So What's That Crazy Title About, Anyway?

One of the poems in my new book piggybacks on a famous Sharon Olds piece

Writers love to pay homage to and build on the work of other writers. You might remember painfully picking through T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in high school English class to find all his allusions to Shakespeare, the Bible, and Dante’s Inferno, and there are tons and tons of other examples, ranging from James Joyce’s Ulysses building on the structure of the Odyssey and Jane Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea picking up on a nearly throwaway character, the first wife in Jane Eyre.

While I certainly don’t claim to have joined the lofty pantheon of these authors, I am definitely part of a longstanding literary tradition. If you get my new book, The Enchantress Queen and the Ghost Who Made Me, you will see a poem there called, “I Go Back to September 1979.” It’s an arresting title, and I can’t really claim all the credit for it. It alludes to a famous poem by Sharon Olds called, “I Go Back to May 1937,” in which she imagines stopping her young parents from ever meeting. She writes:

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

Ultimately, the speaker of the poem decides she wants to live as a result of their disastrous union and that she “will tell about it” in her role as a poet.

Although my mom and stepfather were nowhere near as bad for each other as Olds makes her parents out to be, they met in a bar at the height of the disco era and were not especially well-suited. They had completely different interests, goals, and outlooks, and my mother’s personality was so strong that I felt she took something from my stepfather that should have been his, irresistible Enchantress that she was. In my poem, I try to capture the calculations that each of them make in deciding to be together the first time they meet and use the reference to the Olds poem through the title to help the reader understand that I think this meeting will not really end well for my stepfather in particular.

If you’d like to read the poem on its own, check it out in Club Plum, where it appeared in the Summer 2025 issue.