http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2018/04/april-six-speaking-in-voice-of-another.html
A longish list of poems, good and bad, funny and sad, will form at the end of that post this week.
I can't claim to be qualified to write in the voice of anyone in Old China. (Modern China may be even harder for U.S. readers; we're familiar with the gorgeous decadence of the family memories preserved in novels by people like Bette Bao Lord and Amy Tan, less familiar with a country that's never seemed completely friendly to our interests within living memory. And we still have trouble with the whole concept of a tonal language.)
I can, however, claim to have read and enjoyed Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/05/book-review-snow-flower-and-secret-fan.html
What I remember about the fans on which the women wrote nu shu messages was that the messages were often just conventional phrases that could be arranged in ways considered to rhyme, like a medieval equivalent of pop song lyrics or Hallmark card verses. (In English the ones in the book don't rhyme, but some of them are printed like poems.) That's a thought that lends itself to Bad Poetry!
Topic? Everyone seems to be posting about the passing of Barbara Pierce Bush, who, among other things, helped persuade Governor Jeb Bush that this country didn't need "J for Just-Another-Walking-Target Bush" in the White House. The posts remind me how false our sense of familiarity with celebrities really is. People feel familiar with the public image of Mrs. Bush, they blather thoughtlessly about her life and work and call her immediate family by their given names, and yet they seem to forget that these people are actually human beings, who feel the same way other human beings do when we lose our grandmothers, mothers, mothers-in-law...My mother has finally started acting just a little bit like "her age," as people other than best-case, born-again-healthy celiacs understand ages like 83 (or 92!), and I'm feeling a lot of projected empathy for the Bush clan. And what I know about their actual feelings is, of course, nothing. It's not Mrs. Bush I mourn for, although of course condolences are due, and although I liked her public image: she was a fine, proud role model for middle-aged women living in fear of grandmotherhood. (Yes, matriarchal powers, including the right to be "The Enforcer," are part of my definition of grandmotherhood...and Grandma Bonnie Peters'.) It's not even my own mother I mourn for. It's my imagination of my future self. It is Priscilla I mourn for.
The passing of someone I didn't know personally is no subject for Bad Poetry, which is by definition at least whimsical. (My Muse is too snarky to do poems without whimsy.) But the inadequacy of conventional, polite phrases is something I can be seriously whimsical about. Here is a modern-day U.S. equivalent of a nu shu poem/letter to a friend the writer sees only maybe once a year.
Thinking of You
Dear
Although we're many miles apart
Wish You Were Here
Close to my heart
Get Well Soon
Happy Birthday!
(Oh right--not in June?)
Enjoy Your Stay
Springtime is here
With heartfelt regrets
Lots Of Love
Cheer
Sweet Violets
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