Why This Poem Works: Sestina in the Voice of Frances Glessner Lee
by Jessica Purdy, from Adorable Knife, Grey Books Press
Why This Poem Works: Sestina in the Voice of Frances Glessner Lee, by Jessica Purdy
When I was a child and heard the word murder
It hit me in my center and entered my sleep.
What was this fear I’d never felt? This worry.
In my imagination, my body was carved with an adorable knife.
Each entry meant another miniature. Crime scenes in a nutshell.
Imitations of little deaths in my head.
My dollhouses made them real. To study the bludgeoned head,
the intention. My marriage had been murder
motherhood stifling, in a nutshell.
My husband could only sleep
around. When I was young and in love I said I loved knives.
Guns and their chambers made me worry.
I wasn’t prepared for worry,
but I could make a doll’s head,
a cloth curtain, miniature furniture, a protruding knife.
Was it suicide or murder?
Did it happen while the family was asleep?
Each room seen from above like the walnut shells
my mother would crack, create baby bassinets out of half a shell
with glue and old sheets torn by worried
fingers, feet. Ripped and tucked over a toy mouse asleep.
So now I make dioramas, dolls with bashed-in heads,
cigarettes that glow red, bullets lodged in ceilings. Murder
into art. Maybe the police will think of me like a knife:
cunning and sharp. I’ve always loved knives,
shield myself from those that don’t take my Nutshells
seriously. These detectives need to learn observation, and murders
need to be solved by looking. Don’t worry,
make time for the details in your pretty little head.
Did this one die in his sleep
or did his wife poison his wine and make him sleep?
Did the perpetrator knife
the girl in the chest and then head
home? Crack nuts and leave their shells
like trails of bread crumbs? Did her mother worry
she’d never grow older than sixteen, the victim of murder?
I’ve started sleeping with a knife
under the head of my bed. My obsession became the Nutshells.
Still, my ultimate worry: the precision of murder.
Intro: What do We do with So Much Fear?
Do you have illogical worries and anxieties? Most of us do. Some people believe that writers and creatives may have more anxiety than others. There is some logic to this. The part of the brain that makes up worst-case scenarios is, at its core, telling a story, so it would make sense that the part of your brain that can tell stories to scare you can also tell stories that scare, entertain or enthrall someone else.
Some people believe that when we write about our fears it helps us process them. We can work out scenarios where we potentially conquer the monsters we fear or escape the dangers we worry we will encounter. Some also believe that writing things down is a way of taking control of the stories, which on its own can be empowering. Even if you are telling a story that does not have a happy ending, the fact that you can re-tell it might take back control.
In The Adorable Knife chapbook, Poet Jessica Purdy explores fears and anxieites around real life murders by examining the nutshell dioramas of Frances Glessner Lee.
If you don’t know who that is, you’re not alone. I didn’t know who she was until I started reading Purdy’s poems. Then Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark covered her story on their My Favorite Murder podcast.
Glessner Lee is considered the mother of modern forensic science. She lived in the first half of the twentieth century, a time when women were shut out of working in law enforcement and higher education. Yet, she became one of the first women to teach at Harvard. She is best known for her “nutshell dioramas,” which are miniature depictions of real-life unsolved murder scenes. By making these dioramas and showing them to investigators, she helps train them on how to notice details of the scene of a crime and literally “read the room” for clues.
Purdy’s poem is written in the voice of Glessner Lee, and in it, the speaker of the poem explains how and why she has continued this work.
Using Persona to Explore Aspects of the Self
Obviously, the poem is written by Jessica Purdy, not Francis Glessner Lee. We do not know if the poem accurately represents Glessner Lee’s real motives, but that is hardly the point of a persona poem. The persona allows the writer to imagine themself into an alternate scenario and to explain how they might think if they were in that scenario themselves. The persona offers the speaker a way to think differently about their own psychology, to explore parts of their personality that otherwise might go unexplored.
Using the Sestina to Show Obsessive Thoughts
The sestina is also an appropriate form for this topic. Often in workshops, poets will tell you that if you’re obsessed with a topic, write about it using a form like a villanelle, sestina or ghazal. These types of poems require you to use the same words or phrases over and over again, mimicking the way obsessive thinking works.
Sestinas repeat the same six words, but you must use them in a new way each time. Eventually you need to show that the speaker of the poem has changed in some way.
A Tip for Writing Sestinas
Purdy’s six words are worry, sleep, murder, knife, nutshell and head. These words tell us what obsesses the speaker, and yet they are flexible enough that the speaker can use them in multiple ways.
Sleep, for example can mean literal sleep, but it can also be a stand-in for death, as in “the sleep of death” from Hamlet’s soliloquy.
The word head is used in multiple ways too. In a murder, the head is often the place of greatest violence. The speaker creates dolls heads and heads that are bludgeoned, but the head is also the seat of imagination. It is where the speaker imagines murder scenes and where anxiety lives. She uses it in the phrase “head home” as well.
Probably the most important word in this poem, as I see it, is “knife.” A knife can be an object of menace and danger, especially when talking about murder, but it can be something a scientist or artist uses to cut something open to look at it better and repair it. Lee is using her knife to help solve the murders, some of which are committed with knives.
One of the most important lines is when the speaker says, “Maybe the police will think of me like a knife.” This shows that the speaker is becoming an object of agency. You could read that to mean an object of danger or an object of science or creativity. She is something they can use to help them open things up and see better.
The final usage of knife comes in the last three lines. The speaker says she has begun sleeping with a knife under her head. This shows she is taking some agency for her own protection. It’s not exactly a happy ending. The speaker doesn’t get rid of her fears, but she empowers herself to become more of an instrument for solving murders and protecting herself against them. She takes on greater ability to defend herself against the many dangers of the world.
So well expressed. I appreciate the explanation. More on sestinas, villanelles and that mysterious other one.