"…the stories of their journey embellished or misread or lacking a true bard, a song associate, something with starlight in it, blue lilac starlight and the sound of dipping oars."
-Deborah Digges
She was Motherpoet and Antigone and Grandma Dogs, Persephone (veiled) and Cerberus (with his jaws) carried her train and she crossed places fearlessly — gardening in the rain or circling Walden Pond and always with a book and always with music (counting syllables on her fingers) and always with a legion of animals as companions, and she is gone. For those who were invited in, it has become hard to imagine that poetry can even exist beyond this day. "Make sense or tell the truth," she would quote Randall Jarrell, "choose one, I cannot do both." She would resist this very moment, these words on the page, and yet here we are, and still here are words being formed after all, continuing to elude everything but ambiguity. Poetry.
Empty now the tree house, 101 Blue Hills Road, apple orchards, desks, an office with two windows, birdfeeders, space for the blue garden, the hearth.
How we understand the loss of a friend, a mother, a sister, a grandmother, a poet, a teacher, our beloved who gave away everything, this cannot be said. Instead perhaps grief is like having two hearts, but this new heart we have grown does not work as it should. It ticks too loudly, stops and seizes our breath, makes us slow when we have to cross over thresholds to traverse these spaces now empty, wakes us when we sleep and makes only fatigue for our waking hours.
Good Friday, April 10, 2009, was one of the worst days to have ever been — in the history of days, but it was only one day, one day is not a life, at least not that day.
There is life to consider here. Let us consider just one part for this moment, there will be other moments, but here let us talk about our professor, our teacher, Deborah Digges.
In her office you could find no evidence of the multitude of awards she received for her work; instead, a collage on the walls of her dogs, her sons and her Frank, these things stuck irreverently to the wall with Scotch tape, and the only accolade recorded in this collage were two certificates my friend Jane and I gave to her in 2002 when we were undergrads to thank her for her teaching, to thank her for calling us poets.
She believed that no student should be destroyed despite the quality of their writing at that moment. She was a professor who understood the impossibility of knowing what a student could one day achieve. Her guidance was gentle and generous, and she spent time with each of our poems in workshop, tolerated our being clever, tolerated our enjoyment of our cleverness, helped us through what she called the poetry of our youth. We all learned the language of her subtlety and as she read our poems would wait for the highest approval from her, which was her saying of our poem: "Much to be admired."
Our workshops became a place where she shared her subversive kindness with each of us; sometimes, we wrapped ourselves in the rainbow blankets she brought, sometimes shouting at the gardeners, "Is this the botanical gardens or a university?! We are reading poetry here!" Once spontaneously we all broke into applause when one of us shared that he had experimented with explosives in his backyard, dug a hole and filled it with the powders from fireworks and then lit it ablaze, which resulted in the bomb squad being called. We celebrated these things, we were thieves of books and music and flowers — we were thieves and liars and poets.
Once, at her home, I asked her about sparrows: Why were there so many sparrows in her poetry? What was a sparrow? She replied, "Sparrows are poets: They're everywhere, and they f--k like mad to keep it that way."
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Tina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Professor Deborah Digges was her undergraduate and Ph.D. advisor. She is currently in the process of writing a biography on Digges.
