https://www.feedyourhead.blog/p/a-poem-is-a-thing-that-wounds
A Poem is a Thing that Wounds
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Who Made the World?
Dear Poets,
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
This is the question that Mary Oliver asks at the end of ‘The Summer Day’. We discussed this poem and others this week in an online poetry session and then we wrote in response to the poem.
I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about this poem and others that we discussed.
Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’ and William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ are both poems of wonder and questions.
The Oliver poem celebrates, with trembling awe, the complicated beauty of the world and wonders about the origins of things:
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
Beginning the poem with questions (such as ‘Who made the world?’) highlights the narrator’s almost childlike standpoint which leads to a wisdom framed with more questions at the end of the poem.
The whole poem exudes a sense of amazement, and at the center of the poem’s bewildered gratitude is the statement: ‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.’
There is something endearing and engaging about a narrator who admits to not knowing. This line is the gate which opens to the rest of the poem. A sense of being ‘blessed’ follows; although the narrator ‘does not know exactly what prayer is’ she is comfortable using the language of the sacred only after admitting that she doesn’t know how to pray. Somehow conceding that she does not ‘know’ leads to accessing a connection to the divine.
The holiness radiating out of this moment generates questions about transience and spawns that seemingly simple but deeply rich last question, ‘what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?’ This question echoes the last line of James Wright’s poem and also Rilke’s last line in ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’—each of these three last lines express the almost the same idea in different forms. (Contrasting the poems by Wright, Rilke and Oliver led me to wonder about other poems which end with the word ‘life’ and I could only think of one other – ‘Words’ by Sylvia Plath. It’s difficult to pull off the word ‘life’ in a poem but the words resonates deeply in Western culture. I think of the words in Deutoeronmy (Chapter 30, verse 19): Choose life.( וּבָֽחַרְתָּ֙ בַּֽחַיִּ֔ים). If ‘life’ can be placed in a poem in a way where it surprises then it’s worth trying. (See if you can use the word in a poem – preface it with other words that will make its appearance startle the reader).
The richness of Oliver’s question, in part, comes from the word ‘you’ (the first and only time this word is used in the poem) — the reader is challenged, startled into attention, when addressed with ‘you’ and is asked to look at themself. (Consider writing a poem where the word you appears in one of the last lines for the first and only time).
The other word which jumps out of this question is ‘wild’, a surprising and vital choice of language, disquieting, almost frightening. We are told that our lives are ‘wild’ – perhaps the word suggests that our lives, fragile and finite, can be cut off at any moment, like the grasshopper’s. The word also implies that we are not fully in control of what happens to us and to what happens around us. Life is fierce, rough, and phenomenally beautiful and exquisite. And wild – anything can happen at any moment: ineffably joyful moments or devastating and everything in between.
It’s hard to face it, life is brutal: we lose people we love. And we can’t deny the unspeakable injustices and viciousness taking place in the world. And we also can’t deny the utter radiance of the world. The narrator’s admission of not knowing followed by feeling blessed led to this final question: what choices will you attempt to make in your unpredictable, brutal, ecstatic, and finite life? (Try including the word ‘wild’ in a surprising place in one of your own poems!)
There are two other places I can think of (off the top of my head) where the word ‘wild’ appears in American poetry, and I can’t help but mention them here:
In Emily Dickinson’s ‘Wild Nights’, wildness is celebrated – it is awesome and luxurious, connecting and a bit terrifying, intimate and unfamiliar. And in the ending of Gerald Stern’s ‘The Dancing’, it’s a word of awe and horror.
Prompt:
After looking at the Oliver poem and the Blake poem (below) we wrote poems that began with questions and ended with questions and included a line in the center that began ‘I don’t know’.
The Blake poem also asks childlike questions and focuses even more on wildness than the Oliver poem. It is much darker than ‘The Summer Day’ and in many ways more intense: Blake also wonders and asks questions about this world but it seems to me that the speaker is not just feeling awe and wonder but shock. It’s almost as if he can’t believe what he is asking. This shock is expressed in seemingly very simple questions, which I will paraphrase here:
1. How is it possible that a creature as beautiful and ferocious as a tiger exists?
2. Whoever would have created such an animal and how and why?
3. How is it possible that the lamb could have come from the same source as the tiger?
Here is Blak’es ‘The Tyger’ (his choice of spelling):
The Tyger
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
‘The Tyger’ was the first proper poem I ever read. I was probably between eight and ten years old. I loved the image of the brightly coloured animal in the night forests. I didn’t understand much more than that although I probably intuitively absorbed some of its meanings.
Now, when looking at the poem, I am aware of the concentrated passion of Blake’s questions. This is the language of awesome intensity; the poem bristles with language like ‘burning’, ‘fearful’, ‘Seize the fire’, ‘twist the sinews’, ‘dread hand’ and ‘deadly terrors’. The narrator is expressing his absolute astonishment that the ‘immortal hand’ could create a creature of such ferociousness – his questions suggest that the creator might have these same qualities as well, which is terrifying.
He comes to the realization that the lamb, a very different kind of animal, also exists in the same world as the tiger. The origins of these creatures then is both gentle and fierce. How can such a contradiction be? Blake does not pretend to answer his questions. The whole poemis a series of questions that, like the Oliver poem, encourages the reader to step back and look at themselves, at their own animal qualities, at their own ferocity and softness, at their own questions about the sacred and this paradoxical world.
After our discussion about and writings from these poems we looked at the Sharon Olds poem below. It’s a poem that inspires us to look at ourselves, our animal selves, our denials, our loyalties, our attachments, our wild and precious lives and the choices we make (Olds uses the word ‘life’ three times in the poem’s two final lines).
I Could Not Tell
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.
I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,
the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out
into the air, the clear child
gazing about her in the air as I plunged
to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,
the bus skidding to a stop, the driver
jumping out, my daughter laughing
Do it again.
I have never done it
again. I have been very careful.
I have kept an eye on that nice young mother
who suddenly threw herself
off the moving vehicle
onto the stopped street, her life
in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.
Prompt:
We wrote poems with the repeating lines ‘I could not tell’ or ‘I would not tell’ or ‘I will not tell’ or ‘I don’t want to tell’.
Finally, we ended the session by looking at a poem of profound gratitude and comfort. I often like to end the class with a poem of solace. It is possible to write such poems! ‘Small Kindnesses’ is below. It is written by Danusha Laméris. And here is a link to Helena Bonham Carter reading the poem.
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
Breaking into Blossom
What is sentimentality? The great modern American poem, ‘A Blessing’ by James Wright, now studied in most MFA programs, pushes itself to the brink of mawkish sap. In the poem, the narrator and his friend visit two ponies who joyfully come over to them, and there is ‘happiness’ and ‘love’ and blessings. However, the poem defies sentimentality, and in fact, dark undercurrents bubble under the surface.
Here is the poem:
A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Sentimentality seems to reign supreme with at least four over-the-top lines including ‘they can hardly contain their happiness’ and especially ‘they love each other’. Normally, these types of lines would be banned from poetry! They seem to say too much, they are abstract, overly emotional in their language, and impossible to believe. It’s unlikely that ponies ‘can’t contain’ what Wright calls ‘happiness’.
Hyperbolic and self-indulgent sentimentality doesn’t belong in poetry because, by definition, it is a sweetness that lacks depth, and poems are multi-layered. But why and how does sentimentality work—what’s wrong with describing just feeling very happy? I believe that the reason why sentimentality lacks depth is because it hides truths. It pretends and pushes down something real, somber, or painful.
Just when Wright’s poem finds itself on the edge of full-blown sap, the poem is saved: language and lines appear that don’t pretend, that don’t push down. In fact, the central line that holds the whole poem up not only exposes what’s underneath the happiness and love but expresses the opposite of everything the poet seems to be saying.
The crucial beam that supports the poem is the line: ‘There is no loneliness like theirs’. The line comes as a shock. It’s counterintuitive. How can the same creatures who so ‘gladly’ come, who are so filled with happiness and love can also be filled with an unmatched loneliness?
Wright seems to suggest here that we are all lonely. Every person, every creature, each one of us is alone. No matter how connected we are to others, we are each one solitary being. And even as the poem highlights connection (no one is alone in this poem — the speaker has a friend with him, and the ponies have each other, and two groups bond) an inexplicable loneliness permeates.
Alone-ness is a basic element of the human condition. And declaring the loneliness of the ponies (and by extension himself and his friend) after the exuberant outpourings about love and happiness, the narrator is highlighting the fact that we are ultimately alone on another level. We will die or those we love will die before us. Everything will be lost to us eventually: the highway, the friend, grass, ponies, willows. All, except perhaps, love itself.
In the essay ‘On Transience’, Freud describes his young ‘taciturn friend’, a poet actually, melancholy and troubled, tormented by the fact that everything beautiful – nature, the people he loves, and all that he admires – fades away eventually. Freud tries to help his friend by saying that there is a richness in the love we have for the things and people we care about and deeply admire because everything will fade away.
Ben Jonson makes the following futile and heart breaking argument in his poem ‘On My First Son’ (about the death of his seven year old son): the father hopes to never attach himself again to anything the way he had attached himself to his son. He hopes that ‘what he loves’ in the future he’ll ‘never like too much’. It’s too painful to have ‘too much’ affection when loss could happen at any moment. The vulnerable voice of the bereft father is so poignant because the narrator and the reader know that not liking too much what one loves would make one fated to a life of taciturnity like Freud’s friend. And it’s simply an impossible way to live.
Nothing, (at least nothing material) lasts and intuitively knowing that is a part of loving. Think of the Greek gods – they were immortal, and their lives were shallow and petty. Transience gives life and connection depth. Joy and sadness are intertwined. Wright’s poem seems to understand this which is why he can’t mention ‘happiness’ without ‘loneliness’.
And even earlier in the poem, there are hints of sadness: why do the eyes of the ponies ‘darken’ and why does Wright mention that the ponies are ‘alone’ even while together. The subliminal message is that sadness runs like a current under the beauty of the earth, and this sadness enters the bones of all creatures no matter how glad, connected, and happy.
This idea about the marriage of sadness and happiness, simmering inside the poem, bursts in the poem’s last lines: ‘Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.’ It’s an ecstatic ending, an epiphany, almost religious, filled with rapture. However, if we look closely, the language is saying more than describing an experience of joy. Why does Wright mention stepping out of his ‘body’ and why does he use the word ‘break’? Stepping out of one’s body usually denotes the soul leaving the body or dying. And Wright imagines himself breaking, falling apart. This reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s poem which begins,
I can wade Grief –
Whole Pools of it –
I’m used to that –
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet –
And I tip – drunken –
Dickinson’s narrator also ‘breaks’ from happiness. Ironically, grief can be easier to bear than joy. How can we bear joy when we know (it’s the only thing we know) that all will be lost? However, allowing ourselves to attach to the things of this world while knowing the truth about what will happen may allow us to ‘blossom’ like a flower: open, growing, beautiful.
So My Soul Can Sing
Yesterday we looked at two poems: the first was the extraordinary poem ‘Trauma is Not Sacred’ by Canadian poet Kai Cheng Thom. The second was a poem which has, in some ways, become an American classic: ‘Feeling Fucked Up’ by the African American poet Etheridge Knight (1931-1991).
I highly recommend you listen to Pádraig Ó Tuama’s ‘Poetry Unbound’ podcast which featured the Thom poem. You can listen to the poem being read by Ó Tuama.
And you can read more poems by Kai Cheng Thom on her website.
Trauma is Not Sacred
violence is not special pain is not holy suffering does not make angels abuse defines no one you are more than the things that hurt you you are more than the people you have hurt do not make an altar to your woundedness do not make a fetish out of mine a body belongs to no one a memory is not made to be eaten does it titillate you to hear about assault if i told you my story, would you swallow it whole if i confessed my sins would you feed me to the beasts to purge your own i will show you mine if you show me yours we have all seen the darkness now give us the dawn tell me about the joy you keep in the hollow spaces between your bones tell me again how you laughed when you realized that you were not wholly unlovable i’ll tell you again how i cried when my best friend told me that I was not a bad person remember how we used to count the lines on our palms when we were little how we used to try to read the future for its gifts how we used to make lists of the things we would dream of when finally we were free i will make you a list of the things i’m grateful for i will sing you a litany of reasons to be alive i want to know the songs you wake up for in the morning i want to marvel at the unbelievable graciousness of your being i know that i am capable of pouring love like lavender oil into your cupped palms there is forgiveness like honey pooled in the chambers of our hearts you are the thing i am most grateful for all bodies know how to heal themselves given enough time all demons carry a map of heaven and their scars beneath the skin of every history of trauma
there is a love poem waiting deep below
There is so much to say about this poem – its lack of punctuation and capital letters and how it looks on the page and more. We began by speaking about the bold statements in the poem, the statements which make large claims and don’t include images. As poets, we are trained to not trust statements and to favour images over abstractions in poetry. Ezra Pound warned poets: ‘Go in fear of abstractions’. Modern poets embraced Pound’s advice and the poetry he espoused. Pound’s famous Haiku-like poem ‘In a Station at the Metro’ is the perfect example of a poem which relies entirely on image:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound embraced Imagism and suggested that poets needed to move away from the effusive and often non-figurative quality of Victorian literature. But reading Thom’s poem makes me think that perhaps it’s time to let go of the image sometimes and allow statements and ideas back into poetry. Thom successfully makes audacious declarations without hesitation. Poetry is not just about feelings and sensuality but also about ideas.
I also want to point out that many of the statements are phrased in the negative (Trauma is not sacred, violence is not special, etc.) These ‘nots’ create a tension in the poem as if the narrator is arguing with someone who thinks the opposite. My hunch is that the narrator is arguing with herself. All poetry is essentially an argument with the self. As William Butler Yeats wrote, ‘Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.’
I encourage you all (and myself!) to become conscious of the arguments you have with yourself and allow that inner dialogue into your poems. You might consider trying to write a poem that is made up of a dialogue between different parts of yourself, for example. Yeats did this in his poem ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.’ And interestingly, Yeats seems to have ignored Pound’s dictum (‘Go in fear of abstractions’) and ended ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ with some of the most beautiful statements ever written.
*
I am glad we had a chance to begin writing a list poem inspired by Knight’s magnificent list in the second stanza of his poem ‘Feeling Fucked Up’. The list poem genre has a long history and has biblical origins (Let there be light, Let the earth sprout vegetation, etc. – these are rough translations of the lines that appear in the beginning of the Hebrew Bible). You can also find lists in Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and in ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. And in this wonderful poem by Ellen Bass, Because. If the list poem really interests you then you might like to take a look at the book, The List Poem.
The great Ethridge Knight poem speaks for itself. As I said in class, I attended a memorial service for Knight in New York at Teachers & Writers Collaborative where poets and friends of the poet spoke about him and read from his work. There are many wonderful Knight poems, and people read them, but almost every person at that event read ‘Feeling Fucked Up.’ Reading the poem seemed to liberate people – their faces were shining as they read it. The poem reflects a sense that we can be ‘fucked up’ but still love and be loveable. As Thom wrote, ‘we have all seen the darkness now give us the dawn tell me about the joy you keep in the hollow spaces between your bones tell me again how you laughed when you realized that you were not wholly unlovable i’ll tell you again how i cried when my best friend told me that I was not a bad person remember’. Knight’s poem gives us permission to laugh, rage and love simultaneously and to feel that we are ‘not a bad person’ despite it all.
Feeling Fucked Up
Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—
Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing
Troubled Into Their Making: ‘Bees’ and ‘She Had Some Horses’
The late American poet Lucie Brock-Broido wrote, ‘My theory is that a poem is troubled into its making. It’s not like a thing that blooms; it’s a thing that wounds.’
I have been thinking about these words in relation to the discussion we had in our Comfort & Affliction poetry class yesterday about the poems ‘Bees’ by Jean Valentine (1934-2020) and ‘She Had Some Horses’ by Joy Harjo (b. 1951).
I chose to explore these two poems together with the group because I associate them with each other – I didn’t know why. Not until we discussed them. It was instinct. Only after the discussion did I realize how much both poems feel born of wounds, both ‘troubled’ into their making.
On the surface, the poems are wildly different from each other in the most obvious ways. ‘Bees’ is short (ten lines), concise and unadorned, written in uncomplicated and modest sentences. One line simply states these casual words: ‘Another man comes over’. The Harjo poem is longer (45 lines) and expansive, complex, even sprawling. It has an unrestrained quality both in its sometimes wild language and images and long, breathing lines. One single line reads: ‘She had horses who called themselves, “spirit” and kept their voices secret and to themselves.’
I’d like to write a few words about ‘Bees’ and then post the Harjo poem — after reading it, you can draw your own connections and associations between the two poems.
While almost all of Jean Valentine’s poems come from dreams she almost never mentions in the poem that the narrative is a dream. Dreams are murky especially when you wake up and attempt to describe one. But Valentine distils the dream into translucent, vibrant language – reading her poems is like looking at the varied coloured stones at the bottom of a clear lake. She has said, ‘I’m always working with things that I don’t understand – with the unconscious, the invisible. And trying to find a way to translate it.’
Adrienne Rich also used a lake image in this way to describe Valentine’s work: ‘looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks . . . The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet.’
Here is the poem:
Bees
for Sandra McPherson
A man whose arms and shoulders
and hands and face and ears are covered with bees
says, I’ve never known such pain.
Another man comes over
with bees all over his hands—
only bees can get the other bees off.
The first man says again,
I’ve never known such pain.
The second man’s bees begin to pluck
the first grave yellow bees off, one by one.
One participating poet in class yesterday mentioned that the poem felt like a fable. Another said that it seemed to speak psychological truths about suffering: the very thing that is hurting you may be what will heal you. A thorn can remove a thorn. Some poisons can remove poison. And in this dream-poem, bees can remove bees from someone’s body.
The poem ‘Bees’ touches on the mysteries of suffering, empathy, human connection, and healing. The man who is suffering from the bees is saved by another man with bees. Does this suggest that pain can only be truly addressed by another person who experiences that same pain?
In our discussion we marvelled at the clarity of the narrative – a potentially complicated story is condensed and told without confusing the reader. And the unpretentious quality of the language is remarkable – the poem has a modesty to it. Simple basic words fill the poem: ‘arms and shoulders’ and ‘The first man says’ and ‘get the other bees off’. Words like ‘says’ and ‘get’ are dangerously bland yet the poem benefits from them – we trust this ordinary, authentic speaker. There is nothing fancy there.
The mundanity of these words are relaxing and create a sense of trust. I can imagine how in most poetry workshops the choice of those words would not go down well – I can hear someone saying, ‘can you think of fresher language to use?’ But in this case the commonplace language reflects a mature, grounded speaker – no need to show off with impressively unique words (although there will be one such word in the poem’s last line); rather, we have a trusted speaker, a friend, telling us a profound story with a simplicity that mesmerizes– it reminds me of Stanley Kunitz’s words: ‘I dream of an art so transparent you can look through it and see the world.’ When reading ‘Bees’ I forget I am reading a poem – I get lost in it and feel I am just looking at the world.
And then we come to the last line. The use of the words ‘grave’ and ‘yellow’, especially next to each other, took our breath away yesterday. Yellow is not a colour one would associate with ‘grave’. We spoke about how the word ‘yellow’ is honouring the bees, praising them for saving the man by highlighting their bright colour. And the word ‘grave’, so surprising, so mysterious here. Who would ever associate the word grave with bees? ‘Grave’ has connotations with a burial place — death is an undercurrent in the poem. But the word grave is used more obviously I think to emphasize the true weighty significance of the oxymoron: the bees in the world of this poem both cause and remove suffering.
This short poem raises so many questions but one last question I’ll mention is: why are these men with the bees and not women? I don’t have an answer to that but I will point out that the poem is written by a woman and is dedicated to another woman — the writer Sandra McPherson. This giving of words from one woman to another reflects the giving of the bees from one man to another man. Words wound and heal; bees wound and (at least in this poem’s world) heal. Perhaps the poem is respecting the suffering that both sexes experience. And including two men in the poem rather than a man and a woman might suggest that the two men are the same man. Although the poem honours human connection and empathy, perhaps it’s ultimately considering self-healing. It’s asking, how might we, ‘after great pain’ as Emily Dickinson wrote, restore ourselves?
Joy Harjo’s poem ‘She Had Some Horses’ is also an animal poem and raises questions about individual suffering and larger, community suffering, and it also considers oxymorons within suffering.
Here is Harjo’s poem:
She Had Some Horses
She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.
She had some horses.
She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.
She had some horses.
She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.
She had some horses.
She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped bare of their tongues.
She had some horses.
She had horses who called themselves, “horse.”
She had horses who called themselves, “spirit.” and kept their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.
She had some horses.
She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.
She had some horses.
She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her bed at night and prayed as they raped her.
She had some horses.
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
Phantom Among Phantoms: Robert Desnos’s ‘I have so often dreamed of you…’
Comfort and Affliction: A Poery Reading Group and Writing Workshop
“Poetry comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.” – Lucille Clifton
Robert Desnos
On the of 8th May I met with my poetry group on zoom and, in addition to workshopping poems by participants, we discussed Robert Desnos’s ‘I Have So Often Dreamed of You’ (translated from the French by Paul Auster) titled ‘J’ai tant rêvé de toi’ in the original. (I have posted the original and Auster’s translation below).
Desnos (1900-1945) was initially associated with the surrealist movement in Paris in the 1920s although he grew away from that group. He was Jewish (and also a part of the French resistance in World War II), and died in a Nazi concentration camp. See Jake Marmer’s recent essay on Desnos in Tablet.
In our class we talked about longing and vulnerability and the repeated line in the poem (‘I have so often dreamed of you’ / ‘J’ai tant rêvé de toi’). What does it mean to live, sleep, talk, walk with someone who isn’t with you or even no longer alive? This is the question that haunts the poem. We discussed how within that line lives both affliction and comfort and how its repetition provides some solace even as the longing embedded in the line opens up fresh hurt. We compared the poem to the Song of Songs (found in the Hebrew Bible – Shir Ha’shirim, שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים) and observed how the painful intensity of longing is palpable in both the 20th century poem and in the holy text. However, the speaker in Desnos’s poem seems to be longing for a beloved who may no longer be alive. The sense that the longing is for a ghost, one who has ‘become unreal’, saturates the poem. But over the course of the poem, the speaker himself sinks into a shadow and becomes a ‘phantom among phantoms’; the beloved transforms into a real ‘body’ with ‘lips’, a ‘forehead’, a person to whom he addresses with the last words ‘your life’ / ‘ta vie’).
After our discussion we watched this beautifully animated video of the poem.
I Have So Often Dreamed of You
I have so often dreamed of you that you become unreal.
Is it still time enough to reach that living body and to kiss
on that mouth the birth of the voice so dear to me?
I have so often dreamed of you that my arms used as they are
to meet on my breast in embracing your shadow would
perhaps not fit the contour of your body.
And, before the real appearance of what has haunted and ruled
me for days and years, I might become only a shadow.
Oh the weighing of sentiment,
I have so often dreamed of you that there is probably no time
now to waken. I sleep standing, my body exposed to all the
appearances of life and love and you, who alone still
matter to me, I could less easily touch your forehead and
your lips than the first lips and the first forehead I
might meet by chance.
I have so often dreamed of you, walked, spoken, slept with your
phantom that perhaps I can be nothing any longer than a
phantom among phantoms and a hundred times more shadow
than the shadow which walks and will walk joyously over
the sundial of your life.
Translation Paul Auster
……………………….
J’ai Tant Rêvé de Toi
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.
Est-il encore temps d’atteindre ce corps vivant
Et de baiser sur cette bouche la naissance
De la voix qui m’est chère?
J’ai tant rêvé de toi que mes bras habitués
En étreignant ton ombre
A se croiser sur ma poitrine ne se plieraient pas
Au contour de ton corps, peut-être.
Et que, devant l’apparence réelle de ce qui me hante
Et me gouverne depuis des jours et des années,
Je deviendrais une ombre sans doute.
O balances sentimentales.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi qu’il n’est plus temps
Sans doute que je m’éveille.
Je dors debout, le corps exposé
A toutes les apparences de la vie
Et de l’amour et toi, la seule
qui compte aujourd’hui pour moi,
Je pourrais moins toucher ton front
Et tes lèvres que les premières lèvres
et le premier front venu.
J’ai tant rêvé de toi, tant marché, parlé,
Couché avec ton fantôme
Qu’il ne me reste plus peut-être,
Et pourtant, qu’a être fantôme
Parmi les fantômes et plus ombre
Cent fois que l’ombre qui se promène
Et se promènera allègrement
Sur le cadran solaire de ta vie.
Winner of the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize 2021
Snakes and Ladders
Our five-year-old son and I lean
over squares on the playing board
while our older son reads Twenty-Five Easy Steps
to Becoming Ancient Greek.
A virus is breathing over Earth
and you stand on a high stool in the garden,
place leaves and branches on top of our sukkah.
I move my piece
five spaces, just missing
the head of the snake, its thin tongue blue and forked.
Cracks between the wood floorboards
contain dust, darkness. And the shelves
hold books we love. What will happen to us?
Where will we be next year, many years from now?
On the table rests the box our son built, containing
small labelled secrets he crafted from clay.
The rain has returned, pulling
the night down like a curtain around our house.
I hold the die in my hand, its light weight shifting
with uncertainty, the cool soft corners offer hope.
You crouch, then step down carefully onto the mud,
your hands wet with blessings.
I look at the box: wood and painted gold.
The molded clay angels
sit on the lid, stretch
their clumsy wings towards each other.
Chopsticks, glued to each side,
serve as poles for the faithful to grasp and lift.
Resisting Universality
The International Literature Festival of Berlin asked poet Charles Bernstein for a micro-video addressing racism, nationalism, and the possibility of co-existence. This is a transcription below from his video:
“We may be all in this together, depending on what that means. Whatever the common menace, our outcomes will never be the same. Deep below our difference is not interconnection but incommensurability. Human is not so much shared as contested. Empathy and solidarity are crucial investments but acknowledging our uncommonness alongside our commonness grounds struggles to resist hegemony of the universality.”
These words are important to keep in mind when different groups try to compare their suffering with each other. It’s tempting to lean towards phrases such as ‘we are all in this together’ or ‘we are all human’ or ‘we all share so much in common’ or ‘all lives matter’. But these cliches hide disconnection and lack of empathy. Even cruelty. Forcing sameness can shut down understanding and responsibility.
For example, Jews might try to compare their own past and current suffering with the historical and present suffering of Blacks. There certainly seems to be a lot in common.
However, as Rabbi Yosef Bechoffer discusses in this video, the differences are profound and distinct. It is often the opposite of empathy to try to force connections between the two groups. Empathy is born out of knowing our “uncommonness” and acknowledging “incommensruablity”. For instance, Rabbi Bechoffer says, that although the Jewish people have slavery in their history and historical memory (ancient Egyptian enslavement of the Jewish people), “We have to understand that [Black slavery] was a unique experience which we did not undergo.” He also emphasises some differences between the horrors in Jewish history (mass slaughter) and the horrors in Black history (de-humanisation). “We do not have a dehumanized history. The slavery in our history in Egypt was of a completely different kind. And we came to America as a choice. We did not come here shackled and chained and we were not treated like animals.”
Simone de Beuvoir also delineates difference in this way, resisting the ‘hegemony of universality’ when she writes in The Second Sex, for instance, that the world seems to want to dehumanise Blacks, obliterate Jews, and subordinate women.
Whether Rabbi Bechoffer or de Beuavoir are correct or not in the way they outline differences, the fact is, it is humanizing to be aware of differences and to allow empathy to flow from that place.
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas articulated this idea of honouring the differences of others as opposed to commonalities and suggests that doing so is the deepest form of empathy. He invented a model he called the ‘face to face encounter’ which was his metaphor for encountering another person’s experience. He suggested that the “Self” becomes immediately aware of the Other’s vulnerability and otherness. The ‘Other’ is human (profoundly vulnerable) and, subject to objectification, and they contain an infinite well of feelings, experiences, and thoughts that we will never fully understand, relate to, or know. Acknowledging this is the beginning of empathy.
I wrote about Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘I Measure every Grief I meet’ in an earlier blog. This poem applies to the discussion here as it captures the ‘face to face’ encounter. The speaker is imagining the suffering of another:
I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –
Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –
Instead of making statements about why someone is suffering, she asks questions. And acknowledges various possible causes: ‘The Grieved – are many – I am told –There is the various Cause – ’
Lévinas argues that an encounter with another person forbids a reduction to complete commonality and calls for a responsibility for the other. Dickinson looks in wonder at the suffering of others, mentions her own pain, but does not pretend to fully understand what other people are going through. Perhaps this is the deepest empathy.
Pain — has an Element of Blank —
‘Pain –’ Dickinson wrote ‘has an Element of Blank –’. With this first line from a poem, Dickinson highlights an aspect of suffering that includes numbness. ‘Pain’ can have a blankness to it, a lack, a terrible nothingness.
John Keats also had this aspect of anguish in mind when he began ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense’. However, when Dickinson writes about pain, she is not just analysing the feeling: she is interrogating how to write about pain. According to Dickinson, writing about any emotion must include a ‘blank’, white space, a dash, or some nothingness. These moments of blank replace the emotional language a reader might have expected.
‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–‘ she wrote in another poem. Poetry must include slants and blanks. Dickinson uses her characteristic dashes and white space to replace the words the speaker refuses to utter.
Pain — has an Element of Blank —
It cannot recollect
When it begun — or if there were
A time when it was not —
It has no Future — but itself —
Its Infinite contain
Its past — enlightened to perceive
New Periods — of Pain.
After the word ‘Pain’ the dash hides the source of the pain. This sort of ‘hiding’ takes places throughout the poem. Another instance of it would be after ‘When it begun –‘. The dash that follows ‘begun’ covers any associations or memory of the pain’s origin.
Dickinson’s poetry enacts the process of denial and repression we go through during a time of distress. This is what makes the speaker seem so vulnerable: the denial is a sign that the pain exists and is overwhelming. One cannot be vulnerable without some denial, without some attempt to turn away from suffering. Ironically, poets can most successfully communicate and elicit emotion by not acknowledging that emotion. Narrative is often removed, fragmented. Emotional language is avoided. There are blanks. All emotion has an element of blank in this way. The unbearable (even unbearable joy) hovers beneath the surface of a poem appearing slant in the poem’s music, metaphors, and allusions. This is poetry.
[painting: Edge of Memory. Mixed Media. Joan Fullerton]
Wordless Empathy
When Jews are in mourning, Jewish law requires those who visit the ones who are grieving to remain silent. The emphasis is on listening to the mourners’s pain and allowing the grief to take shape and go through its necessary process. The mourners lead, the visitor follows. The visitor’s words are not important. What is important is the silence and the listening and the fact that the visitor is present. This is empathy.
The nineteenth century America poet Emily Dickinson’s wrote after her father passed away, “One who only said ‘I am sorry’ helped me the most when father ceased – it was too soon for language.” When it comes to grief, sometimes it is ‘too soon for language’.
Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg in his article, ‘Empathy Doesn’t Come with Conditions’, expresses this beautifully, using the shiva call as a model for the ideal Jewish response to the Black Lives Matter Movement.
The psalmist writes, I am with him at a time of distress (91:15). Without words, the Divine presence was with the Hebrews who were suffering under the conditions of slavery in Egypt. Without words, the Jewish people stood around the silent Aaron after he learned of his sons’s deaths. Without words, Batya rescued baby Moshe. In these moments, empathy meant that those suffering did not receive lectures about past behaviour, reprimands about idol worship, explanations, or calls for reciprocity. Empathy first requires a wordless connection to the one who is suffering.
Rabbi Rosenberg writes, “Our African-American brothers and sisters are now, in rabbinic terms, in a state of ‘a mourner whose deceased relative lies before him.'”
Mourning is taking place over the murder of Blacks by police, over hundreds of years of slavery, over beatings and lynchings, over almost a hundred years of ‘separate but equal’ laws, over many years of racist housing and other racist policies.
Rabbi Rosenberg is specific about those who respond to Black Lives Matter’ with ‘All Lives Matter’. He writes that this response ‘should evoke the memory of Holocaust Memorial Day statements where Jews were listed as just another group persecuted by the Nazis or omitted entirely, and shows utter indifference.’
Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘I measure every Grief I meet’ comes to mind here. The speaker of the poem is silent and not in dialogue with the mourner. She is wondering and feeling the weight of another’s grief, reminded of her own suffering but then returning to wondering about the anguish of the other person again. Here is the beginning of the poem:
I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes —
I wonder if It weighs like Mine —
Or has an Easier size.
I wonder if They bore it long —
Or did it just begin —
I could not tell the Date of Mine —
It feels so old a pain —
I wonder if it hurts to live —
And if They have to try —
And whether — could They choose between —
It would not be — to die —
I note that Some — gone patient long —
At length, renew their smile —
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil —
I wonder if when Years have piled —
Some Thousands — on the Harm —
That hurt them early — such a lapse
Could give them any Balm —
Dickinson’s focus on the ‘size’ of the grief and its length takes the power of grief into account: its overwhelming force, its might. She even seems to suggest that a ‘lapse’ (the period after the initial trauma) might not provide ‘Balm’. When we suffer a trauma, sensitivity around that trauma needs to last forever. The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that when we encounter another person we immediately become aware of their vulnerability. This is where ethics is born.
Eve Grubin 