening as students gather information from one another;
• editing, deciding which facts to keep and which to cut, so that the resulting profile of a classmate fits on a postcard. 



Vintage postcard available on Ebay.