Ode to Lorelai and Rory Gilmore
After Stephanie Chang
Friday night, I swallow the moon. Search the sky for the sound of my mother’s solitude.
The candlelight dancing like thieves. Illuminating this dining room’s history of haunt.
Between my fingers: silver knives and silence.
My grandmother thrashes her daughter’s memories onto the dinner table.
Instructs us to feast on them like roasted duck.
I clench the silverware in one hand. The family secrets in the other.
I am remembered for what I never became. Remind my mother of what she left behind.
Tulle dresses. Debutante balls. Rebellion wrapped around a centerpiece.
A daughter’s worth is measured by how well she hides her loneliness.
The family line has a fate worse than a shot of vodka next to an open flame.
A mouth clobbered to nothing but breath. Bones weeping grief.
The DAR ladies whisper about my mother. Call her a disappointment.
Born of the same cloth as failure. She was found crying in a field of yellow daisies.
To love something that dies after a week, she cried, dripping in desire.
The first time I cried was in August. Couldn’t find the moon.
Thought my hunger killed it. Darkness flooding into darkness, I starved.
Only ate daisy petals for a month. Thought it would make me more like my mother.
Independent. Holding a martini in one hand. The family ghosts in the other.
Annalisa Hansford
Annalisa Hansford (they/them) is from Pennsylvania and studies Creative Writing at Emerson College. Their poetry appears in The West Review, The Lumiere Review, Heavy Feather Review and has received honors from Academy of American Poets, Isele Magazine, and 1455 Literary Arts. They studied poetry with Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the 2024 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop this past summer. They call for the liberation of Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and Haiti.
Why Martheaus loved it:
Go ahead and have the Gilmore Girls theme song playing in the background as you read this (link here). You’re welcome.
Annalisa, a personal thank you for allowing me to be able to combine my job with Gilmore Girls analysis. Ah, life is good. When I first read this poem, I was smacked by how well it manages the themes of familial transference and motherhood/daughterhood with it ekphrastic form. (Nerd Alert! Bing Bong: “Ekphrasis” is a term for art that is created in response to another piece of art; in this case, a poem commenting on/using Gilmore Girls). The fear with ekphrastic poetry is figuring out which way to reshape contexts.
What impressed me here was this ode doesn't require watching 7 seasons of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore having questionable taste in partners to understand. BUT AS A FAN, it includes several easter eggs to draw you in (for example, I’m thinking that "vodka next to an open fire" line is a reference to the episode where the inn catches on fire). Gilmore Girls is such a great mine to take a look at cyclical, repetitive mother-daughter stories (I mean for crying out loud "Rory" is just a nickname she got from also being named Lorelai).
The poem also works past its reference point. I mean come on, y’all–"A mouth clobbered to nothing but its breath" and "Only ate daisy petals for a month. Thought it would make me more like my mother" are some bangers! There's a great balancing over heightened imagery with confessional conversation (sometimes I write sentences like that and think I'm way too deep in poetry land). Lastly, I want to point out how the poem moves across settings so easily: from the dinner scene to the whispering DAR ladies to a more lyrical setting with the moon.
So, who’s up for a Gilmore Girls watch party? Don’t worry, it’s only 7 seasons of yelling for these people to get therapy.
Interview:
Was I prepared for a Gilmore Girls poem to show up in my inbox? No. Did it somehow send my whole day into chaos (the good Sookie St. James type)? You betcha. Talk us through why Gilmore Girls was a point of inspiration for this poem.
I wrote this poem a really long time ago actually. I just checked the timestamp on my Google Doc, and I started drafting this poem in March of 2023. I was a sophomore in college when I wrote this, and I’m going to be a senior this year. So my memory is a bit hazy. But I think I wrote this during my spring break. I remember watching lots of Gilmore Girls and reading lots of poetry. When I think of my sophomore year of college, I think of Gilmore Girls. My sophomore year roommate—who has become my best friend—and I would have nights where we watched Gilmore Girls on the floor of our dorm room, eating pizza and vegan cheesy bread from Blaze (the best pizza in Boston). I think I consumed the show so much that year that it just naturally seeped into my poetry.
Swallowing the moon, holding family ghosts in hand, feasting on memory duck--the poem is rich with heightened imagery. How did those images and the central moon pictures come about?
Like I said, I wrote this poem quite a while ago, so unfortunately the writing process behind it isn’t as fresh in my mind as I would like it to be. But a lot of my poems are very personal to me and my life—so this poem was a drastic change from the poems I usually wrote. I wrote through the lens of fictional characters, took on the persona of Rory Gilmore through the vessel of the speaker. I think this is the first true fictional poem I have written. Sure, there’s fictionalized elements in some of my poems—things embellished for emotional truth—but for this poem, I really got into the minds and feelings of these characters. A lot of the images in the poem arose from stills from the show. I think while I was writing this I pulled up a photo on Pinterest of the Gilmores eating at their usual Friday night dinner. I studied the photo and tried to incorporate concrete images from the photo into the poem. For example, the images of dining rooms, candlelight, silver knives, roasted duck, they all came from a still from the show of the three Gilmore girls eating dinner together.
Tell me a little about the poem's form and structure. I see Stephanie Chang is in the epigraph; how did their work come to influence "Ode to Lorelai and Rory Gilmore"?
Ugh, I could talk about Stephanie Chang and their impact on my writing all day! But for this poem in particular, I took a lot of inspiration from their poem “Lotus Flower Kingdom” which won the 2021 Adroit Prize for Poetry. Chang is so deliberate with their language. It’s so striking and haunting. I studied the poem and analyzed the structure of it. I was kind of insane about it. I typed the poem into a Google Doc and replaced each word with what kind of word it is—noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, etc. Doing that helped me to really narrow in on the language of my poem. I wanted to beat around the fluff, get right into the nitty gritty of what I was trying to say.