Finding le mot juste

I’m reading Colum McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking.  It’s literary fiction, a mystery actually, certainly not a place I’d expect to happen upon this passage:

The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning.  Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.

Yes, finding the right word, phrase or sound.  I typically spend hours, days, months on the hunt when I have a poem in draft.  I consult my dictionaries (American Heritage and rhyming) and a thesaurus.  I tune into random conversations or unrelated reading in search mode.  I keep paper and pen by my bedside in case there’s a dream offering.  And when there’s a breakthrough (the word ignore slid into consciousness the other day while I was recycling a stack of old papers—just the one I needed), the satisfaction is enormous.  McCann put me in mind of a poem of mine that expresses how I felt on finding le mot juste in a poem by my fellow poet Cortney Davis.

Wisp
To Cortney

I lift the word from the heart of your poem
and set it down deep into mine.
It aligns perfectly—
the poet’s answer to a poet’s question,
your gift of life to my failed conception.

I am thrilled with my find—
this little wisp of sound, in itself
no more than a common noun
but think where it’s been,
the web of invention starting to spin.

Why do I read?

I’ve been asking myself this question.  Why am I always waiting for the next great read to find its way to me when even the best of them seem to flow over and through me like a river. I recently plowed, pencil in hand, through Adam Rutherford’s A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. Even though I was drawn to the subject and thoroughly engaged as I read, what will I remember about the probabilistic science of genetics a year from now?  Will I forget the author’s name?  even the name of the book?  What about Rachel Joyce’s poignant and thought-provoking novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?  I’ve already lost track of most of the twists and turns in the remarkable journey I took with Harold.

This morning, just as I woke up, a simple answer came to me.  Reading provides essential nourishment for the growth, development and continued well-being of my mind and soul.  Compare it to food for the body.  Individual meals may be satisfying, distasteful or hum-drum.  Most are forgotten by the next day.  But you can only fast for so long before your body fails.

So it is with reading.  And, as with food, there is the occasional memorable feast that enlarges your knowledge, understanding and appreciation for life. Knowing Woman by Irene Claremont de Castillejo is one of the books that did this for me many years ago and on every subsequent reread. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is another.

An appetite for the written word is a great gift for which I’ll always be grateful.

Free Cell

You hear about the cheats writers have to avoid facing the blank page.  They sharpen pencils they’ll never use, eat, wash dishes, run errands, hunt for a lost sock.  My cheat is Free Cell. It’s a highly addictive form of solitaire, almost always winnable but sometimes extremely challenging, installed on all Windows operating systems since 1995.  I don’t know exactly when I discovered it and started to play, but it was at least 10,000 games ago. Ctrl+Z lets you erase your mistakes.  One click and you begin a new game.  Surely this is just junk food for the mind.  And yet!

For me there’s something restorative about manipulating numbers rather than words.  And isn’t finding patterns in a scramble of red and black cards roughly parallel to the process of bringing order to words and ideas that first appear in the imagination and must be wrestled into poetic form or crafted into a coherent essay? 

 While I admit to real satisfaction when I win, there is a point beyond which taking refuge in Free Cell is not therapeutic and the ease of the one-click access to a new game does not enhance my artistic practice.  New ideas emerge in the shower or on a walk but not so far while playing a computer game.  But we all need something to reboot ourselves.  This is a confession and a commitment.  A confession that I’ve squandered hours of my one wild and precious life playing an unnecessary game and a commitment to hold myself responsible for redeeming more of the hours still allotted to me. 

 Thus, one last confession:  It took 42 Free Cell games to write this short reflection.

Working Poems

Poetry is dead, they say.  I don’t know who they are or what evidence they have of the demise but I hear and read this claim regularly.  Now consider.  Poetry slams and spoken word poetry attract large and enthusiastic young audiences.  Rap is a powerful and pervasive popular form.  Professions like mine in health care have recognized the value of the arts, poetry in particular, in communicating with each other, our students and those we care for.  Poems still appear in a number of newspapers and general periodicals.  You hear poetry at weddings, anniversaries and funerals.  You sometimes hear it from the pulpit or podium.  At times of crisis in their lives, non-poets are sometimes driven to express themselves in poetry even though it may remain known only to themselves.  High art or academic poetry may lack a wide readership but it finds publishers.

I like to think that my poems have work in the world, that they pull on their blue, pink or white- collared shirts each morning and troop off purposefully to do honest labor in a hospital, hospice, school or home.  They may boost someone’s spirits, provide comfort or diversion, tell a story or offer perspective.  They might provide the key to unraveling some puzzle. They may inspire reflection or contemplation. 

Am I making too great a claim?  Perhaps—but not entirely.  I’ve had enough feedback along the way to trust that many of my poems find readers ready to receive them.  Once this happens their work is done.

The Poetry of Witness

I recently watched this 2015 documentary featuring Carolyn Forché and five other contemporary poets who have used poetry to describe and illuminate their experiences of war, imprisonment, exile and other kinds of extremity.  Forché herself spent time in El Salvador during the brutal civil war of the 1980s and published a collection titled The Country Between Us featuring poems from those years in which she allows her imagination to work on experience to create art.  The results, she says, stand as evidence of what happened to her and others during that time.  She believes that, at the heart of what she has written, is truth.

I found her words encouraging because I often think back on poems I have written about my own years as a witness to struggle and suffering.  As a nurse, I have doubted my right to speak for a patient whose son has been murdered on the street, a heroin-addicted woman who has given birth to yet another child she did not want, a bedbound elder alone and visited by no one, or a Salvadoran mother who left her children behind when she made the terrifying migration to Washington DC and suffers physically and emotionally as a result.  Is it unethical? patronizing?  necessary?  One thing I have come to believe—I can give voice to those who are voiceless.  Even though my imagination plays on my memories and perspective as witness, I trust that I can illuminate their lives through my words.  They have souls.  Their stories should be told.

Becoming the Making

…some people pick up their tools.
Others become the making itself.
                           Rumi

I came across these lines from Rumi while prowling through the bookshelves at Dayspring Retreat Farm here in Maryland a few weeks ago.  I’m trying to understand them.  Nurses are often taught that they are their most important tool.  They use their minds, hearts and bodies to offer knowledge, compassion and physical care.

Does this apply to poets?  If so, how?  Surely it’s not about the persona of the stereotypical poet —eccentric, intellectual, self-referential, lost to the world of everyday.

 A friend once told me she dreamed that I lived in the house of poetry.  It was her dream, not mine.  Still, I’ve not forgotten it—even used it in some verses of a poem. 

 My friend had a dream
that I lived in the house of poetry.
A woodsy cottage with just one door or
a light-filled penthouse floating on cloud?
She never told.     

I sit at my desk, mind adrift
in the vast rooms of imagination
idly plucking at words
those glittering singularities

each a miniature universe
primed for its own Big Bang
set to create real estate
on this blank page.

Is this what Rumi meant by becoming the making? 

The Artist in Her Studio

“When I’m in an exam room with a patient, I feel like an artist in her studio.”  This is what my long-time colleague and dear friend Teresa says about her work as a family nurse practitioner in a busy clinic in the heart of Washington, DC.  I’ve been reflecting on the idea of the clinician as artist.  Truth is, I’ve never felt exactly that way.  Yes, I worked as an FNP in a similar setting for many years.  As time went on, I felt competent, confident, and fully prepared to help my patients.  Sometimes I felt like a true healer.  But an artist in her studio?  This gives me pause. 

 When I was in practice, I recorded patient encounters first in (paper) charts, then at home I’d let my feelings about them spill  into journal entries.  Some of these became poems or essays months or years later.  “Just who do you think you are, Maggie Jones?” I once wrote in utter frustration about a patient whose needs were far beyond my capacity to meet.   Later, Maggie became a poem that helped me reconcile my feelings about her and grasp what she had to teach me.  The same thing happened with others like Lady Jane Jackson, Miss Mary, Bennie Smith, reckless Bobby and baby Star. 

 As years went on, I found myself tackling challenging clinical issues like the limited usefulness of preventive health screening, the disruption caused by electronic medical records, the question of what to do about incidental findings, the role of placebos, the short life of most “gold standard” treatments, the many unfounded promises of cure and so on.  Yes, I read the professional literature but I also relied on my art to understand and learn.  Therefore these themes, too, became fodder for poems.

 I love the image of the clinician as artist and the exam room as studio.  It’s not a simile or metaphor.  It’s reality.  Medicine and nursing are a blend of art and science.  One informs the other and master clinicians find a way to use each to gain the wisdom that knowledge and skill alone can’t provide. 

Long story short

I marvel at those who can spin an elaborate tale.  Take Jane Smiley.  I just finished reading her 1400-page Some Luck trilogy.  In three books, one chapter for each year from 1920-2019, she tells the story of the Langdons, an Iowa farm family, as they and five generations of their descendants make their way through a century and the world.  It’s also a cultural history of those decades.  So much was recognizable to me—the particular toy a child received for Christmas, the breakfast cereal another ate, the cult that one of the young women managed to escape, the parts of Washington DC that I happen to know, wars, political and financial upheavals and so on. 

How did she research and construct it?  How did she create and manage dozens of characters whom I could barely keep track of with the aid of the family tree printed inside each front cover? How did she keep me engrossed through 1400 pages and 100 years?

Me?  I’m one who starts a story then grows too impatient to flesh it out with color, detail and interesting asides.  Even among friends who are in a listening mood, I’m overtaken by the impulse to condense:

 Long story short, we made it through. 

Long story short, that letter to the editor never got published. 

Long story short, it was him all along.

In poetry and essays, I enjoy cutting to the quick, distilling a thought to its essence and letting the rest vaporize. To layered meaning, metaphor and resonant language I say yes, but weaving an elaborate tapestry of people, places, and plot—it’s simply not my métier.

Long story short, I like to think that poetry and essay (including the short notes I post here) are gifts I have to give.  Each of us has a hunger for variety but a unique expression of creativity. I’m gratified to have discovered what mine is. 

Morning in the library

I look past tightly packed stacks
through plate glass.
Branch loads of leaves have escaped
from their trunks.
They have stories to tell.
The breeze knows this,
leafs through in search
of the one it wants to hear.

I don’t like to force a poem into consciousness or onto the page.  Poems should come when they’re ready.  But that’s exactly what I did a number of years ago on the last day of a summer writers’ conference at a college in northern California.  I’d led my sessions and critiqued my group’s work but hadn’t written anything myself.  I’d hoped to leave with something—even a rough draft that might languish in my mulch file.  I took myself and my yellow legal pad to the campus library, determined to sit there until something emerged then sat for a couple of hours scribbling mindlessly until I lost focus and my gaze drifted down the rows of stacks through the full length windows to a dense grove of trees just outside, their branches swaying in a light wind.  Books.  Trees.  Breeze.  After a time, a phrase emerged, then a metaphor, then a small poem. 

It satisfied me.  Even now, when I read it again and close its 42-word file unedited, I remember the year, place and occasion.  Should I do more of this “forced” writing, maybe follow William Stafford’s poem-a-day practice?  Truth is, I don’t have that kind of ambition.  But I have patience.  I enjoy being a vessel, ready to receive whatever inspiration my muse provides.

A very private medium

In my earlier post about trashing the black notebooks, I wrote about the visual journals I now keep.  Here’s what occurs to me. When it comes to writing a poem, I wait patiently for inspiration.  I spend time sitting quietly or doodling with words.  I open myself to the muse while showering or walking.  Often I come away with nothing, but I’m disciplined about the process.  With my journals it’s different. I don’t ponder.  I act on impulse whenever the mood strikes.  I tear off a magazine cover with a lush garden illustration and start a collage. While reviewing receipts for credit card purchases, I decide to keep the one for two rings and paste it into the journal.  I print out and paste in a photo of our mailbox.  I draw a large circle on a blank page and start filling it in with colors, squiggles and cutouts.  Often captions will occur to me—something related to what’s going on in my life. Occasionally it’s the reverse:  a line of poetry or a newspaper headline catches my attention and inspires an entry.  The visuals follow.

These small books don’t tell the story of my life.  If anything, they represent a random walk through my mind.  In some way I don’t fully understand, they give shape to my psyche.  I support those who curate and share their lives on social media—I suppose that’s what I’m doing here in a very limited way.  But I’ll continue to devote time to gathering up miscellany from my daily life and storing it like grain in a granary for private consumption when I feel reflective, unsettled or hungry for direction.