Maryann Corbett, 73, made a career working as a language specialist for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes at the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys write in plainer English. In her 50s, the St. Paul mother of two began writing poetry, enjoying early success with the publication of poems and, at 62, the publication of her first book. Franciscan University Press published Corbett’s latest book — her sixth — last summer. Titled “The O in the Air,” it explores her doubts, beliefs and Catholic upbringing. She is a member of St. Thomas More in St. Paul.
Q) What do you love about the Catholic faith?
A) The liturgy is the best thing, and I love that the Church has connections with centuries of art and music and poetry without losing a focus on the plain sense of the Gospels. I love that the liturgy involves repetition and that its use of the Scriptures provides us with a fund of shared stories.
Q) How did growing up Catholic attune you to poetry?
A) The use of words in the liturgy attunes you to the prosody, to the rhythm of words when they’re spoken aloud. It was a big driver of my sense of poetics. When we were small children, before Vatican II, we were singing Latin liturgical music. We learned to sing the Gloria from the Mass of the Angels. There are still prayers that I remember more from their rhythms than anything else.
Q) What did it feel like to take up poetry in your 50s?
A) I had been silent for 30 years. I had a lot of experience to mine (for writing). I felt like I had to be quiet during my work life, in what I said, because the revisor’s office is a nonpartisan office and one has to be circumspect about avoiding appearing partisan. So, after I retired, it was nice to feel more free.
Q) The publication of those first few poems must have felt validating.
A) Yes, and it still does. I’m much too dependent on those pats on the head.
Q) Tell me about your new book.
A) I’m proud of it because it’s a beautiful physical object. And I’m proud that I’ve managed to make a unified whole of poems that were written over a long period of time, probably a dozen years. (The) putting together of manuscripts is difficult, but this one was especially a bear.
The idea of “the O in the air” comes from the fact that so many prayers begin with O — “O, Lord.” It also looks like a zero, which represents the idea that God can seem absent. The book is very much about grappling with the difficulties that the Church presents and the question that God raises by feeling distant.
Q) What do you hope readers will get out of it?
A) I hope they conclude that their own struggles or doubts or uncertainties are absolutely normal and that we’re all sort of floating around searching.
Q) The snow-covered field on the cover feels fitting for this season, as we sink into a new year and look back on the past one.
A) Poetry makes me look with critical eyes — even clinical eyes — so that I can get behind what I’m observing to what I’m feeling. I never really stopped going back to those feelings of childhood. I want to get back to the difficulties I had with the Church and faith and my parents during my childhood and fix them and rebaptize them.
Q) Where do you write?
A) I write in the morning in my pajamas in a converted bedroom at a desk that’s too small, surrounded by books on all sides — other people’s poetry, reference books, old textbooks from my graduate and undergraduate years, books in several languages, ancient and medieval. If I start to write, I’m going to be doing it with a pen, mostly on paper taken from the pile of old scrap paper that I have stacked under my desk. I’ll keep on drafting until I think I’ve got something that looks like a whole poem, or at least an embryo, and only then do I put it down in an electronic document. The physicality of a pen is extremely important to me. I know that words flow better when ink flows.
The good stuff does not all come at once, and revision is vitally important — and looking for particular kinds of changes that one can make like introducing alliteration — “the crumbs of the Christmas season,” that’s an improvement that might dawn on you later on — or introducing a more interesting verb, like “the knitting of reasons” instead of “the combining of reasons,” something more tactile.
I want to be more patient with my poems, revising longer, being more hesitant to actually send them out. But I’ve been saying that as long as I’ve been writing.
Q) Your new book includes a poem called “Knowledge,” which is about the annulment your mom received after waiting half a century.
A) It was terrifically important to her. I remember that she called to tell me about it. I wish that the ’50s Church had been able to have a more (Pope) Francis-like attitude toward people whose lives just don’t fit the Church’s ideal “Going My Way” and “Bells of St. Mary’s” vision of what families should be. Mom attended Mass every Sunday and never received Communion. So many people in her position would’ve just given up on the Church. She said: “I’m Catholic. I can’t be anything else.”
Q) What helps you grow in your faith?
A) Learning constantly and reading widely. I am focused right now on Church history, and I would especially recommend the books of John W. O’Malley, who has written about the story of Vatican II.
Q) You found an outlet for your faith by singing in the choir at the Cathedral (of St. Paul in St. Paul). Does that feel like prayer?
A) Yes, especially choral singing because you’re taken out of yourself and you’ve become part of this much larger sound. The Cathedral is just a wonderful place to sing because it’s so reverberant and resonant. The acoustics are amazing.
Q) What has surprised you about aging?
A) It’s logistically difficult. With my husband’s Parkinson’s, we learn something every day about the limits of our coping.
Q) What do you know for sure?
A) I’m trying to be less sure and more open to new ideas, to be shaken out of my standards of thinking. I’m trying to not be so absolute. I’m old. I’m set in my ways. I’m trying not to be so set.
Q) How do you go about that?
A) Right now, my life is doing that for me — all the challenges it presents, particularly the health challenges. It’s like being whacked upside the head approximately weekly.
When you’re less sure that you absolutely know, you might possibly listen to other people more. It’s a matter of love. If you don’t really listen, you don’t really love.
