Elizabeth Robinson
“First Love” and the Remodeling of Trauma
Trauma, like grief, is iterative. It repeats itself, seeking resolution—arguing fruitlessly against the breach caused by loss or violence. The mind and heart turn back on themselves obsessively as though to lick the wound, though the obsessive gesture sometimes serves only to infect further with trauma, to turn obsessively into novel versions of the rupturing event.
Poetry, like any medium, can succumb to cliché and manipulation of the reader. Yet poetry is also a genre that lends itself to honest, necessary witness to the breach. Indeed, poetry’s flexible formal operations depict experience in a way that may help facilitate healing. The drive of narrative (in contrast to poetic modeling), especially in stories about trauma, is often a drive toward sensationalism and facile conclusion. Poetry subverts that unidirectional, emotionally exploitive movement because it has the ability to map experience and affect in crucially nonnarrative ways. A poem has the ability to hold experience without resolution or conclusion, to insist that time stop and, alternatively, to insist that each moment exist as a variant that can pivot out of inevitability into reclamation.
The poems in Donna de la Perriere’s Works of Love & Terror emerge from trauma, loss, and violence. De la Perriere shapes this material with a ragged lyricism:
We roamed the earth,
we encountered gravity,
always refracting and distorting. (24)
The poems are beautiful, intensely pitched, but are mostly not disclosive in a directly biographical sense. Therefore, it is something of a shock when the reader encounters “First Love.” “First Love” is an exemplary model for the exploration and deconstruction of trauma. The title suggests irony, a deflective shrug at a naïve former self. But tonally, the poem is anything but light. Irony here has a painful bite to it. Writing this piece, I’m tempted to raise a trigger warning. This is not a poem for the faint of heart.
“First Love” initially appears to be a direct narrative of a teenage girl being beaten and raped by her ostensible boyfriend. As aforementioned, most of de la Perierre’s poems are crafted much more allusively and gesturally. “First Love” moves away from conventional lyricism to embrace narrative: the poem confronts the reader with brutal violence and an equally blunt formal construction. The twelve pages of the poem are made up of prose-like sections. Following a section, the next page begins with a variation on the final line on the previous page. The floating line is also the iterative element of the narrative and of the poem. Increments of the assault are fed to the reader page by page as shock or outrage (perhaps both) accrete. The repetitions also have the effect of showing the stunned bewilderment of a person in trauma. As Judith Herman writes in Trauma and Recovery, “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma,” and she further observes that survivors “often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory manner which […] thereby services the twin imperative of truth-telling and secrecy.” (p. 1). For example, repetition in the poem marking trauma may simultaneously assert and self-protect.
Consider the long, complex sentence that fills out the bottom of page 42 and its echo at the top of page 43:
But by the time he is raping her—after the friend has closed
the door, after the sound of her hitting then sliding down the
wall, after she’s pleaded with him as quietly as possible
(though, in retrospect, not quietly enough)—she is well past
the point of making up stories anyone at the party might be-
lieve. (p. 42)
*
Stories anyone really listening might believe. (p. 43)
In the former section, the reader gets narrative information along with the girl’s desperate evaluation of how to handle the situation. As is so often the case in sexual assault, fault is imputed to the victim for not pleading “quietly enough.” The echoic rejoinder of page 43 shifts the weight of guilt onto the willfully oblivious bystanders at the party who, if they were “really listening” would not believe the claim that everything is alright. Here, de la Perriere is actually enacting important resistance in the sense that she is compelling the reader to stand between perpetrator and victim as witness. The reader’s discomfort is a crucial element to the poem as an act of resistance. As Herman writes, “The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing […] The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” (pp. 7-8)
Throughout the poem, the reader is implicated in this willful failure to see, even as the speaker struggles overtly, like a fly in a web. This most public self-exposure alternates with a self-erasing dissociation. By the time the boy rapes the girl, for example, she is described as being relieved, because “by the time/ he’s begun to rape her, the worst will probably be over.” (p. 37). During the rape, the girl is fundamentally disconnected from her body, more concerned about what she will tell her parents or if anyone at the party will tell on her, though even this remains in doubt since “by now she’s not really sure what she was thinking,/ whether in fact she was thinking anything at all.” (p. 44). The reader, however, is not permitted to dissociate; the pressures of the poem are excruciating, and each repetition or variation on the narrative amplifies the crisis.
A number of formal decisions are important to the power of this poem. First, consider the way de la Perriere uses page space. The first page consists of a prose-like section at the bottom of the page. On the next seven pages, a single line of text floats at the top of the next page, far above the paragraph at its base. Visually, the single line looks vulnerable, uncertain; it hangs precariously over the solidity of the prose section beneath it. This is a good formal representation of the way a traumatized mind can become untethered from the authority of its own perception: it is not itself; it is a version of itself. It floats nakedly.
In the final four sections of the poem, however, this uneven balance between upper and lower parts of the page alters, and the upper section accrues more text. By the last page of the poem, there is slightly more text in the upper half of the page than in the lower. The change in the visual balance of the page at the conclusion is notable. It does not signal resolution. Still, in a poem about trauma, any increment of change is significant. The form of the page as well as the content depict the ruptured psyche struggling to constitute and solidify a reality that is too painful to have been absorbed in the first place. The poem ends with the speaker denying that she can recognize any connection with the girl who was attacked. Nor can the speaker produce a satisfactory account of the event, though she has tried to do so many times. She doesn’t expect to complete the account this time either, and the poem ends with her “just putting it away” (and, unlike the prior sections, this page does not end with a period).
Point of view is another important element of the poem. The poem is written in the third person: “After he beats her, he will rape her.” The absence of first person pronouns (no “I,” “you,” or “we”) creates a remove, a polite distance from which, at first, the reader feels protected from implication as either perpetrator or victim. The prose format and clean syntax feel reportorial. In fact, de la Perriere is reinscribing the trauma as commonplace. The apparently anonymous “he” and “she” of the poem are everyman and everywoman. This is dismaying—but at the same time, the poem’s reinscription creates a new cultural configuration: in post-traumatic recovery, “social context is created by political movements [and in this instance, artistic work] that give voice to the disempowered.” (Herman, p. 9, my italics)
As the attack replays itself out before our reading eyes, it is no longer hidden. It is no longer a one-off, anomalous incident. The reader can no longer effect an emotional distance by which to navigate the poem. Instead, what’s established is the dissociated affect of the woman who is the recipient of the violence. The girl muses on page 40 that by the time she is being raped she will be “relatively relieved.” Reading that line, I remembered how my uncle once commented that he didn’t understand why rape was considered a crime of violence—it would be over soon, wouldn’t it? After all, he mused, a broken nose or a broken arm would take so much longer to heal. It could be argued that the apparent dispassion of the speaker’s voice and the use of third person pronouns reveals how callous our social conditioning has made us. The poem helps to manifest the degree to which our responses to violence—and sexual violence in particular—are a product of our culture and therefore socially and politically worthy of scrutiny.
The reader must ultimately move with the girl into a state of shock, into the state of negotiation and accommodation that is so common to survivors of abuse and sexual violence. It will be over soon, won’t it? But the patterning of the poem belies that convenient fiction: it won’t be over soon. It will never be over. The event will reiterate itself in a thousand ways, day after day. Here is why it is important that de la Perriere uses poetic (albeit hybrid) form to force a reckoning with narrative. The shift that is enacted within the poem creates a larger, undeniable context in which the poem gives evidence of violence. This occurs through the formal elements already discussed and by way of rhythmic continuities in the patterning here. The desperate negotiations of a mind in trauma riff into variations that are disconcertingly lyrical. But they will not coalesce into narrative clarity. Here in their entirety are the final two pages of the poem:
She’s begun writing this story quite a number of times--
quite a number of drafts—none of which ever gets finished.
She can’t imagine how to impose narrative structure on this.
She can begin it, but always finds herself doubling back—to
provide context or background, to try to make things cohere. (p. 46)
**
And the truth is she probably won’t finish this time either. At
some point she’ll stop, tell herself she needs distance, will
come back to it later, do it right this time around.
But she won’t come back to it, or she will but when she does,
she’ll just reread it, not know what to do with it, then put it
away (p. 47)
Though counter-intuitive, this junction is the moment that healing becomes possible: it opens as the poem acknowledges its failure to resolve, its incorrigible need to double back, its inability to cohere or achieve completion. One element of recovery from trauma is reconnection, and “First Love” creates new connections first by the simple act of disclosure. As noted earlier, the poem forces the emergence of a new, truthful social context. The formal breaks and reiterations of the poem both acknowledge rupture and create new networks of association and connection: this is a power of the poem and a power of survival. The loose ends, the broken pieces, are not incorporated toward conclusion but toward reclamation of the legitimacy and humanity of the survivor. In “First Love,” Donna de la Perriere courageously demonstrates that healing is not sealing the breach, but living with it, and ultimately, in that reconciliation, “putting it away.”
Works Cited
de la Perrière, Donna. Works of Love and Terror. Talisman House, 2019.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 2015.
Trauma, like grief, is iterative. It repeats itself, seeking resolution—arguing fruitlessly against the breach caused by loss or violence. The mind and heart turn back on themselves obsessively as though to lick the wound, though the obsessive gesture sometimes serves only to infect further with trauma, to turn obsessively into novel versions of the rupturing event.
Poetry, like any medium, can succumb to cliché and manipulation of the reader. Yet poetry is also a genre that lends itself to honest, necessary witness to the breach. Indeed, poetry’s flexible formal operations depict experience in a way that may help facilitate healing. The drive of narrative (in contrast to poetic modeling), especially in stories about trauma, is often a drive toward sensationalism and facile conclusion. Poetry subverts that unidirectional, emotionally exploitive movement because it has the ability to map experience and affect in crucially nonnarrative ways. A poem has the ability to hold experience without resolution or conclusion, to insist that time stop and, alternatively, to insist that each moment exist as a variant that can pivot out of inevitability into reclamation.
The poems in Donna de la Perriere’s Works of Love & Terror emerge from trauma, loss, and violence. De la Perriere shapes this material with a ragged lyricism:
We roamed the earth,
we encountered gravity,
always refracting and distorting. (24)
The poems are beautiful, intensely pitched, but are mostly not disclosive in a directly biographical sense. Therefore, it is something of a shock when the reader encounters “First Love.” “First Love” is an exemplary model for the exploration and deconstruction of trauma. The title suggests irony, a deflective shrug at a naïve former self. But tonally, the poem is anything but light. Irony here has a painful bite to it. Writing this piece, I’m tempted to raise a trigger warning. This is not a poem for the faint of heart.
“First Love” initially appears to be a direct narrative of a teenage girl being beaten and raped by her ostensible boyfriend. As aforementioned, most of de la Perierre’s poems are crafted much more allusively and gesturally. “First Love” moves away from conventional lyricism to embrace narrative: the poem confronts the reader with brutal violence and an equally blunt formal construction. The twelve pages of the poem are made up of prose-like sections. Following a section, the next page begins with a variation on the final line on the previous page. The floating line is also the iterative element of the narrative and of the poem. Increments of the assault are fed to the reader page by page as shock or outrage (perhaps both) accrete. The repetitions also have the effect of showing the stunned bewilderment of a person in trauma. As Judith Herman writes in Trauma and Recovery, “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma,” and she further observes that survivors “often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory manner which […] thereby services the twin imperative of truth-telling and secrecy.” (p. 1). For example, repetition in the poem marking trauma may simultaneously assert and self-protect.
Consider the long, complex sentence that fills out the bottom of page 42 and its echo at the top of page 43:
But by the time he is raping her—after the friend has closed
the door, after the sound of her hitting then sliding down the
wall, after she’s pleaded with him as quietly as possible
(though, in retrospect, not quietly enough)—she is well past
the point of making up stories anyone at the party might be-
lieve. (p. 42)
*
Stories anyone really listening might believe. (p. 43)
In the former section, the reader gets narrative information along with the girl’s desperate evaluation of how to handle the situation. As is so often the case in sexual assault, fault is imputed to the victim for not pleading “quietly enough.” The echoic rejoinder of page 43 shifts the weight of guilt onto the willfully oblivious bystanders at the party who, if they were “really listening” would not believe the claim that everything is alright. Here, de la Perriere is actually enacting important resistance in the sense that she is compelling the reader to stand between perpetrator and victim as witness. The reader’s discomfort is a crucial element to the poem as an act of resistance. As Herman writes, “The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing […] The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” (pp. 7-8)
Throughout the poem, the reader is implicated in this willful failure to see, even as the speaker struggles overtly, like a fly in a web. This most public self-exposure alternates with a self-erasing dissociation. By the time the boy rapes the girl, for example, she is described as being relieved, because “by the time/ he’s begun to rape her, the worst will probably be over.” (p. 37). During the rape, the girl is fundamentally disconnected from her body, more concerned about what she will tell her parents or if anyone at the party will tell on her, though even this remains in doubt since “by now she’s not really sure what she was thinking,/ whether in fact she was thinking anything at all.” (p. 44). The reader, however, is not permitted to dissociate; the pressures of the poem are excruciating, and each repetition or variation on the narrative amplifies the crisis.
A number of formal decisions are important to the power of this poem. First, consider the way de la Perriere uses page space. The first page consists of a prose-like section at the bottom of the page. On the next seven pages, a single line of text floats at the top of the next page, far above the paragraph at its base. Visually, the single line looks vulnerable, uncertain; it hangs precariously over the solidity of the prose section beneath it. This is a good formal representation of the way a traumatized mind can become untethered from the authority of its own perception: it is not itself; it is a version of itself. It floats nakedly.
In the final four sections of the poem, however, this uneven balance between upper and lower parts of the page alters, and the upper section accrues more text. By the last page of the poem, there is slightly more text in the upper half of the page than in the lower. The change in the visual balance of the page at the conclusion is notable. It does not signal resolution. Still, in a poem about trauma, any increment of change is significant. The form of the page as well as the content depict the ruptured psyche struggling to constitute and solidify a reality that is too painful to have been absorbed in the first place. The poem ends with the speaker denying that she can recognize any connection with the girl who was attacked. Nor can the speaker produce a satisfactory account of the event, though she has tried to do so many times. She doesn’t expect to complete the account this time either, and the poem ends with her “just putting it away” (and, unlike the prior sections, this page does not end with a period).
Point of view is another important element of the poem. The poem is written in the third person: “After he beats her, he will rape her.” The absence of first person pronouns (no “I,” “you,” or “we”) creates a remove, a polite distance from which, at first, the reader feels protected from implication as either perpetrator or victim. The prose format and clean syntax feel reportorial. In fact, de la Perriere is reinscribing the trauma as commonplace. The apparently anonymous “he” and “she” of the poem are everyman and everywoman. This is dismaying—but at the same time, the poem’s reinscription creates a new cultural configuration: in post-traumatic recovery, “social context is created by political movements [and in this instance, artistic work] that give voice to the disempowered.” (Herman, p. 9, my italics)
As the attack replays itself out before our reading eyes, it is no longer hidden. It is no longer a one-off, anomalous incident. The reader can no longer effect an emotional distance by which to navigate the poem. Instead, what’s established is the dissociated affect of the woman who is the recipient of the violence. The girl muses on page 40 that by the time she is being raped she will be “relatively relieved.” Reading that line, I remembered how my uncle once commented that he didn’t understand why rape was considered a crime of violence—it would be over soon, wouldn’t it? After all, he mused, a broken nose or a broken arm would take so much longer to heal. It could be argued that the apparent dispassion of the speaker’s voice and the use of third person pronouns reveals how callous our social conditioning has made us. The poem helps to manifest the degree to which our responses to violence—and sexual violence in particular—are a product of our culture and therefore socially and politically worthy of scrutiny.
The reader must ultimately move with the girl into a state of shock, into the state of negotiation and accommodation that is so common to survivors of abuse and sexual violence. It will be over soon, won’t it? But the patterning of the poem belies that convenient fiction: it won’t be over soon. It will never be over. The event will reiterate itself in a thousand ways, day after day. Here is why it is important that de la Perriere uses poetic (albeit hybrid) form to force a reckoning with narrative. The shift that is enacted within the poem creates a larger, undeniable context in which the poem gives evidence of violence. This occurs through the formal elements already discussed and by way of rhythmic continuities in the patterning here. The desperate negotiations of a mind in trauma riff into variations that are disconcertingly lyrical. But they will not coalesce into narrative clarity. Here in their entirety are the final two pages of the poem:
She’s begun writing this story quite a number of times--
quite a number of drafts—none of which ever gets finished.
She can’t imagine how to impose narrative structure on this.
She can begin it, but always finds herself doubling back—to
provide context or background, to try to make things cohere. (p. 46)
**
And the truth is she probably won’t finish this time either. At
some point she’ll stop, tell herself she needs distance, will
come back to it later, do it right this time around.
But she won’t come back to it, or she will but when she does,
she’ll just reread it, not know what to do with it, then put it
away (p. 47)
Though counter-intuitive, this junction is the moment that healing becomes possible: it opens as the poem acknowledges its failure to resolve, its incorrigible need to double back, its inability to cohere or achieve completion. One element of recovery from trauma is reconnection, and “First Love” creates new connections first by the simple act of disclosure. As noted earlier, the poem forces the emergence of a new, truthful social context. The formal breaks and reiterations of the poem both acknowledge rupture and create new networks of association and connection: this is a power of the poem and a power of survival. The loose ends, the broken pieces, are not incorporated toward conclusion but toward reclamation of the legitimacy and humanity of the survivor. In “First Love,” Donna de la Perriere courageously demonstrates that healing is not sealing the breach, but living with it, and ultimately, in that reconciliation, “putting it away.”
Works Cited
de la Perrière, Donna. Works of Love and Terror. Talisman House, 2019.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 2015.