Janine Canan is the author of Journeys with Justine, a collection of stories, and ten volumes of poetry including Burning through Everything (forthcoming), Changing Woman (Small Press Review "Pick"), In the Palace of Creation: Selected Works 1969-1999, Shapes of Self, and Of Your Seed (NEA grant recipient). She edited and translated the acclaimed collections, Messages from Amma: In the Language of the Heart ("Best Spiritual Books 2004"), Star in My Forehead: Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler (BookSense & City Lights "Pick"), and She Rises like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Poets (Koppelman Award, "One of the best books to come from the Women's Spirituality movement"-Booklist). Her work has been anthologized by Codrescu, Cotner, Harvey, Laughlin and many others.
When did my life begin? In 1942 I was born in the City of the Queen of Angeles, amidst the worldwide violence of World War II. My father, Lewis, who co-owned two restaurants (classified "essential business"), was spared the horror of the war. At his Wich Stand Drive-in he had courted a twenty year old beauty with poignant dark eyes, Mary Clay, who was studying voice and working as a carhop.
Lewis Marion Burford was a slender, handsome twenty-eight year old, still living with his mother, Flora Agnes (1887-1973), daughter of Lou Eva (Pike) Perkins (1867-1922) and John Exum Cox (1849-1926). Flora Burford was a Quaker whose family had emigrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the British Isles to Pennsylvania, then North Carolina where they settled as plantation farmers in Dobbs (then Wayne) County. Lou and John moved west to Kansas, where redheaded Flora married Benjamin Simpson Burford (1883-1919), whose ancestors originated in the medieval village of Burford, England. The young couple left Kansas to farm in Colorado, and there gave birth to four children: Lucille, Glen, Louis (later changed to Lewis) and Hazel. Born in 1912, seven-year-old Louis was at home sick with his mother on the day his father's Ford skidded over treacherous ice into a tree that took his father's life. Flora remarried and drove west with her children and new husband to Los Angeles, where little Louis was overawed by his first view of the immense Pacific Ocean. Frugal Flora and her second husband, ever struggling to find work, eventually divorced. The children went to work picking oranges and running a juice stand. Somehow my father managed to save enough money for piano lessons. But by age seventeen the Depression had taught him the necessity of making money, and he realized he would have to read "the books of experience" for an education.
My mother, Mary Alene Clay, was born in Los Angeles in 1920, a third-generation Californian. But the history of her family of flamboyant storytellers may never be known-ancestral stories point to heritages from Germans, the English and Spanish, probably Jews and possibly Native Americans. I have often wondered from whom my grandmother, mother, sisters and I inherited our marked epicanthic oriental eyelids. Great-grandmother Jesse Hawthorne, born in California, had married Jacob Kircher, a Mormon blacksmith and Carlsbad, New Mexico, mayor with several wives, said to have descended from German Jews converted to Catholicism. Jesse eventually left Jacob and her children in New Mexico, returning to Los Angeles to open a cleaning business. Lela, the younger of their children, born in California in 1897, was sent east to a Catholic convent school in the Midwest, returning to California to marry Everett Clay and give birth to two daughters, June and Mary. Soon after Mary's birth, Clay departed, taking little June with him. Mary knew neither her father nor her sister.
Temperamental Lela, a good storyteller and phenomenal crocheter, temporarily a nurse and a Communist, was not an adequate mother. Moving frequently, occasionally changing partners, she neglected and mistreated her daughter. Mary sometimes lived with her Aunt Marguerite and briefly with a foster family. Changing schools constantly, with no father or siblings and a difficult mother, Mary found a place for herself in the welcoming world of books and entertained her new schoolmates with plays she wrote.
Both my parents, having lost their fathers early, grew up poor during the Twenties and the Great Depression, but by the spring of 1940, my father and his brother owned two flourishing drive-ins, and he and my mother were in love. A year later the striking dark-haired couple, after attending a wedding, spontaneously drove to Las Vegas and married. The next winter I was conceived in a cozy house on Adale Place. On the second day of November, the second Dia de los Muertos (the day dead children visit the living), I was born shortly after noon in Saint Vincent's Hospital. "Nuns rushed in the halls. Mother wore a silk bed jacket. The nipple was rubber," I wrote in the stream-of-consciousness prose poem "Childhood," dictated in 1977 during my psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatric residency. But twenty years later, in "Introduction to the Poet" from Changing Woman, it seemed more like this:
I slipped out of my mother's anesthetized womb into Saint Vincent's hospital in the City of the Queen of Angels (where my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother had arrived before me). The welcoming hands of a white-coifed nun tucked me into a safe niche in her long black gown that rustled, as she rushed down the corridor, with all the untold feminine mysteries of the millennia.
Mother gave me the name Janine, derived from a Hebrew root that means God is gracious, God is mercifull. She tried to nurse me, but her milk, like that of most American mothers during the nineteen-forties and subsequent decades, "dried up" within a week. I was changed to formula milk and fed on a pediatric schedule. A photograph of my parents with their newborn daughter Janine Ann reveals a joyful father tenderly rocking his first child in the crook of his arm, her tiny face tilted toward his, with a confused-looking mother standing beside him.
After my birth my father purchased an orange grove on Pomona Street in Brea, south of Los Angeles, and we three moved into a creamy cottage surrounded by thousands of fragrant orange trees. There my father and old Mr. Birch also raised chickens that produced eggs for the restaurants; from there he drove into the city to work. Mother began stitching a baby quilt, never finished but the stuffed golden bear who was to ride in the appliquéd donkey cart would become my dearest companion, loved literally to pieces. Before I could sit, Mother propped me beside her, reading stories and rhymes out of Olive Beaupré's beautifully illustrated My Little Book House. One quiet afternoon a blazing war plane crashed into the orange grove; the pilot strolled out of the wreckage nonchalantly lighting a cigarette. By five months, according to one photograph, I had assumed a detached and thoughtful gaze upon the changeable world. I did not crawl, but one day I suddenly stood and walked. My first sentence stunned my mother with its clarity: "May I have drink of water, please."
When I was about two, my parents moved back to Los Angeles for the birth of my sister, Dianne Louise, which took place on New Years Day, 1945. After a short stay in an apartment on Bronson Avenue, we moved into a three-story house at 4338 Palmero Street, located in the View Park hills overlooking the palm tree lined basin, midway between downtown, Hollywood and the beach, and just minutes from my father and uncle's Wich Stand Drive-in. My father chose a white Forties modern house built on a half acre copiously planted with roses, begonias, bougainvillea, all kinds of fruit trees-peach, lemon, lime, apricot, kumquat, loquat, fig and pomegranate, a southern magnolia with large white perfumy blooms, a towering avocado, and pink, lavender and white geraniums that tumbled down the hill with ivy.
My sister and I shared a bedroom lovingly decorated by Mother, where she sang at bedtime beautiful songs like Brahms's "Lullabye," "Springtime in the Rockies" and "Rockabye Baby," or recited amusing rhymes such as "The Little Girl with a Curl in the Middle of her Forehead." We, I especially, always clamored for more. Shortly before I turned three, the War reached its grand finale with America's unforgettable explosion of atomic bombs upon Japan. I entered Dr. Sooling's School for Little Folks, a pleasant place where I recall being scolded (so humiliating!) for spontaneously reaching for Dr. Sooling's bosom as I happily floated upon her lap.
When I turned six-"a stocky six year old in pink organdy...with intelligence in her voice" ("Some of Each," Shapes of Self)-I moved into my own bedroom, a sunny southwestern room over the garage, with a dressing room adjacent to a bathroom, that connected to the room of our much loved Irish housekeeper. The windows were surrounded by intense magenta bougainvillea; at night the avocado leaves shadow-danced on the ceiling. This beloved room, with its floral peach and jade wallpaper, colonial maple bed set and writing desk (that I helped my mother select), its many dolls-Didi babydoll, Jocko Lover-boy (a furry monkey with long arms and felt hands), storybook dolls, and knickknacks-a porcelain swan and elephant, a glass harp-was the setting for the rich inner life that occupied me throughout my childhood.
In the backyard my sister and I played on the swing and slide, built forts under the peach trees, and played badminton and croquet with the neighbors; in the street we played tag with the old pod-shedding catalpa tree as home base. We had a big collie named Michael of Tamarack (later heartbreakingly hit by a car), several cats, gracious neighbors including Mrs. French who watched over us from her window, the gentle Wilsons-a professor, schoolteacher wife and son, and two large Irish Catholic families, whose lively daughters wore intriguing dark blue and white school uniforms.
Mother, often preoccupied with her own problems, still managed to take care of our physical needs. She washed and braided our hair into looped brown braids, dressed us in pretty matching outfits (red wool sweaters, caps and mittens, ruffly pale blue chiffon dresses), decorated our bedroom delightfully, and made trips to the doctor and dentist most enjoyable. Mother loved the arts, had a variety of artistic talents herself, and arranged all kinds of lessons for us. I started with tap dancing at four and piano at five. As I bent over the big white and black keyboard, my fragile graying piano teacher Mary Martha Hart alongside me, Mother, on the rose sofa with her cup of coffee and cigarette in hand, bubbled praise. After tap dancing came ballet, then oil painting, marimba and flamenco, but the piano lessons never stopped. Mother completed her own high school education when I was about five, and our family proudly attended the graduation at which she sang "Ah Sweet Mystery of Life" in her lovely tremulous alto. Above all, my Mother passed on to me her love of beauty in art and nature.
At six, I entered first grade at Forty-Second Street Elementary School. There I painted a colorful cow, and met my friends Toni, Suzanne, Frannie, Maggie, David, Allen and my first boyfriend Archie. Our class memorized Longfellow's "The Children's Hour" and acted out parts of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (I was the narrator). We were immersed in the magic of childhood. On May Day we dreamily danced around the maypole, interweaving our long crepe-paper ribbons. During Covered Wagon Days we were pioneers: I remember Archie pulling his hand-carpentered Conestoga wagon while I, in hand-sewn pink and black dragonfly skirt and large bonnet, carried our doll children.
At home our family plugged in the first television on the block, built by my uncle Glen. Now we could watch Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent inside the big box on our playroom floor. By the time I was eight and Dianne six, a second sister, Michele Marie, was born. After spending her first days in an incubator, she emerged in a soft yellow blanket, soon learning to smile with a calm humor which was to protect her from some of the painful dramas that overshadowed Dianne's and my early years.
In those days I waited long lonely hours to be picked up after school, and getting to school-waking up Mother-was a similar ordeal. But on Sundays, a family friend took me to Sunday school at the friendly Presbyterian church where I had been baptized, and where my whole family attended on Christmas and Easter holidays. Occasionally I spent Saturday night at Grandmother Burford's, and attended a big evangelical church with her on Sunday. Christmases at our house were major events. On Christmas Eve we sang and played piano-even my father played a piece he recalled from his teens, and we caroled with neighbors. On Christmas day there were fabulous gifts, gorgeously wrapped, and the entire Burford family-uncles, aunts and cousins-came to our house later in the day for dinner and more gifts. "A Beautiful Meal" in Shapes of Self describes Mother's traditional Christmas dinner.
A good pupil, I formed strong attachments to many of the dedicated teachers who taught in our public schools. Since Mother was unpredictable, sometimes hypercritical, sometimes overpraising, and Father almost always at work, my teachers were all the more significant; in fact they were crucial. My early poetry collections contain memorials to some of them, such as "Bosom" which fuses my nurturing fourth grade teacher, Helen Humm, with my equally nurturing high school English teacher Blanche Garrison:
Helen Humm and Blanche Garrison have their large arm around me and I am pressed against the massive slope of their bosom. I look up at their silvery shingles of hair and broad roll of chin. Don't be afraid of the paint, says Helen Humm. Just write what comes to mind, Blanche Garrison adds.
My school friends were equally important. We formed a Brownie troop that evolved into a Girl Scout and later a Mariner troop, which afforded us innumerable opportunities to gather for exuberant birthday and slumber parties, craft sessions, volleyball games, and camp-outs under the brilliant pulsing stars. "My Book" (Shapes of Self) sums up the atmosphere of puberty that eventually overcame us:
Karen knows about sex. She has hair down there. Carol is bouncing on her ball in the swimming pool, having her first magical experience. She is rocking in the bathtub bargaining with God. I am floating in my inner tube with my book. Karen passes me a note, a figure with breasts; I add some lines and pass it back. Karen is busy with our drawing. My heart stops. Miss Smith is stalking down the aisle, snatching the drawing, crushing it in her fist. Her eyes are bulging out. Carol is crying at the blackboard. She is the only one who knows how to have one. At night she will dream of me: You were a rebel, you were mysterious, you were a powerful figure; together we would have made a perfect person. I was always in my book.
Indeed, I often had my nose stuck in a book as I devoured Heidi, the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and all the Nancy Drew mysteries given me by a neighbor. A school painting I made of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving shows a girl praying at a table spread with food, her mind filled with dual, transforming images of barren winter and abundant autumn harvest-unconsciously illustrating, perhaps, the vivid contrasts of my own alternatingly happy and unhappy childhood.
Managing his restaurants and other businesses-popcorn company, shopping center, even a small desert airport-Dad worked endless days and nights. He came home for Mother's tasty dinners-lamb roasts or creamed tuna on toast with spinach. We ate together in the coral kitchen booth, and then my father returned to work. Occasionally he came home for a midnight snack, and I was delightedly awakened to join in. My father often took us out to dinner, driving long distances throughout the county for a delicious meal-Southern fried chicken at Knotts' Berry Farm, prime rib at Lowry's in Beverly Hills, or chili with heaps of onions at Joe's downtown. When home, he was always helpful, bringing food for breakfast, bathing us or adjusting bedroom windows for fresh air. Deeply dedicated to his family, he set an example of modesty, discipline and devotion.
Terribly shy in the early years of adolescence, I was focused on school and my dreams. I had a voracious appetite to learn, combined with an aching longing for love, and spent many hours reading and daydreaming sprawled across my jade-quilted bed. The short poem "Burning" (Shapes of Self), based on a real-life encounter with Vanilla, one of my favorite scents, sums up the sort of personality I was developing:
No one is in the kitchen and I am climbing up to the top shelf, where the vanilla is kept. The vanilla of vanilla pudding, of warm bread custard, of vanilla frosting, the vanilla of banana cream pie. I hold the flat dark flask, untwisting its tight little lid. No one is coming as I bend to sniff its secret juice, place its mouth on my lips, tilt my head back and let it run in. You promised!-I swallow, burning.
On my twelfth birthday, Mother took me to the opera, La Bohème: I will never forget romantic Mimi dying over and over again upon her chaise lounge. Often ecstatically merged into the world around me, at twelve I was given my own first vision. One night mysterious shadows agitating upon the bedroom ceiling suddenly revealed the massive, all-consuming waves of Creation, crashing and rolling forever onward through time. From then on I was acutely aware of the reality of transience and knew there was no going back.
Whereas my conservative father lived in a world called "at work," and my mother seemed to float in an interior world with her constant cup of black coffee and cigarette, I lived increasingly in my glowing room. As my relationship with my mother grew difficult during my teens, I spent more time than ever there. And one night, doors slamming, the whole world seemed to shake apart as a major earthquake hit the City of the Angels. My budding independence, mounting energy and passionate hopes were more than Mother, often housebound by inner conflicts, could tolerate-wounding scenes, punishments, forgotten promises, gifts taken back, and threats to send me away to school were common occurrences.
Throughout childhood I often jotted down the thoughts that came to me in some significant and conclusive way-whispered to me by a growing inner voice-and dropped them into the maple drawer by my bed. At thirteen I entered Audubon Junior High School, wrote my first (as far as I know) poetic stanza, an embarrassing pubescent love call, and started studying the harp. "Her Strings" (Shapes of Self) tells how it came about:
Over Grandmother's sofa hung a large picture of a beautiful woman in a long blue dress, playing the harp. Next to her a woman in a gold dress stood singing. Then Maureen Love moved in next door. She played the harp. I used to go over to her big white house and watch her pluck and strum at the end of the long red-carpeted hall. Thin Maureen in her pink dress with her pink cheeks. So it was that, year after year, I asked for a harp. And one Christmas, waking early, I crept downstairs with my gifts, down the rose wool then the beige stairs onto the cool linoleum. My eyes rounded the corner and flew to the harp: Tall regal golden lover. Circling round I breathed upon, and where I touched her strings resounded.
This beautiful, golden 1917 Wurlitzer harp, generously given by my parents and chosen by my harp teacher, the encouraging and eccentric Catherine Jackson, is remembered again in "Whatever You Want" (Shapes of Self):
Catherine Jackson sits at the harp: frizzy gray hair, dangling earrings, long powdered nose, bony bare arms, satiny skirt with painted flowers over her knees. Says, "My mother told me I wouldn't amount to a hill of beans." Her strong callused fingers press into the reverberating strings. Then out the door she swishes with a glissando of laughter, lifts her foot in elevated red leather shoe into her yellow jeep, and vanishes over the hill. Her writing scrawls gaily over the page: You can do whatever you want.
Junior high graduation was an important rite of passage into womanhood, and I wore a grown-up tailored beige suit. My parents took me on a trip to the East coast-DC, New York, New England. By then I was dipping into Mother's psychology books, novels like The Snake Pit, found on a shelf beneath a serene marble Quan Yin head, and scouting the local library for further psychology texts. At thirteen I had dreamed of becoming an architect who would renovate old houses, but now, to the surprise of teachers and friends with more ordinary fantasies, I wanted to become a psychiatrist and renovate unhappy people. An activist streak stirred me to canvas the neighborhood for donations for the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis. A close friend brought me a fascinating book on Hatha Yoga, and soon young neighbors and I were building yogic pyramids. At the same time I discovered the romantic world of Jane Eyre and the Brontë sisters-Charlotte, Emily and Anne. And in American Literature, the summer before high school, I met my first poets-T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
In the 1950s Susan Miller Dorsey High School was a unique school, whose population was one-third European, one-third Asian and one-third African American. The teachers were generally very fine. Disappointed when not admitted to one of the social clubs, I focused increasingly on preparing for college and became active in several organizations-French Club, Chorus, Girls' Letter Society, Ladies service organization, California Scholarship Federation. I became editor of the Girls' Athletic Association newsletter and served as senior class treasurer. My neighborhood friend Maureen Love and I occasionally played harp duets for school concerts, weddings and local television. I took extra early morning classes, World History and Creative Writing, where I wrote my first published poem ("The Distance Is Great" in Dorsey's Trial Flights), about the gap between the young and the old.
At this time my religious search began. Visits to Catholic mass and Jewish synagogue and fantasies of becoming a nun intermingled with visits with friends to Venice coffeehouses where poetry was read to jazz, foreign movie houses, Oscar Levant's live television show, record shops, and bookstores such as the wonderful Pickwick Books in Hollywood. I rode the bus across the broad valley until my father gave me a small black Studebaker with red leather upholstery. While my sister Dianne, attending Marlborough School for Girls, became immersed in a world of boys, I had many free-floating crushes but only a few dates. Nights when my father was at work, I did homework, watched old movies on television with Mother and listened to her lengthy entertaining stories. I was more submerged in literature than ever, and for my graduation my parents gave me-to my vast joy-Harvard's new three-volume Poems of Emily Dickinson, annotated with all known variants, along with a fat volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Complete Poems.
My poem "Childhood," written much later during my psychiatric training, ended:
I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard into Pickwick Books, the record stores. I was watching Madame Bovary in the small dark theater, their legs touching under the table. I was running away, down the block past the McDermotts', the Barys', up the hill to the house with the low brick wall where I sat drying my tears, watching the clouds, the moon. I was walking home. I was wading through waist-deep floodwaters in my homemade woolen skirt. I was going away to college.
Indeed, I was extremely excited about the prospect of college, getting my wardrobe together and packing it into a big green trunk, reading recommended books such as H. G. Wells' Outline of History, and visiting college campuses like Pomona and Stanford. Selected by the American Field Service as a yearlong foreign student to France, I was disappointedly not sent since a family could not be found. But as a graduation surprise, my father secretly arranged for me to travel for a month with my friend Carol to visit her family in Sweden, then join a group of schoolteachers making a grand tour of Europe by bus through England, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. This was a momentous life experience that left many deep impressions and greatly expanded my view of the world.
My childhood had been one of loneliness and bounty. Now approaching college, I sensed with longing a new beginning.
In the fall of 1960, I entered Stanford University, a slumberous, tree-lined campus where the occasional student strolled by with a stack of books, lost deep in thoughts of Western Civilization, a challenging English essay, or an upcoming date. In a German class during the first month, I met my husband-to-be, Michael James Canan, a literate economics major also from Los Angeles. Our first date, a dance sponsored by his "eating club," was taken up with a pressing discussion of politics-his obsession-followed by a surprising goodnight kiss. Mike and I soon became inseparable, studying and eating together and eventually becoming engaged.
I had entered college as a pre-med major intending to become a psychiatrist, but after a demanding eight a.m. chemistry class, repeated discouragement from my pre-med advisor (known in the future as a notorious sexist), and a year of wheeling a library cart through the back wards of Agnew's State Mental Hospital as a Stanford volunteer, I switched my major to French. Thanks to four years of well taught high school French (see "Miss Clementi" in Shapes of Self), I immediately entered advanced courses in French linguistics and literature-Villon, Hugo, Valéry, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Claudel, Prévert, etcetera. In those days it didn't strike me as odd that all the writers we studied were male-I was so happy to be able to read them, however awkwardly, in their native tongue. I was writing a few poems myself, which I showed to no one. About this time, sadly, my mother's mother died of tuberculosis while hospitalized in a mental hospital.
At Stanford I received a superb classical Western education, for which I have always been grateful. The most outstanding courses were Theodore Roszak's Western Civilization section, which met at his home; Frederick Spiegelberg's popular lecture course on comparative religion (I especially remember his lively demonstration of Tibetan ghost traps); and charming Professor Georges Lemaitre's wittily entertaining courses on Sartre and existentialism. I played harp in the Stanford Symphony and took harpsichord lessons. During the summers Mike was building me a harpsichord.
Because I took UCLA summer music courses on Bach-always my favorite composer-I was able to graduate from Stanford in three years with distinction, at the same time as Mike who was a year ahead. That summer Mike worked in the Pacific Palisades bank near his parents' home, as usual, and I finally talked my father into letting me work in his restaurant as a waitress. I was growing very close to Mike's warm and literate Irish-Anglo family, and it was Mike's mother Molly who gave me E. E. Cumming's Collected Poems, precious love lyrics that I often carried with me, savoring them for many years. On August 31, 1963, Mike and I were married in a Presbyterian church in Brentwood. I was twenty, Mike twenty-one. After our honeymoon in Mexico, we arrived in Berkeley to begin graduate school-he in the law school his father had attended, and I in the German department. Why German? Because by now I needed to read Rilke.
My first day on the University of California campus, I was stunned by the umpteen political flyers shoved into my hands as I walked through Sather Gate. Photographs of napalmed Vietnamese women and children shocked me, and it took me several weeks to absorb what I was seeing for the first time and to know what I felt about it. Meanwhile, I had to struggle with my UC advisor, just as I had with my Stanford pre-med advisor, but this time I didn't give up. In spite of his disapproval, I was able to take the Rilke course, along with Minnesang, a course on German medieval love poetry, in my first semester.
I walked into the Rilke class and, at first sight, fell utterly in love with my professor-a Hungarian Jew slumped at the podium, glasses sliding down his nose, cigarette in one of his graceful hands (see "Heavenly Blue" in Journeys with Justine). A mystic philosopher writing an endless ontology, Andrew O. Jaszi, son of a Hungarian counter-revolutionary leader and a Hungarian artist, became my teacher for the next several years. I took all the courses he taught, which were precisely the courses I wanted to take: Goethe, Romantic German Drama, Modern German Poetry, as well as Rilke. Through these courses Professor Jaszi passed on to me his deeply thoughtful and mystical vision of wholeness.
In 1964, the student Free Speech Movement began, synchronized with student rebellions against patriarchal madness round the world. Attending protest gatherings, marches and sit-ins, I canceled German classes I was teaching in order to join my students and professors in vociferous anti-war demonstrations. My husband was absent. One day my old Stanford Western Civ instructor, Theodore Roszak, appeared on Telegraph Avenue, pointedly quizzing me about "the scene." He and his family had moved to Berkeley, Ted was working on his brilliant Making of A Counterculture, and we soon became staunch friends. Through student friends Jane and Steve Sokolow, I was "turned on" to the magical wonders of marijuana; Mike, again, abstained. Following a recipe published by Aldous Huxley's wife Laura for "Heavenly Blue" morning glory seeds, a friend and I had our first psychedelic experience (see "Heavenly Blue," Journeys with Justine)-for me a taste of infinite oneness, culminating in a vision of the entire cosmos revolving in the corner of our apartment ceiling.
I described the cultural atmosphere of Berkeley in the Sixties in my autobiographical introduction to Changing Woman:
In the Sixties the Bay Area throbbed with poetry, effervesced with poetry, was poetry. Robert Duncan was often seen flying down The Avenue in his magic cape. Julia Vinograd, dressed in black and yellow robe and cap, limped into Telegraph Avenue cafes peddling booklets of her poems for a dollar. At the Berkeley Community Theater Janis Joplin, in a sexy short black dress, belted out cosmic lyrics to the accompaniment of Big Brother and the Holding Company, while Ram Dass pontificated afterwards. In San Francisco Glenn Gould hovered over his piano, humming indecipherable chants. At the Jazz Workshop, all night long John Coltrane poured out his heart through his saxophone. Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar arrived in the Berkeley Amphitheater with their soulful sarod and sitar. And at the Golden Gate Park Love-In, Allen Ginsberg sang of the fall of America, transcendently stoned-but by then I was too in love with my Rilke professor to make the scene…. Standing in Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue, I read every new poetry edition that arrived on the shelf-from Robert Duncan's pulsing Opening of the Field, to Michael McClure's mysterious Dark Brown. In the joyous Summer of 1965, an unforgettable Berkeley Poetry Conference presented one-eyed Creeley, howling Ginsberg, raging Le Roi Jones, Olson as a humongous drunken bear, lively lisping Levertov in a striped tee-shirt, ascetic Snyder with a goatee, and Duncan overpowered by his incessant visions. A yogi arrived from India proclaiming Berkeley the heartbeat of the world.
Just before I was to take my master's examination, and Mike was to graduate from law school, and together we were to join the Peace Corps in Venezuela (which Mike had chosen in preference to war in Vietnam), we found ourselves spontaneously deciding to split up. Our paths certainly seemed to be leading in different directions. Mike already had his life mapped out on a staid and conventional track as lawyer and family man. But my life-my search-was only beginning. I was twenty-three and the whole world lay before me as an unknown. I was ready to embark on my journey. A chance meeting that night with novelist Günter Grass, passing through Berkeley on a lecture tour for his novel The Tin Drum, seemed to whirl me forever out of the academic orbit I had been circling in for six years.
Fairly amicably, Mike and I split our minimal worldly goods, arguing only over the lovely walnut harpsichord that he had built for me as a wedding gift, and signed the do-it-yourself divorce agreement. My master's exams forgotten, I was suddenly in Paris, on my way to a friend's whitewashed eighteenth-century ruin on the tiny scorched Greek island of Hydra, suspended in the exquisite azure of the Aegean. Mike remained in Berkeley, studying for bar exams before his own departure for Venezuela, where he was inducted into the Vietnam War anyway, and then escaped by signing up for officer training in an inactive branch of the armed forces, safe in Montana. After a sad month in romantic, sunny Greece, I took a train to Munich-where I took in the vivid colorful angular paintings at the Neue Pinakothek-and then on to Berlin.
Lovely Myrna from Canada, whom I had met in the German department and who would later become a journalist, was already settled in Berlin when I arrived. She helped me find a job, where I lasted only a matter of weeks, as a secretary in the small avant-garde Gerhardt publishing house, run by Frau Gerhardt herself. There I was, in the historical capital of Germany, the heart of German Nazism, where heaps and heaps of bomb rubble alternated with glossy new American buildings that stood proud in celebration of capitalism. Young people with children migrated to West Germany, and war-disabled elders waited for death. The Free University of Berlin, Von Karajan's sublime Philharmonic, diverse avant-garde chamber music groups, the classical Schiller Theatre, and the nightlife were among the most sophisticated in the world. For a few dollars I went to a concert almost every night, danced in the decadent red and black disco clubs, met massive Charles Olson drunkenly womanizing in a dark bar after his reading, attended lectures, dated another lawyer and had painful dreams about my aborted marriage.
One afternoon in a bookstore on the Kurfürstendam, I discovered a new red volume of Expressionist Else Lasker-Schüler's Gesammelte Gedichte, released by Kösel Verlag in celebration of the German-Jewish poet's birth centennial. I tried a few translations, embarking on a project that was to occupy me intermittently for three decades. In Berlin I also experienced the high price a woman often has to pay for the prize of independence: I was raped, beaten, and when I screamed no one came. One wintry day I woke in my narrow cot next to the smoking charcoal oven, looked at the matching lithographs of Goethe and Schiller, listened to the old landlady-who still remembered rape and lootings by Russian soldiers-as she shuffled down the hall, saw out my window snow covering the ground, and knew it was time to go home. On the window sill I left my blooming heather that belonged, said my landlady, not indoors but on a grave (see "The Grave" in Shapes of Self).
Back in Berkeley I moved into a household of lively graduate students that included the young, aspiring political writer Jonathan Schell. Berkeley was bulging with writers in those days. Almost immediately, I entered into a deeply affecting but inevitably heartbreaking relationship with my now also divorced former German professor, Andrew Jaszi-my philosopher. These were days of Coltrane all night at North Beach's Jazz Workshop, Glenn Gould humming on stage to melodies of Bach, Ginsberg pouring out his cosmic Jewish soul, crowded Love-Ins and Be-ins in Golden Gate and other parks. One windy afternoon, as I stood at the window of City Lights Books, an intoxicated old Afro-American man insisted on giving me his tiny red, battered, scribbled-in book of Robert Burns-and it felt like a sign.
Working on a high school teaching credential at the University of California, so I could get a job, I decided to take Peter Dale Scott's poetry workshop. Professor Scott, a Canadian-born poet and political writer, gathered some of our workshop poems together in Pointing Outward, and persuaded me to start teaching creative writing at the university myself, in a special program for student participation. In one class I met an impressive, effervescent, unpublished poet named Dennis Walton, who introduced me to the work of Kenneth Rexroth, translator of the great Chinese lyricist Tu Fu and a magnificent love and nature poet himself. About this time I also taught English to foreign students at the university and was a reader for a Rhetoric professor.
Eventually, I taught high school as a substitute. For a year or so, I lived with a lively group-utopian economist Don Shakow and his wife Carol, poet David Taylor, worshipper of Kenneth Patchen, and writer Greta von Pein Kimball and her husband Jim-in a pleasant house with large windows looking onto the oak-strewn hills of Lafayette and a central fireplace round which we often gathered. In "Protest" (Journeys with Justine), I tell the story of my 1968 arrest in a campus demonstration protesting the university's refusal to allow black revolutionary parolee Eldridge Cleaver, author of a compelling book called Soul on Ice, to teach a course. "Protest" is a kind of love story that ends with the two protagonists being handcuffed and stepping up into the bus that will take them to jail. In my case, the jail was Santa Rita, where I was incarcerated in a large room with dozens of other rebellious female students. The last night, noisy and giddy during dishwashing, I was put into solitary confinement. Seated next to the toilet under a glaring light that never went off, I absorbed the poignant enigmatic graffiti smeared on the walls and read several chapters of The Bible, frightened I wouldn't be released. The next day I walked out of jail with pages of minuscule journals rolled into an inserted tampax tube. My conservative father, appalled by my politics, disowned me.
After 1968 the Women's Movement really took off. Provocative guerrilla street theater cropped up around town, and in the bookstores stapled chapbooks containing the tender and explosive secrets of new and original female voices appeared. Hungrily, I devoured every syllable of Alta, Susan Griffin and Judy Grahn. I joined Women for Peace. I was always in love, it seemed, but my love life was unsettled. For awhile, living in a cottage on Wheeler Street and working as a teacher in the public schools and a private school, I dated the enigmatic sculptor Sidney Gordon. Still crushed by the failure of my relationship with Jaszi, I wisely decided to enter therapy with a British-school psychiatrist, Dr. Hella Fluss. Thanks to her kind role modeling, I suddenly found myself deciding to do the long-postponed pre-med work and-finally-applied to medical school. I disliked the idea of indefinitely postponing having children, for which I longed. But I still wanted to be a psychiatrist-or maybe even an obstetrical gynecologist-one way or another I wanted birth! I was nearly thirty-the time was now or never.
While working as a home teacher, I completed the two years of required pre-medical courses at Merritt Community College and the University of California, applied to a large number of medical schools, and miraculously was accepted at New York University, then ranked fifth among American medical schools. Shortly after my acceptance, however, a tragic event occurred. I discovered that my sister Dianne, unbeknownst to my family, had suffered a schizophrenic break. Though she received considerable treatment, she never recovered. I was devastated by the discovery of her illness, and completing my pre-med coursework was difficult.
Nevertheless, just before leaving Berkeley I experienced one of the most joyful events of my life: I was present at the home-birth of the first baby of my friends Jane and Steve Sokolow who then lived in a commune. The experience is described in my poem "Birth," later read at the 1971 opening of the University of California Art Museum, and blessed with the somber praise of the august poet William Everson as he came to the podium after me.
...A sleeper you wake, you stretch, you wail, beautiful breather you pale- from florid fish to flesh your fluid skin dries out to touch. Your eyes look round, stagger, still widen. Your ears are spiraling, your mouth untwists. Oh, you are open now.
Throughout my twenties, I had searched and sampled. I had rejected conventional married life. And like the woman in a later prose poem, I had "cultivated a life of eager waiting" ("Eager Waiting," Shapes of Self). Now it was time to choose my path. I spent a sunny summer among friends and evergreens on wooded Vashon Island in Washington, where I completed the first version of an Else Lasker-Schüler manuscript, prefaced by David Meltzer who had published some of my translations in his beautiful journal Tree. Then I set out for the East coast and another new beginning.
A month before my thirtieth birthday, I arrived in New York City with eight hundred dollars in my purse from the sale of my scant furniture and little Morris Minor. The high cost of medical school was to be met by a scholarship and loan from NYU that I just then learned had been granted. From a large noisy cockroach-infested apartment on the West Side, I soon moved to a shared apartment on Murray Hill near the Medical Center. "Roach Hunts," "A Queen," "Gloria," and other poems about New York and medical school later collected in Of Your Seed were written there.
Medical school was the most demanding situation I had encountered so far. The intellectual and emotional load was daunting, and I felt as pressured as all the other students. Even so, I could not resist the allure of the great cultural center gyrating round me. I ran off to concerts, plays, poetry readings and art museums to refresh my soul, which felt caged rather like the Haitian woman who turns into a panther "flashing teeth of white ivory/ and eyes of heavy gold" in the poem "Panther in New York." I went regularly to the Metropolitan just to experience two sublimely peaceful Vermeers-the woman in blue reading a letter by the window and the woman lifting a shining brass pitcher. Or I took refuge at the Ninety-Second Street Y Poetry Series, the Saint Mark's Poetry Project, or Louise Bernikow's Manhattan Poetry Club. During my New York years I had the good fortune to hear Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser and Stephen Spender, along with master musicians like violinist Yehudi Menuhin, singer Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, pianist Alfred Brendel, and more jazz greats than I can remember-Betty Carter, Marylou Williams, Yusef Lateef, and many more.
In the spring of my first year, my beloved Grandmother Burford, now in her mid-eighties, suffered a heart attack and passed on. "On the verge of spring/ you bent like a vine/ and went," I wrote. "Loved wine of communion,/ we drank you thirsty/ for a memory…. You were the past/ and returned to it/ leaving the small green sprouts of your seed." Thirsty for memories of my own past, I was painting word portraits of many of the people who had been significant to me since childhood.
After a summer in Berkeley, I returned to a studio in Greenwich Village across from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "narrowest house" in the city. In that building flooded with a symphony of tenants' music, a well-read copy of Denise Levertov's latest volume lay on the floor by my borrowed mattress. In a crate under my TV lived my black-and-white rabbit, who coexisted with my black cat Astatine (who actually dragged the bunny into the closet with her the night she gave birth to a litter of kittens). And one morning I missed all my lectures, glued to the television during a marathon festival of Greta Garbo's entire filmic oeuvre. Riding the bus daily, back and forth from the medical center to the Village, knitting squares for an afghan in New York autumn colors, inspired the poem "Afghan":
Like the leaves in Vermont in October. Squares knitted on the bus going cross-town, squares knitted on the train heading north, squares knitted on the plane flying west. Before the television, during lectures, while conversing on my bed. Then painstakingly crocheted together with brown of tree, with brown of soil. A blanket, a colorful blanket. Like a pile of leaves you can bury yourself in. Heaping them for bonfires. Raising them, hundreds of brilliant flags.
In medical school, as everywhere in the Seventies, the Women's Movement was heating up, and a women's group formed at the Medical Center. Appalled by the shocking sexist and racist display encountered at our Anatomy exam-a voluptuous black female cadaver with an ice pick through her navel indicating pierced anatomical structures we were to name-we were psychologically prepared for our lecture on the human gait: a young woman in a leotard and net stockings prancing on a tabletop, while the professor discoursed on her anatomy, in particular her gluteus maximus (buttocks muscles). Sitting in the front row of the large lecture hall, I instantly stood and turned round to see, midway back, my friend Gloria's broad cape flapping behind her as we synchronously marched out of the hall, followed by a large portion of the class including one of the Anatomy professors, a granddaughter of the great anatomist Cunningham. This was a precious moment of victory, and the lecture was never given again.
And on the afternoon that my classmates coldly dissected frogs in physiology class, I squatted stubbornly and immovably on the desk and poured out a poem to our "Frog": "your eyes/ two polished memories of the stream/where you leapt from stone to stone/ don't blink. Down on slippery tile you don't kick…./ But as they untie you, your legs begin to wave-one green and spotted/ like the gut of the river, the other carved in the image of human squalor." By the time a batch of dogs had been ordered for a physiology experiment during which the animals would be killed, a group of us had mobilized and sent a moral statement concerning the sanctity of life, demanding that the dogs' lives be spared: we would not participate.
When I took my first course in psychiatry, it was instantly clear that I had arrived at my Destiny. I felt an incredible energy, a profound engagement with the enormous range of human problems presented, and composed a few poems triggered by particularly stunning encounters with unhappy patients at Bellevue, hospital of New York's poor ("Panther in New York," "Trouble"), as well as at University Hospital, the hospital of the wealthy ("A Death").
I spent my third year of medical school in California, living with my friend Sam Case, an occasional writer, and continuing my studies in obstetrics and psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco. Uncertain about how I would manage the dual careers of poetry and psychiatry, I wanted time to write and establish my commitment to writing. Around the corner from the house Sam and I were subletting stood Joanna Griffin's (Susan Griffin's sister) Bacchanal, a poetry and art bar on Solano Avenue, where Judy Chicago, Lynn Lonidier, Madeline Gleason and various other feminist artists performed, and where I too gave a reading. At this time I set to work gathering poems for my first collection, Of Your Seed. My dear friend Carolyn Verlinden, from pre-med days, brought the manuscript to the attention of librarian Dorothy Hawley, who in turn passed it on to her husband, Robert Hawley, publisher and editor of Oyez Press. Oyez had published Duncan, Levertov, Di Prima, Olson, Everson, McClure, and other fine poets. I couldn't believe my ears when Robert, staring with his coal black eyes, told me he would like to publish my little collection with an National Endowment for the Arts publication grant.
I returned to New York and rented a studio apartment in Tudor City, one block away from the United Nations, which I furnished with objects salvaged from the cornucopia of garbage bins. Arriving home at ten or eleven o'clock at night from the hospital, I would pour a glass of wine, sit down at my old rock-heavy black Royal typewriter, anchored on plywood and orange crates, and tap out the dreamy lyrical poems of Daughter. Or I read the masterful English poet W. H. Auden, a doctor's son. And either I had a clairvoyant experience or I actually heard Helen Adams read her magical poetry somewhere one night. A new friend, Paula Bromberg, radical lesbian feminist Gestalt therapist and founder of the Women's Therapy Center in Greenwich Village, introduced me to the street and theatrical world of the Village. Paula led me to the brilliant and poetic psychoanalyst Harold Searles' presentation on schizophrenia, and to the Women's Salon where I heard talks by feminist author Kate Millett and peace activist Barbara Demming. At NYU, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talked to us on death and dying. At the UN one afternoon, I had the transcendent experience of hearing Mother Teresa speak about caring for the world's poor. And during a happy getaway to Mystic Seaport at the end of the four years, I experienced an epiphany: "Like a madwoman she swims, flailing at the hard stuff that forever gives way: It is all hers and she belongs to it.... Over her the sky is an enormous mystery she'll forever be turning to" ("A Hand," Shapes of Self).
Although the years in New York were exciting ones, I was homesick for the heartwarming sunbeams of California, the land of my birth, the land of beauteous Calafia, the dark Amazon Queen. I invited my parents to New York for my graduation. We had grown farther and farther apart, and it was only as we ambled toward my New York apartment that it slowly dawned on me my father could hardly walk. I was distressed to learn he was suffering from the awful disease of emphysema-the destruction of his lungs caused by years of smoking, topped by a case of "walking pneumonia."
I returned to Berkeley for a psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatric residency at Herrick Hospital. I loved the Herrick program and the patient work and enjoyed a number of outstanding mentors, including outrageous, gorgeous Cherokee psychoanalyst Bryce Boyer, who wore turquoise jewels and taught us all about early human development. It was Dr. Boyer who introduced me to the work not only of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and Phyllis Greenacre, but most importantly to the crucial work of Margaret Mahler, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, a book that more than any other has helped me for two decades to understand and help my patients' psychological development at the profoundest level. But for my own growth, I now chose Jungian analysis with Dr. Ann Miller.
During my Herrick years I wrote the poems "Rain," "Doom" and "The Singer," and assembled my second collection of poetry, Who Buried the Breast of Dreams. Robert Hawley, no longer actively publishing but ever supportive of my work, published in 1979 an elegant letterpress keepsake of five poems entitled The Hunger. It elicited some encouraging words from New Directions publisher James Laughlin: "These are distinguished poems. You must send me some for my anthology."
At this time I helped Peter Scott edit his forthcoming Rumors of No Law (which included a few Sixties portraits of me), and he in turn invited me to join a Berkeley poetry group that included himself, Diana O'Hehir, future poet laureate Robert Pinsky, and Josephine Miles who from her wheelchair seemed amazingly able to mend anything made of words. I also joined a lively group of San Francisco State University women writers, including Phyllis Koestenbaum, Frances Jaffer, Frances Mayes, Kathleen Frazer, Beverly Dahlen and Nellie Wong. During this period I was also deeply moved by the publication of Adrienne Rich's beautiful Twenty-One Sonnets.
My development as a poet and psychiatrist had, for some reason, always gone hand in hand. In the second year of my residency I gave a talk that explored the relationship of the two:
Long long ago the poet and the healer were one and the same person. Even in today's tribal societies, the shaman sings, dances, paints, administers drugs and personal advice. All of the arts are combined to heal. During the course of Western history, the arts have separated.... Today it is not the psychotherapist or the patient who sings the actual power songs of beauty and healing, but the poet. And often it is to the poet that we go-in moments of suffering and other extremities-for consolation, diversion, illumination and healing. But when even art is not sufficient to console, divert, illumine and heal, it is to the psychotherapist that we turn. For the therapist nurtures the healing speech in others. Psychotherapy is the art of so listening and so responding, that the deepest levels of speech are liberated in a healing "song" that arises from the truest self of the sufferer, and ultimately reveals the power and beauty of what it is to be human.
Frustrated that the Herrick program, excellent in teaching about psychopathology, stopped short of teaching about the healthy personality, I transferred to Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco for the final year of my nine year training. There I participated in an innovative adolescent program devised by much-loved Sullivanian analyst Otto Will, with Anna Freud's protégé Erik Erickson, and Erickson's wife Joan, who created a new arts program. I was in a highly creative state myself, reading with passion Dickinson, Rexroth, Anderson, Lawrence and Murdoch, and pouring out, between 1978 and 1980, 160 prose poems. These visionary poems came out of an intoxicating state in which I seemed to have palpable access to the endless luminous web of Creation. "Ecstatic" sums up the mood:
I'm ecstatic-have written four poems, listening to Bach, and now will do the dishes. Then shower and go over to Helen's to hear her tape on self-love and the levels of love. At five I'll do my shopping at the Co-op, buy two new tires and get my car washed, then come home and get ready-uh oh, the phone is ringing and it's Carol asking about the party and I say, Come over at ten, we'll smoke a joint, then go on over to Steve's. She says, That's perfect, and I say, I'm writing a poem and if I hurry and hang up I can get you in the poem too. I'm beginning to realize that everything really does belong in the poem and this poem could go on forever.
Out of the 160 poems, I selected 80 that were sequenced by Betty Roszak to create Shapes of Self. The title came from a line in an Indian Upanishad: "One who has seen the shapes of Self, runs after them everywhere." These poems, I believe, convey a strong sense of spiritual destination-my own "destination on the enthralling road" ("Destination"). Though I am sometimes "like a beetle pinned against a burning sky" ("Foggy City"), they brim with joy, love and light. There are love poems like "Molten Earth": "You I love like my life. Sunshine cold, pure, streaming down into the pit of my body, all my senses budding hard, unquestionable, untouched rainbows of blossoms...." There are portraits like "Vermilion Flower": "Emily Dickinson is staying at home. She's wearing her white eyelet dress, wandering in her night garden, composing a poem...." There are poems about poems like "About to Speak": "I love the unspoken words in things, their meanings gleaned, their secret initiate choruses held in the little human ear coil for a moment of bright Spring...." There are hymns to nature like "Blossom": "Magnolia blossom, cupped and quivering in the frost, purple on the outside, white on the inside, little feather tongues licking deep within...." And there are, in Shapes of Self, pure songs of the soul like "She's In":
You follow a character along and at a certain moment she opens up and splashes out light: She's golden, sparkling, sleep and overflowing, all blond, all silk, cascading, phosphorescent like waves at night, shimmering and shaking, she's all resonance, all response, an instrument arched and vibrating, light as wood, elegant as bone. She's laughing, she's blinking and twinkling. She's flowing. She's curving like oil, like gold. She wants you, calls you, collects and reflects you. She's ringing. She's squirming and swinging. She's plucked. She's touched-alive. She's over your head. She's eager. She's ready. She's on-within. She's in-gorgeous. She's in!
Upon completion of my residency, I traveled to Greece for a month. Recovering from medical training, and consolidating my own identity as a poet, I ferried to Lesbos in search of the great great Sappho, whose fewest surviving words are worth thousands of volumes by others. My wanderings and musings there inspired a longish prose poem, "Sappho of Eressos" (Her Magnificent Body). It opens, "Sappho looks up, angry about the myths...that wish to enclose her name. But she laughs, glowing like the evening. A pink and orange smile crosses the sky.... She touches those dry roads and sees herself strolling in a dusty dream, seven-string lyre hung at her side, dress twined like the olive tree whose upper arms are jubilantly silver." From Lesbos I took the ferry to Crete, where I visited Knossos, the glorious temple of an ancient Goddess civilization, and stared at pure azure from my cafe chair, occasionally rising to dip in its divine clarity, and then jot down a few words about "The Sea."
I returned to Berkeley to open a practice in general psychiatry in a brown-shingled house hidden by wildly blooming acacias on Carleton Street.
On the evening of October 16, 1980, I walked into my living room and threw myself down on my overstuffed oak couch, as a voice from within proclaimed, "I give up." One of the things I surely had to give up was an impossible infatuation that had been occupying me for some time. And I wondered-with despair that was heading toward horror-would I have to give up children too?
Granted, I was exhausted from the decade of training. The Conservative Era was underway, cuts in education and social programs were affecting people everywhere, including many of my patients. My flat on Carleton had been put up for sale, and I had moved to Grizzly Peak atop the Berkeley hills. Now the mountain I had been climbing for a decade, as I completed my medical training, turned inside out. Before me lay an abyss; I would have to descend to its depths. Some days were so dark that when I woke in the morning, I groaned to realize that I had another day to live through. Great waves were carrying me-whither? One of my favorite books at this time was Virginia Woolf's poetic novel The Waves, which appears in my poem "Birthday":
Sitting in the bathtub, re-reading The Waves, telephone on the floor, I think: My birthday-I'll write a poem. ....Andrew calls and asks me how I am. "Nervous," I reply. "Nervous jubilant or nervous afraid?" "Not jubilant." Yes, Marcia says you think you have reached the middle of your life." In the dark restaurant I had told her, "It all seems so small now," and her eyes flamed. Now to Andrew I say, "No, I'll live longer than that. Grandmother lived to be eighty-five and I have more to do than she did." "You don't know," he says. Dunking my head, I hear our conversation throbbing in the waves. Definitely a middle-aged poem, my new self says, stepping from the bath, dripping. (Her Magnificent Body)
I was thirty-eight, and the Dark Night of my soul had fallen. I needed a guide and decided to do Jungian dream-work with Ruth Collins. "Valley of Death," about the grim reality of nuclear destructiveness, expresses the horror I felt at forces around and within me: "Shaft rising, head of the sacred phallus explodes over the valley in awesome blinding light: Jorñada del Muerte-Heaven fills with radiation, Earth craters like the Moon." The darkness demanded more light-and I wrote "The Duck," which begins:
Mother Father Heaven, can't I have your pure spirit, your pure blue? I'm thirsty, can't You carry me? I want to sleep, can't I lie down in your arms, these lakes-You have so much! Mother Father Heaven, can't I have You?
In "Dance" I wrote: "Soul that has no face, peers out from everything: the bottoms of her feet, the underside of the car, the smoky figure of Mother leaving. In a long dress that sweeps the floor, hair swinging beyond her, she dances it-like sex she dances it. Like stars."
Meanwhile, I decided to establish my own press. Laughlin, who had published one of my poems in New Directions 42, was not interested in doing a whole collection, nor was another publisher I contacted. My Emily Dickinson Press published Who Buried the Breast of Dreams, followed by Daughter (illustrated by Donna Brookman) in 1981, and Shapes of Self in 1982. The first two books were not reviewed, and the latter received its only-fortunately positive-review from fellow-poet Andrei Codrescu. "Told with that lulling incantatory charm of the Arabian Nights, a joyous and lusty book, remarkably free from guilt," he wrote in the Baltimore Sun. Else Gidlow, whom I met about this time, responded warmly: "Remarkable-searing-portraits. You are a perceptive writer-original, too." And poet Phyllis Koestenbaum, whose rhythmic prose poems, along with the lush prose style of Iris Murdoch, had inspired my own, added her kind words: "Your poems flow…. The language is stunning."
In 1982 I attended Stanford University's Conference on Women and Poetry, where I listened excitedly to dynamic readings by fifteen American women poets including Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer, Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, Josephine Miles, and Alma Villanueva-whose passionate visionary work I encountered for the first time. I took a valuable course at the University of California on Revising the Poem, taught by the grande dame of poetry herself, Carolyn Kizer, and learned to disassemble and rebuild a poem as if it were an automobile engine. Longing to study with the musical English-born poet Denise Levertov, I was forever deeply disappointed when a workshop with the poet was canceled due to an airline strike that Levertov wished to honor.
In 1983 I began a long prayer, stimulated by a conversation with one of my patients, a nun: "Lady, how can I speak, my mouth silent/ as the hills, dumb with fear and desire? Lady of the Myriad Names, your beauty and destruction/ freeze my heart. How can I approach You...." ("Our Lady," Her Magnificent Body). "Beautiful Mother of Words," written in 1975 and published in Daughter, had perhaps been my first Goddess poem, but now the poems to Her began to flow in an unending stream. "Inanna's Descent" (Her Magnificent Body), inspired by second millennium BC Sumerian poetry, came next: "Heaven is Hers!/ Earth is Hers!...She is the singer,/ She is desire,/ She is the mountain of silver, gold and lapis. On Her hips tall trees grow, and grasses." And then "Our Lady," in which I invoked the Goddess by all the names I knew: Our Lady of Hiroshima, Horrible Kali, Wretched Ereshkigal, Suffering One, No Lady, Lady of All That Is, Magnificent Lady, Lady of Visions, Smiling Lady Aphrodite, Unattainable and Only Lady, Great-Wombed Mother, Lady of the Universe, Kind Lady, Kwan Yin, Mother of God, Wise Sophia, Shekinah, Lady of All Knowledge.
In 1984 I met Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch, in whose powerful and searching work I had become profoundly immersed, when she came to Berkeley to give a lecture. The story of our encounter was later written in "A Visit from Iris Murdoch." This meeting was the beginning of a precious friendship by correspondence which continued until the novelist's tragic Alzheimer's illness in the Nineties. But in general, this was a difficult time. My adored first Samoyed dog, Orlando, not yet two years old, suddenly died of an undiagnosable illness. A sociopathic patient crossed my path, bringing with her years of personal and professional harassment. And once again the house I was renting was put up for sale, and I was forced to move.
My father, though ill, kindly and generously helped me purchase a lovely meditative Spanish-style house on Avis Road in Berkeley. The first poem I received after the move into my new home was the often anthologized "Dear Body," that came in seven seven-line stanzas as I swam in a nearby public swimming pool. It ends:
With your delicate, hyper-sensitive nerves- painstakingly cultivated by erratic Mother Karma who one moment forgets, the next grips violently, so aware everything irritates or gives you overwhelming pleasure, ecstatic wicked Body, maniacally driven from one unreachable extreme to another, isn't it obvious how, torn between joy and terror, you became a poet, passionately vibrating instrument, house of the certain yet doubting, ever shifting eye. Earthbody, brief spouse, what a strangely inconvenient marriage. Yet you are my only true support. And though you may never fathom what I secretly am, may you- who accepted the nature of existence itself- stay with me in your lovely halo of death till I depart, dearest Body, my slave, my queen.
At the Berkeley Zen Center, I learned how to sit zazen. Taking up Sufi dancing, I began to follow Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, whose spiritual teachings gracefully bridged Eastern and Western psychology. At Joanna Griffin's I had met avant-garde poet Lynn Lonidier. Working on Clitoris Lost at the time, Lynn was obsessed with Greece and, after intensely quizzing me that evening about my travels to Crete and Lesbos, had gone home and written "Isle of Lesbos," the first in a series of poems inspired by our friendship. Lynn loved and supported my work. She created a moving rendition of "Our Lady" on her synthesizer. And in her San Francisco cottage on Vernal Heights, she introduced me to visionary genius Robert Duncan, whose magical singsong readings I had attended since the Sixties. She pressed me to read him my own "Harp" poems from Shapes of Self, poems which symbolize the saintly function of art. But I was then too shy to do so.
Later on, when Robert came to my house for dinner, he talked that stream of language that was his very way of being, his "mouth in which the heart rises/ pouring itself into liquid and fiery speech" ("Circulations of the Song"). Though Robert had lost his mother at birth and his father soon after, he had gained a relationship to the whole cosmos. At a small gathering at the Roszaks' where, ill with kidney disease, he read from his masterpiece "Circulations of the Song," I finally read before him my long narrative poem "Passion of Georgia O'Keeffe" (Her Magnificent Body) which, said Lynn, stunned him ("Is she clairvoyant?" he asked.):
...I know what I must paint now-I paint what I love. Flowers, stones, bones instruct me. Details are confusing. I observe, select, eliminate-ruthlessly I search for meaning inside things. Tearing roots from my heart, arrange in ever broadening light: ikons, offerings, blessings that come from, return to life....
Lynn also introduced my work to her publisher Paul Mariah, founder of Manroot Press. Paul, who had previously published Duncan, Broughton, Cocteau, Fisher, Gunn and Grahn, was eager do a volume of my selected poems. Her Magnificent Body was the result. It came out at a very difficult time for him, for his beloved longtime partner Ken, the main funder of Manroot, died of AIDS during production, and Paul was deeply shaken. Nevertheless we completed the book, which was one of the last books he published. Paul firmly believed that my work would be remembered for its elegiac achievement. Through Paul, I became friends with the wonderful witty mystical poet James Broughton and his partner Joel Singer, a photographer and collage artist. And around this time I also met poet and critic Jack Foley, a lively supporter of many poets. Jack interviewed me with Lynn on his KPFA Poetry Program and published my work in Poetry USA.
In the mid-Eighties I met Professor Margaret Clark, then director of the Medical Anthropology department at the University of California in San Francisco. To this warm and brilliant, charismatic woman I was deeply drawn, and eventually she moved into my home. Around this time I also began to study Vedanta, India's philosophy of non-dualism, with Carol Whitfield, a devotee of Swami Dayananda. At the same time I was inspired by the exuberant Goddess imagery emerging, it seemed, everywhere, and dove into compiling an anthology of Goddess poetry. She Rises like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets, gathered the work of 29 poets, among them Maya Angelou, Meridel Le Sueur, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Anne Waldman, Judy Grahn, May Sarton, Marge Piercy, Robin Morgan, Julia Vinograd, Diane Wakoski, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer, Linda Hogan, Susan Griffin, Elsa Gidlow and Diane Di Prima.
At the same time, my father was dying of emphysema. I had visited him occasionally in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where he and my mother had moved because of his health, and later in southern California, where they had returned as he became more gravely ill. We had some close talks that were moving and reconciling for me; in one he gave his blessing to my poetry (although he never read any of it). In early 1988, Margaret and I bought a beautiful larger home on Tamalpais Road with a magical tower, a mahogany staircase that spiraled upward, and a magnificent view of the San Francisco Bay. We moved in together but it was to be a heartbreaking move. On April 16, my father died. After his death, I worked on the final stages of the anthology, and Margaret, in the process of retiring from academic life, lent her sensitive ear to help me. At this time I was also doing consultation with Jungian analyst Dr. Joseph Henderson, who had been analyzed by and collaborated with Carl Jung himself.
In the spring of 1989, She Rises like the Sun was released by the Crossing Press. Poets Mary Mackey, Alma Villanueva, Jana Harris, Diane Di Prima, Judy Grahn, Lynn Lonidier and Mary Körte joined me in a joyous reading tour at bookstores and colleges along the West and East coasts, and on radio and television. Alone, I traveled on to Paris. Naturally I was delighted when She Rises received the 1990 Susan Koppelman Award for best-edited feminist work and was acknowledged by Booklist as "one of the best books to come from the Women's Spirituality Movement." But I was even more moved when, over the years, many women expressed to me individually how much the book meant to them. Only my mother, ironically, could find something with which to be displeased. She Rises like the Sun sold ten thousand copies before it went out of print seven years later.
Margaret and I were now having problems, and I rented a small writing cabin in Bolinas on the coast where I spent weekends and wrote some of the stories that would eventually become Journeys with Justine. In 1990 Margaret, who had been my anchor, and so deeply loved, moved to San Raphael. At the end of 1991, with great sadness, I sold our magical Tamalpais house. In spite of my agony, I somehow managed to write a couple of reviews during these months, one of Diane Di Prima's long overdue Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems for the San Francisco Chronicle, the other of James Broughton's wondrous Special Deliveries: Selected Poems for Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse. A prolific occasional poet and a sibling-Scorpio, James reciprocated with a poem for my 39th birthday, which I have treasured. "What would it mean," he ponders, "to be a Janine?/ To be beheld/ in the sheen serene/ of a Scorpio queen/ like Janine?"-concluding with "umpteen bangs on a tambourine/ for velveteeny evergreen/ Janine."
During a subsequent visit to James and Joel's woodsy home in the idyllic seaport of Port Townsend, Washington, I was enthusiastically presented with English novelist Andrew Harvey's latest book, Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening. Harvey's account of his sublime spiritual journey to a young Indian woman, considered an incarnation of the Divine Mother, mesmerized me. At James' insistence, I introduced myself to Harvey when he came to Berkeley not long afterward. Jane Heaven invited the two of us to converse about spirituality on her midnight KPFA program, "Magic in the Air," and gregarious Andrew and I were soon friends. On the heels of Andrew's visit came Mark Matousek, Andrew's friend, who had just seen his best friend Carol through her death from AIDS. Arriving on my 49th birthday, Mark presented me with Carol's picture of Mother Meera, smiling radiantly, and a tiny statue of Ganesh, the elephant God who removes obstacles, especially for poets.
Now I packed my possessions, giving many things away and putting the rest in storage in a friend's basement. I closed my psychiatric practice and my various accounts, sent my dear cat and dog to friends, and bought a one-way ticket to Bali. "Bird Mother," I wrote, "You greet me at the gate./ You show me the scaly pine's height./ You offer me the sky's vast freedom./ Now give me Your blessing, wherever I fly" (Changing Woman). Carrying a few light clothes, the photo of Mother Meera, and my portable typewriter, I boarded the airplane that lifted me up to the brilliant pink evening sun, rising perpetually as we flew toward the beckoning East (see "Flight" in Changing Woman). Into the warm wet womb that is Bali, I collapsed for two months, until I was revived by the mysterious prodding and gesticulating incantations of a beautiful Balinese shaman (see "Lost Paradise," Journeys with Justine).
From Bali I traveled on through Singapore, where I awaited my visa, to Madras, India. It was mid-March and boiling hot. Completely disoriented by India's exotic poverty and dust, I roamed the Madras museum, with its many exquisite bronze deities, the carved sandstone temple at Mahabalipuram beach, and other powerful places like the Shakti Temple, from which I was tearfully shooed away as a contaminated non-Hindu. I flew to Coimbatore and drove to Swami Dayananda's ashram in the hills. Swamiji greeted me warmly, and in the days to come worked his insightful and comical spiritual chiropractic on my neglected self. At one point I actually fainted, and when I woke up, I was in a world with which I had a different, fuller relationship. I knew where my soul was (and wasn't), and that it was my true self.
More travel in India: to Belur and Halebid temples, congested Delhi and exotic Rajastan, where I contracted mycoplasmic pneumonia. Only semi-recovered, I flew westward, on to Paris. The flight over the startlingly green continent of Europe, followed by our arrival over the divinely beautiful garden of la belle France, is something I will never forget. To my fresh eyes, Paris seemed so pristine, so lovely, and the quiet, in contrast to India, seemed surreal. At Le Prince Albert on the Right Bank, I joined my former neighbor Phyllis Schaefer, the widow of Chinese scholar Edward Schaefer (author of The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature). After some pleasant travel in fragrant Provence, we returned to Paris, and I rented a studio in a seventeenth-century building on an ancient street not far from the Pompidou. I began to work on organizing the poetry I had written since my last book, Her Magnificent Body, published in 1986.
When Andrew Harvey returned to Paris from a stay with Mother Meera in Thalheim, Germany, we met at his jewel-like, sixth-floor studio overlooking the courtyard of a count. Andrew urged me to visit Mother Meera right away and, on my return, move into his atmospheric apartment wallpapered with the pictures of saints, while he traveled to India to be with the Mother there. Andrew, well known for his spiritual journey writings, high-strung and luminously inspired, whether bubbling with bliss or raging against the world's evils, opened a number of spiritual doors for me. Some of the dramatic moments I spent with him-whether amusing, intimidating or miraculously inspiring-reappeared in "City of Our Lady" in Journeys with Justine. But my 1992 and subsequent visits to Mother Meera herself gave me firsthand experiences of divinity that were truly awesome. These I tried to convey in the short stanzas of "Revelations at Thalheim," which came to me at each darshan.
When at last I returned to the United States to the Bay Area, my Inner Voice questioned impatiently: "What is the point of all this?" Since I had no answer, I drove north and decided to settle, at least for a time, in the Pacific Northwest, on the Olympic Peninsula, in the quaint Victorian town of Port Townsend, situated on a narrow finger of land that protrudes into the deep blue straits of Juan de Fuca, boundary between the United States and Canada. I picked up my cat Marianne-who was glad to see me-and my dazed but loyal, dear dog Sophia on the way. "Welcome to the end of the road," quipped James, who with Joel greeted me with open arms. Struck by James's exceptional productivity out on the edge of nowhere, I was hoping for the same for myself. Above all, I wanted quiet time for further reflection, meditation and healing. Port Townsend turned out to be the perfect place to fulfill all my intentions.
But more astounding, it was here that I finally found my ultimate teacher. I had first encountered Mata Amritanandamayi's extreme spiritual power in Berkeley, during the painful time with Margaret. Her sizzling blessing, her stunning embrace, her burning chant, "Ma, Ma, Ma, Ma," had been crucial to my survival. But then I had no context for such an experience. Now I learned that Ammachi, as this mahatma or great soul and incarnation of the Divine Mother was lovingly known in India and throughout the world, began her annual world tour just twenty minutes from my house. And so it was perfectly natural that during the six years I lived in Port Townsend, writing constantly and conducting my small psychiatric practice, I became ever more deeply involved in Amma's spiritual practice of devotion, song, meditation and service. In Amma I found the manifestation of the maternal love lacking in my own life, as in the lives of most people in the male-dominated and ego-oriented Western world.
The natural setting of Port Townsend was deeply nurturing to my soul: her tall cedars, firs and red-skinned madronas; her eagles, herons, finches, chickadees and shiny crows; her nearby shore where I walked nearly every day, in all kinds of weather, over glowing rocks, with Sophia and later on our new Samoyed puppy, Devi (meaning Goddess). This healing locale inspired many poems that were eventually collected with all the poetry written from 1986 to 1998 in Changing Woman. "Madrona Mother" captures, I believe, the feeling of that gentle place:
At the cliff's edge I sit upon Your deepening root, Your foliage vast above my wondering head. And the Moon comes sowing diamonds down the darkened strait, and kneels beneath Your mighty feet. Now You lean out over the crumbling abyss and gather us back into Your molting red limbs.
Changing Woman unfolds in three movements. It is, uncustomarily, introduced by an autobiographical essay, "Introduction to the Poet." The second section, Fathers' Night, offers poems of political despair over Patriarchy's relentless march in the wrong direction, and hopeful visions of a more sensitive and feminine orientation toward life. The third section, Journey to the Root, contains a long sequence of love poems that follow the nuanced coming undone of a relationship. Journey to the Root begins with The Lover-"Your lotus opened a thousand petals./ And I was a bee-I dove to your center"; continues with Fool's Gold, poems of anger and disillusionment; followed by Lamentations, expressions of the unrelenting sorrow of the lover, abandoned in "Grief's sunken cathedral", "who screams every night when it turns dark/ at the highest pitch, inconsolable," and will not give up her love. "Where are you?" she cries in "Sarangi Sorrow," "under all these milky moping golden stars?" In The Goddesses she begins to accept her fate-"Karmic Forest" concludes, "we were magnificent, falling." And in And I Release You, she finally surrenders. Journey to the Root includes translations as well from the French and German of Francis Jammes, Marguerite Yourcenar, Guillaume Apollinaire, Heinrich Heine and Simone Weil. The final movement of Changing Woman contains spiritual poems: a retelling of the story of the Navajo Creation Goddess, Changing Woman; recreations of poems by sixteenth-century Indian poet Mirabai; many Goddess poems; and poems written through the inspiration of the Divine Mothers of India.
While living in Port Townsend I received, by telephone, a great deal of invaluable criticism and support from my friend, teacher and writer Kris Brandenburger. Besides Changing Woman, I also worked on a series of short stories, Journeys with Justine, which recount a woman's epiphanies over several decades. I finally brought to completion my translations, Star in My Forehead: Selected Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler, which found publication through stalwart editor Jim Perlman's Holy Cow! Press in Minnesota. Individual poems, as well as stories and essays, were taken for publication in a wide variety of journals, and numerous anthologies such as Her Words, Heal Your Soul-Heal the World, American Poets Say Good-bye to the Twentieth Century, and The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Around the World.
During this time Marija Gimbutas died, the great archeomythologist who had published landmark works on the matricentric neolithic European civilization of the Goddess. Her assistant Joan Marler, on whose KPFA radio program Brainstorm I had read my poetry in the Eighties, asked me to write an essay about the relationship of my poetry to Gimbutas's archeomythology for a memorial collection, From the Realm of the Ancestors: Essays in Honor of Marija Gimbutas. The result was "Goddesses, Goddesses: From Archeology to Poetry of the Feminine" (later revised to "Marija Gimbutas and Me"). With drum, tambourine and bells, I performed poetry in celebration of the Goddess at conferences honoring Gimbutas's work on the Goddess civilization held at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis' ancestral home on Madouri Island.
My friend Lynn Lonidier also died during this period by tragically stepping off a cliff and falling to her death on a San Francisco beach. I knew that Lynn had left much unpublished poetry, some of which I had seen, and I felt strongly motivated to see this work into publication. From her archive, transferred to the Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, I uncovered as much of the work as I could, wrote an introductory biography, gathered together a preface from her old friend, poet Jerome Rothenberg, and photographs from her brother, Professor Fred Lonidier. The Rhyme of the Ag-Ed Mariness: Last Poems of Lynn Lonidier was published in 2000 by Station Hill Press in New York.
From Port Townsend I made some significant trips: back to Paris (where I met the enfant terrible of French literature, novelist Bruno Guy-Lussac) and to India (where again I became sick, yet was blessed to meet Mother Teresa in Calcutta, visit the ancient temples at Khajuraho, Ellora and Ajanta, see Swami Dayananda in Bombay, and spend powerfully transforming time with Ammachi at her ashram in Kerala), and of course to California (where I met another saint, Sri Ma, visited Ammachi again, and saw old friends, usually staying at the home of childhood friend, Carol Fabric). One-armed Rusty North, publisher of Sagittarius Press in Port Townsend, handset a tiny blood-red chapbook of poems she selected from Changing Woman, naming it Goddess Poems.
In 1998 I decided to return to California-for which I was longing-in order to be closer to old friends and family, the rich cultural life of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Women's Spirituality network, and in particular Ammachi's ashram in nearby San Ramon. Although my years in Port Townsend had been peaceful and productive, I missed the warmer California spirit and higher energy. I bought a small house in lovely Sonoma, once (for three weeks) the capital of the renegade Republic of California and home of the northernmost Franciscan Mission. Situated amidst rolling green and golden vineyards, Sonoma was graciously built around a spacious Mexican plaza that is now a park with numerous majestic trees, wandering colorful chickens and a pond full of rambunctious ducks.
Once again I opened my psychiatric practice, now clearly focused on integrating psychology, spirituality and medicine. Susan Hahn, poet, friend and editor of Open Bone Review, selected poems from Changing Woman for a lavender chapbook entitled Love, Enter. My noble Oyez publisher Bob Hawley, now terminally ill, published a letterpress keepsake of the poem "And I Release You," also from Changing Woman. And I, meanwhile, turned my attention to collecting from the ten volumes of Mata Amritanandamayi's Awaken, Children, and other sources her sublime words for an anthology of contemplative poems, eventually published as Messages from Amma.
To be a poet is a calling, a gift, a devotion, a duty and, finally, a mystery. I feel graced and grateful to be a woman and a poet, to have known the intimacies of both poetry and psychiatry. And I am thankful for all the many teachers along the way. My life feels like a rich and intricate weaving of abundance and beauty, incessant change and transformation. In masculine and materialistic America-so fascinated with the slick, the empty and the deadly-the image of the poet is often confused with the soul of poetry. My own rather mystical work-focused on the feminine, in love with the feminine, insistent on the feminine-is perhaps an anomaly. Yet my work alone, better than any biography, documents my journey.
While the Divine Mother writes my life, I copy it onto paper. The ink I use is the light within me-my writing a shimmer-strand in the infinite web of her bliss. Not long ago, as I whirled in the embrace of the Ionian Sea, came the poem "In Your Miracle":
Alone in the aqua blue of your body, I whirl my prayer of love, afloat on your liquid bliss skin, above me your umbrella of light- I, your starfish daughter, in your undulating clear blue belly, in the aquamarine of your heart.
[From Goddesses, Goddesses: Essays by Janine Canan, Regent Press, Oakland CA, 2007]