Category: Poetry

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Poem I Loved This Month: September 2019

The poem I’ve loved this month is “I Cannot Say I Did Not” by Sharon Olds. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I usually feature a few poems. This month, just this one. This is the one poem I’ve really loved this month. The essay that follows examines it alongside a little bit of early motherhood.

After writing my birth story, I welled with tears. I kept writing—past the sight of him, past Jon singing him his first song out here, past the extended hospital stay and coming home and debating whether to open ice cream, even past pronouncements and Unabomber ramblings on love and meaning. I didn’t want it to end. Already, the push-pull of grief and joy at him growing, learning. My life, for me, feels perfect—and some grief in the realization that this overwhelming happiness, this cheery monotony, is temporary—in the same way that used to bring me relief (“This is temporary. This is only temporary.”).

Every day is full. Just finishing what I once considered basic tasks—going to the grocery, drinking a cup of coffee (hardly ever warm by the time I finish it), reading a short chapter—feel like monumental achievements. My son is healthy and beautiful. My husband is beautiful and kind. Our yard is unmowed. My hair is undone. I saw two groundhogs in my neighbor’s yard, and one of them (at least) spends his nights burrowing underneath our porch. Laundry multiplies like rabbits. Time disappears like quarters into a jukebox—six in a go. I must remind myself to eat; otherwise I forget until late in the day, at some inconvenient hour, holding a baby and calming a dog. I spend free minutes at my desk, writing. Writing what? The disappointment, I realize, eyes welling over my notebook, eventually just drawing a heart at the end of the story like a middle-schooler in love, is that I cannot put into language how glorious it all is. I can’t even remember it all now, much less get it all down. (Cue Emily in Our Town.) How the means themselves are the ends, how all of this was here before it was here and is gone even now. If I risk sounding precious, it’s because … I feel it all preciously. But my lack of language, or my lack of skill at employing it, will cost me the bulk of my memory of this time. Like how even in photos Wendell almost never looks quite Wendell. I don’t know that at the page I’ve ever felt like I had so many things to say and so little ability, so few words—mostly redundant—to say them.

But then a friend* posted this poem: “I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with.”

“I Cannot Say I Did Not” by Sharon Olds proves to me someone somewhere begins to have the language, a language generous and sparse enough.

This morning, Wendell was still sleeping—Jon had gotten him to go back to sleep, I lay there smiling into the dark like I imagine murderers do right before a kill—watching all I couldn’t see but knew was there around me: the dog whistling after a rodent in her sleep; Jon passed out, soon to be dazed and glaring into the glow of his phone for the time, deciding whether to bike or drive, Wendell heaving out little breaths, still (God willing) a “long portion” left. I was so content at all of this—and at the possibility of sleep—I lay there wakeful, breasts pained, overfull with milk, waiting for the day to meet me.

The line breaks in life, not “needing to be drained” but simply “needing to be (line break) drained.” Enjambment like a door jamb, one that dictates how quietly, how secretly, one can enter or exit a room, whether I’ll wake the baby. This door jamb isn’t square—light slips in, that little emphasis on “needing to be.”

This day I felt like even the sun, the day, was waiting on me to have this moment. (In point of fact, it’s fall, and the sun’s just coming up later every day.)

And then Wendell, not just my baby orbiting out from me further and further into personhood, but a wanting lodged within me forever—like a bullet left in the soldier, it wounds and protects. This sense that, no, none of us is a singular human; we’re all the detritus of ourselves—our outgrown clothes and fingernail clippings and abandoned summer gardens and diapers that have never biodegraded—and our forebears and all the things we may be—our future interests, our child in a bassinet in the dark, our dog on a walk darting at bicyclists while we avoid eye contact and apologize. And yes, the more sinister and slipperier histories and mistakes—a father’s “desire / for his orgasms and for [a] mother’s money.” We are the disappointments of who we can never be—“my mother’s longing for a son” and proof of injustices big or small—“patriarchy” but also a life of handmedowns. “Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my / children, to exist, and with the love of their children.”

Anaphora feels right: I asked, I asked, I asked. A literary device that can feel, to me, cheap—easy to sound right or deep or true, but be false, a way to get into a draft, scaffolding. I’m always suspicious of it when I’m reading. (Is the author trying to emotionally manipulate me? Is this adding an unearned, heightened drama?) But motherhood, repetitive, and childhood becomes a series of endless questions we learn to vocalize or enact until, as adults, we repeat them—often halfheartedly or less hopefully, in arguments or breakups or narrated over drinks or to therapists or priests. Sometimes I’ve become so cynical I’ve shoved the questions aside as kid’s stuff. I think a lot of us do that. Somewhere between toughening or sucking it up. But as Wislawa Szymborska says, “The most pressing questions are naïve ones.” Not Rilke’s “loving the questions” that’s quoted so much as a way of getting good with uncertainty, but love as the questions; love is the question—“what we ask with”—the articulation of asking to be.

And where the sentences don’t begin with “I asked” we get that turn (which she underscores by breaking a line on the word “turn”):

The repetition cut with something new is like the record scratch of the poem, right in the middle of the song, right when you’re getting in your groove as a reader. The first is an underscoring: “Before I existed, I asked …,” almost like a little improvisation to keep the melody interesting, though it does call attention to how serious the whole business is—this asking. Then the asking about the asking, essentially: “Did I ask with life or did I ask with death?” With breath or with the ground that will swallow me? Both? Then a return to the refrain: “I asked, with everything I did not have, to be born.” It’s the last time, and the rest of the poem drops it for the grand finale: which is abstract, rather than concrete, like the rest of the poem: “And nowhere in any /of it was there meaning, there was only the asking / for being, and then the being, the turn / taken. I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with.”

Lots of poems end in epiphany, a form so tried and true, it’s cliched, it’s expected. But Olds earns it. The means of her poem justify its end. (Puns always intended, thank you.)

And now I think, this morning, awake when I should’ve been sleeping, I was asking. I was asking with this moment, “with everything I did not / have, to be born.” And maybe, Wendell, unknowingly, out like a light, in this moment, was, too, through me. And today, poems didn’t seem more stupid than anything else. Still, I can’t say something like, “Poetry saved my life.” Life saved my life. Poetry deepens it. It’s been one of my ways of asking.

I’m so thankful today, dark again, for all the asking.

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*That friend is the poet Jessica Farquhar. Check her out.

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Poems I’ve Loved: August 2019

Before I went into labor, I thought this was going to be about reading Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson and flipping through a book on Dickinson’s garden. In her book, Howe does a close reading of one poem ([“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”]) for most of the book. In college, I had a professor ask us to memorize poems by heart. I wonder now about this saying. The copyeditor in me wants to query “By heart? Consider changing to ‘Memorize poems’ for brevity.”

But isn’t that “by heart” central to what a poem can do for us if we have it ingrained?

For Howe, Dickinson’s poem (which I’d assume she has in her heart) is a faceted gemstone with which she can reflect, refract, and color American history and literature, which are dear to her.

Here are some poems I’ve learned by heart:
“[Wild nights – Wild nights]” Emily Dickinson
“Cowboy Up” Charles Wright
“Miss Blues’ Child” Langston Hughes
“God’s Grandeur” Gerard Manley Hopkins
“The Trees” Philip Larkin
“How It Is” Maxine Kumin

They have been dear to me, some before I really took their meaning.

Going into labor, I wanted something that would calm me and give me strength, so I chose to repeat in my head when necessary the 23rd Psalm, changing the tenses as I saw fit. This poem is one I’ve had rattling around in my head since childhood, and it was easy enough to dust off before heading to the hospital, and language was much more desirable to focus on than pain or back labor or “I’m going to leave with a new person I am responsible for for at least 18 years if I’m lucky.” Instead, enter this Psalm balm: “Surely goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life.” A pretty way of telling myself, “It will be okay; it already is okay.” This ancient poem helped me through most of my labor, including the 7-ish hours I couldn’t sit or lie down. (Birth is metal AF, y’all.)

The poems in my heart help me through.

But these in-heart poems have a practical side, too. Since Kiddo’s been born, audio books have been easier to get through than physical ones. I can move around and not need my hands to turn pages, and if I’m honest, I can space out a little, too. And so, rather than filling my fall with books of poetry, I’d like to work on committing a few more poems to heart. Anyone with me?

Which poems do you know by heart already?

Would love to have a few of you to memorize poems with. Let me know if that’s of interest. (As fall comes on, I’m feeling Frost-y and it would be great to know what poems you all are committing to as the days go by and get shorter.)

Let me know in the comments below, or email me at Lindsey@LDAlexander.com.

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Poems I’ve Loved: May 2019

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
—Faulkner, Light in August

Isnt there something jean valentine.PNG
“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine, from her collection Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press.

“Isn’t there something” by Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is a poet whose work I came to (and who I had the good fortune of meeting) in grad school; but I was younger then, and silence outside my own bothered me more. As I age, I’m finding I’m more comfortable with less said, and though I sometimes lean toward (or on) her more traditional (narrative, explicable, punctuated) poems, I’ve come to love her work. It’s an earned love, entered into with mutual respect and trust over time; to leave so much to the imagination, so much possibility, for the reader, so much space for our subconsciouses to fill in and potentially drown her sharp-quiet thoughts on the page, is certainly an act of respect and trust.

But this isn’t to say these poems are without a dramatic pulse. To the contrary. In a world of jeering, a whisper can be twice as terrifying as a scream, and there is much more in less but an honest-less than in confident hyperbole.

This poem is a little bit more “accessible” than the typical Valentine, even in Shirt in Heaven, a book about memory and grief, and how we never really leave either, but maybe it’s because there’s a comfort in the company.

This elegy doesn’t reveal itself as an elegy until the last stanza. Before, it’s about mis-belonging, about trying to figure out or locate the parts of the self (the parts “like dogs,” “like trains leaving,” “like a gun”). What is a self, a person, made of? And if we’re made of all these parts that only appear at night, or that leave, or that threaten or protect (or both), all these parts that change, how do we keep a hold on ourselves? How do we keep it together?

This poem begins with questions, maybe rhetorical, maybe wanting affirmation from this person who, we later learn, has died. “Am I this? Am I that? Aren’t I like this and this and part that?” The speaker using “Isn’t” instead of “Is” makes for leading questions; a belief that there is indeed something in her like a gun. (It’s the difference between someone asking you “Do you think it’s rude to …?” and “Don’t you think it’s rude to … ?” The “not” implies that the person asking expects you to agree.)

At any rate, the speaker’s sure what kind of person she wants to be but isn’t: the loud squirrel that begs at the porch. And I wonder, what is it about that squirrel’s existence that’s desirable? That its desire is so out-in-the-open?

And here, where she might lose me (and also maybe because I tire of repeated words joined by an ampersand, which seems a little Literary for me), she does the oddest, most beautiful thing. It’s not just us creatures (the speaker, the dogs, the squirrel, bees) who want something (wanting having a double meaning of desiring and lacking); even the inanimate objects might: “wooden planks, / wanting something.” But what could wooden planks want? “To go back into / a tree?”

These two lines contain all the magical thinking of a great grief or great children’s book–a depth and humor and achy longing that have kept me renewing this book to re-read this poem. Here is where the speaker reveals herself and the poem turns: It’s about wanting to return to a place and time that are gone, about being without a path back.

Except in art, where we can hold on, keep the dead living. In this way, the poem is an ars poetica (a poem about poetry), which I usually despise, because they’re often highfalutin and either don’t make much sense to me or, conversely, they oversimplistically overstate how poetry changes the world. Yet, I like Valentine’s message here because it isn’t so hopeful as resurrection. It’s sad, like being the last customer to leave the bar is sad, like waiting for a phone call is sad; an unwillingness to say goodbye. But every miracle is part sad. And yes, this is miraculous, too, that there’s a place available to meet our dead, to grow our planks back into trees that the hungry dogs of us can look to or lie under.

“Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats^

This one’s also a poem about memory saves us or about how the false stories we tell ourselves about future possibility save us from the “pavements grey.” I’ve been reading it often to my belly button/kiddo in utero, in hopes they’ll like it when they move out (of my uterus). It feels good to read out loud, especially the part about “the bee-loud glade.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite songs, “Tall Pines,” a bluegrass tune about the memory of home, leaving it, and returning to die, which also is bucolic and recalls the sound of bees, almost as though written from the perspective of Yeats’ speaker if he did return as an older man: “I’ll never forget the morning I left / The hum of the bees in the hay: / The farther I walked, the louder they talked— / How silent it seems here today.” The bee sounds aren’t there; the trees are taller; there’s a gravestone meant for the singer.

Valentine and Yeats don’t attempt what the bluegrass musicians do, or not quite as fully. They aren’t ready for death themselves, despite what they might imply; or ready or not, they go on living. They don’t return to their Lake Isles; they can’t return to their person yet except for in poetry, the writing of which is an embrace of life. (In something as musical as “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the repetition of the poem aloud does this, underscores its vivacity.)

Yeats doesn’t attempt to force the plank into tree; rather, he remains on the pavement, the musicality what allows the memory to dwell so that he can “hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Still, the poet behind the speaker hints to us that this place isn’t real, or isn’t real in the way memory or hope presents it: at noon, the sky is purple, for instance.

Valentine is more outwardly self-aware, she knows she’s clinging, but in her acknowledgement of clinging of distance, isn’t she closer to obtaining the object of her affection, this lost person, through that person’s own words?

Yeats’ speaker embraces memory (and its sister nostalgia) without questioning its illogic; Valentine’s embraces memory despite its illogic, as a means to an end.

And what is it about loss and bees?* Isn’t there something?

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^Hear Yeats read it himself here. (And you can listen to scholars talk about the poem, and “kill it” to understand it, which, sigh, scholarship.)

*Coincidental: Plath wanted her bee poems to be the last in Ariel, though they’re realer (less bucolic) than the bees of the others here; her hives having swarms and stings, unlike Yeats’.

 

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Poems I’ve Loved: November 2018

A photo of a suspended wooden bridge with fall foliage and a blue sky.
This bridge at Talullah Falls during November in north Georgia is decidedly unseasonable for the two poems that kept me company this month while I was staying in this area.

The Trees
by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
Their recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

What do I love about this poem?

First, its brevity. 12 concise lines that manage to speak about mortality, the speaker’s relationship to nature, and some ineffable sadness—the realization that emotions aren’t forever, but they never quite leave you either. “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.”

Second, its musicality. I dare you to read this poem out loud. (Go on.)

Yes, there’s the rhyming, but in many ways that’s the least interesting formal constraint. (I had many people on my book tour ask me what makes something a poem if it doesn’t rhyme, and I wasn’t able to quote my friend Katie who said something like “No one knows what a poem is.”) There’s a move from a quietness, a softness that matches the slow ponderous observation of a Sad Poet, of a person in grief in springtime. That first stanza, the verbs are “to be” verbs—which just point out existence—and “relax and spread.” There’s an ease in this grief. It’s lush, it’s “greenness.”

Then the musicality kind of breaks itself with a rhetorical question, a questioning of the initial premise, the person wondering if they’re projecting, why it is this scene brings out grief rather than feelings of rebirth. The pace is off, the stresses aren’t what they once were. When you read it out loud, it doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, that question. It requires pause. It clunks. That’s when they return to that initial pace, almost sing-songily: “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.” (Iambic tetrameter or something close for those of you playing at home.)

In the final stanza, the rhythm maintains itself, one can hurry through the ending except the words are a mouthful, tongue twisters, their sounds hard to put together: “unresting castles thresh,” the words brush against and lean on one another, beautiful, but almost brusque “fullgrown thickness.” The final repetition of “sh” sounds (“afresh, afresh, afresh”), a quieting, but loud, isn’t it? It’s a sound nature makes a lot, but it feels like not quite what it means. The sound itself, repeated in the first and fourth lines of that last stanza, introduces a kind of tension between what’s being said—”Begin again”—and how it’s being said—statically, overemphatically (not once but thrice!)—all that repetition; and of course, they only “seem” to say it.

Finally, I love this poem because of its adverbs. I have met so many writing teachers who tell their students in a blanket statement not to use adverbs instead of taking the time to show them how to use them well. (I suspect sometimes it is because the writing teachers don’t know.) The adverb I love here is “almost.”

How are the trees coming into leaf? Not like something someone’s said. They don’t announce themselves. It’s “like something almost being said.” A hesitancy there, an unspoken something, they’re holding back despite being on display.

This is the movement of this poem, too, isn’t it? The poem almost says what it’s about, but never quite circles it. What or who is the speaker grieving? He tells us what he isn’t grieving (that trees appear young as we grow old), but he keeps the true subject of the poem private. He writes a poem, displaying his feeling, yet still plays it close to the vest. This “greenness is a kind of grief.”

“To a Mouse” (read the full poem here)
by Robert Burns

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
          On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
          I guess an’ fear!

And this poem, in its Scottish dialect and ridiculous premise (having a good talk with a mouse). What is it about this poem I love?

First, it makes me laugh that Burns let us know before Oprah it’s best to stay in our lanes, even mice. But besides that. (I think this may actually be about not being alone, but let me have it my way. Please.)

Second, it is a fun poem to learn to read aloud. (If you’re Scottish, maybe you don’t have to teach yourself. Do you? It seems at least a bit performative, and of course, probably somewhat oldey-timey.) I would love to memorize this poem. Reading it out loud also helps if you’re having issues understanding the way the language is written.

What I maybe love best about this poem is that it code-switches. Burns plays dumb like a fox; this speaker is just a country bumpkin who’s accidentally torn up a mouse habitat with his plough, and is so bumpkin-like he decides he’s going to have a heart-to-heart with the mouse. Nothing to see here! No sleight of hand! No tricksy intellectual arguments! Bless his heart.

And he does. But the diction, and thus the register, shifts, in the second stanza to make a political statement. In highfalutin abstract language I might add: “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union …” Then he slips right back into his “natural” dialect (“thy wee-bit housie”!), forging ahead with the conceit and his argument. Really, this is a rhetorical poem, a political poem. While it can be read as a poem of environmentalism, man’s changing relationship to nature, it can also be (and often has been) read as a poem about eviction, what those in power do to those without. Here, Burns’ speaker shows such empathy (though the habitat is already destroyed, the mouse “turn’d out”). The mouse becomes a symbol for the farmer to think about how much he worries about his futures, that his fortune might be no better than the mouse’s. The conceit—talking to a mouse for a long time—is silly; the premise is dark. He’s able to sneak in the political, to get dark, because of the silliness, and the repetitive rhythm and rhyme of the Burns stanza. (Yup, dude has his own stanza.)

And in probably the most human move of all, after spending 7 stanzas empathizing with the mouse and worrying over it, Burns’ speaker lets the mouse know it has it better than him, though. Why? Because the mouse’s present is stressful, but it doesn’t have to, nor can it, worry about the future. Burns, a human, can and does. Despite the “best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” being about worthless, he can “guess an’ fear!”

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Poems I’ve Loved: June 2018

Waterfall and pool, trances of the blast

I’ve read quite a few great poems in the past several months, but my favorite, the one that stuck to my ribs, is an oldie: “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Read it, then come back here so we can discuss.)

I don’t think I’d ever read this poem, despite taking several classes that assigned Coleridge’s poetry in undergrad. To be honest, most of what I remember about Coleridge is that he took drugs (true?) and wrote Kubla Khan but came out of his stupor before he was able to see it through, he was William Wordsworth’s cool friend, an aphorism about words in their best order, and “the star-dogged Moon” and symbolism from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“Frost at Midnight,” less fantastical, more domestic, is much more interesting to me now, as someone steeped much more in homelife than fantasy. This is a parenting poem, a poem that does that thing parents want and progeny dread: hoping children will live the life they were unable to. It’s a poem written from inside, by a fire, with a baby sleeping. If autobiographical, then, a stolen poem: up with the baby, Coleridge writes. It’s also a poem of the natural world, and for its time, the suburban world. The speaker laments growing up in the city and insists his child “shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds … .” This is a 19th-century version a new or non-parent’s “My child won’t sit in front of a screen all day.”

Enter anxiety. The only thing stirring is a flame: “‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness.”

My reading is colored by how the poem came to me—through Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a memoir about the first year or so of motherhood. In it, she admits to having always loved the poem but never having noticed the baby in it. (This is a testament to the ways musical language, rhythm and rhyme, can hide meaning without a closer look. See: every pop song you sing along to until one day you realize the lyrics are awful.) After becoming a parent, she did see it. Here is some of what she has to say:

It is a poem about sitting still, about the way children act as anchors on the body and eventually the mind. … These memories arouse in [the speaker] the profoundest feelings of love for his child, as if every separation he has endured in his life can be mended by this moment of their closeness. … This love is a restitution; it is like a new place, from which the old country, the unhappy past, can safely be viewed. … Coleridge does not mention nappies, noise, bits of old food. I don’t think this is just because it’s the night shift. His poem is written in the present tense; it describes a moment, surrounded, by implication, by other moments, by noise and disarray. Perhaps moments, now, are all there is. But this is a moment to which he brings his gift, which is language, a moment in which his love finds a voice. … In this moment he experiences an elemental greatness.

As her reader, the baby is the first thing I saw, it’s where she pointed me.

Oh, but the second thing. The second thing pleases me to no end. Here it goes.

One of my favorite living poets is Mary Ruefle. A recent book of hers is Trances of the Blast. Reading the book in 2013, I kept wondering at that title.

“Trances of the blast.” Which, what does that even mean? I disliked the title but wanted not to dislike it, to know what was there.

I looked up trances, and it meant only what I thought it did: a state of being entranced, sleep-like, hypnotized. “Sleep-like states of the blast.” I know being literal doesn’t always help, but sometimes it does.

Could it mean what resounds?

Then here, 5 years after reading the Ruefle book, I came across this poem somewhere else, totally by accident, and for hours one afternoon I remained in a pleasant trance of the blast. There was the phrase in its original context, and I’m not quite sure I understand the image fully, but it was literal.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Whether those eave-drops that have collected fall and last as long as the trances of the blast—perhaps the ripples in a puddle, perhaps the silence after the blast of a drop hitting the ground and splitting or whether they coalesce with coldness by the hand of that “secret ministry of frost” who could “… hang them up in silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”

(“Quietly shining to the quiet Moon” may be one of my favorite lines in the English language. To me, Coleridge is a poet of great moons.)

The blast is maybe what happens if the eave-drops (here, actual droplets from the eave of a building) hit the puddle or the ground below. To call a single drop hitting the ground a “blast” must speak to how quiet the night must feel to this speaker, or how sensitive the speaker is, how attuned. The trance though—is it the aftermath?  The quiet after the boom? That “reflection in tranquility” business his friend Wordsworth prattled on about? In that case, this drop is a literal “spontaneous overflow.” Each poem a trance in the after-blast of a reading life or some other event? Or is it the trancelike state the speaker would be in, staring at it, all night up with the baby, unless of course, that “secret ministry of frost” uses its coldness to freeze it.

And it’s fun to think of added modern meanings: blast in all its strength, sure, but also as in an email blast. (Actually, the trancelike state after receiving email blasts makes a lot of sense.) Or better yet, having a blast, the trance we’re drawn into having fun. To blast to destroy, as with dynamite and the catatonic state that might surround it. But I’m most drawn to the sonic meaning, most likely because of a talk Ruefle gave on tone earlier this year. She talked mostly about bells, yes, bells (hell’s bells, to get specific). She quoted Basho: “Coolness / the sound of a bell / leaving the bell.” Trances of the blast.

And of course, the blast of Coleridge’s work, of the Romantics, and the trances we’ve found ourselves in since, especially as poets. Maybe it is that Ruefle’s trance is one of awe and absorption. Maybe that word, part of trance’s definition, a state of absorption is it—having fallen from the roof, a drop blasts on the ground and is ultimately absorbed.

Then the third thing, much less domestic, back to that wild world Coleridge so often seemed more entranced and absorbed by: the sublime, the otherworldly, grandiose nature. (Okay, I do remember some stuff about Coleridge.)

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind*, Suzuki Roshi offered the metaphor of a waterfall—much more dramatic than a drop or two from an eave, but, I think, related. He said that visiting Yosemite he saw a massive waterfall, and it caused him to think about how as the river the water is one whole. As it falls, it separates into groups, drops, and spray—when it is separate, set apart, we notice it, it causes feelings and appears (and even feels) different. The waterfall, he argues, is akin to individual lives. “It takes time, you know, a long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. … Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. … Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing.” Eventually, the waterfall joins the river below, no longer separate entities, in many ways the same as it just was but now indistinguishable, less intense, less alone, a trance of a blast.

In Ruefle’s book, from the poem “Saga”:

Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging—crushed
and sparkling—in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.

My final thought for now: Such joy in not understanding a thing then receiving a little understanding sideways, years later, even if incomplete (especially, maybe, then).  The initial impact, the release, the return: to more trances of the blast. (You know I couldn’t resist.)

What is a thing you read and didn’t understand, then came to understand newly a lot later? Let me know in the comments below.

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*Which I just recently learned about and have yet to read. I heard this waterfall anecdote on a podcast, driving, at a time when it was helpful to me.

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Ancestors and Self-Acceptance, Honor and Joy

Forested mountains

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.

—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.

—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou

Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (in this excellent episode of On Being)

Forested mountains

The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.

But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.

Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)

You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”

The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.

A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).

But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.

In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.

They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.

I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.

Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.

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I Prefer My Poets Dead: Why ‘Making It New,’ or Anything New, Is So Dang Hard

The movie you watch in English class when you have a sub is not called ‘Living Poets Society.’

Virginia Woolf on why we prefer our poets dead:

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

—A Room of One’s Own, p. 14

Stan, from Mad Men:

Everything good I have is from a long time ago.

When an earnest thread on Facebook emerged asking for good work by contemporary poets, I responded by paraphrasing the Woolf quote above. When the friend who started it asked me for recommendations, I came up with a list of favorites and highlighted what might be a best fit, only to have A Random Dude respond that Bob Dylan and Tom Waits were better than any contemporary “self-identified” poets. (Please insert eyeroll here and also a note that I am pretty sure Bob Dylan would lose it if he could no longer walk out to the “Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll” introduction you know he approved.) This annoyed me, but also gave me a good laugh, because clearly Random Dude, according to Woolf, who has earned more of my trust, might say he just longs for how Dylan and Waits were able to make him feel a long time ago.

With respect to Dylan and Waits, many of us can only keep our dead poets alive in our hearts. It’s what brings us such magical imaginings as Mary Ruefle’s “My Emily Dickinson.” It’s why some poets (asininely) opine about dying young, like Keats, or part of why Plath skyrocketed to fame quicker than some of her contemporaries. (Dead longer.) And it’s why those of us poets who still count ourselves among the living are awful cagey about the subject. “We’re working here!”: a rough translation of so many Twitter posts and essays on the non-death of poetry. The dead poets are rich compost people can use to make their daily lives flower and give fruit; us living sods’ works are the pile of eggshells, mown grass, and aromatic vegetables left in the back of the fridge too long, waiting to help. One’s a tool; one’s an eyesore that will someday be a tool. (And if you love Dylan, which, ugh, I do, you’ll know his “folk process” often involves churning up the words of obscure dead poets in his own lyrics, only to be called a poet while he’s living.)

Maybe it’s unfair that readers ask death of us to consider our poems as ones that have “passed the test of time.” But so it is. It’s nice to be a martyr.

As a modern (lowercase m) poet myself, I can even feel this way about my own work. Longing for old writing styles of when I felt or perceived differently—almost as if by another person. Often, poets at readings will say something like, “Many poets will tell you their new work is their favorite; I am no exception.” I guess I am an exception. Which I’m recognizing especially now as I begin work that is not for my debut collection, Rodeo in Reverse. I’m suspicious of new work; sure, loveable maybe, the sounds it makes especially, but I long to do work as good as my old work—and sometimes worry I won’t.

Yes, I worry I peaked at 17 when I wrote a sexy villanelle about hooking up in a car that inverted lines about volume, wheel, up, down; the lines were short—two or three words apiece maybe? My teacher, a favorite, not an effusive praiser, read it out loud to the junior class, which made me elated—my poem was good and maybe the junior class would not think I was a virgin. To me, it’d felt important not to seem like a virgin but also to try and be one then.

Been chasing the ghost of that poem, which is lost to floppy disk and trash heap, for years since.

And if nostalgic for my own past work, one might imagine the case for others’.

Maybe 5 years ago I read an essay on the internet that argued every book you read before age 25 affects you more deeply than those that come after. This is an unfortunate view. I’m not far enough out from 25 to a- or disa-gree, but I wonder how many people are able to read many books after age 25, by which time career and family and responsibilities are likely to be settling in.

I count myself among the lucky few and look at each blank page, each new title askance—in suspicion and flirtation. Who knows? This might be the one I’m looking for. If not, it still does its work in the compost pile.

Besides, dead poets have everything going for them but life, which is a great advantage. Whatever you make today will be old in no time.

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Poems I’ve Loved: January 2018

“After You Left” by Jean Yoon.

I died at the peak of my stardom

I slipped into a pleat in the wheat field

I considered shopping, then surgery

I wept into your turkey jerky silhouette

I married myself begrudgingly

This short poem in jubilat‘s most recent issue struck me for its sparsity and humor, which feels true to heartache and longing, at least to me. “(After you left,) I died at the peak of my stardom” has got to be one of the best break-up lines of all time, in pop music, poetry, or otherwise. But humor isn’t all of it, there’s more mystery here—how, in a world barely 3-D, someone can slip into a pleat in a wheat field, almost like a paper pocket on a collage or the back of a journal, disappeared yes, and also safekept. The beloved’s location is known, though the beloved herself is invisible. It’s “the” wheat field. Their silhouette, like Christ seared into toast, materializes in jerky. Meanwhile, the speaker is the subject; the beloved is only a clause. She dies, slips, considers, weeps, and marries—a kind of afterlife. She puts herself at the first of each line, each sentence. But the beloved is locked in a clause that becomes refrain, implied before every action the speaker takes. The beloved’s absence still comes before. That seems only right.

“Fat F*ck” by Diamond Forde.

what is a pig
if not unclean?          If not the ungodly

gristle buttering your teeth?

I got to see Diamond Forde deliver this poem as part of an audience at the Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series in Knoxville, and it killed. Her body of work was excellent, and luckily this one’s available online at The Offing.

This poem balances on the head of a pin the sexually explicit and violent language used against fat women in our culture. The “you” in the poem, someone who has deployed this abusive language is as distant as a street harasser, as intimate as a lover. The speaker chooses intimacy, the poet chooses to connect. At every harsh word, the speaker opens and blooms, like a wound.

The speaker moves the language and the action from her own onto the “you.” At first, funny, coarse, sensual:

I could reach into your fridge, tongue
the Hӓagen Dazs, stuff its lengthy
pint into my ever-eager mouth—
that’s the kind of sick bitch I am.

By the end, still sensual, the humor turned into a gyre of cleverness that spins out this stunner: “Tell me my belt wraps the world’s waist // then beat me with it.” Read the whole poem here.

“Discovery” by Wislawa Szymborska.

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the years of wasted work.
I believe in the secrets taken to the grave.

This is not a poem I “found” this month, but instead one that’s been recurring to me over the past year. Many Americans are choosing how to engage, but how to disengage, to opt out, could be equally powerful if invisible. The biggest sacrifices may be those we never see. I love this Szymborska narrative poem about a scientist who works meticulously to delete every trace of a discovery. It begins: “I believe in the great discovery. / I believe in the man who will make the discovery. / I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery.” Read it.

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Poems I’ve Loved: December 2017

It’s the end of a year and fittingly and by happenstance, I loved (short,) end-stopped poems this month.

“[Remarkable the litter of birds]” by Emily Skaja

From the start I was told I was a powerful speaker I was told when & how I should speak
It’s true I made a feast of my own misery after all I was 29
I’d had a narrow escape from becoming Julian of Norwich

This poem transmutes again and again, but bookending in flight—the deathly flight of the city birds at the beginning, the bees stopped mid-pollination to be consumed—and disappearing acts—the “special crew” of people who sweep away evidence of violence, of failure, the beautification. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing acts over the last year, mainly women’s (which is touched on in this poem—the speaker asking “Is it antifeminist to starve myself over a boy?”); but this erasure of violence, male or natural or bureaucratic—the assistance in disappearing, the poem dawned that on me. Yes, dawned with a direct object.

The constant in the poem is the form, its stability and confidence, even with the punctuation erased. The lack of punctuation and longer lines is in tension with how the entire poem is end-stopped, which adds authority; it allows the pace to build, release, build, release, each line break a gasp for breath between punches. I love a poem about uncertainty and anxiety written with authority.

Meanwhile, the poet is doing something spectacular with tone: the outlook is bleak, it’s pretty much Handmaid’s Tale, yet, she inserts flowers, she has perspective and humor: understanding the reality of falling apart around 30 and how young 30 is and therefore how hilarious, in retrospect. (It makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend about someone so young he didn’t even realize he was young. That.) She does this swiftly–in the three lines above, saving her former self from the threat of Julian of Norwichdom (a state of being a highly literate writer nun). The poem confesses how writers “feast” on their miseries.

The speaker offers a sort-of epithalamium to marriages who watch her with bees in her mouth. The violence still happens, the hurt still happens, but it’s pretty. I wonder about this in a poem about the coexistence of love and violence; I wonder if maybe the only way people who are brutalized can control violence is through beautification or acknowledgement, sweeping the streets or opening a mouth full of a bees. Can one read a contemporary poem with bees in it and not think of Plath? Inserting that ghost into a poem and the poem still standing on its own is a miracle and a testament to the work its writer has done. Praise be for this one.

Read it in its entirety (it’s short) here, and start the New Year wondering whether you’d live your life over.

“Spell Against Gods” by Patrick Phillips

Let them be vain.
Let them be jealous.

Let them, on their own earth,
await their own heaven.

…
And when they call out
in prayers, in the terrible dark,

let us be present, and watching,
and silent as stars.

If you read my last post, you know how I came to Phillips’ poetry. But it’s not the poem that was most affecting that was my favorite this month. Instead, it’s another, more lyric poem from his same collection Elegy for a Broken Machine.

This near-litany shows the power of anaphora when used sparingly, when inverted. “Let them” repeats itself throughout the poem, syntax shifts to enhance its musicality, so the rhythm exists but isn’t tiresome. Like a bass guitar, it always comes in on time, heavy, but sparingly. “Let them” puts the stank on this poem. (Apologies to this poem.) I’m trying to learn to love anaphora again because I learned over the last decade of my life not to trust it: Its musicality can hide nonsense, unoriginal conceits, all number of ills. Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean its good. But in poetry, in my opinion, if it doesn’t sound good, it ain’t good either. “Spell Against Gods” meets the mark.

The conceit isn’t totally original: “What if gods had to deal with being human and we got to play god?” The gods in this poem are watching us passively like a TV, and so maybe they deserve our cruelty. The word “let” is a passive one, but of course, sometimes it’s the thoughtlessness, the casual cruelties, that cause the most pain.

I love what this poem does to stars, too. Often an image used as a sentimental symbol, “Spell Against Gods” is disgusted with them, how they stare down at us, with their heavens hunkered there, not helping. The description given is not what the stars are but an absence of what they could be, a profound disappointment: they don’t speak. A human might want to disappoint as the stars do, glinting like the tips of faraway knives.

Read the whole poem here.

“Too Anxious for Rivers” by Robert Frost

The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing-to-Question-What-Doesn’t-Concern-Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease to be somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.

Grateful to Mario Chard for sharing this poem on Facebook. To be honest, I have not thought about why I love this poem at all. I just do, and plan on memorizing it in the New Year. Hope you’re 2017 “’twas the effort, the essay of love.”

Read it here.

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Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

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