{"id":123824,"date":"2018-04-05T11:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=123824"},"modified":"2018-04-05T11:39:45","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:39:45","slug":"poetry-rx-suicide-wizards-and-cherry-farmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/05\/poetry-rx-suicide-wizards-and-cherry-farmers\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Rx: Suicide, Wizards, and Cherry Farmers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our column Poetry Rx<\/a>, readers\u00a0write in<\/a>\u00a0with a specific emotion, and our resident poets\u2014Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz\u2014take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Poets,<\/em><\/p>\n

A very, very dear friend of mine committed suicide on\u00a0April 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\u2019t able to help\u2014even though, being a suicide and mental-health advocate myself, I know there are some things you can\u2019t help. I don\u2019t 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?<\/em><\/p>\n

Do you have a poem for this? I badly need one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Still Struggling\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Struggling,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m so sorry to hear about your friend. His death was, of course, not your fault; you\u2019re simply not that powerful. (Nobody is.) He was ill and succumbed to his illness. You know this intellectually, but I\u2019m aware that sometimes, moment to moment, it can be difficult to access that knowing. Before getting into the poem stuff, I want to give you (and anybody reading this) the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number: 1-800-273-8255. Poems can do a lot, but if you\u2019re struggling with suicidal ideation or depression, you need to be talking to a professional, not a poet.<\/p>\n

Growing up, I always thought it strange that when I was sad and miserable, I wanted to immerse myself in sad and miserable art instead of happy art that would improve my mood. It seemed like this was the norm for everyone else too. I never saw anyone get broken up with and then listen to \u201cWeird Al\u201d Yankovic on repeat for days or drive home from a funeral weeping to Lonely Island. I thought this was some weird masochistic streak common to all of humanity\u2014when wounded, we sought art that would dig its thumbs into our wound.<\/p>\n

Now I understand this phenomenon differently. I think, when wounded, we seek solace from others who have suffered the same wounds and lived on to create in spite of them. In Erika L. S\u00e1nchez\u2019s \u201cSix Months After Contemplating Suicide<\/a>,\u201d we hear the voice of a speaker who has known, intimately, real psychic pain. Her poem opens:<\/p>\n

\n
Admit it\u2009\u2014<\/div>\n
you wanted the end<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
with a serpentine
\ngreed. How to negotiate<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
that strangling<\/div>\n
mist, the fibrous<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
whisper?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
To cease to exist<\/div>\n
and to die<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
are two different things entirely.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
But you knew this,<\/div>\n
didn\u2019t you?<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The title situates us in a space of survival, in the clarity of after<\/em>. But through the field of the poem, we whirl against each texture of the through<\/em>\u2014\u201cYou lit a flame \/\/ to your shadow,\u201d \u201cyou cupped a goat\u2019s face \/\/ and kissed \/ his trembling horns.\u201d This is the way out, Orpheus\u2019s journey back to the upper world. \u201cThe ghost?\u201d Sanchez writes. \u201cIt fell prostrate, \/ passed through you \/\/ like a swift \/ and generous storm.\u201d I pray this passes through you, too, that you can honor your friend by saving what he could not.<\/p>\n

\u2014KA<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Dear Poets,<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m twenty-four and have been freshly flung into a postgraduate world. I think a lot about adulthood (mostly about what it means\u2014it still feels like a foreign word to me), but I also think a lot about my inner child. Last year, I taught ninth graders as a student teacher. I can attest to the special kind of wonder and imagination that fills even the younger side of adolescence. As I move into what society says should be my early \u201cadult\u201d years, years commonly associated with doubt and struggle, I want to continue to nourish my own childlike capacity to wonder, imagine, and make magic of the world. Do you have a poem that contains (or seeks to liberate) that particular perspective?<\/em><\/p>\n

Signed,<\/em>
\n I Want to Be a Wizard When I Grow Up<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Wizard,<\/p>\n

So much of the project of poetry is to return us to the state you describe. The Russian defamiliarist Viktor Shklovsky argued for art that \u201crecovered the sensation of life,\u201d famously commanding artists to \u201cmake the stone stony.\u201d How do you return to the stone the essence of its stoniness when we all see thousands of stones every day? How do we actually experience the stone, the tree, the bird, the Grecian urn instead of having them merely signify themselves? Children are incredible at this. When a two-year-old puts a pebble in her mouth, we are immediately reminded that yes, pebbles do look an awful lot like food! We are shaken free from our knowledge of the stone, and the stone\u2019s stoniness is restored.<\/p>\n

There is an entire contemporary canon of wonder poetry to draw from, poets like Ross Gay and Fanny Howe and francine j. harris and Heather Christle and Carl Phillips who wonder at nature and living and language and the mind and the body and and and \u2026 But for your specific question, \u201cAstonishment,\u201d by Wis\u0142awa Szymborska<\/a>, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanis\u0142aw Bara\u0144czak, leaped to mind. It begins,<\/p>\n

Why after all this one and not the rest?
\nWhy this specific self, not in a nest,
\nbut a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
\nNot topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
\nWhy on earth now, on Tuesday of all days,
\nand why on earth, pinned down by this star\u2019s pin?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Few poems I\u2019ve read so perfectly capture the profound strangeness of being, defamiliarize sentience itself so eloquently or with such charm. \u201cWhat made me fill myself with me so squarely?\u201d Szymborska asks. As I moved into adulthood, as I segued from teaching middle-school students to teaching college students, Szymborska became a direct line back to that elemental wonder, my powerful and endlessly reliable defamiliarist engine. Whenever the plaque of adulthood seems to have hardened the membrane between bewilderment and me, I return to her. For me, this poem has often been the \u201cmystical moist night-air\u201d to the world\u2019s \u201clearn\u2019d astronomer.\u201d<\/a> I hope it might become that for you too.<\/p>\n

\u2014KA<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Dear Poets,<\/em><\/p>\n

I traveled to a big city several hours away to meet up with a man I\u2019ve been in love with and haven\u2019t seen in a long while. He never showed up. I haven\u2019t heard from him since either. I don\u2019t know how to feel at all, and so I was hoping one of you might have a poem to guide me through it a little.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks,
\n<\/em>Spurned and Alone<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Spurned,<\/p>\n

I read your question and immediately thought of \u201cThe Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer<\/a>,\u201d by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. She writes,<\/p>\n

\n
I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said<\/div>\n
Okay. Couldn\u2019t hurt to try?\u00a0<\/em>and shuffled back to his roadside stand<\/div>\n
to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made<\/div>\n
a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would\u2019ve been<\/div>\n
full of pies, tartlets, turnovers\u2014so much jubilee.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In this instance, you\u2019re the cherry farmer. Even though it stings now, the clarity of your \u201cOkay. Couldn\u2019t hurt to try\u201d moment will relieve you of any future anxiety about what could have been. You were bold, you were spurned, but you gave it a shot. Now you can return to your life and move forward. He, however, will forever be wondering about the \u201cpies, tartlets, turnovers,\u201d the jubilee he might have had.<\/p>\n

\u2014KA<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Read more\u00a0Poetry Rx here.<\/a>\u00a0Need your own poem? Write to us<\/a>!<\/i><\/p>\n

Kaveh Akbar\u2019s poems have appeared recently in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0New<\/span>\u00a0Yorker<\/span>,\u00a0Poetry, t<\/em>he<\/em>\u00a0New<\/span>\u00a0York Times,\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>Nation, and elsewhere. His first book,\u00a0<\/em>Calling a Wolf a Wolf, was published by Alice James in the U.S. and Penguin in the UK. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at\u00a0Purdue<\/span>\u00a0University and in the low-residency M.F.A. programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our column Poetry Rx, readers\u00a0write in\u00a0with a specific emotion, and our resident poets\u2014Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz\u2014take 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\u00a0April 1 last year. I was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1426,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33114],"tags":[33580,33583,19555,33582,24349,2011,33584,33585,30306,33586,16484,33581,4152,6150],"class_list":["post-123824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-rx","tag-aimee-nezhukumatathil","tag-astonishment","tag-carl-phillips","tag-clare-cavanagh","tag-erika-l-sanchez","tag-fanny-howe","tag-francine-j-harris","tag-heather-christle","tag-ross-gay","tag-six-months-after-contemplating-suicide","tag-stanislaw-baranczak","tag-the-woman-who-turned-down-a-date-with-a-cherry-farmer","tag-viktor-shklovsky","tag-wislawa-szymborska"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoetry Rx: Suicide, Wizards, and Cherry Farmers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Is there a poem for getting over the guilt of a friend\u2019s suicide? 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