Name: Noelle Zingarella (Signed) · Date: 27 Jan 2020 02:04 AM · For: Chapter 1

Hi Vicki! I’m here for the CMDC Round 1

 

As soon as I saw you’d written a poem about Vernon Dursley, one of the least likable characters in all of the fandom (right behind Dolores Umbridge I think) I had to read it. And darn if you didn’t make me feel a twinge of empathy for dear old Vernon too, just like you did in Threads of Hope for Dolores.

 

You make good use of your repeated beginning of each stanza; beating this drum of where Vernon came from—starting with the shabby houses in a place like Cokeworth—or maybe Cokeworth itself—and ending in his office at Grunnings, where he hopes no one ever asks or realizes from whence he has come.

 

And yet—this poem makes me want to know this little boy Vernon, the one who played in the streets and survived the war. The one whose parents tried so desperately to drag the family up by their boot-straps. If only they hadn’t put their son in Smeltings and taught him that fitting in was the most important thing. If only he’d been able to teach the other boys the games that he knew and was trying to forget—lest they know that he was from the wrong side of the tracks. If only he had learned to work with his hands and to tend the land and be proud of something he had truly made—instead of taking a ‘respectable job’ that fed the family but killed his soul.

 

If only. I would have liked to have known that Vernon. Thank you for making it possible for him to exist at all in this lovely poem.

 

 

Nice work!

 

Yours,

 

Noelle

Author's Response:

Hi Noelle, 

 

Thank you so much for reading and reviewing this poem about Vernon. I wrote it for a poetry assignment on the poetry forum of MNFF.  We were directed to use the "I come from..." format, and one of my fellow poets wrote about Dudley and one about Petunia, so I decided to round out the set by writing about Vernon.  (Dudley won first place.)  It reflects what I perceive as the strong social class stratification in England and the difficulty of upward mobility.  Yes, Vernon was a jerk, but there's a sort of desperation in his jerkiness, as if he was afraid of something deep down, something just beyond his reach.  So this is how I envisioned his back story.  I'm glad you liked it.

Name: Lacey Black (Signed) · Date: 20 Jul 2019 03:59 AM · For: Chapter 1

Hey vicky

i just wanted to leave a little more love

ive read this poem by you a few times because I think that it’s important as Vernon here would say to know where you come from and to use that understanding to connect it to who you are and why you are who you are. Sure Vernon isn’t the most well liked person, and he sure is a horrid uncle to harry but he is who he was raised to be, he is who he has always felt he should be. The abuse aside because that’s not what he was raised to be, he was everything he wanted to be, father to a boy just like him named after his grandfather, husband to a pretty blonde woman, a hard working man but not a labourous man, to have a life easier than his father but one to feel proud of that he feels he earned just the same.

I think that it takes a brilliant writer to connect with a character like Vernon Dudley. Someone who is typically the villain in someone else’s story. I think it takes an ever more talented writer to write from that perspective and make the reader relate and understand them. Not the abuse but them inside for who they are and why they are and what they are deep down. 

You created a beautiful piece here, and I commend you for being able to take a dislike character and making him almost likeable!

Great writing

Xo lex

Author's Response:

Hi Lexi,

Thank you for reviewing this poem too.  I wrote it for a poetry challenge on MNFF, using the "I come from..." format, and one of my fellow writers wrote about Petunia, and another one wrote about Dudley, so I felt I had to finish up the family by writing about Vernon.  So the head of the poetry forum got a complete set! An interesting exercise, to imagine what kind of early life would make Vernon what he is today, clawing his way up the social ladder from a lower class family to a middle class family, always trying to do things just right so that he will fit in, and always afraid that people might find out, in this society with pretty fixed social classes, his secret about where he came from.  Would they think less of him if they knew?  It would offer some insight into his paranoia about Harry's background, but of course it doesn't excuse it.  I tried to make Dolores Umbridge more understandable in my story, "Threads of Hope" about her early life, but I don't think I could ever make Amycus and Alecto Carrow even the least bit sympathetic!

I'm glad that you enjoyed this poem.  Sorry that the font is still being wonky.

Vicki