Just One Thing with Shannon Moran

Shannon Moran’s poem “Over Spring Break I Shave My Mothers Head” explores mother-daughter relationships, diseases, and the dread of loss. Here, she shares just one thing about the piece:

This poem was born out of my Poetic Forms workshop during my MFA at the University of Missouri—Kansas City (shoutout to esteemed poet and amazing professor Dr. Hadara Bar-Nadav!). I was tasked with writing a poem in syllabics, so I chose seven syllables per line and this piece just poured forth. I've been a free verse girlie for my entire career, but it was in this class that I learned just how helpful a container can be. It took HOURS of tweaking to get it right, but having a strict form was so generative. In revisions, I've had to break the form here and there to offer better clarity and image, but most of the lines have stayed true.

This piece was obviously inspired by watching my Mom go through cancer treatment. I was living so far away in Kansas City while she went through treatment in Baltimore, and I really did hop on a same-day flight to help her with her hair. It felt like this strange, but wonderful, reversal of the mother-daughter roles for a brief moment. Speaking of, thank you to my Mom, who has no idea I wrote this piece. I don't know if she'll love it. But charting our relationship has been an obsession of mine in my work. I'm glad she called me at a moment of intense vulnerability and fear. I'll always pick up that call. Mothers and daughters, man.

Also, I really was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, and I took to saying that I "tried to hang myself in utero" when I was an angsty teen. I thought this was hilarious, and thought that my Poetry cohort would laugh at the line in workshop, but they all seemed pretty sad instead. Oops. My mother did once tell me that everything I said was "for shock value," which was, looking back, the read of the century.