Interview with Donna Pucciani
You speak of “urgent solitude” in your poem; how does it mold or inform your creativity?
I wrote this originally as a pandemic poem, although it can be read on many other levels. As a retired teacher, I am privileged to be able to stay home in order to keep myself and others safe during this year of covid. I am also privileged to live in a neighborhood where I can take walks at any time of day or night, and to be isolated from others, a horrible luxury right now. The best I can do to help others right now is to avoid them. This “urgent solitude” is a sad duty, but a necessary one.
Then there is the eternal “urgent solitude” of immersion in one’s own thoughts in order to write a poem. Being alone in nature often gives way to a poem, or being by myself playing the piano or reading other poets’ work in the solitary space of my small “office” at home—another luxury, of which Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own.
What does it mean to be human in this day and age?
Being fully human in this day and age takes commitment and moral compass. With the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and before that, the Women’s Marches here in Chicago, Occupy, LGBTQ rights, and further back in my life, the Viet Nam War and the fight for Civil Rights legislation and the ERA, I have always been aware that “the personal is the political.” In my view, we are required as humans to stand in solidarity with others, in whatever way we can.
Also, although I do not consider myself a religious person, I find myself searching in the church for a spirituality that can help stave off burnout and the temptation to just walk away or opt out. I refuse to do that, and continue to engage in the dialogue for justice and peace. It’s not an easy path, with the forces of hate and anger threatening our very democracy right now. That makes it even more urgent to become more fully human (even as this season of the Incarnation is upon us, in the Christian tradition), despite the challenge all around us. I hope to live up to that challenge, to refuse the role of “guilty bystander,” as MLK points out in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. I am an old white woman who treasures those words!
Can you share a snippet of poetry that speaks to you, and tell us why?
The first and best snippet that comes to mind, however trite, is Donne’s “No man is an island….” His words are particularly cogent right now, even as we must embrace each other virtually, by staying apart in order to stay alive. It’s the Zen of pandemic.
Poetry Preview:
Sun, Shadow, Moon
Sun, Shadow, Moon
I follow my shadow,
one-dimensional sepia,
the sun behind me now.
An urgent solitude propels me ahead,
my gaunt form unrecognizable,
even to me. I step into the evening
with no thought of the past,
of backward roads, the illusory alleyways
of another life branching into night
like arteries, neurons, the properties
of cauliflower brains, the filaments of stars,
the rings of ancient trees,
the veined juices of leaves,
the astonishment of shapes
hidden in the hive of humanity.
I pound myself into flatness.
I exchange my corporeal flesh for something
in the play of light, a werewolf sans gleaming teeth,
as a planetary void calls me into the haven
of dead stars, to emerge as shapeshifter
under the rising moon.
Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, Journal of Italian Translation, Young Ravens Review, and others. Her seventh and most recent book of poems is EDGES.
one-dimensional sepia,
the sun behind me now.
An urgent solitude propels me ahead,
my gaunt form unrecognizable,
even to me. I step into the evening
with no thought of the past,
of backward roads, the illusory alleyways
of another life branching into night
like arteries, neurons, the properties
of cauliflower brains, the filaments of stars,
the rings of ancient trees,
the veined juices of leaves,
the astonishment of shapes
hidden in the hive of humanity.
I pound myself into flatness.
I exchange my corporeal flesh for something
in the play of light, a werewolf sans gleaming teeth,
as a planetary void calls me into the haven
of dead stars, to emerge as shapeshifter
under the rising moon.
Donna Pucciani, a Chicago-based writer, has published poetry worldwide in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, Journal of Italian Translation, Young Ravens Review, and others. Her seventh and most recent book of poems is EDGES.