My poetry professor gave out an assignment to write five interconnected, longer poems. The goal was that by the end of his course we would all write book-length poems.
I was mad in love with the old victorian mansions of University Circle, now serving as office buildings, fraternity houses, and apartments. A boy I’d dated had an apartment that was half of an old bathroom in one of these gorgeous houses. I rented garret rooms and corners of bedrooms and sat on wide, leaf-littered verandahs to write. I reveled in the idea of the poor and brilliant playing in the discarded finery of the boring, dead rich.
In the end, I decided to write the poems from the points of view of the houses, with each one having a name and a personality. I made most of them women. I wrote about the Theta Chi fraternity house, and about an abandoned ruin and a house that had been turned into an office for CWRU security. My favorite was my ode to a rooming house which I named Hazel after Hazel Drive, one of the mansion-lined streets of University Circle.
The professor admonished me to stop being so factual, and to “tell the more true lies” by mixing up features of the houses and inventing small bits. I remember that helped a lot. Hazel has bits of the house my ex-boyfriend lived in, and a house I lived in, and the shooting victim I passed one day on Euclid avenue. He was right, somehow, putting things that weren’t in Hazel into her made the poem a truer portrait of her.
Anyway, twenty years later, Hazel has been razed to the ground and replaced with new townhomes. The house my ex lived in a bathroom of is now part of a driveway for a grocery store, but their memories live on in my poem in Liquid Imagination, March 2018.
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