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THE HEART’S NECESSITIES:
LIFE IN POETRY
by Jane Tyson Clement and Becca Stevens
“Seasonal
Interlude Amongst Two Artists”
The heart’s
necessities
include the
interlude
of
frost-constricted peace
on which
the sun can brood
--Excerpt
from Jane Tyson Clement’s poem “Winter”,
--Excerpt
From Becca Stevens’s song “Tillery”
This is
the mark of a great artist: that she can
write something as if she’s speaking directly to you at a particular moment,
and yet, with the same line, speak just as clearly to you in a different
moment.
--Becca
Stevens, excerpt from Prelude, The Heart’s Necessities: Life In Poetry
Jazz musician, singer, and songwriter Becca Stevens was grieving
the loss of her dear friend and music collaborator Kenya Tillery (Right), who had
succumbed to breast cancer on March 7, 2008.
She also experienced writer’s block: she couldn’t find the words to honor Kenya
through her own music and lyrics. Becca
came across an unopened book on her own library shelf – the poetry collection No
One Can Stem the Tide that her father gave her for Christmas of
2007. She opened the book and
immediately found the two poems “Winter”
and “February Thaw” side by side and
incorporated phrases from those two poems to complete her eulogy song for Kenya
titled “Tillery”.
Not only
did they capture the season of loss so perfectly, but they did so with exactly
the right rhythm and number of syllables to fit the melody I had already
written.
--Becca,
The
Heart’s Necessities: Life In Poetry
With the approval and permission from Jane’s original publishers
Plough Publishing House and family, Becca has thus far recorded five songs
using phrases from Jane’s own poetry: “Tillery”, “105”, “For You the Night is
Still”, “Response to Criticism”,
and “I Am No Artist”. The song “Tillery”
has been recorded on four different albums in four different settings and is
now a band name. All of the writing for
the music and lyrics was done in numerous Brooklyn apartments Becca has lived
throughout the past eleven years. And she plans on writing more music and
lyrics, using lines from Jane’s own poetry.
Jane Tyson Clement (1917-2000) grew up in Manhattan, New York
and always had a love for poetry. She
graduated from Horace Mann High School in 1935 and was awarded the high
school’s top poetry prize. She attended
Smith College where she majored in literature and poetry. She was awarded the Mary Augusta Jordon Prize
for her poem “Strange Dominion”
which was deemed the “best original literary work” of her 1939 Smith College
graduating class.
Even though she lived a life of privilege she was discouraged by
the modern day Christian church’s tolerance of war, nationalism, racism,
injustice, and inequality and felt those very things were in direct
contradiction to Jesus Christ’s teachings of love and peace and the gospel.
She found respite on the ocean when she would vacation in Bay
Head, New Jersey. There she would walk
the ocean’s shores and meditate and write poetry.
Becca also found solace in
the ocean where she would vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina. When she read Jane’s poems about her
experiences with the ocean she felt another connection with Jane.
Soon Becca was not only incorporating Jane’s poems into her own
music but writing conversation pieces in response to Jane’s poems and how those
poems affected her life.
All of this, along with photographs, is detailed in THE
HEART’S NECESSITIES: LIFE IN POETRY by
Jane Tyson Clement and Becca Stevens; Edited by Veery Huleatt; jacket cover
photo by Tabor Chichakly; and published by Plough Publishing House on April 22,
2019.
Becca felt another
connection to Jane with her poem “Into
the Dark Which Is Not Dark” specifically when Jane writes these lines: Into the dark which is not dark/ but only the
light we cannot see,/ reluctantly I let you go.
In The Heart’s Necessities:
A Life In Poetry Becca
writes about those lines, and her response could also be a description of her
relationship with Jane: Deciding that your creation is complete means it’s no
longer in your control. That can be
unsettling, but if you want your hard work to live on beyond yourself, you have
to share it. Only then is it free to move
through others, to grow, inspire and live a life of its own.
The
Heart’s Necessities: Life In Poetry is a 182-page masterpiece of a communion
between two artists, both women, both in love with poetry and the belief in its
eternal power. Jane communicates with
Becca through her poetry and Becca responds by writing artistic pieces to
Jane’s poetry, thus the living language between two women, across two realms of
reality, and two time frames, continues – forming its own art form – that will
continue
to live on as each page is read.
Communications between
Jane and Becca continue about the similarities and differences of their
relationships with their husbands:
Jane’s Bob (Right Top) and Becca’s Nate (Right Bottom), one of the similarities being that both do
not believe in hasty love.
and know
the hasty blossom
as swiftly
will decay,
while other
flowers are waiting
to grace a
forward day.
--Jane
“TO R.A.C. XVI”
Jane warns
that hasty love, love that is rushed or clinging, will not last, while love
that is patient and steadfast even through ups and downs or “necessary evils”
has the strength to “grace a forward day.”
--Becca,
The
Heart’s Necessities: Life In Poetry
The climax of The Heart’s Necessities: Life In Poetry is when in the Fall of
1952 Jane and her husband Bob listen to a talk by prominent Philadelphia Quaker
Florrie Potts about her visit to the Bruderhof, a Christian pacifist movement
founded in Germany in 1920 by Eberhard and Emmy Arnold (Left); a movement Jane, her husband
Bob, and their seven children embraced. As a result Jane wrote some of her best poetry, which could be deemed
spiritual by other Christian believers. Becca finds all of Jane's poems, both secular and spiritual, to be inclusive to
all people.
Every so often I come across a poem like “Out
Of A Difficult And Troubled Season”, where Jane’s faith is apparent, but not in
a way that seems exclusive, or that pushes away a non-Christian reader.
--Becca, The Heart’s
Necessities: Life In Poetry
To read “Out Of A Difficult And Troubled Season” click on the link
below to order The Heart’s Necessities: Life In Poetry
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