Apr 11, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
I lost a best friend, fellow vagabond, and gifted poet to a long battle with cancer. We traveled and performed together for years. We joked over homemade-hotel-room drinks about how the $31 we raked in from the donations for the night’s house concert, or whatever it was we could drum up, weren’t even enough to pay for the liquor we’d bought before the gig. And he walked with me through the shadows of the “relative loss” of my young daughter through divorce. (Although, now in her mid-20s, we are as healed and close as can be.)
Towards the end of his time, we sometimes cried in late-night restaurants about his impending fate — how it would affect his kids, how his wife would eventually have to move on. We sometimes laughed about it all too… to keep from dying sooner than necessary. He had a precocious, and often precarious, sense of humor in the face of last things.
Watching Jim die, so slowly, paired with what I went through with my daughter, had a profound and permanent effect on me. His had to do with: Do this thing. Don’t sit around talking about it. The world needs poetry. The ride’s over before you know it. So don’t mess around. Finish the book. Publish it yourself. The other presses are too slow. Then, get to work on the next one.
Where my daughter is concerned, the effect was even more profound. For, basically, she is the reason I’ve written a poem a day for over two decades. I began to journal, for her, in a way, every day in the wake of her long absences. I wanted a record that she was always in my heart, and on my mind. And that daily journaling habit quickly turned into my daily poem habit, and, thus, 26 books.
Poetry, to me, is uniquely qualified among the written arts to speak to the hearts and souls of those who have lost someone dear. Loss is a time for quietness, a time for speaking softly… if at all. Therefore, poetry’s special gift for leaving out all unnecessary words, makes it perfect for these hurting souls and hard times.
So it is that poetry asks the reader to slow down. Don’t read so fast. Let’s breathe. Our words will be few here. The lines will be short. And all that space on the right-hand side of the page will be the comforting silences between the lines, and between us.
In essence, poetry gets to the point. And, if it’s doing its job, it won’t say any of those stupid, mindless things that too many people too often say to us when we’ve experienced profound and inconsolable loss. My father, a pastor, was an absolute master of quiet poise and what not to say when he showed up at the heartbroken home, the hospital, or the funeral parlor. I believe my poetry carries this quality of his in its toolbox.
About Nathan Brown
Nathan Brown is an author, songwriter, and award-winning poet living in Wimberley, Texas. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, where he’s taught for over 20 years. He served as Poet Laureate for the State of Oklahoma in 2013/14 and now travels full-time performing readings, concerts, workshops and speaking on creativity, poetry, and songwriting. Nathan has published over 20 books. Most recent are his new collection of poems, In the Days of Our Seclusion, the first in a series, now known as the Pandemic Poems Project, that deals with the year of the pandemic, and a new travel memoir Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large. Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. His earlier book, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. Brown’s poem “Nevertheless, It Moves” comes from his book To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words.
Resources:
Nathan Brown website
In the Days of Our Seclusion by Nathan Brown
Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large by Nathan Brown
Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems, by Nathan Brown was finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award
Two Tables Over by Nathan Brown won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award
To Sing Hallucinated: First Thoughts on Last Words by Nathan Brown
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
“I Want to Listen to Your Absence”
Apr 10, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
First, I have lived long enough to have outlived most of the people who were important to me when I was young. My parents died years ago. My younger brother died three years ago. All but one of my aunts and uncles have died. Cousins have died. Many close friends have died. At this point, I am reminded of a recurring mantra in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: “So it goes.”
I don’t find myself weeping for them. I do talk to some of them now and then on my long walks down the narrow canyon to the river below my house. It’s my personal sliver of wildness. But I don’t weep. I do weep for my daughter, Melinda.
My daughter died nine years ago now. She was a doctor, and when the tornado hit Joplin, Missouri, twelve years ago, she served as a first responder working triage, separating those who could be helped from those who couldn’t. She was haunted by those memories. She was at ground zero, breathing in the dust. Three years and one day later, she died from an auto-immune interstitial lung disease. I don’t know, nor can I prove the connection, but there it is, the sequence.
Eight months before she died, I started living with her in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She was working off her medical school debt at a clinic there and wanted someone to keep her company. She didn’t want to live alone in a new town where she knew no one. This kind of fear in her was something new to me. My daughter had always pushed the boundaries before, going to new places and living alone was not new to her. But this is my thinking, looking back on it. At the time, I was retired, writing poetry, and thought of it as an opportunity to spend time with my oldest daughter, who had been out of the house for two decades as well as a place to spend isolated time writing.
So, we lived together in a house on the old Santa Fe Trail, a block from the old Plaza in Las Vegas, for a couple of months. She would leave for work in the morning. I would read, write, and take long walks during the day. Then, when she came home from work in the evening, we would take walks through the town. Often, she would have to slow down or stop to breathe. We thought it was her having to adjust to the high altitude. But after two months, her breathing didn’t get better. In early October, she was too sick to work. I drove her back home to Texas. We thought the lower altitude would help. At first, it seemed to, but she didn’t get well.
There were doctor’s appointments, hospital visits, tests, and more tests. My daughter simply got sicker and sicker, and there was nothing anyone tried to do that helped.
I was holding her and talking to her when she died. I still relive those last days over and over in my mind. There is so much more to say, but you asked me how my loss affected my writing.
It’s been nine years, and somewhere in the equation, I have learned to quit saying it was a loss. Not always. Sometimes, I slip into the mindset of thinking of it as a loss, but that doesn’t help anyone. My daughter died, yes. And yes, I think she was cheated. But my thinking she was cheated doesn’t change the reality of it. And here we come to how it has affected my writing.
In some ways, I might say it hasn’t affected my writing at all. The themes of my poetry seem to be consistent. My use of the extended metaphor hasn’t really changed. But to say her dying had no effect, or my grieving for her had no effect would be misleading. She is almost everywhere in my poetry. But then she always was. All of my children are. Everyone I have ever loved makes appearances. Some people I don’t love, even though I should, make their way in as well.
I weep for her, both in the reality of my waking life and in my writing. So, there’s that. But I also still make coffee every morning. And that becomes the point of it. It can be expressed in so many ways. One is that “the ordinary clings.” Another is a lesson I learned as a young man when I fell in love with someone who didn’t fall in love with me. I thought I would die, but I didn’t. I quit school, joined the Navy, and I thought I would never make it through boot camp, but I did. Andrew Geyer once told me something about being in ranger school. “You think you can’t, but you can.”
I write to breathe, I try to explain. I am constantly haunted by Virginia Woolf’s charge that a writer has an obligation to live in the presence of reality. I swallowed that challenge whole, and that’s what I try to do, if not in my day-to-day, at least in my writing. That, of course, begs the question of what does it mean to live in the presence of reality?
I was in the room with my daughter when her doctor told her there was nothing they could do to help her. It was just the three of us. “I don’t want to tell you this,” her doctor said. She might as well have been speaking in an alien tongue, not foreign as in another country, but alien as from another planet. As soon as he left the room, I dismissed everything she said. I knew my girl was going to get well. I simply knew she would live. That was living in denial and understandable, but it wasn’t living in the presence of reality. Three weeks later, my daughter died. She was surrounded by people who loved her. We sang to her.
Living in the presence of reality is, among other things, accepting that we all die, that all things which can arise, will pass away.
I don’t want to drift into cliché, but it isn’t so much a loss as it was a gift to have had her in my life. Yes, I still weep when I think about her dying. I weep when I think about her as a two-year-old balking in front of the entrance of Carlsbad Caverns. She dug in her heels and said, “No, no, no. Don’t want to go in cave.” So, I carried her the whole way. But carrying her was a gift. Just having her love me was a gift. And I have had so many gifts.
Of course, I can’t carry that attitude all of the time. I am human. But I’m claiming it as my point of view, at least for the moment.
How can poetry help? It helps me. That’s all I can say. Every time I get to know a poem, and getting to know a poem means reading it over and over until something happens. That doesn’t happen with just any poem, but there are moments when a poem can transport you into a realm of clarity. It’s that clarity which helps us to endure. Not just endure, but thrive with a certain style that makes living your life beautiful. That and a good cup of coffee.
About Brady Peterson
Brady Peterson lives near Belton, Texas, where he worked building houses for much of the past thirty years or teaching rhetoric and literature at a local university. He once worked a forklift in a lumber yard in east Austin, tried to teach eighth graders the importance of using language, worked briefly as a technical writer, and helped raise five daughters. He has run one marathon, fought in one karate tournament, climbed one mountain, failed to make the UT baseball team as a walk-on, and took tango lessons with his wife. He is the author of Dust, Between Stations, From an Upstairs Window, García Lorca is Somewhere in Produce and At the Edge of Town.
Resources:
Brady Peterson website
Dust by Brady Peterson
Between Stations by Brady Peterson
From an Upstairs Window by Brady Peterson
García Lorca is Somewhere in Produce by Brady Peterson
At the Edge of Town by Brady Peterson
Apr 10, 2023 | Community, Family, Grief
My own loss and the deep grief that accompanies it brought about profound change in the way I experience creativity. Deep loss breaks you down in a way that also cracks you open. There is loss of control and surrender. Tears and sorrow pour out, but light also pours in. I learned to listen to my voice in whispers — my intuition — instead of dismissing it. Instead of trying to craft something that made sense, I listened to thoughts and wrote down what came, almost like transcribing. Then I could always go back and shape things. Writing from a place of intuition and deep vulnerability helped in my healing, and I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that it resonated with others.
I have lost count of how many times poetry has been a life raft for me. Poems can help us to know we are not alone. They can access emotional places that ordinary conversation does not. I believe that the purpose of art is to whisper truths to each other in the dark. There is an intimacy and magic in reading words on a page that move you, that speak to you. That is the gift a poet is giving us with her/his/their careful attention—to let you know you are not alone in the dark.
About Beth Wood
Beth Wood is a modern-day troubadour, poet, and believer in the power of word and song. Beth has been writing, performing, and creating for twenty-five years. In addition to releasing fifteen albums, Beth has released three books of poetry, Kazoo Symphonies, Ladder to the Light (2019 finalist for the Oregon Book Award Stafford/Hall award for poetry and 2019 Winner of the Oregon Book Award Readers’ Choice Award) and Believe the Bird (Winner of the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award). She has been recognized by the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award, The Sisters Folk Festival Dave Carter Memorial Songwriting Award, the Billboard World Song Contest, The Oregon Book Awards, and many more. Beth lives in Sisters, Oregon, with her rescue dog Hannah and is continuously writing and rewriting her artist’s manifesto.
Resources:
Beth Wood website
Kazoo Symphonies, by Beth Wood
Ladder to the Light by Beth Wood, 2019 finalist for the Oregon Book Award Stafford/Hall award for poetry and 2019 Winner of the Oregon Book Award Readers’ Choice Award
Believe the Bird by Beth Wood, Winner of the San Francisco Book Festival Poetry Award
Beth Wood’s photo was taken by Heaven McArthur
Read other acclaimed poets reflections on grief
