I first read Carol Purington’s poems in the 1980’s
when I was living in Japan. What a surprise to discover a haiku poet
living in Colrain, Massachusetts, just a few miles from where I had
grown up. On my first visit to Woodslawn Farm, I remember picking
Black-eyed Susans along the roadside and presenting them to Carol’s
mother, who ushered me to Carol’s bright corner room (formerly the
parlor). Now, whenever I visit my family, I drive up to the western
hills to spend time with Carol. Larry Kimmel, a tanka poet and editor of
Winfred Press, often joins us as we talk about poetry and read our own
work to one another. In the summer of 2001, we composed a linked tanka
to commemorate our gathering.
Cocoon of Coolness
Nasturtiums floating
in an earthware bowl
vivid memories
given away this afternoon
by three farm kids who harvest words cp
from noon to dusk
in the room where you spend your life
cocoon of coolness
out in the fields armyworms
bore through the ripening corn mc
over cake and coffee
with cream fresh from the barn
you tell of a tea ceremony
at the window
thrum of a hummingbird lk
the different pitches
of our voices as we read
poems of love and grief
a childhood teddy bear
straddles the iron lung mc
seen in my mirror
insights flash from face to face
that nameless fragrance
garden chimes touched by a breeze
that crossed the continent cp
from the kitchen
the clatter of supper dishes
still so much to say
by the door stone
marsh-mallows fold their blue lk
On Carol’s first day of elementary school, she put
her head down on her desk because she had a bad headache. Her teacher
sent her home. A spinal tap at the hospital tested positive for the
polio virus. Her brother and sister were also positive, but they had no
symptoms. Carol was able to move her left hand from her chest to
abdomen, but that was all. She spent the next two years in hospitals and
rehabilitation centers, breathing with the aid of an iron lung or a
chest ventilator.
Left by my parents
in a hospital room
in isolation
the dark of their going
the dark of my staying
Weeks isolated
from
those without the virus
My baby brother
learning to take steps
My body learning not to walk
Carol learned how to read in a rehabilitation
center where she used a long stick with an eraser on it, held between
her teeth, to turn the pages.
empty afternoon….
her teacher says I must not
divide by 0 cp
between hopscotch and geometry
I draw a blank lk
My childhood room
four-square but with a fifth corner
no one ever saw—
a crimson carpet waited there
to fly me to fabulous lands
After two years in hospitals, followed by an
extended stay at her aunt’s house (which had a generator for emergency
power), she was able to return home to her beloved Woodslawn Farm. Carol
breathes with the assistance of a chest ventilator; in the corner of her
room is a Porta-Lung (a light-weight version of an iron lung), where she
sleeps at night.
Between thunder
and the world seen again
by lightning
the drag of my ventilator
losing power, losing breath
She has control of two fingers on her left hand,
which she uses to turn on the switch for her telephone and to access her
mouth stick so she can turn pages in a book. Through the advancement of
computer technology, Carol is now able to write her books with a
voice-activated computer. “Polio changed my life, but it didn’t ruin my
life,” she says in Away from Home,
a limited edition of prose for family and friends about her first years
with polio.
Even in the dream
marveling the way
my body floats—
I who
cannot move
swim free of gravity
Porcelain stopper
from my first bottle of perfume
apple blossom
the magic of childhood gone
before I could use it all
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Carol composed hundreds
of haiku, inspired by the changing seasons at Woodslawn Farm and stories
told to her by family members. She also drew on childhood memories.
"Memories have their roots in emotions, but they also grow from the
messages our senses bring to us about the outside world and the body’s
connections to it. I can still feel the sharp prick of gravel on bare
feet made tender by the winter’s confinement in socks and boots, the
stickiness of dandelion ice on my fingers after I picked a bouquet for
my mother. I remember racing as fast as I could down the little slope
from the sand pile to the house, using the momentum gained by the
descent to run up the steep back stairway to our kitchen. A glass of
cold milk waited for me there, or warm chocolate-bit cookies, or the
aroma of something cooked for supper.”
She discovered tanka through reading translations
of Yosano Akiko’s Tangled Hair
as well as original English-language tanka. “Reading these poems was
like being splashed all over with a downpour of emotions. I was
immediately, joyfully aware that this ancient form could embrace a
life’s worth of songs and sorrow, passion and peaceful musing,” she
writes in a recent article in Ribbons,
the Tanka Society of America Journal.
Spring snowstorm
all day I watch
daffodils
disappearing like joy
in a swirl of might-have-beens
Reading Carol’s tanka, I am reminded of Japanese
poets who transformed personal adversity into poetry. Masaoka Shiki,
suffering from debilitating tuberculosis, recorded his every-day
observations in haiku and tanka, which he called shasei
(sketches of life). Like Shiki in his Stray Notes While Lying
on My Back, Carol writes about what
she sees from her bedroom window at Woodslawn Farm: hummingbirds at the
feeder, fresh-mown hay, cows grazing, snowfall on the mountains. Toward
the end of his life and in pain, Shiki wrote: “I feel the pain and see
the beauty.” Carol’s love of beauty and nature connect her to the world.
The old barn
falling into wild rosebushes—
I no longer demand
that the pain be taken away,
only that beauty grow beside it
A pond made by beavers
fished now in the magic of twilight
by a tall heron…
it is time to go indoors
but I’m not living in time
Carol’s poems also bloom from her imagination. In
1997, she shifted away from her own life and went back in time to write
a tanka narrative in what she calls a "‘shadow voice." In The Trees
Bleed Sweetness,
she takes on the persona of a Native American woman from Western
Massachusetts and follows her life from childhood to old age.
Singing at dawn
because the lightness of green has come back
to the valley –
and so have we,
O little yellow bird!
Through waterfall spray
salmon flash silver to their mating
No one near to name
the wetness on my cheeks
He has chosen another
Four years later, she published a second tanka
narrative, A Pattern for This Place,
which explores the life of a pioneer woman living in Massachusetts two
hundred years ago.
He returns at dusk,
wild strawberries cupped pink
in his hard palm
I eat their sweetness one by one
and we talk about the day
Night and day and night
the baby’s cough –
I have no medicine,
no old woman to tell me what to do
And the snow deeper every day
Carol is one of the most innovative and prolific poets I have the pleasure
of knowing. She has published eight collections of poetry and prose. Her
haiku and tanka have won prestigious awards, including First, Third and
Honorable Mention in the Tanka Society of America’s 2002 International Tanka
Contest; Award for Best Book of Linked Verse: A
Spill of Apples: Tanrenga and Other Linked
(Haiku Society of America, 2004); and a Merit Book Award for
Family Farm, Haiku for a Place of Moons
(Haiku Society of America, 2000). In 2006
Greenfield Community College awarded her their Distinguished Alumnus Award.
In Gathering Peace,
her most recent tanka collection, Carol takes us on her life’s
journey—beginning with anticipation and hope, expanding her mind in a
world narrowed by physical limitations, discovering the joy of writing
poetry, acknowledging the pain of having a body unable to satisfy
longings, and finally acceptance and peace. “I am a writer because I map
my heart and my world with words and I need to see these words on paper.
To me this is breathing, not therapy.”
What night the crickets
began to measure time?
I was not listening
dazzled by the weave of firefly
and falling star
Books by Carol
Purington
HAIKU
Family Farm, Haiku for a Place of Moons,
Winfred Press, 1999
Woodslawn Farm Haiku for a New England Year,
1989
Braided Rug,
Haiku and Variations,
co-written with Sally L. Nichols, 1995
TANKA
The Trees Bleed Sweetness,
Winfred Press, 1997
a spill of apples, tan renga and other linked
verse with Larry Kimmel, Winfred
Press, 2003
Gathering Peace,
Winfred Press, 2007
PROSE
Away from Home,
Winfred Press, 2005
