May 3, 2018

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 week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line.

Illustration by Ellis Rosen.

Dear Poets,

My seventy-two-year-old mother used to wake up early every day and text me the weather so I could dress accordingly before I left for work. I’m twenty-seven years old and—I am proud to admit—fully capable of checking the weather myself. But despite my repeated protests, my mother texted me daily anyway. She passed away suddenly in late February. We shared so many quirky traditions that feel lost to me now.

I was wondering: Do you have a poem that might speak to these small gestures of love, either from the perspective of what it’s like to give them or to receive them?

Yours,
Missing the Weather

Dear Missing,

Your mother’s texting was an irreplaceable gift, undoubtedly one of many such gifts she gave you. At first, my instinct was to send you Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (“What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices” being among the language’s great articulations of our inability to appreciate small gestures of love in the moment they’re given). But then I thought it would be better to give you something that spoke specifically to maternal love and its associate—too often thankless—labors. Read More

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April 19, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: You Will Love Again the Stranger Who Was Your Self

By Claire Schwartz

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 week, Claire Schwartz is on the line.

Dear Poets,

I was betrayed this past year by someone I deeply loved and trusted, and whom I thought loved and trusted me. The experience felt almost surgically, cruelly precise in the way it mapped onto my history of trauma, and so I have been triggered while also overwhelmed with loss. This betrayal has been deeply unsettling to my sense of myself, my ability to trust others, and my belief in the possibility of love and partnership in the future. I am struggling to find myself again. Do you have a poem for me?

Sincerely,
Lost at Sea

Dear Lost at Sea,

I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this painful and destabilizing betrayal. As Kaveh crucially reminded us, a poem alone is insufficient support as we work through our histories of trauma. Not as a remedy, then, but as resource in what I hope is a vast constellation of support, I offer you Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love.”

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Revel in the declarative stability of that affirmation: “You will love again the stranger who was your self.” It’s a missive from the other side of this wreckage. Read it aloud to yourself. Hear the truth in your own voice, and forge an opening toward that future.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

I love these first two imperatives. They are sufficiently pointed to penetrate the haze of grief, and yet allusive enough for the holy and eternal ritual practice that is self-love. That third imperative, though, feels a bit trickier. At first, “who knows you by heart” seems perhaps to refer to the other to whom you ceded parts of yourself. Read differently, it is “the stranger who has loved you // all your life … who knows you by heart.” Even when your attention was turned toward your relationship, you were there all along. You do know yourself by heart, Lost at Sea, even in those moments when you feel most at bay. Now, give the care you were giving away back to yourself. Move from the sacrifice and sustenance of bread and wine to the poem’s opulent final directive: “Sit. Feast on your life.”

—CS Read More

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April 12, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: The Most Beautiful Part of Your Body Is Where It’s Headed

By Sarah Kay

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 week, Sarah Kay is on the line.

Original illustration by Ellis Rosen.

Dear Poets,

I’m so angry all the time—at nothing, at the people around me, and at myself. I find that I’m unsatisfied in my job, in the town I live in, and in my own development as a person. I know I’m young, but I feel as though I’ve squandered every opportunity given to me. It’s like I have a beast inside of me, clawing at my lungs. There must be a poem for that feeling, right? For when you’re so angry you just want to scream at the next person who even mildly upsets you. I want to be kinder, gentler, and I realize that bottling up this anger is unhealthy. But I truly don’t know how to express it—please help me do so!

Sincerely,
An Angry Machine

Dear Angry Machine,

In your letter, you mentioned that you feel like you have a beast inside you. I have a poem for you that is about a beast, and also anger, but it is a very tiny beast. Specifically: Franny Choi’s poem “The Mantis Shrimp Speaks.” In the preface to the poem, Franny informs us that “the Mantis Shrimp has the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom. Their powerful limbs spear or club their prey using one of the fastest responses known to man. They can deliver a blow that is equivalent to the force of a bullet.” What a perfect metaphor for how anger makes us feel: both beast and also tiny, both supercharged and also insignificant, pounding our fists against the injustices of the universe. Franny writes:

This is the only way I know how to tell someone what I want, to describe the infinitely unfolded accordion of my heart. To love with a rage gone blind from the knowledge of the stolen lands, dirty wars, honor killings, false idols, forced soldiers, and buried throats haunting every sentence. Too many truths setting my retinas ablaze, and me, mad, mad, mad at the end of it all.

Sometimes your anger is not wrong or incorrect. Sometimes it means that you are paying attention. After all, “it is hard, being a prism in a burning city.” But note that the narrator of this poem specifies her need to “describe.” Your instinct is correct: bottling doesn’t help. Describing does. Articulating the rage (to a therapist, a friend, your journal) is a way of focusing it and pinpointing what the rage is against instead of letting it morph into a vague and all-encompassing “anger” at “nothing.” Find the somethings. Point at them. Detangle them. At the very least, putting anger into words is a way to push it out of your throbbing human body and, perhaps in the process, find a direction for those powerful limbs.

—SK

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April 5, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Suicide, Wizards, and Cherry Farmers

By Kaveh Akbar

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 week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line.

Dear Poets,

A very, very dear friend of mine committed suicide on April 1 last year. I was the last friend to have seen him. A full year has passed, and I still feel utter despondency that I wasn’t able to help—even though, being a suicide and mental-health advocate myself, I know there are some things you can’t help. I don’t know what I feel. I feel pain, like a piece of my body was torn apart. I have been walking on eggshells with everyone, thinking, What if I say the wrong thing and push them into something like suicide?

Do you have a poem for this? I badly need one.

Still Struggling Read More

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March 29, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: No Feeling Is Final

By Claire Schwartz

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 week, Claire Schwartz is on the line.

Original illustration by Ellis Rosen.

Dear Poets,

I met a boy my first semester of college, and I immediately liked him, but then I watched as he fell in love with another girl. They had everything in common, and he experienced many firsts with her. They dated all through freshman year, then broke up over the summer. Then he and I began dating. We love each other immensely, and we’re even planning a future together. I know bits and pieces of his past relationship, but I’m too nervous/insecure to ask him about it directly. I feel like it shouldn’t matter, but I also want to understand that part of his life. I am experiencing many of my own firsts with him, and his ex-girlfriend pops into my head. I find myself jealous and angry and hurt sometimes, even when I know I have no right to be. I guess I need help in understanding my jealousy. Is there a poem that will teach me how to accept that he had a previous love and life before we shared ours?

Love,
Abashedly Jealous
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March 23, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Rootless and Rejected

By Sarah Kay

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 week, Sarah Kay is on the line.

Illustration by Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

I was a third-culture kid, which basically means that any attempt to describe my identity requires a silly amount of en dashes. I recently went through a difficult breakup that has made my lack of roots more apparent and intolerable. I know this is a big ask, but is there a poem that can help me build a home?

Sincerely,
TCK

Dear TCK,

I am half Japanese American and half Jewish American, I grew up in New York City, and I attended an international school. I am very familiar with the phenomenon of being a third-culture kid, as well as a prisoner of the en dash. (For those less familiar, third-culture kids are children who grow up in a country or culture that is different from that of their parents. It is a common experience of expats or children raised abroad, and while the term attempts to cover a very disparate group of humans, I like that it gives a unifying language to children who grow up feeling different or lost or just a little bit outside.) These days I spend my time performing and teaching in schools around the world. I encounter TCK’s growing up in totally different countries and yet they all share similar experiences. They feel like a community to which I am connected. Because of this work, I also spend a lot of time in airports, those miserable transient places, and I spend most of my time far away from anywhere or anyone that feels like home. And oh! “Home!” That ephemeral and impossible ideal. Where is it? Who is it? How can we find it and reach for it when we need it? Today I give you Naomi Shihab Nye’s beautiful piece “Gate A-4.” In it, she speaks of an experience in an airport, when a woman needed her help. Together, they built a small community at the airport gate. For Naomi, we carry “home” around in our language, in our food, in the way we look into someone else’s eyes. She writes,

I noticed my new best friend–by now we were holding hands–had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

You don’t have a lack of roots, TCK. You just carry yours with you. And even if it feels like you don’t come from one single place or that you do not belong to a “home” that you can point to on a map, all those en dashes you carry help you form new homes everywhere you go. As Naomi says: “Not everything is lost.”

—S. K.

PS: watch the author share her own piece. Read More

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Category Archives: Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Lie to Yourself, What You Will Lose Is Yourself

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: You Will Love Again the Stranger Who Was Your Self

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: The Most Beautiful Part of Your Body Is Where It’s Headed

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Suicide, Wizards, and Cherry Farmers

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: No Feeling Is Final

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Rootless and Rejected

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