The Language of Music

You know those questions the bank wants to keep on file to ensure secure access to your account—mother’s maiden name, your first pet, your birthplace, etc.?  One that came up for me a while ago was “favorite teacher.”  I didn’t miss a beat.  I wrote “Ron.”  Ron Elliston was far more than favorite, he was best.  Ever.  And he came into my life long after my formal education was complete.  I’ve always played piano but knew very little about music theory, improvisation,  playing by ear or mastering Gospel style at church where I really needed these skills.  Good fortune in the guise of a friend led me to Ron whom I later found out was a jazz pianist and university professor well known and admired on the local scene.  Had I known this then, I would have been intimidated and might never have begun my journey with him. And I might never have come to love jazz.

At my first lesson, he said, “I can’t teach you Gospel but I can teach you the language of music and you can make it your own.”  After 14 years working with him I came away with that and so much more.  Ron’s thoughts ran deep.  His style of teaching was like nothing I’d experienced before.  Despite his passing in 2015, his voice is and will ever be in my head.  As I pore over the  notes and recordings I made during and after lessons, I’m reminded of how my writing has also been informed by what I learned from him.  For example, I was inspired to write lyrics for many of his compositions.  And I once gave a talk at a writers’ conference titled, “Silence and Other Lessons from the Language of Music.” 

Yes, silence.  After I’d played a tune I’d been working on, Ron’s critique surprised me.  “I don’t hear the silence,” he said.  “Silence is as much a part of music as sound.  It’s what gives sound its meaning.”  I soon realized how that take-home message might apply to writing as well.  Poems,  like people, don’t mature overnight. The journey from notebook or scrap paper to finished poem can take years—and much of that journey may be silent. (“Get rid of your concern about making something happen,” Ron said.)  I’ve also come to value the way a poem breathes with help from phrasing, punctuation, line breaks, and white space on the page.  When spoken aloud, I believe that a poem deserves to be framed in silence so that poet and listener can focus before and reflect after the reading.  These seconds of silence can set the tone and may convey as much meaning as the words themselves.

I could go on sharing lessons from the language of music but will close with this:   “Music is like life.  It’s as big as you want it to be—a living art.  It teaches you how you should learn to live your life.”  Thank you, Ron.

Picture Books

Last month I attended a book launch for my friend Cheryl Hellner, a gifted poet and teacher. It struck me as a beautifully illustrated story book for children.  But Cheryl, who has long haunted children’s bookstores for teachable stories, told us that a picture book is illuminated not simply illustrated.  The artist’s work fleshes out the story, giving it depth and added meaning. 

At the event, Cheryl asked us to think about the books we remembered being read to us as children.  Many classics were mentioned, all of which rang a bell with me but none of which I remember hearing as a child. There was only one that sprang to my mind—and I remember it clearly:  Egermeier's Bible Story Book.  I particularly remember the pictures, some of which were just plain scary in their somber black and white reproductions.  When I got home, I looked it up online and there it was.  I recognized the cover immediately.  It had to have been the 1939 edition (years before I was born let me add).  Reader, I ordered it. 

As I await the arrival of my bible story book and the memories it will bring to mind, I offer two of my takeaways from Cheryl’s presentation of Sing Up the Earth!  First, I was reminded that illumination is what I’ve always wanted for my own poetry collections, especially the last two.  In fact I used that very word in writing about the “poetry on canvas” that I chose for Heresies to Live By.  The second is a fresh reminder that picture books are not just for kids. Given that, you may ask what has stayed with me after reading Cheryl’s story of a child, a Grandpa, a tragic fire and the re-creation of a clay flute. It’s this:  Grandpa told me that artists must work and not be afraid to let things fall apart, take a new shape.

This last year was a hard one for me.  Things fell apart.  But now it’s time to take up the work that is mine to do and let that work take whatever shape it will.

The Edit

She was in her early 80s, a mother, playwright and Jungian analyst living alone and reflecting on her own life and the world in which she lived.  Her name was Florida Scott-Maxwell.  I’ve had her notebook, published in 1968 as The Measure of My Days, for several years but have been going through it again.  In it she writes this:

A note book might be the very thing for all the old who wave away crossword puzzles, painting, petit point, and knitting.  It is more restful than conversation, and for me it has become a companion, more a confessional.

This fits with my own experience.  But later on, as she recovered from major surgery and was finally given the okay to make a trip to visit her grandchildren, she feels “brilliantly well” and writes this:

I am off, and I leave my note book behind.  What need of a note book when one is out in the world?

This does not fit with my experience.  I almost always travel with some sort of notebook for observations, caught phrases, sketches, collages or watercolor impressions.  I can’t think of anyone else I know who finds this practice satisfying.  Yet their lives are as rich and fulfilling as mine—maybe more so.  They remember, they reflect—they have their own pursuits.

What has popped into my head is the question of whether they edit their life story in any way.  Take, for example, the photos we keep on our phones.  I know people who have thousands stored out there in the cloud including many duplicates and now unidentifiable people and events.  At the moment I have 392.  I’m continually adding, reviewing, deleting, or cropping them for clarity. It’s the same thing I do by keeping notebooks—the entries are not regular or extensive, more like a rough edit of my experience of the only life I’ll ever have.

How I Began

I was seven or thereabouts when I wrote what I think was a poem inspired by the words on a wooden plaque that hung above my bed:  Put God First.  I clearly recall writing it but have no recollection of what the poem said.  I was not one of those child prodigies who fill notebook after notebook with stories and poems.  In fact, I produced no further work until, at age 12, my story about frontiersman Davy Crockett and a bear (my twist on a popular folktale and song from the1950s) hit the kid’s page of the local newspaper and earned me $2.  The next impulse to write did not surface until, in my 20s, sitting in the San Francisco Mission making a sketch of the arch in the sanctuary, I began writing words that took the shape of a poem:  Cold antique silence / shattered by an irreverent whisper…. 

I produced a few other poems during that decade along with a couple of short stories, best forgotten even though one of them earned me a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont. Rather, I was encouraged by my boss to do professional writing—first journal articles and essays, then, at age 37,  a textbook on international nursing.  Still, I’d never felt destined to be a writer until, in my 30s, I experienced an irresistible pull toward poetry.  I signed up for workshops, sent work out, had a few poems accepted, then, at 49, published a chapbook combining narrative poems arising from my experiences as a nurse in a small urban clinic along with haunting photographs of some of our patients taken by Jim Hall, the physician with whom I worked. I’ve published four books of essay and poetry since then.  The fourth, in my 70s, is likely my last.

Will I finally lose my desire to put purple ink on a yellow legal pad or occasional entries into one of a variety of journals I keep?  No.  This one thing I’ve learned—though I don’t pretend to know just how it began—I will always have the habit of art. 

Reading My Obituary

No, I haven’t written it yet though I know people my age who have done so, either on their own or as part of a group exercise.  But at my age, it’s not out of the ordinary to think about how I want to be remembered.  Truth is, if an obit is written and published after my death, it’s unlikely to attract many readers outside my circle of family and friends.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what is most likely to survive me is my online identity.  For the first few decades of my life the internet did not exist so there are no references there to my early years.  Even now, since I don’t post on social media, there is only my website, which will vanish the moment the maintenance fees go unpaid, and a respectable number of links on Google and other search engines under my professional name.  There are none to my nickname or legal first name.  I did find one reference under my maiden name, linked to a work-related photo of me in El Paso, Texas wearing a giant sombrero along with another photo of someone else identified as me.  I have no memory of the photo or the occasion.  Make of that what you will.

So, I’ll exist, if at all, as Veneta Masson, nurse and writer. And I will only surface if someone has occasion to search for my name and knows how to spell it.  (This assumes that the internet continues on in its present form.)  It puts me in a thoughtful frame of mind.  I know what matters most is the legacy I’ll leave in the hearts and lives of those I love.  But may I hope that, just maybe, that legacy will include a random poem or essay from one of my books.

Are You Writing?

It’s a question I’ve come to expect in the course of a conversation with anyone who knows that I write, especially since it’s been three years since I published my last collection and just six months since the love of my life died.  The answer is yes and no. 

No, I don’t have a project or even the draft of a poem in the works. 

But yes, I am writing.  There’s my current 5x7 spiral sketchbook (number 12 in the series) that I open when the mood strikes.  It contains observations, records of memorable events, provocative quotes, mandalas, collages and even the New Yorker cartoons that capture some aspect of my life.  There’s the yellow legal pad where I do free writes from time to time.  These pages help me to pin down my thoughts and offer me a chance to imagine the first line for a poem even though it will likely never come to life.  And, as you see, there’s this online journal.

Then there’s the soft leather-bound book handcrafted somewhere in Asia that I received for Mother’s Day.  It probably goes without saying that I receive a lot of notebooks as gifts and don’t find a purpose for them all but this small one, with its thick rough cut pages, coming at the time it did, I decided to use.  What does it want to become, I asked myself?  Not a replacement for my sketchbook, something else.  Turns out I keep it next to the chair (Allen’s reading chair) where I drink my morning coffee and use it to record my first random morning thoughts, many of them disconsolate, some of them surprising.  I don’t know that this will come to anything but we’ll see where I am when I’ve filled the pages.

It occurs to me that what’s missing from my writing practice is correspondence—not emails, but the old-fashioned kind that many writers of note took pains to maintain with family members, friends, readers and publishers back in the day.  I used to do this.  Many of us did, but I currently have only two friends who post letters and these are rare and precious, both the letters and the friends. I can’t say that I plan to revive my correspondence—emails and even texts have choked out that garden.  But I can say with near certainty that I’ll continue my long habit of filling blank pages with words.

This Theme Keeps Recurring

In September of last year, I wrote about the two places that have most inspired me as a writer—two rooms in two different homes.  In November of last year I wrote about the stage set for playwright August Wilson’s autobiographical play and how the various props illuminated his life and his writing.  I imagined how I might design such a stage set for myself. 

Then, on a Mediterranean Cruise I was lucky enough to take last month, I discovered a book in the ship’s library titled Paradise of Exiles by Olive Hamilton published in 1974.  In it she tells the stories of several British writers drawn to Tuscany for important portions of their creative lives—Shelley, Byron, the Brownings, Trollope, D.H. Lawrence, the Sitwells and others. What drew them there?  The climate, the cost of living, the company of other writers?  And how did the spirit of this place affect their work?

Our ship stopped at a port in Tuscany.  I could see how it might attract artists of all kinds. We also stopped at ports along the Côte d’Azur in France where many painters have come because of the quality of the light (or so I have read).  I can attest that it is stunning.  All this left me wondering how my own creative journey has been affected by my place is the physical world—primarily the capital city of the United States, Washington D.C. What if I had moved mid-career to the Big Bend area of Southwest Texas, something I seriously contemplated at one time? Would I have written about the borderlands instead of the city?  What subjects would I have addressed?  What shapes would my writing have taken?  Perhaps there’s a clue in this never-finished poem from back then:

We sit in the desert
high on a limestone ledge
watching the dying sun
draw blood from the mountains.
Below us the river,
a blade of whetted steel,
knifes its way through rock

We are not surprised
at news of desert storms
for we have come to expect violence
in a land where the wind
cows every unbowed head
and even the plants, to survive,
poison the ground around them.

Here's a Surprise!

My beloved Allen has died.  I am shrouded in grief.  As I thumb through a book of songs while planning his funeral, a loose piece of sheet music falls into my lap.  How?  From where?  It’s a song I’d written for my church community many years ago called “Don’t Get Sick on an Unripe Tomorrow.”  Clearly, this is not meant for Allen’s funeral.  It is meant for me.  I mull over the lyrics and play it again and again on the piano.  It becomes a source of great comfort.

Meanwhile some dear friends and family give me books about grief and grieving.  I haven’t felt ready to read them, but imagine my surprise when lines from some of my own poems begin floating into my head at odd times.

From “La Muerte”
Old Mother Death sits / down beside me. / Neither cruel nor kind / she does not take, she receives.

From “Buying Time”
Each life makes its arc / then glides out of time / slipping all ties.  Pain dies. / Desire dies.  Gone, / the humming dread of what waits beyond breath.

From “Holding”
I loosen my grip,/ let him slip from my grasp // knowing, somehow, he’s still held // and not only he but we—… // we are, all of us / held.

From “Upheaval”
[…death has] struck / shattering everything fragile / collapsing carefully crafted structures… / Their familiar terrain disrupted / all learn to tread carefully.

From “Griefs, Like Nesting Bowls”
No church, priest or liturgy here / just battered souls / in silent communion.

From “The Poet’s Job”
Their poems may end on the ash heap / though the divine combustion / has been known to light up a city / or, like a disposable penlight, / guide one or two souls down / the dark path / to their own door.

The idea of my own poems leading me back to my own door—it’s breathtaking really.  

Epiphany

If the imagination were a place
this is what it would look like—
not a place you go to but the place you are—
this cluttered terrain where random thoughts
arise and take root and inspiration waits. 
There you are traipsing through
an everyday day
when you stumble
onto a tiny live wire, coiled tight
ready to spark.  You don’t see it at first
but when it ignites—oh, you know
you’ve caught fire.

How I Learned What I Learned

The setting is the crucible in which many a work of art has been fired.  There is a stool, a coat rack, and atop a desk, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

This is the set direction for August Wilson’s autobiographical play, How I Learned What I Learned.  It’s a one-man show consisting of a series of reflections, anecdotes and conversations spoken by the actor playing Wilson.  The first sections are titled My Ancestors, Hill District, 1965, The Set (the main drag where life happens), Barbara Peterson and on from there concluding with one called How Do You Know, What You Know.  These sections are framed by pauses during which the actor is typing. 

Already an admirer of Wilson’s 20th century ten-play cycle set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, I was quite taken with this one when I saw it performed in 2017 at the Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland.  The set design was riveting—the bucket of nails, the ball of rags, the lunchbox (all of them “detritus of the Wilson canon”) strewn on an abandoned lot with a performance platform in the shape of a boxing ring (Wilson was a boxing fan).  Behind it hung a wall of paper scraps cut from 5,555 sheets of paper—a tribute to Wilson’s habit of writing his plays on legal pads, envelopes, napkins and checks, whatever came to hand.

At long last I have my hands on a copy of the script and just reread it.  I’m thinking about people, places and events that I’d include in my own one-woman play—Conneaut, Hilda Burr, Ninth Street, Shirley Cochrane, 1993, Rebecca, the nurse poets…. And my stage set?  Maybe a basement room with a plank desk, electric typewriter, the 1969 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, my old leather home care bag and, on the wall, Rachel Dickerson’s woodcut, “Wanting Memories.” This is a work in progress. The script will evolve. 

At the end of Wilson’s play, the actor pulls a poem from his pocket and reads it aloud:

We are what we are—
Are made by old things,
Come back. Clearly,
Brilliant as the sun.