Writing Lessons: Can Memoir Be Poetry? Of course

CAN MEMOIR BE POETRY? I get this question all the time. Of course it can. In fact, you can write memoir, poetry, memoir screenplays, plays, lists, essays and book-length pieces. Memoir is a genre that allows for a lot of forms, and here to show you one of them is a poet of gorgeous ability. Let me introduce you to Keven Bellows, who chooses poetry to write about the many topics of her life. I’ll let her explain. 

Writing Memoir in Narrative Poems

by Keven Bellows

I write about my life in narrative poems, not prose.   The poetic form with its layering, use of simile and metaphor allows me to rediscover not just the events of my past, but also the emotional and psychological surround. I wrote poetry as a child and young adult, but stopped when I married (twice) and had children. Years later, an extremely difficult work situation sent me back to therapy. My therapist insisted I come, despite an infection in my vocal chords that silenced me. She instructed me to write what I wanted to talk about, and she would read it back to me. The long-buried wound was very deep, and the only way I could express myself initially was indirectly in poems. (Poetry says the unsayable.)

At age 50 I still had more to uncover and discover, and poetry was the vehicle that allowed me to do that. Interestingly, I remembered I became a poet as a child, because then, as often now, I was not able to express directly the tumultuous mix of fear and despair about my beloved father’s alcoholism and my mother’s cool indifference.

Most of the poems in my first book, Taking your Own True Name, excavate my childhood and my own alcoholism in college and during my early years as a mother.

Often the impetus for a poem was a remembered phrase of my mother’s or father’s that would spring into my consciousness, e.g. “your father always wanted to shut you in a drawer.” I wrote, her voice was like, “the sound of a drawer slamming shut”. She deeply resented my father’s excessive love for me–a fact I think I captured in another poem titled “The River” that begins, “My mother and I lived on opposite banks of my father’s love”.

But I wrote my way through my child self to my woman self and could understand and love her, unfortunately, long after her most untimely death.

Illuminating a difficult childhood with poetry was very gratifying, professionally and personally, and a found a unique voice that felt authentic. I have been dedicated to writing poetry and learning more about the craft ever since. Now I teach poetry, both appreciation and writing. I most definitely found my calling in the second half of my life.

My next book was all about memories, too– though much sweeter ones, allowing me to recapture the man I loved as he was slowly disappearing into Alzheimer’s Disease.

The Blue Darter (Amazon) reads like a novel in poems from the night I met legendary journalist Jim Bellows, through our glorious life together and the difficult years at the end.

That book actually came about in a poetry writing workshop where the instructor asked us to write a letter we would never send, stating our true feelings. My letter, to Jim, told him about my exhaustion and my despair. When I read it to the class, everyone cried.

The teacher–a fine poet, himself– explained the reason people cried was that the words and the emotion were true. He added that if a poem doesn’t move you, it’s probably not!

He suggested I write some poems about this very painful chapter in my life. Another teacher, whom I revere, told me the poems should be a book. Writing it was amazingly therapeutic and helped me to hold onto the Jim I knew and loved as he slowly left me. Here’s the title poem:

The Blue Darter

From behind the big desk

across the expanse of office,

in one fluid motion

he stops just short of embracing me,

frozen in the doorway

surprised by his energy,

his undisguised intent.

(We’d barely met.)

                  When every day he searches

the same pockets, drawers

for the keys he had moments before.

anxiety fuels her impatience.

She shuts her heart’s eye to the man

who was so famously certain.

I love his long hands

always moving, talking for him,

one always caressing a cigarette.

He often anchors the other

on chair-backs and vaults over

to sit down, crumpling the cellophane

from the pack, throwing it

on top of the bookcase

for the cat he taught to fetch.

When her eyes sweep over him

on the couch where he sits

re-reading the New York Times,

the TV turned to what comes next,

she tells herself to stop, touch

his hand, his cheek but doesn’t.

Flashes of dark hair, lean body

hurrying through his newsrooms

tossing a Delphic mumble

over this shoulder,

diving into the pool at dusk,

crushing me against him

in taxis, on hotel beds

in Beverly Hills, London, New York

When he inquires each night

which side of the bed she will sleep on,

she wants to scream, the side I always sleep on.

But she answers calmly, continues to floss,

tries to forget only she remembers

their decades of a shared bed.

All momentum through careers, cities,

as managing editor of the Miami News

he was nicknamed the Blue Darter,

for a rare swift-moving hawk

whose endangered habitat

made front-page headlines.

Thirty-five years later,

his wingspan is a shadow,

his mind a collection of odds and ends.

Each morning, the third time he asks

if he should feed the dog, she yells.

From the beginning I understood

I’d been swept off my feet

to play a role in his life.

He calls me his ingénue.

It seems she is the one thing

he has not forgotten,

but his faithfulness fails to move her.

All edge and edgy, shut down,

she was not born to be a lodestar.

He was the fixed point.

Author’s bio

Keven Bellows lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Ragamuffin, who selected her during a visit to a local shelter. Her name is the subject of much discussion, even in the era of unisex names. And no, her father did not want a boy. He had one! She is named for an uncle, one of her father’s seven brothers–the one who never had a child of his own.

Born in upstate New York where he father was a state Supreme Court Judge, she was the youngest of four children. She was educated at the Emma Willard School in Troy, NY and at Wellesley College, class of 1959. She also has an MBA from UCLA.

Keven married a Harvard lawyer in 1960 and had a son, Michael.

That marriage ended in divorce. In 1971 she married Jim Bellows, the youngest and last editor of the storied New York Herald Tribune, when he came to the Los Angeles Times. He came with three daughters, and he and Keven had one child, Justine. They have 10 grandchildren. Jim died in 2009.

After a long career in business, both in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, she returned to her childhood love of writing poems and is currently a student of poetry as well as a teacher in the Osher Program at UCLA Extension. She writes for the Huffington Post.