TIME, PATIENCE AND BEAUTY

I will never forget the spring evening I stood on a west-end Toronto sidewalk with writer Anne Michaels. We had just finished an informal gathering of poets from a writer’s workshop she taught at the University of Toronto in early 1991. Her face aglow with a serene and knowing expression in the waning light, she listened intently while I told her that the magazine work I’d been doing left little space for creative writing.

 At that time, she was thick in her first novel, Fugitive Pieces, carving out her own creative space by teaching two back-to-back courses at the university, leaving the rest of the week for writing. Her comments during the class, always perceptive and unhurried, gave me the impression she had forged a different relationship with time than the rest of us. She urged us to arrange our days so we’d have several undisturbed hours to write.  Trained as a journalist to produce finished pieces on a deadline, I was surprised to learn she sometimes took years to complete a poem.

Her steady and sure way of writing paid off. When Fugitive Pieces was published five years later, it won several prestigious awards, among them The Orange Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel award and the Guardian Fiction Award. The book sold a million copies across twenty-seven countries, including 200,000 in Canada, and was made into an acclaimed film.

This spring, fourteen years after the release of Fugitive Pieces, I learned that Michaels had just completed another novel. About to embark on a promotion tour through Canada, the U.S., England and Europe for The Winter Vault, she told a Toronto Life interviewer that the book was written mostly from 1 to 5 a.m. when her children were asleep. “Writing at night you have a type of freedom,” she noted. When I read this, I pictured her at work in the dark, one lamp illuminating the page in front of her where words emerged in a slow but constant stream until the black veils of night lifted.

Back in 1991 in west-end Toronto, having listened to my editing work woes, Michaels looked at me calmly, then said, “Leave it for a year. After that time, you won’t want to go back.”

As it turned out, the magazine I was working for folded a year and a half later, in the same month my fiancé was diagnosed with a large inoperable tumor at the base of his spine. In between trips to the hospital and doctor’s offices in Toronto and in New York during a radical bone marrow treatment, I began writing more frequently in my journal, which became a container for turbulent thoughts and feelings about Greg’s deteriorating condition. Eventually, poems started emerging from this writing, which took on a life of their own after his death nine months later. Some of these were long narratives that stretched over several years of writing. During bouts of impatience, I harkened back to Anne Michael’s example during this time, and also took comfort in the experience of other writers, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, who started his masterpiece the Duino Elegies in 1912 and completed it in 1922, five years before his death. “Out of writing and rewriting beauty is born,” said Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver, who often takes forty to fifty drafts to complete a poem. Other poets take a hundred. 

I began to see I was engaged in a new relationship with time. Instead of being its hostage as I had for most of my life, with production and deadlines driving my work, I relaxed into the mysterious deeper rhythms of the writing, taking my direction from an inner movement that had little to do with outer dictates. The poems formed according to my readiness and maturation, a deeper order I followed, albeit by trial and error, for many years until they were complete.

But this was not all. I began to sense this inner movement was connected to something that transcended conscious knowledge and indeed, not only informed the timetable of the book, but all aspects of its creation. It seemed part of a hidden harmony that artists and writers have known about for centuries but rarely speak about, except obliquely–the mystery of creating from the deeper sources.

A few months after I completed the last poem about my fiancé’s illness and death, four years after the others, Even the Slightest Touch Thunders on My Skin was accepted for publication by Ontario publisher Black Moss Press. There was good reason for the wait. I moved to Salt Spring Island, B.C., met my new partner and finally understood what the experience had to teach me:

SILENCE GATHERING IN BLUE AIR

What the heart remembers after years of absence:

a certain look in an old photo,

eyes brimming with dare and longing,

or the deep undercurrents of his voice

months later on a phone message never erased,

or mid-day on Palm Sunday along College Street

hand-in-hand on a crowded sidewalk after the second chemo,

but what of this morning light in the long grass,

the soft trill of swallows, the gleam in the dark pond,

a solitary dragonfly stalking the garden

and what of the nights

silence gathering in blue air

a faint mist over the ride of trees,

cinders glowing in the dark room.

It’s taken eight years to learn

that death is not a failure

nor is it a bad dream we enter

when this world is lost to us.

We return to the beginning again,

where nothing matters but the heart

that continues its wild beat

searching for the skull of its birth,

wanting nothing but light.

(published in WordWorks, 2009)