The One You Feed - How to Navigate the Complexities of Caregiving with Kathy Fagan

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

In This Episode, You'll Learn: Exploring the complexity of emotions within us and how our choices feed into that: How to navigate caregiving and its unique challenges How can we better understand the multiplicity of feelings and desires inside of us How the process of writing can allow you to process and find distance from tough emotions The challenges in accepting aging and mortality How paying attention is critical in both creative endeavors and in life The importance of staying curious and unafraid to face sorrow How can we explore the nuances of trust and care in relationships To Learn More, click hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I really do believe if one wants to be an artist of any kind, certainly a writer, and maybe just like a human being who's self-aware and aware of the world around them, attention is our best offense and defense. I mean, it is the skill that we need to most cultivate, it seems to me. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. in venues such as the New York Times, Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Poetry.

Kathy co-founded the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University, where she teaches poetry and co-edits the journal OSU Press Wheeler Poetry Prize Series. Her most recent and sixth book is Bad Hobby. Her previous book, Sycamore, was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. Kathy has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Hi, Kathy. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric, for having me. I'm excited to have you on. A co-friend of ours, Maggie Smith, who's been a guest on the show, recommended you. And you are a poet here in Ohio, in Columbus, Ohio. You teach at Ohio State University.

So I always love having people locally on, and I love your poetry. And we're going to be discussing primarily things from your latest book, which is called Bad Hobby. But before we get into that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,

the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, thanks, Eric. That's such a great opening gambit. And I was both really attracted to the parable when I saw it and also extremely uncomfortable with it. And I was sort of thinking about those dual responses. And then I was teaching one of my poetry classes a week ago, and I mentioned John Keats' notion about negative capability. John Keats, the romantic 19th century English poet. And in a letter to his brother, he talks about this notion he has about negative capability and defines it as someone being capable of being in uncertainties and mysteries, the ability to hold in one's mind

two opposing elements at once. Good wolf and bad wolf made me think of that spectrum in between and sort of being able somehow to balance the two, right? In that most creatures, it seems to me sort of dwell on a spectrum between the two, right? And maybe even thresholds before and beyond that spectrum, a kind of liminality at either side. So not just a binary then, but a sort of plurality and multiplicity, which feels to me perhaps maybe truer to my experience. And so that's what that wonderful parable made me think about, all the spaces in between and on either side. Yeah, I love that idea of negative capability that Keats had. And it's funny that you bring

it up in that way, because we are talking about our logo right now. And our logo originally was similar to what it looks like now. It's a wolf head that, you know, sort of two-facing. One wolf was very delineated in dark colors, one was delineated in white colors, and there was a line right down the middle. It was very binary. And over time, it became clear that for many people, it gave the idea that dark is bad, light is good, right? And so in today's culture, we'd want to be no part of perpetuating that idea. So then our logo moved to blue. We thought, let's just kind of like, okay, blue is going to be sort of neutral in that way. And the gradient between the wolves went from a binary line to very much a gradient, a shading, a variety of reasons. I don't know if we'll change it or not. Listeners, if you have an opinion, weigh in. But what we've thought about recently is a wolf of all colors. You know, a wolf that has all the different colors in it, because that's really a closer

approximation of what's going on inside of us, right? There's not just a good and a bad inside of us. As you mentioned, there's all these different desires and goals and wants and competing priorities. And it's just this smorgasbord of things. Exactly. Inside of us. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I think the parable is useful in its core idea of we have a choice and our choices matter. Right. So I think that's the key part. But I really resonate with everything you just said there around that multiplicity. So I thought maybe we could start by getting you to read one of your poems from your new book.

And I thought we could start with the poem, Mourning. Yeah, thanks. I will read that poem. Mourning. I walk out each morning, the sun on my back. It is not the hand of my mother. She is dead now. It is not the hand of my mother. She is dead now. It is not the hand of my father. He is needy as a child and cannot think to comfort me. I won't say God, but you might. Often in poems, you means I, and I means you, and with our common griefs,

I, and I means you, and with our common griefs, confusions, and best efforts unacknowledged, that may be true outside poems, too. The sun feels good. It feels warm on my back. The heat between my shoulders reminds me of something, like the riddle, beginning what,

and ending everything that would love you and kill you but doesn't there's so many things in there that i love but i really love this idea of common griefs confusions and best efforts it's a beautiful idea you know there's a lot of grief in this latest book i think sycamore is your book before this, and there's grief there too. And different kind of loss in that. A totally different kind of loss. That was the loss of a relationship. This is parental, but that common grief idea. So I thought maybe we could start by talking about your father and his dementia. Listeners will know Ginny and I have gone through this with her mother for the last

six years. Her mother passed in October. So a topic that's near and dear to our heart, and I know a lot of listeners too, as well as just this idea of people of a certain age having to start caring for their parents. Absolutely. Yeah, it seems so common among the, speaking of common grief, so common among my age group. In fact, so much so that when I was recently at Penn State Barron giving a reading, young people even came up to me to talk about their parents' experience with their grandparents, their own experience with their grandparents. At first, I thought, oh, this is definitely going to make clear what age I am by talking about these kinds of issues in my poems,

but it is a larger concern, even than I was aware, with lots of folks sort of caring for the ill and the elderly. And in fact, in the memory care facility that my father last month actually passed in, there are many younger people as well there as a result of stroke, Parkinson's and other kinds of issues. So it's not just dementia, although that was what robbed my dad of his life for the past several years, certainly. We hadn't lived together since I was a child when he moved in with us in 2013. And his conservative faith and politics had always been a challenge for me as a queer agnostic liberal feminist. And though I'd long been aware of his physical disability, I wasn't aware of the extent of where his dementia and other kind of physical ailments

had gotten him into. He likely had lifelong cognitive disabilities that I wasn't aware of as a child. We were poor. My parents didn't go to college. We were very much working class. And this kind of thing, if there were issues, they weren't addressed, or they couldn't afford to be addressed, or folks didn't know what exactly they were dealing with, with these kinds of issues. And so he passed because he was mostly pretty charming. So when he came to live with me, we navigated these systems of public health care and social services that I, in my privilege as a well-educated, tenured professor, hadn't had to deal with since I was young myself.

And so that was a real education for me. At around that time, I had been dealing with writing with sort of oblique poems about my own childlessness. And when I was in charge suddenly of my father's care, I had to think really long and hard about a lot of reverse caregiving, right? The child becoming the parent to the parent. That's what resulted in bad hobby. like, hey, you're the age you are. And I watched my mother do it with my grandmother. But somehow, I just didn't see it coming. Now, that may be because I was focused on getting a son into college and getting myself out of a bad marriage. So in my mind, it was like, all right, he's off to college. I'm out of this marriage. You know, now it's me time.

Freedom. Freedom. Yeah. How little I knew about what was about to appear on the horizon. So I just, I remember just being a little bit taken aback by it, but it is so common these days. And so many of my friends are going through it. You mentioned sort of your dad and his conservative politics and you being, you know, liberal and queer. And, you know, one of my best friends lives with his parents, both of them. I mean, he's got a double dose of it. They're both struggling mightily. And he's gay. And Fox News just blares through that house all day, every day. And I just think, wow. I feel that pain. Absolutely. Yeah, there was a short period of time

when I just couldn't even share a meal with my dad. It was actually 2016. I don't have to tell you what was happening in 2016. And it was, it was impossible to have a civil conversation and made worse, of course, I wish I had understood this at the time. But it was, of course, much more fraught because of my father's advancing dementia. Right? Of course. Yeah. I mean, because I mean, at least my experience with people and dementia is that the filters start to come off. Exactly. The executive control that's like, well, maybe that wouldn't be the right thing to say starts to vanish. And you're just like, oh, whoa. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. the, I can't think of the word for it. I was gonna say fabrication, of my experience with my dad. And again, because

I hadn't dealt with someone struggling with dementia before, I did not know what was happening. And I certainly wasn't able to learn how to deal with it. In fact, one of the saddest things about this journey that my dad and I went on together was, and this is later when he was in memory care, medicated with antipsychotics and antidepressants and was losing virtually all of his memory except my name and maybe one or two other details about his previous life. He was sweeter. He was kinder. He was the dad that I remember looking up to and feeling so, you know, snuggly with as a little girl. But all that period before that, when we were, you know, going toe to toe, you know, I regret it, but it happens that impulse control in a dementia patient just

vanishes and he would sort of say and do anything. And I responded because I'm, I'm a human being. Yeah. You know, I fought back. It's on the job training for sure. Yes. You know, and we went through a similar thing with Jenny's mom. There was a period where she became extraordinarily bristly, to put it kindly, you know. Yeah, they can become really aggressive. Yeah, yeah. That kind of aggression is so common. Yeah. I mean, we had caregivers getting shoved, you know, and so we had to start to medicate her a little more heavily because, I mean, she was running out the front door, banging on the neighbor's door, screaming, they're trying to kill me. I mean, it was just, so we had no choice but to medicate her. And then she became more docile at that point.

And that's its own heartbreaking thing. So yeah, it's a tough journey. You said somewhere that caregiving and writing poems moved hand in hand during those years. And I felt like I was failing at both. Yes. Because on the one hand, as I just explained, I did not know how to care for my father in his condition. I was working full-time, caregiving full-time. Thank goodness the pandemic hadn't quite yet arrived. I was directing, I was serving as director of our creative writing program, and I felt pulled in a million directions. When I look back now, I'm not even sure how I managed to write this book, except I needed to process somehow. And I've always gone to writing for that.

The challenge that I faced in making the poems was I wrote poems. I didn't write autobiography. that I faced in making the poems was I wrote poems. I didn't write autobiography. I'm not a prose writer. I don't write memoir. And these poems appeared as very autobiographical poems. And so how to shape that into what I recognized as a poem, which is an art form, not journal keeping, or even reportage, right, was a whole other kind of challenge. And so yes, I felt absolutely as if I was failing on both counts. And it took a lot of work to feel as if I had an actual publishable manuscript, and certainly my editors and some early readers helped with that. And also to find a way to sort of continue to have my own life while caring for my father. And that took years, many years to figure out.

Did you say that your father just passed recently? He did in the end of December, a month ago. Okay. For some reason, reading the book, I had the sense that, I mean, I knew it was recent, but I thought it had happened sooner than that. Yeah. I think so many people these days will relate with that. I feel like I'm not doing good at either of them, right? If we've got a demanding full-time job and children, many mothers or fathers. I mean, I felt that as a father all the time. Like I'm not doing enough there and I'm not doing enough here.

And yet I'm giving everything I've got. You get into caregiving for an adult. It's the same thing, you know? And then how do you stay sane and take care of yourself? And, you know, we had a guy on the show once and it was really helpful for me. I think it was the interview with a guy named Ken Druck and he had a book about raising an aging parent. And there was a line in it that stuck with me then and was really important to me through that whole process and has continued to be my mother with my father. And he basically said, what we all want is somebody to come along and tell us what enough is. Am I doing enough? And he basically said, that doesn't exist. That

idea of enough simply does not exist. There is no right answer to that question. There is simply the life you have, the circumstances you're presented with, the best that you can do, what your values are, but no one's going to come along and say that was enough because all of us can feel like we're not doing enough, which is not a very good feeling. And as I said to you earlier, I'm an over-preparer. I want to know how to fix problems. I want to get it taken care of. You're absolutely right. And I'm going to have to look up, Kendra. It seems to me to be absolutely true that there is no template. We're just doing it by the seat of our pants. And we're lucky if it mostly works out. We know how it ends. But otherwise,

we don't know what the path is going to look like. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Coming up against dementia in her mother and my father was a challenge for obviously a thousand reasons. But one of them was, I'm very similar to you in that I'm like, all right, give me a problem. Let me go solve it. I will fix it. I will work on myself. I will do what I need to do. And I have a general belief. This is not in all circumstances, in all cases, but a general belief that wherever we are, there are some positive things that we can do in our lives that are going to move us in a better direction. But with her mother and my father, you're staring right at very clearly like, no, there's not. I mean, maybe you can make them more comfortable.

Maybe you can make their care a little bit better. Maybe you can make their day better by playing guitar to them. Yes. But this is not fixable. This is going one direction and one direction only. And there is nothing that you're going to do to intervene to at the core issue, make it any better. Yeah. And that's absolutely heartbreaking. It's also, I think, oddly, maybe one of the elements that gave me some strength to keep going, because there is no payoff. I mean, you know, we're doing it just because we love them. even with kids, I don't have children. So I can't say this is true. Definitively, you would know better than I but, you know, you just kind of expect them to get on with their lives. And, you know, make something of themselves, right? And maybe even be better than you have ever been. But with an aging parent, that's not going to happen. There is no down the line result. It's losing them and then

being on the front line of mortality yourself. And that's not cheerful, but it's true. It's honest. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's very different. I often felt like, still feel like, I still have my mother and Jenny's dad will eventually get old. But it felt so clearly with her mother in this case, because we were closest to that. We were living here to a fair extent of the time. It really felt like, you know, when you pour energy into a child or a project or a volunteer thing, it feels like you're pouring energy into life. This felt a little bit like pouring energy right into the grave. I mean, to be really morbid about it, it just felt like, okay, well, that's a ton of energy. It's going to have no ripple effect in the world. I mean, now it's changing us.

Absolutely. In powerful ways, right? It's changing us in powerful ways. And hopefully that change makes us more compassionate and kind and better able to help and serve in the world and all that. So I don't mean to say that it's not with value, but it's very different than most things we approach in life. As you said, there simply isn't a payoff. The payoff is simply I can live with myself later knowing that I did the best I could according to what my values are. Which to me is a big deal. But yeah, very different. When I went to the memory care unit, when I've gone there

to see my father, Ginny's mom, we were able to keep at home for a variety of different reasons. But when I went to the memory care unit, it was one of the most heartbreaking places I have ever been. And I just remember looking around and just thinking a little bit of that, wow, look at all the resource and energy and misery here. That's basically just propping up people who we wouldn't. And I'm kind of a right to die advocate for those reasons, you know, like we did not need the last four years of what we went through. The first few years while she had dementia, we still had a quality of life. We still had, it was okay. It was difficult, but it was worth it. It felt like she was here in some

way and we were engaging with her and it was difficult. But after a certain point, whether we were in the room or not in the room made zero difference to her world, as near as we could tell. And so it was just this kind of like, well, what are we all doing here? You know, so for those reasons, I've become much more in my later years, sort of a advocate for the right to die idea. Absolutely. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Ohio will see the light as Vermont and other states have. But yeah, I mean, I've always had dogs and cats all my life. And when they get to a certain point where they're so ill that they have no quality of life, I can have them put down. Yep. That seems to me to be a merciful act. And as much as I love them and miss them, I know that we had a great time together and we've come to the end of that time. I would like to think that that kind of mercy could be shown to our parents and our partners and ourselves as we get to that point. Yeah. My mom has had a long battle the last number of years with chronic pain. And I don't think she would make the choice to check out yet, but she says all the time,

you know, about a couple of times where I put a dog to sleep, everybody came over and we laid around, you know, the dog was there in the center of us and we all petted her and gave her love. And she was just happy as could be right and she just went off like that and you know that's not what happens to most people my mom just says all the time like i wish you could do that for me yeah it's heartbreaking yeah and again i don't think she's ready to do it but i also think knowing there's an off-ramp sometimes in that way would be a psychic relief in and of itself i I completely agree with you. Like if this pain is at this level and nobody can fix it, and we've been trying a lot of things, you know, I would like to have that option for her. Well, they call that right to die death with dignity.

Yes. And that's another way of thinking about this very same issue. And certainly, you know, my father did say to me five years ago, I want to check out. Can you help me? And this from a devout Catholic who understood that suicide, taking one's own life, was a mortal sin. But he was finished. He was done at that point. And there was nothing that we could do for him and nothing that he could do for himself. So all of that is very painful. And these are huge questions that so many people are, whether they're terminally ill or

dementing or dealing with aging parents or terminally ill parents and spouses. This is rough. This is a rough one. The roughest. Yep. Yep. All right. Let's change directions a little bit here so that this entire conversation doesn't, isn't about death, death, death, death, isn't about death and dementia. The new podcast from the one you feed called death and dementia. So I have a lot of listeners. Yeah. So I did want to talk a little bit about something you said a minute ago, though. You've always turned to writing as a way of processing things. You also have talked about in different interviews I've read about going to talk therapy and talking about things.

And there's something you wrote that I would like to read and then ask you to explore a little bit further. You wrote, what happened though in the process of making poems out of the raw autobiography was what always happens when I write as opposed to what happens in talk therapy. As I search for ways to pressurize my language and shape my poem, I become, in addition to myself, the speaker or persona of the poem. Then I can find some distance from the subject. Talk a little bit about that, because that's a really fascinating idea, finding a way to process that gives us distance, which many psychologists talk a lot about.

Cognitive diffusion acceptance and commitment therapy calls it. Mm-hmm. Of course, I came to this understanding through poems, not through therapy. Sadly, I came to therapy somewhat late in life. But the best way that I can describe it is by working through the raw material on the page. I perhaps, like an actor, have to stand behind the material and think about ways to deliver that material. So, while it might be, and certainly was the case in Bad Hobby, extraordinarily personal, it has to be shaped. And I have to think about it in terms of the audience, the imagined audience or readership that I have in mind. And what is it that they understand? What is it that they don't understand yet? What do I need to explain? What can I

possibly withhold? What kind of arc of understanding am I shaping when I'm making this poem? What is it that I most want to focus on as I'm writing? And what is it that I don't know I need to focus on yet, right? In what way am I allowing for discovery, both as I work through the poem and invite a reader in to the poem? All of that sort of comes into play and certainly know, on the table in a very repertorial and extraordinarily emotional, right, kind of way. In the poems, I really did have to take one step back and maybe even, you know, a second and a third step back in order to honor the shaping process that art needs. Yeah, and I think it's not to say that one is a better way than the other. I mean, actually, you know, obviously, the fact that you write poems and go to therapy means there's there's value in both of them. But I was really struck by that line allows me to get a little distance from them. Because as I said, acceptance and commitment therapy talks very much about this idea of cognitive fusion and cognitive diffusion and psychological flexibility, right? You know, they've got all sorts of different tools to get a little bit of distance and art is one. And as you were talking, it hadn't occurred to me when I read this before, you made me start thinking about songwriting and in songwriting. I don't write many of them anymore. I write little bits

of music, which are scattered throughout all these episodes, but in a songwriting, there's a similar thing. There's an emotional theme that's there. It means something. But then it's like now realize, yeah, it does provide a way of looking at the situation from a different angle or a slight bit of distance. And distance is certainly not always a bad thing, right? We all have ways of distancing ourselves from our emotions, which may not be healthy or useful. For me, art has always been a helpful one. It's been a way of both processing and getting distance sort of at the same time, in a sense. We hear, you know, the term composing oneself, right? And there's composing oneself, which might not be the greatest thing in the world for talk therapy. And then there's composing your

art, you know, composing a song or, you know, composing another work of art, visual art, for example, a painting or what have you. And that takes a certain amount of critical distance. And I think that that's one of the things that I'm talking about when I talk about the distance that I managed to get from my subject matter as I was making the poems. Yep. I want to ask a question about a line from a poem that struck me. And the poem is called School. It's in the new book. You're describing you sort of talking your way out of having to go to school. You know, you didn't want to go to school. You've got a great line in there about, you know, you didn't

want to be seen and you didn't want to be not seen, right, at school. And that, I resonated with that so much. It's like, yeah, both. Like, everybody's ignoring me, but oh, geez, don't pay any attention to me because it's not good. But the line that caught my interest that I wanted to ask about was you were saying about your mother, she must have trusted me or not much cared, which may be trust's result. Say more about that line, that pivot there sort of caught me a little bit off guard and made me really start thinking about caring and trust. And so from your perspective, what did that mean? Yeah, that's a great question. And I had to think about that a lot when I surprised myself with that line, specifically with relationship to my mother and the relationship that she and I

shared. I think that it has something to do with an established kind of relationship between two people that feels so intimate and so complete that the boundaries between one person and the other hardly exist or barely exist. I'm not saying that's a healthy relationship, but I do think often, and certainly this was the case with my mother and me, I do think those boundaries think really hard about that difference between trust and care and what those sort of gradations are between those two verbs, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. Well, it struck me because it made me think about my relationship with my son and how I

have generally trusted him and that in a way that has allowed me to not care. And by not care, I mean I care deeply, deeply about him, but I don't spend a ton of mental energy worrying about what he's doing or is he making the right choices because I have some underlying trust. So it does allow me to not have to care in the sense of pay a ton of attention to that part of the relationship. And so like many great lines, it certainly leaves me with more questions and rumination in the positive sense than answers with it. And so but it just really jumped off the page at me and it caused me to really kind of reflect on that nature. Well, I'm so glad that it did. I think so much of this is experiential as I was listening to you talking about your son. I mean, you must have reason to trust him. And because you do,

you don't have to pay as close attention as you might to a problem child. And I certainly think that was the case with my mom and me. Sometimes, though, in my experience, what that can lead to, and I know I felt this with friends, I felt this with young people that I've been responsible for, students that I've had who seem especially high achieving, right? And then something happens and you're like, whoa, I need to pay a little bit more attention here. Right? I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. And that could absolutely occur. You know, I'm definitely watching with him and I have this, not just in him, but particularly in him. But I also have a belief, like I know difficulty is inevitable. He's going to go through tough times. He's going to make bad decisions. It is inevitable. I mean, we've been joking recently, he's going to be a wildland firefighter out West. And we were just joking recently about, you know, when he got arrested for lighting a fire in a park in Upper Arlington, him and his friends were hanging out and they thought it'd be nice to have a campfire. And so not the best decision, but also one that caused me to be like, well, you know, who cares? Like, you know, not a big deal, right? You know, I just

find trust a concept that is always sort of on my mind in what can I trust in? When we say we trust someone else, what do we trust them to do or not do? And I think to a certain extent, for me, when the expectations are a little bit more realistic with people, I can trust that they're never going to do something that hurts me or they're never going to do something wrong or stupid or thoughtless. That kind of trust just gets ruptured again and again and again because we're all fallible. Yeah, absolutely. Deeply. Humans, man. What are you going to do with them? What are you going to do with them?

Yep. Yep. So there's another line from a poem called Kielsen. This is very near the end of the poem. And this feels like this line I felt echoed in lots of different parts of the book. And it was, which is why I stopped speaking in the first place and would sooner go hungry than ask to be understood. Talk about your surprising lines. I surprised myself with that one. This is to provide some context. In

the poem, the speaker is fortunate enough to be living in Switzerland, surrounded by French speaking people. I do not speak, but just barely passable French. And I wondered a lot about that experience, my experience with language, English versus French, and how deeply and profoundly uncomfortable I was trying to ask for what I needed, even at market, for example, in a language that wasn't my own. And it occurred to me that as a poet, I have so fully invested myself in the English language, that to not speak a language perfectly is sort of my idea of hell, right? I cannot bear to speak a language badly, to fumble, you know, as a child would. I mean, this is a grown-up discovery I made. This was not something that I knew about myself before this trip, but it had resonances for me in terms of

my own family and ways that I stopped asking for things that I needed because I couldn't find the language for it. The language either wasn't modeled for me by either of my parents, or I simply wasn't sort of yet emotionally mature enough to be able to put words to what it was that I was feeling. And so I couldn't ask for those things. We were talking about your son and my dad and the things that we need from each other as humans. We so often, in my experience, can't quite articulate to each other, to the people who love us the most and who would most want to give those things to us if they knew what they were.

You know, we feel these shortcomings not only in our relationships with our parents and children, but I think, you know, certainly with our friends and our partners as well. That's, I think, where that moment in the poem comes from, is thinking about all those issues. The resonance it had for me was on your childhood. You've talked in different places about being a very sensitive child in a working class family. And as you mentioned, your gift with language is profound. And I'm sure it was there to some degree early on, at least that fascination with it. And yet how difficult, as a sensitive person, one of the hardest things is to be not understood. It feels very often to

not say what we need or what's happening or what we're feeling than to actually get the courage up to do it and have it go poorly. Absolutely. And that's what that line just brought up in me was that like, you know what, I'd rather just sit here mute than try and articulate something that you're not going to understand or that you're not going to give me. I'm going to feel more alone after this than I did before I spoke. I think you're understanding that absolutely correctly. And it's not the most mature response in the world, but we are talking about being children, right? And we respond as children to those kinds of what we consider to be slights or misunderstandings. I have been thinking a lot about why it is given

what we've just discussed. Poetry is my chosen genre given those facts, right? And poetry is probably the least direct and the most circuitous and the least popular and most widely unread of all the genres. And I do think that there's a reason that I chose that, because it felt like the safest place to put my words. There are a lot of other poets, some of which I like, some of which I don't like, who are far more direct in what they are saying. Your poetry, there's a lot of craft in it. There's a lot of imagery and symbolism. To me, it's not immediately obvious in all cases. Like, what are we talking about here? You know, there are times I would go back and read a section three or four times and finally it would sort of dawn on me. I'd be like, oh my God, that's beautiful. Like,

but the first time through didn't fully resonate. So I wonder if maybe we could ask you to read another poem now. Sure. That poem would be called AccuWeather Real Feel. AccuWeather Real Feel. As I made out first wing, then fur, I half hoped for a kitten kind of squee,

at worst the sci-fi seahorse kind. But what I stopped for in the road was a squirrel's lost battle with a red-tailed hawk. Both looked at me in the Venn diagram we made, our intersection being nothing to be done. We were warned it's a jungle out there. In here, too, though more often a petting zoo, with its matted coats and molars, a few dry pellets stuck to your mittens after. Some do better than to weather it. Some are known to feather a nest with it. My people were never good at reaping benefit. Euphemism they understood. When rain chokes the air, they call the day a soft one.

I'm here by sheer luck. No one is coming after. We'll feel. Soft dawn in the meadow. The pups unseen by the passerby. The bitch gone days ago. I particularly love this image of a squirrel's lost battle with a red-tailed hawk and both of them looking up and the Venn diagram, the intersection being nothing to be done. That

is so great. What that brings up in me is this idea, and actually it's somewhere else in another poem of yours, and I don't know whether it was in this book or another one, but you talk about nature being red in tooth and claw, meaning there's a lot of blood. And as you've gotten older, you've gotten a little more comfortable with that idea. That was kind of the feeling I got there is that moment of, it just is, you know, the squirrel lost the battle with the hawk, but if the squirrel had won the battle with the hawk, then the hawk would be trouble. I mean, it just is. As a Zen practitioner, we're looking for those moments of ultimate clarity aging and mortality. There is nothing to be done about that except what we do on a daily basis, right? I was reading a book called Thin Places by Kelly Nidaharty, an Irish writer, and my grandparents were Irish immigrants. And I had conveniently forgotten how much those liminal spaces or those in-between spaces, we were talking about this when we were talking about the wolf parable too,

how they're considered sacred to the Irish. And that Venn diagram has always seemed to me to be a kind of a perfect place for those liminal spaces, those in-betweennesses, right? And perhaps there as much as anywhere is that space where there's nothing to be done. It just exists. It's where the life and death happen. Yeah. And so I think what I'd like to turn towards now is an idea that I've seen you talk about a few different places. It's the critical role of attention in being a poet. I actually think attention is a critical part of being a human, learning to work with our attention in certain ways. And in my spiritual Habits program, that's one of the principles we spend a lot of time on. But talk to me about attention from your perspective.

It is my special thing when people ask me, well, what advice would you give a young poet? And my best advice is pay attention. I really do believe if one wants to be an artist of any kind, certainly a writer, and maybe just like a human being who's self-aware and aware of the world around them, attention is our best offense and defense. I mean, it is the skill that we need to most cultivate, it seems to me. skill that we need to most cultivate, it seems to me. Certainly, we pay attention with all of our senses. And there are other ways to pay attention like reading and going to films and listening to music and looking at paintings and walking out in the world and smelling the smells and looking at the trees. I mean, these are all ways of paying attention. I think some people would think of those as modes of prayer, that kind of paying attention. I do think that it's a form of praise. It's a form of joy. It's a form of being our most human selves, being attentive. And the best way also, it seems to me that I have found to love others, you know, to not scrutinize necessarily, but to just simply pay attention, you know, listen when someone speaks, not even to you, but just sort of out there in the world to sort of pay attention.

Yeah. Another poet, Mary Oliver said, attention is the beginning of devotion. And that's a phrase that has always meant a lot to me. Pay attention. Yeah. for me are two things that, again, I haven't invested the time in either to really make the craft good. So I don't think that what I create is good for that reason. And it is completely beside the point almost entirely, which is the way it makes me look at the world is totally different. They are modes of looking at the world. I've set myself projects at different points to like take one beautiful picture a day. And the beauty I'm looking for is not in my ability to create a photograph. I'm looking for the beauty in the world. But when I can really keep that idea in the front of my mind, like I'm actually looking all day long, totally changes my experience of life.

Yeah. No, I love that. It makes me think actually about my dad who, until he couldn't keep his iPhone any longer, which we'd given him to sort of stay in touch with us, both while he was living with us and walking around the neighborhood. And also when he was in memory care, he would use it to take multiple. And in fact, I have on my cloud, thousands of photos of clouds. And there came a point when he was taking pictures of clouds in the sky when he didn't any longer know the word for cloud or sky, but he loved them so much. And he felt this need to record the changing light in the sky, the changing clouds. And when, of course, we would walk outside together, there was always that moment when he would stop and look up, and when he had his phone, take many, many bursts of photos of the clouds. So yeah, I mean,

I totally get this idea of capturing and recording and keeping close to you these moments in photography. And I do think that that's really closely related to what poetry does with image, right, and sound. I mean, it's a very, you know, temporal art in that way. One of the reasons I love poetry is that it teaches me a little bit to look and see like a poet might, you know, what's in a good poem is a fascinating level of attention. You know, in a good poem, there is attention like, holy mackerel, that was all sitting right there in front of me. And I didn't even see it in that way. I didn't even think of it in that way. Oh, now I know, I know another way to look or view the world. And that's why I think art both from a creation and I don't want to use the word consuming,

but, you know, taking in art is so valuable to me and in so many other people's lives. It's like making art just to make it for me has been really good. When I was younger, it was so much about I'm going to make this art and then people will like me. It was an ego gratification project. I don't necessarily mean that entirely negatively because I think everything we do has some element of that in it. We don't get pure motivation. But with me and art, for the most part, I have no illusions. I love to play guitar. I love to record little musical bits for the show, but I don't have any aspirations beyond that. And actually getting to that point with it for me,

right? You're a professional poet. So you're, you're and I are going to be different in this way. But for me, it was that total, like I'm doing this just because I do it. I completely understand what you're saying. I think it's about giving attention as opposed to getting attention, right? Oh, yeah, that's a beautiful way of saying it. in poetry and what keeps us going as poets when there are so little to be gained, certainly financially and otherwise. And really, it seems to me to be about the surprise of it, right? The ways in which we please ourselves, maybe reach someone else, you know, a reader and just continue to be surprised by what we notice. Yeah. Yep. So we're going to end with when someone asked you, what advice would you give a poet? I'm just going to read it because we've talked

about part of it, the be attentive part, but the rest of it to me, I was reading, I was like, well, yeah, that's great advice for a poet, but it's just kind of all around like, here's good human advice. It feels like one of those things that should be printed on like, you know, one of those posters, you know, where they have motivational poster. Yeah, yeah. Not a motivational poster, but you know, like, here's the things I knew in kindergarten or whatever, you know, kind of idea, but read a lot of poetry, read a lot of everything, have a life, be interested in stuff, stay open and curious and engaged, play, don't be afraid of sorrow. And it's mostly just this, aged play. Don't be afraid of sorrow. And it's mostly just this, be attentive.

I still believe it. I try to live my life that way. And it's not always easy with, you know, competing demands, right? But I do try to be that person. Wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Kathy, thank you so much for coming on. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get all of your books. We did not get to talk about, sadly, your collection of poems before this one, which is called Sycamore. And I love sycamore trees. I'm crazy about sycamore trees. Well, the whole book is not about sycamore trees, but they show up a lot. And they are spectacular.

And the poems about them are also. So thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community we wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support and we don't take a single dollar for granted to learn more make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you feed community go to one you feed.net slash join the one you feed podcast would like to sincerely

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