On this Voices from the Heartland episode, MPR’s Marlana Benzie-Lourey talks with central Minnesota poet Nancy Paddock about the growing popularity of poetry, teaching workshops at nursing home, and the different types of poems. Paddock also reads numerous poems.

Program includes various musical elements.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) The furniture of her life
(00:00:02) spread over the yard for strangers eyes and fingers feel for something solid some thread from the whole cloth of the past. Polished brass bed the heavy oak table and Buffet her best China right away and Crocs boxes of clouded zinc cap mason jars all for sale all drowning in the quick Litany of the auctioneer. What will you give me? He picks two sheets and towels with crocheted edges grabs up an armload of quilt. What do I hear? $1? Come on, do I hear 2 for more than a hundred hours of work? I can't resist bid $10 to take home the pieces of a life bound together a patchwork of tiny flowered baby clothes splashy apron Paisley's tired Blues. Stripes of a husband's pajamas A pattern of her own created with patients of the slow silent mending of wounds women's work made to be used worn out to keep us warm because my mother and my grandmother did not make quilts. I'll sleep tonight beneath the stitches of a stranger who sleeps beneath the ground. The thread unbroken passes on to
(00:01:39) me.
(00:01:50) Do you find that in your work you're often using the voices are the stories of people that you come into contact with? I know you know, as you mentioned you've gone on to do other types of oral history projects working in both schools nursing homes other smaller communities. Yes. I do finding the way in your palms to some extent that other people's voices come into my bum. Sometimes I've written poems tried to you know, get into another point of view entirely as though I am someone else and then of course, it's a different voice and other times you find yourself speaking far forces of nature, you know trying to to say the thing that that no one is saying to make the connection is not being made. I think that's one of the jobs of the poet to find the words for things that aren't easily spoken. Do you feel like poetry is being read these days? Well, that is probably more poetry presses and now that it any time in history, I don't know an awful lot of poems are being published certainly, you know, you talk about times in the past were all they were famous poets there were very few and now every place you look there are poets. So certainly there's a lot of writing going on and there's a lot of reading at least by other poets. And then of course, there's a lot of work going on in the schools a lot of children are writing poetry. So I mean, it's not like Russia where you get audiences of thousands, but it's different from the way it was when we first started out in the 60s. You would do a reading in Minneapolis and there'd be six or eight or ten people there and four of them would be the poet's were reading and it was kind of terrible. Now, there are people that poetry readings and often large crowds. So it's happening Nancy. Paddock herself should get a small part of the Credit for the Public's interest in poetry. She has spent years encouraging people to write and read. She laughingly calls herself a cradle to grave teacher since she's worked with both three-year-olds in a Montessori School setting and Elders in retirement centers. The next two poems are from workshops. She held in a nursing home in many Yoda. I would get groups of people together and they would we would talk about a certain topic and then I would make a poem out of what they said or sometimes. I would do one-to-one sessions with person and that and make a poem out of what that person said. There was one man, who was my star pupil and his name was brick and I came to realize he was aptly named because he had been in this Nursing Home in a wheelchair for 8 years, but that had not been enough to break him. This poem is about his life. It's called lessons of the season. His cigarette smolders
(00:04:46) at the filter. He Wills his
(00:04:48) thick yellowed thumb to knock off the long Ash
(00:04:52) in 5 minutes of Labor the leg lifted and dropped lifted and dropped he manages to seat himself on the bike for his daily stationary ride one side of his tongue curls around words muffled guttural forced from one side of his throat I feed myself. But they give me a bath dressed me here. It cost me 1800 a month just to live this can't go on. His eyes burn his Raven laughs explodes at this predicament for eight years in this place. He has tried to grasp life's meaning in his one good hand before he lets go. He says always something to learn each season come round and he has learned the lessons of this season that the lifetime of a man's skill can be reduced to feeding himself holding a hand of
(00:05:59) cards or a
(00:06:00) cigarette that everything. He needs can be kept within one drawer. That Spirit without
(00:06:11) fading can be prematurely
(00:06:13) buried in numbed
(00:06:15) flesh. There was
(00:06:34) another. person that I had a lot of contact with in that nursing home and she was For all practical purposes fine. She walked around she told stories she made up wonderful things to tell me but she had short term memory loss. And so frequently within the space of an half an hour. She would tell me almost in the same words the same thing page through a book of poems and find the same poem and enjoy it again. This poem is called short-term memory loss. Her day is our Hopscotch pattern scratched in Dustin erased for each new game
(00:07:21) pieces of her face glance
(00:07:23) back at her from Bright shards of a mirror shattered in her grand escape from sorrow. She does not remember that she does not remember
(00:07:35) though familiar strangers Daily Light damn islands of deja vu Her husband's absence, her daughter's visits blur in a watercolor
(00:07:47) wash their dutiful plants die unwatered on
(00:07:51) the sill,
(00:07:53) but she is surrounded by Wonder. Flowers proud around her from no seed she has planted what a miracle the world is she says and yet it's accepted by everybody as so
(00:08:06) ordinary. We just don't see it. For her each
(00:08:12) moment is spontaneously generated a miracle. She opens to embrace again for the very first
(00:08:20) time.
(00:08:33) When we were talking earlier, you said that for a while you stop writing poetry. If I both of the poems that you just read the ones from the nursing home in than the earlier one the estate sale were written some years ago. Why did you stop writing? And then why did you begin to write poetry again? Well, I don't know that I ever absolutely stopped. But but I stopped believing in poetry. I started saying well, there's so many problems in the world there. I mean it is threatened. It's very existence is threatened. We don't have time to think of pretty ways to talk about it. We need to get up there and scream, you know from a soapbox or whatever and I was involved in lots of environmental projects and and various things that were much more direct way of talking. Two people and I felt that I just don't have time. You know, there is not time. None of us have time to deal with our own writing or our own even our own development, but it was it would not go away and finally then I thought well the source of the healing is inside of us. The source of the healing is the Poetry that is in us and poetry is hooked up with that part of us. That is at the very Ation of life and if we get cut off from that we dry and die just like a plant cut off from its roots and I needed for my own sustenance daily life to be hooked up again with that Center and the poems are the result of that there the byproduct if you will of my connection with your own deep self and soul. I don't know. Maybe we don't have time for anything but poetry that's beautiful. Some people think they have to make money instead of making poetry and there was some poet who said well, there's no money in poetry but there's no poetry and money either. So anyway, so perhaps for your poetry represents our better part or an attention to What beauty?
(00:10:51) Dreams. Hope
(00:10:54) someone well, it's all of those things and it's different for everybody. If you ever want to find definitions of poetry that are totally different ask any part. Each photo will find a totally different way of talking about it. And for some you know, it would be Beauty and for others it would be pointing out all of the ugliness in the world and but it's a connection with with your deepest voice the thing. That you say the thing that that is is yourself and like I say that's different for everyone in your poems. Do you point out beauty or do you point out? What's wrong both? I was very afraid at first to point out things that were wrong. I felt very nervous unless I was praising something so like poems like the estate sale or are praising and connecting healing and then I went through a long period of time, right? Bombs that were essentially exorcisms pointing out things that were wrong and now the pumps that I write are much more going back into my own self my own childhood and lots of times they'll have praise and exorcism all mixed together. Why don't you read us another poem Okay, this is a poem about making bread and it's about that connection with the Earth. And how our bodies are made from the earth and we know that of course, that's not anything that a poem has to tell us but maybe a bomb can say it in words. That would make it somehow pop into Consciousness in a new way making bread wheat berries ground in my hand Mill oil of seeds that have followed the Summer
(00:12:49) sun honey each spoonful the life work. Have a beer all these lives blend with sea salt and yeast in
(00:13:00) my grandmother's bread bowl. I stir with her spoon that is worn flat on one side from years. She made bread
(00:13:11) and then the dough Brown as a summer child rolls over and over elastic young flesh in my hands East creatures lifted, right? round as the belly of the Earth I form loaves that are nets to catch the Sun and when the winter kitchen warms rich with its smell we eat. An ancient strength flows into us out of the
(00:13:44) ground
(00:13:53) Nancy Paddock lives and rights in Litchfield, Minnesota.