Poems on Pregnancy, Birth & Motherhood
A collection of 70 Australian Poets
Edited by Vee Malnar
Launched 23 October 2004
@ Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Sydney
Sydney Launch | Melbourne Launch | Article | Email
It's a curious thing how synchronicity can affect your life.
It was during my first 2+ years as a mother that I collated, edited and formatted First Breath. At the time my husband and I had just moved to an area of Sydney that was new to us. With our new baby, we were largely without the circle of friends and family that a new family might hope for. Simultaneously, being a first book for me, First Breath was like having a first child in that you don't know how it's going to turn out. At the beginning I didn't know how to parent, or how to create a book. It was a similar thing.
Due to our relative isolation, the poets submitting to the anthology became in no small way a community to me. Without their ongoing influence, my mothering experience may have been of quite a different nature. It was like tapping directly into the collective unconsciousness, and it helped put a lot of things in perspective. For example, who could really worry about a child not beginning to walk 'when they were supposed to', after reading a poem on how another child's disability meant they might never achieve that at all, or how the anguish of a grazed knee paled into nothingness against the poetic agony of a parent whose child died at birth. I learned something from just about every poem, and they all had worth.
Some of the subjects are generally not acceptable in society today, but these taboos have no bearing when it comes to recording personal experiences of them. Issues covered include breastfeeding in public, the right to home births, and the right to terminate.
However, for one reason or another, not everything could be included. Some of my greatest pain about the project was not being able to include potentially brilliant poems because the poet could not be contacted to request an edit or two, or because they hadn't included a contact number, or they'd moved. While only 70 poets made it through to the final cut, in all over 100 sent their work - and often more than one poem. The ones that didn't make it were not discarded lightly, and all were read thoroughly.
Often negotiating edits with the poets that could be contacted was a test of my patience and diplomacy skills. Being something of a poet and writer myself, I know full well how touchy people can be over criticism of their work. Many times at this stage the poet - justifiably - wished for no modifications to their work, but most were open to some change, whether it had been a matter of punctuation or a major re-write. There were still many difficulties I needed to overcome during this process. For example, how do you explain to the writer of a eulogy that the piece is not poetic enough, and could they please do a re-write? It's a toughy.
As the editing began to draw to its laboured conclusion, I began the arguably even more painful task of formatting the book. A word of advice for anyone considering a similar project: avoid Microsoft Word. There are many programs available for download at nominal cost which do not have the aggravation that Word will cause. Regardless, I gradually sorted the poems into an order which I think provides smooth, and interesting transitions. it was during this part of the process I fully understood the diversity of poetry I had amassed. Apart from the wide and varied perspectives, were the wide and varied poetic styles and forms. Punctuation was a nightmare. It's an understatement to say the anthology is linked by theme, not style. This diversity is what makes it so special.
There are so many great stories in those pages. On reflection, I feel poetry is the perfect medium for parents that have no time to write at length, but wish to artistically record the themes of their life, such as the kinds of feelings that overcome a new parent, the interrogation of hospital procedures, the pain of still-birth, trying to get a lively infant to sleep, waking at three and warming a bottle to the shrill strains of crying baby, and many many other events that need to be caught as they are experienced. Just like the events they express, poetry is the art of life, transcribed.
For a copy of First Breath, Poems on Pregnancy Birth and Motherhood, email Vee.