One of the questions poetry asks us is how do we live in a fractured world? Suicide rates in the United States over the past two decades have been on an alarming rise. According to the American Psychological Association there has been a 30 % rise between 2010 and 2016. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in our country. Mental health is still less understood and accepted and treated as is physical illness. The brain is a complex organ.
Poetry is art and art knows truths that science doesn't have terms for yet. Medical studies on the effectiveness of treating emotional disorders is mixed, but expressive writing in psychological therapies has long been used. Confessional poetry was birthed from the womb of psychiatry. Today, the medical humanities and the study of literature as a means to heal and understand is gaining traction, deepening understanding, and building bridges.
Robert Frost once said that every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world. And so it is with Didi Jackson's forthcoming book of poems from Red Hen Press, Moon Jar. To heal from the terror and pain of surviving the suicide of a loved one is a tall order. Moon Jar seeks to find wholeness in the fissure through art and the natural world.
I spoke with Jackson about the title poem recently. Moon Jar is an ekphrastic poem that uses ancient Korean ceramics as a way to build a metaphor and allegory. The moon jar’s beauty lies in its imperfection. The surface of the moon jar is like the surface of skin, full of various markings and freckles, but perhaps the better for it. The moon jar defines beauty to include imperfection. Here, ekphrasis understands that nothing is perfect. It reminds me of quilters of yesteryear who used to make sure to have one imperfection in their quilts because only God is perfect.
The idea of modesty in the act of creation informs the tone of this achingly beautiful lyric. The finely hewn couplets and elegant syntax draws us down the page using assonance and shorter lines. The poem has a quiet power in its own testimony. The speaker is lit up by the moon’s nudge toward epiphany, which allows the speaker to merge with all color, all light, a kind of redemption that fills the fissure. A momentary stay.
Moon Jar
My wedding ring is missing
one small diamond, and
I like it that way: a reminder
of the imperfect in
all of us, like that keyhole
size of grief that remains crystalline.
In Korea, ceramicists for centuries
have made moon jars: testimony
to the virtue of modesty: asymmetrical
warping on the wheel, slumping
in the pine-heated kiln,
impurities when fired — black
dots and pocks on its surface
like freckles on skin.
I have been kept awake
so many nights by the moon:
its pull on the pines and night birds
and who, like a monk, keeps a sharp order of time.
Never a perfect sphere,
the milky moon jar joins two
clay hemispheres into one.
When the light of the moon
finds me, I am the color
of everything in the winter night.
(originally appeared in Southern Indiana Review)
EP: Suicide continues to be a major killer in the United States. Your forthcoming book “Moon Jar” speaks to the suicide of your second husband. How did you navigate the difficult terrain of healing and writing? Artistically, were their beacons of light that lead the way?
DJ: So many who take their lives believe there is some part of themselves that is flawed. Maybe someday we will come to value each other exactly as we are. I took consolation and inspiration in the works of a number of poets and artists who served as guides in my writing of Moon Jar. I found myself looking for poets who write about their grief, whether it be from the loss of suicide or not. Ruth Stone, Matt Rasmussen, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Edward Hirsch, Anna Akhmatova, Beth Bachman all served as inspirations as writers who have seen the darkest of days and moved through that darkness with their poems. Just after my husband’s suicide, I was especially buoyed by Kevin Young’s anthology on grief, The Art of Losing. Just to know that I wasn’t alone in facing what seemed to be an impossible recovery was incredibly beneficial. Visual artists helped too, modern and abstract artists especially Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra. In his essay, “Why Modern Art Matters Now,” Kirk Varnedoe argues that modern art “is a source not of absolutes and enduring truths, but of uncertainties constantly exacerbated, of pieties constantly exploded” and therefore opens itself to a range of human experiences. The work of writing the poems in Moon Jar became a way for me to process what had happened and a way for me to begin to recover by investigating my own range of emotions.
EP: In the title poem, Moon Jar, the speaker is reckoning with the imperfect life and how to live it. The moon jar itself is an object that represents a larger trope. I know you are also a teacher of art history, but what made you want to write about the Korean ceramic moon jar and how it relates to the overall narrative of the collection?
DJ: I taught art history for almost ten years. Recently, I was teaching a course on the intersection of language and visual art. Before I could introduce my students to any type of art, I wanted to offer several good reasons why we should look at art in the first place. The moon jar, as Alain de Botton and John Armstrong mention in their book Art as Therapy, is a great example of morality taught through visual art. They ascertain that art can serve many functions. Moon jars are made by joining two hemispheres of clay. That metaphor alone is so beautiful. My poem mentions a wedding ring, a western symbol of unity. But, what I love most about the moon jar is that it is beloved for the imperfections that come from combining the two halves, firing in the kiln often adds blemishes and spots. In a time when we are obsessed with perfection, this idea is refreshing.
Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
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