Only This

I’m reading Rumi again, starting with passages I marked last time around.  I’m reading Wisƚawa Szymborska’s poems, wishing I could hear her voice in the original Polish because I’m drawn to it even in translation.  I’m reading a new Chris Abani collection my friend Al sent me because he’s devoted to poetry and turns down the corners of pages with poems he wants to read again.  I go to these first.  I’m reading all 358 pages of stories and poems in The Examined Life annual because this is a community of writers I am part of and I want to know what’s going on with the other members.  I’m also reading, dictionary in hand, María Dueñas’s novel, El Tiempo Entre Costuras.  Set during the Spanish Civil War, it’s a fascinating read—historical fiction.  I don’t know what it’s called in English.  Translations of titles aren’t always literal, nor do you find yourself in exactly the same story when it’s migrated from one language to another.  I mention this because I believe that the ability to enter another world through its language enriches me as a poet.

Finally, and I admit it, I’m squandering unconscionable stretches of my so-called work time drifting from link to link in Google and YouTube.  I’ve written nothing in recent weeks. Only this.

Rumi says, “A little while alone in your room / will prove more valuable than anything else / that could ever be given you.”  He is wise.  I take him at his word.  But I wonder….

Getting on with it

I have mixed feelings.  My new poetry collection, Heresies to Live By, is back from the printer.  Now the next phase must begin.  Call it getting the word out.  Call it distribution.  Call it daunting.

Make no mistake.  I’m very happy with the book—a wondrous collaboration with Lisa Carey and Wendy Schleicher from Lucid Creative who designed the book and the 12 gifted artists from Art Enables whose work brings the poems to life and adds depth of meaning.  But the purpose of publishing this collection isn’t achieved unless someone receives it.  And that someone has to know about it first.

Nowadays even major publishers leave most of the burden of publicity to their authors.  The book tour (live or virtual), the glossy magazine ads and solicited blurbs and reviews are usually reserved for potential blockbusters, a category in which books of poetry rarely figure.  But for me as author, publisher and distributor of my own work for the past 23 years, the challenge is even greater.  My books are most often sold hand to hand or on consignment to Amazon where, over time, they dribble into the libraries of faithful colleagues and the occasional stranger.

I knew this is how it would be.  I did it in spite of the odds.  Now I pick up my marked up copy of Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch and go to the chapter about the artist’s inner critic, the judging spectre, where I reread this wise counsel:  “The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it.”  Yes.

When the right tune arrives inside you

Some years ago, a poet friend told me about Milkweed Editions, a favorite indie press of hers located in Minnesota.  I decided to check it out.  I went to the website and browsed through titles.  One caught my eye immediately, a poetry collection titled Playing the Black Piano by Bill Holm.  I ordered it.

Why?

I was curious about the kinds of poets Milkweed publishes.

I love music.

I play piano.

I wanted to know what this man had to say about playing the black piano.

In Bill Holm, I discovered a burly white-bearded Minnesotan of Icelandic descent (this last figures in much of his work) who writes in a way that stirred my imagination and quickly engendered a sense of kinship.  His book whetted my appetite for more. I continue to buy and read him.  How his poems and essays have influenced my own music and writing I can’t exactly say, but I hold on to these lines from his poem, “Magnificat.”

It’s a mystery why one
note following another
sometimes makes music,
sometimes breaks the heart,
sometimes not.

Don’t ask the reason…

Listen as long as you can;
sing whenever the right tune
arrives inside you.

I’ve always believed that the poems I’m meant to read will find their way to me and the ones I’m meant to write will, somehow, make their way to those meant to receive them.  Reading Bill Holm, I recognize the mystery in all this.  I honor his reminder to listen—and sing when the right tune arrives inside me.

When do you call it quits?

It pains me every time I read about a writer who died leaving unfinished work, a novel in progress or unpublished poems.  Sure, if they are important enough, someone may complete the novel or gather up the poems for a final “complete works,” but it’s not the same.

In contrast, there’s my first and favorite writing workshop leader who said that she had decided to write no more poetry after publishing her latest collection.  I was shocked.  Does a poet just do that?  Shirley Cochrane was in her early 60s.  She lived to be 90.  I’ve just laid my hands on a copy of her last book, long out of print.  Turns out it was published when she was 73 and it contained some new poems.  This matters to me…

…because here I am, ready to publish a late-life collection.  Is now the time to stop writing poems and focus on other interests?  It’s hard to imagine making such a calculation.  In this life, you do the work you’re given to do.  Everyone leaves something unfinished when they die—a woodworking project in the basement, a packet of seeds never planted, final goodbyes unspoken.

It was different when I left my last nursing job.  This was a difficult decision and, yes, I had regrets.  But deep inside I knew it was time.  Like writing, the nursing profession was a calling.  Could it be that nursing was something I did and a poet is something I am?  Not quite.  I believe that I’m called to healing.  Nursing was one way to manifest this.  Poetry is another.  In one of his plays, Alan Bennett has the poet Auden speak about “the habit of art.” (I wrote about this in my notebook entry of September 2015.)  Whether or not I publish poems, I’ll always read, write and observe what’s around me with the sensibility of an artist and compassion of a nurse.  I’ll keep the habit of art.

Acknowledgments

Just now, opening to the Acknowledgments page of a poetry collection by the Black British poet Roger Robinson, I notice that he thanks 41 individuals by name for their “guidance, support and encouragement.”  Yes I counted them.  He goes on to list a number of organizations and collectives with which he’s associated.  Well!  Although Robinson isn’t the only writer to acknowledge colleagues, mentors and family members in this way I was struck by the sheer volume of them in A Portable Paradise.

This makes me wonder if I am an outlier.  I am lucky enough to have a room of my own and I do my writing here, in solitude.  Since my workshop days decades ago, I haven’t ordinarily asked anyone to read and critique my drafts.  I’ve not been part of a writing group nor have I ever opened my legal pad or laptop in a café or on a park bench.  (Okay, once in an auto repair shop.)  And yet, I do feel part of a larger community. 

Since the mid-1990s I’ve been a member of a loose association of nurse writers.  We communicate mostly by email but have joined up to produce occasional workshops and, thanks to the diligence of certain gifted members, a few anthologies.  We value each others’ personal stories and literary contributions to our profession. 

I don’t send out my work on a regular basis but, when I do, I most often choose a publication that has formed a community around it.  Pulse magazine—voices from the heart of medicine comes to my online mailbox and features a poem or story once a week.  The Healing Muse from SUNY Upstate Medical University is an annual of art and literature I have contributed to and read cover to cover.  I’m hopeful about my association with Vita Poetica, a new, DC based collective of artists whose work is informed by a spiritual lens.

Most important is my library of keepers—poetry collections I keep coming back to because they inspire me and  shape my thinking.  Bill Holm, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, William Stafford, Ted Kooser, and Rumi are among them—and of course the collections of work by nurses, physicians and others who address themes that have long been of importance to me.

There is solitude and there is community, a perfect meld for me.

Leaving the Mainstream

Truth be told, I’m not leaving the mainstream.  I left it long ago.  Early on I stepped off a traditional career path for one less traveled.  In time, I left employment for a mosaic of side gigs.  After a disappointing first experience with an established New York book publishing house, I decided that, in the future, I’d be my own publisher. Most recently I’ve allowed the muse to have her way and take my writing in new directions.

Right now I’m splashing about happily in my small side stream preparing to publish another poetry collection.  The title came to me years ago.  I’ve selected the poems and arranged them in three sections.  I have an introduction and short bio in draft.  As always, graphic designer Lisa Carey is onboard to design the book and guide the printing.  I’m collaborating with Art Enables (www.art-enables.org) in D.C. to incorporate work by their artists.  Plans to get a Library of Congress Control Number, ISBN and barcode are in process.  The price and print run (small, I’ve learned my lesson) are pretty much set.  Publicity, as always, will be an interesting challenge but I have a few ideas beyond Amazon.com and a family-and-friends launch party. 

It’s such a pleasure to create the whole package in a way that reflects my vision.  It’s not profitable mind you.  In fact it will likely cost more money than I hope to recoup.  But that’s not the point.  When you cook an elaborate dinner for your family, craft a special quilt for a new baby, build a bookcase for a friend or perform music you’ve labored to learn, if you’re like me, you’re not doing it to make a profit or a reputation so much as offering your gift to those for whom it’s meant. This project is something that’s in me to do.  I know those for whom it’s meant.  And I look forward to presenting it sometime next year.

Sage-femme

A few weeks ago, as I was writing a thank-you note to an editor at the American Journal of Nursing which just published a poem of mine, it occurred to me to wonder when my work first appeared in that journal.  Oh my!  It was 42 years ago—and it was not a poem but an article about international nursing.  Rummaging through my curriculum vitae, I discovered that my first professional publication was dated just one year before that.  What a long span as nurse and writer these 43 years reflect! The list of articles and books also reveals my personal and professional evolution.  I had imagined I would have a career in international health but in time was drawn into a new field of practice as hands-on nurse clinician in primary health care, then in later years, as part-time editor, small-time publisher, workshop leader and, finally, teacher of health care ethics.  Meantime my preferred medium of expression was changing.  I abandoned expository writing but continued to produce essays.  From essays I gravitated to poetry which I found satisfying because its language is musical, metaphorical and concise.  It activates the imagination in a way that often leads to revelation.

Twenty-some years after that first publication, I began Sage Femme Press as a way to share my explorations of healing art.  Though I’ve had reason to regret my choice of the French term for midwife which many Americans find awkward to pronounce and others mistake for a website about midwifery, I stand by it.  The literal translation is wise woman.  To be a wise woman is my aspiration as nurse and poet. Whether it means helping revive health as a nurse or birth new insights as a poet, it’s as good a reason for being as any I can imagine.

Feeling My Way

For Mary Oliver, it’s love for the physical world and the bond between all living things.  So says the blurb on the back cover of Devotions, her last collection of poems.  Comprising nearly 450 pages, it contains work from her first book, published when she was 28, through her last, three years before she died at 83. What’s remarkable to me, aside from the beauty of the language and the endless flow of insights that she brings to light, is the coherence and consistency of her subject matter—the physical world, living things, the bonds between them.   

I ask myself, what is mine?  I usually say my work is devoted to explorations in healing art but that’s less a theme than a mission statement.  Beginning in my thirties, I wrote narrative poems inspired by my experiences as a professional and family caregiver.  As I age, my themes have broadened.  I am not consistently drawn to nature or observations from everyday life, nor do I consider myself a confessional poet.  I am not enamored of what I think of as high art, the inaccessible poems you puzzle over and eventually give up on. You could say I use language as a blind person uses a cane to feel her way down a path, slowly tap, tap, tapping and listening for what the taps tell about what she can’t see.

I tap my way along the ragged edges of science and art, health and illness, life and death, faith and doubt, orthodoxy and heresy. I want each poem to teach or reveal something, perhaps answer a question.  I love what the Australian poet Les Murray wrote in “The Instrument” after asking himself the question, Why write poetry?  One of his answers was For working always beyond / your own intelligence.  Looking back at my most recent notebook entries I see that I am wrestling with the same question.  I realize I don’t have to know the answer, just accept that, in Murray’s words, Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed / evinces the gift.

Preface to a Preface

Published collections of poetry rarely come with a preface—a foreword perhaps written by a critic or scholar if the poet is renowned or long dead, but you don’t often hear from the poet directly.  Why, I wonder?  Is it because a poem should speak for itself?  because the poet’s own story is of no consequence?

As for me, I’ve always offered some sort of introduction to my work.  I want to connect with the reader—to open a conversation as it were, rather than abandon her to an often challenging medium.  And I want to establish a context for the collection itself.  If I were to publish another book of poetry, I’d want to explain that I’ve enlarged my focus from healing art inspired by my decades as a professional and family caregiver to include observations and insights that have presented themselves to me as I’ve pondered spiritual questions and formative experiences over the course of what has turned out to be a long life.

Most of those I imagine to be “my” readers are caregivers themselves, or patients or family members.  Would they be drawn to broader themes?  Would the common reader (a term that came to me via Anne Fadiman who got it from Virginia Woolf who borrowed it from Samuel Johnson)—anyway, that uncommon person who reads for pleasure and turns to poetry for the music of language and enjoyment of form as well as illumination and personal enrichment—would this person be drawn in by a preface?  Would he or she even bother to read it?  This is the question I’m asking myself right now. 

As poet Kathleen Norris writes in her memoir The Cloister Walk, “to answer a call as a prophet, or a poet for that matter, is to reject…human valuation of any kind, accepting only the authority of the call itself.”  So perhaps the question I should be asking myself is not whether there are readers primed for a new collection of my poems but whether I am called to produce one—with a preface.

The Great Unsettler

For the Zoom launch of the 2020 issue of The Healing Muse, a fine journal of literary and visual arts published at SUNY Upstate Medical University, I was among the writers invited to read one of their poems.  Sifting through notes from here and there while thinking about what to say by way of introduction, I stumbled on a couple of quotes that, together, seem to define my approach to healing art.

The first was one I’d clipped from the Washington Post back in October 1998.  It’s from Susan Okie, a family physician, poet and former science reporter for the paper:  “Americans think of medicine as a scientific search for truth.  It’s easy to forget that, like art or politics, medicine is also a shifting expression of our culture.”  As a nurse in practice for decades, I know this to be true.  It’s made me think very carefully when I weigh expert opinion and consider the merit of new practice standards.

The other is recent and comes from the August 24th issue of the New Yorker in a piece on the British poet Alice Oswald.  She says, “I think it’s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler.  It questions the established order of the mind.  It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing of rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.” 

 I realized that the poem I planned to read, like so many others I’ve written, did indeed work at the root of my own thinking about uncertainty in health care and life.  I recalled poems like “Gold Standard,” “Reference Range” and “Cure.”  I titled this one “Pre-need.”  Writing these has helped me find clarity and gives me a place to return to when, inevitably, doubts arise.