{"id":134036,"date":"2019-02-28T13:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T18:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134036"},"modified":"2019-02-28T13:36:52","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T18:36:52","slug":"poetry-rx-i-cannot-give-you-an-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/28\/poetry-rx-i-cannot-give-you-an-ending\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Rx: I Cannot Give You an Ending"},"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>

\u00a9Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

Dear Poets,\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I recently got into a relationship\u00a0with a wonderful, intelligent, caring man. I had been holding out on dating for a while, I was waiting for something to really click. Things are clicking with this person, but I am having a hard time deciphering if this is the kind of love I\u2019ve been\u00a0searching for.\u00a0You know, the\u00a0kind of love they write\u00a0grand poems about. Maybe that type of love doesn\u2019t exist, or maybe I am destined to be unsatisfied in matters of the heart. I know that love comes in many forms, but I can\u2019t help being so afraid of ordinary love. Searching for a poem that offers insight into proving (or disproving) the old chestnut \u201cwhen you know you know.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\n<\/em>Defeatist Romantic<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Dear Defeatist Romantic,<\/p>\n

I always feel a little sad on my birthday. Even when the day is beautiful, ideas about time and progress converge into this nagging feeling that where I am is not exactly where I should <\/em>be. But holding my life up to some nebulous standard doesn\u2019t get me closer to anything I want; it only diminishes my ability to see the expanse where I already am. Questioning is crucial, reflection is important, but trafficking in lack can obscure the wide possibility your present offers. If you are always looking toward an elsewhere, you may one day arrive there without the capacity to recognize it.<\/p>\n

For you, one of my all-time favorite poems, in which the speaker, his vision deepened by time, looks back at the gorgeous, ordinary labor of great love: Robert Hayden\u2019s \u201cThose Winter Sundays<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

Sundays too my father got up early
\nand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
\nthen with cracked hands that ached
\nfrom labor in the weekday weather made
\nbanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That \u201ctoo\u201d in the opening line undoes me. Such a small, unassuming word, carrying with it the week\u2019s six work-filled days. The poet\u2019s touch is humble, like the father who doesn\u2019t parade his exhaustion, but instead rises early to warm the house for his family. I like to think of the \u201ctoo\u201d\u2014that immaculate craft\u2014as the speaker\u2019s inheritance. The poem becomes possible when he relinquishes his ideas about what love should look like\u2014ideas that precluded him from recognizing his father\u2019s gestures.<\/p>\n

Speaking indifferently to him,
\nwho had driven out the cold
\nand polished my good shoes as well.
\nWhat did I know, what did I know
\nof love\u2019s austere and lonely offices?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can\u2019t tell you whether this relationship with a wonderful, intelligent, caring man fills you in the ways you need, but I can tell you that you that by holding the love you have against a preconceived idea about what love should be, you risk missing the beautiful forms already in your life.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

Dear Poet-on-Duty,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Two years ago, something terrible happened to me. It is something that happens to a lot of women my age who go off to college, in much worse ways to most of them than to me, and yet still\u2014something terrible was done to me by someone I thought I trusted. I have spent these two years trying to recover, to heal, to find life and ambition and bravery again, and I see a therapist and take my meds and call my mother and go to bed early and I still feel like I have been marooned alone on the island of my leftover body.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are poems and stories about rape, but the language always feels hollow or flat to me. The stories that end in anger and persistence and resistance don\u2019t feel true. Justice did not happen, though I tried; I don\u2019t feel a need to speak up any more than I have already done. The story did not get a perfect ending. I just want to know that there is, somewhere, someday, some ending for\u00a0me\u00a0that is good even if it is not beautiful. I wish I had a poem for this vast, weird sorrow that lives inside me, for feeling like I don\u2019t know how to heal while all the time moving onward toward it anyway, and still having so very far to go.<\/em><\/p>\n

Is there a poem for this?<\/em><\/p>\n

With much love,
\n<\/em>Still Stuck<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Still Stuck,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sorry this happened to you, and I\u2019m glad to know you\u2019re seeking many forms of support. A poem works best, I think, in an ecosystem of care. Oh, how your letter resonated with me. Recently, I\u2019ve been chafing against the word survivor <\/em>when it\u2019s been handed to me to name my own experience. Survivor<\/em> feels like a narrative when what I need is a poem, riddled with silence and absence and not-knowing. It feels like survivor<\/em>, when imposed, anxiously insists on the present\u2019s triumph: you\u2019re past that now, right?<\/em> It can be lonely there, in that aftermath, even though people so often seem to want to deny it. I love that you\u2019ve asked for a poem as company. I want to offer you George Abraham\u2019s \u201cEssay on Submission<\/a>,\u201d a poem filled with imperfect endings, which are, seen differently, beginnings that bring their pasts with them:<\/p>\n

Having ebbed in the disbelief of it instead of its weight.<\/p>\n

Stone-tiled the floor the blood a trickling fire confessional.<\/p>\n

Here the ocean metaphor refused.<\/p>\n

He tore me shut & seeping no vastness.<\/p>\n

To marvel or hide in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sometimes, if you move past the period at the end of the line, past the blank space of the line-stanza break, cohesive sense returns. More often, meaning slips, proliferates. And isn\u2019t that, actually, how it always was? The body can no longer sustain the fiction that it only gets better.<\/p>\n

…histories like this cannot.<\/p>\n

Be known let alone escaped even the one.<\/p>\n

Where i set fire to my colonizer i can afford neither.<\/p>\n

Reclamation nor reconciliation<\/p>\n

No.<\/p>\n

Unfragmented i cannot give you an ending.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no guarantee in these lines but, in the uncertainty, there is truth. And in truth, there is company. The end-stopped lines and ample white space dislodge standard ways of reading. When I read this poem aloud, my breath is hitched where the punctuation jars sense. Sometimes, something happens that ruptures the syntax of our living. Sometimes, there is no language there. Abraham\u2019s poem has offered me an antidote to loneliness in that space. It hope it might offer you that, too.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

\u00a0<\/em>Full disclosure: I am a bit odd. I admit it. I\u2019m good with it. I am an only child and an introvert by nature. I love the house when it is quiet, when my daughters are in bed. I wake up in a fog of dreams and carry them with me as long as can, through the morning routine, through the school drop-off, through the drive to work, and even as the day starts and my boss is calling, I am still there, in the company of a great many imaginary friends.<\/em><\/p>\n

My daughters are just as dreamy as I am, but they are also present and energetic and happy among their friends. I have to work at playdates and social events\u2014the introvert in me groans a bit, but I know it is important. I want them to have what I never did: a tribe.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I do not have many friends, and the few good ones who love me, oddness and all, are at a geographical distance. I talked to my father the other night, and through the FaceTime flickers, he told me what I already know: that I am isolated. I would fix it if I could, if I knew how. My mind feels so fractured these days, and I have to fight for the quiet moments. It is more and more difficult for me to send pieces of myself into the world, since it never seems to go well. I have not done any of the things I dreamed of doing, and I have done other things I never imagined were possible. But there is a sadness that I cannot shake, and a loneliness. I am most at home in the company of books, but I know less about poetry. I would be grateful for any lines you can offer.<\/em><\/p>\n

With much gratitude and much admiration,<\/em><\/p>\n

A Bit Odd in Virginia<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear A Bit Odd in Virginia,<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve come to the right place! Mary Ruefle writes: \u201cIt is the first experience you ever had of reading a decent poem: \u2018Oh, somebody else is lonely, too!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

I feel such kinship with you. I, too, find such joy in the imaginative space solitude grants. I cherish the title of Bob Kaufman\u2019s poetry collection Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness<\/a><\/em> because it reminds me that to be alone and to be lonely are not the same\u2014though sometimes they overlap. But then, I am reminded that I do delight in a certain kind of company. Rainer Maria Rilke writes<\/a>: \u201cTo know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.\u201d You know now that you need to join in. That knowing is a gift your solitude has given you. What a rich inner life you\u2019ve developed to offer the world.<\/p>\n

For you, Dionisio Mart\u00ednez\u2019s \u201cFlood: Years of Solitude<\/a>:\u201d<\/p>\n

To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.
\nTo the one at the back of the empty bus.
\nTo the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall.<\/p>\n

To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past.
\nTo the one who loses with the deck he marked.
\nTo those who are destined to inherit the meek.<\/p>\n

To us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The poem is a toast and an address. The accumulation of solitudes have produced a gathering.<\/p>\n

Keep going. You have the model of your daughters, the beauty of your efforts, and the unfolding gift of your lush interior life. If reaching out to others doesn\u2019t \u201cgo well,\u201d that\u2019s just information. That\u2019s okay. It\u2019s practice, necessary searching. Be gentle with yourself. Keep trying. You will find your people.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/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":"

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