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08/10/2016 08:30 AMFor Old Saybrook’s first poet laureate, the creative spark spurring a poem’s birth all starts with the first line.
“You enter a poem with the first line and you have no plan—you don’t know yet where you’re going. It creates curiosity,” says Pat O’Brien. “I could be observing the lights of a window and it calls to mind a calendar, and that then leads to poem. I’m kind of obsessed with time—mid-life is so important.”
Patricia Horn O’Brien, whose first published poetry book was When Less than Perfect is Enough, first started writing poetry and keeping a journal in late elementary school.
“I think it came out of some kind of angst,” Pat reflects.
Throughout her life, the need to write and observe was fulfilled through daily journal writing.
“I was always writing,” says Pat. “The benefit of writing to me is that it is a way to understand life and how I react to it. Central for me is observing the human condition, and [seeing] how nature gives us a story back.”
Writing has also been the tool that has served different purposes at various points in her life.
When her only brother died in a car accident at 37 years of age, she remembers going up to her desk in a Cape Cod house gable and just writing and writing for days as a means to cope with the sadness.
“But I also remember watching my son and grandchild doing cartwheels on the beach and wanting to write of the joy I felt,” Pat says.
Writing poetry is her talent and her vocation, but she also had another career, that of a social worker.
“I surrendered a child for adoption once and being in a place of need myself, it connected me to a path to help others in need,” Pat says.
Her first job was working with the City of New York in social services. It was the meaningful work she sought. So she went on to earn a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University.
She stepped away from the career while raising her own children, but returned to it when they were grown. Last month, after working for 15 years as a social worker with the Guilford VNA in nursing home care, she finally retired.
“I would work with a homebound person to help them consolidate and access resources, to help them manage their illness, to support the caregivers. Over a nine-week period, I might go out to a patient’s home four times,” Pat explains.
She says it was through the daily practice of her Buddhist faith that she was strengthened and able to support and help her patients. Every evening for many decades Pat has sat for 10 minutes to meditate on a breath.
The daily practice helps her “to maintain a soft heart and a strong back” (a Buddhist saying) in order “to have compassion, and some knowledge and wisdom to work with a broken heart,” says Pat.
“What meditation does for me is that I realized I could give up the notion that I had all the answers. I could just be in the moment with the person in need. Often they had the answers themselves,” says Pat.
Through the Shambhala Meditation Center in New Haven, Pat joined a team that trained inmates at two men’s prisons and at the York Correctional Center, a women’s prison, to be hospice volunteers for other inmates who were dying.
“When we finished up at York, I did not want to leave,” says Pat, so for about four years, once a month she and a nurse met with the group of inmate hospice volunteers to provide support; she brought in artists, musicians, funeral directors, poets, to meet with them.
With her retirement from social work now final, this month she’s embarking on a new life chapter. And central to that new path is her plan to devote more time to writing and to the poetry groups in which she is a member as well as to her role as volunteer docent at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme.
“The poetry group I co-founded in 2012 is the Connecticut River Poets. There are 15 of us. We hooked up with Perennial Design to publish a book. In the book, a painting by a local artist is paired with a poem [written by one of the group’s members] that is inspired by that painting,” says Pat.
This new book of paintings and poems was just released on July 25.
Another recently published volume, Soulful Grace: The Past in Poetry,
is a collection of poems inspired by objects in the historic Hart House on Old Saybrook’s Main Street. The poets whose work appears in this book, a publication of the Old Saybrook Historical Society, plan a public reading event from this book at the Hart House on Saturday, Aug. 27 at 3:30 p.m.
Pat’s other poetry group is the Guilford Poetry Group, a group in which she’s been a member for many years.
“One of the best things we do, both the Guilford and Connecticut River Poets, is that since 2012, for every exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum, we write poetry to respond to the exhibit,” says Pat.
And then, as the temporary exhibit’s time is nearing an end, the poets and the museum’s directors plan a celebration with a poetry reading and live classical music played by an instrumental duo.
The poetry groups also work with students to encourage them to write poetry.
“Each January, we engage the Old Saybrook High School creative writing class and invite them to submit poetry and then we participate in the reading [at the Florence Griswold Museum] with them,” says Pat.
For a number of years, Pat and Nan McNeeley, another published poet, have served as the final judges for the annual Acton Library Poetry Contest each April. And in the past 18 months, Pat has taken on a broader role as a member of the Acton Library Board of Trustees.
Eight years ago, she started writing one poem a day. Now in retirement, she plans to write more, hoping to write enough to publish a second book of poems.
“Meditation, mindfulness, staying in the moment—these practices support my efforts to be a writer,” says Pat.