Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Donna Brook

This poem by Donna Brook first appeared in Hanging Loose 42 and also appears in her collection, What Being Responsible Means to Me.

THE SCHOOL OF PAIN

No one comes here to learn
what we teach.

They all want to be better off for it,
to know its applications, to grow
from the experience, to go through
just once.

What we offer
is the fact that it hurts
and is not the same as pleasure.
We’ve found

anything else, or less, or more
is not pain.

-- Donna Brook

I started out as an admirer of Donna Brook’s poetry and then I became an admirer of Donna Brook, so, in addition to being her editor, I became her husband.  Just to make that clear.

The School of Pain appeared in Fall 1982.  In the poetry world, Big-Time Suffering still had its ardent fans: Finish eating your depression stew, dear; it will make your poems grow up big and strong.  We still got lots of Dear Sylvia and Dear Anne poems from young women longing to be miserable.  The boys had to dress up as Berryman and Lowell.

Of course the idea that agony is ennobling goes far beyond the making of poems.  It’s still with us in relentless daily news reports – the guy who thinks he’s a better person because he’s had stomach cancer, the hollow-eyed saint, the uncomplaining amputee, the positive thinker being chewed on by tiger.  If it really worked that way, there would, indeed, be a real School of Pain, and it would have a waiting list.

-- Robert Hershon