For the Love of Poetry

Dressed in a pink shirt, light blue book in hand, Nashua resident Rae Marie Bruce stood in front of a green chalkboard at the front of a room of people.

Not unfamiliar with talking to people about writing, Bruce's classroom on this Wednesday night in October was a little different than the ones of her past.

On Oct. 25, Bruce, a former longtime teacher at Merrimack High School, stood in front of a group of adults to give a poetry reading and talk about her new book, “This Glorious Disorder,” during an event at the Merrimack Public Library.

Bruce was 64 years old when she earned her Masters of Fine Arts in writing. It was her second masters, her first, in literature, coming from Rivier College.

Eight years later, Bruce is now the proud owner of a stack of identical books printed with her name on the cover, her photo on the back. Earlier this year, Bruce self-published her first book of poetry, a collection of the poems she has written in the last 20-30 years.

“I wanted to see the results of my work in a collected way. I wanted to leave something to my kids besides drawers full of folders of drafts,” Bruce said, pausing for a moment. “I did it as a gift to myself.”

Having spent much of her life teaching, Bruce, who developed the two-semester creative writing curriculum at Merrimack High School, decided in the years following her retirement in 1999 she wanted to go back to school herself.

She talked with her husband, asking if he thought they could afford it if she took some classes.

“He asked how much it cost and when I told him he said, 'Rae, it's only money.' ”

She spend two years in an MFA writing program through Vermont College, calling them two of the best years of her life.

Most of the program was done remotely, from her home in Merrimack, but 10 days at the end of each semester were spent in an intensive residency that allowed the students to work with their peers and professors alike to hone the work they'd been doing all semester.

Bruce called it the perfect scenario.She's an early riser, her husband preferred to sleep in. She would get her work done early in the day, much of it before he was even out of bed.

“I think those were the happiest two years of my life, I swear,” Bruce said.

Then her husband, W. Ralph Bruce, former pastor at St. James United Methodist Church, got sick.

Bruce put her writing on hold to care for him.

“I haven't written very much since then, but I'm starting to write again,” she said, pointing out that it's changed a lot, though. She uses a computer mostly, as arthritis has made writing on a notepad a weighty task.

Her poems, which have very naturally been reflections of her life over the years, are more recently a reflective look at her husband's illness and subsequent passing on June 3, 2010.

“You don't know what grief is via spouse until it happens to you,” she said. “We thought we had all this time.”

But Bruce said she beginning to be able to take an artistic look at it.

Her book reflects her life in the years before she earned her MFA with stories told in verse about the people and places of her childhood to her life as an adult. Poems range from “Hearing the News,” about the telegram that came announcing her cousin had been killed in war to “The Red-Haired Kid with the Crew Cut in the Front Row Who Asked If I Could Pinpoint the Exact Moment When I Realized That Life Had Passed Me By,” an extraordinarily long-titled poem about an experience with one of her students.

“(Poetry) is always a distillation of your experience,” she said.

As a writer, Bruce has for years practiced what she preached as a high school teacher. She finds comfort in taking the time to find the right word choice, the best length of the line and she is especially particular about projecting the right image, reworking a poem until it is perfect.

Today, she does this from her cozy one-bedroom apartment at the Hunt Community in Nashua, where she moved just two weeks before her husband died.

In addition to writing she enjoys playing bridge, taking in community concerts, traveling when she can and spending time with her friends, many of whom still live in Merrimack where she lived for more than two decades.

Early on, Bruce taught high school for five years before leaving to stay at home and raise her children.

After 10 years home with the kids, she took a course to help her transition back into teaching before spending time substitute teaching. She later held jobs at Rundlett Middle School in Concord and Bow Memorial School.

When she and her husband moved to Merrimack, Bruce took over for a teacher at the high school who left on a maternity leave and never returned.

“I liked working that department with the people there,” Bruce said. “It was a very creative department.”

She began the creative writing program at the high school, teaching it the first year with no curriculum, setting her own plans as she went.

“After the first year I said 'I never want to teach like that again,'” Bruce said.

So she set to work putting together a curriculum that included writing exercises to get students to think about how they tell a story using dialogue, description, sensory experiences and more. She taught units on different types of writing like short stories and narratives, saving poetry as the final unit of the year.

“I found and used a bunch of books with writing exercises because I realized I didn't need to reinvent the wheel,” Bruce said. “I think the best way to teach writing is to show them a model, to have something to talk about, not writing in a vacuum.”

That creative writing program was Bruce's pride and joy. She put her heart into it and molded it from the very beginning.

“I felt a real attachment to that program,” Bruce said.

To this day she also has a deep sense of pride attached to the writing center she and now Merrimack Middle School Principal Debbie Woelflein started when they both worked in the English department. It started from a grant proposal they wrote together and using the federal grant they started “The Write Room,” where students they trained coached other students to help them complete writing assignments.

She said the grant money was used to buy computers and supplies and she supervised it for about four years.

“It was an excellent idea, but under utilized by the teachers,” she said.

Some students used it a lot and it worked for a while and then faded away. Though she believes it would be a great program if it continued to this day, it did not hold up with no one committed to keeping it going.

Bruce looks back fondly on her days as a teacher. She has a student here and there that she remains in touch with. She is still friends with past colleagues, and she carries those days on her in her writing, be it in her poem about the boy with the red crew cut, or the lessons she taught that remain with her as she continues to write.

Bruce's first book of poetry may or may not be her last, she's not sure, but she is certain it was just what she needed. The book is mostly work from the manuscript she turned in at the end of her MFA program, but she has at least four times the 55 published poems sitting in files at home.

“Lots of poets self publish first, like Whitman and Blake among others, so I feel like I'm among good company,” Bruce told her listeners at the library on Oct. 25.

For more about Bruce, visit her website, www.raemariebruce.com.