Scrapbook Deckle-Edged Photo

Alexandra Burack:

“Scrapbook Deckle-Edged Photo” was begun in a summer, 2023 workshop with the brilliant poet and teacher Richie Hofmann as a response to this ekphrastic prompt: “Pick a beloved photograph. This could be an old family photo or something you snapped recently on a walk or with friends. Write a poem of six long lines, in which the lines extend almost to the end of the page, about what is just outside the frame.” Although a great deal of my work has centered around the death of my father, Boris, at the hands of a drunk-driving police officer when I was 8 years old, I’d never before attempted an ekphrastic poem using the last photo taken with him in Vermont, where we camped every summer. The first draft of the poem emerged as a traditionally-lineated poem of 36 lines and heavy on contextual family history. However, I realized as soon as the second draft that its organic form was the prose poem, and this change refocused the centrality of the content on what lies beyond the borders of the frame. Work on drafts 3 – 4, completed over the remaining months of 2023, prioritized great compression and precision of language to allow the series of images to be the engine of the poem’s velocity. In early 2024, I completed the 5th draft, which centered on tightening the syntax. In mid-September, 2024, I completed a 6th draft and then considered the poem in its final, publishable form. This poem was submitted to numerous literary magazines for many months, and was rejected until its acceptance by Pangyrus.