I wrote this poem a few hours before the Workshop. I knew it was going to be a "Round Robin" and I was not going home first and I had not sent in a text. (Which is what you're supposed to do!) It arose out of a one to one support lesson I had just finished with a very bright, but severely dyslexic girl who was studying Arthur Miller's A View From a Bridge. The task I was supporting her in was the standard "Write two letters home from Rodolpho one before, the other after the killing of Eddie". In the play Rodolpho is an illegal Sicilian immigrant who falls in love with Catherine, who is in the care of Eddie a narrow-minded longshoreman of Sicilian descent. Out of jealousy Eddie accuses Rodolpho of wanting to secure citizenship by marrying Catherine, his ward. Eddie betrays Rodolpho to the authorities and is knifed in a brawl.
Hugh, an English teacher himself, guessed most of this. The poem was downed for its potential cultural condescension towards an apparently uncomprehending and philistine student a la Educating Rita. Though comments about opaqueness also went home, especially the misunderstood references to Eastenders and to Marilyn Monroe. A tricky misunderstanding was the constant vocative confusion caused by addressing the student as 'you' and then addressing Miller ("Your tragedy's..") Another valid criticism was the problem of tracking down who was being referred to as "this man" in line 22.The word 'oversea' in line 8 was quite clearly an unpopular invention, as well.
I thought I had written a poem about how we all try to find goodies and baddies and that this doomed Miller's much-vaunted theory of tragedy that we have conflicting visions of greatness which clash because they are great. My student like most people, including myself, thinks Eddie is a bad character who receives a just reward.
There were also two offending passages. One about spelling (line 4) which (as I don't really want to write a poem about a dyslexic child) I may not be able to do anything about, and one about not knowing the text (line 9). I decided to revise the poem because the background was understood, even though the foreground needed clarification.
I recast 'You' as 'She'. This also had the effect of clearing up any misunderstanding about whether the student was a boy or a girl. As this was not significant to the poem's meaning, I didn't want it getting in the way. Though in line 5, I revised it to say the "the man that (the much lamented) Tiffany will natter on about".This also had the effect of displacing the relationship. I cleaned up the first offending passage using the same device. I cleaned up the second offending passage by changing 'You' to 'we'. This is a very important change. Out of my experience, last-minute essays have to have their content put on hold in order to attend to the expression. Yet it also clears up the shared bewilderment all of us have confronting so-called tragedy when all we want to see are villains or victims. Hence the substitution of 'touch' for 'know'. I also changed "You can" to "Critics can" in line 18. Extra to this I introduced further background by substituting 'GCSE' for the notorious 'oversea'.
Once I had made these changes, I found myself determined to keep the meaning of the poem, while allowing for some of the good lines workshop members wanted to keep in. The final draft of the last stanza was conducted almost in dialogue with Leona whose grasp of the poem's meaning kept me revising rather than re-writing.
She sits long-leggedly in front of me,
a battered table in between, on which
she writes, at my correcting pace, with glee
that she can spell and phrase without a hitch.
She's dreaming of the man that Tiffany
will natter on about tonight, in local pitch,
when, home, she drops down to watch TV,
forgetting these letters scrawled for GCSE.
We barely touch the text and wouldn't care,
in any case; it's finishing school now.
"Rodolpho's just a crazy man whose dare
to break the law got grassed and anyhow
his brother knifed the grasser, so it's fair
in'it, Sir?"
A teacher, I take my story-book
bow
and wait for her to take the pupil's share
of the action, "What's tragic's what you wear."
It doesn't matter knowing why they spar,
these people of the moral stage. Critics can
dress up Miller or Monroe to be the star,
to make it work. Truth follows its own plan:
high tragedy's too separate, too far
to reach. Yet I would be this crazy man
and, reaching out again, risk one gold bar
and know, in hunting, that the door's ajar.