University Times

Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields.

Always know sometimes think it’s me, but you know I know and it’s a dream.

—The Beatles

It was 1967 when the Beatles released “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a surreal song that became the initial inspiration for a college freshman at Allegheny College.

“I wrote a poem about it and, looking back now, it was probably a horrible poem, but it got published in a literary magazine at Allegheny,” said Pam O’Brien, whose third chapbook of 26 poems was published in 2010 by Pudding House Publications. “I didn’t understand the Beatles song and I didn’t understand my poem, and yet there was this connection, and ever since then I’ve been writing poetry.”

Pam O'Brien at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Partly influenced by her deep interest in Salvador Dali and Garcia Lorca — an interest fueled by her life-altering junior year abroad in Spain — O’Brien’s latest collection, “Acceptable Losses,” returns her to surrealistic themes after forays into persona poems (dramatic monologues), sestinas, family narratives and the poetical retelling of fairy tales.

The two sections of the new collection, “I AM LOST” and “I LEARN TO RESCUE MYSELF,” are framed by two poems, “Surreal I” and “Surreal II,” that each revolves around a Dali or Lorca theme.

In “Surreal I,” for example, O’Brien writes:

Dali haunts me still

dreamed about staying forever.

Had I not chosen motherhood,

I might have been a surreal woman.

Those kinds of surreal themes are sprinkled liberally among the chapbook’s individual poems with dream-like images that defy logic and standard time and space.

“Surrealism, Dali and Lorca — you really don’t get it, but you do get it on some unexplained level,” she said.

“I’ve always loved writing and words. Most poets and English teachers are that way,” said O’Brien, whose job at Pitt is teaching and developing the curriculum in the English department’s public and professional writing certificate program, where she is associate director. “But I grew up in a house where that was not valued. My mother didn’t want me in the house reading books. She wanted me out playing. So I didn’t do a lot of writing,” she recounted.

“In high school all I was interested in was being a great majorette — and boys, of course.”

But in her hometown of Erie, O’Brien stumbled upon an informal class in poetry appreciation at Gannon University (where later she would earn her master’s degree in creative writing; her master’s thesis eventually became the source of her first chapbook, “Kaleidoscopes,” published in 1999).

“So once I finished my majorette classes at the Y — my big priority — I took this little poetry course. We read Amy Lowell’s ‘Patterns’ and we read T.S. Eliot: ‘In the room the women come and go,/Talking of Michelangelo,’” O’Brien said, still remembering a refrain from an Eliot poem.

“Again, it was not so much that I understood it, but I learned that words can do something that we never expected they could do.”

She said the same holds true of one’s dreams, which in “Acceptable Losses” became the building blocks of O’Brien’s poetry.

“I started recording my dreams, sometimes just fragments, phrases. I have a sheet of paper by the bed for when I wake up remembering a dream,” she explained. “I don’t wake up from a dream knowing the whole poem; these fragments are changed dramatically from what they were. I woke up with the piece of something and later made it into a poem.”

After gathering up a host of fragmented images from her dreams, O’Brien looked for the meta narrative.

“What hung this all together is that my dreams were the dreams of that person who used to be me, who lived in Spain many years ago. I apparently never got past that when I became a grownup,” she said.

O’Brien was a Spanish major studying at the University of Madrid who knew no one when she arrived in Spain and at first was wracked with homesickness.

“I was a little girl from Erie, Pennsylvania. I was a majorette, you know? I’d never been on an airplane before I went to Spain. I’d never been on my own. I’d never been in a big city. Here I was living in a city of 5 million people,” O’Brien recalled, adding that early on in her stay she planned a quick-exit strategy in case things became intolerable.

“Of course, I’m glad I stayed. It all changed once I could speak Spanish better and I made some wonderful friends, people who are still my friends,” O’Brien said.

Her best friend during her 15-month stay in Spain was Jose, himself a poet, who became a recurring character in “Acceptable Losses.”

“It was not a physical relationship, it was a writing relationship, a really deep friendship, and we’ve stayed in touch and we still send our poems back and forth in email,” O’Brien said.

“He knew a lot about Dali and Lorca and I was very interested in them. I did my senior thesis at Allegheny on Lorca’s book, ‘A Poet in New York.’ It’s a surrealistic book about this Spanish guy trying to make it in Harlem and all these different places in New York, and it hit on some of the feelings I had trying to adjust to Spain, but sort of in reverse,” she said.

Eventually, O’Brien fell so much in love with Spain that when the time came she wondered whether she should return home. “I seriously questioned: Maybe I want to stay. Maybe this is where I truly belong,” she said.

“The logical part of the collection in ‘Acceptable Losses,’ if it were anything, is this rethinking of the person I might have been if I hadn’t become the person I became. How much did this really change me? How much more would I have changed if I had stayed and would it have been for the better?” O’Brien explained.

“Instead, I came back from Spain, ended up with the totally wrong guy, we got married and had a child,” she said.

She got divorced, then several years later rekindled her friendship with an old high school buddy, Jack O’Brien, who became her husband (and, incidentally, created the cover art for “Acceptable Losses”).

“None of that would have happened if I had stayed,” and while she believes she still would have become a poet, she likely would have been a much different poet, O’Brien noted.

She said the most difficult part of writing poetry is not so much finding inspiration, which comes from who and where one is, as it is finding the time to entertain the muse.

“Most of my poems come to me over the summer and over Christmas, because being a writing teacher takes so much energy and creativity I don’t get to write much. Once in awhile, I’ll get a little break — we were over in Israel over spring break and I did some writing,” O’Brien said.

“I think poetry requires you to have free space. If I get busy with work, I’m sure the creative thoughts are still there, but I don’t reach them.”

Training one’s inner ear for poetry also takes effort, she said. “I think you develop that over time. I think that aural part of poetry is really, really important. I always read my poems out loud to myself when I write them. And if I’m not sure how a poem sounds to others, I’ll ask my husband to read it to me.”

At times, a poem can emerge without warning. “It just takes off, and I get lost in the poem,” O’Brien said. “Sometimes, I have the last line and I know where I’m going with it.”

For example, O’Brien wrote a poem about her daughter, who had moved to Los Angeles.

“The whole poem came from something she said on the phone to me. Molly said, ‘You know, Mom, I love you, but in some ways you’ve ruined my life.’

“I had my last line, and then I wrote the poem imagining her in L.A. and this brand new life, sitting with her friends, having a glass of wine and some cheese — and saying that I’d ruined her life.”

Often, O’Brien said, a poem provides an unexpected turn, where “the process just takes over, and you have to be able to go with it. That’s what acceptable losses are. As we move on with our lives, the decisions we make — yes, we must accept them, but also we have to ask: Which of those changes we make become an acceptable part of the new life we move on to? What do we keep?”

—Peter Hart