Jan Hutchinson
We have a most unusual poet for you today. Jan Hutchinson is a lifelong student of poetry who has lived for over thirty years in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, where she raised three daughters and worked for many years at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. The unusual thing about her is her writing method. Poetry,for Jan Hutchinson, is a daily practice which in many ways resembles a spiritual one. For the last twelve years she has written at least one poem every morning. She calls these “thimble poems,” because, unlike her earlier academic poems, she says, they are “small and homey,”not written with an audience in mind but for her own “growth, rescue and amusement.” The “thimble poems”are simple and accessible. They ask the big questions in an almost childlike voice, full of spiritual longing and rebellion against all dogma. Often they strive for a gentle humor and grace in the face of later-life losses. Many of them include a character named Grace, an imaginary friend who dresses in thrift-shop finery and, despite her age and plumpness, loves to sing and dance. Grace is calm, wise and full of humor – qualities Hutchinson tells us she herself aspires to.
Jan Hutchinson is currently at work amassing a volume of her Grace poems, the working title of which is: All the Grace We Can Muster. Her two previous collections are Poems of Prayer and Heresy (UUMSB, 2008) and Raggedy Prayers and Crooked Ladders (UUMSB, 2013). In both books, the poems are accompanied by skillful and whimsical drawings by painter Chet Kalm. You will notice that the three poems below do not have titles, only dates, because they have been selected from the “thimble poems” of Hutchinson’s daily practice.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
12/3/2012b
Let’s not let
the inevitable
vulnerability of aging
turn into fear.
Let’s sit and observe
our vulnerability
from high up
in the life guard chair
of the witness self.
2/4/14c
If you look
in the psyche’s mirror
and hear a litany
of your imperfections,
then, don’t you see,
you’ve already become
your own wicked
stepmother.
5/15/2013b
Grace leaned back
in her chair at the table,
to watch a small, black spider
hike upside down across the ceiling.
She told me kindly:
“Relax your linear mind,
now leap beyond it.
Cease the constant self-instruction.
Let your poems float you.”
Something ticked slowly
in the quiet kitchen,
not the clock,
perhaps the heat pipes.
Just then the little spider
she’d been watching dropped
from the ceiling. Grace caught it
with one hand and set it
in the magenta geranium
on the window sill.
“Leave it there,” she whispered.
“Always there is less need to explain
than you imagine.”