An Ode to the Ode: Lory Bedikian on How the Form Helped Her Grieve and Grow

Before my mother died, I visited her in the hospital with a notebook and pen in my bag. I asked her to tell me things she had never told me, things she may have always wanted to share or that she may have started thinking about with all the hours she had spent in these hospital rooms.

She claimed that I was taking notes for her funeral. She was annoyed, exhausted and wasn’t in the mood to recount anything. But I didn’t know what else to do. I knew the end was near and I wanted to preserve something, anything. I wanted her to be heard even if she didn’t know what she wanted to say. I can see now it was an attempt to control the madness of losing her.

I began to ask questions and she slowly gave me grace notes. I went home that evening with the notebook and set it down. The notes stayed untouched.

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During my MFA at the University of Oregon in 2000 a required text was The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Eavan Boland and Mark Strand. The ode chapter gives examples from Percy Shelley to Joy Harjo. I attempted the form, but I don’t know if I fully gave myself the permission to write them; I didn’t realize then that we can really break a form and make it malleable to suit a poem’s ultimate message, urgent purpose.

I write when I am in struggle. I turn to form when I need control over the uncontrollable. So, when my father passed away in 2018 it made sense—even obvious, in retrospect—that I would be drawn to “Odes.” I began to write odes or ode-like poems in response to him not being able to stand anymore due to camptocormia and other health issues.

In November 2019, I gave a workshop on “The Ode” as a visiting instructor to a class at Woodbury University. It was while I was preparing for this workshop when I received a call from my mom. She had gotten the bad news that there wasn’t much time left. She told me I had to be brave. I told her I was. I gave myself no choice.

With a strange determination, after my mother passed away on March 5, 2020 I revisited the ode again, but it was different this time around. Now I asked the form to help me praise what moments of her life she had retrieved and relayed to her daughter before her exiting this world.

The form of the ode assisted me in reinventing a loved one’s voice and rebuilding a life in lines, no matter how insignificant it may have seemed at the time. I took what I had jotted down that day in my notebook  and began to see what shape the ode should take, what order the memories should move in and what revisions needed to be made to make her thoughts now my poem.

The world was deep into the pandemic so I ordered a copy of All the Odes, a bilingual edition, a collection of Pablo Neruda’s work. Page after page, the collection was testament to the belief that material for our writing is everywhere and in everything.

Neruda’s odes are written for sand and salt or Lorca and the Americas. I began to write more of my own. I felt that the form of the ode allowed the poet to praise even those things that brought loss, sorrow or difficulty.

The drafts saved me. I wrote through the nights and didn’t know what would become of these rough attempts. In some way, reading odes and trying my hand at them, helped me get through the darkest days.

The ode workshop is one I’ve continued to teach at different writing centers and programs throughout the country since. During all those workshops we looked at traditional examples of the form leading up to contemporary poets specifically poems from John Keats, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove and Lucille Clifton.

We discussed how historically the ode was an elaborate poem which praised or glorified a person or event. They were recited, put to music. Probably recitations were done at special, pompous events. So, basically, an ode could have been a poem praising an event at an event.

We discussed the three forms including the Pindaric, Horatian and irregular. Big canonical names were mentioned like Spenser, Dryden, Wordsworth and the list goes on.

Really, the ode may have been one of the first forms of public relations, publicity and marketing. I told participants that we can write odes not only to celebrate some event or person or thing, but also to embrace, to reclaim or to own something we thought had a hold on us.

My mother’s death was one of the most informative, life-altering events. At the end she expressed regret for not doing more with her life. It scared the hell out of me. I began to send my work out, something I had stopped doing regularly after becoming a mother. I sent a variety of poems with my submissions, but made sure to include a few of the odes I had composed.

A group of my poems won the 2022 Pablo Neruda First Place Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International Journal and among the group was the poem “Ode to Their Leaving,” an ode written about not only my parents leaving their home-countries of Lebanon and Syria but also about them both passing away

In my second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body I include three odes. The collection opens with “Ode to Their Leaving,” which stands alone before the following five sections of the book.

Now that I look at the collection after publication I realize that many of the poems are odes even if they don’t contain that word in the title. The pieces try to uphold and capture a moment in order to insist that the speaker has experienced something beyond the mundane moments of life. A poem titled “Needle Biopsy” could have easily been titled “Ode to A Needle Biopsy.”

I’m grateful that I was drawn to the form of the ode years ago and that the reading, studying, teaching and writing created something in me that felt confident enough to write my own versions and send them out for publication. Bishop was right about losing. It’s easy. What’s hard is doing something with the loss to create something that remains for ourselves and for others.

I never thought I’d be sitting and typing about those difficult times. I never thought I would lose my mother in that awful way. I’m grateful a poetic form kept me company and then when I needed it most, nudged me to write it all down, to praise, embrace what was and what remains.

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Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body by Lory Bedikian is available via the University of Nebraska Press.