{"id":134824,"date":"2019-03-21T13:16:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-21T17:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134824"},"modified":"2019-03-22T12:04:42","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T16:04:42","slug":"poetry-rx-your-absence-has-gone-through-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/21\/poetry-rx-your-absence-has-gone-through-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Rx: Your Absence Has Gone through Me"},"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

\n
\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9ELLIS ROSEN<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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

I am a poet myself; I write about the strength and love my family provides for me, and about my identity as a daughter. A few months ago, I found out that my father has a second family and has been hiding years worth of lies. Since confronting him, he has become offensive, threatening, and hurtful. He refuses to acknowledge what\u2019s happened and insults me instead. Even more than feeling betrayed and rejected, I feel like my sense of self and of reality is crumbling. I keep second-guessing my father and our family\u2019s life together. I would love to read a poem that provides some comfort or affirmation as everything familiar falls apart.<\/em><\/p>\n

With Love,<\/em>
\nFormer Child<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Former Child,<\/p>\n

We are accustomed to thinking of the future as unknown. The past, on the other hand, often feels like a stable coordinate from which any number of futures might be charted. Your father\u2019s betrayals have complicated that clean narrative line from where you\u2019ve been to where you\u2019re going\u2014a line that often constitutes a central pillar of identity. But you are a poet. You have practiced something other than narrative.<\/p>\n

I want to offer you a poem I turn to when the coordinates of my life feel unmoored, not because it directs me to feel more grounded, but because it nourishes the possibility of being exactly where I am, wherever that is: Seamus Heaney\u2019s \u201cPostscript<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

And some time make the time to drive out west
\nInto County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
\nIn September or October, when the wind
\nAnd the light are working off each other<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

I like to think of the poem\u2019s title not so much as a remark at the end of a text, but more in terms of its components: post<\/em>, script<\/em>\u2014what occurs when you are on the other side of how you\u2019ve been writing your story. This story\u2014the one that, for so long, you called truth<\/em>\u2014was a dwelling place. What you grew there is yours, even after you\u2019ve had to move out. Grieve as you need to, but don\u2019t relinquish what you\u2019ve made.<\/p>\n

You signed this letter \u201cFormer Child,\u201d which indicates that you\u2019re connecting with a self who has been harmed by the very person supposed to protect your needs while holding space for the ways you\u2019ve grown up. Parent yourself now. You know how. Bring your love and your strength forward to new relationships, including, first, your relationship with yourself.<\/p>\n

Useless to think you\u2019ll park and capture it
\nMore thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
\nA hurry through which known and strange things pass
\nAs big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
\nAnd catch the heart off guard and blow it open.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cUseless to think you\u2019ll park and capture it \/ More thoroughly.\u201d Don\u2019t try now to fix this moment into a future past. You don\u2019t need to rewrite your whole narrative now. Just be present. Practice noticing: how the wind feels, how the light looks. Just be here now, wholly, with your blown-open heart. Beauty will reenter. You will find yourself there.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

My best friend of thirty years died this past March. Life is just not the same without her. I have a wonderful husband and other friends, but she was my person.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d love a poem\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks for what you do,
\n<\/em>Missing My Friend<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Missing My Friend,<\/p>\n

As I write this, I am listening to Jason Moran\u2019s \u201cCradle Song<\/a>.\u201d At the beginning, the song is a simple piano melody, punctuated by the sound of a pencil. As the song continues, the pencil falls away. The piano\u2019s music grows surer, more elaborate, soars. When Moran was a child, his mother would sit with him during his piano lessons, taking notes. In Moran\u2019s song, the pencil is at once a recording of his late mother and a note back to her written from his present, as a brilliant musician in the world\u2014a life that has everything to do with what she made possible.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m so sorry to hear that your friend, your person, has passed away. I recognize in your note her enduring presence in your life. For you, a short poem by W.\u2009S. Merwin, a remarkable poet, as well as an antiwar and ecological activist, who died last week. The poem is called \u201cSeparation<\/a>.\u201d It reads in its entirety:<\/p>\n

Your absence has gone through me
\nLike thread through a needle.
\nEverything I do is stitched with its color.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On one hand, Merwin\u2019s poem speaks to the ways that the loss of a loved one can feel all-consuming. On the other, \u201cSeparation\u201d reminds me that loss is a change in the shape a relationship takes and that, like all revision, loss is a creative act.<\/p>\n

Like Moran\u2019s \u201cCradle Song,\u201d Merwin\u2019s \u201cSeparation\u201d recalls how the death of a loved one is a profound loss and how we carry it forward. The shapes your own future might take offer your friend ways to live on\u2014not only because you hold her with you, but also because she made you possible. I hope that amid all else you find a kind of company\u2014an invitation\u2014there.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

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

I know that it is an unhealthy trope, the idea that an artist (in this case, a writer) must be tortured and sad to produce good art. But it\u2019s hard not to be seduced by a good \u201cgut punch\u201d line in an insightful poem, or be drawn in by the heartbreaking twist in a love poem\u2014including in your own work. Still, I want to channel some positive emotions for my art: for example, I now love a boy that loves me back just as kindly, and I want to put my joy into words but cannot seem to find any. Do you have a good poem to show that art can come from happy places?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\n<\/em>Happiness-Induced Writer\u2019s Block<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Dear Happiness-Induced Writer\u2019s Block,<\/p>\n

Oh, I love this question! I am so happy that you are in love and that you want to offer your joy to your writing! I\u2019m sitting in a gorgeous flood of joyful poems, thinking about which one I most want to share with you. In the very first installation of Poetry Rx<\/a>, Sarah wrote about the poem that came immediately to mind: Ross Gay\u2019s \u201cCatalog of Unabashed Gratitude,\u201d from his collection by that same name. Gay is a poet and a gardener and has a genius touch for allowing beauty to bloom. \u201cI want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude \/ over every last thing,\u201d Gay writes. And he does\u2014he holds his generosity like a magnifying glass over the world\u2019s beauty. The form of the ode enlarges love by attending to it. Even elegies, I think, are often forged in joy\u2014but contoured by the fact that what we love cannot last.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s James Wright\u2019s \u201cToday I was Happy, so I made this Poem<\/a>\u201d: \u201cI see that it is impossible to die.\u201d And Li-Young Lee<\/a>: \u201cThere are days we live \/ as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy \/ to joy to joy\u2026\u201d And Osip Mandelstam<\/a>: \u201cMyself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree. \/ It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power \/ And it was all aimed at me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the poem I most want to offer you today, is not so much about joy as it is coauthored by joy. For you, Vera Pavlova\u2019s \u201cI am in love, hence free to live<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

I am in love, hence free to live
\nby heart, to ad lib as I caress.
\nA soul is light when full,
\nheavy when vacuous.
\nMy soul is light. She is not afraid
\nto dance the agony alone,
\nfor I was born wearing your shirt,
\nwill come from the dead with that shirt on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Love, Pavlova\u2019s poem recalls, gives you the strength to move further into being alive\u2014to risk more, whether that may look like. It\u2019s okay\u2014beautiful even\u2014to walk into this new mode of writing without knowing what you will find there. Love will catch you.<\/p>\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

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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