There are certain songs I cannot listen to anymore because they remind me of someone associated with the pain of loss. R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” reminds me of an old heartbreak in college, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” of a more recent heartbreak, and listening to Luther Vandross’ “Dance with My Father” is my quickest trip to tears because it speaks to the emptiness I feel after the death of my own father. Music, it seems, owes its popularity and success to the way it can be absorbed by the listener and given a personal context. We give intimate meaning to a song, responding to the sentiment of it in the same way we will mouth the lyrics—we make it about us.
I believe that a slightly different dynamic becomes established in poetry. We read certain poems because we wish to experience the emotion. I am not referring to elation or nostalgia, since music can fulfill that need as well. I’m talking about the poetry that gives us permission to be moved, perhaps to help us understand or at least give language (when our own words fail us) to our feelings of grief or confusion or distress. I will go ahead and call it catharsis since this relationship is set by the reader, not the writer. I will go ahead and call it bibliotherapy, which acknowledges the intent of the reader, not the writer. And I believe there is nothing wrong with this. In fact it is necessary. Certainly it gives reading a poem a function aside from reading for pleasure or for artistic appreciation. It gives the poet and the non-poet alike a personal reason to turn to poetry.
I recall that after the tragedy of 911 (the 6th anniversary fast approaching), poetry was suddenly in demand. Billy Collins made an appearance on national television to read a poem. Former poet laureates offered poetry suggestions in newspapers. People began to make sense of the aftermath by writing poems that spoke to the recent events or by reading old poems that offered solace because they were suddenly endowed with new meaning. Poets were sent out to the schools in NYC to use poetry in helping children make sense of the shattered safety of their homes.
I suspect it’s because of all places, even in cold-shouldered New York City, poetry is where emotion is still allowed. Song as well, of course. I remember listening to Bette Midler’s heartfelt rendition of “Wind Beneath My Wings” at the televised Yankee Stadium ceremony for the families and friends of 911 victims. And then the fundraising followed via poetry readings and the sale of poetry anthologies.
I witnessed a similar communal healing effort after the tsunami of 2004. A notable project that came out of that was In the Arms of Words: Poems for Disaster Relief, edited by Amy Ouzoonian. More recently, similar organizing efforts were made after Hurricane Katrina.
In all three of these instances I saw the humanity of the poetry world once again. These tragedies inspired both verse and activism. That’s what I always thought poetry was for—the expression of emotion to move and mobilize people through art. It certainly has been used that way in many politicized communities in this country.
There are nay-sayers, of course, people who don’t believe poetry and politics should mix, or who negate the power that poetry can have in the daily lives of an ordinary citizen. And that’s fine. I’m not going to argue with a dissenting perspective, though I find it interesting that those nay-sayers always seem to have time and motivation to argue with the rest of us.
Anyway, a poem I keep going back to is an old standby: from Bertolt Brecht’s “Motto,” which he wrote, I believe, while in exile after the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany:
In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times
Certainly, with the current political situation at home and abroad, we are living the dark times. A more contemporary example for me is from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera, a poem in Spanish titled “En el nombre de todas las madres que han perdido sus hijos en la guerra” (rough translation: “In the Name of All Those Mothers Who Have Lost Their Sons to War”). It is a beautiful healer’s blessing and an impassioned offering of consolation and peace that begins:
Le cubro su cabecita,
mi criatura con sus piecesitos fríos.
Aquí lo tendré acurrucado en mis brazos
hasta que me muera.
Parece años desde que estoy sentada aquí
en este charco de sangre.
Esto pasó esta mañana.
I’m wondering if you could tell me about a poem that you need at certain times in your life. What is your necessary poem?
A poem I always return to is Derek Walcott’s Love After Love.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
“Stupid America” by Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado. As a Chicano writer, activist, and educator, this poem–a grito in our community–always demands a response. Positive and Negative. I feel it reminds me/us of the deep need for Voice among those who are often Silenced. Read poem at http://www.xispas.com/poetry/delgado.htm
R–thanks for this essay. Here are my necessary offerings, both from the Japanese:
If you have hearts, O cherries of Fukakusa,
This year alone send forth your flowers in black.
Kanzuke Mineo, KOKINSHU anthology #832; trans. Seidensticker
[translated as two lines]
So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.
Ono no Komachi; KOKINSHU anthology; trans. Donald Keene
[translated as five lines]
I love this post because it reminds me of the connection between poetry and music, and these two art forms’ connection to emotion. For me, necessary poems are generally those that, like cherished songs, I’ve internalized through repeated reading, sometimes memorizing.
What’s funny, though, is that most of the time, it isn’t a particular poem that come to mind in states of emotional intensity. Usually, for me, it is particular lines of poetry that emerge into consciousness.
One of these lines, depending on my (often dark!) mood:
“And the love, whatever it was, an infection.” (Anne Sexton)
This is a sentiment I almost never feel free to express out loud, but sometimes the feeling hits me: some of my past loves have seemed like obsessions, or infections. This last line from one of Sexton’s poems (I forget which one!) evokes the memories of many lovers come and gone, and many other types of helpless/hopeless love, as well.
i don’t know if i have a necessary poem in my life but i do know that the work of martín espada as a poet, essayist, teacher, editor and orator have been invaluable to my personal education as a poet.
ps- good to see you blogging here, rigoberto.
A dear friend…a brother, I might say…gave this to me in the throes of my own heartbreak and I have returned to it at least every two months, ever since.
“Privilege of Being”
Robert Hass
Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy–
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed–
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation in offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.
There are many, many poems, but “Star Struck” by Andres Montoya is one that quickly comes to mind.
The Irish poet, John Montague, who was born in Ireland, but spent his childhood in Brooklyn, wrote a handful of poems about his mother that I return to. One is called “The Locket”. I haven’t read it in a while, but feel prompted to return to it.