I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Sometimes people ask me, why did you write a memoir?

Why not a collection of poems on the same subject?

I understand the question, but it implies there's some kind of ranking between forms that one is better than the other.

In this case, I just couldn't have done the same narrative work in poems.

That's not a limitation of poetry.

It's not that poems can't accommodate that kind of narrative. It's only to say

that's not how I decided to approach the material. The same is true in reverse, though.

Sometimes the material begs to be a poem or a whole book of poems. I've read incredible

collections that almost feel like memoirs in verse. The poems do work with image, line, syntax, and

white space that would be difficult to achieve in prose.

They don't tell a story. They sing a story. Today's poem excavates childhood memories in a way only a poem can, and it enacts the fragmentation,

the peaciness of memory. I should also mention that the poem uses lines from one of my

favorite bands built to spill as an epigraph, because in our memories,

sometimes other people sing parts of the story. On Being Told I Should Write a Memoir

by Jan Henry Gray.

There's a mean bone in my body.

It's connected to the problem built to spill.

Describe the room.

Name the pain.

Where are you headed?

Wandering.

...