{"id":130155,"date":"2018-10-18T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T13:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130155"},"modified":"2018-10-18T12:23:51","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T16:23:51","slug":"poetry-rx-a-love-poem-without-cliches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/18\/poetry-rx-a-love-poem-without-cliches\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Rx: A Love Poem without Clich\u00e9s"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our column Poetry Rx, 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,\u00a0Claire Schwartz is on the line.<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

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

I am one of you. I have been for a while. I am also jaded and worldly and often write with plenty of saltiness, irony, and smarty-pants-ness (enough to be taken seriously). I teach my students to \u201cavoid cliches like the plague.\u201d I tell them to keep their crushes out of their poems at all costs. I tell them to find new words for new feelings and to always surprise themselves with what they pen and present to others. But lately, I\u2019ve fallen in love. I\u2019ve fallen in love and all I have are platitudes. Percy Shelley is not helpful. W. B. Yeats is not helpful. Christian Wiman is too sad. Most of the contemporary poets I read are too angry or skeptical for what it is I actually feel\u2014relief and an overwhelming joy that I have found a human such as the one who last week surprised me with the delivery of a baby pumpkin (a baby pumpkin, poets!) just because.<\/em><\/p>\n

Give me fresh eyes. How do I write of such happiness and adoration while \u2026 \u201cavoiding clich\u00e9s like the plague.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Yours,
\n<\/em>Dumbstruck Poet<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Dumbstruck Poet,<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have platitudes. You have a baby pumpkin! And you do have fresh eyes. Love gives them to you. What you need now is to give yourself permission. Finding ways to wrap this ineffable feeling in language requires innovation. Words can\u2019t ever entirely hold that thing, not really. That\u2019s why there are so many poems trying to say, I love.\u00a0E.E. Cummings<\/a>: \u201clove is more thicker than forget \u2026\u201d June Jordan<\/a>: \u201cI SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED \/ GENOCIDE TO STOP\u201d Ross Gay<\/a>: \u201cHere is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.\u201d There are so many shapes to that failure. There are so many things of beauty created in that attempt.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cultivate a reciprocal relationship between your art and your expansive living. Sometimes language will surprise you into new experiences. Sometimes, experience will surprise you into new language. In Heather Christle\u2019s whirlwind work, it feels to me like that scrim between language and other forms of experience has been gorgeously exploded\u2014everything known handed back to me anew. For you, her poem \u201cWallpaper Everywhere Even the Ceiling<\/a>,\u201d the torqued syntax of which jolts us out of the familiar:<\/p>\n

What is that thing that can happen A garden
\nis that thing You are walking around and sudden
\nOh no dahlias You know that feeling \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When you told your students to keep their crushes out of their poems, did you believe you already knew what you would find there? I imagine you might have warned your students not to write a flower-laden poem about love. But have you ever read anything like this before?<\/p>\n

\u2026zinnias dahlias
\nunabashed and blooming like another thing that can
\nhappen love That is just an example Love is this
\nthing an example of love is the wind moves the warm
\nair square along a face and then love I love you tethered
\nlike a rose sudden Oh no love and all alive in the garden<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Irony affords a self-protective distance. Joy can be very serious. To risk losing something you love, to love the world enough to gift it that vulnerability\u2014that is the work.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

I\u2019m a student in a demanding program and I\u2019m taking a year off school due to depression. I had hoped to make the most of my newfound free time by reconnecting with the hobbies I used to love. Instead, I\u2019ve been off for months and have barely gotten out of bed.\u00a0I\u2019ve had all the free time in the world and yet could hardly care enough to spend it on worthwhile activities. I feel I\u2019ve lost my sense of direction and don\u2019t want to waste the rest of this year just lying around. Please give me a poem to bring me back to my motivation and sense of self.<\/em><\/p>\n

Love,<\/em>
\nTired of Being Tired<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Tired of Being Tired,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry you\u2019re experiencing depression, and I\u2019m glad to hear that you\u2019re taking the healing time you need. I hope you\u2019re also seeking other forms of support. A poem is not a therapist. A poem is not medication. A poem is one site of interior fortification that can, in my experience, work alongside other forms of support. In that spirit, I want to give you N\u00e2zim Hikmet\u2019s \u201cThings I Didn\u2019t Know I Loved<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

it\u2019s 1962 March 28th
\n<\/sup>I\u2019m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
\nnight is falling
\nI never knew I liked
\nnight descending like a tired bird on a smokey wet plain<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAll the free time in the world\u201d sounds glorious in theory, but it\u2019s an impossible unit to work with. And it\u2019s an illusion. Even the world doesn\u2019t have all the time. For the speaker, awareness of time catalyzes the journey into what they didn\u2019t know they loved; it is precisely the knowledge that time is fleeting that sharpens the speaker\u2019s noticing.<\/p>\n

I just remembered the stars
\nI love them too
\nwhether I\u2019m watching them from below
\nor whether I\u2019m flying at their side<\/p>\n

I have some questions for the cosmonauts
\nwere the stars much bigger
\ndid they look like huge jewels on black velvet
\nor apricots on orange<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

my heart was in my mouth looking at them
\nthey are our endless desire to grasp things
\nseeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
\nI never knew I loved the cosmos<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To reconnect with motivation is a beautiful aspiration, but it\u2019s a formless task. You cannot get there from here. Try instead beginning where you are. Look out the window. What do you see? Where does that sight lead you to? What do you love? What you love will lead you back.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

I am in my first year of community college and I\u2019ve come to know it as a strange halfway place, like a train station. It\u2019s a good place to get you where you want to go, but it\u2019s nowhere to build a life. Everyone I meet moves away after a few months. People don\u2019t go to the train station to make friends. I understand now the nature of this place, but I struggle with a loneliness that seems incurable and I still have a year and a half left here. Do you have a poem for the feeling when you\u2019re waiting for your train to come, but you know it\u2019s still a long way off? When you want to build, but you know nothing you make will last? When you\u2019re faced with a year of loneliness, but can\u2019t bear the thought of it?<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\n<\/em>Waiting for My Train<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Dear Waiting for My Train,<\/p>\n

You\u2019re right. A train station is an unusual venue for making friends. But I love watching people in train stations: greeting each other after a long separation, idly flipping through a magazine, or rushing past you, face etched with purpose. There\u2019s something beautiful in those crossings, and there are so many ways of being that happen in those itinerant spaces. Those spaces can absolutely make you lonely as well. Presence in a place defined by contingency is difficult. Sometimes, the knowledge of an elsewhere is necessary nourishment\u2014not to refuse where you are, but to steady yourself to more fully receive the particular forms of immediacy offered there.<\/p>\n

For you, Nomi Stone\u2019s \u201cWaiting for Happiness<\/a>,\u201d which in putting language to the beauty of what\u2019s coming, nourishes the present:<\/p>\n

Dog knows when friend will come home
\nbecause each hour friend\u2019s smell pales,
\nair paring down the good smell
\nwith its little diamond. It means I miss you
\nO I miss you, how hard it is to wait
\nfor my happiness, and how good when
\nit arrives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love how dog knows that friend\u2019s scent dissipating in the air is not a disappearance, but the promise of a new emergence. I love how Stone reminds us that loneliness can map the distance to somewhere else.<\/p>\n

Here we are in our bodies,
\nripe as avocados, softer, brightening
\nwith latencies like a hot, blue core
\nof electricity: our ankles knotted to our
\ncalves by a thread, womb sparking
\nwith watermelon seeds we swallowed
\nas children, the heart again badly hurt, trying
\nand failing.<\/p>\n

Keep going. Happiness is coming.<\/p>\n

But it is almost five says
\nthe dog. It is almost five.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Want more? Read earlier\u00a0installments of\u00a0Poetry Rx<\/a>.\u00a0Need your own poem?\u00a0Write to us<\/a>!<\/i><\/p>\n

Claire Schwartz is the author of\u00a0<\/em>bound\u00a0(Button Poetry, 2018)<\/em>. Her poetry has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Apogee,<\/em>\u00a0Bennington Review,<\/em>\u00a0The\u00a0Massachusetts Review, and\u00a0<\/em>Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Iowa Review,<\/em>\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em>\u00a0Virginia Quarterly Review,<\/em>\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/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,\u00a0Claire Schwartz is on the line. Dear Poets, I am one of you. I have been for a while. I am also jaded and worldly and often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1418,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33114],"tags":[1184,33585,23569,4981,38995,38996,38967],"class_list":["post-130155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-rx","tag-e-e-cummings","tag-heather-christle","tag-june-jordan","tag-nazim-hikmet","tag-nomi-stone","tag-waiting-for-happiness","tag-wallpaper-everywhere-even-the-ceiling"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoetry Rx: A Love Poem without Clich\u00e9s by Claire Schwartz<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 18, 2018 \u2013 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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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