q&a
geraldine connolly
January 2007
The poems appearing in the March ’07 Ensemble Jourine, Seven Portraits, came out of the time your father was dying. Can you talk about the process of writing them in the midst of this difficulty?
In the midst of enormous changes I think there is the desire to keep things fixed, to keep something, anything the same. It’s like reaching for an island of familiarity while swimming a river of rapid change. My older brother died very suddenly about a year ago. My father was suffering from bone cancer, and my mother had been in and out of the hospital with heart disease problems. After the enormously painful months while my father was dying, I found work a consolation. It was something I could control in a period when things were out of control. I found myself wanting to put something, anything in order. I was trying to write at that time but most of the work still remains in progress. I was a little too raw emotionally to get much new work done that was publishable, so I decided to go back over some work that I’d started during the seven years after my father was diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to create a memory gallery. He’d been very sick over the early summer of 2006, and after his death in July of that year, I went back over some older poems I’d been working on and tried to polish them and arrange them. Doing any kind of absorbing work during those days was difficult but at the same time trying to choose and arrange a group of poems, revising and ordering some poems, felt absorbing and therefore comforting. That’s how I came up with these “Seven Portraits.” I was trying to make order in the midst of the tremendous disorder of my life at that period of time.
I began with a portrait of the street because a street is never the same, always in the midst of change and thus seemed an appropriate place to begin. The gray street, like my life, seemed to be subject to “mysterious arrivals and glittering departures.” I notice now that in the poem I turn away from the view of the street to a view of an apartment window with its solitary telescope and table set for one, emblems of how life’s journey is a solitary one. Or perhaps the image could be a longing for quiet, for the solitary room of the writer’s life. The telescope works as an image of perspective. Finding perspective is always the difficult task, both in life and in writing.
Then I picked portraits of my parents during their decline, like “My Father at Eighty-Two.” My father’s Alzheimer’s turned him into a completely new and strange person, but I wanted to record that, to have an elegiac poem that recorded the sadness of his decline. I’m someone who thinks on paper. I have to empty my hand to find out what I’m thinking and feeling. The portrait of my mother, too, focuses on her heart disease, her confusion, her helplessness. She was a quilter. Her quilts tended to be structured and balanced but I became fascinated by a crazy quilt I bought at an antique store in Pennsylvania where I grew up because I realized it spoke to me somehow. Hence the poem of that name.
At the very core of the need to write is the fear of being forgotten. The “Self-Portrait” in this group is understandingly a little grim, the landscape far from the center of the world and the speaker disoriented. I had moved away from a life in the Washington D.C. suburbs to a small town in northwestern Montana. I wanted to write down how this felt. Then there’s the portrait of my mother as a child. My mother has always been a difficult person. “My Mother at Seven” tries to imagine her empathetically, as a child selling eggs door to door after her father died and her mother, a non-English speaking widow with nine children, struggled in a small industrial town. I put “Blue Spring” in this group because of its ending which suggests regeneration and renewal. I wanted it to read as a positive force.
As George Bernard Shaw said, “Life is about creating yourself.” I guess I’ve created a gallery that remembers a difficult stretch of time. It’s interesting that though I thought I was attempting to fix some characters in place and time, they are disobedient and unfixed. The poems seem to acknowledge that as soon as something’s in place, it begins to change. The door opens, the children grow up and leave home, the vase falls, one’s mother suffers, the father gets sick and dies, the plate gets cracked. Things change and change.
How does nature influence your poems?
How this question has intrigued me. I wish it were an easy correspondence. Many of the poems in my first two books were narrative poems and the progress of a story has a certain logic. The logic of nature is something entirely different . . . there is a wildness to it, an unpredictability that I react to with love and fear. It is an unending source of inspiration.
Sometimes I feel like I project my feelings onto nature, sometimes I feel like nature projects its moods onto me. I like to react to objects in the natural world and to meditate on them. I am someone who loves to be outdoors and who is greatly affected by weather, sunshine, lack of sunshine, mist, cold, rain, or dryness. All of it seems to register somehow on the way I feel. Landscapes also have a strong effect.
I grew up in an eastern landscape, in Pennsylvania, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains; a soft lush green landscape of rolling hills and winding creeks. My grandparents owned farms, and I spent a lot of time outdoors. I always felt that being outdoors was soothing. At the same time, it was freeing. I loved the freedom of roaming on my bike or playing in the woods, having adventures with my brother and sister, or with cousins or friends. Some great dramas of my childhood were enacted outdoors. We owned a summer cottage in Canada, on the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. Again, there was a lot of freedom to roam outdoors, observe animals, fish. and swim. We weren’t as closely supervised, I think, as children are perhaps today. I think being outdoors so much, playing imaginatively, dreaming up adventures, like taking a canoe trip with a cousin to explore a nearby cove, was a powerful thing. These experiences helped build an imaginative life, dreaming something and then enacting it. In mid-life, my husband and I moved to the Rocky Mountain West which has a much grander landscape of high mountains, huge expanses of open sky, large lakes and I think that has had an influence on my work. It was difficult to come to terms with this new immense landscape, and I think I’m still struggling with it. Rather than writing narratives, I found myself wanting to write about the new kinds of trees, flowers, and vistas I was experiencing. But encased in it somehow was also a sense of longing for the landscape I had left behind, the one I had lost.
At this time, we are spending half of our year in Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, which is a completely different topography, of Saguaro cactuses and strange spiky plants that look like they’ve come out of a Dr. Seuss book. Now I’m starting to write some poems that include this landscape. I think it really takes a while to absorb it though. The southwest is a rich and interesting place.
I have been also reading and studying a lot of Zen poems which traditionally incorporate travel and changing landscapes. These Zen poems are extremely spare, very concise, yet somehow, like a desert plant, they don’t take up much space but are radiant and suggestive. Reading this work has been so refreshing. The poems are elegant, concise and compact. For the May 2007 issue of Ensemble Jourine, I put together a grouping of loose haiku poems. At any rate, there’s often a very clear correspondence between Nature and human emotion. Seasons are important. There’s a great empathy with the natural landscape.
What led you to experiment with Zen poems?
I suppose that I was in need of some kind of spiritual transformation. Experiencing two family deaths in a short period of time, I had a desire to pare back, to meditate, and confront the spirit more directly, try to come to some peace or understanding of the essential experience of life. The experience of writing in this tradition also coincided with a more serious practice of yoga. I read Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism and liked the idea of a practice that believed in inner purity and goodness rather than the “fallen world” of Christian religious convention. Zen is a discipline, what Suzuki calls “opening the Mental Eye to look into the very reason of existence.” It’s a difficult concept to understand, but the mind is hypnotized into a state of unconsciousness where emptiness, a kind of peace is realized. There is more of a harmony between the outer world and
the inner world.
As in poetry, the inner being is of utmost importance. The beauty of Zen poems is that they wake up the mind, allow the poet to be attentive. Such awakening might take years of effort. It could possibly bring a transformation of the spirit. But I like the idea of the process. The Zen aesthetic embraces saying things with the fewest possible words, saying them with simplicity, naturalness, directness, and profundity. Suggestibility is the key—saying things with the fewest brushstrokes possible. Philosophical inquiry is at the heart of it. You must identify with an object, identify so closely that the self disappears.
The poems are small, yet they can contain multitudes of nuance. They observe carefully and if art is about selection, haiku can be seen as a very severe form of selection. If the selection works, there’s a radiance to the poem. I’m thinking of Basho’s great lyric poem: “Even in Kyoto—hearing the cuckoo’s cry—I long for Kyoto.” Somehow this poem, though it is short, captures the paradox of being in a moment at the same time that one is aware that it will pass, it will disappear, like the cuckoo’s cry. Being in Kyoto, like being in life, is a temporary state that is so fleeting, like the bird’s cry, like the passing thought that even while it is being experienced is already changing to the next idea.
I love the intimacy of these small, jewel-like observations. They seem to capture the very essence of poetry. When one gets tired of too many words, too much over-statement or moralizing or posturing, these Zen pictographs can be so refreshing.
They look much easier than they are. Traditionally, Zen masters refused poem after poem about their disciples’ awakenings. There’s a spiritual discipline that’s required as well as an artistic discipline. There’s an extreme distillation of experience which requires an acute state of receptivity and awareness. The ideal is when the distance between the observed thing and the observer disappears. The observation must be genuine, must ring true at the same time that the precise correspondence in the natural world must be described well. And sometimes I think the small picture is certainly a microcosm of the big picture. Working on them felt like a consolation.