Poem of the week: A Birthmother's Catechism by Carrie Etter
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jun/30/poem-of-the-week-carrie-etter Version 0 of 1. Imagined Sons by Carrie Etter consists of a title sequence of prose poems, framed and interspersed by 10 poems shaped in the call-response form of the catechism. This week's poem is the third of these, and shares their common title A Birthmother's Catechism. The narrator is a mother whose son was adopted soon after his birth. In the main sequence she describes a series of encounters with the now-adult child. This is not the report of a literal search, nor an effort to construct an identity, but a mosaic of the numerous possibilities of relationship. The meetings and sightings occur unpredictably, in all kinds of settings – a supermarket, a fairytale, a dark backstreet, a bus, a graveyard – credible but dreamlike spaces that are projections of inner consciousness. Funny at times, fast-moving and psychologically astute, these tiny monologues are held together by a narrative voice as seemingly self-possessed as it is candid. The Catechisms, by contrast, are dialogic, introducing a second, interrogative voice. "Catechism" means "oral teaching", and its original aim was to promote the memorisation of religious doctrine. Etter reinterprets the form as both a psychological and a melodic device. The intense, same-question repetition pushes the speaker into a corner, where poetic self-defence may be disarmed, the creative play of the prose poems distilled to a barer essence. The music is strong and simple – canticle as well as catechism. The catechumen is dared to sing the song of unmediated loss. Although all the Catechisms essentially dramatise one speaker's self-questioning, the typography of the third is atypical. The catechiser's questions are not printed in italics. This has the effect of bringing the two voices more obviously into the same psychological space. Other poems also pose painfully straight questions ("What do you remember?", "How did you let him go?") but this one's "Who do you think you are?" has more combative and rhetorical overtones. As a non-rhetorical question, it suggests an unspoken codicil "Who do you think you are to him?" The self-probing has shifted focus. The underlying question is "Who does he think you are?" Elsewhere in the Catechisms, confident non sequiturs may run rings around the questioner. The answers here lean towards realism: they seem like wary approaches to the unknown and unknowable. The birthmother imagines herself disembodied ("a musical phrase … ") and unsatisfactory ("a wrong answer"). She's an "aptitude" which separates the son from his adoptive family, an emotion ("unacknowledged longing") and a mythological "first mother" ("Eve".) That last, one-word answer is a shock tactic, and encapsulates the mother-and-child's fantasy compensations for disinheritance. The myth is abandoned as soon as summoned and the next time the catechumen answers the question, "Who do you think you are?" it's a self-deprecatory "No one, no one at all". With its haunting hesitation, repetition, and absence of hyphen ("No one, no one … ") the statement encodes an erasure, and a wish that the child might happily never know and name his loss. It's a cadence of renunciation, singular and resonant, in a text otherwise charged with restless energy and novelistic powers of invention. • Carrie Etter will appear at the Ledbury festival early in July: check out her blog for this and other dates.
A Birthmother's Catechism Who do you think you are? A musical phrase remembered from time to time for no apparent reason Who do you think you are? A wrong answer Who do you think you are? An aptitude for words his parents do not share Who do you think you are? The vestige of an unacknowledged longing Who do you think you are? Eve Who do you think you are? No one, no one at all
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