To solve a problem, we need to name it. From reflections and talks with friends, here are some of the deeper reasons why some of us writers aren’t writing.
Read MoreHow to Write About Death (According to Czeslaw Milosz)
Once when I was having a difficult week that I didn’t want to talk about, a classmate once asked me how I was doing. I said that wildebeest learn to walk minutes after birth.
This is why people hate poets. And 25-year-olds. (And it was a pretentious, MFA student thing to say. I don’t talk like this now.)
No matter who’s using them, metaphors can be walls to crouch behind, stained glass that color the world, or the only tools we have to say what we mean.
As a very private person, I love writing poetry because it lets me say exactly what I mean without directly divulging anything personal.
But there’s also an argument for authenticity and the power of speaking plainly. To be bold enough to say what you really mean. Chekhov said, “The role of the writer…is to describe the truth so plainly the reader can no longer evade it.”
All this to introduce a poem that I’ve come back to many times.
My invitation for those of us who don’t often read poems: The feeling is as important (if not more important) than the process of decoding.
My favorite poems are houses and not puzzles, so live inside them before making them into escape rooms. Take your time.
Here’s poet Elisa Gonzalez reading it for you (minutes 1:28-2:50).
Gathering Apricots
Czesław Miłosz, translated from Polish by Robert Hass
In the sun, while there, below, over the bay
Only clouds of white mist wander, fleeting,
And the range of hills is grayish on the blue,
Apricots, the whole tree full of them, in the dark leaves,
Glimmer, yellow and red, bringing to mind
The garden of Hesperides and apples of Paradise.
I reach for a fruit and suddenly feel the presence
And put aside the basket and say: “It’s a pity
That you died and cannot see these apricots,
While I celebrate this undeserved life.”
COMMENTARY
Alas, I did not say what I should have.
I submitted fog and chaos to a distillation.
That other kingdom of being or non-being
Is always with me and makes itself heard
With thousands of calls, screams, complaints,
And she, the one to whom I turned,
Is perhaps a leader of a chorus.
What happens only once does not stay in words.
Countries disappeared and towns and circumstances.
Nobody will be able to see her face.
And form itself is always a betrayal.
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(I left white space to encourage you, because I know the digital world is fast-paced and overstimulating, to slow down, go back, reread, and create a moment to live inside a poem.)
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*
*
Maybe let your eyes flit back to certain spots.
*
*
Ok, let’s talk about the first section.
What I notice:
Many commas and long sentences - it’s easy to get lost, and there isn’t clear direction.
“In,” “over,” “below” - it takes awhile to settle on a place
Words like “grayish on the blue,” “clouds of white mist wander,” and “dark leaves”
The words evoke a feeling of mystery, like going for a walk at twilight after a rainy day.
If you say them out loud, some of the words whisper together.
There’s also a sense of obscurity - the white mist would keep us from seeing what’s below it. If the leaves are dark, they’re hard to distinguish between.
We don’t have any action until the fifth line (and even then, it’s just apricots glimmering), and the pace is slow.
Why are their random Greek myths no one knows about?
The first stanza is hazy, wondrous scenes of nature — words like “wander” and “glimmer” set a fanciful and mystical scene.
Vagueness and obscurity is everywhere, from the in-between time of twilight to mist, which makes it difficult to see. The leaves are dark, the hills are grayish blue. We can’t see what’s beneath the haze and leaves.
To me, this first section feels like the most pastoral and loveliest description of depression ever — unmoored and disoriented in a beautiful world. Grief rambles and floats like a walk in the woods until we land on the speaker’s survivor’s guilt.
The symbol of setting aside the apricots because the dead cannot enjoy them is powerful, but soft and comes at the end. The speaker’s survivor’s guilt is lightened to “It’s a pity…”
However, this is only one side of the speaker’s grief. While now they only sigh and stop eating a certain kind of Greecian fruit, a quiet, dim, lingering sadness that dampens certain moments, we’ll soon uncover the raw, violent, chaotic, blunt grief in the commentary. Here it is again:
COMMENTARY
Alas, I did not say what I should have.
I submitted fog and chaos to a distillation.
That other kingdom of being or non-being
Is always with me and makes itself heard
With thousands of calls, screams, complaints,
And she, the one to whom I turned,
Is perhaps a leader of a chorus.
What happens only once does not stay in words.
Countries disappeared and towns and circumstances.
Nobody will be able to see her face.
And form itself is always a betrayal.
What I notice:
The speaker’s regret
How different this is from the first section. We have:
Short sentences: The pace is faster, the writing’s more immediate
No natural description
The action starts right away (“I did not say”)
Death is referenced in the third line as opposed to at the end.
The loudness of this world, as the speaker is haunted by “thousands of calls, screams, complaints”
“Is alway with me” “is always a betrayal”: There’s no escaping this.
The guilt and regret in “betrayal,” especially coming after “I did not say what I should have” and “Nobody will be able to see her face.” He feels helpless in his inability to do right by the dead
Not only is he alive when people he loved died - his attempt to express his grief isn’t good enough and has to be redone. Even after writing this, he admits that no matter what he does, “Nobody will be able to see her face.” For how powerful writing is, it can’t bring dead people back the same way they were when they were alive.
The fog and twilight that seemed so lovely in the first section were also obscuring a more haunting truth.
Contrary to the “It’s a pity” grief of quiet mist and a fruit basket, he admits death is “always with me and makes itself heard.” Instead of seeing it in the distance as soft hills and trees, he is haunted by “thousands of calls, screams, complaints…”
Some biographical context: Miłosz lived in Poland as the Germans took over, lived in a prisoner transit camp. A nun rescued him, he left Warsaw in 1944 at age 33 for a safer village while the city burned. In 1945, he became a cultural attache for Poland, and his mother also died that year. He left for France in 1951 and was offered a teaching position at UC Berkeley in 1960.
“Countries disappeared and towns and circumstances.” Entire places, lives, and possible futures ended again and again.
This poem was written three years after the 1987 death of his wife, who had been with him since before Warsaw, a constant during destruction, war, death, and upheaval.
In the commentary, we feel pain, helplessness, and guilt without embellishment or philosophy — no natural imagery, no winding, six-line sentence. One sentence per line — choppy and halting, the way grief stops everything. Because “form itself is always a betrayal.”
But I don’t think the commentary negates the first part of “Gathering Apricots.” There are many sides to trauma and grief, and we can write about it as though we’re looking at it through a telescope or we’re drowning in it. Maybe it’s helpful to have both ways. Maybe one way helps you create a bridge to the other.
You are surrounded by myths, and that should scare you
The pandemic shut down immigration procedures for tens of thousands of people across the United States, and my partner was one of them. Because of this, his visa expired before the next arrived and he needed to quit the job it had taken six months to find, and it was unclear if they’d keep the position open while he waited for the visa.
Surviving 2020 with sanity intact was already like swimming in a tidal pool, but now it was like doing so in the dark. I needed a plan to feel at ease, but without the job, it was impossible to form one for where we would move when our lease in Miami runs out at the end of this month, where I would continue my job search, whether we’d be caught in this in-between state indefinitely.
Uncertainty makes me panic. Each time I’ve graduated, it’s as though my flashlight has died in a dark cave. I’ll take any way out, whichever tunnel I first grope towards, regardless of how much I want what’s on the other side — a job offer, a new degree, a new state — if it brings me out of uncertainty, I’ll take it.
So when our plan failed, anxiety pumped through me as though I was on a raft about to hit white water rapids. Though it had been years since I had seen it, I felt the absurd need to watch something that would explain what was happening. At 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, I switched on “Into the Woods” (make fun of me if you must) to explain what was happening.
In the musical, each character is questing after something — a cloak, a prince, a grandmother’s house — and will do anything to get it. They beg, borrow, and steal to reach their desires, but once everyone’s reached their “happily ever after,” the unintended consequences of their actions throw them back into chaos. No one gets what they wished for — the prince is a womanizer, the giants turn vengeful when Jack steals a golden harp, the broken curse gives the bakers a child but the baker’s wife suddenly dies.
The chaos we were in finally made sense — this, it turns out, is what life gives you, regardless of what you want. You cannot predict what you’ll be given. Instead of longing for a happy ending, be glad with your lot. My anxiety dissolved, and I returned to my work, content in uncertainty because a story had helped me make sense of my life.
Stories have power. We invent them to bring order to disorder, definitions where there are none. You only need to look to how Greek mythology explained the seasons, war, darkness, everything else that was unclear. Even though we now trust science to explain the universe, we are still surrounded by myths.
To name a few:
Hard work + college + relationship = success and happiness
Love rescues you from yourself and makes your life complete.
The wedding, the couple’s first kiss is the beginning of an eternal happy ending.
Men with families are incapable of treating women poorly.
Shopping at Whole Foods means you are conscientious and compassionate.
If you’re polite to strangers, you’re probably a good person.
Follow your dreams, and you’ll be wildly successful.
Adulthood = a stable income, a house, a family, owning a vacuum cleaner.
Myths and stories can comfort us, but they can also blind us to uncomfortable realities. The truth is there’s no formula to being happy or successful, to who you can expect to be kind and decent, to what the different stages of life bring you.
Let’s take this even further. Here are the myths I had in mind when I began this article:
Work hard, and you’ll be rewarded.
Once upon a time, we enslaved, lynched, and segregated black people. But through the Civil Rights marches, segregation was illegal, and all was well.
What these narratives leave out:
Redlining, the race-wealth gap, discrimination in hiring and housing
My primarily white, suburban school was much more well funded than the inner-city, primarily black schools
The War on Drugs was invented to disproportionately put blacks in jail to an unfathomable degree,
Still-unpaid reparations and that major historical figures had wanted them: Sherman had wanted to give freed slaves two acres and a mule, Lincoln had wanted reparations, Martin Luther King, Jr. had planned to continue marching for economic equality before he was killed.
“Don’t worry,” our cultural narratives told us. “All is well.” And if all was well, there was nothing left to work for. You can’t act on what the story leaves out.
We rely on stories to see us through the darkness, but sometimes we need to let our eyes adjust to the dim light so we can understand what’s really there. If we believe a relationship is only real when it feels like a fairy tale, we can let ourselves off the hook for working through whatever hang-ups we have with intimacy or wait for the other half to save us rather than taking responsibility for our own well-being. If we believe hard work and a degree is all you need for success, you don’t need to confront what your soul longs for after you finish the commute home. If we believe our system is fair, we don’t need to fight for equality.
Stories can become weapons for good as well. But the danger comes when we don’t understand the truths behind them and think for ourselves.
If you live outside of these myths, it can feel lonely. You can feel helpless by the weight of how much stories dictate our choices and keep us from questioning. This poem, “The Last Day” encapsulates that helpless feeling that defies explanation.
Read it slowly, read it out loud if you want it to add anything to your life.
The Last Day
Lucille Clifton
we will find ourselves surrounded
by our kind all of them now
wearing the eyes they had
only imagined possible
and they will reproach us
with those eyes
in a language more actual
than speech
asking why we allowed this
to happen asking why
for the love of God
we did this to ourselves
and we will answer
in our feeble voices because
because because
Read it again, more slowly, not racing to decode its meaning.
What I find:
The eyes “only imagined possible” and language “more actual/than speech” can perceive and speak more than our poor human body can.
The question is asked by “our kind.” They say “we allowed this” and “we did this to ourselves.”
We can only say “because.”
It can feel overwhelming and paralyzing to understand the degree to which stories can keep us from confronting our personal and cultural darkness and how helpless we feel to change the realities behind them. But we need to believe in that possibility. To do that, maybe we need a different kind of story, or maybe we need to see our systems for what they are and take responsibility for our ability to change them. I don’t have any simple takeaways. But I know our world is too complex to fit into a narrative.
It looks as though the visa is coming through, and our lives will move forward. But we’ll find new problems, and we’ll travel through more uncertainties until we die. All I hope for is we don’t become frozen by the fear of something keeping us from a permanent happy ending that won’t ever exist. Like Jack in “Into the Woods,” the metaphorical prince we long for might bring us more trouble than good.
Instead, I hope we enjoy life and do what we can to be better. And when I tell the story of my life, it’ll have a thousand-page appendix of everything I took out in order for the narrative to make sense.
The danger of clinging to happy endings
I once was fired from a job I thought was going to launch my career. In a two-minute conversation, my plans fell to pieces.
“Life changes in the instant,” Joan Didion writes. Her husband collapsed suddenly, unexpectedly, while she mixed the salad at the dinner table.
In my case, I didn’t let myself be with the panic and uncertainty. I couldn’t. Instead, I felt the need to form a plan, even though the experience should have taught me that plans mean little to the rest of the world. Six months later, I ended up 1,500 miles away in a Master of Fine Arts program in Boca Raton, far removed from humble Kansas to a place where CVS has a wine section and iguanas sun themselves on canal banks.
While the program was one of the most valuable experiences of my life, I wish I hadn’t been so desperate to escape the fear of free-falling, being without a plan. I still experienced all the anxiety and stress of having felt I failed — but because I hadn’t allowed myself to feel it initially, it was just repressed, a small roar in the background I met again when I graduated.
We understand life can change in an instant, and yet we cling to the idea we can predict our days because anything else is terrifying. This inability to accept the limits of our control means, when the plan changes, we can spin out. Like when a pandemic spreads through the world at exponential speeds and your entire life changes. We see how illusory our security is, and we can’t accept it. It’s as though, while crossing a bridge, you finally looked down and envisioned your plummet to the bottom.
What we do with this reality is what Rebecca Solnit writes about in her essay, “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends.” When the pandemic started, she began recording herself reading fairy tales to bring comfort as we grappled with the change that swirled around us like a hurricane.
The tension in our own lives is similar to the suspense we feel in the middle of the story as the hero nearly drinks from the poisoned cup or as they’re almost gored by the bull.
We don’t know how to accept being in the middle. We’d much rather believe we’re in the ending, the “ever after” that goes on forever, and we would do anything to fast-forward our lives until we get there — just hibernate until the vaccine arrives.
For the first months of 2020, we refused to believe COVID could take hold of our cities as it did Wuhan and Rome. We couldn’t accept that our story would change so quickly, that we would be thrown into so much chaos, that we were not at our safe ending. So we clung to the status quo (some of us still do) until reality forced us to let go.
When that failed, we clung to comforts — television, alcohol, baking (Netflix stock went up, liquor stores made incredible profits, and no one could find yeast) — anything to help us forget how disoriented and stressed we were. Or we repeated the fears again and again like a to-do list, circling them in our minds. We have the same conversation again and again — where the infection numbers are, how odd it was when the world was so quiet.
But in forgetting our anxiety, we forget other valuable pieces of ourselves. And in repeating it on loop, there’s less room for the rest of us — hope, beauty, enjoyment.
As Buddhist monk Pema Chodron cautions, if you try to forget your anxiety (or any uncomfortable emotion, really) or cling to it, you only make yourself suffer. Google searching our anxieties or repeating the same list of stressors again and again doesn’t make the fear go away. Fears are like small animals who, when kept in a box, only cry louder. They want to be seen.
Instead, Chodron says, let yourself be open to it. Give it compassion, attention, and curiosity. Open yourself to feeling vulnerable and unsure. See if you can strip away your longing to feel calm again, certain again, and choose to be with whatever comes up. When you greet that anxiety, it becomes less frightening.
“We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t,” Chodron writes. “We can’t escape it any more than we can escape change, any more than we can escape death.”
When I did a 10-day Vipassana meditation, I sat in meditation for 10 hours each day with no back support. Eventually, my back began to ache strongly, and I spent much of my meditation time shifting my posture to reduce the pain. When I tried to focus on my breath or other physical sensations, my attention zoomed like a magnet to my back. But eventually, I learned to separate the pain from my reaction — the dislike of the pain, the anger I felt about hurting. The pain itself was only pressure and heat. The rest was my doing.
While we have to accept our circumstances, we also need to understand we have more control than we might think. While it isn’t enough control to live in a world without COVID-19, it is enough to be active and engaged, not resigned, because resignation lets us off the hook for enacting change.
It’s east to pretend the system is inevitable than it is to realize our daily behavior can ripple out and cause chain reactions. Solnit writes deterministic thinking is partly what won the 2016 election. When people thought Clinton’s win was inevitable and Trump’s win impossible, many decided not to vote or to vote for a third-party candidate. We assumed we knew what the future held because to imagine the unexpected seemed impossible. Similarly, unless we’re directly threatened, we can hold the false belief that we have no impact on our world.
Solnit says, “...I ran into this false omniscience again and again, and found that a lot of people liked certainty, even grim certainty, more than the genuine uncertainty of what would happen next. If you pretend the future is preordained, you don’t have to do anything.”
To resist the idea of false omniscience, we need to practice hope. Hope that the status quo won’t continue interminably and then act to ensure it won’t.
We have the same agency in uncertainty as we do in stability. People who have protested for Black Lives Matter have realized their actions can create change, though there are mountains of work left to reverse racist policies of the legal system, education, and housing. But people taking action gives me hope.
Krista Tippet says, “It’s absolutely to bring clear eyes to what in the world must be better, and to be present to the world and its frailty and its suffering, but also...to wake up every morning and say, ‘Yes, yes. That is true. I am present. I see it. I care’ — and to see that generative part of the story that you can be part of.”
To acknowledge you have little grasp of what will happen next: That’s beginner’s mind. It’s being open to the fact that our universe is random and chaotic. It’s to hope for new realities and begin to enact them. As an example, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was unscripted. He was relaying a scripted speech when Mathalia Jackson called from the crowd, “Tell them about the dream!”
We assume we have less agency than we do, or we point it at the wrong things — vanishing discomfort, trying to change what we cannot instead of changing what we can because the task seems too much of a bother. It’s what keeps us from engaging in uncomfortable conversations, both political and personal — asking our family members the questions that matter in favor of familiar small talk. We want to be comfortable, so we invent a reality in which our actions cannot create change. And in uncertainty, we can so desperately want to have calm that we will do whatever we feel we need to get it.
But clinging to familiarity, Solnit continues, is like bellyfloping on flotsam instead of swimming. The heroes of fairy tales are ones who take their fates into their own hands, leave a familiar home, take risks, make allies, outwit and invent.
She says, “We are in the ocean and time is fluid and the waves will keep coming and there is a distinct possibility that this is okay.”
Making Sense of My Florida Life: W.S. Merwin Lends a Hand
If you haven’t heard, I’m the poetry lady. I’m on a mission to show how poetry has fallen out of our culture, why that’s a damn shame, and how to enjoy and extract meaning from poems.
This week’s poem is weird, winding, and will give you whiplash. It deals with what you make of a chapter of your life after you leave it — specifically, what it means to leave one city for another. Especially if, while you’re in that chapter, you know it won’t last.
It’s perfect for what’s happening in my life. After five years of living in America’s weirdest, most disorienting state, I’m grappling with what it means to leave.
To leave the state means to close a chapter that I can’t name — the last five years spent living in South Florida. In case you’re unfamiliar with this area’s oddness, let me explain. In South Florida, the population turns over so fast it’ll make your head spin. Every highway exit feels like a different city. We have Florida Man, skyrocketing COVID cases, hurricanes, are butt of the country’s jokes. Florida is loud and unapologetic and constantly defying categorization, whereas I am mild-mannered, nervous, and crave predictability.
I’m the overly friendly Midwesterner who’s often tried to make small talk with grocery store clerks who look right past me. While others use the beach for selfie-sessions in designer swimsuits, I wander in my street clothes, my one-piece safely tucked in my closet. And in Miami traffic, I grip the steering wheel with white knuckles, anticipating the moment I’ll be honked at, cut off, or slammed into by one of the cars making a “Miami left”: When a car from the farthest right lane swings in front of all the other lanes to make a left turn while the light is red.
W.S. Merwin’s poem “Late” is perfect for preparing to leave something I always knew was temporary, that never felt like mine, that I wanted to feel part of but never did.
Again, I know many people want to scroll straight past the poem — it might feel like asking you to dive into uncertainty, to knowingly make yourself uncomfortable as you encounter something ambiguous and strange.
My advice:
Take your time reading it. Read at half, or even a quarter, of your usual reading speed. The more slowly you read, the more likely the poem is more likely to speak to you. Think of it like a small animal — if you move too fast, it’ll dash away.
Remember poetry is never straightforward because much of our interior lives are not clear or direct — there’s a beauty in ambiguity, room for you to interpret as you will.
Read it out loud: Poetry is partly music. It’s enjoying the sounds of words.
Here we go.
Late
W.S. Merwin
The old walls half fallen sink away under brambles
and ivy and trail off into the oak woods that have been
coming back for them through all the lives whose daylight
has vanished into the mosses there was a life once
in which I lived here part of a life believing
in it partly as though it were the whole story
and so not a story at all and partly knowing
that I clung to it only in passing as in
the words of a story and that partly I was still
where I had come from and when I come back now later
and find it still here it seems to be a story
I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it.
And now, I invite you to read it again. More slowly — again, if your eyes have been fast as a highway, slow down to 15 mph. If you didn’t before, read it out loud.
The first thing I want to say is I understand if this poem frustrates you. It’s OK if it disorients you. Stay with it...I’m going to lead you through this, and it’ll be worth it.
First task: Go back and find any lines that seem to be more alive and urgent (I call these “hot spots”).
Here are mine. It’s OK if yours are different.
The oak woods have been coming back for the oak woods. It’s as though the walls always belonged to the woods, and the woods now reclaim them. The woods have a will, and it’s unsettling.
The lives whose daylight/vanished into mosses. “Vanished” implies suddenness, being here one day and gone the next. The daylight of our lives is a beautiful idea to me and feels like any good, alive, bright part of our days.
That is my place in it. After so many lines of hemming and hawing about what the place was, the speaker says something definitive. His place is to know this part of his life is a story they “know but no longer believe.”
We see how time changes stories. There’s something about time marching on and changing things, changing us. There’s something about endings, slow and fast. Consider these words from the first few lines:
half fallen
sink away
trail off
vanished
There’s a sense of things ending sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly.
And now, listen to the poem — try to hear which letters are more often repeated. Feel free to reread it.
Here’s what stands out to me: The “l” and “w” repetition. The “l” because it’s so frequent and the “w” because it’s such an unusual letter — the whoosh of air as someone walks past, a letter in “wonderous,” “wandering,” “waif.”
To me, there’s a tone of otherworldliness in this poem. Some of it comes from what we associate with fairy tales — ivy, stories, trees and moss that have their own will. There’s magic, and there’s confusion, and there are chapters ending the speaker can’t make sense of.
Part of this disorientation is the speaker’s. The poem is one long sentence, like someone who keeps changing their mind. How casually it moves into “there was a life once,” a phrase that shows us that life is no more, that this scene is personal. And how confusing to have a life once that “I lived part of a life/believing in it partly.” What does it mean to believe in a life or only partly believe in it? What does it mean for only part of the life to be lived? We don’t get clear answers.
Late
W.S. Merwin
The old walls half fallen sink away under brambles
and ivy and trail off into the oak woods that have been
coming back for them through all the lives whose daylight
has vanished into the mosses there was a life once
in which I lived here part of a life believing
in it partly as though it were the whole story
and so not a story at all and partly knowing
that I clung to it only in passing as in
the words of a story and that partly I was still
where I had come from and when I come back now later
and find it still here it seems to be a story
I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it.
Because this is one winding sentence, it isn’t always clear what’s happening. Let’s break it down. We start in nature. Once there was a building, then it fell and nature grew around it so thickly it was as though the woods were absorbing the wall. Just as one could revisit the “half fallen walls” and recognize them as part of what is no longer here, so the speaker revisits his story and tries to understand what it meant now that everything around it has changed.
...there was a life once
in which I lived here part of a life believing
in it partly as though it were the whole story
and so not a story at all...
The poem is one full sentence that winds, changes direction. This place is first a whole story, then part of a story, then not a story at all. then the words of a story, then a story familiar but not believed in. It seems like it’s trying to disorient us, trying to keep us from understanding it. What the speaker’s past life was, how he believed in that part of life, why it becomes “not a story at all” is frustratingly unaddressed and unclear. I only know the speaker is revisiting a piece of his past he once, partly believed was real, lasting, he would stay there.
If you ever moved to a new city on a whim, were in a relationship you knew but never admitted wouldn’t last, tried a fad diet you knew you couldn’t sustain but lied to yourself that you could, you understand this. It’s what it feels like to brush against a memory you will never understand.
But part of the speaker knew this part of his life was temporary, knew it was “a story” but not “the story” of his life. And, looking back, it’s so far away it is as if it’s a different life. Time takes things away, like how nature reclaims abandoned buildings, like how the day ends. Note the title is “late,” as though it’s a late hour and the day’s almost over.
Merwin was criticized for being inaccessible and enigmatic. We get lost in the poem, just as we get lost when we try on new roles, new places, new groups of people, knowing we’ll soon shrug them off and return to our core definition of ourselves. I think this is part of the poem’s mission — to show through its syntax how the speaker grapples with the problem of how to fit into his life’s story a chapter that never quite belonged. He changed, but then reverted back to before the change began.
...I was still
where I had come from and when I come back now later
and find it still here it seems to be a story
I know but no longer believe and that is my place in it.
Here’s what I think.
If there was ever a poem to describe feeling displaced, as though you can’t articulate the ways you’ve shifted, how your identity is not what it once was, this is it.
And if there was ever a place that disoriented you the same way this poem does, Florida is that place. I grew up in Kansas, can explain it to you in a few sentences. But Florida is so many identities, cultures, lifestyles together it’s impossible to pin down or understand my role in it.
South Florida is of wealthy New Yorkers, immigrants, wine sections in CVS, iguanas, anhingas, and other animals that look like dinosaurs, Tesla, the country’s wealthiest and poorest populations, a (typically) hot real estate market built on sinking land, a swing state, the exits off I-95 as different as states.
I always felt that Florida was only a few sentences in my life, but while I was here, I had to convince myself it was part of my story in order for it to make sense. I had to make it part of my identity. Now I’m leaving, and I predict I’ll one day wake up feeling like the Florida portion of my life was just a fever dream. I’ll revisit the memory later and see it almost as another life, one that I only partly believed in, knowing while I was here I tried to make it feel like I belonged though I could never convince myself fully.
In a way, every chapter of our lives is transient. Time will overtake and obscure each chapter as it obscures everything. What matters is how we look back in retrospect.
Discovering the 'City of Poetry'
This post is meant to show you why poems matter and how the way we read them changes their value. I know this might be outside your comfort zone, but if you’re a skeptic, I ask you to bear with me.
Ten years and some spare change ago, I lived in Wichita and felt I was there by accident and didn’t belong (think: seas of baseball caps and sweatpants, indie films are thought pretentious).
I didn’t understand myself and didn’t know what I wanted. I had just given up on a music degree because I felt that music had done all it could for me. There were parts of myself I needed a new language to find, and that language was poetry.
I had felt before like an undercover agent for poems. I remember being bored out of my skull in math class, pressing my pen through my paper in anger because learning about numbers made no sense. Before placing my graphing calculator in the bin, I wrote “E.E. Cummings is king.” (I think I agreed with him that “feeling is first.”)
All of this is now embarrassing in the right context, as I now understand the reason students hate mathematics is because it’s taught through memorization rather than with the critical thinking and creativity that makes it beautiful. And I’ve moved from E.E. Cummings to other poets, but the passion is still there.
But we can put all that aside.
I’m here to convince you that poems are cool. More than that, much like each culture is limited by its language’s vocabulary, we are limited as humans if we do not speak the language of poetry.
I sense your hesitation. I get it. You may have felt about poetry the way I felt about algebra — why don’t poets just say what they mean plainly? Is there worth to verse? (Please groan here.)
Source: Lithub, “Poems R Just Less Popular Memes”
The way we’re taught poetry in school is often technical. We’re asked to memorize the definition of “anaphora” and decode poems so we can give a one-sentence summary. We start with the least accessible poems like Shakespeare’s sonnets simply because they’re classic and for some reason, school is about the classics. None of this leads to enjoyment — how it feels to live inside a poem, how poems can make leaps in space and time no other form can make.
However, all of this argument is useless unless I can prove myself to you. I’m going to show you one of the first poems that knocked me on my ass and showed me what poems can do that no other writing can. It helped me access parts of myself I didn’t know existed. And I’m going to help you learn to speak the poem’s language just like someone else helped me.
Don’t worry — it’s only 53 words (shorter than the last paragraph), and I’m not going to use terms like “iambic pentameter.” But you need to trust me, or you might get frustrated.
Here’s what I want you to do. And if you don’t do this, the rest of what I have to say means less. I want you to:
Read this slowly. I’m betting so far, if your eyes were cars, they’ve been going at about 50 mph so far. Slow that down to about 12 mph, like you’re going through a neighborhood and want to read the addresses on the houses you pass. You’ll notice more this way.
If you’re in a place where you can read it out loud, read it out loud. Poetry is musical, so it’s best if you can hear it.
Accept that you may be confused for a minute. Poetry isn’t something you only decode. It’s something you enjoy for its music, tone, mystery. This could be a new language for you. It’s OK if it takes some time to get fluent. And even then, part of the draw of poetry is mystery and open-endedness.
Ready? The poem is right below, waiting for you.
Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House
Gregory Orr
It is autumn and I can see the lake because leaves have fallen. The distant water becomes blue leaves on the bare branches of oaks.
I look back at the house: two empty armchairs on the porch. She is sitting in one of them, and my wife is a child in her arms.
Give yourself a minute. Let it sink in.
Now, read it again. Out loud this time, if you didn’t earlier. Here it is below:
Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House
Gregory Orr
It is autumn and I can see the lake because leaves have fallen. The distant water becomes blue leaves on the bare branches of oaks.
I look back at the house: two empty armchairs on the porch. She is sitting in one of them, and my wife is a child in her arms.
Then, sit still for one full minute and don’t do ANYTHING (including counting seconds) but look at the poem, maybe seeing which parts stand out and you want to go back to. Don’t try to decode it. This is time to absorb the poem and quiet your mind. Don’t read on until you’ve done this. I mean it. And remember, if you’re confused, let yourself be confused.
Did you do it? I hope so.
Here’s your next task. (I’m not going to do ALL the work for you. I want you to know you have the power to speak poetry on your own.) I want you to find every word in the poem that feels like or seems similar to the word “loss.” Scroll up and do that now.
When you’re ready, here’s my list:
autumn
fallen
distant
bare
empty
As I finished writing the above list just now, I started to feel this poem. My mood just shifted from that of a red-blooded poetry-crusader determined for you to love poetry how I love it to the feeling of losing someone and that loss surrounding you like a frozen blanket years later. To feel left behind and alone. There is death in this poem, starting from the title and ending with the ghosts at the end. And it’s in between, with the bare branches and distant lake. There’s a sense of separation from the living world and the people this speaker knew well — his wife and her grandmother.
Grief is in our DNA. Loss is part and parcel of the bargain that brought you your life. And both sides of this bargain are alive in this poem.
Loss is in the landscape each year as leaves die and fall from the trees so they can survive the winter. It’s in the house’s empty armchairs. The focus that’s placed on these chairs makes me think the speaker knows this house well and has been accustomed to seeing the chairs filled by people who are no longer here — their emptiness signifies an important loss. Note that to feel this loss, we required no backstory, no character building, no explanation of how the deaths happened or how long ago, no name of the place where there is a cabin and trees and a lake. In poems, you can do more within less space.
Source: Casey Fyfe, Unsplash
OK, let’s look at words. Because poems were first only spoken aloud, they have a musical quality of repeating sounds, and those sounds are often important to other parts of the poem. Your next task is to scan the poem for every word that starts with a “b.” Here’s the poem again.
Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House
Gregory Orr
It is autumn and I can see the lake because leaves have fallen. The distant water becomes blue leaves on the bare branches of oaks.
I look back at the house: two empty armchairs on the porch. She is sitting in one of them, and my wife is a child in her arms.
Here’s my list:
because
becomes
blue
bare
branches
To me, the letter “b” gives a tender, gentle sound. It’s one of the first sounds babies make: “buh.” Much sweeter than choppy consonants like “d” or “k.” There are also quite a few L’s in the poem...leaves, lake, the “l” of fallen and blue. These sounds help us hear the poem’s tone like a bass helps set not just tempo but also tone in a song.
The sounds tell me this loss isn’t harsh. It isn’t (at this time at least) like walking barefoot on frozen grass, like coming home to find someone has taken all your furniture, like the speaker is yelling into a wall of snow.
No, there’s a tenderness to this loss...it’s still grief, still mourning, but there’s also movement to what comes after grief. The speaker is between two places: the lake and the house.
Speaking of which, I admire how authoritatively our scene is set. It is autumn, I can see the lake, leaves have fallen, and (my favorite) the distant water becomes blue leaves. There is no hesitation, concession, or question. This speaker is clear-headed.
Now for what it means. In the world of poems, water can become leaves and we need not explain in what sense or why — the point is the experience rather than the explanation. Think about why the lake becomes leaves, and consider the rest of the poem. Take some time to create your own interpretation. Everything is correct as long as it can be traced through what’s on the page.
Here’s my interpretation.
Water gives us life. It’s why all civilizations are built near rivers. Water keeps us alive and creates new life. It’s also death, like the Ganges River of India where so many family member’s ashes are poured each year, like the River Styx that goes through the underworld, like how ocean storms claim lives in shipwrecks, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods. Water is continuous and connective, like how the Mississippi flows through the entire country, a life creator, and a life ender — it’s the full life-cycle.
So when the speaker can see water, that matters. And it’s because the leaves no longer obscure his view the speaker can see the lake. It’s because death shakes us up to show us what matters that he can see what’s often obscured and invisible and also essential.
And the water looks like leaves even when the tree has none. He knows the leaves will come back, that this mourning isn’t the end. This is his future — there will be more life.
But he’s compelled to look back to the house — this loss won’t leave him. And he sees the empty chairs are filled with ghosts — her grandmother and his wife, who is now a child. He sees her as innocent and new, and most importantly, he sees her. She’s still here, and she isn’t alone.
The past doesn’t leave this person. But he has enough distance from this loss to also see the lake and know that life continues. He sees the possibilities of new life in nature echoed in the new life of a child. The new life can’t come without death.
In 53 words, this poem has created music, a small world, and one of the most universal experiences — reckoning with death. What it means and how we can live with it. It did this with no backstory.
It doesn’t need a backstory. But the backstory is powerful and adds a layer of meaning, so I’ll tell you anyway.
The poet, Gregory Orr, accidentally shot his brother while they were hunting, and his brother died. Gregory Orr was 12 years old. His mother died shortly thereafter, and his father became addicted to amphetamines. This man is fluent in grief but like all of us, he isn’t immune to its pain.
Orr leaned on poems to carry him through the grief, the guilt. He sheltered in, lived in “The City of Poetry” (the name of a section of his book “River Inside the River”). He was once imprisoned but able to keep a book of Keats. He said in “River Inside the River,”
The poem was my ladder:
Rungs and lifts of escape.
Source: Poetry Foundation
Poetry gives shelter. Poems help us make sense of ourselves. I’ve often written poems without knowing what they were “about” until months later when I understood a new part of myself — fears of intimacy, overwhelming, exhausting empathy toward everyone I met, feelings of abandonment. Until I could understand these parts of myself through psychological language, I spoke them through poems and felt better for it. These parts of ourselves we don’t understand still need to be heard because they’re part of our entire, crazy, complex, contradictory natures.
To not try to speak poetry is to ignore your subconscious, ignore what can’t be explained any other way.
To speak poetry is to do the opposite. It’s to listen with feeling and awareness to even the least comfortable parts of yourself. You might argue with me, but I think poetry can save lives. And it breaks my heart that most of us don’t speak it.
Most of us get frustrated and get out before it gets good. It takes time and patience, and we tend to want things to happen quickly. But everyone can read and write poetry, and everyone can benefit from this just as everyone benefits from being literate.
“Ghosts at Her Grandmother’s House” is 53 words, and it knocks me on my ass every time I read it. The first time was at Wichita State, and I was 18 and knew next to nothing, and the poet Albert Goldbarth showed us its magic the first day of my first poetry class. I felt like there had always been this locked door in the house that was my life and he had just unlocked it for me and the world through that door was a strange, overwhelming beauty.
The sky was clear and sunny with Midwestern gusts sweeping across the brown grass where the red tulips grown each year hadn’t bloomed yet. I gripped a red spiral notebook that held my notes that were suddenly the key to everything.
This Week: Sardines, Florida Disorientation, and Miami's Race-Wealth Divide
This week, I’ve been trying to establish new morning routines to help me start the day with a settled but curious mindset. Step one is to write Morning Pages as suggested by Julia Cameron. Step 2 is a 30-minute meditation. Step 3 is 15 minutes of reading followed by 15 minutes of creative writing. Here’s what else I found this week.
Five-year Florida-versary: Next month, I will have lived in Florida for five years. I only came for graduate school but stayed because of my partner. Florida shook me up in a few ways:
I’ve lived in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. Coming from the Midwest, where every stranger smiles and makes polite small talk, the direct, no-bullshit approach of New York and Cuban culture initially surprised me. But now, I feel like South Florida has taught me to stand up for myself and communicate clearly.
Growing up in white-collar suburbia, I didn’t understand wealth disparity and the race-wealth divide on a concrete level. Miami has the highest of both of these in the country. For example, seeing Teslas less than a mile away from homeless encampments taught me on a concrete scale.
Miami (and all of South Florida) has so many identities, and the population tends to be more transient than other areas of the country. Drive half a mile and you’ll find yourself in a completely different architectural style, culture, and lifestyle. Wait a year and see which people in the circle move away. Living here can be disorienting.
Recipe of the week: Sardine fritters by Antoni Porowski. Crispy, spicy, simple, and warm. I recommend watching the full video before making these so you don’t grab your phone with sardine-batter fingers like I did.
Song of the week: “Lose Your Mind” by So Many Wizards. This is one of those indie songs that immediately feels familiar in the best of ways. The lyrics are also a great reminder to just take a break and try to enjoy life. I’m still learning how to be an adult, be a good person, and enjoy my life. For me, a big piece of that is listening to songs I love.
Podcast of the week: This Reply All podcast episode, “The Least You Could Do,” discusses Venmo and PayPal payments sent from white people to black people with no explanation following the Black Lives Matter protests and the killing of George Floyd. It’s a funny but thoughtful discussion of how people are at a loss for how to help or just want an easy way to be let off the hook. (If you’re looking for ways to help, here’s a list. I’m also reading “How to be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi. I’m learning, too.)
Uplifting story of the week: The story of the Barcelona Opera reopening to an audience of almost three thousand plants soothed me. Avoiding parks has been one of the toughest parts of lockdown. Being in nature calms my whirring mind and makes me feel connected to the wise, complex ecosystems that I rely on. Some of my best memories of my hometown, Overland Park, Kansas, are of taking long walks on sidewalks shaded by a canopy of oak leaves. But Miami’s population is so dense you can’t go to the park without passing dozens of strangers, so I’ve been cautious about visiting parks.