as if I’ve hauled my sweaty-palmed, embarrassed self to my first P.A. support group, dreading the moment…ugh..now it’s my turn.
\nInhale.\u00a0Close my eyes. Exhale. Open my eyes. Scan the room. Say it.
\nHi, I’m Tracy and I’m a poet.<\/p>\n
Often I\u2019d prefer to be nobody, like the narrator in Emily Dickinson\u2019s poem I\u2019m nobody! Who are you?\u00a0<\/i><\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Are you – a Poet – Too?<\/i><\/p>\n In the late 1980\u2019s when I first began thinking of myself as a poet, I went public. I enjoyed reading before an audience, I published poems, I told people I didn\u2019t even know that I was\u2014a poet (albeit a beginning, not especially skilled one).<\/p>\n who don\u2019t have the decency to refrain from public displays of affection. Yeah, that was me, with poetry. I was passionately attracted to poetry, infatuated, over the moon.<\/p>\n Poetry!<\/i><\/p>\n How do I love thee? Let me count the ways\u2026<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n \u2026I love thee with the breath,<\/i><\/p>\n Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,<\/i><\/p>\n I shall but love thee better after death.\u00a0<\/i>\u00a0(Elizabeth Barret Browning)<\/p>\n So I sought therapies: New Criticism<\/a> and Deconstruction<\/a>. Poetry knew me; poetry loved me. And then I was living in New Hampshire, a place crawling with poets. of my relationship with poetry\u2014contentment, quiet respect, affection, living in a romantic, literary landscape (New England!)\u2014<\/p>\n The diagnosis of my husband\u2019s dementia overturned all my plans. Suddenly the only thing I wanted was to go home\u2014to Minnesota\u2014to be near my family, to curl up under the porch of the old homestead and whimper. In February, 2016, I moved us. The story of my romance with poetry has now passed through all the stages of a lifelong marriage\u2014passionate attraction, disillusionment, anger and infidelities, renewed appreciation and the business of day-to-day, explosive crisis and blessings.<\/p>\n I have enjoyed a renewed kinship with family, with old friends, and with Minnesota, a place I had no intention of learning to love again. I have formed a new, entirely different but abundantly lovely and loving relationship with my changed and ever-changing husband. Poems and spiritual words provide some solace. Having become proficient in navigating poetry\u2019s creative, illogical, non-linear ways of knowing, I am adapting to living with dementia\u2019s amusing-aggravating-terrifying-mystifying thoughts and behaviors. All of this summons long-buried memories and new ways of seeing.<\/p>\n I am a poet and a writer. I have my topics. Love. Loss. Poetry. Benedictinism.You know those annoying, wildly in love (or lust) people<\/h3>\n
I wasn\u2019t content to merely love poetry, I needed to know<\/em> poetry.<\/h3>\n
\nThat\u2019s when I learned that Literary Criticism is very, um, critical. As happens with all relationships, disillusionment arrived. Conflict. Anger.
\nI thought a rational approach would gain me a finer appreciation for poetry. Instead, a masculine Lit. Crit. <\/i>voice took up residence in my head. He spoke in\u00a0New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics <\/a><\/i>jargon with a British-Royal-Family accent. Whenever I read or wrote poems, he pushed his way into the party and deconstructed obnoxiously, \u201cWhat about gender\u2026race\u2026ideology\u2026Freud\u2026Marx\u2026irony\u2026the failure of Romanticism\u2026and who chooses the canon?\u201d He questioned me into chaos. I began to see poems (those I read and those I wrote) as meager, undernourished, whiny, insignificant, annoying.
\nI stopped calling myself a poet; I took up with memoir. I had a fling with fiction.<\/p>\nI left poetry but poetry wouldn\u2019t leave me.<\/h3>\n
\nWithout willing it to happen, I made friends with dozens of poets. Like Donald Hall<\/a>, I daily gazed up at Mount Kearsarge. My appreciation for poetry renewed. I took a workshop led by Maxine Kumin<\/a>. I met Patricia Fargnoli<\/a> (former NH Poet Laureate), who stood on Frost\u2019s grave and wrote a prize-winning poem about it. She became my mentor for two years. I became good friends with Alice B. Fogel<\/a> (current NH Poet Laureate) and Katherine Solomon<\/a>.
\nI persisted in calling myself a writer, not a poet, although I continued to write poems. I also continued to write creative nonfiction and fiction.<\/p>\nIn 2015, I thought I was in the happily-ever-after phase<\/h3>\n
But then came the explosive crisis.<\/h3>\n
\nTwo years have passed and the crisis has been, predictably (however much I did not anticipate this),<\/p>\nfollowed by blessing.<\/h3>\n
Now it\u2019s time for synthesis.<\/h3>\n
\nPoetry, and his dementia, and my recent association as an Oblate with a nearby Benedictine monastery have served as gateways:<\/p>\n\n
There comes a time when we must accept who we have been, which brings us to who we are.<\/h3>\n
\nI invite you to join me here in exploring how they\u2014how everything in our ordinary-mystical lives\u2014interconnects.<\/p>\nWhat summons your long buried memories and\/or new ways of seeing?<\/h3>\n