I had my first short story published in Calling All Girls, a teen magazine, when I was twelve. Still, poetry? Most of the poems I knew then had lines that were metered, rhymed and end-stopped. A poem or a sonnet was a small gem, but when I tried to write one, I ended up with doggerel (though I didn’t know that damning word then). I’d read Longfellow’s Evangeline, hypnotized by the “forest primeval,” a book, gorgeous, surreal yet not the kind of poem I had been longing for then. But, when I was fifteen, my teacher, Miss Stephens brought me the poetry of Robert Browning. Yes! Poems that are dramatic monologues, that tell stories, that don’t have periods at the end of most lines: Fra Lippo Lippi, Porphyria’s Lover, The Pied Piper, Caliban. But the Browning poem that changed my life, that told me—a young story-teller—that I might be a poet was My Last Duchess.
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
This poem helped make me a poet. It has drama, cruelty, flirtation, irony, subtlety, and a lesson on how to create character: innocent or evil, strong or weak, beautiful or ugly. This poem, like most of Browning’s, has passion, pace, many enjambed lines, and theatrical surprises. His poetry also dared me to take risks, to write about what I do not yet know. Yes, he used rhyming couplets that I don’t, but my fascination with his other techniques helped me create dramatic monologues, persona poems of Mary Todd Lincoln, Molly Bloom, Virginia Woolf, a Russian sailor in a flooding submarine at the ocean bottom, and many more. My gratitude and thanks go to Browning and Miss Stephens. But I’ve moved on, writing different poems now, not usually monologues but still, remembering what I’ve learned, seeking drama, complexity, finesse, surprise, darkness, and light, trying to reach the unknown and unknowable.
Yes, Browning, she—my first Duchess
was the one who showed me
never become Neptune’s docile sea horse
and, instead, take a stand, be strong, be alive.
Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 8 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist’s books, 2 plays. Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. In May 2024, her 8th poetry book Green Leaves, Unseeing will be published by Marsh Hawk Press. Title inspired by Virginia Woolf, cover painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway & an editor at Pedestal. www.susanterris.com