A Season of Gift Giving

It’s ironic and perhaps tragic that a former friend who looked forward to getting old never got the chance. After her death from breast cancer in her late thirties, her husband called to let me know. She and I had not spoken in years, as I had committed the cardinal sin of not hanging on her every word and following through on the “shoulds” she dished out like mashed potatoes from the vat in a school cafeteria. We had become friends after she hired me at a chain bookstore, and I find it hard to think about her without remembering certain titles. Today, I’m thinking of When I’m an Old Woman, I Shall Wear Purple. She loved that book in her late twenties and already had her retirement wardrobe planned. I was about five years younger than she and couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the book or the idea of being an obnoxious old woman telling everyone else what to do. Besides, with my English degree safely tucked under my wing, I imagine that I wasn’t terribly impressed by the quality of the purple verse. These days, I don’t care much for pedigrees: literary or otherwise. If something resonates with me, it’s of value. If is doesn’t, it’s not.

A poet I keep coming back to (after her word was brought to my attention in a book on memoir writing) is Eavan Boland, and in the Author’s Note to her New Collected Poems (published in 2008; she died in 2020), she matter-of-factly states which poems (from previously published books) the reader will find in this one. This sentence is an example of what the rest are like: “In addition, I have retrieved two poems from 23 Poems, a chapbook which came out in 1962 when I was eighteen.” There is no room for argument in this brief note. Boland doesn’t explain more than necessary, she doesn’t justify. She simply says, “This is what I’ve done.” There is courage and confidence and an inner calm in such a thing, and I have some of that here in my older woman years.

In my younger, less courageous, confident, and calm years, I offered my writings to the world. At one point, they took the form of nearly 500 one-thousand-word blog posts. I’ve since come to see that the world is better off without those, mostly because almost none of what I wrote was mine. Every word was chosen to please some mythical authority, and I don’t know that any of them found favor with a single human being, perhaps least of all, me. Before those one-thousand word posts, there were other posts that were both better and worse (if nothing else, they were usually shorter, and that undoubtedly made them better). Back then, I wrote a lot about art as an entity, trying to define it and philosophize about it. I wrote about beauty, too. I was rather taken with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notion (put into the mouth of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot) that beauty will save the world. I keep my hands off that now, but I am still rather taken with idea that art is a gift (first introduced to me by Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art), and I think of that now with Boland’s poems: she has used her gift for versifying to create and offer gifts of poetry, and doing this is her business. Offering them up for others is her business, too. The reader, on the other hand, is asked to receive her poems as gifts. That’s all, and that’s more than enough. Her poems, though, have given me another gift: taking the book off the shelf this morning has reminded me that I, too, have gifts to give, and I should do that. After all, can something even be called a gift until it is given?