Behind the Vines

Writing and Drinking Through Loss

by Farley on January 17th, 2008

When I was in grad school, one semester I took a poetry workshop focused on translation.  It could be from one language to another or it could be from one interpretation to another.  My favorite thing to do was to take a poem I love and rewrite it from another angle or perspective, upping some emotion or idea that was already there.  With a remake of a Margaret Atwood poem, it was the slight stalker nature of the speaker.  For Edna St. Vincent Milay’s “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed,” it was making the lost love context more modern.  My friend Jeremy, who was working on his PhD at the time, demanded that I send that revision to the very-hard-to-get-into magazine Poetry. That meant a great deal since he was the person whose advice I sought most, whose feedback was the most important to me.  Jeremy was encouraging and helpful and very, very honest.  He once wrote in his response that perhaps he was being merciless, but that I was a good poet and he owed it to me.

He would always ask me to send him revisions and  new stuff, as well.  Since I’ve been in California, I haven’t written much poetry.  There are several reasons.  The first is that I’ve managed to work poetry into my weekly tasting notes at the winery.  The other is that I write so much for my job, blogs, and newspaper column, I have no time or desire to write for myself much these days.  Writing was always a form of catharsis for me, a way to express myself and work out the anger, depression, what have you. Now, somehow, I manage to sneak in unrelated issues here when I need to write about them.

Such is the case now. Working out of my grief, I wrote (or rewrote, as the case may be) a poem when I was home.  It was a reworking of “Vino Tinto” by Sandra Cisneros in which wine, the metaphor in her poem, becomes the literal subject in my re-composition.  I had been meaning to give that poem a try, but the need became more urgent, somehow, when I found out that Jeremy had passed away. Thirty years old, like me, and no longer on the other side of the country, on the other side of an e-mail. No more asking me for poetry or which decent boxed wines he could get for his friend who wouldn’t drink anything else. Jeremy never did get into wine that much (preferred the whiskey, that one) but he’d drink it if I brought it to one of his many English department soirees or when he came over for dinner.  

And, oh, how he could listen. So if he’s listening now, I owe it to him, since I didn’t answer that last email request about boxed wine, to at least write him a poem, even if I can’t have his response.

Poem here

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POSTED IN: poetry about wine, wine as it relates to life