Soap Opera Weekly, August 31, 1999

The Other Half: Ode To Love


GL's David Andrew Macdonald provides plenty of inspiration for poet Nicolette Nicola. It was the perfect job for her. The kids in her charge were 5,9 and 11, and during the day they were in school while she worked at a magazine. Then she picked them up from school and took care of them until 8 p.m. For seven weeks in the summer, she went with them to their house on the coast of Maine.
"Not a difficult thing to do!" she declares melodiously, recounting her good fortune. She was, however, predisposed to dislike her employer's "baby brother" -- an actor from New York -- when he showed up for a visit at the end of the season. "I decided that he must be very pompous, and when I met him I thought: Yes. He is really pompous." Still, she agreed to have a drink with him, and decided, before the night was done, that he wasn't so bad after all. Slightly more than a year later, her employer became her sister-in-law.
In January 1994, in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Nicolette Nicola married David Andrew Macdonald (Edmund, Guiding Light) in the midst of a heavy snowstorm. It was a fitting backdrop for this daring imaginative bride, who wore an Elizabethan gown of white crushed velvet and carried, instead of a bouquet, a little white muff, adorned only with some greenery. In her hair she wore a simple, circular band, with one satin ribbon flowing from either side. "I love winter," she says enthusiastically. "I didn't want to wear one of those summery little dresses, and I didn't want a traditional flower thing. I had one attendant who carried a mix of berry and pine, and wore hunter green velvet. It was right after Christmas, and all the white lights were still on the green trees in the church. It was beautiful."
Nicola is a poet. For her, it's not just a gift that transfigures the events of her life or feeds her soul; it's something she does every day -- or tried to. "Poetry is what I always wanted to do," she says. "I started writing when I was probably 10 or 11, and kept journals of it." She loved both reading and writing, which was, she concluded, "reason enough to be an English major." Thinking she might ultimately teach, Nicola attended West Minster College in New Wilmington, Pa., for her bachelor's, and later obtained a master's at Bennington College in Vermont. "There was a professor at Westminster who was a poet, and he was always sending out work. I didn't know anybody could do that. I was like, 'You can send things out? People will publish this?' You don't make any money at it, but who cares?" He also told her about Poet Lore in Bethesda, Md., the oldest continuously published literary magazine in the country. "I called them up and said, 'Could you use an editorial assistant?'"; she remembers, "and they said, 'Yes, but you'll only make a small stipend.'"
Academia momentarily behind her, the young woman followed her heart to Bethesda and looked for a second job to pay the bills. "I don't know what made me think of nannying, but I needed room and board, so I called an organization called White House Nannies, and took this job with a family of five. The parents were both lawyers, and I liked them immediately. It was an incredible experience, because I met a lot of people in the poetry community in Washington. Then a lot of people at Bennington were from the New York area, so that gave me a circle in the city."
It is apparently a wider circle than one might guess. "New York has a huge poetry community,"; Nicola says. "There's stuff happening all the time. There are some readings of other people's works, but for the most part you go and read your own. A lot of poets don't read their works very well, and David says nobody but an actor should be reading it. But I'd rather read my own than have somebody else do it, and I don't think I'm as bad as a lot of people." It can be argued, in fact, that all poetry should be read aloud. "If you look back in time to its roots, poetry is basically meant to be told. 'This is a tale I'm going to tell you, and I'm going to tell it in rhyme, because that way you'll remember it.'"
And despite the pandemic seduction of the Internet, there is also, she argues, a kind of tactile imperative that she hopes will guarantee the survival of books. "One thing about being a poet in an electronic age is that you can go on the Web and find literary magazines, or even get your poems published. But I think there will always be a need for people to buy books, because there's something about holding a book in your hand. People love books. They won't want to download it. What are they going to do with all that paper?"
The nettlesome questions, of course, is how do poets survive in a world reluctant to reward their efforts financially, or nurture that creative focus from which their poems spring? Nicola has tackled the first aspect by working four days at a consumer watchdog commission where she is in charge of publications -- the most artistic slot there. Shifting gears from her day job and tuning out distractions is more difficult. "That's very hard," she concedes. "I still haven't mastered that. I'll come home and it's, 'What shall we eat for dinner?' And then it's 'Let's watch CNN for a while.' There will be the lost hours. It helps to have an understanding spouse, which I do. Usually, I can start to write, but sometimes it doesn't happen until very late, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all." She frequently gives herself exercises, like writing a poem about mundane things, such as cooking or shopping. "It's amazing what that can do. I remember thinking: I can't do that. That's not what it's all about. It has to come to me. But then I realized the more successful writers are those who make it part of their everyday lives. If you wait for the muse to speak, she may never come."
Nicola had her first paid publication just a few months ago. "They paid me $10 a page," she says, laughing happily, "and it was a two-page poem."