Nic Sebastian reading my poem “Eating the Heart First” at Whale Sound. (First published by Eclectica Magazine)
I’m so honored.
Category Archives: Death
It is never enough, is it?
Why do I carry some nebulous shame for things I have or have not done in my life? I wish I could have a ‘no apologies’ attitude and continue brushing off the backhanded compliments or outright snubs. I am glad in who I am and enjoy the life I have created with my family. I am growing as an artist and believe in my work. I am moving forward in the process of discovery that writing offers—that life offers. But recently something was said to me that made me waver oh so slightly in those beliefs. I am writing this entry to clarify my perspective for myself and to make a statement to those others who judge me.
I am in recovery. I am recovering from abuse, breakdowns and raw grief. I have been open about my history. I have engaged in this recovery with all of my being for the sake of my children and loved ones. I know I am cherished. I cherish myself. I cherish this time I have which almost slipped from me due to illness, misdiagnosis of that illness, and the devastation of self that was the result of both.
I wondered for years about the life I could have lived if I did not have bipolar disease–if I had not fallen apart those so many times. I do not allow myself to wonder what my life would have been like without Adam. I do remind myself that at the time others were pressuring me to not have a child at such a young age. His life was a grace in mine. I learned more about love, compassion and humility through Adam’s life than I ever could have if he had not been.
I embrace the life I am living. I realize I am where I need to be to do what I desire—which is to raise my daughter to the best of my ability, do meaningful work in the world and honor the loving relationships in my life.
Since I have lived in relative stability for several years, I have come to be able to pursue the writing which brings me great joy. I took the first steps on this path in 2004 after Adam died. In dealing with my grief, writing offered a path out. Through the writing process, the creative process, I am accessing life and myself in deeper ways. I am looking within and without and creating art through myself. That activity is essential to my recovery and my peace. That I have achieved some success is uplifting beyond words, but I will try:
Each success, no matter how small, in the practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark.
I believed what was believed about me for too long rather than believing myself. But I won’t hold those negative beliefs any longer, not even a shred. My ambition is true and I am on fire with it. I set myself on the path and I do not allow much to divert me from it—even gross insults and arrogant snubs.
No, I don’t have a chip on my shoulder but I do recognize when I am being belittled and it will not go unanswered.
An Excerpt
Here is a very brief excerpt from my creative nonfiction piece, Nacona, about my horse by that name, which was a gift to me from my parents when I was a teenager. I revised the piece tonight and submitted it to a magazine that has previously published my poetry. I’m hoping they will take this piece as well.
…The drainage ditch is wide with water. Nacona heaves over it because I ask her to. We slide three feet in the mud. Nacona’s back legs give out and she rolls me off. My feet dangle out of the stirrups and I rise unbroken but soaking with mud. A. is riding the Thoroughbred gelding, Lucky, and she turns back to laugh at me. I burn with humiliation. I scoop a patty of mud with both hands and hurl it at her. Lucky half-rears and breaks into a sideways gallop. A. stops Lucky and hops off his back. She trudges through the field wildly threatening me. I cup another whopping pound of mud and throw it smack dab in her face. Her mouth is open blurting a curse and now she’s choking out black mud. Her choking turns to laughter and she fills her hands with a solid mud bomb. It hits me in the right boob. That’s it. Our mud fight’s a free-for-all…
Six Months In
So far in 2010–six months in–I have had nine poems published and three have been accepted and will soon appear in magazines. I am thrilled to bits about this. I was updating my C.V. with the new acceptances and noted that 49 pieces of my creative writing have been (or will be) published. Most of them have been published since 2004.
In 2004, my son died.
When Adam died, I promised myself that I would live my life as a writer; that I would write purposefully and professionally for the rest of my life, God-willing. I have lived the writing life each day since. I embrace my role as writer, along with my roles as wife and mother, proudly and with serious intent. I always start out my “bio” with the phrase:
Clare is a poet/mother/wife…whatever.
I am these things at my very center. I move outwardly from ‘that place’ in my heart—
I can also share that I have bipolar disease. I have struggled for most of my adult life with its symptoms. I have had serious breakdowns and lost so much but I have been very blessed to have a doctor who saved me with careful attention and astute clinical sense which he used in my treatment.
I have been in recovery since 2000. That means I am moving forward but the disease never leaves. It is always at my back. It is deadly–but thankfully I have been able to care for myself and my family somewhat steadily for a long period. I learned the hard way how to sense the oncoming symptoms. I have the strong support of family, friends and a treatment team of doctors.
I am in recovery.
I am recovering.
I am.
If you would like to read the poems that have been published on the Internet so far in 2010 please click the links below.
“White Bull, Black Road” Scythe, Vol. II, 2010
“The Woman You Married” Scythe, Vol. II, 2010
“Little Poem at Pink Moon” Scythe, Vol. II, 2010
“Memento Mori” THE RED ROOM: Writings from Press 1, anthology, 2010
“Mute” Blue Fifth Review, blue collection 1, anthology series, 2010
“Winter Brought Out All the Knives” Melusine, 2.2 Spring/Summer 2010
“Birthing” Avatar Review, Issue 12, Summer 2010
“Make a New Garden” Avatar Review, Issue 12, Summer 2010
“The Never That Was” Avatar Review, Issue 12, Summer 2010
“Father Almost Drowning” Poets & Artists, forthcoming 2010
“Open Me with a Fire of Words” Wild Goose Poetry Review forthcoming 2010
“Premature” Literary Mama, forthcoming 2010
I have a page in this art project.
Haiti
My prayers and thoughts for healing the suffering of your people go out to you…I have and will continue to give what I can.
My prayers, too, are for all who are suffering in mind and body.
Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 on behalf of the American Red Cross. — Text YELE to 501501 to donate $5 on behalf of The Yele Haiti Foundation.
Close to the truth, but not
I don’t usually post poems on this blog, but this poem was previously published in an online journal that unfortunately doesn’t exist any longer.
SCATTERING ASHES INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO
Storm-light cracks the rain-whipped windshield.
We are numbed by the beat of the blades & grief.
Your childhood was a shattered peace; memories cut on broken hearts.
When your father left, life derailed into a crushing wreck.
Strangers you called “uncle” streamed after the bars closed.
You soothed yourself with lies. You showed her mercy, love.
Your mother wanted to be drunk when she died. She reeked of urine.
You gave her vodka on ice. It kissed her like morphine.
Your inheritance is a collection of rings; none made of gold.
She bequeathed mysteries for your mourning.
In slashing rain, you seek a point on the storm-dark horizon to take you
into a sweet memory of her, but she is obscure, inscrutable.
You offer ashes to the thunder & wind.
That death is our singular future gives you peace.
Assured the moon will still pull these gulf waves
even when no one loved is left living.
(First appeared in Southern Hum, Issue 3, March 2006)
Living Truer To My Self
OFFICIAL BLOG RENEWAL POST002-1015
In 2004 the death of my beloved child prompted me to look deeply at my life and how I could live truer to my self from the point of Adam’s death onward. What meant the most to me beyond my own and my family’s health and well-being was to be the writer I was born to be. I dedicated to Adam my pursuit of writing with impassioned effort. I began to write daily, reverently and passionately. My commitment to write everyday was charged with the notion of being my true self, doing rather than thinking or talking about being a writer.
I approached my ambitions with professionalism and perseverance. In the past I worked in sales and marketing, and in public relations. I thought to bring these skills to my writing career as I sent my work to potential publishers. When I went to “poetry socials” I carried a leather portfolio (nerd-alert) which contained my poems. I sought out other writers on the local scene and made a few tight connections. I pressed forward to create opportunities for myself to share my work publicly in many forums. The embrace of my writer-self was wholehearted.
When writing, my creative energy was manic, but reigned in and tempered by my determination to make a successful go at creating a body of publishable work, as well. I produced mass quantities of poems, half-eaten scraps and some whole, worthy efforts. Many pieces are laughably juvenile but I persisted and did not perceive these efforts as failures. I held the belief and still do that I am learning a skill and improvement is desired and necessary. I truly believe I will get better and better with deep sustained effort.
As much as a desire to develop professionally is the motivation to deepen as a human being that drives me to write. I am carving a path outwardly and going deeper into myself, which is the true reward of being an artist. Artistic growth is highly desired. As I live superficially I often disconnect from my self and do not acknowledge the inner worlds. Writing out my life (in quasi-confessional poems) has given me the tools to cut through the dross and release the voice within. I defy labels which would classify what type of poetry I write. I write free verse, but some forms. I firmly believe that all of my writing is experiment, but not necessarily experimental.
In the five years that have passed since I began on the path of living a writing life, I have had remarkable experiences and successes, and have been blessed with rewarding and nurturing friendships with likeminded writers. I am on a path and I do not allow much of anything to divert me from it. I have chosen to step off for a time here and there but the groove is well worn. I’ve heard it said that if a writer is not writing, they are writing in their head. It could be true, but I hold myself to the principle that if I am not writing down what’s in my head, I am not writing.
Nice to meet ya, again.
OFFICIAL BLOG RENEWAL POST001-1014
Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. And I have been in dark, metaphorically dark and literally extinguished places. I’ve been around fires a blazin’ too and they can be happy places!
Ah ha, yes. Well.
I am a poet/mother/wife living with bipolar disease. I have been blessed with clarity and stability in my medical situation for a few years with the effort put in by my strong team of caregivers medically, in the healing arts, and through the support of loving family members who have stood by me. I had recurring traumas and “breakdowns” in my life which robbed me of many things. I was unhappy and clinically sick for most of the 1990s.
I’m gaining back my life, which could have been lost, had I succumbed to the disease and died. (And yes Bipolar kills. Look up the suicide rates of bipolar people, people!) I have been gaining back my sense of self and finding healing through writing. There’s a link between mental illness and creativity. My interest would be: poets who have bipolar disorder. This is a hot topic and I expect to weigh in on it from time to time.
I’ve always been a writer, writing up to this very sentence, poems, plots, plays and peddling pure phiction.
I am a lifelong resident of Louisiana, and a graduate of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now called University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I majored in English and minored in Philosophy—the perfect match of disciplines for a budding poet. I published a few poems in college, got married, and only sporadically wrote for a few years.
When I feel the aura of a poem coming on to me so clearly, I am moved by words yet forming, as if words could ride air and pass through my skull, form the syllables in my mind and mouth, and I get up from whatever I was doing and write something. Writers write. Thinkers think. Thoughts fly away until you put the thought-words on a piece of paper or enter them into a computer—then you are a writer, for having written it. Congratulations!
Pre-Poems/Free-Writes— the mystique of this airwave/brainwave/of what was working in my subconscious/some feathery slip of a thing flits from its dark hiding place and dawns in the mind.
I was a lazy writer, in the sense that I did not demand it of my self. I wanted to learn how to do it my way. Not in a conventional class room. I wanted to be in my environs living and drawing my poems from the right here that I am living. The within: my domestic life, sex life, body life, mind’s life, and my natural life as a creature on this planet with other creatures, domesticated and not.
I am in the pursuit of the image. It is my starting point in all writing I do. What is the image? Observation is the key. I am also an amateur photographer, so for me it is usually a visual stimulus. A description must encompass, not describe too much but rather show in deft and artful language the essence, the charm of it.
Is it startling? Is it sustainable? What I mean is does it having lasting qualities to live on in the poem if we construct an environment for it to thrive? Will its meaning inspire other meanings which may or may not conflict with the intended meaning. Does this matter? If it is what it is and you want that image/those words, then you choose. Poetry is making choices. Words-connections-shaping-breaking-exploding and putting the poem back together, or not– are the choices of the artist. Read poetry, get inspired, and learn to make choices. Major choices are definitive; some choices allow a little wiggle.
That’s what it is about.
I am building around a central image, not always, but habitually. Images come from things and we get to know things through our senses, sight, smell, taste, hear and touch, so images come from the basic 5 senses—this is basic knowledge of what is concrete and what it abstract in the study of poetry but it is crucial because by utilizing these tools you can transform, imagine, ignite passionate responses, and through words you can bloodlessly crush people in a way they like to or would rather not like to be crushed.
So when I return I will speak of why I am in pursuit of the image as it is stated at the top of the blog.
I welcome comments for friendly and heartily espoused discussions. What I have written here is brief and leaves many questions to me but I wanted to holdback so questions could be put to me and any other readers for discussion.
The Next Steps
…will be to review and revise the two manuscripts…get back on the writing track…move forward after two surgeries and other health issues…cope with a great loss (a loved one) …play guitar…teach self not to worry so much…be open to new words…
