Poet finds solace in words and music

SANDPOINT - Fingers slip in silence along the keyboard, trying out the shape of a melody in the same, tentative way a walker might test uncertain ground before taking a step. As her right hand grows more confident in those movements, the left glides like a whisper across rows of buttons. It finds its focal point and stops.

The bellows - kept still until the song has played through its soundless rendition - heaves a sigh of relief as the instrument extends to full length. A low chord starts at the floor and takes no time at all to fill the one-room cabin. The bellows start back the other way and the right hand commits itself to the notes, pressing the keys, playing “Sweet Hour of Prayer.”

“I like to play the hymns,” the woman behind the black-and-white accordion says when the melody has ended and the last chord has drained from this tiny cup of a home that is at once her bedroom, her kitchen and her creative space. “They're easy.”

She sings with the country music on the radio when she thinks you're not listening. It's a nice voice, not strong, but sure of itself. It is the trill of a brook after the mad rush of spring has gone and the water is content to wend gently along through the rocks.

Her other voice - the writer's voice - has the same gentle quality. But underneath the beauty and humor that skip along the surface lies enormous strength, fed by an aquifer that presses through the toughest emotions and purifies them, clarifies them, until they come out the other side as the lines of prose and brackets of verse that make up the poems of Vivian E. Bogardus.

The one table in her single-room cabin is covered with the trappings of a writer's life - pens, pencils, bottles of Wite Out and notebooks. It is also the collecting spot for the accoutrement of normal life - a small cross, costume jewelry, scissors, a shoehorn. All of these items are merely the perimeter for the books and clippings and pages of poetry stacked between them.

“Let me just find one here,” Vivian says, thumbing through her latest self-published work in search of a piece that handily encapsulates something that has come up in conversation.

See POET, Page 5

“I wrote a poem about that!” she announces after a new topic takes hold, pouncing on the stack of writing to emerge with a piece that seems a good match.

Twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Amateur Press, recently published in the magazines “Byline” and “Good Old Days” and well-known commodity to reader's of the Nickel's Worth and The Senior Gazette, she has no illusions of ever raking in big money a freelance poet.

“I'm supposed to get $5 for one of these and the other paid $15,” Vivian says, holding up two magazines that printed her submissions. “I don't think I'm going to get rich at this.”

The payoff, she explains, doesn't have a dollar sign next to it. It is comes in proximity to a single, diminutive word.

“Bonkers,” the poet reads from a clipping held at just the right distance to get it in focus. “Some people go bonkers at football games, I get excited with ‘by' by my name.”

Yes, the eternal lure of the byline - that addiction that compels writers to stuff their very souls into envelopes and makes their spirits soar or plummet depending on what the postman brings back. A check is grand, sure, but a package containing copies of a magazine with the writer's name secreted somewhere inside is better than a love letter. The slick cover feels smooth as satin; the ink is perfume. And the byline - the byline is validation that, after hours of solitary toil, someone, somewhere will cast their eyes upon the words.

It's the same reason Vivian has begun to compile her poems and self-publish them. In the past, small presses have distributed collections of her work. But with many of those publishing houses gone and a limited number of print outlets for poets like herself, flying solo makes sense.

Her most recent compilation is titled, “My Madeline” and, like her other collections, it is an exploration of both the light-hearted romps that come from humorous subjects and the more ponderous steps than accompany things that are serious or just plain sad. Vivian approaches either side with an equanimity that comes from experience. Her writing has muscle - it can pull a belly laugh from you on one page and sock you in the belly on the next.

A couple of years ago, she was a full-time caregiver for her husband. As he became more ill - going blind and losing a leg to diabetes and advanced osteoporosis - he was moved to a nursing facility. Vivian followed him there, volunteering with the other residents every day and making sure she spends as much time as possible by his side. When his hands shake, she feeds him. When he sleeps, she watches over him. She knows her husband is bound to die and, in the shadow of death, she stands by his side.

At the end of the day, she comes home to the little cabin and writes. Fear cannot edit her work. She makes no effort to stop the emotions that swell and break like waves as the lines cover sheet after sheet of paper.

“It's my outlet, my solace,” she says. “I sit down to write and it just starts coming out. A long time ago, I would try to stop that flow when it got too intense. Not any more. It isn't poetry unless it comes straight from your heart.

“People recognize that it's real - that it's not put-on - when they see it on the page,” she adds. “They read your work and say, ‘I've felt that way - I've gone through that.'”

It's that communication that Vivian craves. She found it the first time when a junior high school English assignment put her in front of the rest of her class, reading aloud the humorous poem she turned in.

“I got an A - maybe an A-plus - on it,” she says. “And when I read it to the class, everybody laughed. I was hooked.”

Never afraid of serious content, she still has unerring aim for the funny bone.

“Arithmetic,” she says in a mock theatrical tone, holding up another clipping from another published poem.

“He's teaching her arithmetic,

Because that is his mission.

He kissed her once,

He kissed her twice,

And said, ‘Now that's addition.'

And as he added, smack by smack,

In silent satisfaction,

She sweetly gave his kisses back,

And said, ‘Now that's subtraction.'

If he's even half a man,

He's bound to make her sigh,

And when she learns her fractions well,

He'll teach her to multiply.

But Dad appeared upon the scene,

And made a quick decision,

He pushed the boy out of the door,

And said, ‘Now that's division!'”

She laughs at the play on words and the way words play. Which brings to mind a quick succession of funny poems, followed by a story about one of her songs. Over the years, several of her poems have found their way into music and some of those have been published. Country songs, with titles like “My Pillow Knows” and “All Over Again.”

“I like writing country music because it's so real,” Vivian says. “And that's what you aim for in poetry, too.”

Back to the story, she describes her first performance as a songwriter. It was a March of Dimes benefit and she was a young married woman who happened to be pregnant at the time. From backstage, the signal was given for her to walk out in front of the backup band that would accompany her. The expectant mother with the guitar stepped to the microphone, introduced herself and then introduced the name of her song - “I Won't Let You Love Me.”

“I always thought that was funny,” Vivian says. “I was pregnant and I was standing up there singing, ‘I won't let you loooooooove meeeeee!'”

She laughs with the same, brook-like nature as her singing voice and, for the moment, water seems to skip around inside the walls of this small cabin, this poet's corner, where Vivian Bogardus pours her heart out one line at a time.

The poet's latest book is available at the East Bonner County Library and Vanderford's in downtown Sandpoint.