Photo credit: Stig Hjelmgaard | by Lynne Hjelmgaard
“When I attempted to put my feelings on paper it became clear that it would be a long, slow process with hard work and determination at its core”
I wasn’t very old when I was in the living room at home, my parents were having an argument with my older sister. I don’t remember what it was about, but I had an overwhelming feeling that I was observing them from afar. How vulnerable and uncertain we were. Naturally, as a child I forgot about this experience, but that awareness and otherness, those feelings of separation and loneliness have never left me. Instinctively, I had a need to look deeper. I was questioning and searching even then. I also knew that my parents couldn’t solve this dilemma for me. They seemed unhappy and lonely too and, in some ways, I felt older and wiser.
Growing up in NYC most summers I was sent to sleep-away camp, and though I disliked being sent away, I loved being in the outdoors – those early experiences of connecting with nature – sleeping outdoors, taking long hikes in the mountains, being caught in thunderstorms, drinking water from a running stream and the silence of the countryside are precious in my memory now. I hold on to them with abandon, they nourish me.
When I was older, I lived on a sailboat with my husband and children and was at sea for long periods of time. I became even more aware of our impermanence, our vulnerability, a vastness difficult to grasp. The return to life on shore felt tame and unfulfilling in comparison to being at sea, at times even more lonely. I longed to pursue writing full time and had an urgent need to talk about how it felt to sail on the ocean – a letting-go like no other letting-go that I had experienced before.
Nostalgia for home, displacement, and rootlessness, later moved into grief and loss when my husband died. I subsequently travelled back to places we had lived. I wrote him letters in my journal, trying to figure out where I belonged. It took years of not knowing. In the meantime, writing became the centre of my life. When I attempted to put my feelings on paper it became clear that it would be a long, slow process with hard work and determination at its core.
I had to ‘fill in the gaps’, read widely, read other poets and writers who were writing about similar themes and whose poetry I grew to love. I realised if I kept up the daily reading and writing I would come to a better understanding of myself, discover what I wanted to say, what was most important and real – to be able to dig deeper, find the language and words that were satisfying, combine places, words and feelings into a truth.
But I couldn’t do it alone. I was fortunate to meet Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver in Paris and be part of their writing workshop for several years. Doug introduced me to The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. Alice’s early Selected Poems and Mysteries of Small Houses were a great influence. Those initial years with her in Paris have remained with me. Steadfast and always nurturing. Jane Hirschfield’s Each Happiness Ringed By Lions was also an important book for me. I obtained a writing residency in Vermont and at the Danish Academy in Rome, (I had lived in Rome with my husband) where I began writing the elegies for him. Dannie Abse’s memoir of loss, The Presence helped me pursue this sequence of elegies even further, as did his poetry, advice, and encouragement. I’m indebted to Mimi Khalvati and Jane Duran whose work I admire and opinions I trust. I’m grateful for the nods of encouragement I’ve received along the way and learned to trust my instincts more, listen to my inner music, take the time, however long it takes, to listen to myself.
As the American poet William Stafford said: be alert, be aware of the nowness of things. Poetry is a kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye.
