A REFINING OF THE ABILITY

To tell the truth
by Marc Lebovitz



They were on a collision course, and Lucia Cordell Getsi was only a small child.

It was at an early point in her childhood when the intelligent, independent, adventurous Tennessee girl and the magical, illuminating world of books met head-on at the William H. and Edgar Magness Community House and Library in the Middle Tennessee town of McMinnville. It probably came as no surprise to those who knew her that the second child of Sam and Georgia Cordell flung herself enthusiastically into reading. None of her ventures were or are halfhearted.

"As a small child I decided that I needed to be stronger, so I would carry these large boulders around," the Illinois State University Distinguished Professor of English recalls. "And when I decided I had to cure myself of vertigo, which I'd had since I was seven, I started to climb the faces of cliffs near my home. No ropes, no tools, no nothing. It was terrible, but I thought I needed to get over my fear. I'd get to the top and then lie down and crawl back to the edge like a snake and make myself look over-for hours."

When she characteristically made up her mind to know everything there was to know in the world, she pitched camp in McMinnville's library and became a library fixture. With a ruler she measured the stacks of books she would read, making sure she completed at least a foot of books per week. She eventually knew every shelf in the Magness Library and became aware that knowledge was larger than the library only when she perused a "read" shelf and discovered a new book had appeared.

She loved horse books, dog books, Nancy Drew books, and books her mother didn't want her to read, such as Forever Amber and Inherit the Wind. She read books at the library, at school, during church sermons, on the porch, sitting in trees, and at night under her bed blanket with a flashlight until morning.

For all the literary world gave to Lucia Cordell Getsi, she has admirably and sufficiently repaid as an adult. She has published five volumes of poetry and translations as well as poems, fiction, translations, and critical essays in 60 or 70 refereed journals. Among the writing awards she has won are the Capricorn Prize for the book of poems Intensive Care, the Ann Stanford Prize, a Pablo Neruda Prize, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and numerous grants and awards for The Spoon River Poetry Review, which she edits.

Even more important, Getsi shares her passion for the written word with students from elementary school through college graduate school and with the general public of all ages. Her public school poetry workshops, public lectures, and public readings of her works have ignited interest and enjoyment in poetry throughout the United States.

There is a bittersweet irony to the physical and mental fitness conditioning young Lucia put herself through, because she was barely out of her teens when both capacities were put to the test. Her mother, a strong, intense, and deeply religious woman, committed suicide just days after Lucia's 21st birthday. Exactly 20 years later, in 1985-86, Getsi's 17-year-old daughter, Manon, contracted the deadly and paralyzing Guillain-BarrŽ syndrome. After many months of hospitalization followed by rehabilitation therapy, Manon recovered, although she continues to be vulnerable to other ailments.

Those traumatic experiences, plus her other life experiences and observations, have played a key role in Getsi's poetry. Manon's illness resulted in Getsi writing the award-winning Intensive Care, the creation of which served as an outlet for Getsi's anger and frustration and also allowed her to be a proxy for Manon's then-still voice. She admits that being able to write about the experience, in a way, helped save her own life.

Books were young Lucia's lifeline to other worlds, her escape from small-town Tennessee, and an endless source of experiences and information. At various times in her life she thought the information was her own. Once, as an adult, she cut open an infected wound on a horse's leg, squeezed out the bad blood, and had her daughter, Manon, lead the horse to stand in the creek each day for a week until the water healed the wound. The horse survived. It wasn't until about a year later, while reading the classic book My Friend Flicka to Manon, that Getsi discovered that her "intuitive knowledge" used to help the horse actually came from the pages of that book, which she had read and reread as a child.

But Getsi's real memories, experiences, observations, and emotions are ingredients that produced the award-winning poet, author, editor, and professor she is today at Illinois State University. Although her careers as an educator and as a writer have been distinguished for years, the honors have been particularly frequent in recent years. She was the 1994 Poet of the Year in Illinois, the same year the University named her an outstanding researcher, and last November Gov. Jim Edgar presented her with the Governor's Award for the Arts in the individual artist category.

She graduated magna cum laude in English from Middle Tennessee State University and has master's and doctoral degrees from Ohio University. She had NDEA and teaching fellowships at Ohio and studied for one year in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship. Her first book was a translation of the complete works of Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl, followed by books of poetry titled Bottleships: For Daughters, Teeth Mother Letters, and No One Taught This Filly to Dance.

Intense personal experiences have not only been the subjects of her writing, but the insight Getsi gained during those experiences and throughout her life continue to invigorate her poetic juices. But experiences and emotions and observation don't make the poetry write itself. Getsi spends countless hours on each work and particularly enjoys the opportunity to focus only on poetry while in residencies, such as last summer's residency at the Ragsdale Foundation in Lake Forest.

"When I'm at a writers' colony, or on a grant, all I do is write," she says. "I can obsess about one poem for weeks, if I want to. Often I'll write one humongous poem, and then the filtering starts. There are huge baths of imagery, thought, context, emotions that wash over the original images, thoughts and ideas I started with. Poetry is the kind of art that needs long spaces of time to think and to create and just allow the fluid movement of images to wash over the whole paradigmatic axis of memory, the whole memory self.

"That's what grants such as from the National Endowment for the Arts permit artists to do. But now the stupid, totalitarian people who are scared of ideas and who want the world their way have had their way with the NEA, and it's basically gone," she says.

"To write a book of poetry takes, usually, five to 10 or 11 years, but Intensive Care was an exception. It took me from 1988 to about 1990 or '91. When I first started writing those poems it was very cathartic. The poem 'Nursing' was written when I was in such a rage, I was so angry, the kind of anger where you think you are going to melt. I was angry at the entire medical profession, angry at nurses who couldn't spell or remember to cover Manon's stomach with the lead shield during the 1,000 chest X rays."

During Manon's first months of hospitalization, none of her body's systems were working, including her ability to speak. She communicated by spelling words. Not vocally, but by having her mother or a nurse recite the alphabet out loud while she indicated by blinking, letter by letter, the words she wanted to communicate. A nurse who either could not spell or who did not want to make the effort to communicate Manon-style moved Manon's headset, which the paralyzed teenager used to call for the nurse, out of reach of her head-the only body part she could move at that time. As a result, Manon could not alert the doctors that her feeding tube was twisted and she was in great pain and long overdue for a pain shot. Her mother discovered the problem the next morning. She addressed the nurses in "Nursing" (see page 6).

"There were wonderful nurses too, of course," she recalls, "but the poem was cathartic in dealing with those bad ones. Some of the other poems in the book were ways of funneling unresolved things from my life through that experience. That experience cast a new light on those unresolved things, the kind of light that makes meaning in life. That kind of 'making meaning' is what makes us human."

Manon still weeps at her mother's public readings from Intensive Care, and to this day there is still one poem that Getsi cannot read aloud without choking a little. "The book, for her, is my experience of her illness," she says. "It is a mirror she can look back into because, blessedly, she did not see herself in the mirror during that time. At the time, she looked as though she would not survive, and I did not let her see that."

Although she continues to bring poetry to classrooms in Illinois and elsewhere, Getsi can't hide her disappointment in the state of reading, especially reading poetry, these days.

"Poetry just isn't there in the schools," she says. "It isn't in public schools, it isn't in the libraries, it isn't even much in the bookstores except for specialized bookstores. Anything that requires lonely concentration is not in the schools anymore. It's not a financial issue, it's just unnatural to our contemporary culture to be silent. But poetry grows out of that silence. As a result, poetry now has been marginalized and hidden."

Reading during childhood, particularly reading poetry, can introduce children to a new worlds of information and insight and experience that can ultimately inspire them to explore their own ideas and feelings. Children, Getsi firmly believes, need poetry and art and music and drama and all the arts in their lives as early as possible in order to have the greatest benefit throughout theirlives. But the great power of poetry is nowhere to be found in too many American schools.

"Ninety percent of the teachers in elementary and high schools don't know where to go to find poetry. I've been to hundreds of school libraries where they don't have books in the library, only audiovisual equipment or computers. Most school libraries don't have poetry, especially elementary school libraries. It's because students aren't expected to go in and read; and, if they do go in, they don't read poetry, because they haven't been exposed to it. I've been to some of the best schools in our state to do a poetry workshop and have had students who have never read a poem. They might get a Hallmark card with what is called poetry on it, and that's what they think poetry is. What do you do?" Getsi asks.

"I can't tell you how many times I've received calls from teachers who ask about my poetry outreach program, a small outreach program I run through Spoon River Poetry Review, who say, 'Poetry is the field I feel most unsure about, most uncomfortable teaching.' I tell them they don't have to 'teach' poetry, they don't have to know everything about a poem before teaching it. All they have to do is enjoy it, and let students enjoy it. Just put the poetry out there.

"The program is free to the schools, but they have to do it under my conditions: three weeks devoted to nothing but poetry in the English classes," she says. "We use a Spoon River Poetry Review poet, and I try to feature two poets a year with an Illinois connection, so I have an endless supply throughout the state.

"The only thing I want to come out of it is that students have a fantastically wonderful, integrating experience with poetry. They accomplish something, learn something new, get excited about it, assimilate it, accommodate it, and are changed by it; and they are different people when I or my assistant walk out of their room. I want the students to have an experience that imprints so deeply that they will associate the experience with language, with poetic language, and with poetic form forever. They know it is something called poetry, and they can access that world any time they want, easily. I teach them the access points: the literary bookstores, the small presses, now the Internet, how to get the books, and what books to look for."

Lest anyone get the impression that the absence of poetry in the schools tempts her to quit bringing poetry to the younger set, Getsi brims with hope and excitement when she tells about the students in the K-2 class she met in Granville, Illinois, or the very at-risk teenagers attending a special Los Angeles school that serves as their last chance at a high school diploma.

In her discussions about poetry with all those groups, Getsi sometimes uses prints of paintings of horses by German artist Franz Marc as a basis for imagery. "I use Franz Marc's works because they always have weird stuff in them that can't be explained," she says. "I ask the students to walk into the picture and describe what is happening. I ask them to describe shapes and to step in and out of the painting and to walk around the horses in the picture. The assignment is to write a communal poem, which everyone contributes to and which ends up many pages long before it gets whittled down [see page 9]."

"And that is a complete experience," Getsi says. "They brought their whole world into it and put another world into that whole world and have taken that enriched world and galloped to wherever they think they are going back to. But they'll never get back to it, because these are changed little people. They'll never look at art the same way or a horse the same way. That is the secret power of art.

"It's about imagination and the ability to imagine," she says. "Television and movies steal our ability to imagine, and that's a killer for poetry. Without the ability to imagine, you can't really read, but you particularly can't read poetry. Unless you can picture in your mind everything that passes in front of you in a poem, you get nothing out of it. I can't teach students to write until I teach them how to think metaphorically, in an image-based way.

"The kids in L.A. were kids who had seen everything: pregnancy, drugs, guns, death. They really wanted to go to this school although it's very hard; and, if they don't stick with it, they are out. I laid out the paintings, and we started talking about them. They are very smart kids with wonderful language skills. The poetry they wrote spoke volumes to me. All their hope and unjaded idealism came pouring through."

Getsi's mother was descended from Braxton Bragg, a brilliant Civil War general who is blamed in part for the South's defeat because of his failure to take advantage of the victory of his Army of Tennessee at the Battle of Chickamauga.

"I see those fanatically obsessive, brilliant, moody characteristics on that side of the family, and I have been obsessive off and on about a lot of things in my life," Getsi admits. "But I've channeled it differently, redistributing aspects of my personality. Writing helps to rechannel things, because it requires an intense paying attention to things and requires a self-honesty. That could be an illusion, but I really think it does.

"You are very aware, when you are writing, of when you are lying. Truthfulness is not easy. It really is very difficult," she says. "The act of writing is a refining of the ability to tell the truth, the need to tell the truth. Only the artist knows how very difficult it is to be truthful."

Quotation taped to Getsi's Stevenson Hall office door: "Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."-Willa Cather

"People are hungry today with their self-help books and natural health and tai chi and meditation and yoga and all this kind of stuff," Getsi says. "But the nourishment they need is available to them through literature. They just have to take the time to access it. You can't read a poem like you read a newspaper, because it is all the invisible stuff, all the stuff you're not reading, that is what's important, and it takes time for that to come forward."

Getsi recalls a personal example of the nourishment and enjoyment that comes from literature in general.

My Friend Flicka is about the relationship between love and death and between insanity and genius. It is a magnificent novel that had a profound influence on me as a child, especiallythe love-and-death and madness-and-genius motifs. I saved that horse's life in Tennessee, but I didn't know I had learned it from that book until I read it with Manon.

"One time, Manon, her first stepfather, and I were reading the book out loud in the car on the way back to Normal from the stable in Decatur where our horses were stabled. We were reading and couldn't stop when we got to our driveway," she says. "It was the climax of the novel, and three of us were sobbing. The boy in the novel had been up all night caring for the horse, who had been badly injured by barbed wire and was all infected and about to die from this terrible fever. It is a powerful description of love as a life force and of what it feels like to begin to die, of the process of death. In fact, it's an exact description of what I went through with Manon.

"But in the story there is a transference, and the fever goes to the boy, who becomes sick with pneumonia and is delirious. He hears a shot and thinks his father has shot his horse. Actually, the father had shot a cougar. The boy wakes up six months later and finds that Flicka is alive and fine. Flicka is the anima of this little boy, it is his female side, his creativity. It's a complex, amazing novel.

"Well, we clambered back into the house, still reading the whole time, sitting on the floor for another 20 minutes, all of us sitting there sobbing as we finish the book. We weren't a bit embarrassed! Incredible! Jeez! How many times does that happen when a family can share that kind of emotional experience-safely?"


Nursing




The Big Blue Horses in Autumn



(By the K-2 class in Granville, Illinois)




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