The Thread I Follow

It’s been ten years since I started Veneta’s Notebook.  March 2014.  I’ve posted 54 times—nothing to shout about when compared with other internet blogs.  Still.  Why did I start?  I’d just updated the Sage Femme Press website to a platform I could manage on my own.  I envisioned the notebook as a way to tell my (mythical) readers about my literary activities and events (rare). 

Over time a rhythm developed.  I began to post every two months.  The entries were short, maybe 200-300 words, the trend in most blogs and many periodicals in light of the online public’s short attention span.  They began to focus on my journey as a reader and writer. Even when I’m not actively writing poems or essays, I’ve remained remarkably faithful to this one discipline. 

In my posts over the years, I’ve referred to the poet William Stafford five times. He and his work never fail to inspire me.  In March of 2016 I quoted these lines from his poem, “The Way It Is”:

 There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.

I realize that this notebook illuminates for me the thread I am following.  I don’t know where it will lead or whether it will be a straight path (doubtful) or a labyrinth with an intricate structure of interconnecting passages (more likely).

And what have I learned through these ruminations?  First, that my creative life is worth reflecting on, for me if for no one else.  Second, that just as was the case during the years I wrote regular columns for nursing journals, subjects never fail to present themselves. I marvel at this—over 50 years and inspiration, while sometimes tardy, never fails to arrive.

Naming Rites

A strip of paper I’d torn out from somewhere fell out of one of my books the other day as I took it off the shelf.  On it was this quote attributed to Erica Jong (no source given):  “To change one’s name is the first act of the poet and the revolutionary.”  I know that, years ago, when I chose to go by Nina rather than Veneta (my given name) in my personal life, it felt like a relief, a coming out—yes, this is who I am!  But I’ve kept Veneta as my professional name, largely because that’s how I originally established myself.  I suppose I kept the Erica Jong quote because I was still pondering the idea of names.

I’ve known of writers who publish under one or more pseudonyms—perhaps for different genres, different audiences or a yen for anonymity or intrigue.  I’ve toyed with the idea and recently went so far as to settle on a pseudonym I might adopt, then googled it to make sure it wasn’t currently in use.  It was—claimed on Facebook by a woman whose photo was so dramatically different from the persona I’d imagined for myself that I dropped the idea immediately.  Besides, what was I intending to write under that name?  I had no idea. 

While googling, I decided to try to source the Erica Jong quote by typing it into the search bar.  What came up startled me.  The quote now read, “To name oneself is the first act of the poet and the revolutionary.”  Still no original source given but Oh! there is a difference here. I realized that I have in fact named myself as poet and, differently, as a private person.  Neither is a pseudonym but both affirm my agency and, as I expressed it once in a poem, a settling down deeper into myself.

There Is War in Ukraine

There is war in Ukraine, war in Israel and Palestine.  I’ve not been inspired to write about war.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions are causing massive displacement and loss of life around the globe.  Although I am overwhelmed by the magnitude of these tragedies, they have not informed my work.

There is paralysis in the United States Congress and deep political divides among our citizens.  I’ve written nothing about it.

We are plagued by racism, poverty, addiction, the influx of immigrants.  Many poets, novelists, essayists and artists address these issues in their work.  Not a line from me, at least in recent years.

Disparities in health care, education, housing, employment.  Nothing.

The last poem I completed was about a sunflower.

My last free write ended with
Just look at this page
Inky squiggles that evidence thought
Wonder-full

What thought was that?  Clearly, my imagination has not been fueled by the things that trouble me most.  Should it be? I wonder.

Dark Matter

“Much of life is the narrative equivalent of dark matter,” writes Parul Sehgal in her New Yorker essay “Tell No Tales.”  Aha!  I say to myself, it’s just like the genome, just like the universe.  So much of importance is inaccessible to us. 

And so I continue the reflection I began in July’s notebook entry which suggested that the written word is what remains.  From what we remember, we shape the narrative of our lives, we create our story.  The unstoried self, on the other hand, is lost to us.  And yet, and yet….Writing the poem “Winter Count,” I attempted to cull a single memorable event from each year of my life from age 14 to 54 that would mark the passage of time. I wondered if I could do it—my memory is not as keen as some people’s.  But as I immersed myself in the past some of that dark matter came to light.  I was surprised at what I could remember. I enjoyed shaping the arc of a significant span of my life in this way.

In my field, health care, we have come to value patients’ own stories, not just the ritualized history that we set down in the medical record, because they provide context and insight that may be useful in guiding diagnosis and treatment.  These days story is used as a means to enlighten us about all manner of things:  immigration, war, climate change, politics, relationships, travel and so on.  Still, the question Sehgal poses in her essay remains:  “What is it that story does not allow us to see?” 

The Written Word Remains

My husband Allen has been working on his autobiography “for the family.”  And just recently I received links to the online version of memoirs my brothers John and Tim have written in response to weekly email prompts from a company called Storyworth that publishes your collection of reminiscences along with photos you provide in “a beautiful keepsake book.” 

Reading these has sent me on a nostalgia trip of my own.  Though I don’t envision writing an autobiography, I have written a lot over the course of my life.  The other day, I started reading at random in one of the small notebooks I’ve kept on and off for the last 30 years.  In one of them, I found a clipping I’d pasted in from a 2001 essay by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post.  In it, he observes that “so much of life passes us by, unappreciated…Then gradually time leaches away the remaining vivaciousness, until we are left with only the faintest of outlines and just a few brightly colored moments, the ones that will flutter through our dying minds.”  He confesses that he hardly remembers anything about the city where he spent four years in graduate school or the classes he took, then goes on to quote the novelist James Salter:  “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”

I don’t have the entire Dirda essay, just the last couple of paragraphs on yellowing newsprint, but I’ve been reflecting on the idea of the written word as what remains of our lives. Much of my experience and interior life are embedded (though often disguised or told slant) in the poems, essays and songs I’ve written.  I’m very glad to have these along with the various notebooks, sketchbooks, file folders and yellow pads that have accompanied me through the years.  What will happen to them after my death I have no idea, but I feel confident that some of my published work will survive at least for a while.  More importantly, my writings help me remember and appreciate some of the “brightly colored moments” of my life.

An Honest Solo

A jazz musician I know is speaking admiringly about another player’s solo:  “They’re always honest,” he says.  I’m taken with this observation.  What does it mean exactly?  What is honesty in art?

 I should offer some context here.  Traditional or straight-ahead jazz is improvised music within a structure of phrases and chord changes.  First comes the “head”—the tune as written.  Then the “front man” (or woman) and each “sideman” (or woman) solos, using their artistry, skill and imagination to offer a fresh take, a creative improvisation that adheres to the structure and references the tune.  The performance closes out with a repeat of the tune as written.

 An honest solo, as I’ve come to understand it, means speaking your truth through the medium of your instrument, telling your own story while avoiding imitation and cliché.  It’s not self-serving.  Sometimes, when moved by a solo, a listener will call out, “Tell it, tell it,” an affirmation that encourages the soloist to go deeper.

 I love jazz and find so much in it that influences my writing.  I, too, want my work to be an honest solo.  I want to take up my instrument—my pen—listen for the truth I’ve been given and express it with all the skill and artistry I possess—clean, uncensored, guileless. While I honor the conventions of the art, the story is my own.

First Line for Today

When I’m trying unsuccessfully to free write my way into a poem or essay, I often end with what I call a “first line for today.”  It’s not intended to go anywhere.  It’s a kind of creative throwaway, a stop.  Here’s a few examples:

• What lies just on the other side of the glass is the life I’ve not chosen

• And what are windows but eyes and overcoats

• It’s a train wreck, this collision of faith and reflection

• Old shoes tell the tale

But once in a while the first line doesn’t want to stop and results in a snatch of writing that leaves me deeply contented:
I sit here enmeshed in my life
            The stirring of books and papers and colored ink
            The breathing of paintings on the wall
            My desk shifts its weight, waiting patiently for my return
            and this chair welcomes me—whispers words
            of invitation to sink into the deep green rainforest
            where inspiration awaits.

Genuine Poetry? Who Decides?

The first time I happened upon a commentary celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s long poem, “The Waste Land,” there was this quote from the poet:  “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”  I understand why he may have found it necessary to say this.  I, not for want of trying, have never been able to commune with Eliot’s dark, jagged poem, dense with historical, classical and linguistic allusions, much less understand it.  I won’t dispute that it is genuine.  Critics say it is seminal, a watershed, a central work of modernist poetry.  It has endured.

But if I were to offer an example of genuine poetry that communicated to me in advance of (or sometimes in the absence of) understanding, it would be “Omeros,” Derek Walcott’s book-length poem, a retelling of Homer’s ancient Greek sagas set in the Caribbean and laden with cultural and classical references that did not disrupt my engagement with the story or my appreciation of the music of the language.  To my mind, it’s a distinct contrast to Eliot’s.

I don’t claim to be immune to the lure of the obscure. In “Fantasie-Impromtu” I end with these lines:  It only takes one to lift [a child’s spirit] up / and set a rainbow in her hair. It’s a reference to Chopin and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” the song based on a lyrical section of his piano piece.  Even I don’t pretend to know how the rainbow metaphor came to me but I’m grateful for it and hope the imagery speaks to readers whether or not they know the music.

Now back to Eliot’s statement.  In my view, there’s no reason to label poetry genuine or—what?—fake?  bad?  I say it either resonates with you or it doesn’t.  Just like music.  Just like a painting, a story.  We all get to decide what art feeds our spirit and delights our senses.

On Poetry Readings

I’ll just say it:  I’m not a fan.  My experience has been that most poets are not effective readers of their own work (spoken word poet-actors excepted).  It’s difficult to appreciate the intricacies  of meaning and sound in a poem after one hearing.  It helps to have a written copy in hand but, even so, you don’t have the opportunity in a live reading to sit and digest what you’ve just been fed.  What I do enjoy is hearing from the poet about how they came to conceive, write, and revise the poem—the story behind its creation.  Then…

…a week or so ago I was leafing through the October issue of The Atlantic and happened upon James Parker’s short essay, “Ode to Being Read To.”  In it, he tells how he fixed his insomnia with whiskey and audiobooks.  He’s picky about his prose (nothing “super-fancy”) and his readers (“The voice I’m listening to should be elevated, but not theatrical”) but discovered that being read to in this way lulls him to sleep.

In recent years, I’ve begun to have the occasional sleepless night.  I’ve tried listening to nature sounds, Native American flute music and guided meditations on YouTube, all to no avail.  Then, scrolling through podcasts one night, I happened upon Poetry Unbound and its host Pádraig Ó Tuama.  I was doubtful about listening to poems in the night (what kinds of poems?  what kinds of readers? would I find myself critiquing them?), but I am so grateful that I gave it a try.  It’s Pádraig Ó Tuama himself who selects and reads the poems in his wonderfully comforting Irish lilt.  In each 15-minute segment, over soothing background music, he reads a poem, offers commentary that illuminates it and then reads it a second time.  I find that I don’t require whiskey as I listen, learn, sink down into the sound and, eventually, sleep.  The perfect poetry reading!

How to Write a Sunflower

I’ve only done it once before—no twice—this thing called ekphrasis—writing visual art.  The first time I was inspired by Chardin’s 18th century painting titled “The Attentive Nurse.”  A long ago memory floated to the surface when I happened upon it in a coffee table book.  I decided to go to the National Gallery to see it in person. The canvas was much smaller than I’d expected but still captivating.  The poem I wrote in response hinged on the boiled egg the nurse in the portrait had prepared for her (unseen) patient and a memorable incident in my own professional life involving an implacable patient and what he considered an over-cooked egg on his breakfast tray.

The second time, years later, a vivid abstract by a friend titled “Still Life Illusion” triggered the realization that, as I say in the poem that followed

My landscapes are always peopled.
Clouds, rocks, trees—all have faces.
And not just landscapes—
houses, cars,
doodles, coffee stains,
abstract paintings,
all become, for me
an Ellis Island of the mind…

This time the challenge to write an ekphrastic poem comes from outside.  Marissa Long, the gallery curator at Art Enables with whom I collaborated on my collection Heresies to Live By, asked if I would write a poem inspired by the work of one of its resident artists for a fall event featuring poetry.  I eventually focused on two artists whose paintings drew me in.  Both Dennis and Gary are disabled, largely nonverbal—and gifted.

Dennis’s piece features a field of sunflowers under a blue sky studded with cryptic letters or marks—a hidden message perhaps.  Gary’s is abstract—a collage with thick black coils, 20 or more of them, in what looks like a dark autumnal seedbed.  If the imagination were a place, is this what it would look like?  Hmm.  Have I stumbled upon the first line for Gary’s poem?

While I’m not usually drawn to writing visual art, I do like the melding of forms and the discovery of insights that each offers the other. Right now I’m interested to find out what’s there among Dennis’s sunflowers and what’s happening in Gary’s seedbed.