“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to
become what they are capable of being.”
Goethe
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WRITERS' FRIENDSHIPS Edited and compiled by Robert Sward "What You Need to Know..."
by Margery Snyder
Poetry and personal relationships are irretrievably linked in my experience--
my life partner and consort of 17 years is a poet, or rather a "spoken word
artist," and the making of poems and songs and monologues is very much present in
our daily life together. But the myriad and deep complications of poetry
embedded in a domestic relationship, a pair of writers as mates, are far
beyond the scope of this series, so I'd like to tell the story of another of
my particular friendships with poets.
Donna M. Lane and I met because one of my coworkers at my dreary day job was
Dorothy, her domestic partner. At the time I was engaged in an effort to
keep my "drudge" life at work separate from my "real" life outside the
office as a poet and social being--but Dorothy said, "You're both writers, you
should meet," and after about a year, we did. Our writing was the reason for
our acquaintance and sharing the experiences of a writing life became the
foundation of our friendship.
Poetry is the most personal of arts. Poets' friendships are both
professional, when we publish each other or lend a critical eye to each
other's work, and personal, because the poems, whether explicitly
autobiographical or presumed fictive or even the most abstract of imaginary
worlds, are so revealing of our private selves.
Sometimes the writerly nature of my friendship with Donna was evident in our
private reading sessions, in which we read new poems or works in progress
around the dinner table in an informal, friendly sort of workshop. We
learned each other's voices in listening to these readings and soon could
notice whenever there was an inflection in the reading not apparent on the
page, or a seeming intention in the written poem not reflected in the spoken
words. I could rely on Donna to identify an inauthentic or awkward line in
one of my poems and she learned to trust me to point out the places where her
intention slackened or got sidetracked--but we never crossed the line between
this kind of informed response and actually editing each other's writing.
Taking out the blue pencil would have transformed our relationship into one
of work, and without speaking about it we chose to stay in the realm of
friendship and limit our collaboration to intimate listening. These
things--attentive understanding, honest reaction without malice, an educated
appreciation of the other's talents--are the gifts poets can give to their
poet-friends.
Other times the intertwining of poetry in our relationship was revealed in
our tacit agreement NOT to talk about our own work or the poems of other
poets we knew--simply to prepare a meal, or go for a walk, or play a game of
Scrabble, or gossip and talk about nothing, giving our writer's minds a quiet
interlude for invisible work. Poets need their friends most when they are
not actually writing poems. It's a relief then to be with someone who is
sensitive to your fear that inspiration will not return, a friend who will
understand if you need to stop whatever you're doing and write something that
has come to you, right now.
When we were both interested in seeing our poems published, we commiserated
about the grinding submission process. I realized that Donna just couldn't
tolerate the emotional ups and downs of acceptance and rejection and still keep
her work in circulation. So I volunteered to take over the secretarial
duties of submitting her work for a time, because I believed her poems were
worthy of publication. She gave me a sheaf of poem copies and a roll of
stamps, and I began sending her work out to the same publications where I was
submitting mine. When her poems were returned with rejections, I simply
turned around and submitted them somewhere else, saying nothing to her until I
got an acceptance. Insulating her from the process of getting her poems
published was a unique gift I could give to Donna. Other poet-friends would
never have consented to surrender their poems to my postal ministrations,
nor would I want someone else to do this for me--but it's an emblem of
poet-friendship.
The closest conjunction of our poetry and our friendship came in this, the
poem I wrote for Donna in 1992. It's quite personal, based on the facts of
our shared experience, but it's also an invocation addressed to all the
poets I know:
at the time she was diagnosed
You are a bundle of clarity
Your poet-voice comes across a room
Scourge of our species
Limbs falling away, paring down
You must tease the true thread
Appeared in GREEN FUSE (Santa Rosa), No. 24, Spring 1997
Collected in THE GODS, THEIR FEATHERS (San Francisco: Blue Beetle Press,
1992)
BIO NOTE:
Margery Snyder is a poet, flute-player and accidental photographer who
pronounces her first name with a hard 'g'. She was born in Washtucna,
Washington, a small town amid the dry wheatlands in the downwind shadow of
the Hanford Atomic Reservation, grew up in southern California, studied
literature in Santa Barbara, Boston and Chicago, and began to write and perform
poetry only after she settled in San Francisco in 1985. She is the author
of LOVING ARGUMENT (Viridiana: SF, 1991), THE GODS, THEIR FEATHERS (Blue
Beetle Press: SF, 1993), THE SECRET HUMMING (Mel Thompson Publishing: SF,
1994), and EARTHLY MAGIC (Deep Forest Press:
SF, 2001) and works on the Internet as Poetry Guide at About
(http://poetry.about.com/), in partnership with Bob Holman of UNITED STATES
OF POETRY fame.
Her work lives on the Net at PERIHELION
(http://www.webdelsol.com/Perihelion/snyderpoetry.htm), THE ASTROPHYSICIST'S
TANGO PARTNER SPEAKS (http://www.heelstone.com/margery.htm, where three of
her poems are paired with photographs by Michael Monteleone), and in BEEHIVE's
New York/San Francisco collection
(http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/23arc.html).
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Perihelion
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