#poetry – Ladies of Mystery

It’s an old phrase: priming the pump. Back in the 19^th century, it meant pouring liquid into a pump to expel the air and make it work. Even now, an internet search will tell us that before any centrifugal pump can be operated, it must be primed. Priming is the process of replacing air in the intake lines and portions of the pump with water.

But our subject is books and writing. Priming the pump also means encouraging the growth or action of something. In this case, my work-in-progress.

It’s a historical novel. I have a large pile of words that will eventually become a coherent first draft. Where the hell I’m going? How am I going to get there? Will it make any sense? It probably will, to me. Will anyone else want to read it?

Thus I prime the pump. I’ve been seeking inspiration in one of my research books, taking lots of notes. I’m paying attention to the timeline of actual events, in order to integrate my fictional characters into the crowded parade of real people who were doing things in my setting in 1878 and 1879. As I do this, I write notes to myself, usually set apart in brackets, outlining things I want my protagonist to do. Or learn.

There’s a lot going on, but it’s impossible—and improbable—for me to place her physically at all the significant events, much as I would like her to be an eyewitness. I must pick and choose the most dramatic scenes and figure out a logical reason for her to be there. The rest, she’ll have to learn from others. Besides, the book already looks like it will be long. Some events need to be mentioned in passing rather than detail.

So, reading a book, in this case, a research book. Or another book. Like this one. Years ago, I was going through a bad patch that soured me on life and left me feeling perpetually grim, grumpy, and depressed. A friend tossed me a lifeline, a book. It’s Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, by Sarah Ban Breathnach.

I’m not one for touchy-feely, self-help books. Over the years, I’ve bought a few, gotten little from them, and quickly donated them, passing them on to other readers. But Simple Abundance spoke to me at a time when I needed it. It’s a collection of essays, one for each day of the year, looking at things like joy, gratitude, beauty, and so forth. I read one essay every morning. I’m always surprised and gratified when the essay for a particular day speaks to something that’s going on in my life. Such as the day my father died. That essay was exactly what I needed at the time.

One of the best takeaways is the gratitude journal. Each evening, I jot down three or more things that I’m grateful for—even if it just clean sheets on my bed, a quiet day at home, and especially a productive day of writing. I find that keeping the gratitude journal has changed the way I look at life. That helps immeasurably with my writing.

Simple Abundance also introduced me to the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. On a date at the end of the year, the author quotes Cavafy’s poem Ithaka. During my trip to Greece in October 2023, my group visited the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, constructed in the late fourth century BCE. It’s considered the most perfect ancient Greet theatre with regard to acoustics and aesthetics. It is still used for the performances of ancient plays.

Our tour guide demonstrated the acoustics at Epidaurus by standing in the middle and reading a poem—Cavafy’s Ithaka. As we enter the new year, I leave you a few lines from the poem [translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, C. P. Cavafy/Collected Poems, Princeton University Press, 1992.]

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

. . . .

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years . . .

May your voyage this year be long, full of adventure and discovery. And productive!

For many years the poetry books I collected, starting in my teens, sat on our bookshelves untouched. I have no idea why I stopped reading poetry, but I did.

Then, one cold and rainy afternoon last month, I made myself a cup of tea and after pulling several books off a shelf, curled up on the loveseat in front of the fire and began to flip through the pages. I intended to find poems of gratitude to be used for this blog, but I got off track, delighting in rediscovering poems I had loved and admired regardless of topic.

In high school, I was introduced to the Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelly, Byron, and Blake; whose works beckoned me to understand the world through nature, imagination, revolution and those marginalized in society. I memorized stanzas that I can still recite because they so filled my heart.

Later, still in my teens, I was drawn to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a lyric poem that presents deep feelings and emotions on subjects such as life, death, love, and religion. Did it help clarify or shape my own identity? Probably not, as my own experiences and travels unfolded in their own unique way, but at the time, I was entranced by it.

As an English major in college, I read and discussed the works, both in and out of the classroom, of contemporary poets like John Barth, who was in residence at my university; Laurence Ferlinghetti; Karl Shapiro; Leonard Cohen; and Wallace Stevens, who, in 1955, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems. To me, his poems resonate like verbal music and his perfect control of language evokes a myriad of complex feelings.

Throughout my college years and beyond, I discovered, read, and admired the works of many more poets, Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot among those, but also the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.

My father, who was born in 1919, graduated college and then went to serve our country during World War II. One of George Patton’s scouts, he received two bronze stars. He was a fierce man: in his morals, ethics, and values; his love for his family and for his country. Towards the end, his fierceness continued as he battled serious health issues that never seemed to daunt or derail him from living the remainder of his life to the fullest.

The eldest of his four children, I was the first to read a eulogy at his funeral. I never could have expressed what I knew of my father’s spirit better than Thomas’ poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night”, written for his dying father in 1947, the year I was born.

So, I guess this blog really is about both poetry and gratitude. Gratitude that I had a family that encouraged education, an education that exposed me to poetry, and a family that embodied and still does today, the meaning and actions of love.