Mill Valley poet and filmmaker focuses on her craft during sabbatical
Mill Valley poet Joan Baranow's sabbatical in 2020 led to a fulfilling, creative adventure.
If life gives you a pandemic, write poetry. Well, that’s what Joan Baranow did when the Mill Valley resident’s long-planned sabbatical came in 2020. When the world slowed down, it gave the Dominican University of California professor time to write and read poetry as well as reflect back on her two decades-plus of work.
The result is three books — two full-length books and a chatbook — which she’s published over the last year: “A Slight Thing, Happiness,” “Aphids in the Rose” and “Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague,” which won the Brick Road Poetry Contest.
In her work, Baranow, who founded Dominican’s MFA program in creative writing, reflects on themes of family, illness, including her experiences with breast cancer, nature and the simple pleasures of life.
With her husband, physician and poet David Watts, the pair have collaborated in filmmaking, including the PBS documentary “Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine” and a series on illness and healing, featuring poets like Marie Howe and Rafael Campo, which she revisited during the sabbatical.
Q What inspired you and David to start your series?
A Bill Moyers, in collaboration with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, put together two series: “The Power of the Word” and “The Language of Life.” I earned my doctorate degree at Rutgers in New Jersey during the time when the poetry festival and poetry program was really getting off the ground in the mid-1980s. It was a very exciting time. I ended up working for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. The festival became popular and they would get poets from all over the world to come. And, Jim Haba, who created this, had the foresight to have it filmed. We were inspired by that. We thought, we should do our own series about illness and healing. We got a grant of some seed money to do this initial footage and traveled around the country. Then, life intervenes and we got sidetracked into this other PBS film that we made about Shands Hospital in Florida because they have a well-established arts and medicine program. But we’re working with that footage now.
Q What inspired your reflections on illness and healing?
A Everyone has illnesses. It’s inescapable. But my own, it isn’t really the driving force. To me, it’s the creation of the art and film, because I think it makes a poem more accessible to people and when it’s in this cinematic mode, people can really connect. …. Poet Alicia Ostriker told us poetry is not necessarily therapeutic, but it’s always diagnostic because you have to confront reality. She was saying how when you have a diagnosis or if a loved one is diagnosed, often you just go into denial. And with poetry, you have to confront that. And that’s why she says if you’re going to be on a path towards healing, you can’t be in denial. You have to look at reality. And a poem gives you that whether you’re writing it or reading it.
Q How did you feel looking back on your work?
A My first full-length book came out in 1999. And then, with full-time teaching and raising two sons, it was 20 years before my next book came out. Each of the three books that came out recently are quite different from each other. The first one, “Happiness,” is about family, starting from efforts to get pregnant. The little chatbook was about having breast cancer in 2011. It was not a dangerous breast cancer, and I just had a lumpectomy and radiation. So I thought, how can this become a more substantial book? I started looking at poems I’d written with nature as their theme, thinking that they would make a nice pairing with the journey of breast cancer. I wrote a new poem after all these years of having a mammogram, as an occasion to look back on. And then the third book, in part reflects on COVID.
Q How’d you get into poetry?
A I wrote my first poem when I was 8 years. I always loved poetry, the pleasure of it, the excitement of it, the musicality of language. And that’s never left me. It’s so satisfying to make something that really says what you want to say without even knowing that’s what you wanted to say in the first place, because it’s a path of discovery.
Q Is there anything from that time off that carried over into your teaching?
A In the course I’m teaching right now, called “Expressive Writing,” I tell the students they don’t have to write about illness. If you’re writing about what’s important to you, then it’s gonna have a beneficial effect on you. I’ve had students write about some really significant losses. And I’ve just been so impressed by their courage, and how kind and generous they’ve been to each other.