In Conversation with Bonnie Naradzay

How and where have you found deep beauty in the past year?

As I write this, March is upon us again. I remember vividly how, on March 11 last year, I led a morning “Poetry Salon” with people at Miriam’s Kitchen, a daytime homeless shelter in a church basement in downtown Washington DC, as I’d done on Wednesdays every week for years. At 4 p.m. I was at Ingleside, a retirement community elsewhere in the city. At Ingleside I’ve led monthly poetry workshops for years as well (I call these workshops Salons also, though I am mindful that a Saloon is only an extra “o” away from what I do). The next day, everything was closed abruptly. 

I continue to lead monthly Salons at Ingleside on Zoom (from home). But I’ve not seen the Miriam’s Kitchen poets for nearly a year, and I miss them deeply. While I wait for signs that this homeless day shelter may be able to provide space again for writing and artmaking, I think about showing up at breakfast time there (the meals are boxed, now, and distributed outside) to look for old friends.  

That time in March when everything was shutting down, the Australian scientist from the National Institutes of Health who rented a room in my house literally got the last plane out to return home. Then I felt truly bereft, since we’d talked every evening over communal dinners. 

One of the many other activities canceled March 12 was the evening class I was taking on one of the Gospels. I emailed my classmates that I was feeling disconsolate. In response, someone invited me to walk with her every morning at Brookside Gardens, not far from where I live. This yearlong morning walking ritual with a friend, in a place of beauty that changes daily, has saved me. In addition, we have volunteered to give out boxes of produce and food to the lines of people in need.  Perhaps we left the confines of the classroom to journey in another’s footsteps.

How have the monthly Salons at Ingleside sustained you and your students during the pandemic?

Sarah Yerkes, who will be 103 in April this year, published her first book of poems after she’d turned 100. Her publisher, Passager, had issued Henry Morgenthau’s poetry book a few years earlier. Passager’s online Pandemic Diaries welcomes diary submissions https://www.passagerbooks.com/pandemic-diaries/ and features poems by Sarah and others. She and the others in the group delight in composing poems and look forward to our Zoom get-togethers. 

They write poems, sometimes wryly humorous, about the pandemic and their isolation, but they also respond to “writing prompts” that I include with the thick handouts I prepare each month before our sessions and email to them. Of course, putting together a handout of poems and explanatory material, with a focus on a certain type of poem or poet, is a monthly challenge, and I am grateful for everyone’s suggestions. This is a two-way street we’re on; we sustain each other in our efforts.

How has the pandemic impacted your writing?

Suddenly the world opened up unique opportunities through Zoom offerings, readings, and discussion groups.  In August I enrolled in a semester of weekly sessions on Homer’s The Odyssey, through St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. This Zoom seminar, which ended in mid-December and required a 15-page paper, was a great experience. (I also wrote an essay, for the graduate school’s journal, on coping with the strangeness of being in a Zoom seminar.) Without leaving home, I was transported into the world of an ancient epic, and I stayed there as long as I could.

For most of this pandemic year, I’ve been writing a poem each day. I doubt I would have done so otherwise, but this is a pandemic approved activity! Writing each day has become another discipline, like morning walks. Accountability always helps! Those who sign up must share something daily with others, and the people I’m grouped with change each month. Consequently, in addition to reading and writing about past plagues, I write about the one we’ve weathered for a year now. 

The ritual of walking around Brookside all year has given me much to observe and write about. Nature easily seeps into my poems. The blue heron, the lone cormorant, barn swallows learning to fly, turtles lined up on a log, the cherry tree blooming out of season, the still pond that mirrors the sky all make their appearances. Because politics and troubling events in the larger world have continued unabated outside the peaceful gardens, and I read the news relentlessly, this world we live in enters into my writing these days too, as it must.