In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Kaveh Akbar is on the line.

© Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

I am at a point in my life where I have very little structure, where every day is full of small decisions and every move feels like a long shot. I am in the process of beating an addiction (I hope), but this means that I am fully sober, grounded, and often a very raw kind of awake for every long minute of the day, however brilliant, brutal, or just plain boring it is. Do you have a poem that could quiet my mind or offer me clarity?

Thanks,

Actively Awake

Dear AA,

I remember so clearly the early days of sobriety. I’d stare at my watch willing the time to pass faster, only to see, like in those old high school movies, the second hand seemingly move backward. When your whole life is predicated on feeding your addiction, and then you remove that addiction entirely, you’re suddenly faced with a lot of life. A lot of hours, minutes, seconds. It’s one of the reasons I got so into poetry; it was literally just a place to put myself. I could read a book of poems and not worry about what to do with my body or my mind for an hour, two hours. I could write a poem and somehow make four or six or eight hours just fly by.

For you, I prescribe one of my very favorite poems, Jean Valentine’s “I Came to You.”

I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
no, not the world, not reticence

It’s a bizarre poem, one with very few words (and most of those words are repeated). Its first sentence is a sentence I have repeated to myself like a protection spell throughout my years of sobriety: “I came to you / Lord, because of / the fucking reticence / of this world.”

I’m just as confused as anyone as to what I mean when I say words like “Lord,” and I have even less of an idea of what Jean Valentine means, but my sense is that here, it means something like “that which is bigger than my own ego,” possibly even something like “surrender.” I came to surrender because of the fucking reticence of the world. That makes sense to me. If the whole world loved what I loved (in my case, alcohol and various choice narcotics) as much as I did, there’d be no need for surrender. My behavior would be totally understood by all. But the world’s reticence, its “fucking reticence” brought me to my knees.

But then Jean goes into hyperdrive—“no, not the world, not reticence, oh.” And that “oh”! The volumes I could write around that “oh”! I feel in those two letters the futility of language, the frustration of trying to meaningfully convey any real experience of suffering or grace with these sounds, these barbaric black letters on a page. And then she ends the poem with the only thing she seems to know for certain, the only thing that is absolutely within her purview to state without qualification: “We were sad on the ground.”

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

I’ve recently endured a crisis of faith that resulted in my leaving the only spiritual home and community I’ve ever known. I feel small and lost, yet strangely alive. Even brave? Still, my entire worldview has shattered, and I am in a disorienting free fall. I’m hoping you can help me create a soft place to land with poetry about change.

—Falling, yet Free

Dear Falling,

I love the way your letter frames the leaving as an opportunity for bravery, for creation and change. For you, I prescribe another favorite, Ben Purkert’s “Natural Intelligence.” It begins:

The plural of anything is bound to be sharper:
countless birds spelling V above my head.
Where they land, a field must slightly compress,
hardening under their cool weight.

There’s so much to love in this poem, but I especially love the way it is attentive to change and stasis: the weight of a flock of birds causes a field to “slightly compress,” but the birds themselves remain what they are, something people call a kind of “intelligence.” You say your “entire worldview has shattered,” but you are also feeling “strangely alive.” What flux! Having left your spiritual community you are no longer among as you had been, and that can be painful. But remember, Purkert teaches us that “the plural of anything is bound to be sharper.” What luck, then—you’re looking for “a soft place to land,” and your sharpness has worn away as you’ve moved into aloneness. You’ve already become your own soft place.

—KA

*

Dear Poets,

My girlfriend is about to enter her final year of medical school before she enters the wonderful but terrifying world of the National Health Service. She is utterly brilliant and caring to her core, but I can tell she’s scared. She’s going to be faced with some desperately sad situations (along with some triumphant and remarkable ones) and I think she’s wondering whether she has the strength to handle it and also is petrified of the mistakes she’ll make. Please can you help me to reassure and comfort her?

Yours,
Wanting to Soothe

Dear WtS,

For a long time I thought I was going to be a medical doctor. I was moving through the motions, trying to be a good Iranian boy, taking all the biology classes and doing hard science extracurriculars, imagining myself going to medical school at Johns Hopkins and then working at the Mayo Clinic. My parents were thrilled. Then, I discovered poetry and everything went to hell. To this day, my parents joke (at least I think they’re joking) that they should have taken me out of school the day my English teacher first sent me home with a stack of poetry books.

This to say, I have such profound respect to your girlfriend for doing an incredibly difficult, thankless thing, and for being willing to carry the burden of doing that incredibly difficult thankless thing for, presumably, her whole life. Your desire to support and celebrate her through this makes me love you both, and reading your letter I immediately thought of this poem by Rafael Campo.

what I would like to offer them is this,

not reassurance that their lungs sound fine,

or that the mole they’ve noticed change is not

a melanoma, but instead of fear

transfigured by some doctorly advice

I’d like to give them my astonishment

at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping,

and how ridiculously gently it

slicked down my hair

Campo is a practicing physician himself—which, sidebar, is totally nuts. I have thrown my entire life into learning how to write poems and still feel like an apprentice. Imagine being able to write as well as Campo and also be a whole entire medical doctor as a career. The mind boggles.

Anyway, your letter made me think of Campo’s poem because it sounds to me like your girlfriend isn’t so much concerned about remembering the right “doctorly advice,” but instead about managing the inevitable losses and griefs inherent to her profession. Her heightened sensitivity to the humanity of her role is an essential calibration, one that I expect will make her uniquely capable of doling out what the doctor in the poem hopes to give. Astonishment, yes. And that most elusive thing to find in a doctor’s office: comfort.

—KA

Want more? Read earlier installments of Poetry Rx. Need a poem? Write to us! In the next installment, Sarah Kay will be answering questions. 

Our poets, brilliant though they may be, would like to remind you that they are only poets. If you or someone you love requires professional help, please consider the resources listed here. 

Kaveh Akbar’s poems have appeared recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, the New York Times, the Nation, and elsewhere. His first book is Calling a Wolf a Wolf. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.