Slow Dancing

By Malca Litovitz and Elana Wolff

Showcasing the fruits of creativity from illness, this duologue and poetry collection addresses the last months of author Malca Litovitz's life and her devotion to writing. Life, love, and death are all reflected upon in unshielded, intimate language without pretense. Raw and moving, this poetry collaboration inspires appreciation for those living and love for those lost. {Guernica Editions}

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Jan 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781550714746

Malca Litovitz

Malca Litovitz was a full-time teacher of English literature and creative writing for 25 years, in addition to being an editor, critic, performer, mentor, and award-winning poet. She was the author of At the Moonbeam Café and To Light, To Water, which won the 2000 Jewish National Book Award. An endowment for the Malca Litovitz Prize in creative writing has been established at Seneca College-Toronto.

Book preview

MALCA LITOVITZ & ELANA WOLFF

SLOW DANCING

 CREATIVITY AND ILLNESS (DUOLOGUE AND RENGAS)

DUOLOGUE SERIES 3

GUERNICA

Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)

2008  

Contents

Foreword

DUOLOGUE

RENGAS 

Pulse 

Shift 

That Deer 

The Wish Is Eden 

Room of the Heart 

Rhyming Pillow 

The Sage City 

Bird of Paradise 

Chimaera 

Strings 

A Loon Calls 

Full Blossom 

Handwritten Letter 

Dream-Child 

Rooftop 

Last Year’s Thyme 

Purple Scarf 

Startling Surprises 

Rainbow-Maker 

Old Dreams 

The Whale 

The Dance 

Fill Me 

New Key 

Mother-Love 

Dove 

I Look to the Sun 

Moon-Sliver 

Flowering 

Mountain Wedding 

Sanguine Rooster 

Intention

Shades of the Soul 

Lots of Room 

Poses 

Morning Light 

Notes 

Acknowledgements

For our children, Adam Litovitz and Noam and Adi Wolff, with love

FOREWORD

Malca and I met in autumn of 2003, shortly before our second poetry collections were launched by Guernica Editions at Bar Italia on College Street in Toronto. Our attraction was fast and natural. During the following year we read together from our work at local poetry venues, collaborated on a three-way interview with fellow Guernica poet Merle Nudelman for the online journal The Danforth Review, and planned to expand this exchange into a book-length Triologue. This didn’t happen. In spring of 2004 Malca fell ill with what was the metastasis of cancer and our initiative was shelved.

Malca emerged from her course of chemotherapy resolute. She returned to her teaching position at Seneca College, kept busy with friends and family, continued to smile, write, and think affirmatively. She was determined to collect her newer and older poems into a third collection, and asked me to help her with this work. I felt favoured. During the summer and fall of 2004 we met regularly to talk, read each other’s poems, edit, and shape our third books.We grew close over poetry. In December, as the editing work drew to a close, we decided to embark upon another venture together: writing rengas – a form of collaborative, linked poetry, similar in structure to haiku, with origins in medieval Japan.

We eschewed the formal renga rules, agreeing to write line-by-alternating-line, and took turns at going first. We put no stipulation on subject matter, syllabic count or line length. Our aim was simply to continue working together creatively. At first we chose the privacy of our computers for exchanging lines and the first four rengas were composed through e-mail. We negotiated punctuation as we went along and sensed when a poem had come to a close. We chose titles from key words or phrases upon completing each piece.When, in March of 2005, Malca was again hospitalized, at the Princess Margaret Hospital, we continued to exchange lines by telephone, also during visits. We maintained a steady momentum and communicated daily, sometimes two or three times daily, as the words came to us.

At the end of April, her health in decline, Malca returned home.We continued to write daily, and with a new urgency. At the beginning of May, Antonio D’Alfonso, our publisher, encouraged me to tape a duologue in which I would direct Malca to talk about her literary life. I immediately prepared a set of opening questions and taped the duologue in two sessions, on May 8 and 10. I transcribed one of the tapings in time for Malca to hear it read, and give her approval, before I went on a trip to the west coast. We composed four rengas by phone while I was away – Rengas 28 to 31(Moon-Sliver, Flowering, Mountain Wedding and Sanguine Rooster). Her condition took a turn for the worse at this time and writing became increasingly difficult. By the end of June, she could hardly write at all. I incorporated an oral line into Renga 35 (Poses), completed after visiting her at home on July 4. She was hospitalized again later that day. We wrote our final renga on Friday, July 8, side by side at The Toronto Hospital. It was Renga 36 – a symbolic number – twice 18, the numeric value of the Hebrew word chai, meaning alive. Malca was in good spirits that morning, brighter than I’d seen her for weeks. I felt heartened.

The following Monday she