“I love your wide-open poetry” is what the great poet Pablo Neruda once told Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti, who believed Neruda to be speaking of a broader group of poets, those of the Beat Generation, responded with “You opened the door.”

How have the words of another opened the door for you?

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WordCandy has a bit of a new look, and the peskiest little bugs worked out. Best place on the web for great quotes and stunning photos. Stop by and pick out something sweet to share with a friend–on Facebook, Twitter or by email.

Follow this link for sweet fun: wordcandy.me.

My family moved out of state and I started eighth grade in a school without an orchestra. I joined the city’s adult symphony instead, sitting second of two chairs. I took private lessons from a man who looked to be a cross between Professor Snape and Harry Potter. None of the girls in my class wanted to take lessons from him. With his large round glasses and long, greasy black hair, the spindly music instructor frightened me only slightly less than his brutish, muscular wife who always answered the door red-faced and angry. “I am here to play viola,” I said.

I’m finishing up our book club discussion of Ordinary Genius over at Tweetspeak Poetry this week, telling my musical history and writing a sonnet. I’m told that my sonnets (I’ve two to my name) tend to sound a little angry. Maybe it had to do with my viola teacher’s angry wife, I don’t know. You could check it out if you’d like.

And while you’re there, I’ve got a brand new slate of our weekly Top Ten Poetic Picks–great finds in art, poetry, music and writing. My favorite this week? The Halloween costumes based on famous works of art. You’ll want to see them. Trust me on this.

This is not the type of writing  I normally do here. But this was a story I thought needed to be told, and asked my friends Kathy and Mary to sit down with me a month or so ago and tell it. A modified version of this article appears in this week’s Grant County Review.

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Kathy Madsen knows how to celebrate a birthday.

On her birthday next week, Kathy will tie a bright red ribbon around her name and throw it into a five-state pool to match up with someone who needs a kidney.

That’s some party favor, let me tell you.

Last spring, Kathy was on her back porch in her pajamas drinking coffee when her friend Vangie called. Vern and Vangie Heupel’s daughter Mary, living in Sioux Falls, had just been released from the hospital after and ICU stay due to kidney failure.

Kathy reassured her friend that she would do everything she could, thinking that she might drop off a box of chocolates or offer to mow the lawn. But before she knew what she was saying, she heard herself tell Vangie, “I’ll test for you. If I can give Mary a kidney, I want to give.”

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Mary Heupel was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of four. She has managed the illness successfully with insulin and diet and doctors have assured her there was nothing more she could have done. But now in her early forties, her kidneys have been through too much.

Shortly after Easter, Mary became ill at work, and went to acute care thinking she had the flu. She was sent immediately to the emergency room and admitted to ICU with her kidneys functioning at only eight percent. After a week, she was sent home to think about her options. By the time she returned the her doctor the next week, she was told she would have no option but dialysis.

Mary is certified to perform her own dialysis at home, a four-hour process she undergoes three times a day. Because of the constraints of the procedure, she has become virtually homebound, leaving only for work each day and church on the weekends. Her mother has moved in to care for her and provide transportation, as she is unable to drive herself given her condition. Her dad, Vern, splits time between Sioux Falls and the couple’s home in Milbank, helping out wherever he can while taking care of responsibilities at home.

She now faces a decision: a kidney transplant or continue dialysis for the rest of her life.

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Kathy and Vangie met a few years ago. Kathy had been visiting her son in Oklahoma and attended church with him. When she returned home, she sensed the desire to be involved in a church again. She drove to ValleyBaptist Church in Milbank one Sunday morning. She sat in her car and looked at the building, rethinking her decision. “Do you know how many doors there are in that church? God, I can’t do this.” she said.

She was about to turn around and go back home, when Vangie appeared at her car window and invited her inside. They became fast friends and now participate in Bible study and garden club together and often sit together in church.

Realizing the magnitude of what she’d promised to do, Kathy called her husband, Greg, hoping to persuade him to along with her plans to give up a kidney for Mary’s sake.

“Remember I said I wanted to do something for Vangie?”

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“I want to test for them,” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“If I’m a match, I want to give a kidney.”

“I know.”

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What no one knew was whether Kathy would be a match for Mary. As things turned out, she was not, and for a while it appeared as though Mary would have no donor options. Then the hospital staff introduced them to a paired exchange program.

Both Mary and Kathy would have to go through an extensive testing process to ensure that both were eligible candidates for a transplant — Mary to receive a kidney and Kathy to give one. Once they were both cleared, they would be entered into the draw to be matched with another donor/recipient pair in a pool of patients from South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois.

Once a match is made, the surgeries will be scheduled and all four will take place the same day. “It’s just like Grey’s Anatomy,” Kathy says. “They’ll put it in a little red box and run down the hallway and put it on a jet place. And then it’s there.”

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“Mary was dealt this card because she is a very strong person. I think Mary is so brave it’s not even funny,” Kathy said. “What she’s going through now, I don’t know if I could do it. She is an inspiration to so many people.”

Mary credits her faith for giving her the strength. “Whenever I have a doubt or even an inkling of something crosses my mind, I just pray and it turns me around. I have a lot of faith in God. I always have.”

She said that what Kathy is doing means everything to her. “She has a heart of gold. I’ve never met anyone before who would say, ‘Yes, I’ll give you a kidney,’ right out of the blue.”

As for Kathy, she just wants Mary to live a good, long life. “We’re blessed with two kidneys and we can share one with someone who needs it. Why not? Why not do it and save someone’s life? I want Mary to sit on the porch with me and drink coffee and throw rocks at the rabbits. I just want her to have a happy life. “

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The tests have taken several months, and the process has been delayed at times due to other medical setbacks. In the meantime, the bond between the women has grown.

On one occasion when the three had gone to the hospital together to pick up some testing items, a receptionist asked Kathy for her birthdate  to complete some paperwork. Kathy told her the date, October 29.

Mary turned to her mother and exclaimed, “Mom! That’s Shelly’s birthday!”

The Heupels lost Shelly, Mary’s older sister, to cancer in 1983 when she was just 17. The realization that the two shared a birthday seemed to cement their resolve to complete this process together.

In keeping with the way these lives have intertwined, it seems that Shelly has found a way through Kathy to give her own birthday gift to Mary.

Looking at Kathy, Vangie said, “She is our daughter.”

Kathy, smiling, replied, “Officially.”

Last week, my parents visited us over the weekend. Their stay was extended by a vehicular malfunction. My dad returned home, car fixed and a shiny new repair bill under his arm, and wrote this. I don’t know if he meant for me to publish it. We’ll see. 

***

by Paul Willingham

We took a little trip in our Mercury auto
Out through the farm byways of Minnesota
Crossed the border into South Dakota
To visit the chief poet at Claims Poetica

We weren’t deterred by freeway lanes narrowing
The corn and bean harvest was in full swing
Green behemoths, chewing, shelling, grain a-spewing
And rival crimson machines were also working

Past a gleaming chemical plant, the sign read POET
Hmmm, Miracle Gro for poets, wouldn’t you know it
Sip this magic elixir, then start to pen it
As the words start to flow and the rhymes are a great fit

The radio announcer notes that Edgar Allen Poe
Died this date one hundred fifty three years ago
POET inspiration fluids, Edgar ‘the poet’ Poe
A coincidence you say, well I do not think so

Quotes from Poe the Poet, but not the raven
“The generous critic fann’d the Poet’s fire,
and taught the world with reason to admire”…
“Poetry is the rhythmical, creation of beauty in words”

(Edgar Allan Poe 1/19/1809 – 10/7/1849)

When I traveled last month, I attended a writer’s event at The Mount in Lenox, Mass., which is the beautiful, sprawling estate of 20th century author and poet Edith Wharton.

I have a photo essay up at Tweetspeak if you’d like to enjoy a glimpse into the spirit of Edith Wharton, which is evident throughout the “autobiographical house.”

Stop on over.

By this time, I’m ready to ask the chicken question.

I’ve been scratching around for an angle, and even as I type this, I don’t have one. But Kim Addonizio tells me I don’t have to know where I’m going when I start writing, and even goes so far as to say it might be best not to. If that’s true, then I could walk her way and ask the age-old question to see if it gets me all the way across the boulevard.

(Addonizio got a poem out of it when she tried.)

So what do you think? Why did the chicken cross the road?

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It’s Wednesday, and I’m at Tweetspeak where we’re reading Kim Addonizio’s  Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within together. Come on over to read the rest of the post — maybe you’ll find out why the chicken crossed. Or how it wound up in my dryer.

Ordinary Genius: Why the Chicken Crossed the Road

Photo by Toby M, Creative Commons license via Flickr.

It’s been a great week of fun over at Tweetspeak Poetry – here’s my quick digest, of great articles worth your time.

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There is not a single more recognizable southern drink than sweet tea, except maybe Kentucky bourbon. And if one were to combine the former with the latter, one might find a sort of southern drink Nirvana.

– Seth Haines has a weekly community poetry prompt on Mondays, this month writing found poems together around the theme of tea.

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I steady myself for the cardboard colors to come:
Dun, amber, sepia sweeping over ungrazed prairie.

– Glynn Young reviews Judith Valente’s Discovering Moons

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The recent discovery of a third daguerreotype of Victorian-era poet Emily Dickinson has historians scratching their heads. Long believed to be reclusive and camera-shy, Dickinson seems to paint an entirely new picture of herself, positively mugging for the paparazzi.

– A Tweetspeak exclusive report on the possible discovery of a new Emily Dickinson portrait. (This might explain why I was unable to complete my journalism studies.)

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L.L. tagged me on Facebook to come but I was busy that night. Lucky me. [smiley face] Poetry is nonsense. And cryptic.

– Hear me confess to making disparaging remarks about poetry…shortly before beginning to write poetry. Join me and the Tweetspeak gang for a new book club of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius.

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Tweetspeak’s managing editor and I enjoyed poetry readings on the same terrace where Edith Wharton and Henry James sat “on summer nights, reading Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ aloud.” Not once did security try to escort us to the gate. 

– It’s my week to bring you the best poetic news you can use (or leave sitting on the table). This week, it’s engineered poetry, who to blame for overdue books, and how to talk about classics you’ve never read in our Top Ten Poetic Picks.

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I thought of my own life and its lack of transition. My own spiritual tradition ritualizes very few rites of passage: birth, marriage, childbirth, and death. Our larger culture celebrates only a few other markers: driving at 16 and drinking at 21.

– Charity Singleton talks about life transition through the lens of the art museum.

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Still here? It’s way more fun over at Tweetspeak…

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Make your life better by subscribing to Every Day Poems.

And one last thing? My favorite WordCandy image of the week. Make your own? It’s simple, and beautiful.

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Top photo: Dinner table at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s mansion in Lenox, Mass.

It wasn’t so very long ago I made the awkward discovery I wasn’t the smartest person in the room. It’s something I can be, you know, if I frequent the right rooms. But there are only a few rooms where that works for me.

The rest of the time, I’m not it.

Turns out (luckily enough) that I don’t have to be.

I find myself in a lot of those other rooms lately, just one of the regular occupants, neither being nor needing to be particularly smart. I tend to keep my voice a little lower, have far less to say and what I do say might be muttered under my breath.

I’m liking that, more than one might expect. It relieves a lot of the pressure, and curiously enough minimizes the potential downside of really messing things up.

This week I started reading The Spirituality of Imperfection (Kurtz and Ketcham). Not far in, the authors remind of the nature of error as a simple fact of our days.

Errors, of course, are part of the game. They are part of our truth as human beings. To deny errors is to deny ourself, for to be human is to be imperfect, somehow error-prone. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and ache for wholeness, to hurt and try to find a way to healing through the hurt. To be human is to embody a paradox…

We are not “everything” but neither are we “nothing.” Spirituality is discovered in the space between paradox’s extremes, for there we confront our helplessness and powerlessness, our woundedness. In seeking to understand our limitations, we seek not only an easing of our pain but an understanding of what it means to hurt and what it means to be healed. Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to “blame” for our errors–neither ourselves nor anyone nor anything else. Spirituality helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the very core of our human be-ing. Spirituality accepts that “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

Here’s to letting someone else be the smartest person in the room. I’ll be in the back row, getting to know my limitations a little better. Maybe you’d like to sit in the next seat over?

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Photo: Letter on Edith Wharton’s desk, taken at The Mount, Lenox, Mass.