HEALING WORD
The ups and downs of creativity
When I go to chat with Paula Harris, I am supposed to be in a training session at work. But it’s OK, Harris has written me an excuse note.
It begins: ‘‘Dear Sir, with halfhearted apologies and honest reasonings...’’
It goes on to wax lyrical about a military coup, ballet, elephants and my shoes, gold brogues that day.
I will keep it forever. It is poetic magic.
Harris’ thing is words. They tumble from her closely shaven head on to paper with a grace that is all her own. She’s not quite sure where they come from, but ‘‘they are always there’’.
She won the New Zealand Society of Authors Lilian Ida Smith Award for a handful of her poems recently and to say it was a shock when the news came in is a missed opportunity for hyperbole.
‘‘When I opened the email from New Zealand Society of Authors, I was expecting the usual ‘blah blah, thanks but no thanks, please try again in the future’. But this one said ‘congratulations’. Congratulations! I may have screamed just a little. I may have run up and down the house a couple of times. I may have gone back to re-read the email, and then screamed again, and then run up and down the house again. I think I scared the sun away. Yes, I can be that powerful.’’
For Harris, the award means many things. She says that for 20-something years she has been an emerging poet. ‘‘I think maybe I got stuck in my chrysalis, part way out. Pesky wings getting in the way, I suspect.’’
It means a bit of money to help her work towards her first poetry collection, A thousand deliciously ill-advised ways to shorten your life,
and it means a push towards the positive, ‘‘cracking open the chrysalis once and for all’’.
Her wings get stuck sometimes, she says. Depression is a part of her daily life. She swings up, up, up and then the descent down is steep and deep. There’s not a lot of in-the-middle time, she says. ‘‘When I feel good, I feel amazing, and when I feel s..., it feels like there is no way out.’’
Her depression is part of who she is. It’s the hard part, but it’s also the part of Harris that her writing comes from. When she is medicated, ‘‘the words start to slip away’’.
‘‘I was on anti-depressants and the words just left me. They ran away and it felt like they weren’t coming back. Now, the words are always there, ticking over, waiting for the right time to turn into something.’’
She laughs when she talks about what her poems are about – ‘‘90 per cent are about me’’. It’s not hard to miss. The woman that runs through Harris’ narrative, funny and on-the-edge poems has a shaved head and an armful of tattoos. So does the woman in front of me. ‘‘But people still talk about ‘the character in my poems’,’’ she says, with raised-eyebrow irony.
Much of what she writes are little snippets of her world, small handles to hang a life on. One of her poems, Between aftershocks, Mike and I play hopscotch with a stranger on footpath markings, is exactly what it says, but it is also an off-kilter look at what it felt like to be in Christchurch in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquakes. That’s the bit it doesn’t say, but the bit that makes you feel.
Harris wants to do the thing that poems by other people do for her – ‘‘that sensation that I am not alone, someone else feels this as
well. When a complete stranger writes what I am feeling that means I am not alone with my feelings’’. She looks quizzical for a moment, then smiles, fox-like, ‘‘or I just think, damn that’s good. I really wish I had written that’’.
It’s the words though that make her do it, those words that swirl around in her head, and it’s the things, the things she sees and wonders if others do too. Little things, everyday things, funny, quirky, mundane, made-up, murky and pure slices of clarity. Those are the things that need to get out.
In her poem, The many ways in which our first date would be a disaster, and which we will talk
about for years to come, Harris delivers some killer lines, like actually, potentially, killer.
‘‘At dinner, I’ll sprinkle Black Death on your food, which will possibly seem a little bit negative / and maybe even excessively pessimistic / but I want a man who’s strong enough to deal with anything that may come / because if you stick around there will inevitably be things that will require some strength to / deal with / and this seems like a good way to see what you’re made of.’’
It’s not sweetness-and-light poetry, but it is sweetly dark. Harris can’t get out of bed some days. It’s a struggle sometimes to talk, think, function. But what she has is those words and the beautiful way that they sit beside her.
What she gives is those words too. They fall from her heart, to her head and to the page and for me? These lines in a now cherished excuse note: ‘‘Please excuse Carly for not attending the / Compulsory Security Training / She had better things to do.’’