Florilegium #1
By Sara Dudo
“Florilegium” is an explorative writing column by nature enthusiast, poet, adjunct instructor, and Palette’s associate editor Sara Dudo. “Florilegium” refers to a collection of literary excerpts or fragments, evolving from the early 17th-century Latin (flos, flor– “flower” + legere “gather”) literally translating to “bouquet.” While in medieval Latin, the word referred to a compilation of writings or notes, it later found use in describing anthologies relating to flora and horticulture. With one foot in the literary world and the other in the horticultural, Sara will explore through this bi-monthly column her braided history with agriculture and farm work, travel, and writing, offering her woven experiences and findings. For each memory, Sara will examine writing and poetry through the lens of collection, both of literary gathering and literal gathering of flowers, plants, maps, insects, and more.
Re: How Do I Write This?
___A bird re-entering a bush
___like an idea regaining
___its intention, seeks
___the missed discoveries
___before attempting
___flight again.
___—Jorie Graham, “One in the Hand”
About eight years ago, I was attending a small university in South Jersey called Stockton University, where I majored in Literature, with a concentration in Creative Writing. I strictly wrote fiction (admittedly, badly-written fiction of strong independent women robbing men in the West), until my junior year, when my love for poetry was unearthed. I never thought too much of poetry before this, mostly because I didn’t take the time to understand the verse of Dickinson or the genius of Shakespeare, and because I just wasn’t well read in the genre. But after my first poetry workshop, studying Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, and reading (and rereading) Larry Levis’ Winter Stars five times, I was converted.
At this time, I was also shamelessly pining after a mysterious guy in my Shakespeare class. This would have been very romantic if not for the fact that he was involved with someone else at the time, and I still didn’t understand Shakespeare. However, after a few serious fumbles on both his part and mine, Ray and I finally started dating at the end of junior year. And as an added surprise, in that summer, we worked side-by-side on the same flower farm (more on that another time).
Since I had just begun my relationship with writing poetry and had also started a new relationship with the man I’d end up marrying three years later, I wrote a lot of love poems. Mostly notes to myself on my notes app that I’d later try to string together into intimate stream of consciousness prose. I attempted imitations of the famous Pablo Neruda and that little pink book and sought to exchange my independent women hoodwinking western men trope into a love finally received, lights all peripheral and dewy in the summer of our youth. And I knew they were cliché, full of images overused and a theme that often bores nowadays; hence why I never bothered to submit them to any magazines. As a new poet, I was terrified of being cliché, of not adhering to Ezra Pound’s demand of “making it new” (Make it New: Essays).
Of course, this is only where the story begins. June wore an oracle, July had wings. But August brought me plummeting back down to earth, out of the firmament. At the beginning of the pinnacle month of summer, Ray was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, late stage two. We were twenty-one, preparing for our senior year, and he was informed cancer plagued his body, his chest scans luminescent. Days spent surfing at the beach and late nights talking on the river docks were exchanged for days lying in bed, with the air on to keep it cool, and a stack of movies to entertain us through the first days. His first admittance of “I love you” was soon followed by the guilt-driven attempts at persuading me to leave him, to avoid the pain of his possible death. I stayed.
Chemotherapy began soon after, and we started our fall semester. When I wasn’t at university or working at the flower farm, I was accompanying him to his chemotherapy appointments in Philadelphia or keeping him company as he fought through days of nausea and fatigue. When I visited him, I was the soothing presence, the constant. At any other time, I was falling apart, coping with the reality of his potential death and watching him grow sicker from treatment and the cancer that chemotherapy couldn’t quite evict from his body.
As is the case with most writers, I was seeking the security and hideout of poetry as a means of coping, and of expressing my fear, anxiety, pain, grief, whatever name to identify this shifting experience. I wrote about the day trips to Philadelphia and the conversations along the way (and too, the silence). I wrote about lost youth and feeling like so much time had been stolen from us. Most couples get at least a year of the honeymoon phase, I thought, and we hardly had two months. I wrote about his experience, the behind-the-scenes daily atrocities that I knew he wouldn’t write but deserved to be shown. Where he was humble and refused to complain, I was rampant with lines.
During this time, I was more passionate about writing than ever. However, my literary conundrum was twofold. First, I myself was not diagnosed with cancer, so there was the constant guilt gnawing at my conscience, prodding that I did not have the right to record everything, because it wasn’t happening to me. Besides the typical “it could be worse” comments from family members, there were also the awkward side comments and behind-the-back judgements of those who found my practice of writing the experience to be odd. To many, writing out Ray’s tribulations and my attempts to comfort him and bring him peace were inappropriate, and albeit, even embarrassing. Was I sensationalizing his pain for my own gain? To me, it was the most natural course of action. I’m a writer. It’s what writers do. I need to write down what’s happening to me and to those around me in order to understand it. If Joan Didion was correct in saying “We write to discover what we think,” I was writing my way through discovering what I believe about life, purpose, and love.
Second, I wanted my work out in the world, but I feared that my content (a young person dating another young person who gets diagnosed with cancer) was far too overdone, thanks to the romanticization of illness in the movie industry. Hollywood produced several movies, including the adaptation of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, with the same basic plot: a young individual receives a fatal diagnosis, and together with their partner, they live their life to the fullest, empowered by their prescribed death. Other key qualities: impressively beautiful characters, even with the dark shadows under the eyes and chemotherapy regimens poisoning their insides; recurring adventures and/or travel regardless of the common restrictions on social activities given germs and low blood cell counts; and the death of one character as a peaceful and natural ending of the movie, sans the years of grief the other character would experience and the thousands of dollars of debt accumulated on a credit card from that “you only live once” trip they were somehow medically cleared to go on.
So, if I was going to write about Ray and myself, our history working on a flower farm, and the trials that came with his cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatment, how could I do it in a way that wasn’t selfish, cliché, overdone, or inappropriate? How do I approach this in my own voice, in a way that says, “you may know the ‘illness within love’ trope, but you don’t know our specific story.” And I think we all fall into this self-doubt in one way or another as writers—how do I write about a topic, such as love, in a way that offers something new?
I could hear Pound’s famous line of “making it new” harassing me as I sorted out how to write what felt true to me while also being new, exciting, intriguing, and powerful (although, it turns out Ezra Pound didn’t come up with this idea at all, but rather likely stole it from the neo-Confucian scholar Chu Hsi). The most obvious and logical answer, but what I also believe to be the best answer, is just to make it yours. Given my background in farming and travel, I’ve always been passionate about horticulture, flora and fauna, entomology, landscape, and the likes. Additionally, as a literature major, I enjoyed conducting research on technical terminology and etymology. The answer to these questions was hidden in the very things that are mine, the things I notice that another individual may not, to shift the perspective of the prism ever-so-slightly to catch the light I saw. While a danger in this mindset would be to base it on the “I’m not like other writers” mentality, I put forward that it isn’t about negation, but rather celebration of the particular life experiences and interests of the writer. To quote Jorie Graham, I sought after “the missed discoveries” of our life.
When I wrote about the day trips to Philadelphia, instead of focusing on the conversation, I manically wrote down everything I saw along the way: fields of blueberry bushes turning red for the winter, the changing leaves creating a golden hall of the highway, the river shadowed by dead maples attacked by lanternflies, etc. I asked Ray if I could peruse the papers his doctors gave him, with the names of all the chemotherapy drugs, side effects, and other medical information like his blood cell counts. I took questions I had always had about nature, like “why does this plant do this?” or “why does this insect act this way?” and sought to answer them through finding connections between my observations of the natural world and my observations of Ray, of us, of humans.
In my poems, I explored entomological behavior, such as “lanternflies suck the sap from trees, / weakening the plant just as cancer cells / steal nutrients from the body.” I referenced those sweet flowers of summer, such as bougainvillea, the rich papery goodness in purple and red: “in traditional Mexican medicine, bougainvillea has / long been used to heal certain ailments – if I die first, make me into bougainvillea paper flowers.” Research on the etymology of flower names like jonquil, zinnia, and daffodil informed lines: “Zinnia derived from the botanist Zinn, / but much earlier called mal de ojos / by the Aztecs; color so bold / it nauseates.” I considered the poinsettias that decorated Ray’s hospital room at the end of December as he slept quietly with blood clots pulsing in his lungs, and I obsessed over geomorphology, studying landforms within desert and mountain landscapes, drawing connections between acts of the land and acts of the body: erosion, underground activity, and the role of water, wind, and time. How is the body like an arroyo? Like a hollow? Ultimately, I considered that ethical question of writing someone else’s pain by interviewing Ray, asking him to rattle off a list of all his favorite things from his childhood. I noted in a diary entry, “To know their pain, you must know the individual. And to love them well, you must not let the pain be the entire frame.” The resulting poem, titled “Remission” attempted just this: “ray the bird in you the jade in you the try in you / ray the wren you watched from child window ray / the flowering pear phalanx on Main rounding the haste / in you ray.”
I know offering the counter-advice of “make it yours” in response to Ezra Pound’s “make it new” is not groundbreaking. But thus far, I’ve found that the clarity and confidence of my work has arisen from the specificity of our shared experience, from looking at our life with the possibilities of “missed discoveries,” and from “researching [our] own life” as Michael Pearson advocates. My habit of scribbling on the back of flower farm to-do lists and order sheets, collecting research and data on plants and insects, and journaling the daily life of illness is how I’ve reckoned with pain, change, and beauty, in my life and in my writing, and how I’ve created my own framing of reality as a writer, as you can, too.