Tweet
Scripture provides inspiration for poet
By Rich Barlow | August 5, 2006
Boston Globe,MA
Aug 5, 2006
For 30 years, Patricia Giragosian labored in journalism and teaching,
but those were always a holding pattern while she sought her heart's
destination, a poet's career. "I felt I was being Lois Lane," she
says of her newspaper days. "My poetry is me."
Yet the need to pay the bills, plus literary stage fright, gave her
a stiff-necked resistance to publishing her work.
Then Giragosian, 53, of Boston, began exploring her family's Christian
roots in the Armenian Apostolic Church. In particular, the counsel
in 1 Corinthians ("For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then
face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also
I am known.") reminded her that human time is short, that all can't
be known now, that trust in the future is a precursor to living.
"To get to this point, I've had to clutch onto something, and my
spirituality has been a great source of strength," she says.
At last, things are breaking her way; she has been published in
several forums, was a finalist in a New York poetry competition,
and is writing full time.
It is a cultural stereotype, the solitary scribbler toiling for a
literary breakthrough by the dim light of a desk lamp. To struggling
writers, there's little that's romantic about this monastic
lifestyle. Last winter, a discussion sponsored by The Writers'
Room of Boston about the occupational hazards of penury, isolation,
and deadlines drew a crowd, reports Rabbi Susan Schnur, a writer who
assembled the panel.
Not all wordsmiths seek their solace and their muse in spirituality,
of course. But when you're a writer and a rabbi, faith is as essential
as the word processor. Schnur compares spirituality in handling
inevitable literary setbacks with the Jewish mourning tradition of
sitting shiva. In writing, she says by e-mail, "one must learn to `sit
with' and even `welcome' the hard stuff: The first draft necessarily is
awful; the time spent on material that you later decide is irrelevant
to your project is par for the course; the days when all you do is
put in a comma and then take it out -- yes, that's what it means to
be a writer."
"Writing is lonely," says Myrna Patterson, a Cambridge poet and writing
teacher who fuses her Jewish heritage with Buddhist practices to combat
that loneliness. From Buddhism comes the idea that we shouldn't grow
attached to anything, be it material goods or the loneliness of the
present moment; Patterson tries to pass on that wisdom by encouraging
students to meditate.
If writers' block is their problem, pluck out preconceived notions,
she advises, and discard "any fixed idea of how things are going to
turn out."
Giragosian says she finds her poetry topics by the compass of faith.
The New Hampshire Review, in its current issue, published her "Portrait
of Gertrud Lowe," a haunting meditation prompted by the fate of the
title character, a real-life woman who posed for a painting in her
youth and who later perished in a Nazi concentration camp.
The poet gazes at the portrait, juxtaposing the innocent's pose
with knowledge of what was to come. "No white dress / can save you /
from the Anschluss," she writes, continuing later:
Facing the easel, it was natural that your shoulders folded toward
your breasts to avert the artist's gaze, just as they will turn the
moment you witness history's obscenity one afternoon when stormtroopers
shoot the locks on the French doors of your house and kick down the
screen of your dressing room to pull you, napping from the burgundy
velvet cushions.
"I wanted to remember this particular woman," says the poet. "[She]
ended up in circumstances where her remains cannot be found, where no
one knows what happened. . . . I felt guided by my sense of spiritual
yearning and seeking some kinds of answers about why evil happens."
Her spiritual choices aren't always grim. "Fenway," an ode to the
ballpark currently among poems on display at Boston City Hall,
is about generations passing on values to their successors and the
bonding that takes place when people visit that landmark. But whether
as cheery as a summer ball game or as chilling as Nazi pathology,
a writer's subject can fulfill William Faulkner's definition of his
craft's spiritual mission:
"It is [the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his
heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride
and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of
his past."
By Rich Barlow | August 5, 2006
Boston Globe,MA
Aug 5, 2006
For 30 years, Patricia Giragosian labored in journalism and teaching,
but those were always a holding pattern while she sought her heart's
destination, a poet's career. "I felt I was being Lois Lane," she
says of her newspaper days. "My poetry is me."
Yet the need to pay the bills, plus literary stage fright, gave her
a stiff-necked resistance to publishing her work.
Then Giragosian, 53, of Boston, began exploring her family's Christian
roots in the Armenian Apostolic Church. In particular, the counsel
in 1 Corinthians ("For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then
face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also
I am known.") reminded her that human time is short, that all can't
be known now, that trust in the future is a precursor to living.
"To get to this point, I've had to clutch onto something, and my
spirituality has been a great source of strength," she says.
At last, things are breaking her way; she has been published in
several forums, was a finalist in a New York poetry competition,
and is writing full time.
It is a cultural stereotype, the solitary scribbler toiling for a
literary breakthrough by the dim light of a desk lamp. To struggling
writers, there's little that's romantic about this monastic
lifestyle. Last winter, a discussion sponsored by The Writers'
Room of Boston about the occupational hazards of penury, isolation,
and deadlines drew a crowd, reports Rabbi Susan Schnur, a writer who
assembled the panel.
Not all wordsmiths seek their solace and their muse in spirituality,
of course. But when you're a writer and a rabbi, faith is as essential
as the word processor. Schnur compares spirituality in handling
inevitable literary setbacks with the Jewish mourning tradition of
sitting shiva. In writing, she says by e-mail, "one must learn to `sit
with' and even `welcome' the hard stuff: The first draft necessarily is
awful; the time spent on material that you later decide is irrelevant
to your project is par for the course; the days when all you do is
put in a comma and then take it out -- yes, that's what it means to
be a writer."
"Writing is lonely," says Myrna Patterson, a Cambridge poet and writing
teacher who fuses her Jewish heritage with Buddhist practices to combat
that loneliness. From Buddhism comes the idea that we shouldn't grow
attached to anything, be it material goods or the loneliness of the
present moment; Patterson tries to pass on that wisdom by encouraging
students to meditate.
If writers' block is their problem, pluck out preconceived notions,
she advises, and discard "any fixed idea of how things are going to
turn out."
Giragosian says she finds her poetry topics by the compass of faith.
The New Hampshire Review, in its current issue, published her "Portrait
of Gertrud Lowe," a haunting meditation prompted by the fate of the
title character, a real-life woman who posed for a painting in her
youth and who later perished in a Nazi concentration camp.
The poet gazes at the portrait, juxtaposing the innocent's pose
with knowledge of what was to come. "No white dress / can save you /
from the Anschluss," she writes, continuing later:
Facing the easel, it was natural that your shoulders folded toward
your breasts to avert the artist's gaze, just as they will turn the
moment you witness history's obscenity one afternoon when stormtroopers
shoot the locks on the French doors of your house and kick down the
screen of your dressing room to pull you, napping from the burgundy
velvet cushions.
"I wanted to remember this particular woman," says the poet. "[She]
ended up in circumstances where her remains cannot be found, where no
one knows what happened. . . . I felt guided by my sense of spiritual
yearning and seeking some kinds of answers about why evil happens."
Her spiritual choices aren't always grim. "Fenway," an ode to the
ballpark currently among poems on display at Boston City Hall,
is about generations passing on values to their successors and the
bonding that takes place when people visit that landmark. But whether
as cheery as a summer ball game or as chilling as Nazi pathology,
a writer's subject can fulfill William Faulkner's definition of his
craft's spiritual mission:
"It is [the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his
heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride
and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of
his past."