From Dewey Decimals to the Sick Bed to a Single Page // Joanne Clarkson

Joanne Clarkson discusses how her work intersects with her writing and how to stay authentic as part of Lauren Davis’ guest month, “Writing About the Living.”

I spent almost 20 years as a professional librarian working in public libraries, and in that role every day I put not only my reputation but also my soul on the line to defend America’s first amendment right to freedom of speech. This was the single most important reason I went to library school. I wanted to devote my life not only to a concept but to a place where everyone and anyone could express their truth. And everyone and anyone had access to the information they needed to live their truth. In the ’80s this was fairly easy. There were always the people who snuck into the stacks and coloured in naked bodies in the anatomy section with magic markers. And righteous groups who marched in demanding that Judy Blume be removed from the shelves. But by and large, patrons understood that knowledge was sacred. When libraries got public computers in the 1990s, my idealism was challenged daily if not hourly. Librarians never really look at or judge what people check out or request. We focus on the information, not the person. But those first computers would freeze, repeat, and go haywire in unimaginable ways that would require us to reset and readjust them. We couldn’t avoid confronting what was glaring at us on those monitors. Images are much more vivid and immediate than words. I don’t want to remember or describe the horror or the ludicrous inappropriateness of what we saw in living colour. And it wasn’t mine to label as such. The library developed a whole new clientele. We put up privacy screens. Each PC had a card with instructions about how to exit a website after visiting. Were some people afforded access to information they had been afraid to ask about? Sure. Did others stretch the limits of what was considered socially and even morally appropriate? Of course. The greatest lesson I learned from being a librarian was never to presume to know another soul or human heart. But it was after I left libraries that I truly began to understand the deep reason I defended open-ended expression. After a life-changing personal event, I re-careered as a registered nurse. I was especially called to hospice care. Much of hospice involves pain management. I had no idea how many kinds of pain there were until I worked with the dying and their families. I was startled to learn that the generally accepted definition of pain is, as expressed by Margo McCaffery (nurse and pioneer in the field of pain management), “whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever the experiencing person says it does.” I held this as the essential credo of my bedside practice. And of my writer’s practice as well. Letting essential truth be whatever it needs to be, meaning whatever it needs to mean, is my first amendment of writing. Poetry has been my artistic and spiritual practice since I was a young child. Growing up in a family of artists and musicians and having talent in neither arena, I turned to words. Because of my sister’s death which loomed over my life even though it happened before I was born, my father’s death from cancer when I was ten, and my beloved grandfather’s descent into angry and violent dementia through my teen years, the ‘why’ of illness and the fate of the soul have always been my areas of truth telling and seeking. I identify with Ruth Stone, whose poems repeatedly question her young husband’s suicide. Gregory Orr, wrestling with guilt over his brother’s accidental death. And Stanley Kunitz, who wrote many verses about his father’s suicide in a public park six weeks before he was born. I found kinship with my patients, their caregivers and loved ones. Their stories began to invade my poems. Sometimes a phrase from a conversation or an incident. Other times a small object scapegoated. There were also entire poems focused on a miracle—or transgression. I was aware of the danger of violating confidentiality, which was not only a betrayal of the trust people placed in me as a healthcare provider—it could also get me fired. I could lose my nursing licence. I never used real names, and I often changed the specifics of situations. But I couldn’t not write what I saw, what I felt. And I believed some of my poems deserved more than my act of writing and then relegating them to a bottom drawer. They contained moments that could heal and console—everyone and anyone. They needed to be read. I once faced a situation where I had faxed and called and left messages for a doctor who ignored my request to refill fentanyl pain patches for a dying 23-year-old man. Finally, I drove to his office and stood in front of the receptionist’s desk, telling her I was going to camp out there until I either got the script or the physician himself came out and told me why I couldn’t have it. She went and got the doctor, a young man fresh out of med school. Looking into my eyes with great sadness, he told me he couldn’t refill the meds because the boy’s mother sold the last box of patches. I was stunned. A parent myself, I have written and rewritten to understand how someone could withhold comfort from their dying child for—what? Money? Other drugs? Power? I wrote her as fallen god. I made fentanyl symbolic. I spoke about the problem of drugs in society, destroying families. I engaged in imaginary dialogues with her. I made up stories about her broken life. I wrote to her, for her, and about her as if she was me. Each effort entertaining some element of possible truth. Now, I don’t even remember her name. I would like to briefly mention two poetry collections that have taught me something about how to speak difficult truth into art. The first is Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec. Diaz makes her brother’s drug addiction and its impact on her family the story of a fallen god, taking with him light bulbs and lives: “He lived in our basement and sacrificed my parents / every morning.” Reading and rereading these poems showed me how effectively authors can craft myth through image, tell stories in broken pieces. Nowhere is her brother named, yet we know him intimately down to the final verses which redeem him (somewhat) by sharing his narration of wartime experiences. The other is Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Water & Salt, winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award for poetry. An Arab-American, Tuffaha makes war, political struggle, immigration, and the concept of home personal for each of us. She employs vivid detail, repetition which creates form, and varied use of “person.” Her mastery of the second person “you” creates dialogue and intimate address: “We travel back so that you / will know who we were and who / you might be … ” She made me aware of my options for creating degrees of distance.

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Through the practice of reading and writing poetry about deep wounds, I have identified five ways to stay authentic:

1. Tell a story in the form of a myth or fable.
2. Find an image or small detail that represents and takes the brunt of the relationship.
3. Speak broadly about a social issue, often by repeating a line that poses a question.
4. Write in first person, making the poem about myself alone.
5. Create an honest and respectful dialogue using second person.

Through the practice of reading and writing poetry I continue to learn the many ways a name can be unspoken. I might not remember what the mother was called in my example above, but I do remember the name of her son. Before he passed, he finished the book he had been working on for years. It was the book about how he came to learn forgiveness after he forgave god for his life-long suffering, for the disease transmitted through his mother’s genes. And I stake my reputation and my soul on the right of that book to be read even if it means that pain might be a consequence. “Let’s all work together,” the kind doctor offered that day, “and find a safe way to provide those patches.”

Joanne M. Clarkson's latest book is the award-winning collection The Fates (Bright Hill Press, 2017). Believing the Body was published in 2014 by Gribble Press. Clarkson has received a GAP grant from Artist Trust, and her poems have appeared in publications such as Rhino, The Baltimore Review, Emrys Journal, The Healing Muse and Fjords Review. Her nonfiction book There's Always a Miracle: True Stories of Death Before and After Life contains 24 pieces about her experiences as a hospice RN. See more at www.joanneclarkson.com.