Dear friends,
I keep thinking about your solstice stories from last week. These summer nights — I’m in Scotland this week, a little north of Ireland, so it stays even brighter even later — are a bliss to me. The early mornings too. I’ll be getting a ferry this morning (from Oban to Mull, and then after a drive across Mull, a small ferry over to Iona), so I woke with the early light and am now at a window looking out over granite houses and green, listening to birds and traffic and the sound of ferries honking. (There’s a wren whispering nearby, and however big my own heart can swell, it will never swell to the size of the song of a wren.)
This week, we published my interview with Kimberly Campanello. An American poet from Elkheart, Indiana, she’s lived on the other side of the Atlantic for a long time. These days, she’s Professor of Poetry at Leeds University. I met her years ago at a poetry reading in Belfast. We have two interviews with her for you, actually — this first one spends a lot of time on her reversioning of Dante’s Inferno. That famous poem begins with:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
The first line can be translated into English as something like “Midway through life’s journey”, and the poet is whenever “midway” (“nel mezzo del cammin”) is. Is that 45? Is that 40? For some, it’s earlier; for others, it’s later. Either way, in her early 40s, Kimberly Campanello was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s. So, “midway through life’s journey”, she had a new terrain to traverse. Her versioning of the Inferno is at once a translation project but also an account of paying attention to the hells and heavens she’s reflecting on as she’s learning drug regimens, as well as a travelogue about the town in Italy that her grandmother left to move to Elkheart, Indiana.
I know, I know. It’s Elkhart, not Elkheart. But I made the mistake and didn’t have the hart to change it. In the original Miami-Illinois language, the place is named “mihšiiwiateehi”: elk’s heart.
Interviewing Kimberly, I was struck by her world-making project in response to a world-shattering or world-altering news of a Parkinson’s diagnosis. She’s young, not yet 50, and has built a repository of work, a living archive of experience and attention. So sustained. So powerful. So brilliant. She’s a wonder.
My prompt for you this week: What happened to you midway through life’s journey? How did you made a map for yourself? Who have your companions been?Dante’s Inferno has a companion — Virgil — who guides the poet through the nine levels of hell.
Now I’m thinking of Emily Dickinson’s response to her correspondent’s query about her life’s companions:
“You ask of my Companions Hills- Sir-and the Sundown-and a Dog-large as myself, that my Father bought me-They are better than Beings-because they know-but do not tell-and the noise in the Pool, at Noon - excels my Piano.” (link)
What happened to you midway through life’s journey? Who or what accompanied you? It doesn’t matter if that’s the formal time of “midlife,” as it’s termed now. If you’re 30, midway was 15; if you’re 80, it was 40; you get the idea. Midlife is a shock — it was for me, it changed me — and you see things, coupled sometimes with regret, sometimes with resolve, sometimes with fatigue, sometimes with something else.
When I was 9 years old, I decided that I now had “sense” and felt alive to the world and threat and consequence. I was glad to have grown up. I knew things I knew a child should not. I knew I liked writing, but also knew nobody else should be able to read what I wrote, so I kept things in my mind. The next week, I looked back on my sense-arriving self and thought, “Pah! What. A. Fool. NOW I have sense, but I didn’t then.” A year later, I turned 10, yes — the same. At 40, I woke up and knew that what I’d tried to believe was gone. Now, at 50, I arrived at sense this morning, listening to that wren.
Enjoy the first installment of the wondrous Kimberly Campanello, friends, and I’ll see you in the comments.
P.S.: Friends, an audiobook version of 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: a Poetry Unbound Collection is on sale now for 70% off until the 29th of June. You can buy it here.
Also, I was interviewed by Chip Conley for his podcast about midlife, which you can find here.
The Latest from Poetry Unbound
You can also listen at poetryunbound.org or wherever podcasts are found.
Poetry in the World
A list of my events: Online and in the U.S. (Santa Fe, NM) and England (Kettering)
August 9–13, Santa Fe, New Mexico
I’m leading a four-day intensive workshop at Modern Elder Academy called “Poetry as a Common Language”. We’ll read, write, and discuss poems on finding and deepening connection. (For more information, click on the date heading.)
August 27-30, Kettering, England
I’m absolutely delighted to be returning to this year’s Greenbelt Festival, a gathering of arts, activism, and belief in England, beginning. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
I’ll be leading evening worship alongside Nadia Bolz-Weber and Doug Gay as part of the Festival of Preaching, beginning at 5:30 p.m. (For registration info, click on the date heading.)
I’ll be leading a virtual craft intensive on poetry and desire through Poets House, beginning at 6 p.m. ET. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
December 18-20, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
I’ll be leading a retreat on poetry and prayer at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. (For more info, click on the date heading.)
Good morning, dear friends, and Pádraig, what a lovely gift to arrive at this prompt on a Sunday morning, wren song and all. I am slow to wake this morning after a weekend of gigs. Last night, a sunset concert with my old band, Hippie Tendencies, with whom I haven't sung in quite some time. Revisiting the songs I wrote just after that midlife point led to the most luminous evening (I’ll leave a photo in my notes) and had us all questioning why we aren't still writing together. The answer is artistic evolution, each of us reaching, but perhaps it is time for a revisit.
I just turned 60 in May, so by these measures, midlife would have been 30. I had just moved to Italy following a man who was not good for me. I didn’t yet speak the language, and I was floundering, trying to decide what direction my creative path would take. It was a moment of reckoning with a difficult childhood and the slow, terrible recognition that I was recreating the same stifling atmosphere I had grown up in.
It took a few more years, but the epiphany came when my brother visited and said that next time he would stay in a hotel because he could not bear to watch how I was being treated. That same night, I understood: any home where my favorite person on the planet cannot stay is no home I want to build. bell hooks had already been whispering this to me. "All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way." I left.
My companions in that period were mostly musical, as I was building a band. Ani DiFranco, in particular, was instrumental in the steady expansion of my own badassness. (One of the few covers we played last night was her "Buildings and Bridges”!!) And it was in that same period that I discovered bell hooks, whose Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood expanded my everything and handed me back a sense of self. She wrote, "To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality." That sentence became a compass.
I am still building on what she gave me. I look forward to reading you all, though I may be slow this week, still feeling the beautiful work of the last three nights.
When I think of the middle of my life-to-date, I tend to revisit the great tearing asunder the occurred when my faith and marriage fell apart in tandem, which happened in my 40's. I am 63. So this prompt leads me to my early 30's. I love this. What "happened" to me in that half decade was my children. I finished having the four of them. They were my constant companions in every literal way. In every place I was, they were there. I have lately been feeling some envy towards my friends, also in their 60's, whose life work has amassed into things rather substantial. A body of work. A giant life savings. Recognition. Acclaim. On a long drive down the Eastern seaboard a few weeks ago I was pondering this. Pondering the "generativity v. stagnation" of my own life. Padraig made the off-hand comment at Omega that "no one will read us after we are dead" (by which I was terribly offended). Maybe not. But in my children, in their children, in their physical attributes, the tone of their voices, their sense of humor, their dreams, their integrity, the folks they touch...I do get to endure. My bank account is by no means bulging. No one is heralding me for anything more than a kind word or deed. And I am deeply loved. And I love oh-so-deeply. And this is all brought to you by what "happened" to me in mid-life. Thanks, Padraig.