The Breath in Colman’s Poetry

Cathy Colman is back with a cache of poems that bundle her thoughts and words from a life that no longer exists. Poets immortalize a lost love, untimely death or forsaken dream. In her new book, ‘Beauty’s Tattoo,’ Colman eulogizes a life, not another’s, but her own, her double. She will be reading and signing copies of the book on Thursday, October 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. The book can be understood as a diary of sorts of Colman’s extreme suffering from 2001 through 2005. The source was fibromyalgia, a condition characterized by long-term, body-wide pain. And while she was battling the disease, she investigated one remedy after another with no relief, except in writing. ‘Writing became a lifeline for me so I didn’t become a victim,’ says Colman, a resident of Pacific Palisades. She chose a letters format”Letter to the Dark Mirror,’ ‘Letter under Siege” in order to have a dialogue with her body and what was happening to it. ‘It was almost as if it were ‘the other,’ and I needed to formalize it this way because I needed to write to that ‘other self’ that was suffering.’ The book reflects a longing for the old life, Colman says. ‘I saw people out on the weekend hiking. I wanted normal things’travel, being in the sun, long hikes. Suddenly I was in this cocoon.’ Despite her expressed guidance to the reader as to the context of the poems, these short lyrics are masterful in their utility of language and clear-eyed imagery. The reader tumbles along faster and faster on Colman’s recognizable outer signposts only to shiver at the metaphysical revelation. ‘A lot comes from my unconscious filtered through the craft,’ she explains. ‘ I often take a list of random words from books or a half line from somewhere else, and I begin writing. Like Michelangelo, who talked about ‘freeing the slaves from marble, I free the poem from the words.’ Colman is an experienced poet, so when she talks about craft she is talking about the tools of poetry, the rules for the dance. Or, as she is also a musician, the musician’s skill. ‘By practicing every glissando, every run, you can give it your own interpretation or better instrument to unfold a philosophy.’ A small, quiet presence, now mostly pain-free, Colman accesses a storehouse of treasure for her poetry, including her journals dating back to the early 1970s. She uses dream imagery and also waking dreams, which, she says, she can access with ‘wild writes.’ ‘I allow myself to completely go free, to free-associate, barring no images, bypassing the internal censor.’ At the same time, her poems may contain historical references, often to music, which carry the internal content: ‘Around the perimeter of the yard, the composer Satie was stalking, stalking /his even paces, the madness of sameness/where music is played in the shape of a pear.’ Her poems are dense and while they flood the reader, there is a kind of sixth degree of comprehension. We may not get the line-by-line meaning, but are moved with feeling at our self-recognition. Colman’s work is brave; she meets love, loss, sex and triumph honestly and explicitly. And all along, the music of the words, the rhythm of free verse draws us along through the whole book as if we were on her journey. She characterizes her life as odd, growing up with the ‘glamour’ of Hollywood. Her father was a TV producer (‘The Love Boat’), but she became ‘an intellectual, as an antidote. I loved high culture, Ezra Pound.’ She started writing at 5, but also loved acting and singing. She thought she would become an actor, but at Berkeley, the acting classes were all filled, so she became a serious writer. She later studied at San Francisco with poet Stan Rice, who changed her life. Colman published her first book ‘Borrowed Dress’ in 2001, which won the Feliz Pollock Prize for Poetry, and has won several other prizes and appeared in many journals, but this doesn’t reflect the breadth of her talent. She has developed an expertise as a script consultant, working with a number of Hollywood writers, including Scott Frank (‘Get Shorty’) and Ed Solomon (‘Men in Black’), and she wouldn’t give up her teaching without a big heartache. ‘ I love my students,’ she says, adding ‘I somehow was good at helping people whenever they are blocked. Poetry inspires the fiction and vice versa.’ And now, to prove the point, Colman is working on a novel and another book of poetry. ‘My novel will have to do with illness, my childhood, fictionalized. The poems will speak about how the world is different for me now. I am writing about the men and women writers who have influenced me, like Oscar Wilde, and using the strategy in each poem that actor Delphine Seyrig used: ‘Didn’t I meet you last year?’ For once, it will not be my personal life.’