Patrice Vecchione - My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice: A Guide to Writing Poetry and Speaking Your Truth

Also by Patrice Vecchione

NONFICTION

Writing and the Spiritual Life: Finding Your Voice by
Looking Within

Step into Nature: Nurturing Imagination and Spirit in
Everyday Life

POETRY

Territory of Wind

The Knot Untied

AS EDITOR

Fault Lines: Childrens Earthquake Poetry (coeditor)

Catholic Girls (coeditor)

Bless Me, Father (coeditor)

Storming Heavens Gate: Spiritual Writings by Women (coeditor)

Truth & Lies: An Anthology of Poems

Whisper & Shout: Poems to Memorize

The Body Eclectic: An Anthology of Poems

Revenge & Forgiveness: An Anthology of Poems

Faith & Doubt: An Anthology of Poems

Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience (coeditor)

Copyright 2020 by Patrice Vecchione

A SEVEN STORIES PRESS FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote brief passages in a review.

Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NAME s : Vecchione, Patrice, author.
TITL E : My shouting, shattered, whispering voice : a guide to writing poetry and speaking your truth / Patrice Vecchione.
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019030537 | ISBN 9781609809850
(paperback) | ISBN 9781609809867 (ebk)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: PoetryAuthorshipStudy and teaching.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC PN1059.A9 V383 2020 | DDC 808.1dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2019030537

For a girl I knew once and for a long time
and in memory of my mother, Peggy Vecchione,
for the gifts of poetry and courage

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over...

to those who have reason to fear its power,
or those who still believe
that language is only words.

ADRIENNE RICH

Contents

Introduction

A Chewed-Up Pencil in the Back Pocket of an Old Pair of Jeans

Once upon a time a girl lost her voice. She had been treated cruelly, and for years, she said not a yes or a no. What she couldnt say out loudthe unspeakable and the everyday thingsshe turned into poems, and that led her later to reclaim her voice, anew, aloud.

Once upon another time a boy kept a journal that he filled with his lifes challenges and triumphs. When his father found the notebook he read it, and in front of the boy, he set a match to his sons words. That would have kept many from writing again. This young man bought a new notebook, wrote a new poem, and after memorizing it, tore out the page and set a match to it himself. At the top of the next page he wrote the first word of his new poem. If his father were to read it, there would be nothing to anger him. This notebook with the mostly missing words later became the young poets first book. Such was the determination of the poet within him.

Our lives are made of stories and poems, from the tiniest incidents to the biggestearly childhood experiences like icing your first cake to more recent ones like a first crush. Theres hitting your first home run, the private embarrassment of cheating on a test and not getting caught, a #MeToo moment.

Writing poems is a way to uncover what most needs to be uncoveredto loosen the tongue in solitude, to make connections that cant be made in conversation. Poems are made of questions more than answers. They can withstand sudden shifts of direction, may be full of contradictions. Poems dont shy away from incomplete sentences. A poem of no more than three lines can defy darkness or change the winds direction. The poet Kwame Dawes said, Poetry offers us the capacity to carry in us and express the contradictory impulses that make us human.

Once upon another time there was a kid who was overwhelmed by her life. She needed a way to reckon with her confusions, those knotted and gooey ones that pressed against her. Her fathers daily shouting in Italian and English made his eyes spin, and when he called her an idiot, she wanted to disappear. She was embarrassed by the slurred speech of her mothers drunken public outbursts. At school she felt out of place, as though the oddities of her home life were visible. In front of most others she was quiet. But inside her head loud bees were swarming.

One morning during her first year of high school, wearing the brown felt hat with the beaded sunburst on the front (the hat she wore even to bed), her long hair falling down the length of her back, she walked out of class, giving no reason. Behind the music building, late morning winter sun leaned warm against the wall and she sat down. Someone was playing drums inside a classroom. But the girl was listening to something else, something within her, and it was persistent.

Pulling out a small notebook and a chewed-up pencil from the back pocket of her jeans, the girl began to write. Unlike the dread and drudgery that came with classroom writing, this was nearly effortless. It was as if the poem were writing her. She read it once to herself. Satisfied, she returned to class.

That girl was me. For a long time, my poems stayed hidden in notebooks. I wrote to make something out of what scared me, to separate myself from the crazy instability of my home life and the sense of not fitting in at school. To say how it felt, I wrote to save my life. Not for a long time did I have an inkling that within me there were books to be written, that I could become a writer.

That was lifetimes ago, really. That books have my name on the spine continues to amaze and delight me. When the first copy of a new one arrives in the mail, Im glad you cant see me because I dance around the house, holding the book in my arms like a small partner. When I see a book of mine on a shelf in a bookstore, I touch the place where my name is printed.

In poems, paragraphs and chapters, I discover that I know more than I thought I did, that Im braver and more daring than I believed I could be, that Im not as different from others as I once believed, and maybe most importantly, that Im not the idiot girl my father told me I was.

***

Whatever your life situationwhether you live in a city high-rise or a cabin in the woods, whether you have one parent at home or two or none, whether you know what you want to say or think youve got nothing worth sayingthere are poems within you that only you can write. I know that as well as I know the truth of sunlights warmth against my face on a cold day.

That voice of yours, does it shout? Has it ever hit against a wall, shattering like glass? Or does it whisper, making no more sound than a dream does? Has your voice been yours for a thousand years or are you finding it tonightyour very own voice calling to youso you cant fall asleep and must write word upon word on the page of night?

What youll write nobody else will. Nobody else can. Youre the only one who knows what you know, who dreams what you dream, the only one wholl turn a phrase just so, wholl follow the word soul with tricks. If you dont write your poems, they will never be written, and the stories of your life will go untold. If you dont write your poems, theyll not even have the substance of smoke. If you dont write your poems, theyll be lost, and with those lost poems go parts of you.