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.

Souvenir

I’ll just say it.  I want to publish another poetry collection.  The last, Clinician’s Guide to the Soul, came out in 2008.  Yes, I still have plenty of unsold copies.  No, there has been no demand for a new book.  Yes, a number of the poems I’ve written since then have found their way into print.  No, I have no idea how I’d manage distribution of a new offering.  But I know the title—have known it for years now.  It is hovering.

A couple of weeks ago, we took several cartons of books needing new homes to Friends of the Library, a large used bookstore near here.  It was immediately apparent that others had been spending some of their quarantine time doing the same sort of culling.  It was nearly impossible to enter the store what with cartons stacked up inside and out.  We were told to leave ours outside on the crowded sidewalk with all the other large and small containers, some sealed, some open to the elements.  Damp book covers stared back at us forlornly.  Will our donations ever be catalogued, shelved and resold?  I felt both guilty and sad abandoning them there.

That said, I can’t seem to resist the urge to gather up uncollected poems from the scattered periodicals in which they’ve landed and rescue those languishing in computer files.  I want to use them as puzzle pieces from which to create a whole new story for the readers I always imagine when I write. I want to illuminate them with visual art, lay them out in a pleasing way. I want to make a book with a spine, ISBN number and barcode.  The print run would necessarily be modest—I could call it a limited edition.

If nothing else, it would be a souvenir, something to remember myself by. 

Doodling

One recent afternoon, doodling with colored pencils in my 5x7 notebook (blue and green were the colors that drew me), I found myself filling in some open spaces with three phrases

the creative journey

fits and starts

and yes, an arc.

As I sat there looking at what I’d written, three p’s popped into mind:  presence, patience and practice.  Perhaps these were reminders of what lies at the heart of the creative journey, at least for me, at least at this stage of my life. Show up, wait patiently for inspiration then, inspired or not, put something on paper, if only a doodle.  I wrote the three words at the top of the page.

Then three other words presented themselves. I wrote them at the bottom of the page realizing that they indicated obstacles to creativity:  time, purpose, productivity.  They resonated but didn’t seem quite on point.  I crossed out time and wrote haste.  I changed purpose to resistance and, finally, productivity to greed.  The message from me to me cautioned against a rush to complete work, resistance to themes that seem unfamiliar or take me in a new direction, and greed—putting out work for the sake of putting it out, adding it to my portfolio and, with luck, publishing it.  None of these impulses nourish creativity. 

Interesting where a doodle can lead.  Interesting what happens as I (in poet Billy Collins’s words) wait for a little flame / to appear at the tip of my pencil.

Ephemera

This time of pandemic invites reflection.  Reading Louise Glück’s essays on poetry the other day, I thought about her statement that “the advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”  As a poet, I’d like to think this is true—and it is for a very few.  But, like life, poetry, art and other creative work are for the most part ephemeral.

I think about this website and all the care that’s been lavished on its design and contents including the poems, photographs and proselets (what I call these short pieces I write for my online notebook).  But the moment I fail to pay the bills for my domain name (sagefemmepress.com) and internet platform (Squarespace), the whole thing will vanish into the ether.  True, I have poems in print and can make hard copies of the notebook entries but I’m quite sure they, too, will have their day and then disappear.

So, why?  Those of you who have read my work are a small group and those who visit this website, even smaller.  But I, like all of us, need a way to express myself.  I want to make sense of my experiences of life and bring my thoughts and feelings to light.  This can happen in any number of ways—cooking, crafting, conversation, meditation, to name a few.  As a nurse, family caregiver and writer, healing art has become mine.  It’s a privilege and a necessity for me and, I hope, a small gift of enlightenment to those who receive it.

From the Q-Zone

Quarantine comes from the Italian for 40 days, 40 as in the 40 days and nights of flood in Noah’s time, Jesus’s 40 days of spiritual torment in the desert before beginning his ministry and the edict in 14th century Venice that ships remain at anchor for 40 days before entering port during plague years. I didn’t know this etymology 40 days ago but I know it now.  I am, in effect, quarantined like everyone else in my part of the world while the covid-19 pandemic plays out.  This quarantine, for me, has already lasted longer than that.  But 40, Google tells me, is simply a metaphor for “a long time.”

Enforced seclusion should be a writer’s friend.  There you are in your favorite chair with your yellow legal pad and purple pen watching clouds pass overhead, opening yourself to inspiration.  I’ve just finished reading Patti Smith’s memoir M Train which begins with this arresting statement:  “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.”  M Train, it turns out, is a collection of Smith’s dreams, musings, vignettes from daily life and fragments of personal history loosely strung together like beads on a necklace.  It drew me in.  Smith did manage to make something out of what she called nothing.

I, on the other hand, feel burdened by a surplus of “somethings”—unread books that may serve my work, poems in draft that won’t come to life, weighty pandemic themes asking to be addressed.  The editor of a periodical I admire has issued a call to send in anything we past and present contributors have written about this challenging time. I have nothing.  I wait.  I’m tempted to be facile and claim that it’s not easy making nothing out of something.  But what I’ve learned is this:  the impetus does not come from me.  It’s given, just as I believe it was to Patti Smith as she sat in her favorite café with notebook and pen.  It will come when it comes and I will be ready.

Job Description

I’m reading an interview with the writer Barry Lopez in The Sun, one of my favorite literary periodicals.  In it, Fred Bahnson, the interviewer, poses a question about an essay Lopez had written late in life about sexual abuse he’d suffered as a child.  Lopez replied that he’d spent years dealing with the emotional disruption this experience had caused and finally concluded that, as a writer, he was capable of addressing the subject in an objective way.  “I wanted to write this out and have it behind me,” he said.  Publication of the essay brought lots of mail—personal pleas for help, requests for testimony by lawyers, and exhortations to support legislation before Congress.  He declined these.  “My job,” he told Bahnson, “is to create clarity around complex issues, and to hand it to other people who are smarter than I am, and more strategic, who know how to draw up and implement effective laws.  I know what I’m not any good at.”

Lopez’s response struck a chord.  This is an election year in the United States.  An enormously consequential election.  One issue at the top of the list in most voters’ minds is health care.  I know a lot about health care as a nurse and administrator with many decades of experience. I care deeply about these issues. Once, years ago, I testified before a Congressional committee. Once I attended a demonstration in front of the District Building in D.C.  I’ve written on health policy a few times, narrative pieces inspired by personal experiences.  But I no longer show up  at rallies.  I do not contact my elected representatives, write letters to the editor or post my views on social media. I don’t join action networks.  What I do is write—in my fashion—as a poet and essayist and, in that way, reach a small number of attuned readers.

This year in particular I feel guilty about my lack of activism, my failure to make more practical contributions toward better health in this country.  But maybe this is not my job description.  Maybe my job is, as Lopez says, to create clarity around complex issues in order to provide insight and inspiration for those with the skills to create meaningful change.  Maybe my challenge is to accept my limitations and focus on doing my job.