[ChrisW]

Hello Alicia,

I'm so glad you're Tim's guest here. A few weeks ago I was hit by (what seemed to be) an insight into your poem "Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother" (which was one of my favorites in _Archaic Smile_), and this gives me the opportunity to have you comment on the poem. Of course, if I'm right, it's probably something that anyone with half a brain would get right away -- I tend to be very literal-minded (something you have said about yourself, but I am LITERALLY literal-minded).

I was thinking about letters to the dead and it struck me that although this poem is on the surface a letter FROM the kingdom of the dead, it might be understood as a letter to the dead, but with a twist. I mean that Hades in the poem isn't death, but rather grief, and that the dead person is not Persephone, but her mother. Or maybe that's not the way to say it -- better to say that the poet is trying to understand the absolute unreachability (but paradoxical closeness) of the dead and the nature of grief by imaginatively switching places with the dead.
(Of course, Persephone is eventually released for 6 months out of every year, but I take it this doesn't enter into your poem.)

This hypothesis fits well with the first line "First--hell is not so far underground". Also, I think it fits with the portrayal of the dead -- the living often seem as silly to the grieving. ("They pester you like children for the wrong details--/How long were his fingernails, did she wear shoes" -- one of my favorite bits, by the way -- wonderful comic relief.)
My hypothesis also fits with the very moving final paragraph
(the futility of writing the letter combined with the need to write it anyway, even though the writing is painful).

Well, anyway, I don't care whether I'm right or wrong (or whether it's too obvious to mention) but I am curious just how you got the idea for this poem and how it developed, and I hope I can provoke you into saying something about that.
--Chris