Fighting Cancer with Poetry
Written by James Navé
Last week, I was in a vintage book store, looking for a book on crock-pot cooking, Two times a book in a nearby shelf caught my eye. It was a slim volume so it took up little room on the shelf, but it seemed to be deliberately pushing itself out to the edge of the shelf, as if it were beckoning me to pick it up.
This happens to me a lot with books but I resisted. I walked around the corner to the next aisle and I swear I could hear that book calling me. I marched back and pulled it off the shelf. Its title was Looking at the Light: Fighting Cancer with Poetry by James Navé.
When I saw the author’s name, I admit I was intrigued. Native son James Navé is an internationally known poet, storyteller, and creativity coach. He’s revered as a leader of the Spoken Word movement. Think poetry slams and disdain for academic poetry. He is consumed by poetry. He loves it, he lives for it, it seems to pulse through his veins as essential to his existence as blood.
But I wasn’t in the mood for poetry. I wanted something reader-friendly and completely accessible. I flipped through the book. Sure didn’t look like poetry on those pages. No separate lines or stanzas. Instead it seemed these poems were printed as short prose pieces—I learned later that was indeed James’ intention. It was in essence a book of poetry for people who think they don’t like poetry. I walked out of the store with the book in my hand.
It was indeed a reader-friendly book. I started it as soon as I got home, and even with post-it note marking, I finished it before bed. James was diagnosed with prostrate cancer and decided to write a poem a day during his recuperation. He had surgery in Hendersonville and then stayed with friends in Asheville for weeks.
“I’ve seen the sands of Mauritania,” he writes, “heard Frank Sinatra croon in Vegas, walked rivers in Peru, hitchhiked the Pacific Highway, poetry slammed a perfect 30 at the Green Mill in Chicago, but when trouble came, as it did, this winter, I clung to Carolina like fog drifting over the land.”
His first post-surgery sight was of his beloved life partner Trish sitting in a chair beside him in the hospital. “I felt surrounded by light”….and “gave myself over to being loved and that is a miracle all human beings deserve.”
Recuperating at the houses of friends in Asheville, James is grateful for their warm hospitality. How many of us, truthfully, have friends with whom we could recuperate from surgery? As we read all the poems in the book, we are struck by not only how many good friends this man has, but how much they love him in return. “I wish I could gaze into the sky,” he writes, “and see everyone I know all at once.”
Like many people facing a major disruption in their lives, James realizes he’s been thinking about prayer a lot lately. “I have a responsibility to look at the world,” he admits, “face the light, pray with my eyes open, chin up.”
On April 22 he writes a passage that blew me away—I think it is the most sensual image I ever read. He is contemplating bees, which fascinate him. “Perhaps it’s time to bathe my face in honey and wrap my arms around a mountain.”
By May, James is sick of being patient and drinking green tea. “Like [poet Carl] Sandburg, I have a hankering for some hooch that will fire up the poet in me.”
Now in Taos, he looks back on his carefree, reckless days where he always chose the risky road. “Most of our stories” he seems to be telling all young people who are rebelling against their parents, “rise from the risks we take.” But it is an older, wiser man who is dispensing such advice. “Sometimes I wish I were 20 again, back in the days when I didn’t expect to die.”
Off to New York City, where the rhythms of life are totally different from Asheville and Taos—an “ambulance honking,” a “fiddler playing in the corner”…”stilettos tapping the pavement…at least ten times a day.” But North Carolina is not far from his mind.
“Of course I’d like to be 33 again,” he writes “leaning against my 1968 Plymouth station wagon at the Black Mountain Musical Festival, sky-blue shorts and red t-shirt hugging a body lean enough to run seven miles up any mountain.”
In his last poem, the hundredth, James and Trish head to Boston in their friend’s BMW, for the celebration of his nephew’s wedding. Far from their Asheville home, his family remains close.
“Ceremony requires ritual opening of the heart, the intense acceptance of fire. Warm under apple trees in bells and memories, I sat in the second row, alive in the time and place of three generations.”
Bottom line: A heart warming, wonderful book for anyone at any stage in their life. Can be ordered from your local independent bookstore.
Looking at the Light: Fighting Cancer with Poetry, written by James Navé, Imaginative Storm Publications, 106 pp., 2012
www.imaginativestorm.com, or www.jamesnave.com
The Artist’s Way
One of the many things James Navé is known for is his long association with Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. Her most recent book, Prosperous Heart: Creating a World of “Enough” was reviewed in the January 2013 issue. Read it online at www.rapidrivermagazine.com/2012/prosperous-heart. James Navé is teaching The Artist’s Way here in Asheville this month.
If You Go: The Artist’s Way, April 16-May 21, 2013. Six Week Workshop facilitated by James Navé. Tuesday Evenings, 7-9 p.m. at 261 Asheland Avenue, at the Training Center at Town and Mountain Real Estate. Tuition: $195. To register call (919) 949-2113.