by Robert “Bob” Bussey
Do you believe in magic? How about fate? How about dumb luck or Murphy’s law? Do you believe that people come into your life for a reason and not just by pure chance? Or at least have you ever felt that way? Have you ever met someone and felt, or realized, that you could have known them your whole life? Such is Shelley.
I don’t remember how I first met her. It was probably Murphy’s law as I stumbled through one or more catastrophes, or most likely just dumb luck (or Lady Luck in this case). But no matter how we first met, it has been magic, it felt like fate, and she could have been one of my childhood neighbors who I played ghost or tag with. It just felt that way. And, in many respects, that is also how I feel about her poetry. It strikes many chords in my soul, in my heart, in my mind. It reminds me of so many instances in my own life. And her poetry is easily transferable into many people’s lives.
Shelley has written a second book of poetry. I was given some “pre-release” copies of some of the poems so I could read them and then pick her brain. I’m not sure if her book will be out when this article gets published, but I do know that I was privileged to be one of the first readers to delve into her newest writings. (And here is some inside scoop … she has enough for book number 3 already).
I met Shelley one afternoon at a local coffee shop (she likes coffee shops) and peppered her with questions about the 4 poems that she sent to me. My questions and her responses, sometimes lengthy, are set out below. (In some instances, I have edited both questions and responses).
Her first book, “Pretty Little Widow,” focused on the theme of grief from losing a loved one. From the start of the grief process to the end and beyond. Her second book consists of the general theme of grief but takes a deep dive into what is done to deal with the grief. How does one get on with everyday life, since life for the living does not end when someone is lost. Those are things we can all relate to in one fashion or another. How do you cope/deal with the loss of someone who had brought so much “magic” into your life?
So, let’s get to the interview:
RLB: Is there any particular theme that runs through the new book?
SJ: The title (Our Lady of Perpetual Loss), really comes from this idea that for a while life felt like it was loss, after loss, after loss, and when I was compiling this collection, I realized that the poems that I was pulling into this collection were all, almost all, written in response to loss. They are not necessarily about loss, but they were prompted by loss. Several of the
poems were written after receiving news or experiencing the loss of someone close to me and they are not necessarily about losing that person but something that was triggered in response to losing that person. Another one of the themes that runs through the book is nature. There are a lot of nature references.
RLB: I was going to get to that.
SJ: Yeah, and I think I got to a point in my own grief journey where I was making an intentional effort to notice more of what was around me and appreciating time and space of the moment, and I think that comes through in the nature of poems as well.
RLB: I noticed that one of your poems you reference a Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda.
SJ: Pablo Neruda.
RLB: And he’s famous for his one book, 20 Love Poems and Song of Despair.
SJ: Yes.
RLB: And I notice that a lot of his poems also have nature references, and he uses those in a metaphorical way to talk about the lovers he had as a young man. He was only 20 years old when he wrote that book. But, my point is that he used nature in a metaphorical way to describe his loves, his loss of his loves, and other aspects. Do you use nature in the poems in your new book in a metaphorical way?
SJ: I read his book in the early days of my own grief journey. I probably read his book four or five years ago. And connected to it, you know you always find poets that you connect more to than things of others. I connected to his work early on. When I wrote the poem that references the Neruda poem, I had just lost a friend, and somehow I made the connection across time and space, and I feel like that happens a lot in my work where things that I have read or experienced over a period of years, just incubate for a while until it comes out in my writing.
RLB: Yeah. Let’s go to your – Chasing Selene
SJ: Ahuh.
RLB: Who’s Selene?
SJ: Selene is the goddess that would pull the moon into the sky.
RLB: And your first phrase is: “The water, calm as glass mirrored out before us.” So remembering something?
SJ: Yes, yes.
RLB: What are you remembering?
SJ: A lovely memory in a boat on the water under a night sky that was just lovely being in that moment.
RLB: “The water” is not a metaphor for anything?
SJ: No, this is a literal memory.
RLB: Literal memory of the water?
SJ: Yeah, yeah.
I went on to ask Shelley about each nature reference to see if she was using any of them in a metaphorical fashion. To see if she, like Pablo Neruda, was using nature to describe something very human. But, she consistently said that the references to nature were simply about nature.
But, she was using nature, or her seeing nature, to come alive, to renew, to begin again.
SJ: It’s a movement from the moment. The moment that’s unfolding and shifting your gaze from basically what is eye level, what’s here tangible around us and shifting your gaze to the heavens and realizing our place. How small we are in our place in the cosmos. It’s a way of reminding myself that whatever turmoil I or someone might be feeling or experiencing
that if you look around you, look to the heavens, you start to understand how small we are in the bigger scheme of things. It is putting yourself into the bigger scheme of things to get a better perspective of your own life. For me, reminding myself that there’s a bigger cosmos out there helps me to not feel so overwhelmed with my own problems. The perspective for me is that I can remind myself that I’m not in control all the time. And that then frees me up from worrying about every detail because if I can’t control and fix it, you know I have to step back and realize, well, what can I appreciate and what can I enjoy.
With that, here is her poem:
Chasing Selene
Shelley Jinks Johnson
The water, calm as glass
mirrored out before us.
A peach-colored sunset behind us
Reflects off the marble surface.
Gathering wildlife congregate at the water’s edge,
Uninterested in the noise and disturbance of our boat.
No fishing tonight.
Moon hunters we are for this night only.
Searching for a reminder of how small we are,
drifting in a cosmos
as we wait for something new
to crash into us.
Let’s move on to the next poem, “The Dip and Dive.” Again, I searched for a hidden meaning. A metaphor. Anything to look behind the curtain, anything to glimpse the inner magic. But my hopes were dashed against the rocks. Here is what Shelley had to say:
RLB: You never give up. Uh, Dip and Dive. The Dip and Dive. Any significance to the poem? Are these ups and downs of a relationship or life in general?
SJ: Life in general. It is life in general. It’s projecting life onto this dance that I watch every evening unfold with the bats. There is a colony of bats in my backyard. I have two large palm trees in my backyard, and they are really, really, tall and the dead fronds just hang straight down and so at dusk, I have two big bat colonies and at dusk they swoop down. I don’t know if they are nesting on the dead fronds or what, but they swoop straight down and before they hit the ground they go up and they circle. They are a lot of fun to watch. They will circle and then in the morning right at dawn, you will see them come in and they will circle, and they do the same thing, they will go down and then they go straight back up. Last year a storm broke the top out of one of my palm trees and so it’s dead now – I watched, I walked over, and I watched as one by one the little bats crawled out and flew away, crawled out and flew away. So now I just have one big colony.
No hidden metaphors. Instead a description of an event in nature that you can almost touch, almost see for yourself via her words. I like to say that “Poetry is Written One Word at a Time,” and this is a good example. While the emotion, the intent, is often not one word at a time, we as humans are limited to setting out our ideas one word at a time.
The Dip and Dive
Shelley Jinks Johnson
Darting artfully from palm fronds
Drooping from the weight of death,
The dance begins at dusk
And gracefully cycles until dawn.
Dipping to water’s surface
For the daintiest drink
They climb and dine
On a delectable banquet of bugs
Awaiting their destiny.
Summer’s divine gambol,
A feasting foxtrot weaving
Dips, dives, darts, and dashes
Into a drama of exquisite existence.
The night envelops me
And lulls a complacent joy
Almost forgotten.
Entranced and delighted
I am unable to look away.
“Darting artfully”…. Almost like an artist is painting the scene. “Dropping from the weight of death”…. Bringing a picture to one’s mind of the heavy emotions that death/loss of many sorts brings to us. “The daintiest drink”… as if some young ladies were having a tea party. The poem is filled with imagery set out in words, creating visions in the reader’s mind.
The next poems we discussed, “Dancing” is set out below. But before we dive into it, you need to have just a wee bit of information about Pablo Neruda, who she references. Pablo Neruda (Pablo from here on out) was from Chile. He lived in the early 1900’s. He was considered by many to be the best of the best Spanish Language poets of the twentieth century. His poems, all written in Spanish have been translated into multiple languages, including English. His most famous book, “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” was written when he was in his early 20’s. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. “Twenty Love Poems …” was published in 1924 when he was a mere 20 years of age. Shelley read his work some 5 years ago, and some of the lines in his poetry sat in the back of her mind until she authored “Dancing.”
Here is what Shelley had to say:
RLB: Alright. So “Dancing,” I didn’t catch a nature theme in there.
SJ: No, it is more than any of the others that I sent to you about loss, but I write that in reference to a friend, an elderly couple who were just lovely, lovely, people, and she fell and hit her head and then died the next day. And when I got the news that she had passed away, I sat down and wrote that one.
RLB: So when did you write this one?
SJ: I wrote that one in between ‘23 or early ’24.
RLB: You read Pablo four or five years ago?
SJ: Yes.
RLB: And you use at least three different lines straight from his poetry. So how did that get blended in?
SJ: Yeah, I think I was thinking about loss and how sad it is to experience another loss and how the sadness of grief, of freshly losing someone, and that line kept repeating in my head … “I could write the saddest lines, I could write the saddest lines.” And where his was a love poem, mine became more about the dance of life and how you know there is never
going to be one without the other. There is no life without death. There is no spring without winter. There is no joy, we wouldn’t know what joy is if we did not feel pain and suffering and sadness and so acknowledging that that life is made up of all those things. And I think I visualize this as a circle dance, or push and pull between the two, and continue to find joy,
continually and intentionally reaching out for joy amid grief and sadness. And how necessary that is because I’ve seen, I’ve been to grief groups where I see people who have been stuck for years in places of grief and they won’t allow themselves to come out. And I think to continue living you must keep moving, you must stay in the dance.
Dancing
-after Pablo Neruda
Shelley Jinks Johnson
Forgetting is so long.
Slivers of memory drift away
like hazy tendrils of the mind.
Moments dissolve too quickly
to catch, escaping through
the sieve of our fingers.
Life is short.
I forget to pause, breathe deeply,
grip intensely our souls’ exchange
in a moment of laughter, our
essence transferred in a single
tear shed together.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines
as I neglect the persistent tapping
of a reminder to remember
in morse code, or something
similar. A language forgotten,
blurred.
Love is so short though I have loved.
When now becomes past
and I open my ears to the story
unfolding in my peripheral vision,
I remember.
I remember.
You were beautiful. But now
you are gone and life,
I am reminded, will end.
Memory and forgetting will resume
their dance.
Until the lights go out.
The last poem Shelley sent to me does actually have some metaphors in it. (We can argue about whether the others were also filled with metaphors. I still want to pull back that curtain.)
Here is what Shelley had to say:
RLB: Bloomless summer …
SJ: All metaphors. That one is all metaphors.
RLB: Oh, so bloomless summer isn’t talking about your life?
SJ: Ahuh.
RLB: And so nothing was great, everything was terrible, the flowers actually shrunk?
SJ: It was actually, literally, but metaphorical as well. So we had a drought a couple of years ago….
RLB: Yeah
SJ: And literally nothing was blooming, and all of my flowers were dead.
RLB: It just has a nature theme.
SJ: Yeah, it does, yeah and extracting the reality of what was happening as a metaphor of my life and trying to heal and to find out how to move on.
RLB: “My colorless backyard.” So we know it wasn’t colorless but that was representing what?
SJ: It was representing me. I wrote a poem that’s in Pretty Little Widow that’s a self-portrait and it talked about how all the colors drained from me and the world and everything’s gray, and it felt like that for a very long time.
RLB: So again a state of mind and emotional state?
SJ: Yeah.
RLB: that you were in.
SJ: Yeah.
I’m going to let you now figure out the rest of the metaphors that are in the poem. And, also let you relate your own life’s experiences to the words so well set out by Shelley.
Bloomless Summer
Shelley Jinks Johnson
Winter seemed no colder
than the last few years.
Especially ‘21 when we saw back to back
ice storms and I thought
my palm trees had died.
Sheer exhaustion is a real thing.
Like when I slept for months after
losing myself to caretaker role
and aligning my rhythms
to hospital beeps and bloody needles.
It takes the body more than a season to recover.
My jasmine vine hasn’t bloomed
since the wilting of last fall;
crape myrtles struggle to open any buds.
Ants still march, busy with their labors.
Summer heat, heavy and oppressive,
weighs down even the best intentions.
Life is waning
in my colorless backyard.
And I think,
“Maybe spring will not come again.”
But I know it will,
no matter who is not here to see it.
Shelley’s new book, “Our Lady of Perpetual Loss” is set to come out in late May or sometime in June of this year. You can pre-order the book by clicking on this link: OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL LOSS by Shelley Jinks Johnson – Finishing Line Press
Shelley has 2 other books: “Pretty Little Widow” a book of poetry and “North Star”, a children’s book. Both are available via Amazon and at other book sellers. If you click on the following link you can find her work on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Shelley+jinks+johnson&ref=nav_bb_sb
Shelley is also the fearless leader of the Open Mic nights at Tamp & Grind, a coffee shop in downtown Alexandria. When I say fearless, I mean fearless.
