Poetry like a prayer

By Carol Cole-Frowe

July 06, 2008 12:47 am

— By Carol Cole-Frowe
Transcript Staff Writer
Jim Chastain — father, husband, friend, writer, poet, movie critic, attorney, cancer patient — has found a whole new universe of friends and fans as he’s dealt with his illness and reached out to those close and not so close with his creative talents, whether or not he meant to.
Chastain has penned a new book of poems, “Antidotes and Remedies,” which debuts with a reading 2 to 4 p.m. next Sunday at the Depot.
“Antidotes” make up the first about 30 poems, with “Remedies” making up the final group. And although Chastain describes “Antidotes” as serious, that’s not entirely true. Some are serious. And some are just flat out funny or searingly satirical, words massaged by a man who’s turned out to be an exquisitely human storyteller of life and love of his friends and family.
“I don’t ever get way too serious,” says the longtime film critic of The Norman Transcript. “But life goes on and you have to clean up dog sh*t in the backyard.”
But — he pauses — and says there’s a spiritual element to it.
“I think poetry is like a prayer. Just trying to figure out what life is,” Chastain says.
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A person can learn a lot about living from someone who is dying.
The 44-year-old Chastain knows a lot about both.
In 2001 at the age of 37, he found a lump on his right arm, a malignant fibrous hystiocytoma. It was a soft tissue sarcoma that attacked the triceps muscle of his right arm and eventually took it. He chronicled his fight against the cancer in his book, “I Survived Cancer, but Never Won the Tour de France,” published by Hawk Publishing Group.
Woven throughout “I Survived Cancer,” a series of updates to his friends and family, were his poems. Those poems were a wonderful surprise to many of his friends, some of whom didn’t know he wrote poetry.
Chastain has had feedback he didn’t anticipate as a result of the regionally popular “I Survived Cancer.”
“I love my first book,” he says. “People write me from all over the country. Old friends I would have never talked to again. … That book has been a grassroots movement.”
It’s led to great conversations with people he didn’t expect to reach out to him.
Chastain survived his first bout with cancer. But cancer returned in August 2007, and the battle rages on between the illness in his body and the creativity in his mind.
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Chastain’s poetry sings and cries and hugs and hurts.
The slender volume is full of his insights on his situation and how he tackles his challenges du jour. That’s not to make light of his battle, but brings his wry writer’s humor to his situation.
It’s Chastain’s gentle, loving way to provide advice to those who are dealing with the challenge of cancer now, to those who love a person with cancer, to those who are a caregiver to someone with cancer, to those who would come after.
He gets asked reasonably often to share his insights, reading poetry maybe 50 times last year, often with his friends poet Nathan Brown and songstress Beth Wood.
“I get asked to talk at writing things, poetry things, health things, church things,” Chastain says, acting almost but not quite surprised. “My wife (LeAnn) doesn’t get the whole poetry thing. It’s just something I love to do.”
That’s when he’s not working at his day job — as an attorney with the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals.
Being a poetry-writing attorney seems like an oxymoron. But really, it’s a coping mechanism.
“I just like how poetry can do a whole lot of things — illustrate truth,” Chastain says.
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These days he’s grown a more than Miami Vice Don Johnson beard to cope with the “acne” that uncomfortably accompanied his most recent series of chemotherapy treatments — his 15th round of chemo.
“The acne started on my nose … it covered here to here,” he says, gesturing pretty much all over his body. The redness is not as obvious as he thinks it is, but apparently makes him uncomfortable.
“It’s all doable and I don’t want to be a griper,” he says. “And I have discovered that when I’m not feeling good, my creativity just leaves.”
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“Antidotes and Remedies” is published by Village Books Press and is available on Chastain’s Web site at www.Jim Chastain.com and in several local book stores.
He doesn’t know what to expect from “Antidotes” as to the success of the book, but says it doesn’t really matter.
“Poetry’s never about the money,” he says.
The reading at the Depot will be after he returns from his most recent updates from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
And Sunday, he’ll be reading poems to anyone who wants to hear them.
“It should be a big party,” he says.
Carol Cole-Frowe366-3538ccole@normantranscript.com