Various Patricia Smiths and Various Strands of a Life

I have spent some time this morning listening to Patricia Smith's acceptance speech for the National Book Award for poetry; another poet pasted it in a Facebook post.  I went to the website where one could watch the whole ceremony (here), but instead, I'm listening to Ezra Klein's interview with Patti Smith--the more famous Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, the author of Just Kids, along with more recent books.

Back to the poet Patricia Smith, who was the only poet of all the nominees whose work I had read (go here for the full list).  I hadn't even heard of the poets nominated until they were nominated.  Some years are like that.  But happily, I have heard of Patricia Smith; I remember a presentation she did at an AWP conference, probably as far back as the one in D.C. in 2011.  I probably wouldn't have discovered her book Blood Dazzler on my own without hearing her talk about it at her presentation.  It showed me what poetry could do, and I'm glad she's now gained wider recognition for her poetry.

And now I've done what I've always done:  I looked up her birth date.  She's ten years older than I am.  I read her whole Wikipedia entry, and of course, she had a lot of writing history before Blood Dazzler.

This morning before I got up out of bed, I was thinking of my novel idea that I had earlier this year which I wrote about in this blog post:  " a new narrative that might weave the voice of an older woman in seminary, a younger woman teaching section after section of freshman comp in a community college, a middle aged woman struggling to write poems around the edges of her administrator job--and yes, they would all be me."

Because I've been rereading The Hours and teaching Waiting for Godot, this morning, even before I got out of bed, I was thinking about that idea, about a poet who is closer to the end of her life than the beginning (age 60-70), who finally gets big recognition.  Maybe her first and only book with a spine is the one which wins the big award (a Pulitzer or a National Book Award, something bigger than publication alone).  Different life phases could represent different theological/philosophical positions on life.  For example, the administrator job is the Waiting for Godot existence, where so much seems meaningless.

Some things I might include (but not saying too much here, so as not to lose my writerly interest):  the young poet, pre-chapbook-publication, reading May Sarton's journals and marveling at her envy of other poets despite her own success.  The late life poet, getting ready for the awards ceremony, trying to decide what to wear, and she remembers long ago how she had planned out what she would wear should Oprah chose her book for Oprah's book club.  All that "manifesting," but no one tells you how long it might take for a dream to actually arrive.  A book of photographs of writer's studios or that book of interviews, Parting the Curtains, and feeling jealous of the amount of time that writers in the book have--and then, 30 years later, realizing that she has carved out time for much of her adult life by getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning.  Reading Kathleen Norris and wanting to go to a monastery, and all the other more rigorous religious traditions contemplated.

Could I weave these strands together in a compelling way?  Will I?

These days I am feeling my writing time drained away not by non-writing tasks, the way I did when I was an administrator.  These days, my writing time is drained away by things like sermon writing.  Let me turn my attention to that.