It’s an altered book based on the 19th century hit novel-in-verse Lucile. It’s fiction. It’s Journal: The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Amy Zoe Mason.
Owen Meredith's Lucile, is a classic novel-in-verse. What can poets learn from the altered book based upon it?
Journal: The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Amy Zoe Mason is written in casual, everyday prose. Here is how it begins:
They say that losing a loved one and moving are two of the most stressful events in one's life. I am dealing with both. I am still coming to terms with my mother's sudden death just two months ago. And we will be moving from Houston to Massachusetts this spring. (1)
Authors Kristine and Joyce Atkinson use e-mails, recipes, notices clipped from newspapers, diary entries, torn bits of old letters, and recipes to forward the plot. They also employ collage -- with a gorgeous procession of photos, house plans, children's drawings, mah-jongg tiles, stencil work, lace inserts, antique prints and a host of other devises overlaid upon Meredith's text. These non-verbal media act as a kind of running commentary alongside the letters and journal entries. It seems that Amy Zoe Mason, the fictional creator of the altered book, is allowing us to witness the working of her subconscious during a life crisis.
I should note that very little of Meredith's original Lucile reveals itself between the heavy material overlays. Snippets do peer out from time to time, acting, much as does the collage work, as the emotional substructure of the surface narrative.
Significantly, the original Meredith text reappears at journal's end, when Amy Zoe Mason is no longer able to work on her project:
He will wake without a mother.
He will hate me when he hears
From the cold lips of another
all my faults in after years. (2)
and
I was weak - I cannot tell -
But the serpent in my ear
Whispered, whispered - and I fell. (3)
Altered books such as Journal share a great deal with contemporary poetry. In fact one could argue that altered books arepoetry, in that they convey events, emotion, and character -- through a verbal medium -- that speaks to the non-verbal part of the brain.
Without the ability to use visual media, contemporary poets attempt to find new ways of using words in a non-verbal way. Modern poets work to break down traditional word-meaning associations so they can use the sounds words make, instead of the definition of words, to transmit meaning. Journal authors Kristine and Joyce Atkinson use visual cues -- pattern, color, and texture - to accomplish the same thing.
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For further study, Ruth Whitman, Ellen Bryant Voight , and Les Murrayare poets who use journal entries, letters, and other scraps from every day life in their work.
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- Atkinson, Kristine, Atkinson, Joyce. Journal: The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Amy Zoe Mason. Simon and Schuster: New York. 2006. .
- Meredith, Owen. Lucile. Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Boston. 1881. 159.
- ibid.
