Houston friends turn a pandemic into poetry
Sunday is Day 120 for Isabelle Scurry Chapman and Jim Blackburn.
They have known each other since the early 1970s, part of a foursome with their respective spouses, John Chapman and Garland Kerr. Blackburn, Kerr and John Chapman met even earlier as students at the University of Texas. The two couples have co-owned property, traveled the world, hiked together, watched many birds and helped guide each other through life’s ups and downs.
But they only started counting days this way in March, not long after they returned to Houston from a trip to Egypt.
Earlier that month, they were all on a Nile cruise when Blackburn, an environmental attorney who teaches at Rice University, received a disturbing email from his department chair. “Get back,” it said. The first Houston cases of the novel coronavirus had emerged. One of his colleagues had just returned from a similar cruise and tested positive.
“We were four hours out of Aswan, and there was no turning back,” Blackburn says. He and Kerr flew home as soon as they could. The Chapmans went on to Petra, and three days after they got home, flights were suspended. None of them contracted the virus, but they lived on edge for a few weeks, and that put Blackburn in a thinking mood.
He created a page on his website, Virus Vigil ( jimblackburn info.com/virus-vigil), as a way to stay in touch with people. “It’s a way of making contact at a time when we have none,” he says. He invented a word to describe such an effort: connectuality.
Blackburn has posted a poem featuring a different bird for each day since March 22, accompanied by Isabelle Chapman’s charmingly loose paintings of the birds. They did not know how long the pandemic would last, but they felt they had a decent bank of material to sustain the practice for a while.
Blackburn and Princie, as friends call her, have collaborated twice on self-published book projects inspired by their mutual love of birds. (Well, their spouses are actually the publishers, Blackburn says. “So it is a total family exercise.”) “Birds: A Book of Verse and Vision,” came out in 2009. Last summer they produced “Hill Country Birds and Waters: Art and Poems.” Redbud Gallery in the Heights staged a show of Chapman’s paintings in February to celebrate.
Interpretation of poetry
Day 1 of Virus Vigil began with the American Bittern. The poem is set in South Texas brush country, but Chapman has her own inspiration. Although she and Blackburn may nudge each other toward a particular bird, they work “in parallel on their own
bird tracks,” he says. He doesn’t try to describe her paintings. She doesn’t try to illustrate his poems.
Chapman’s paintings all have a layer of text. She pulls from the Tao Te Ching or uses verse by the mystical poet Rumi to add depth. Cigar boxes and books are her preferred canvases. Cigar boxes are easy to write on, she says. “Used books are the covering for a story, so there’s something in there already.” She especially loves old books with signs of age and human use, even if they are slightly mildewed. Archival issues don’t concern her. “I use markers and elements of collage; it might even be a candy wrapper off the street,” she says.
The Egyptian goddess Nut inspired the written layer of her first painting for Virus Vigil. The March trip was top of mind, and fittingly, the first and most visible line reads, “Without you, I am entombed.” Chapman does not try to paint her subjects realistically, she says. “The more awkward they get, the more I like them, and the more I can make them funny — which I can’t do
very often.”
Blackburn’s poems have become funnier as he has veered from free verse into a steady diet of nine rhymed stanzas — for reasons he can’t explain, except that his readers like the rhymes and symmetry. He does not aspire to be a William Wordsworth or even a Robert Frost. “It’s my interpretation of poetry, if you will,” he says. “I write what feels good, for myself.” Poetry enables him to express his spiritual thoughts better. “It becomes a lighter, almost ethereal form of writing that kind of allows me to fly with the birds and with the spiritual connections I’ve gotten from them.”
Each Virus Vigil post opens with a prose prologue of memories, musings, science and maybe a bit of preaching about the virus or politics. “Several people have told me they like that more than the poems,” Blackburn says. “That’s just loose conversation, then the poetry takes off in a direction.” His poems all end with a call to attend “Earth Church.” “When I quit drinking, I adopted Galveston Bay and the natural system as a higher power. That has become Earth Church, my spiritual center,” he explains.
“These are temples, places we ought to go out and enjoy … So much of our religion doesn’t emphasize the Earth to the extent I think it should.”
With Virus Vigil, he has found another pulpit for work he’s done throughout his high-profile career as an environmental attorney. He likes to call himself a “birds and bunnies” lawyer, although opponents in court probably wouldn’t put it that way. He has litigated to protect the Columbia Bottomlands, the Wallisville Reservoir area, Galveston Bay and Matagorda Bay, also authoring scholarly books and papers.
He pretty much speaks to the choir with his mailing list of more than 400 Virus Vigil email subscribers, but he’s thrilled when he hears from someone he doesn’t know. “That’s doubly rewarding, to get an unexpected greeting from somewhere out there,” he says. Occasionally professional birders call out mistakes. He doesn’t claim to be a professional birder any more than he claims to be a professional poet. But he does have a knack for doling out sage advice.
Part of it is about place and about encouraging people to step outside and appreciate the natural world. “This project is our connection to people, some of whom are people we don’t know, but their connection grows to the bird life,” Chapman says. “I have a good friend in Colorado who is totally into flowers and hiking but has never listened to the birds. Now she gets up every morning and hears and seems them. People are grateful for this project. It makes me feel good.”
The big question now is, how much longer will the pandemic go on, and how much longer can she and Blackburn keep feeding Virus Vigil?
How long can it go on?
They have pretty much exhausted their existing work. Everything they have posted for the past month is new. “We’re close to the bottom of what we’ve got available, so we may have to go to every other day,” Blackburn says. “We’ve got some African birds. We’ve traveled together with our spouses to Africa, India, Ecuador; so we have a few out-of-country birds we may begin to bring in. That could be fun.”
He is not ready to stop encouraging readers to be safe and smart, and Virus Vigil gives him an outlet for that. “We’re big believers in masks and science. A lot of the poetry is about science,” he says. “A lot of the poems address the impacts of climate change and the need to do something about it. I’ve thought about the word ‘enough.’ We don’t all need as much as we have, probably.
“I once asked a company when we would have enough plastics, and they looked at me like I was nuts. But we’ve got to kind of put a cap on some of this stuff, and we’ve got to put a cap on our activities during COVID. Those are realities; science generated dictums. They’re rebelled against because they’re inconvenient.”
Chapman continues to paint birds partly because she views them as harbingers, she says. “Right before Hurricane Harvey, you couldn’t hear a conversation on my front porch because there were so many doves. Now it’s kind of a rarity to see a dove here. Other birds come in the spring and go on; they tell us about what season it is.”
Thursday’s Virus Vigil entry offers a lesson in Mexican freetailed bats, Bracken Cave and karst topography in the Texas
Hill Country.
“Wow. Day 117, and we still have some new material, and we still have COVID, which is like a bad shadow lurking just at the edge of our vision — never clear, always just in front, or behind, making us uneasy,” Blackburn writes. “… the antidote is to reach out and find a friend to comfort, to say ‘Hi’ to and try and bring a little light to chase the shadow away, plus using the hand sanitizer and a mask.”
He also gets in a pitch for saving “a unique natural wonder of Texas, an Earth Church monument that today receives no special protection.” He notes that the Bracken Bat Cave has been preserved by Bat Conservation International, “which you might consider supporting. And be safe out there,” he writes.