The Best American Poetry

Who is Amy Bishop [by Catharine R. Stimpson]

February 28, 2010- The figure of Amy Bishop haunts me. I fantasize covering her trial when it happens.

        "Who is she?" asked a graduate student and a law student  earlier this week.

        The question surprised me.  Bishop has gotten so much media attention, including my first blog about her. To recap:  On February 12, a biology professor at the University of Alabama/Huntsville who had been denied tenure, she took a pistol to a department meeting , killed three colleagues, and wounded three others. The New York Times has published two front-page articles and more. People Magazine had a  March 8 story, "Murder on Campus."  It may have been at the back of the book, but there it was----between the scary coverage of a minor celebrity gone missing at the Winter Olympic Games (since declared a suicide),  and the sweet  coverage of a  nice man who rehabs sneakers for poor kids.

        As a result, we know more and more about this newly public figure. She was proud of, even flaunted, her Harvard doctorate. She was distraught when she was denied tenure at Huntsville.  She and her husband, Jim Anderson, were Trekkies, an aspect of her interest in science fiction.  People wrote that he stayed home to care for their four children. And, she was a companion of violence.  In 1983, when  she was 21, she killed her brother with a shotgun. No charges were brought. Far less drastically, in 2002, she hit a woman in an International House of Pancakes who took the booster seat she wanted. She screamed at barking dogs. People's first line: "You crossed Amy Bishop at your peril."     

        Such vivid portraits of Bishop fit only too neatly into three stereotypes. She compels our attention because all three apply to her. The first, which can have its harmless charms, is that of academics as strange, nerds, indifferent to norms and forms.  A university student evaluation said disapprovingly of a professor, "He wears the same pants every day." The second  and third stereotypes mark the passage of the strange into the frightening. One is about the scientist, the proud proponent of reason, who unleashes irrational forces of destruction. The other is about women. Meant to engender and nurture life, they turn vicious, female pit bulls without lipstick. 

        Beyond press coverage and beneath stereotypes, who is Amy Bishop really. I wish I knew. I do gingerly map her onto other angry people ---both men and women---in academic life. They are always on the edge of hysteria and temper tantrums.   They exercise power by oscillating between threatening to jump over the edge and actually doing it. Bystanders and colleagues respond through placating gestures and through shrugging denials of the psychic violence around them.  How much did Bishop's family cover for her in this manner?

        The incessantly enraged are both far more overt and far less common than standard issue passive aggressives. They content themselves by projecting themselves as innocent victims of circumstances they have actually helped to create.  A trivial example: the man who complains widely that he was refused access to the gym.  He had never bothered to renew his free membership.

        My dismay in not knowing who Amy Bishop is really is more than the cliche-ridden  inability to know who anybody really is---be that anybody an intimate or a somebody with whom we connect through the illusory intimacy of modern communications. My dismay is the symptom of commingling fears: fear of impotence if a passive aggressive's self-serving narrative goes viral and finds wide acceptance; fear of participating in a cover-up of the behavior of the perpetually angry; and worst of all, fear that someone will "snap," that oddly  benign word for the eruption of violence, in my presence, in my subway car or faculty meeting.

The Trouble Clef - Poet's Suicide [by Lera Auerbach]

So many poets have killed themselves – they could form a city or a small country of their own. Somewhere in the gray islands of Nowhere, after getting drunk on the waters of the Styx, they can’t quite remember the reasons for self-slaughter. Surely there must have been something unthinkably unbearable, but what comes to mind is the messy kitchen, the stack of unopened bills, smells of decay, the yellowing pages of an old folded newspaper with a poem printed from the time when they still loved themselves – and it was mutual.

Why was it so unbearable to wake up every day to the same face in the mirror – was it really such a torture?

No, there is nothing romantic in suicide, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, like flossing out adjectives. Life is an act of courage, death – of cowardliness, a bastardized cry for attention – you, hear me, pity me, you, you all who didn’t see this coming, vomit your guilt on your freshly-ironed shirts. My death is your punishment.

Suicide is contagious. Follow the poet – life is simply too much. God gave you free will – so use it, dammit. The easiest answer is the shortest – no. Can’t deal with it – so kill yourself. Can’t bear it up close – just exit, slamming the door, giving the bird to Divine Providence.

Death is, by far, the best PR act. Don’t cringe as if you have never thought of it. Choreographed stage-exit. Turn on all the spot-lights! Bravi, bravissimo! Only no curtain calls nor applause in this show.

Where was your guardian angel when you shot yourself, drunk on boredom and despair? What was your last thought? Tired indifference? Belated remorse? Childish hope that you wouldn’t quite die, and when you woke up – all would be changed, so you would be spared the burden?

I have stared too long into the light; black circles float in the bullet-proof air. Is it true that depression is one of the mortal sins? Is it a physical sickness? A chemical cocktail of the body? Is suicide murder? Would the church condemn me? Is it contagious? Could it spread to my family?

Writing poems is a dangerous profession. Playing with the gods has its side-effects.

Two words remain in the ruins of the vocabulary, in the last note, scribbled hurriedly, while there is still time, on the closest piece of paper, some unpaid bill perhaps, written across the page in shaky dancing letters, two words, smashed between the inked lines, not answering ‘Why?’, not answering to ‘Why now’, two words, shaky thought, footsteps to Nowhere: forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me, forgive...

On Suicide [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

 Hi I’m posting out of turn today because I’m sitting here still kind of freaked that Rachel Wetzsteon killed herself.  I was friends with her and I was friends with Sarah Hannah who killed herself a few years ago.  We all got our Ph.D.s at Columbia around the same time (me in history, them in poetry) and were all three poets in New York City over a lot of years.   The last time I saw Sarah was at the MLA just a few months before she died.  My husband bumped into Rachel a few months ago on the highline, the new park on old elevated train tracks, he had the kids with him, they were all just up there walking around, looking at the flowers.

So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it.  Don’t kill yourself.  Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time.  It’s awful.  But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear.  Hear me out.

In the West, in the past, the dominant religions told people suicide was against the rules, they must not do it, if they did they would be punished in the afterlife.  People killed themselves anyway, of course, but the strict injunction must have helped keep a billion moments of anguish from turning into a bloodbath.  These days we encourage people to stay alive and not kill themselves, but we say it for the person’s own sake.   It’s illegal, sure, but no one actually insists that suicide is wrong.

I’m issuing a rule.  You are not allowed to kill yourself.  You are going to like this, stay with me.  When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community.  One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide.  That means that every suicide is also a delayed homicide.  You have to stay.  The reason I say you are going to like this is twofold.  First of all, next time you are seriously considering suicide you can dismiss it quickly and go play a video game (or something else meaningless and fun, it’s when we try for meaning that we go crashing into the existential wall – the universe is absurd, to get along with it, you should be too).  Second, and this one’s a little harder to describe, if you are even a tiny bit staying alive for the sake of the community, as a favor to the rest of us, I need to make it clear to you that we are grateful that you stay.  I am grateful that you stay alive.  

Since I started thinking about this, when Sarah died, I started thinking about how if I’m grateful that you haven’t killed yourself (even though the fact of it only recently came into my mind), then you are also likely grateful that I haven’t killed myself (whether consciously yet or not).   I have found that thinking about this can feel like a multitude of invisible arms linking to support me.  I can fall back into faith in humanity (which is hard to have, admittedly, but the guy I hope is good at least exists).  We have to carry each other, like Bono says.

The truth is I want you to live for your sake, not for ours.  But the injunction is true and real.  Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you.  I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that.  Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope.  I know that this means a struggle from one second to the next, let alone one day at a time.  Know that the rest of us know that among the faces we have met there are some right now who can barely take another minute of the pain and uncertainty.  And we are in the room with you, going from one moment to the next, in whatever condition you manage to do it.  Sobbing and useless is great!  Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead.  A billion times.  Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead.  

There are poets and other artists, psychotherapists and average Joes, who are thinking of your struggle and appreciating what you have managed to put up with.  We are grateful.  Best of all, practicing tuning in to your gratitude for other’s staying alive also tones up your ability to feel the gratitude that people are extending to you too, you start to feel the support of it, the invisible arms.  Don’t kill yourself.  Suffer here with us instead.  We need you with us, we have not forgotten you, you are our hero.  Stay.

What Instruments We Have Agree

 News of the talented and much-loved poet Rachel Wetzsteon's death circulated yesterday and this morning an e-mail from her friend Rachel Hadas confirmed the sad news.  We're still trying to make sense of it.  She apparently took her life, at 42.  Too young to die. 

As we close out this year, I want to plead with everyone out there who is in despair and feels hopeless: wait. Please please get help.  Here's a place to start. 

-- sdh

Among School Children - What Makes a Great Teacher?

David Lehman's post last week about suicide prompted this comment from Jeff Oaks, Managing Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series.  It's worth highlighting here because it illustrates how a seemingly small gesture by a caring teacher can have a transformative -- possibly life saving -- impact on an impressionable student.  In addition to being a fine teacher, Milton Kessler (1930-2000) published several volumes of poetry, including The Grand Concourse. His poem, "Comma of God," was chosen by Heather McHugh, for The Best American Poetry 2007.

"I had a a great teacher, Milt Kessler (left), at SUNY Binghamton who was reading poems I had given him in hope of being let into his poetry workshop.  He couldn't understand, he said to me, why everything was always fading away at the end of my poems.  I didn't have an answer then, but it was because my vision, such as it was then, was tied into the recognition of mortality, which both sweetened everything around me, and made it impossible to ever feel like I could have happiness.  His answer was to get up from his desk, look out his window, which then looked out over a large field of wildflowers.  Then he said, Come here.  I stood up next to him at the window.  He took my hand in his, which really freaked me out, and said, Look at all that life.   Isn't it wonderful?  Just look at it.    And we stood looking at that field for a minute or so, holding hands.  Then he let my hand go.  We went back to where we'd been sitting.  I honestly don't remember what we talked about after that. I was still buzzing with life. That was a transformational moment for me who'd grown up among a lot of unhappy adults; I'd imagined that unhappiness was all I had to look forward to, and maybe even unconsciously had begun to create a poetry that would prepare me for that inevitability.   Milt worked so hard to get us to fight against simple closures in poetry, to embrace what was difficult to say and feel, and to bear the weight of those things as a privilege, as a responsibility.  To be angry as hell in a poem.   Not to just feel nostalgic or blue because that was the fashion. To not give up.  I wish someone would write the book of writing assignments that encourage that!"  -- Jeff Oaks

Thank you, Jeff, for this moving anecdote. 

-- sdh

Dark Contagion

Sweet Bleaders,

I like this discussion about suicide that has been going on around here.  You guys are wonderful and I'm proud to be working with you.  So I'll say something else too.   I think when people kill themselves it is like they open the back door on the plane and they accidently take some people with them.  In a poem I've posted here I say if you shoot yourself you crack the bio-dome.  (Here is The No Hemlock Rock on my blog in stanzas, I posted it here as a paragraph), I am prepared to insist that suicide should be morally forbidden is because it causes massive harm to the people who know you, and know of you, and know your work.  Most of the great atheists in history have asserted our right to take our own life, but I don't side that way.  They were emphasizing that we owe nothing to the universe, I am emphasizing that we owe this to each other.  

One thing that predicts suicide a little is having suicide in the family already.  If our community is in any way a family than what David said in his post has pretty much got to be true: Suicide is contagious. But it isn't respiratory, talking about it makes it less likely to fester and kill.

If you are dying and you want to hurry the thing up that's one thing, but if you just despise yourself and curse the air, tough tits, you have to stay.  

Make art, make a mess, climb on the furniture.  Scream and cry.  But don't kill yourself, for the sake of everyone else.  Please accept my thanks.  Thank you for not killing yourself.  I know how hard it is and I am grateful.  Thank you for staying.  Let's just owe that to each other.  

You don't have to understand everything all the time, just note that we are all connected and that if you write and publish and post you exponentially increase the number of people who get their hearts all scarred up just because you didn't know how much harm it would do.  So just don't.  If you would like a written thank you note, I suppose something could be arranged.   

Do you swoon for miss stevie smith (1902-1971)?  of course you do.  I think we could use a morsel of her or two.

First of all you should know this great poet story, so I'll remind: Coleridge always said that he wrote his great Kubla Khan after dreaming it in an opium-induced sleep, and that after he got a few stanzas down from this vivid dream a business man from the town of Porlock knocked on Coleridge's door and after their conversation ended, Coleridge went back to his desk, the dream had vanished.  That is why the full title of the poem is "Kubla Khan; or A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment." 

Okay, so here is the first part of smith's poem:

Person from Porlock 

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock 

And ever after called him a curse 

Then why did he hurry to let him in? 

He might have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge 

in fact it was wrong (But often we all do wrong) 

As the truth is I think, he was already stuck 

With Kubla Khan. 

He was weeping and crying, I am finished, finished 

I shall never write another word of it, 

When along comes the Person from Porlock 

And takes the blame for it. 

It was not right it was wrong, 

But often we all do wrong.

Smith then goes on the tumble around in her nursery rhymes for a few stanzas, and then:

Is Suicide Contagious?

Is suicide contagious? I'm afraid the answer is yes.
In the last two weeks, the poet Deborah Digges and the painter Darragh Park joined David Foster Wallace and Tom Disch among the noteworthy writers and artists who have taken their own lives in the last year. In 2007 we lost Sarah Hannah, Liam Rector, and Landis Everson. There must be others. I write with full compassion for them and for the people they left behind.
I've heard from a number of friends, off line and off the record, who are distressed by what seems to be an epidemic. They have asked me to address the question head on, as I haven't done in this space.
We who teach have, I believe, a special responsibility to the young people who come to us for tutelage, support, and advice. We must do all we can to remove the false glamor that may enshroud an act of self-slaughter. Suicide is not romantic. Madness is not glamorous. The suffering that leads someone to jump off a bridge or take a lethal dose of poison is unbearably painful. There is nothing ennobling about the act. There is not even any guarantee that a violent death at one's own hands will amount to what W. H. Auden called, in his poem about Icarus, "an important failure." And let no one minimize the distress and damage that the premature death causes for the children, the parents, the families, the friends, the students and the teachers who will go on living albeit with a new burden of consciousness.
There is a line in Paul Valery's great poem, "Le Cimetiere marin": Il faut tenter de vivre. It is not an easy line to translate. But it should be as well-known among us as the last line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." Rilke wrote: You must change your life. Valery: You must try to live.
-- DL

Darragh Park (continued)

Cherry blossoms filled the air, swept by the May wind, and a friend said, "Oh, I thought it was snowing." That, Darragh Park said, was the effect he tried to get across in his paintings. He wanted to convey the pink cascade before it gained definition as blossoms or snowflakes --  and to convey the friend's face at the same time.

Darragh, who died Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said he had "a vision of vision." As a motorcyclist he learned on entering a curve that he had to focus "beyond my immediate destination if I was to operate the machine smoothly and stay alive." He had to be able to divide his sight between two points and let "the rest of [his] vision" take in everything between them. The beauty of his paintings is a beauty achieved by the supremacy of vision. How cruel that of all ailments, he had to suffer the progressive deterioration of his eyesight.

Darragh did the cover of "An Alternative to Speech," my first book of poems: a wraparound black-and-white cityscape in the rain: the traffic, human and vehicular, on the corner of 25th Street and Ninth Avenue. Darragh was devoted to James Schuyler and did the covers for Schuyler's "Collected Poems" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and for "The Diary of James Schuyler" ed. by Nathan Kernan (Black Sparrow): both are portraits of the poet. Darragh must have done covers for other books, and I would be grateful for details from anyone who has them.

-- DL

Maybe We Should Talk [by Stacey Harwood]

Many years ago, a colleague of mine and long-time employee of the agency where I worked jumped to his death from the 13th floor of our office building.  It was mid-day.  The office complex straddled a highway; there was traffic below and office workers coming and going on the sidewalks.  The impact of his body was so powerful that the people working in the lower floors could feel it, and every bone in Bob’s body was shattered.  A man with the build of a longshoreman, Bob was flattened like road kill.
 
At the time I was, in addition to being a policy analyst, a volunteer employee assistance coordinator.  As such, I was trained to give confidential guidance to coworkers in need of help.  I did not counsel them; I helped them find the resources they needed. 
 
During the weeks following Bob’s suicide, I helped arrange grief counseling sessions for my fellow workers.  Trained crisis counselors from a nearby hospital trauma unit led the sessions, during which   those close to Bob and those who had witnessed his death were encouraged to talk about how the experience affected them.  Bob’s closest friends and colleagues were plagued with nightmares, unable to silence their frightening thoughts, and consumed with guilt about what they might have done to help or save him.  At the crisis sessions these otherwise reticent men -- buttoned-up lawyers, accountants, engineers -- sobbed openly, confessed to their feelings of inadequacy, and struggled to come to terms with what they believed to be their lapse in responsibility because they were unable to help Bob. At the same time, by hearing each other share stories of their recent contacts with Bob, we all learned that many knew that he was suffering, that his closest friends had begged him to get help, and that he had promised that he would but didn’t. One especially loyal friend had researched psychotherapists and coached  Bob while he made an appointment, one that he failed to keep. He was determined to carry out his plan and to succeed.  
 
   His plan:  He had a plan.  As I later learned during more in-depth training on suicide prevention, the sirens should go off when someone reveals that he or she has a plan and the means to carry it out.  When someone shares this information, even if they beg that it be kept confidential, do not keep it confidential.  Sadly, many suicides are so determined that they will keep their plan to themselves.  They’ve made up their mind, their mood lightens as one’s mood tends to upon making a big decision, and all that remains for them to do is to wait for preparation to meet opportunity.

    The other day, after David and I learned of Deborah Digges suicide, we counted on our fingers the number of writer-suicides in recent years.  David asked on Facebook why so many poets are taking their lives.  Someone responded that poets are no more likely to commit suicide than firefighters or Finns.  While that may be true, it shouldn’t stop the discussion of this tragedy among poets, for those are our friends and colleagues and the life of the poet is what we know.  Maybe we owe it to ourselves and our loved ones to learn more about suicide, just as we learn about heart disease and alcoholism.  How do we observe each other with compassion and express our concern when someone close seems to be in a downward spiral? 
 
Many of you who read this blog are teachers as well.  What should you tell your students? Is this a conversation for the classroom? What should we do?  

No Hemlock Rock [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

No Hemlock Rock Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself. Don’t. Eat a donut, be a blown nut. That is, if you’re going to kill yourself, stand on a street corner rhyming seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with racket. Allow medical terms. Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost, if necessary, but don’t kill yourself. Let your friends know that something has passed, or be glad they’ve guessed. But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are bat crazy you will batter their hearts in blooming scores of anguish; but kill yourself, and hundreds of other people die. Poison yourself, it poisons the well; shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome. I will give badges to everyone who’s figured this out about suicide, and hence refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank you for staying. Please stay. You are my hero for staying. I know about it, and am grateful you stay. Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus. Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay. Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus. Dare to not kill yourself. I won’t either.