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Photo Sue Harrison
Poet Nancy Pearson looks at those who fall between the cracks of the American dream. |
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Pearson’s poems pen a cautionary tale
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Nancy Pearson’s poetry often deals with the underbelly, with the homeless, crack-smoking girls with too many miles on them or with children in less than childlike situations, but she never devolves into confessionary angst. Her words are sharp and sometimes draw blood, her own, but they are more of a cautionary tale, a there-but-for-fortune kind of sideways glance at where one or two wrong steps might take anyone.
Pearson is a second-year writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and she reads with fiction writer Fiona McFarlane at 8 p.m. this Saturday. FAWC is located at 24 Pearl St. in Provincetown.
Pearson looks more like the girl next door than the neighborhood crack dealer but she’s had her share of down times.
“These poems are not autobiographical but they are about inner conflict,” she says. “I did spend most of my 20s in and out of mental institutions. I was depressed. I had trauma in my past I could not escape. I was self-mutilating, suicidal.”
She was homeless for a while and admits to doing a lot of serious drugs to get to a high she was searching for as a way out of her inner pain. But, she says, the narrators of her poems are people she was around, not herself.
“I was like a fly on the wall. I was there but not participating in some of the events,” she says.
That is most clearly delineated in her raw and graphic multi-part poem “From the Motel-by-the-Hour” which won second place in the Iowa Review poetry competition.
She evokes a land littered with emotional broken glass using a carefully placed phrase lingering in an otherwise sweet story, as in “Cyclic.”
“I am twelve. My father and his four girls/ are fishing in the yellow marsh. It is easy —/ reeling in small loaves of sunlight, before the winter/ I began slicing my wrists like fruit,/ before I spent my Medicaid check on crack,/ before I demanded the world recognize my suffering.”
Mining personal pain is good as long as one can transcend the woe-is-me genre, she says. She wants there to be a gentleness between the writer and the speaker of the poem. The poem’s speaker is hurt and troubled and now she’s finding grace — that’s the message she wants to send.
“I had to get out of the vanity of my own grief,” she says.
She’s traveled a long way from her Chattanooga upbringing. In addition to her time in mental institutions and San Francisco crack houses, she managed to earn a degree at University of Virginia and an MFA from George Mason University. She volunteered and then taught prisoners at the Alexandria Detention Center, a job she admits to being highly unqualified for. She even worked for the State Dept. in a job so obscure she was able to spend most of her day writing poetry, the very poems in fact that got her into FAWC.
“I do want to say that my experience at FAWC has changed my life in profound ways — the people, the fellows, the staff are all amazing.”
Her life is all good now. No more drugs, no more trips too far into the dark side. “I’m lucky, I survived,” she says.
She’s even written a bunch of love poems, something she laughs about and says she never expected to do.
Her collected poems are about to be published by Perugia Press in a book titled “Two Minutes of Light” this coming fall after winning their first and second book award.
For the future, she says her themes of the displaced and disadvantaged people in life will continue but with a broader theme.
“I have huge sympathy for the maligned and downtrodden,” she says. “You can let all kinds of things happen to you personally and you have to get yourself out of it. But I want to look at the larger picture, at displacement, homelessness, refugees, the people from Dafar, our own homeless on skid row. What is a home and what are we without it, whether it’s a van or a house in the suburbs?”
She recalls reading that most of us are one paycheck away from sliding into homelessness and sees clearly that the line between being okay and not is a very thin one at best.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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Apr 17th, 2008