My poetry folio follows the life of Rose Grainger, the mother of renowned Australian classical music composer Percy Grainger. The idea for this suite arose when we were asked to write a poem based on any item or exhibition in the Grainger Museum in class. There are a plethora of fascinating displays in the museum, but I found myself drawn to one in particular: the layout of items that were in Rose Grainger, Percy Grainger’s mother’s, purse on the day she committed suicide.

I have always been curious about eerie and dark subject matters, and there is something especially uncanny about a man who had kept every last artefact of his mother’s- right down to her locks of hair. Their perfect arrangement within the glass case reminded me of stage props and struck me as extremely odd. This inspired me to write the first poem I wrote in the suite, ironically, the penultimate poem: beloved mother’s driving gloves: her last drive. I hadn’t planned on writing prose poetry, but it was the form of poetry that I felt most conveyed a sense of eeriness.

I considered producing a biographical narrative through my poetry suite but felt daunted by the idea of doing so. While I had read lots of prose poetry, I had never written anything like it before. I grew more comfortable with the idea when I was introduced to *Suite for Percy Grainger**[[1]](<https://www.notion.so/Poetics-Blueprint-my-writing-process-f485f15418ef4f209637ddb6ee3dc226#_ftn1>)***, a collection of biographical poems by Jessica Wilkinson. In reading snippets of her available poems, I was intrigued by how her poems replicated Grainger’s music score sheets. I further read biographical collections by Joanne Burns[[2]](<https://www.notion.so/Poetics-Blueprint-my-writing-process-f485f15418ef4f209637ddb6ee3dc226#_ftn2>), Stephanie Green[[3]](<https://www.notion.so/Poetics-Blueprint-my-writing-process-f485f15418ef4f209637ddb6ee3dc226#_ftn3>)and Jane Williams[[4]](<https://www.notion.so/Poetics-Blueprint-my-writing-process-f485f15418ef4f209637ddb6ee3dc226#_ftn4>).

I was further inspired by one of my favourite verse poets, Jennifer Cheng, who writes biographies based on mythical characters. I am often fascinated by lucid, dreamlike, surreal images and thought maps that often emerge through certain forms of prose poetry, so I tried to replicate similar feelings in this suite.

Research wise, I predominantly utilised the Grainger Museum website which holds digital information on all the museum collections. The Grainger Museum had also released an exhibition catalogue[5] which presented a timeline of Percy Grainger’s life alongside letters he and Rose had sent back and forth to each other. These letters and facts guided all of my poems. I wanted to present my research artistically in my poems; above each poem is the title of the collection that inspired it.

 The voice is an omnipresent third-person, however my intention was to capture Rose Grainger in her entirety: her obsession with image, her all-consuming and at many instances, fanatical thoughts, and most importantly her strange relationship with her son (that many people speculated was incestuous). Rose Grainger had an unsound state of mind for the majority of her life, as her physical and mental sickness lead to incessant delusions and nightmares.

 Jessica Wilkinson’s poems inspired me to break up some of my prose poems with musically inspired poems that could potentially be sung; *walking tune, what could be more natural?, The lost lady found.* I utilised iambic pentameter- albeit not very strictly- for a sense of rhythm and melody in the poems. Percy Grainger's composition, *Walking Tune*, inspired my poem of the same title. I wanted to juxtapose Rose Grainger's mundane routines like walking and eating with her abnormal state of mind. I paired the regular rhythm of the poem with the word ‘well-preserved’[[6]](<https://www.notion.so/Poetics-Blueprint-my-writing-process-f485f15418ef4f209637ddb6ee3dc226#_ftn6>). The meaning behind this sole poem encapsulates the way I’d like readers to interpret my whole suite. How did Rose Grainger's everyday thoughts and delusions oppose one's everyday mundanities?  

I thought of my suite sort of as a miniature museum, composed of moments, lists, relics, dreams, worries and conversations that made up Rose Grainger’s life just before giving birth to her son, all the way until she committed suicide: epistolary poems, shorter verse poems, poems that start and finish in two separate poems. I loved reading through sections in the catalogue that detailed unexceptional details of the Graingers’ lives, like their grocery lists[7] and Percy’s sick care-routine[8]. As such, almost every word and phrase in my suite has a meaning behind it. For instance, ‘strawberry jam’ in The lost lady found was **a food Percy and Rose Grainger often ate[9]; the repetition of the phrase ‘blue-eyed’ and the colours cream and white symbolised their stance on Nordic Superiority[10]. The titles of the poems either act as 'artefacts' of Rose's life, reflect Percy’s composition titles, (walking tune, the lost lady found, molly on the shore, or quote Percy’s letters and books (Did Mother have a touch of hypercondria?, ....these were happy days, That ‘Unmentionable Disease’).

 My frequent use of enjambment is very much intentional: it reflects what I imagine Rose Grainger’s thought patterns look like, which are complex and simple at once; its complexity stems from her delusions, nightmares, desperations, while its simplicity stems from basic human feelings like fear and love. I tried to replicate a murky and unclear thought process by breaking up my lines at “improper” times. That is, when a thought is supposedly unfinished and has no ‘closure’. This pattern of thought acts similarly in my prose poems, where lines often run on longer than they need to, or are interrupted by other disturbing thoughts or images.

 The suite thus begins with a wistful Rose Grainger and ends with the opposite. However, the ‘epilogue’, *Relics,* paints a sweet picture of Rose and Percy’s life together through descriptions of their beloved keepsakes. The suite can then be interpreted as going full circle.

This suite was a pleasure for me to research and write. Writing about historical figures from a perspective that felt almost intrusive gave me a learning experience I will continue to use and revise in my future work.

[1] Suite for Percy Grainger, Jessica Wilkinson, 2014

[2] Apparently, Joanne Burns, 2019

[3] Breathing in Stormy Seasons, Stephanie Green, 2019

[4] Parts of the Main, Jane Williams, Ginniderra Press, 2017

[5] Percy Grainger : From Meat-Shun-Ment To Cut-Cure-Craft, Alessandro Servadei

[6] Percy Grainger : From Meat-Shun-Ment To Cut-Cure-Craft, Alessandro Servadei, p. 20

[7] Percy Grainger : From Meat-Shun-Ment To Cut-Cure-Craft, Alessandro Servadei, p. 31

[8] Extract from Percy Grainger, Aldridge-Grainger-Ström Saga, 13 October 1933, in Percy Grainger : From Meat-Shun-Ment To Cut-Cure-Craft, Alessandro Servadei, p. 8