A Poet’s Nanaimo

Poet Billy Collins, when discovering William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” found it to have “immediate appeal.” Billy’s essay, “Into the Deep Heart’s Core,” was the first one I read in Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (Penguin Books, 2017). I’m a fan of Billy Collins and his poetry and wanted to find out what inspires him.

As it turns out, Billy finds pleasure in memorizing a poem. He writes: “When you internalize a poem, it becomes something inside of you. You’re able to walk around with it. It becomes a companion.”

Wherever he is, Yeats hears “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” even when he’s on “the roadway, or on the pavements grey.” The final line of the poem is: “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Collins interpreted that as: “I want to go somewhere better than where I am.”

Billy found that when having an MRI some years ago, he opted not for the music which might have been “Neil Diamond classics or something” but opted to recite to himself “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” He took different approaches to reciting it such as saying just the rhyming words or saying every other line. By the time the MRI was over, he was in the process of saying it backward. “And the poem – like a good companion – had saved me from really freaking out.”

Rather than “the pavements grey,” one can hear “the call of a safe, peaceful place, especially while under duress,” Billy suggests: while lying in the MRI, in jail for the night, or while stuck on an elevator. “Once you’ve installed the poem in your memory, it’s there […]

Our older cat, Squeaker, is in his new, insulated hut outside. He can keep warm and dry as well as keep an eye on what’s going on in the neighbourhood. Inside our house, it’s cozy and warm on a day that’s overcast, heavy with the possibility of more rain. Since the women’s writing circles are over until the new year, I’ve been appreciating the warmth from the words and stories left behind.
At one of the fall afternoon Writing Life circles, it was affirming to write “why I write” as the first writing practice we did.

Lately I’m realizing that I’m writing to make sense of a life lived. That afternoon in the writing circle, I wrote: “I write to feel the pen moving across the page, to taste life twice, to reflect on the day, to wonder in words, to record possibilities, to ask questions, to listen to myself, to write a life and save a life. I write to commune with myself, to connect, to tap into my own wise self, to express gratitude, to make lists, to immerse myself in the process.”

As Nanaimo writer Carol Matthews told me recently: “I don’t understand what I’m thinking or feeling until I’ve written it.” I can definitely relate and have been writing in journals for decades. That’s a daily practice and in those journals can be the seeds for poems, personal essays, this blog.

When I saw Carol recently she quoted from the last lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art”:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

For those of who explore what we’re […]

I’m very grateful I live in a part of the world that has four seasons. During the grey days of winter, I feel like nesting and being quiet (not “getting ready for Christmas”) and while winter stretches on into the new year, I long for the first signs of spring. The rhododendrons in our front garden come out at various times and just like the seasons each year, they don’t last. There are more flowers to appear in summer though and they’re still making an appearance such as the butterfly bush, Rose of Sharon, pink lilies and lavatera.

Summer, or the heat of it, takes up so much space. It’s like another person in the room. We’ve had a “heat wave”on Vancouver Island and we’re fortunate to be close to the ocean, just a short drive away. And we’re experiencing very hazy skies with an orange sun at sunset due to the wild fires on the mainland of British Columbia. The full moon was an orange ball as well.

As of August 2nd, we’ve entered the season of Lammas, the fall quarter of the year on the Celtic calendar. While we still call it summer, shorter days are not too far off. My We’Moon calendar suggests making a corn dolly and hiding seeds in the folds of her dress, “to be held by the Goddess through the coming dark time. These may be literal seeds of herbs, vegetables, flowers – or the seeds of ideas, dreams, hopes, desire for healing. We get to feel our original earth-based natures as we unearth old rituals for protection from the hard times. These times are now upon us. May we be strong and resilient for what is to come.”

It […]

The New Moon is a good time to come up with an intent for the next lunar cycle. (The moon was dark on Monday and now there’s a sliver in the sky.) On Sunday a small piece in the collage I did, prompted my intent: “At a sale of the unredeemed what will I remember, take back, reclaim, renew?”

An intent usually isn’t in the form of a question, but there you go. The small collage bit was a reproduction of a very old ad for an auction of unredeemed items from a pawn shop. “Sale of the unredeemed” really captured my interest. Just the sound of it created a poem, or at least the title of one. “Redeemed” is a term I would have heard in my early days going to church with my grandmother but right now, I’m thinking about taking back what I may have given up or forgotten.

In the Mary Oliver poem I referred to in my last blog entitled “Living the Questions,” she says: “And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away / from wherever you are, to look for your soul?”

Thomas Moore said something in his book, Care of the Soul, that to me connects with that sale of the unredeemed: “Observance of the soul can be deceptively simple. You take back what has been disowned. You work with what is, rather than with what you wish were there.”

I came across the quote in The Wisdom of the Body by Christine Valters Paintner, a book I’ve been reading as part of my morning practice. It feels to me as if the “unredeemed” may be the gifts we haven’t been acknowledging and if we don’t, they […]