I Stop Writing the Poem

(Read by Gallagher in the Youtube video to the right)

     I stop writing the poem
₁    to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
     or who dies, I'm still a woman.
     I'll always have plenty to do.
     I bring the arms of his shirt
₅    together. Nothing can stop
     our tenderness. I'll get back
     to the poem. I'll get back to being

     a woman. But for now
     there's a shirt, a giant shirt
₁₀  in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
     standing next to her mother
₁₂  watching to see how it's done.

First, some background knowledge - As she says in the Youtube video, Gallagher wrote this poem (part of the collection Moon Crossing Bridge) after the death of her late husband Raymond Carver. The two, madly in love, had gotten married even with the knowledge that Carver did not have very much time left to live. By writing this collection, she found a way to deal with the pain of her loss.

Even though Gallagher has written many collections of poetry, it is a tad difficult to find a large selection of her poems online. I came across this particular poem while finding videos on Youtube, and the simplicity struck me while I listened. By having the title start the poem and the first line finish the phrase, there is a sense of interruption just from reading up to there. Then I noticed the large jump in subject from writing poems to folding clothes, and it seems very strange that Gallagher would stop writing just to fold laundry. Her reason for putting it like that may be to delicately show the reader that something has suddenly gone askew in her life. Throughout this poem, I could feel the emotion lying under the subtle irony and simple phrases.

Literary Devices –

Enjambment: a run-on line of poetry that carries over from one line to the next
- It is found in lines 8-12. The first two lines refer to the loss in her life while the last three speak of another family where the daughter is growing up. This example of enjambment plays up contrasting situations, which could each represent life and death.

Irony: a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant
- Found in the title, it is ironic that Gallagher begins with saying that she has stopped writing for the time being, but she was writing this poem at that time. So she in fact did not stop writing poems, only the style had changed.

Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole
- I think the shirt she is folding in lines 4 and 9 could possibly qualify as a synecdoche because it could be argued that Carver’s shirt is a part of him. However, the poem does seem to imply that the unworn shirt represents the loss of him, which then means this is an inferred metaphor of sorts instead.