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From: will.dockery@gmail.com (W.Dockery)
Newsgroups: alt.arts.poetry.comments,rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: My Father's House / gjd (for new comments)
Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2025 18:36:12 +0000
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On Fri, 7 Feb 2025 19:31:54 +0000, George J. Dance wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Feb 2025 11:29:25 +0000, Will Dockery wrote:
>> George J. Dance wrote:
>
>>> My Father's House
>>>
>>> This is my father's house, although
>>> The man died thirteen years ago.
>>> They said it would be quite all right
>>> To take a drive to see it now.
>>>
>>> Dad laid those grey foundation blocks
>>> And built the whole thing (from a box),
>>> Toiling after each full day's work.
>>> I helped, though I was only six.
>>>
>>> Look, here's the back door I would use
>>> And here's where I'd remove my shoes
>>> To enter; there I'd leave my things
>>> And, when allowed, climb up these stairs.
>>>
>>> In this room I'd wash many a dish,
>>> Gaze out this window, and I'd wish
>>> To be so many other places.
>>> (Wishy-washy? Oh, I guess!)
>>>
>>> Outside, the garden that he grew
>>> Where I would work the summers through,
>>> While watching my friends run and play
>>> Mysterious games I never knew.
>>>
>>> That room's all changed; oh, where is it,
>>> The one chair I was let to sit?
>>> (For boys can be such filthy things.)
>>> Which, the corner where boys were put?
>>>
>>> Oh ... down that hall there is a room
>>> Where I'd be shut (as in a tomb)
>>> After the meal, to make no noise,
>>> To read or play alone, and then
>>>
>>> Lights out: in bed by nine each night,
>>> Some nights wanting to pee with fright,
>>> Face and pyjama bottoms down
>>> As for my father's belt I'd wait.
>>>
>>> Oh, if I were a millionaire
>>> I'd buy my father's house, and there
>>> I'd build a bonfire, oh so high
>>> Its flames would light up all the air.
>>>
>>> ~~
>>> George J. Dance
>>> from Logos and other logoi, 2021
>>
>> Here it is, MFH.
>
> Thank you for reposting this poem of mine, Will. While it's true that it
> has been discussed a lot over the years, it also true that at least one
> person wants to discuss it now; and this would be the appropriate place
> to move those comments, rather than leaving them scattered all over the
> group. So let's start with this one:
>
> On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 16:15:27 +0000, Michael Monkey Peabrain (MPP) aka
> "HarryLime" wrote:
>> On Mon, 3 Feb 2025 13:06:00 +0000, George J. Dance wrote:
>>>> Why do you lie so much, George?
>>>> (That's a rhetorical question, as you've already intimated that your
>>>> pathological lying stems from you having been abused as a child.)
>>>
>>> No, Lying Michael: I have never said, or even "intimated" (!) that I was
>>> pathological, lying, or
>>> "abused as a child".
>
>> You wrote a "mostly autobiographical" poem detailing the abuses you
>> suffered as a child, George.  And you're demonstrating your pathological
>> obsession with lying in your trio of denials, listed above.
> https://www.novabbs.com/arts/article.php?id=15801&group=rec.arts.poems
>
> HarryLiar has manufactured yet another fake quote; I have never called
> this poem "mostly autobiographical" or autobiographical in many ways. I
> have distinctly told him in the past that, while some of the speaker's
> memories were based on my own childhood experiences, not all of them
> were; I was using them in a work of creative fiction, not an
> autobiography of any kind. So he lied and made up a fake quote to
> support his lie.
>
> The poem is meant to be a dramatic monolgue, in the style of Browning
> (His "My Last Duchess" is a good example), meant to get inside the
> psychology of a  speaker or persona. The speaker may have experienced
> his childhood as "abuse" - HarryLiar calls it that but the speaker
> doesn't. The memories of it, though, have stayed on his mind, and he
> wants to get rid of those memories (symbolized by burning down the house
> at the end).
>
> It's deliberately left to the reader to decide if the speaker actually
> had been abused by his father or not. I did structure it, for effect,
> from the least to the most abusive-seeming experiences; from having to
> use a back door and remove his shoes to enter the house, to doing
> household chores, to doing garden work in the summertime, to not being
> allowed to use some of the furniture, to having to stay inside alone at
> night and be in bed early, to being subjected to corporal punishment.
> Adding them together like that, it's easy enough to conclude that the
> father had been abusive; but I'll point out that all of those events
> were things children commonly experienced 50-60 years ago, and that none
> of them were commonly considered abusive.

As Karla Rogers often reminded us:

"Try not to mistake the speaker in the poem with the writer of the
poem."