My Slant
1129
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
Wit explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
Emily Dickinson
Three years ago at a coffee shop on Mt. Washington when Mike Simms first asked me to write a monthly blog about anything at any length for coalhillreview.com, I was surprised. I was so depressed about being in the process of being divorced by my husband of 33 years and being diagnosed with a potentially fatal, auto-immune liver disease that I said no, or maybe I could if I wrote under a pen name. Mike said, “Think about it,” and he handed me an Autumn House review copy of Andrea Hollander’s Landscape with Female Figure: new and selected poems, 1982-2012. Then, Mike gave me a ride home in his pickup truck back to my downtown, fortress of solitude in Gateway Towers. That evening when I settled into reading Andrea’s new poems, tracing her marriage’s long disintegration into divorce, I took heart. I wasn’t the only older woman dealing with a broken marriage. I knew that I not only wanted, but that I also needed to write a review of her book under my own name. When I thought I no longer had a voice, Mike gave me a new prose voice. What a great gift Mike (and Andrea) gave me!
Writing that first blog was made easier because I was assigned a form and subject: a review of Landscape with Female Figure. However, writing the second blog essay meant that I had to dig deeper into whatever leaky truth trove I might possess to discover not only content, but also a rhetorical form to accommodate the subject and my new point of view. At that time I was still in the midst of the legalities of divorce: not the best of all times to publicly let one’s almost ex-husband know much of anything that might be on one’s mind. I found myself yet again wishing I was writing hidden under a pen name. Essays, even the most informal blog/essays, always involve a lot of trial and error, a sort of trying to figure out what one thinks out loud, so to speak. That’s when I remembered Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell it slant.” And, that’s pretty much what I did monthly until the divorce became final almost two years later. I discovered I didn’t need to take subjects or even emotions head on, though many of the blogs I wrote were deeply felt. I slowly learned to trust the writing process itself would dissipate, disarm, and soothe me through any essay subject I chose. In many ways writing essays was almost the opposite of writing poems, which often served me as ways to intensify my hidden feelings. My own poems often frighten me. Sometimes after writing a poem I’m emotionally exhausted for days, but writing an essay seemed to corral me, seemed to give me more emotional control.
Also during a good part of these last three years, I discovered that my two sons didn’t know me. Maybe most sons don’t really know their mothers, but I suspect that in my case, I always tried to protect them by withholding many of the messier parts of my life, especially the time during my first marriage and divorce from their abusive father that happened when they were toddlers. And, because my family—my grand parents, my parents, my uncles, my aunts, my brother, and most of my cousins—died or were murdered either before my sons were born or when my sons were barely in grade school, I wrote about my childhood and family. So, some of the essays I wrote became memoirs, my attempts to pass along a legacy to my sons, even though they may or may not have read these essays. Maybe, some day…maybe, not. That is their choice.
This is my last blog for coalhillreview.com. Mike Simms has retired as the editor of coalhillreview, and the new editor, Christine Stroud, is reshaping her on-line journal into a more formal publication of poetry and reviews. This is as it should be, I wouldn’t have it any other way, especially if I were the new editor. But, know that I am thankful to have been given the healing gift of sure and accepting publication for these last three years.
My prosaic closure has come just as I have begun to resume my poetry writing life. July 1, 2016, Mayapple Press will publish my third full-length poetry collection, The Relative Heart & Selected Sestinas, the new poems exploring family, place, and the last of my pastor’s wife persona poems. I have begun writing a few new poems for yet another book, this one dealing with dusk and other end of life subjects. I don’t know how many more essays I will write, but I do know that I have one more long literary essay that I need to write which will be about the life and style my former poetic persona, the pastor’s wife. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to prepare for that task in such a grace-filled venue.
Onward…