In Conversation with Nancy Naomi Carlson
A review of your new book, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, notes that "they come to us just as we need them. The poets here celebrate a culture and caution against hatred ... " What’s the significance of your book at this particular time in our history?
Thank you for bringing up the new anthology. Full disclosure: the anthology was the brainchild of my co-editor, Matthew Silverman, and these were the words he used to sell me on the idea. Throughout the ages, human beings have had a tendency to scapegoat other human beings … a need to blame others for all of life’s negative consequences and their own personal shortcomings. We now find ourselves living in a polarized America where White supremacists are pandering to people’s baser instincts. This anthology is a small act of resistance against the hatred and fear bubbling all around us.
How have the passing of your mother and sister-in-law in a year of so many losses affected your writing?
You really know how to get to the heart of the matter, don’t you! These huge personal losses took place in the same three-month period (November 2020 – January 2021), against a backdrop of hundreds of thousands of deaths in this country and the world. As a professional counselor, I am well acquainted with the stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—though we often cycle through these stages over and over again until we finally arrive at acceptance. It’s a process, and it’s not the first time I’ve been pulled into this vortex. Unfortunately, it will not be the last.
To keep myself from going under, I have clung to writing and translating, which have sustained me from the start of the pandemic. (I’ve heard from others about major writer’s block, so I consider myself very fortunate to still be able to write.) Indeed, I have never before been as prolific, except, perhaps, during chemotherapy, when I translated René Char’s Le Marteau sans maître (Hammer with No Master). It seems I now have a lot to say in my own writing, especially broaching existential themes. I instinctively know whether I need to condense my thoughts into a poem or luxuriate in the space prose affords. I’ve been finding that my writing has provided a balance for my mourning, which will eventually run its course … the mourning, that is, and hopefully not the writing!
Where and how have you found deep beauty in the past year?
Having been on lockdown for close to a year, my focus has understandably narrowed. I have barely left the house, and only for “essential” purposes, such as a mammogram, a dental implant started pre-COVID, and a handful of outside visits with my mother. I have found deep beauty in the kindnesses of friends and strangers behind their masks. Most importantly, I was fortunate to have been able to find deep beauty in my mother, discovering a side of her I hadn’t known before.
I knew her to be an accomplished woman, having been a pioneer in foreign language education at the elementary school level. At one point she was president of the American Association of Teachers of French and got to meet with Indira Gandhi! In her nineties she took up painting and was interviewed on radio and TV about her one-woman shows. Such a role model, my mother, on how to live one’s life, but also a role model for how to die. She wasn’t afraid of dying, and said she viewed her last several years as “bonus years.”
In the autobiography she wrote at age 95, Gladys Lipton Tells All (Almost): A Saucy Exploration of Her Life and Times, she provided a road map for living a long and happy life, which included starting each day with delight about being alive, choosing to be cheerful (no matter what), and exploring new ways of facing disappointments. Over the course of her ten months of lockdown, she let her hair turn gray and grow longer. She no longer wore lipstick or cared about her clothes. Above my desk is my mother’s picture, a month before she died, taken by my photographer sister. My mother has never looked more beautiful.