Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED,GLADLY BEYOND

  E. E. Cummings

  At Ohio University I hold three jobs. Twenty hours a week I log in and read submissions for the Ohio Review, a prominent literary magazine. On weekends I take orders and ring the cash register at a sub shop in town. And during the week I work the dish line in the university cafeteria dish room. A friend from my poetry class works the same shift. We come rushing to the dish room from class, clock in, don our white aprons, and join the full-time cafeteria workers, the men and women from Athens, Ohio, some with young families of their own to support. When the trays come down the belt, our job is to take the dishes off the trays and stack them. After our shift, every table wiped and polished, floors glittering, the last of the student-stragglers having left, my friend and I sit in the empty cafeteria, and sip our cups of milky Lipton tea and workshop each other’s nascent poems until by seven or eight the blackness of night begins to press against the windows.

  My friend is blond and thin, with long bony fingers and wide brown eyes. Her smile reveals two slightly overlapping front teeth. She reads my poems and I read hers and together we form connections between the bits and pieces of interior life hidden in the poem’s blank spaces, crossing out unnecessary words and phrases, moving a line here or there. Along with reading each other’s poems, we discuss the poems we are studying in class and flip through our anthologies together, sharing poems we admire. While other students are attempting to solve math proofs and chemistry problems, we are studying poetic form. In the poetry workshop we discover a wide array by exploring how poems gain their power; for example, we read the work of Robert Bly for its simplicity of language; E. E. Cummings’s for the way in which syntax and punctuation transform meaning; James Wright’s for his narrative gifts and symbolism embedded in images of the natural world. We read Pound, Eliot, and Marianne Moore, sometimes struggling over their poems’ intellectual girth and use of literary allusions. I can picture my friend’s hands sitting across from me at the long linoleum cafeteria table as she holds the page of one of my poems, and then takes the pencil behind her ear and begins to mark it up. Through poetry our friendship deepens.

  TAKING THE HANDS

  Robert Bly (1926–)

  Taking the hands of someone you love,

  You see they are delicate cages . . .

  Tiny birds are singing

  In the secluded prairies

  And in the deep valleys of the hand.

  * * *

  My penciled marks at the bottom of this poem in my battered copy of Silence in the Snowy Fields I purchase at the college bookstore read:

  Bly uses one clear metaphor in order to arrest a few moments of emotional life. The hands of someone you love become delicate cages where birds are singing. Bly celebrates the small idea of a hand holding the wonders of nature to comment on love and friendship. Poetry is an attempt to find, discover something and embody it in the cage of a poem. Bly has embodied love in the delicate cages of the hand. The entire poem is a metaphor.

  This poem is an example of the deep image, a literary term originally coined by poets Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg and redeveloped and revolutionized by Robert Bly, James Wright, and other midcentury American poets. It is a poetic technique that allows concrete elements and experiences (in this poem the image of a hand) to generate poetic meaning. Through the delicate artfulness of this small five-line poem, the metaphysical inner connections between the spiritual world and the physical world that occur when we hold someone’s hands are made visible.

  Influenced by European poets like Lorca and Neruda and as a reaction against the scholarly poetry of Pound and Eliot, Robert Bly’s work sought to advance a new kind of poetry, where the conscious mind is giving way to a more passionate, irrational style. In an author’s note, Bly stated that he is “interested in the connection between poetry and simplicity. . . . The fundamental world of poetry is an inward world. We approach it through solitude.” Now, whenever I reach for someone’s hand, or someone reaches for mine, I think of Bly’s poem and the mysteries held within it, and those days in the cafeteria in the early evening just before dusk, my friend across from me, her brow wrinkling in thought and concentration, as the two of us analyze lines of poetry typed on thin sheets of white, onion-skin paper, as intensely as if we were surgeons operating on a patient.

  Bly’s “Taking the Hands” reminds me of this delicate love poem by E. E. Cummings, where a pair of hands figure as a closing image.

  SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED,GLADLY BEYOND

  E. E. Cummings

  somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

  any experience,your eyes have their silence:

  in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

  or which i cannot touch because they are too near

  your slightest look easily will unclose me

  though i have closed myself as fingers,

  you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

  (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

  or if your wish be to close me,i and

  my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,

  as when the heart of this flower imagines

  the snow carefully everywhere descending;

  nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

  the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

  compels me with the colour of its countries,

  rendering death and forever with each breathing

  (i do not know what it is about you that closes

  and opens;only something in me understands

  the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

  nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

  * * *

  How is it that one person can unlock something private within us? Or awaken things in us we fear? How can one person know us more intimately than any other, or even than we know ourselves? “The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses,” Cummings writes, the use of the word “voice” as a modifier for “eyes” allows the reader to experience how much the speaker of this poem “sees” into his subject.

  Cummings composed poetry as a child, writing a poem a day from the age of eight until twenty-two. He experimented with form and language to create his unique avant-garde style, sometimes employing invented words, turning nouns into verbs, and avoiding standard use of punctuation and capitalization. Yet underlying the word play, the polyphonic layering of voices, and parentheses buried within parenthesis, flows tender emotion.

  PASSION

  THE RED COAL

  Gerald Stern

  WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  THE TROPICS IN NEW YORK

  Claude McKay

  HEAT

  Denis Johnson

  After I graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the early 1980s, I move to New York City to embark upon what I’ve come to consider my true calling: becoming a poet. The city is a strange, forbidding place, so many people trapped on one island. I am overwhelmed by the smells of rotting fruit and cooked meat from the street vendors, the garbage, the way in which the city’s inhabitants adopt the street as their private living room. I’m a Midwest girl; I’m used to open spaces. There are times when I begin to doubt my calling and my reasons for being here. I won’t survive on poetry alone. I have to eat and figure out how to support myself. I go to Bolton’s discount clothing store and buy my first suit and pair of black pumps for job interviews. The color of the pencil skirt and matching jacket I choose is cranberry, and when I look in the mirror, I feel immediately grown up. I barely recognize myself. I answer an ad in the New York Times for a position as an editorial assistant for a religion and philosophy editor at a university press where I’m required to take a typing test. I interview and am hired for the position. I’m glad to have a job that pays the rent, offers health benefits, and doesn’t involve waiting on customers
in a restaurant.

  It’s my first real nine-to-five job. I type letters, file correspondence, and take phone messages. I prepare manuscripts for production and occasionally read submissions and write reports about them. I’m fascinated by the various stages of how a book is made, how it arrives in the form of carefully typed manuscript pages and roughly twelve months later it becomes a book. I share a tiny, two-room apartment on West Seventy-Third, in a building where many aging ex–Zeigfield Follies actresses reside, with a poet friend and classmate from the Iowa Workshop. When I pass through the lobby on my way to work, the ladies, with their dyed blue-and-purple hair, thick make-up, and sagging skin, congregate there with their shopping carts, glancing at themselves in the mirrored wall. In Midtown the city is a teeming hive of concrete and glass. Everywhere I look, more buildings, more anonymous strangers filling subway cars and rushing in and out of offices. At night, home from the office, I retire to my room, sit at my musty, flea-market-find oak desk, turn on my Selectric typewriter, and work on poems. I flip through poetry books for inspiration and companionship. I am restless, unsure, lonely. Eight months pass and I hear about a new position at a trade house that publishes fiction and poetry and is more suited to my interests. I apply and am offered a job and eagerly accept. I like my new job, but I wonder if I’ve made the right choice, if I’ll ever publish a book of my own, or be able to support myself in this city. Outside my window, in the street below, people dine in cafés and drink in bars, or stroll home after the theater or a concert. Sometimes it seems as if the whole city is going on without me and an unnamed desire travels through my being. Sometimes that desire is so great I can’t contain it. I get dressed and go out and walk up and down Broadway just to get out of my own head. The desire is like a red coal burning inside my body.

  THE RED COAL

  Gerald Stern (1925–)

  Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember

  what it was like in the spring of 1950

  before the burning coal entered my life.

  I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one

  below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels

  and one crooked broken masculine one

  and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain

  with skin wrinkled up like a chicken’s

  beside the razor and the silver tap.

  I didn’t live in Paris for nothing and walk

  with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks

  thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire

  and I didn’t save the picture of the two of us

  moving through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen

  and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams

  unless I wanted to see what coals had done

  to their lives too. I say it with vast affection,

  wanting desperately to know what the two of them

  talked about when they lived in Pennsylvania

  and what they talked about at St. Elizabeth’s

  fifty years later, looking into the sun,

  40,000 wrinkles between them,

  the suffering finally taking over their lives.

  I think of Gilbert all the time now, what

  we said on our long walks in Pittsburgh, how

  lucky we were to live in New York, how strange

  his great fame was and my obscurity,

  how we now carry the future with us, knowing

  every small vein and every elaboration.

  The coal has taken over, the red coal

  is burning between us and we are at its mercy—

  as if a power is finally dominating

  the two of us; as if we’re huddled up

  watching the black smoke and the ashes;

  as if knowledge is what we needed and now

  we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge.

  The tears are different—though I hate to speak

  for him—the tears are what we bring back to the

  darkness, what we are left with after our

  own escape, what, all along, the red coal had

  in store for us as we moved softly,

  either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning,

  on the gray sidewalks and the green ocean;

  in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores;

  in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.

  * * *

  “The Red Coal” recounts a story of two young poets, strolling through the streets of Paris, talking about their poetic predecessors, Hart Crane and Apollinaire, remembering the time when they were young intellectuals attempting to make a life through poetry. One poet has achieved more success than another poet, but I’m not sure that’s what the poem is mostly about. It documents that burning thing inside us, whether it is a passion for poetry or art, or medicine, or law, or being a construction worker, or a chef. The burning coal is that thing we must find in life, our raison d’être, our calling.

  * * *

  There is another desire pulsing through me. It is a desire, as a grown woman, to meet my match and find a partner. But it seems impossible here. There is something about being in a populated city full of individuals with like-minded ambition that makes my loneness all the more palpable.

  Over time I begin to create my own mental map, my preferred routes and destinations. The Italian coffee house I like to go to for iced cappuccino, the Korean greengrocer where I buy my fruit and morning bran muffins, my path through the park on a Sunday. But at the end of the day, something happens sometimes when everyone turns homeward and the neon lights of the city flicker on. Loneliness becomes its own continent. It makes me question who I am and the choices I’ve made. I recognize that many people my age are working in the financial world, they’re lawyers and traders, or training to be doctors, or they work in advertising and fashion. When I’m not worried about how I’m going to pay my monthly rent on my meager salary, I worry about the career I’ve marked out. I recognize that being a poet is not a career. It is something to do in the secret hours of the early morning or late at night, in the cracks and crevices of a weekend, but it isn’t enough to sustain a livelihood. I begin to wonder about my choices. After a string of unfulfilling encounters with men I meet in cafés or at poetry readings or artist residencies or parties, men who claim to be one thing and turn out to be another, who are smug or self-absorbed or nutcases or too much in love with me or not quite in love with me, I begin to lose hope. At night, I grow sentimental and nostalgic and remember my first love who absorbed so many years of my psychic and emotional attention and wonder, does he think about me too? Would I have been happier had I stayed in Cleveland?

  WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED, AND WHERE, AND WHY

  Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

  What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

  I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

  Under my head till morning; but the rain

  Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

  Upon the glass and listen for reply,

  And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

  For unremembered lads that not again

  Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

  Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

  Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

  Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

  I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

  I only know that summer sang in me

  A little while, that in me sings no more.

  * * *

  Edna St. Vincent Millay had many love affairs. Her biographer, Nancy Milford, said of her: She smoked in public when it was against the law for women to do so, she lived in Greenwich Village during the halcyon days of that starry bohemia, she slept with men and women and wrote about it in lyrics and sonnets that blazed with wit and a sexual daring that captured the nation. This wistful sonnet was written in l923 when Millay was thirt
y-one years old. The poem opens with the speaker in contemplation, alone at night, listening to the rain, remembering the ghosts of past lovers that “tap against the window.” The last lines are terribly sad and beautiful, softened and consoled perhaps by memory of a love affair and the notion that at one time “summer sang in me,” even though no more. I once heard that Sigmund Freud said all literature is about love and sex or was it love and death? I would venture to say that all poetry to an extent is about unrequited love, not necessarily carnal or romantic love, but yearning.

  * * *

  One Sunday morning I wake up early and walk on Broadway to Fairway for my breakfast: a muffin, peaches, cherries, and melon. On the streets are crates of rotted fruit and garbage in piles, waiting for pick-up. The sidewalks are dirty and in need of a scrub down. Heat rises from the subway grates and for a moment I feel faint. Up this early, all I see around me are homeless men wrapped in dirty layers of clothing and homeless women pushing shopping carts. I don’t know why I am here anymore, why I am working all day in the office and coming home on nights and weekends to read submissions of debut novels and short stories, hoping to find, in sheaves of paper that pile up into a toppling tower on the floor of my two-room apartment, the living breathing soul and voice of a story that will eventually get printed and published and sell zillions of copies so I can eventually get a promotion. It is summer and I think of the green fields and parks and simple ways of living where I grew up and that I’ve forgone and emotion wells inside me. Maybe it’s time to call it quits and go home.

  THE TROPICS IN NEW YORK

  Claude McKay (1889–1948)