Poetry

As I write this, I am eating breakfast and hoping it will take only another hour to write this post and get the car packed, the garbage tossed, the dishwasher emptied and reloaded...etc, so I can head out to pick up Robin and point the car north to Ellison Bay and The Clearing for Poetry Camp. (We'll drop Jed, who's been here for two weeks at the UW Memorial Union to catch the bus to O'Hare.)

But when the message is posted, tomorrow, I will be trying to write poems, along with our Poetry Camp participants. Robin and I do the exercises--in fact the last poems I wrote, none of them worth even revising, were last year's exercises. I haven't written poetry in a year; haven't even wanted to.

The last good poems I wrote, collected in a manuscript, "Limited Warranty," have spent the past year or more trying to get published, to no avail. One or two have made it into journals, but the rest just collect rejections--one in the past week from a press that specifically wanted poems about illness. It's been, to say the least, discouraging.

I have an idea of why no one wants to publish these poems, most of which I wrote in a rush in the months after I learned that my cancer spread. People's reactions to any writing--fiction, nonfiction, poetry--is based largely on their ability or desire to identify with the subject, or with a character. For example, a woman who has chosen to stay with her husband rather than pursue a true(r) love may be blown away by the currently popular novel, Loving Frank. Mamie, Frank Lloyd Wright's second wife and the protagonist of the novel, represents the life not chosen--wild, romantic, risky.... A reader who hasn't had an affair, or hasn't considered leaving her husband and children in pursuit of true love, may find the novel a good read, but nothing special.

And most people really resist identifying with someone who's destined to die, and soon. No one wants to confront their own mortality, in poetry or anyplace else. So some editors tell me they find my poems "very moving" and "fine writing" -- but they're not interested in publishing what they, or their readers, may perceive as a downer. (And one manuscript screener, very young by the look of her handwriting and the tenor of her comment, wrote "Thank you for giving poetic voice to your experience," which I have a hard time accepting as anything other than thinly-veiled disdain .)

So, since my subject is often death, and what everyone from Oprah to journal editors and poetry contest judges prefer is recovery, I feel as though writing and sending out poems is a colossal waste of time. Better to write the blog, which is there for the people who know me, and are therefore interested, or who find their way to the writing through the magic of the internet.

Where would I be without cyberspace?

And now, I'd better get to the dishwasher!

Busy Days....

....so busy, in fact, that the week has gone by without my thinking very much about the blog, or what to write today! I've been really focused on the book manuscript, Facing Fear, trying to tie up the final revisions before I leave next Sunday for a week in Door County. Every day, I go through a chapter, trying to make the format uniform and--most tedious--converting the cryptic footnotes into some sort of coherent listing of sources that will appear at the end of the book. I've assigned myself a chapter a day, and today I finished the next-to-last piece. All that's left is the epilogue, the page of guidelines for confronting fear and anxiety (self-help condensed, is the way I think of that page), and the acknowledgments. And then printing out about 250 pages. Maybe I can do all that tomorrow afternoon; maybe it'll slop over to Wednesday. At any rate, I think I will be ready to take the manuscript to Kinko's on Thursday. And then I can turn my attention to getting ready for the poetry class (we call it Poetry Camp) that Robin Chapman and I teach at The Clearing in Door County.

What else have I been doing? Jed arrived Monday evening (a week ago), and Nazgol, his significant other, flew in from LA on Thursday night and left this afternoon. So I've been playing with them in the afternoons and evenings. Fortunately, I guess, the chemo I got on Thursday didn't include oxalyplatin, so I bounced back quickly, and was pretty much fine by Friday. We went walking in the UW Arboretum to see the glorious crab apples and lilacs, and on Satrurdy drove all over southwest Wisconsin, it seemed, on back roads--taking the Merrimac Ferry (free, cable-pulled across the Wisconsin River, one of my favorite parts of the state) to go to the International Crane Foundation and a nearby, sort of, natural area, before heading to a fine potluck celebration of a friend's 60th birthday. Yesterday, I went to a graduation party for Pasha Sternberg, who immigrated with his family from the USSR as a 5-year-old seventeen years ago. Amazing to see kids grow into fine young people, especially since I don't feel any older than I did in 1991.

And I've been busy planning trips for the summer-- to DC for fireworks on the 4th of July, and up to the Boundary Waters in August with both my sons and their girlfriends, a trip that I will combine with participation (I hope!) in a Dragon Boat regatta in Superior, Wisconsin. I've signed on with TeamSurvivor, a group of women cancer survivors who do all sorts of exercise, for their paddling sessions on Wednesday evenings. Can't wait to get out on the water, although it won't happen this week, when I have a meeting of another group, or next, when I'll be at Poetry Camp.

Speaking of next week-- I'm going to try an experiment, made possible recently by Blogger, the Google program that hosts thousands of blogs, including this one. I won't have my computer with me up north, but I will be able to write a blog post before I leave Madison, to be automatically posted next Monday. So you'll have something to read even though I'm far from cyberspace, solidly planted in the real world, amid the trillium and maybe even yellow lady slippers.

Visit to Trinity UCC Church

Yesterday's trip to Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago was quite wonderful. Fourteen of us went, many from Congregation Sha'arei Shamayim (CSS), the Reconstructionist Jewish congregation of which I am a member. (The bus driver and his wife also joined us. They didn't even realize that it was Obama's/Wright's church until they were inside--and they really liked the service.)

I couldn't have organized the trip without the help and support of many people, including CSS administrative assistant Jim Manos, who made many phone calls for me to bus companies and to a restaurant we stopped at for lunch, Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, and several friends and acquaintances, including Bacia Edelman and Judy Klehr, who helped promote the trip to people they knew. Several people who could not make the trip for various reasons (illness, Mother's Day commitments, and so forth) sent checks to help pay for the charter and make seats available to people who could not afford the fare.

The trip generated some wonderful publicity, including a conversation on last Tuesday's "Eight o' Clock Buzz" on WORT, our community radio station, between Norm Stockwell and host Stan Woodard, and a really good article in the May 7 Capital Times by Judith Davidoff, which you can access at http://www.madison.com/tct/archives/. I know it also generated a lot of discussion (dare I say argument?) between friends, spouses, and acquaintances. I couldn't have imagined better consequences!

We were warmly greeted by the church, and our presence was noted from the pulpit. The service itself was incredible, and quite different from the Youth Sunday service that Jed and I attended in late March. This was a full-out regular service, with the adult choir, which must have nearly a hundred members, singing almost throughout the service, accompanied by organ, electric guitar, and drum set. Rev. Otis Moss, James Wright's successor as pastor, led the service and gave the sermon. He's an amazing orator, and the organist accompanied him with little riffs as he built, again and again, to a peak of excitement and exhortation.

At one level, the service could be seen as purely religious, though clearly that strain of Christianity that emphasizes Jesus's compassion for the poor and unfortunate and insists that we emulate it. At another level, there were clear (to me, anyway) though implicit references to current political events. For example, a responsive reading reiterated the statement, "Divine love does not ask family to choose between family members." The minister was explicit about the inclusive nature of this statement: "Beloved, we love W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. We love Marcus Garvey and Ida B. Wells. We love A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. We love Ella Baker and Angela Davis. We love Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael." And a little later in the litany: "Beloved, we love Ishmael aned Isaac. We love Jacob and Esau. We love Moses and Aaron." He never said "We love Rev. Wright and Barack Obama," but the importance of not choosing between even these "family members" driven apart by politics and media was clear.

The sermon, also, was effective on multiple levels. On the surface, it was exegesis of the week's scripture reading, Luke, chapter 7, verses 36-49. In these verses, a Pharisee, Simon, invites Jesus to have dinner with him. A prostitute enters the house without being asked, and washes Jesus's feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them repeatedly, and anoints them with balm or perfume. Simon is appalled. If Jesus knew she was a prostitute, he says to himself, he wouldn't allow this. (Rev. Moss said, in an aside, "Now how would Simon know who this woman was, unless he'd been hanging around the red light district himself?") Jesus tells Simon a story to emphasize how much more important forgiveness is, for someone who has many sins, and he forgives the prostitute's sins, wiping the slate clean, so to speak, so she can begin a new life.

At the beginning of the sermon, partly I think because it was Mother's Day, Rev. Moss emphasized the righteousness of women, and the difficulty they had in being ordained by the men who governed the churches (including UCC), even though they had clearly been "ordained by God." It was a very feminist and also, in parts, very funny introduction, praising women (like the prostitute) who did not know their place, and refused to accept other people's definition of who they were. It introduced one of the themes that ran through the whole sermon: do not let other people define you. Rev. Moss focused, later, on how important this was in the black community, especially for black youth, so often defined in negative stereotypes by the media, the school system, the police and the courts. As he pointed out, "If I can dismiss your pain [by defining you as a "bad person"], I don't have to act [to change society or correct injustices]."

The second main theme of the sermon, picking up on Jesus's forgiveness, wiping the slate clean, was that we, too, should forgive past sins and look to the present and the future. Again, Rev. Moss focused the congregation's attention on black youth, suggesting that what should matter is what a young person is doing now, and what he or she will do in the future, not his or her past grades, or drug use, or misbehavior. He pointed out that even Richard Nixon was spared certain punishment by Rosemary Woods' judicious use of the "delete" button, and noted that "God does not want a resume of yesterday; doesn't care about the stereotype people have of you.... Jesus doesn't see every negative thing.... If God doesn't look back, why should we?" So use that delete button!

Not everyone in our group agreed, but several of us saw the sermon as (among other things) an extended metaphor about Rev. Wright, and the way he has been defined and stereotyped by others--and particularly by those who don't want to act to correct the problems in the black community, and in the US, that Wright has spent his career addressing. (And I'm not referring to the spread of AIDS by the government. Or his alleged anti-Semitism.)

It was really a masterful sermon, I thought, because it was so rich in meaning, and in levels of meaning. And I have to say, it was some of the best theater I've ever seen! Truly, the whole day was wonderful.

And now i'm off to the Arboretum, where I think the fruit trees are in full bloom.

Balancing Acts, Faith, and Denial

When I saw my oncologist last Thursday, he decided to take me off oxalyplatin, one of three chemo agents I've been getting, because my neuropathy--numbness in both feet and hands--has been getting significantly worse. In truth, it had occurred to me to cry "uncle" to him, not just because of the neuropathy, but because it's been taking me longer and longer to bounce back from each chemo treatment. But all I had to say was that I'd been dropping things (like half a can of Coke in a hospital elevator--what a mess!) and having a little trouble with zippers, and that was enough for him to decide to keep me on the leucovorin and 5FU, but take me off the oxalyplatin, which is what causes the neuropathy. The problem is that the neuropathy can become permanent, if it goes on too long. Not a pleasant prospect.

Of course, this is a two-edged sword, because the oxalyplatin has clearly been working on the tumors. "Well," Dr. Holen said, "we don't know that for sure. Maybe it's the leucovorin and 5 FU that's been working." Right. But if I have an oxalyplatin holiday, they can always start it up again if, or when, the tumors resume growing. I'll have a CT scan sometime in June, before I start the promised two-month vacation from all chemo.

Meanwhile, without the oxalyplatin, I bounced right back from chemo this week--no nausea, not much fatigue. It was a definite, and pleasant, change from the past two or three chemo infusions. So now I just have to have faith that the tumors have been beaten back enough that they'll lie low for a while. Or maybe what I have to do is just ignore, for now, the possibility that without the oxalyplatin, they'll grow back. We call this denial. Which is not to say it's a bad thing to do.

The experience mirrored, in a way, the balancing act involved in organizing Sunday's trip to Trinity UCC. People who had expressed interest in the trip started questioning the decision to go as soon as Rev. Wright's media exposure began. But the responses ranged from "don't go"--expressed quite well by Fred B in his comment on last week's blog post--to "I would be even more interested in the trip if Rev. Wright were going to be preaching." And I had already chartered the bus. So what to do? How to balance the "go" and "don't go" arguments?

Since I never intended the trip to be an endorsement of Rev. Wright or Barack Obama, much less Louis Farrakhan, but had been clear from the beginning that I wanted to bring people to Trinity to express support for the congregation itself, I decided to go ahead with the trip. I had to have faith that people would understand the rationale for the visit, whether or not they agreed with it--and to practice a little denial, too, about the likelihood that people wouldn't understand. I explained my motivation aned intent to everyone who asked--including a reporter who's doing a story about the trip in this week's Capital Times (now, sadly, a weekly rather than daily paper). No one canceled his or her reservation, and at the moment, it looks like at least 16 of the 29 seats on the bus will be full. Maybe more. I'll report on the experience next Monday.

Meanwhile, I came across a quotation in an article about the psychological challenges of living with chronic cancer that gives another perspective on balancing acts. The article (which was in an online journal called cureextra) quotes Steven Passik, a psychologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Passik points out that living with chronic cancer requires perspective-taking.and compartmentalizing. "Suddenly, you want to live every moment of every day. But this is just not possible. You can't live in the moment all of the time. You need to cultivate being involved in life with enough denial to put the cancer at arm's length."

Precisely. And it's good practice for all the balancing acts of life.

Planning

Hola! glad to be back after last week, which was highly productive but pretty tough, mentally. More about that later. But first, an invitation:

I'm organizing a "field trip" from Madison to south Chicago on May 11 to attend services at Trinity UCC, where Rev. James Wright is now senior pastor. (See the March 31 post for a description of my trip to Trinity with my son.) Madison Jews and others upset by the anti-democratic "guilt by association" rhetoric that links Barack Obama through Rev. Wright to Louis Farrakhan, and who want to support the beleaguered congregation at Trinity, will be warmly welcomed at the 11 AM service.

We will head down to Chicago on Sunday morning and will return immediately after the service (which is about two hours long), stopping on the way back for lunch. We will travel by chartered bus; the cost, if the bus is full, will be $30 round-trip.

If you'd like to join us, or would like more information, please email me at jlstrass@wisc.edu. (Email will work much better than a comment to the blog, which won't give me your name or email address!) To reserve your space on the bus, send a check for $30, made out to Judith Strasser, at 511 Sheldon Street, Madison 53711. We can take 29 people. At this point, enough people have expressed interest to fill about half the bus-- but only a few have sealed their commitment with a $30 check! Still I expect the bus to fill, on a first-come, first-served basis. So if you want to join us (and I hope you will), send in your reservation money ASAP!

Now, about the past week. I was, as I mentioned last time, at Edenfred, an artists' retreat in Madison. Although I went home at night, I worked very intensely from about 9:30 to 5 every day, Monday through Friday, revising my manuscript, Facing Fear. The retreat was a wonderful gift; I was able to make it almost the entire way through the manuscript, and I now feel confident that I will have the revisions finished before May 25, when I go up to Door County (northern Wisconsin) to teach poetry for a week at The Clearing.

But the week was exhausting, and emotionally difficult. For one thing, it was a very monastic existence, and I'm no monk. For another, the subject matter of the book is occasionally difficult. For a third, when I took short breaks to read a novel, the book I chose (because it was related to the subject of the last chapter of the monograph) was Lovely Green Eyes, by Arnost Lustig. Lustig is a terrific writer. He's a Holocaust survivor, and his many books of fiction, including Lovely Green Eyes, are accounts of life at Theresienstadt, the concentration camp where he was imprisoned. Not exactly escapist literature.

Also last week, I learned that a friend and fellow poet had been suddenly taken ill and was scheduled for very serious surgery in May. She sent me an email telling me about this, and explaining that she and her husband would likely not be able to go to Chicago with us, which they had been planning. But now, of course, it's difficult, or impossible, for her to make plans. When I wrote back, explaining that I understood completely about the way illness interferes with planning for the future--it's one of the really big losses I've experienced--I suddenly realized that this was precisely what I'd been struggling with all last week, without being really aware of it. I have no idea whether I'll be around to see Facing Fear when it is finally published. Which, in a way, calls into question all the work I was doing--because if I'm not around to market the book, it's unlikely to get into many readers' hands. (Hardly any books, these days, get sold without considerable marketing effort by the author.) Of course, that's why I didn't allow myself to think about this problem while I was at Edenfred--it could easily have paralyzed me, and then I wouldn't have accomplished anything. But sometimes it takes a lot of effort not to think.

Another friend pointed out that nobody can really plan how the future will take shape; people just think they can. Which is, of course, true. But I'd argue that those of us who live with existential uncertainty because of illness are a different breed. It's difficult to sit quietly and listen while friends plan their biking trips for next week, or their vacations next fall, or reserve hotel rooms for conferences next February, when these are events that I would, under different circumstances, also be involved in.

Last summer, when I had to cancel my plan to go to a chamber music retreat, I fell into a pit of despair, thinking I'd never be able to plan anything again. Soon enough, I climbed out of the pit by reasoning that I could plan to do things so long as, if I had to cancel, I wouldn't inconvenience other people. So, for example, last fall I recruited my friend and co-editor Robin to accompany me (and if necessary, substitute for me completely) on a speaking engagement in late April. Honestly, I didn't think I'd be around to give that talk. But last Tuesday evening, Robin and I drove happily off to Brookfield (near Milwaukee) and spoke to a group at the Unitarian church. Sold books, too!

Similarly, I now expect to be able to teach (with Robin) the last week in May in Door County; something I really questioned last fall, when we signed up. So planning is possible, but difficult.

As is quite obvious when I look out the window. Here it is, April 28, and it's snowing. Great big flakes.

Crocuses and My Voice

Finally! The sun came out today, and the three or four clumps of purple crocuses in my front yard, which have been up for about a week, opened today. They're gorgeous. Ever since they started showing purple, they've been tightly wrapped around themselves--like me hugging myself, trying to keep warm. (We actually had some snow on the ground Saturday evening.) But as I say, the sun is out, and it's warming up quickly--they say tomorrow and Wednesday the highs will be well into the 60s. All I want to do is sit out on the front stoop and admire the flowers. Oh, and pump up my bike tires to see if I can manage 15 minutes on the trail near my house.

But what I'll spend time on, instead, is getting ready for a little in-town writing retreat next week, to work on revisions to the fear manuscript. I read through it last week (for the first time in two years), and was surprised and pleased to realize it won't take as much work as I--uh--feared. (To use the word loosely.) But I have a big pile of clippings and other material that's accumulated in the years since I finished the manuscript, and this week I plan to go through all that stuff and read it and sort it into folders related to each chapter. Next week, I'll just head every morning by 9 AM to Edenfred, the local artist's retreat where I've been generously offered a place to work, away from temptations like coffee with friends, the gym, email, and even this blog. So no post next Monday. Sorry, but if I don't completely clear the decks, I won't get the revisions done. Procrastination is my middle name. I should probably take solitaire off the laptop, too!

An email from an old friend who recently read my blog said it sounded like now I could talk, even on the phone. I realized that I haven't really made clear what's going on with my voice. It's true that the chemotherapy I've been on since last fall has improved matters significantly. My voice, as a number of people have commented in the past month or so, is much stronger. I attribute this (with no actual evidence) to the tumor on my vagus nerve letting loose its grip. I can breathe more easily, and speak more easily. But things are not perfect. I imagine the tumor is still there, hanging on a little. Or maybe it permanently damaged the nerve. The ENT doc I saw last fall said that sometimes paralyzed vocal folds recover completely; sometimes they don't, even if the cause (which could just be a virus, though obviously that wasn't my experience) disappears.

I can make myself heard fairly easily in relatively quiet places, but not in noisy restaurants or, say, on a busy street when a truck or bus is passing. I can have short phone conversations on good connections (usually land lines, but sometimes cell phones) with people who have no hearing problems (and you'd be surprised how many people, young and old, do--even if they're not aware of it). But I actually find even short conversations, like the one I'm about to make to schedule an oil change for my car, tiring. And the long, lovely conversations I used to have with friends and family are still quite impossible. I can speak in public with a microphone, but again, it's tiring, and I still need to share the podium with others, like my friend and co-editor Robin, who will come with me in the next couple of weeks when I have been asked to give two out-of-town talks about our retirement poems anthology.

What makes speaking tiring, I think, is partly psychological (will I make myself understood?) and partly physical. I just don't have enough breath to sustain a long sentence. I speak in phrases. I would like very much to be able to sing, for example, but when I tried it in the car a couple of days ago, I could only get out a word or two before I had to stop for breath. It's this limited aerobic capacity, also, which affects how much physical activity I can do. I'm much, much better than I was last fall, when I could only walk about a quarter of a city block before stopping, gasping to catch my breath. But on Friday night, when a friend and I parked and then walked a block uphill to a theater, I was very slow. Level is good--Robin and I walk for 45 minutes or an hour in the mall, and I don't gasp at all. Uphill is problematic. But I'm working on it. And I realize that if I were not working out several times a week, walking and going to strength training and spinning classes at the gym, I wouldn't be doing as well as I am.

And now, with the sun and the warmth, the crocuses and I have the whole outdoors to explore, at last!

Remember--no new blog post next Monday, but you can use the time to read old posts and post your own comments! And I'll see you back here on April 28. Cheers!

It's Spring....

...and in Madison that means that there are promising days, and not-so-promising. The piles of filthy snow are (mostly, but not completely) gone; the street-cleaning machines seem to be getting a lot of the sand and salt out of the gutters; people are raking their lawns, which are ever-so-slightly less brown; the temperature went into the 60s over the weekend... and today it is again cold and windy and gray.

It's sort of like life. (Heck, it is life.) I had my CT scan on Friday, and saw Dr. Holen, who reported that the tumors are smaller, and some of them are no longer visible! Hooray! But I also had chemo on Friday, and the after-effects laid me low for pretty much the entire weekend. It occurs to me that I try very hard to put on the best possible face, in this blog, and when I see and speak with friends and family, and for myself, too (in fact, mostly for myself)-- and a lot of people, as a result, think I'm "courageous" (which I'm not) and (probably) also insanely perky.

So here are a few sentences describing the downside, aka this past weekend. I felt fluish most of the time--nauseous, a little feverish, tired. Pretty much all I did on Saturday was sleep and put one load of laundry in the washer. Sunday was a little better: two more loads of laundry, and tidying the kitchen. Naps. Virtually the entire Sunday Times. A couple of chapters of Drew Gilpin Faust's history of how the Civil War changed Americans' understanding of death, This Republic of Suffering. It was beautiful outside, and I really wanted to take a walk, but I couldn't motivate myself to open the door until near sunset, when I saw my neighbors, who had brought over a piece of cake a couple of days earlier, walking past the house. I opened the door to return the plate. That was the extent of my "walk." I had a brief conversation with Kim (the neighbor); she was the only person I talked to the entire weekend, except for a couple of brief phone conversations with my friend Helen. Helen and I hoped to get together, but she's an MRI tech and was on call all weekend; worked all day Saturday and until 3 AM Sunday morning, and then went back to the hospital to work some more late Sunday morning. So getting together was out of the question.

I felt physically cruddy, and extremely sorry for myself.

Today is much better. I worked out at the gym this morning; I feel good; I'm getting some work done. Filed my income taxes, for example. Wrote this entry. Am about to read another chapter of the fear manuscript. And... there are purple crocuses blooming in my front yard!

Up, down, up. It's spring.