Poet: Megan Denton Ray
Poet Background:
Megan Denton Ray, born and raised in Tennessee, earned her MFA in poetry from Purdue University in Indiana, and currently lives and teaches in Tennessee.
She is the author of the poetry collection Mustard, Milk, and Gin, which won the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in many different places and publications, including POETRY, The Sun, Salt Hill Journal, The Adroit Journal, Passages North, amongst others. She has also been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2016 National Society of Arts and Literature Chapter Career Award.
The Boiler Journal also included some quirky biographical information about her when they published some of her poetry in 2017: ‘She is an old-soul, grandmotherly-type young person who is trying to figure out how to be a real adult without losing her sense of childlike jubilation. She’s fascinated with taxidermy, exotic plants, and anatomical oddities. She has an identical twin sister, a tiny birthmark that looks like a clover, and lots of Earl Grey tea.’
Much of her work focuses on nature, trauma, and the connection between the human condition and the environment. She has been outspoken about the difference between where she grew up and when she briefly left Tennessee for the Midwest, saying that the difference in social atmosphere, coupled with having four seasons and gaining something akin to ‘tornado-phobia,’ gave her a new lens to examine the world through, and the social, economic, and racial differences between the Midwest, Indiana particularly, and the South at large are significantly less than most people think.
Poem: ‘Layla’
In 1988, I was three pounds. In 1992, I was jealous as I traced my fingers along an album’s edge— my drunk daddy’s love for Eric Clapton. I was wild and negligible, like the honeysuckle. I stretched my sweet, leafy fingers through the chain link fence, somewhere
in Tennessee, off the side of Grigsby Chapel Road. I remember the brick house, the grey putter, the pain beating at the back of my throat as I stood at the door
and waited for my father to come outside and play. He was in love with Layla. I’d sit for hours on the big stone by the garden, longing to travel,
stem by stem, to places only the sun can sift through. I used to pick the okra and eat it raw. I used to dream of being a tiny stray spark, the stacked kindling
at my father’s hearth. All the while, Layla blasted from the inside out. I was just the yellow-green, the nuisance flower, growing and curling my way
around a cold, metal spine. I only wanted to be loved like Layla. Or, I wanted to be Layla, or to know Layla. I wanted her to give me ginger ale. I wanted to swish it
from cheek to cheek. I wanted her to feed me berries, to spread them out on the big stone by the garden, to offer them each to me, one by one. I wanted her
to tell me it was okay to eat raw okra. I wanted to show her that there were ferns growing inside my trusting, upturned wrists, and for this splendor be unzipped and entered.
This I know for certain: I was muddy, but I was lovable. I wanted someone to patch me up. I wanted someone to lean down and kiss the bandages of my body.
Analysis:
I found Ray’s work by happenstance—I went to a nearby library and browsed their ‘New Poetry’ collection, and I pulled her collection out from the rest and was struck by the beautiful cover. For me, that’s all it takes sometimes to be convinced to check out a poet’s work, and I wasn’t disappointed with her work. While much of it is dense with language, the language is used in such a way that Ray paints vivid pictures and images in a reader’s mind as he/she works through the collection, and I found myself tearing through the thing in one setting. Her poems flow one into the other, the topics and themes heavy but similar enough to create one cohesive message for the whole collection, and I will most likely be re-reading it again this summer (I first read it last fall when the leaves started to fall off the trees around here), hopefully under a tree along Lake Michigan or somewhere else where I can look up and stare out at some natural wonder to pair with her poems that often rely on or invoke nature-esque images/scenes.
This poem, titled ‘Layla,’ was originally published in 2017 in The Boiler Journal. Looking at the overall theme of the poem, one conjures up the ideas of abandonment, possible abuse, addiction, and how to deal with a family member who has an addiction to a substance that blurs the responsibilities they have with other family members, oftentimes failing to uphold their end of the unspoken family contract.
To frame the poem, Ray uses the famous Eric Clapton song ‘Layla.’ This is not accidental either—while the lines where Ray writes about her father loving the song and playing it over and over again may be autobiographical, the song itself deals with a woman who has been mistreated and abandoned by her father. In the song, Clapton sings to try to convince the woman to stay with him and be his lover, and he tells listeners that he was first drawn to her because her ‘old man had let [her] down.’ Digging even a little further, there is another twist to using Clapton’s song—Clapton himself is a notorious abuser who has admitted that he has abused his past girlfriends and wives both physically and emotionally over the decades. He has started to retract from the spotlight in recent years because of past behavior, especially in the age of #MeToo, and, while I can’t say it for certain, especially as the poem was written before most of the #MeToo allegations came to light, it seems too coincidental for me that a poem about a father abandoning his daughter would choose to use a Clapton song as a framing device if it wasn’t meant to be intentional.
The first four stanzas of the poem introduce the loneliness and abandonment that is woven throughout every line, with Ray cluing readers into several important parts of the ‘story’ of the poem—her father is a drunk, she was a child that liked to be free and roam in nature, oftentimes taking off and becoming unencumbered with the stresses of the world that plague adults, and that the poem takes place in Tennessee. It further fleshes out the setting by talking about Ray ‘stretching’ her ‘sweet, leafy fingers / through the chain link fence, somewhere / in Tennessee, off the side of Grigsby Chapel Road.’ To me, that conjures up visions of open, rolling hills filled with wildflowers, with the edge of them close to a dirt or gravel-speckled road, while a child running up to the fence to either time herself as she runs back and forth in the field or watches cars pass inhabits the world of the poem too, both ideas of freedom within boundaries. Ray further paints the picture of the house where she grew up with her father, providing another idyllic setting that turns dark when you consider that she’s talking about the theme of abandonment and being ignored by a parent, and she uses the idyllic manner of nature to juxtapose her pain with the darkness that her house, with its sounds of ‘Layla’ coming out of speakers from within, represents.
Over the next four stanzas, Ray dives even further into this idea of nature being her escape—she compares herself to plants, she writes about a humanized form of the woman from ‘Layla’ acting like a mother with her in nature—picking berries, gardening, etc.—and she talks about being a spark that can warm her father’s heart, comparing herself in a way with something that is one of the most natural things in all nature (fire). The evoking of the woman from the song also makes me wonder where her mother is in this whole poem—we only hear about the speaker’s father, and the mother is completely absent. Does she want Layla as a motherly figure, or is this supposed to clue us readers into the fact that the speaker doesn’t have a mother? Or, similar to her father, is her mother frequently absent, maybe having to work double time to compensate for her drunk husband’s lack of ability to keep work or have a job that pays enough to support the family? The stanzas paint another picture of loneliness in a bright setting, putting the poem amongst wild flowers and bushes of berries and conjuring saccharine images of a mother picking berries with her daughter, laughing and eating them together, and it’s all done in a way that the speaker seems to resent in a way—she calls herself a ‘nuisance,’ as if a child wanting to be loved and noticed by her father is something that is annoying and small, and she wraps the natural world around her in a way that tries to compensate for the love that is missing.
The last two stanzas end the poem on a more triumphant note—in the second to last stanza, Ray starts to clue readers into the fact that, even if she doesn’t feel loved and needed by her father, she recognizes that the Layla of the song, if she was real, wouldn’t be her ultimate savior—only she can truly save herself and make herself feel such a way that brings enough comfort and acceptance to her own life, and she speaks of ‘ferns growing inside my trusting, upturned / wrists, and for this splendor be unzipped and entered,’ which gives the impression that everything she needs is inside her already. She just needs someone to be there and ‘unzip’ it from within her, showing the world that she truly does have something to offer like a famous song might, and she knows it. The last stanza caps that idea off in much more solid terms, saying that she knows ‘for certain’ that ‘[she] was lovable,’ which reads as both a declaration and a confirmation to herself that she is enough, and no parent who abandons her or ignores her can make her feel bad enough about herself that she will let it ultimately control her life. However, she also speaks of the yearning still for such a parental figure in her life, saying that she ‘wanted someone to patch me up.’ She wants to feel the parental love of an adult who can patch her wounds, both literal and metaphorical, and she recognizes that, while she could do it alone, she doesn’t want to, and she just wants that one person to be there for her, ‘kissing the bandages of my body’ and treating her like a child who is to be loved before all else.
For Future Reading: