October 4, 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, Sarah Kay is on the line.

Dear Poets,

This year, I have seen so much death. Losing the people I love used to be my biggest fear, but now I have lost so many so quickly that I find myself with a new one. I jump into problem-solving zombie mode every time it happens. There’s so much to do and so many people to take care of. Last week, a poet I knew killed himself. I spent the night comforting every friend he had and, in the middle of comforting, I realized how used to this I had become. I know just the right thing to say or not say, just how long to hold the silence before it had to break. I am an expert at helping others deal with the grief death brings. Now, my biggest fear is that I will get too accustomed to tragedy, to suicides, to death. I am scared of getting used to losing. I am scared of losing all this pain. I don’t ever want to stop feeling. I don’t ever want to get used to it. Is there a poem for it, any words that will stop this from happening?

Too Used to Death Read More

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September 20, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Poor Deluded Human, You Seek My Heart

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,

I am the daughter of two wonderful, loving Chinese parents, and I have a supportive boyfriend and caring friends. But still, I somehow find myself dealing with daily feelings of anxiety and inadequacy. I am a humanities major with an uncertain future and less-than-average academics, and I am faced with continual feelings of shame and embarrassment about the lack of effort I put into my studies. My parents are intellectual giants who came from nothing and worked their way up into high-earning jobs so that they could give me the best possible education and life, and I feel as if I have squandered the opportunities they have worked so hard for me to have. To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices, and are constantly caring and understanding. How do I deal with my fears that I will never be able to honor my parents by becoming more successful than them?

Sincerely,
Dutiful Daughter

Dear DD,

“To make things worse, they are extremely supportive of my choices” is such a strange and quintessentially immigrant utterance—I am smiling with affectionate recognition. What to do with the guilt we feel that our lives are often so much easier than the lives of our parents? How can any of our fears, anxieties, lonelinesses be worth mentioning when theirs have been so great? For you (and often, for myself), I prescribe Hai-Dang Phan’s “My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edition (1981).”

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September 6, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Your Naked Back in the Mirror

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.

©Ellis Rosen

Dear Poets,

My family and I are what the newspaper headlines would deem immigrants. Living in a city where people of my kind are under constant scrutiny and threat has caused me to lose hope. I used to find solace in the community of poetry nights until I found myself subject to the same questioning stares there because of my headscarf. There are small acts of hatred that take place that don’t make their way into newspapers. My parents drop me off at university and their breath is suspended in the air until I text them, ‘reached alright.’ And again, they hold their breath till I walk through the front door at night.

I no longer think about my big dreams of writing or research. I pray for safety, for me and for everyone in need of it right now. Do you have a poem for this? For this feeling of being like a lost spaceship, floating with no promise of a return?

Sincerely,
Lost in a Big Crowd and Scared

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August 30, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: This Gloom is Someone Else’s

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.

Dear Poets,

My birthday is coming. It’s not a “big” one—not twenty-one or fifty or a hundred or any other special number—just a regular number in the middle. Honestly, there’s no particular reason I should feel this year is so much more painful than others, but I do. I’m not sure I can describe the feeling—it’s not something to wear purple for, per se. It’s more of a lost feeling: How did I get old? This body is mine and yet surely must also be someone else’s. I want to age gracefully and, most of all, I do not want to become invisible—to myself or anyone else. And I could use some encouragement, a vote of confidence, to know that this is possible. Is there a poem that could help?

Sincerely,
Me

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August 23, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Like Bread in a Stay-Fresh Wrapper

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,

I was in an abusive relationship for several years, and two years ago today the man I’d been involved with died by suicide. We had not been in touch for a long while before his death, but I’m still not through dealing with all the damage from our relationship and completely unequipped to know how to grieve him. Is there a poem that might help me make more sense of an overwhelming amount of conflicting emotions?

Sincerely,
Still Not Over It

Dear Still Not Over It,

I thought a long time about which poem to prescribe you, and kept coming up against the reality that no poem would precisely correspond to your exact experience (unless you wrote it!), nor would any poem help you “make more sense” of a situation that is aggressively hostile to sense—a man claimed to love you but he hurt you, you freed yourself but he died and now you need to learn how to grieve him despite his abuse. It’s profoundly irrational, which is to say, it’s profoundly human and true.

I give you Kevin Prufer’s “Black Woods.” The poem ends:

Listen to yourself. Did he step inside you?
Listen to yourself. Is he trapped inside you?
Let go of me. Is it black woods in there?

It seems to me a poem deeply invested in exploring our inherently illogical response to grief. The chilling, unforgettable closing repetition of “Listen to yourself” is, of course, what the griever can never do, not really, so overpowering is the noise of grief itself. The open, bracketed spaces remind me of Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho—here are moments too thundering for history to keep them, the silences not silences at all, but rather typographical concessions to the failure of a medium.

This sounds like an excruciating situation, and I hope so much you have people in your life with whom you can speak about it. Prufer’s poem offers a glimpse of the irrational heart of grief warring with the omnipresent pressure to conceal it, to move beyond it and once more conform to convention. I hope you find the freedom to argue, grapple, and grow with the grief you’re experiencing.

—KA

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Read More

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August 16, 2018

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Nevertheless, Live

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,

Is there a word for the feeling when you know the wise thing to do, but you, always a fool, do the opposite? I wish I knew the word—I would have said it when this boy slept a night by my side. I would have said it when I first lost him, and then six months later, he came back for me. I would have said it, even if only a whisper, when I fell for him all over again, even harder than before. And now I would repeat it to myself, like a benediction, as I face the possibility of him drifting away.

That is the feeling for which I need a poem. The feeling when you know that he’s going to leave, and you’re remembering how hard it was to lose him the first time, and this time you’re in deeper, and you know you should cut it off now to reduce the heartache a little, but you foolishly continue to hope. The feeling every lover has, before sadness makes them wise.

Sincerely,
A Hopeful Fool

Dear Hopeful Fool,

I love your letter. What you’re seeking—a word for a feeling you know but have no language for—gets exactly at one reason I hold poems close: not necessarily to choose differently but to experience differently. For you, Mary Szybist’s “The Troubadours Etc.”:

Just for this evening, let’s not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens
promising, promising.
At least they had ideas about love.

I think one word for what you describe is the one you use: hope. But hope’s wisdom buckles when the vision it was pinned to dissipates. So here is a sturdier word: faith. Faith’s intelligence is not bound to the outcome of any single situation; faith is something surer that you build when you choose the not-knowing. Faith marks an interior constitution, a way of being that says more about the self than it says about any external event. “At least they had ideas about love.” Read More

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Category Archives: Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Pain Will Become Interesting

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Poor Deluded Human, You Seek My Heart

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Your Naked Back in the Mirror

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: This Gloom is Someone Else’s

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Like Bread in a Stay-Fresh Wrapper

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Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx: Nevertheless, Live

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