My Wobbly Bicycle, 48

Years ago, when my former husband had just been hired at the University of Delaware, the then-Department Chair offered to fly me from Arkansas to Delaware to look for a house for our family. (Can you imagine that now?) The night I arrived, there was a guest poet reading. I was invited. The poet was the late, great, silver-haired Seamus Heaney. I’d read a few of his poems, but basically I didn’t know squat.  At the reception—which was quite intimate, at someone’s house—we were brushing shoulders, picking up cheese and crackers. I could have said anything, asked him anything. But I couldn’t think what to say.

During our first year at the University of Delaware, Sir Angus Wilson was a guest faculty member. I was teaching part-time there and was a grad student at the University of Arkansas, studying long-distance for my exams. I could have taken Angus’s course, but I didn’t. I think I was afraid of making a fool of myself.

 The great poet James Wright (below) spent a semester at Delaware the year before he died. We took a long walk in the woods together with his wife Annie and some friends. I remember his singing the French Chef’s song from Sesame Street to our son. At least we could talk of burls on trees, fall leaves on the stream, and Sesame Street.

 While I was at Delaware, we hosted—you may recognize some or most of these names—Rita Dove, Charles Simic, Stephen Dunn, Dabney Stuart, Michael S. Harper, Camille Paglia, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley (below), Susan Sontag, Ann Beattie, William Gaddis, Christopher Hitchens, Nicholas Kristof, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, Charles Johnson, I could go on and on. And of course we had Gibbons Ruark, Jeanne Murray Walker, and W. D. Snodgrass, (et moi), on the faculty. I became friends with some, others not.

I wonder now, what CAN we get from other writers, particularly those who leave us awestruck?  What can we get, period, from each others' presence in such situations?

Back then, I thought it was a game of who knows stuff and who doesn’t. But no. I'm certain now that it isn’t the exchange of information that matters, it’s the presence of one whose life has been utterly given over to, to, to something—to expression, to art, to seeing, to knowing, I don’t know what to call it, but I know it when I see it, the face of complete abandonment, not just abandonment, but abandonment TO something. To something worth everything.

A comment from another great, Jim Harrison: “Though I don’t teach I often get sought for advice from young poets. I say I don’t have time for you unless you’re going to give your life to it. That’s what it takes.”

It seems that we “absorb” from others more than we “exchange.”  I may not have missed out on anything when I was struck silent. All the great and modestly-great people I’ve been in the presence of, something has passed between us that’s changed me. And maybe them.

Of course the same thing can be said of books. There’s an actual exchange. We absorb each other. We change each other. Which makes it matter, I think, WHAT we read. Which makes it matter HOW we read, what we’re after when we read.

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A note: No Need of Sympathy has been nominated for the William Carlos Williams Award, the UNT Rilke Prize, as well as the Kingsley Tufts Award. Any one of those would make me pretty  happy.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 21

Monday was glorious. Finally the nausea from radiation wore itself out, the sun shone with the bright surprise that I associate only with northern Michigan. It got up to almost 60. Jerry and I raked a bit of the winter debris from our miniscule yard, shoveled the last of the snow out from under the hydrangea and azaleas, chopped up the ice underneath, and when I got tired (quickly),  I sat in a lawn chair for half an hour letting the sun blast away on my face. In the afternoon, we went downtown to see Quartet (I loved it: with Maggie Smith, and Dustin Hoffman’s debut as director/producer). We ate downtown, a normal meal, and I had my first glass of wine in months.

 Life is fluctuation: Tuesday, back to chemo. I don’t have a port in my chest. The doctor and I decided with only six chemos, why bother, and there’s some risk. So, the nurse got the needle in a vein, but apparently it was in the wall of the vein. Nothing could get through. She wiggled it around for a while. Ugh. She tried a second vein. Then she tried one on the right arm. It seemed to go in but the drip was too slow. She called in the “lower arm and hand vein specialist,” who was able to find a good vein farther down my arm. Did you know that the farther toward the extremities you go, the more sensitive the body is? Hands, feet, full of nerve endings. But after it was in, all was well. I slept for most of the four hours of drip—it’s the Benedryl (for avoiding any allergic reactions) that pretty much knocks me out.

I think I snored. There were four others there. I felt bad about it, but they all swore I didn’t.

Monday was Earth Day, and I was thinking, what is all this blog-writing, this general passion for memoir, this artistic spilling of the gut? I sometimes feel foolish, or useless, making my writing a higher priority than joining the groups fighting to save our environment.

No. Not “the environment.” They’re fighting to keep carp out of the Great Lakes, they’re fighting to save a 300-year-old tree from the road crews. “Heaven is precision,” says Christian Wiman. “What I crave is writing that gets right down to the nub of Now.”

               As the late, great James Wright said, “I want the “pure, clear word.”

               This is the thing. The immediate, personal word. The lyric impulse.  

               The needle in a vein.

Wiman reminds us (in his new book, My Bright Abyss: the Meditations of a Believer), that It was the pure lyric spirit of the poet Osip Mandelstam that Stalin couldn’t abide, that put Mandelstam (pictured here) finally in a concentration camp where he died. It was, says Wiman, “the existential liberty and largess, the free-singing soul that, Stalin seemed to sense, would always slip free of the state’s net. People who think poetry has no power have a very limited conception of what power means. Even now, in this corporate country, where presidents do not call up poets on the telephone, some little lyric is eating into the heart of money.”

Elizabeth Bowen: “To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything. “

George Oppen: “I think there is no light in the world / but the world. And I think there is light.”

I can’t justify the books of poems—or essays—I’ve written, I can’t justify my mornings at the computer, tapping out words that aren’t trying to persuade, aren’t trying to fix or mend, aren’t trying to explain. They’re trying to sing, I guess. They seem to want to be written, whether I win big prizes with them or not.

And writing about this cancer: I use the word “about,” but that’s a misnomer, really. The cancer’s a force behind the words. It’s one of the tensions that will play in the poem even if it doesn’t make an actual appearance. It does often make an appearance. It’s on my mind.  How to keep it in its place, so the poem opens out into the unknown instead of locking itself down in fascination with details or wanting to narcissistically TELL ALL. In other words, how to make a true poem. Or a true essay. Or a true story. I have no answers. I turn to others’ poems and essays—like Christian Wiman’s memoir above, about his cancer and his faith—where I can watch how it’s done well (I think he does it well), or not so well. And turn to the masters, them first and last, the words that have lasted a lot longer than blog posts.