The Best American Poetry

Anne Sexton: On the Anniversary of her Death [ed. Terence Winch]

 

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

 

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

 

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Anne Sexton studied with the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University and also worked as a model and a librarian. Although she had written some poetry in childhood, it was not until the later 1950s that she began to write seriously. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. The book won immediate attention because of the intensely personal and relentlessly honest self-revelatory nature of the poems recording her nervous breakdown and recovery. Their imagery was frequently brilliant, and their tone was both sardonic and vulnerable. Her second book of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), continued in the vein of uncompromising self-exploration. Live or Die (1966), a further record of emotional illness, won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974). Sexton taught at Boston University in 1970–71 and at Colgate University in 1971–72. She also wrote a number of children’s books with her close friend, poet Maxine Kumin.  Sexton died by her own hand on Oct. 4^th, 1974. The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976, edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton), and Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978) were published posthumously. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton, was published in 1977 and No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose in 1985.      [from the Encyclopaedia Britannica]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Don't Kill Yourself [by Carlos Drummond de Andrade; selected by Stacey Lehman]

I was looking through my copy of Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 for the publication date of "One Art" so I could respond to Dean Rader's challenge when I found Bishop's translation of this moving poem. -- SDH 

Don't Kill Yourself 

Carlos, keep calm, love
is what you're seeing now;
today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,
day after day tomorrow's Sunday
and nobody knows what will happen
Monday.

It's useless to resist
or to commit suicide.
Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself!
Keep all of yourself for the nuptials
coming nobody knows when,
that is, if they ever come.

Love, Carlos, tellurian,
spent the night with you,
and now your insides are raising
an ineffable racket,
prayers,
victrolas,
saints crossing themselves,
ads for better soap,
a racket of which nobody
knows the why or wherefor.

In the meantime, you go on your way
vertical, melancholy.
You're the palm tree, you're the cry
nobody heard in the theatre
and all the lights went out.
Love in the dark, no, love
in the daylight, is always sad,
sad, Carlos, my boy,
but tell it to nobody,
nobody knows nor shall know.

-- Carlos Drummond de Andrade (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)

from the archive; first posted November 10, 2010

No Boundaries [by Lera Auerbach]

Sometimes I wish to press the knife against my skin and let out blood
because the world is growing within me, overflowing; it overwhelms me –
for how is it possible that the world is within me while I’m within the world?
Where are the boundaries between us?
Where do I end, and the world begins?
I step barefoot on the ground and feel the rotation of the Earth.
I’m falling through the universe at breathtaking speed while not moving at all.

 

At the Ritz: Plath, Sexton & Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

1958: Eisenhower’s in the White House, Explorer 1 satellite launched, The US. Supreme Court rules for school integration, Elvis joins the Army, the Yankees win the World Series, the microchip is invented, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is published, Marilyn Monroe films Some Like it Hot, Sylvia Plath moves to Boston and joins Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s writing seminars.


It’s also the year I was born. But that is not why I’m here conjuring 1958. Or maybe it is, inserting myself into this story about an imagined cultural intersection of poetry and pop. In my mind, Plath and Sexton are having martinis at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. They’ve come from a Lowell seminar, their minds buzzing. At the next table is Monroe. She’d driven up from Connecticut where she lives with husband Arthur Miller. She’s newly pregnant, her body hormonally adjusting. She’s nervous that she’ll lose this one too, especially as she must fly to LA next month to start filming. As she sips her cup of tea, she thinks about Arthur, his struggles with writer’s block, her need to get away for a few days. Marilyn pulls her journal out of her handbag to write. Truman Capote’s book tumbles out. As she reaches down under the table to retrieve it, she notices the two women at the next table. All other eyes in the dining room are on her, but not theirs. They are deep in conversation. There is something about them that intrigues Marilyn. Does she know them from somewhere? Plath and Sexton are playing it cool. Of course, they know that Marilyn Monroe is sitting next to them. It is only as she looks directly at them, that they turn to meet her gaze.

From everything that I have learned in the research I undertook to write poems in the persona of Marilyn for my newest collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, neither Anne Sexton nor Sylvia Plath never met Marilyn. Plath wanted to, or her subconscious wanted to meet Marilyn according to a 1959 diary entry: “Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. I spoke almost in tears of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us (her husband and herself) although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me a manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.” Discovering this diary entry prompted me to write a poetic response from Marilyn to Plath:

Dear Sylvia,

Give me your bitten hand.

I will paint each moon sliver—

Amaryllis red.

If you are a girl

swirled in the thick of a dream,

I am a play

of red-tongued wolves and barn owl howls.

Let me curl into your hair, crawl beneath

your winter. Scrawl me in lines.

Let me mean everything to you.

I promise lavender and honey cakes

and the taste of Christmas roses.[1]

In fact, as I drafted poems for An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, I had Sexton and Plath on my brain. That all three women suffered mental health issues and would die early by their hand was an obvious connection. But they also were living and making art and pushing against the constraints of being a creative, working woman at a time when women were expected to be homemakers. Sexton, Plath and Monroe began connecting into a single powerful force in my writing. I drafted a cento constructed of lines from poems all three women wrote in 1958. While that poem did not make it into my final collection, remnants of Sexton and Plath’s imagery linger in several of the poems, and specifically the bee imagery from Sexton’s “Said the Poet to the Analyst” and “Ringing the Bells” and Plath’s bee poems particularly “Wintering,” echo in my persona poem, “Hello it’s Me, Marilyn” where Marilyn is dying. Even now, beneath the lilt of Marilyn’s voice, I hear the lower pitched ones of Sexton and Plath in my ear—like a brilliant, feminist chorus and suddenly, there they are in the Ritz hotel, across from the Boston Public Garden, together and it’s 1958.

 

[1] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marilyn Monroe not only loved poetry and poets, poets have reciprocated in writing Marilyn into poetry. While I may be the first to write an entire collection centered around Marilyn, in doing so I have entered into a long tradition of poets who have written poems devoted to or referencing the famous actress.

Marilyn appears in passing in Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis” published in 1957, while Marilyn was still living, as “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” and more recently in Alex Dmitrov’s “LOVE” from his new collection LOVE and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over

the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in

champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I

cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way

she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will

say au revoir.”

 

In fact, it is Marilyn’s tragic death that poets have explored over and over. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” from 1968, with her death as metaphor for America:

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

DiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!

That Death should seem the only protector –

That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could

only dissolve her! A method

of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it, America.

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

perhaps she had said. ‘All I had was my life.

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?

Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

Then in 1984, Sharon Olds writes a poem with the same title that appears in her collection from that year The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984).

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Marilyn’s death forever transforming the men, and the reader in Old’s poem. We cannot look away. In Frank Bidart’s 1996 poem, “Marilyn Monroe” that ran in The New Yorker, Marilyn becomes a vehicle for the idea and perhaps the impossibility of transformation.

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

Even nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn continues to serve as poetic muse, metaphor and mirror. And there’s no end in sight. Brava Marilyn!

The End [by Lera Auerbach]

The Tree – Acrylic on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

 

THE END

(1)

It is hard to know how to start a book.  

Its ending is an even greater mystery. 

How do you know you’ve finished
writing the book you're writing?

After all, the end is never the end
(unless you die just as you’ve finished the last sentence.)

Some may argue that even if you (meaning the reader)
or I (meaning the author) die in the previous sentence,
even that would be no more of an end
than death (which is, in all fairness,
rarely the end of anything.) 

This is why suicides are so useless.
Because nothing really ends,
and a lot of new troubles begin.
Everything remains, even more than before
outside of your control (since you are dead
and can't do much about it.)

(2)

Why have so many poets killed themselves?

(3)

I have a young peach tree, which we planted in the backyard of our dacha in hopes that one day it would produce delicious peaches. When we planted it – the tree looked healthy and full of green leaves. Soon its leaves turned yellow and then fell. All of them. Instead of a tree, I had what looked like a naked dead branch sticking out of the ground. 

Perhaps it is not dead, I thought. Perhaps this tree is of a poetic, sensitive nature and, just like a poet, needs attention and nourishment. Instead of pulling the dead stick out of the ground, I bought fruit-tree vitamins – large spikes full of nourishment, which I pressed into the ground all around the roots. The next morning, the tree was still without any leaves, but it was covered in tiny white flowers – the tree was alive and grateful. 

If we could find every poet in the moment of despair and offer him or her some vitamins, perhaps not so many would end up killing themselves. And there is always the next suicidal poet waiting for some kindness. Even if he or she has not written a single line of poetry.

 

A protective blanket of words [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Arctic Dreams - Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask. 

I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist. 

Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you. 
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.

In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life. 

"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."

Post mortem motherly care.

(2)

A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable. 

A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.

(3)

"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years. 

“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry. 
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions. 

Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.

As if words could make a difference. 
As if anything could still make any difference.

In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans? 

(4)

Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission. 

If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness. 

Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster. 

But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together. 

 

Commuters Who Found "Heaven" in the NYC Subway [by Catherine Woodard]

 

 When "Heaven" appeared in the NYC subways, many admirers of the poem asked author Patrick Phillips for permission (not that they needed it) to highlight his poem in funerals and memorials. Several mailed programs that reprinted "Heaven." One father wanted permission to make t-shirts of “Heaven” for the third anniversary of his son’s suicide. 

"It felt incredible to have people speaking back in that way," Phillips said at an Oct. 25 celebration of 25 years of Poetry in Motion. The program is a partnership between the Poetry Society of America and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts & Design. 

Fans typically reached Phillips through his website to describe why the poem touched them. Several composers wanted permission to set “Heaven” to music. One woman carried a MetroCard with the poem on the back for a year; then retired it to her bulletin board at work once it expired.

Phillips always wrote back. His replies are tender and personal; the exchanges are moments of civility and connection. A few excerpts from the more than 25 that arrived directly in his inbox:

Ashley: Your poem "Heaven" is one of my most favorite ever. After the recent death of my mother, I find myself coming back to it again. It comforts me and brings out tears as well. I like the world you created in that poem very much.

Phillips sent condolences to her and her family for the loss. Ashley continued the conversation with a question: I was wondering if I might ask you the inspiration for that poem. If it's too personal I understand.

Patrick: Not too personal at all, Ashley. I wrote it around the time my wife's father died, too young, from really merciless prostate cancer. He was a dear friend of mine, and I was feeling very sad that my sons would never know their wonderful grandfather. Around that same time I was also reading a lot of Renaissance poets like George Herbert and Ben Jonson. I was moved by and envious of their faith in a heavenly reunion, and the poem was really my version of that... My imagining how beautiful it would be if we could all be together again somehow, with Ollie there with my sons... Not sick, not weak, but the way he used to be. The poem is just a dream in which "time avails not," as Whitman put it, and my grown sons somehow get to know my lost friend. And now I'm all teary on my commute home!

***

A rider whose kitty had recently been poisoned: what you said soothed my heart…

Patrick: I'm also so sorry to hear about what happened…, and can really sympathize, as our silver tabby Simba is curled up on the desk next to me even as I write this (as he is most days!). We both send condolences. All the best, P

 ***

Others were just appreciative of a moment of reflection during their commute.

Tom: I was on the C train today, jammed against the wall in front of the 
Poetry in Motion panel. I enjoyed the poem so much i scanned back up to find the author and was pleased to see your name attributed to it.
I love the idea of Heaven to be our personal world of remembrance as 
well as the looping rhythm of the poem itself. I kept reading it in a continuous loop like a prayer or mantra and for a few minutes I was able to forget the handbag wedged in my lower back. Thank you for that.


***

Dear Mr. Patrick Phillips b. 1970: Just wanted to let you know that tonight I read your poem again on the Queens-bound A train. I love your poem because it is simple and written in plain English. It makes sense and it rhymes in perfect harmony. It is also very powerful. Thank you for creating this masterpiece that I enjoy ever so often when I get on THAT car on THAT Queens-bound A train on my way home after a long hard day of living in New York City.

 

"Heaven" is among 100 poems in a new anthology The Best of Poetry in Motion: Celebrating 25 Years on Subways and Buses. Published by W.W. Norton, the anthology is edited by PSA executive director, Alice Quinn. Phillips, Billy Collins, Aracelis Girmay, Major Jackson, Jim Moore, Paul Muldoon, Marilyn Nelson, Elise Paschen, Molly Peacock, Katha Pollitt and Kevin Young launched the anthology Oct. 25 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at Lincoln Center. 

 

More about Poetry in Motion from The Best American Poetry blog:

Jim Moore's Poetry in Motion surprise on Spring Street. 

Reflections by Marilyn Nelson

Happy 25th Birthday Poetry in Motion  & video of "Grand Central" by Billy Collins

 

Catherine Woodard is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project.

 

Dean Delivered [by Catherine Woodard]

 

Michael Jordan with Coach Dean Smith

The obituaries of legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith have heralded his civil rights activism and team-above-self philosophy as much as his basketball legacy. President Barack Obama honored Smith with the Medal of Freedom in 2013   as a leader who transcended his sport. This week, I asked the motley crew at my middle-aged, co-ed basketball game, to pause in respect. I wore black socks and black headband to mourn, and a Carolina blue shirt to celebrate the life that shaped my values and ethics as much as any member of my biological family. For once in my life, I could stand at the three-point line and feel like Michael Jordan – who called Smith “more than a coach…a mentor, my teacher, my second father.” I raised my index finger and pointed downcourt, the way Smith taught players to thank teammates for an assist.

In my close extended family in the tobacco belt of North Carolina, Dean Smith was a deity. He echoed what they taught me about loyalty, humility and hard work. Coach –there was only one for my kin – connected me to my father who struggled with depression and alcoholism. None of that changed when I played for UNC rival Wake Forest in college. My junior year, in March, my father killed himself with a shotgun. For the rest of that season and many after, Coach Smith signaled from the sidelines all that my father wanted for me. 

 At 56, I’ve not got a lot of game left, but I still have a lot of Dean, on and off the court. Or at least I hope so.

 

Finding the Net

 

I could count on my father,

closed down, bed bound,

for Carolina basketball.

 

He would come out

for supper, snacks,

our Boys in Blue.

 

Dean Smith delivered.

Forty minutes of family,

triumph, selfless defense,

 

four corners of calm.

I seldom saw the bourbon

or pills. I watched perfect

 

pass after perfect pass

trounce the devils.

And my father fade.

 

I will find the open man.

 

 

In Third Grade My Father Loves Me Best When I

 

Watch hoops with him

            I can stay up late if I nap after school. The nap is my idea.

            I know why Coach Smith is the Dean of college basketball.

 

Open the 1957 scrapbook 

             When our Tarheels beat Wilt the Stilt for the National 

             Championship, the year before I was born.

 

Talk politics

             I know the Constitution is a do-over of some Articles

             Confederation. I can name the Supreme Court.

 

Ask about Washington, D.C.

             The trip he shook hands with Sam Rayburn, the big boss

              of a House, but not the White one.

 

Understand football

             How guards and tackles protect quarterbacks.

             That safeties must save the day.

 

Laugh with him about playing God

             of the Grapevine in Glendale. His younger cousins

             were angels. Fetched grape juice, Ritz crackers.

 

(poems from a work in progress, For Opening the Mouth of the Dead)

 

Catherine Woodard helped return Poetry in Motion to NYC’s subways and is on the board of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in CNN online, Painted Bride Quarterly, RHINO and other publications. She is a former journalist who lives and plays basketball in NYC. 

 

Don't Let Robin Williams' Darkness Spread [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

(Ed note: Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It has written extensively about suicide here. In this piece, published yesterday in the New York Daily News, she cautions that celebrity suicides can trigger more deaths.)

Losing Robin Williams hurts. Many millions of people loved him wholeheartedly. Others saw him as brilliant but a little too earnest, which now seems like a lovely offense.

So the pain is widespread. It makes sense that we are talking about it in the media and on the Internet.

But it is also a real problem. Mass celebrations of people who kill themselves, even beloved people, can send the wrong message and influence others toward hurting themselves.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/don-robin-darkness-spread-article-1.1901235#ixzz3AMtQeqEN

 

Throwback Thursday: Suicide & Biography in Poetry [by Rochelle Hurt]

It’s Throwback Thursday. For those of you who aren’t on social media, that means we all post Polaroids of ourselves in the ‘80s, or something like that. I wasn’t very interesting in the ’80s, since I mostly just ate fruit rollups and watched cartoons. So today I’m throwing way back to 2003, when I was a freshman in college—but also to the ‘60s.

News recently made the rounds that Anne Sexton won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry basically by default. According to David Trinidad, Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry reveals that while she wasn’t at the top of any of the judges’ lists, she was the only one on whom they could all agree. Plath was also in the running, though she was dead by then. Of the comparison between the two, one of the judges, Phyllis McGinley, wrote “Both women are neurotics and their poetry is based on the fact.”

Confessional poetry gets a lot of flak for this very reason, and it’s often worse for female poets. It used to irk me that Plath and Sexton frequently got lumped together as “the suicide girls,” when they clearly had different styles and distinct voices. In the classroom, I saw their biographies too often overshadow their work. Why didn’t the same thing happen to John Berryman, who also committed suicide? Why didn’t W. D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle get put down as simply neurosis in book form?

I was troubled mostly because I thought this biographical focus belittled these women’s work—and certainly biography can be used that way—but in truth, it was both Plath’s and Sexton’s reputations as suicide girls that initially appealed to me as a beginning poetry student. The first collection of poetry I bought was Plath’s Collected Poems. Sexton’s Selected was the second or third. Until I discovered them, I had some vague, unfortunate notion of poetry as a highfalutin genre of bald white men lecturing to me in rhymes about nature and the true meaning of life.

Whose life? Not mine, it seemed. I was a freshman in college, and I was in the middle of an emotional crisis (as most college freshman are). I felt like a failure for wanting to give up on my dream of becoming a painter. Everybody around me looked talented and happy. I was depressed, drinking a lot, and thinking about death often—not just practically, but also conceptually, which is important creative work. I didn’t want to be comforted (and when it comes to poetry, I still don’t). I wanted the dark, the dramatic, and the feminine.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe   
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.  

 (from Plath's "Tulips")

O little mother,
I am in my own mind.
I am locked in the wrong house.

(from Sexton's "For the Year of the Insane")

I have gone out, a possessed witch,   
haunting the black air, braver at night;   
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch   
over the plain houses, light by light:   
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.   
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.   
I have been her kind.

(from Sexton's "Her Kind")

When I read lines like these, I felt I had a stake in poetry. There was palpable frustration in these poems, and brashness channeled into imagery and music. Furthermore, these were women who had found success through their art not by ignoring their personal experiences, but by tapping into them. For me, that represented a new possibility for my own (troubled, female) voice. 

  
I wanted the literary equivalent of PJ Harvey

I didn’t devote myself to Confessional poetry, but it was my entry point, and I think this is true for many young girls.That’s certainly not to say that one must be an angsty teen to appreciate Plath or Sexton, or that their work is immature, or that they should be grouped together as a matter of course. (Most poets would agree that Plath is a master of craft and language and should be studied as such.) I only mean to suggest that, while we shouldn’t always be reading poetry as memoir, thinking about poets’ biographies (including neuroses, suicides, etc.) is OK, and perhaps even beneficial for beginning poets—if it leads to further consideration of the work. Why avoid talking about these things (or anything) in art? 

Furthermore, I think it would be a terrible thing to impress upon young poets the idea that any initial identification with a poet’s “neurosis” is amateurish or shallow. People identify with poets as people (rather than simply poets) for a number of reasons: race, class, gender, sexuality, culture, region. There’s nothing wrong with that, because of course, poets are people. Many students will get to know these poets’ work through stories of their lives (and yes, their deaths), and that's not always a bad thing.  

A page from my freshman year

For this reason, I also think it’s okay for beginning poetry students to write about their personal lives. Some instructors discourage this, but often there is rich material in students’ experiences that can be mined in a number of ways not limited to confessional poetry. (I understand the reluctance to read yet another cliché-laden breakup poem, but this is really a problem with form, not content). Remember what the second-wave taught us about the personal being political? Sexton’s Transformations poems blend childhood trauma (not limited to her own) with fairy tales to question cultural values and gender stereotypes. In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath uses the event of her suicide attempts to challenge readers’ notions of the confessional mode and provoke questions about the relationship of tragedy, poetry, gender, and exhibitionism. Using one’s personal experiences doesn’t preclude engagement with the world.

 Tomorrow: My last post--an interview with poet Cori Winrock! 

Revisionist Dream [by Lera Auerbach]

In memory of Maxine Kumin, here is a short song I wrote on her poem "The Revisionist Dream". This is a performance by Angela Denoke and Roger Vignoles at the Kölner Philharmonie.

 The Revisionist Dream by Maxine Kumin - Poetry Archive.

 

The Year I Didn't Kill Myself by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Time Passes

Today I woke up and stretched for a bit while listening to a dharma talk on pain. How boring. Sometimes I wonder how to write these posts. Maybe that’s a way of saying sometimes I wonder if I have a right to write these posts. I’m suspicious of memoir but then I think maybe that’s more about my own lack of self-confidence and my own long term commitment to silencing myself, which I think is something a lot of us do. Or maybe it’s that it seems so long ago. Or like no time at all.

It’s less than a month until the twenty-sixth anniversary of my mother’s death. For a long time I would have said: It’s less than a month until the twenty-sixth anniversary of my mother’s suicide. This year I’m trying to think of it in a different way. Suicide or not, the fact is my mother’s been gone for twenty-six years. It’s awful and common no matter how I cut it. Twenty-six years ago this February day I wasn’t talking to my mother. Or, I had just started talking to her after a year or more of silence. I thought it was just a year but then a woman she’d been in the hospital with found me online and sent a letter saying she’d read my work and it seemed like my mother and I had reconnected and were back in touch at the time of her death. She made it sound like it had been a lot longer than a year.

I mean, I know time is funny that way. I had a friend who would say, “How long has it been since we’ve talked? It’s been forever.” when, in reality, it had been at most a few weeks that didn’t seem like much time at all to me. But then another friend would have the audacity not to be in touch for four or five days and I’d assume the friendship was over. All this is to say I’m hardly a reliable narrator and also that so much depends on where one is standing.

In February of 1988 I was in 8^th grade at McGee Middle School. All I can think of as I write that is the hallway near my locker and the Social Studies room I was sitting in when my mother died. That feels like no time ago or maybe a better way to put it is there feels like no physical distance between me and the girl sitting in the classroom, who will find out when she gets home that her mother died at ten o’clock that morning.

Yes, I can be right back there in a moment to the day my mother died. To say she killed herself is both true and somehow easier to bear, at least today. I spent so much time thinking about my mother killing herself that I hardly thought about her dying.

At first it was because I couldn’t say she killed herself. The day after my mother died, Sandy walked up to me in the hall and said, “What did you do last night?” I said, “My crazy aunt killed herself.” Which let me say it and not say it all at once. It let me test it out. I don’t remember what she did when I told her that. We were walking past the lunchroom, which was just past my Social Studies classroom. I can feel that room waiting for me to go in it but I won’t. Not now. I know I said the word, “Pills.” That must mean that she asked how she did it.

Why didn’t I say my mother killed herself? Why didn’t I say, at least, my mother died? Nobody in that school knew my mother. I felt embarrassed about all sorts of things and maybe that was one? Who was I to say that she died and get their pity or their sympathy? Especially since we had only started talking again after how, after how many years? That last part’s from the Bishop poem, “Santarem” and the lines are totally different. It’s about remembering things wrong. Actually it’s about remembering everything right and still being wrong. Actually, it’s about someone asking about a wasp’s nest a million years after the fact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course I may be remembering it all wrong.

In February of 1988 I’d just started speaking to my mother again after what I believe was a year and a half at most of not speaking. This was after a visit where she told me I’d be happy if she died of cancer and then told me she was going to go cry and I probably should too. I remember sitting in the living room while she sobbed in her bedroom with the door all the way open. And then some things happened and I went home and we didn’t talk for almost eighteen months. And then we did talk. And then she killed herself.

Died, rather. She died. That’s the lasting effect on both of us. All this talk of ethics and selfishness and murder. It’s the wrong stone thrown into the pond.

“How did she die?”

“She killed herself.”

“She took a bottle of pills.”

“She was really poor and not in good health.”

“She lost hope.

 

“Is your mother still living?”

“No. She died.”

Stop all the clocks. Or set them all to the same time all over the world and through years so when the hour strikes we can’t make sense of anything through the horror of the clanging.

Some people you miss after a few weeks and some you wish would call you all the time. Some things you want to last forever and sometimes they do and mostly they don’t. It’s February 2014 or February 1988 and I haven’t spoken to my mother in too long. It kills me and it probably did back then too. Who cares?

I think she did. I do.

To life, to life, l'chaim. Per la vita! Um das Leben! Pour la vie! Chun saol!,Для жизни!생활! 生活!, !לחיי!,في الحياة

(ed note: Gabrielle Calvocoressi's posts last week reminded me of this post, by Jeff Oaks, from 2009.)

---

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

The Year I Didn't Kill Myself by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Not Guilty. Full of Light.

Every night before I fall asleep I say, “Goodnight, God. I love you. Sleep well.” I don’t say it out loud because it’s just between us. I realized the other day that I began saying it after my mother killed herself. I’d always prayed. Or, I’d always talked to God. Nothing big really. I didn’t ask for things so much as talk about my day or sometimes I’d ask questions. I mean, sometimes I’d beg. When I was getting bullied in middle school I remember asking God to please help me because I didn’t think I could take it any more. I have such a clear vision of sitting in our narrow stairway in the late afternoon saying, “Please. Just please.” And then the phone rang and there was some boy on the other end of the line saying he was going to kill me when I came to school the next day.

I didn’t think to hold it against God. Even before my mother killed herself it never occurred to me to blame God for the lousy things that went on in my world. The boys who tripped me in the hallway were the boys who tripped me in the hallway. I was pretty sure most of their parents would trip me too if given the chance in a room where no one was looking. As far as I was concerned, God was good company. I didn’t go to church in the very religious town I grew up in, I just walked through the cornfield talking to him. I did say “him,” it’s true. Now I think of God as a kind of deep pressure and gong inside me that echoes into the world but back then that felt male to me. Anyway. God was who I talked to in a life where I didn’t have lots of folks to talk to. Walking through the fields, waiting for the bus, sitting in the living room in Vermont when my mother’s third husband brought a homeless man back from the liquor store and we all sat there as they got drunker and drunker. And later that night after my mother played a game with me where we got her husband up to bed and then asked him outlandish questions that he answered in his sleep. “Are you stupid?” “Are you stupid?” “What does a monkey sound like?” I lay in bed and talked it through: how weird it was and how I felt kind of bad for Jimmy, lying there with my mother laughing and getting him to answer one question after another. And I admitted I’d liked laughing with her, that I’d kept laughing just to keep being near her.

And yet, I did stop talking to God for awhile.  In those first months after my mother died I don’t think I checked in at all. I’m not sure where I was really, or who I talked to. Those months are a blank for me. I remember I went to school the day after she died. I remember her mother calling me on the phone and saying I’d killed her daughter, how I could hear the television in our living room as if the voices were coming from somewhere very far off. And then she said, “It will happen to you too. I can see it in your handwriting. You’re very sick.” I could have used God then but I wasn’t sleeping so maybe that’s why I didn’t confide in him. I don’t think so, though. I think I felt she was right and that if that was true then I didn’t deserve to talk to anyone. Who was I to have a gong inside me? Who was I to sound it?

I don’t know how I came back. I just know that I did and sometime around then I began saying, “Goodnight” and “I love you. Sleep well.” I would think of the whole world, I’d picture the planet with all its blues and greens and then I’d imagine all these voices saying “It’s your fault” “It’s your fault.” How crazy is that? But it helped somehow. I’d imagine God getting to sleep and be at peace for awhile and then I’d fall asleep. First I’d make my whole body get as tight as it could until I was almost electric and then I’d shake all the tension out of me. Or like I was a gong ringing and ringing until I became the deep silence of nobody blaming me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tonight it’s Shabbat. We lit the fire for the first time in our little house here in Carrboro. We ate Brussel’s greens with coconut oil and garlic. We ate mung bean pasta and drank some red wine. I thanked God, which was like the twentieth time I checked in today. Is it praying? I don’t know. I saw the most beautiful burgundy leaves on the way home from my walk and said, “Look at that” to the pressure inside me. My student did the coolest thing with syllabics and I said, “There you go!” and it sounded the gong in my torso and then I was endless. I thought of how to explain what it was to be shaking on the BART all those years ago and how Robin would sit on the phone with me until I got home. How I’d say, “I am so crazy.” and she would say, “Honey, we’re all crazy.” and how I’d talk to God about it that night, about how great Robin was and I’d thank God for Robin and Brian and Julie and Ryan and Jen and always Angeline and I’d keep listing with the gong sounding until I’d fall asleep.

Another day I’ll talk about blame. About who and what I do blame. But not tonight. I will say I don’t blame my mother. And I don’t blame my God. And most days (though not all days) I don’t blame myself. The fire’s still smoldering and the crickets are making a ruckus even though it’s deep into November. Everything is so alive tonight. Including me.

The Year I Didn't Kill Myself by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

November 21, 2013

Dear Mom,

Yesterday I couldn’t seem to do it. Well, that sounds a bit more dramatic than I mean it to. Yesterday I couldn’t seem to get myself to write this column I’m working on about you and me and suicide and why we do or don’t keep living. It’s something that happens to me. I get overwhelmed.

It was a good day though. There was lots to write about. I woke up and went to acupuncture in town. I decided to take the bus instead of driving, which turned out to be a great idea because I took the slower bus that takes you all through Carrboro. Oh! Do you know I moved to North Carolina? I’m not sure where you are and if you can see me from there and I haven’t written you a letter since Los Angeles. I like to think you’re with me but I have to admit I can’t feel you here except maybe once in awhile when the sun comes through the leaves in a certain way that kind of reminds me of Vermont or Autumn in the front yard at your parents when you used to come outside and watch me throw a ball against the garage door.

Anyway, I’ve moved here and yesterday I took the bus. It got full fast, which was nice because you could hear all the different conversations. Every time someone would get off the bus driver would say, “You have a good day.” It made me smile and do a quick little shake of pleasure to hear all of those polite goodbyes. One elderly man got on the bus near “Johnny’s Gone Fishin’” and saw his other friend already sitting and said, “My Man!” Can you imagine? How good that must feel to get on a bus and have someone say that to you! I got off the bus and walked to Stacy’s office. I was about twenty minutes early, which I didn’t mind because I got to sit in the office waiting room in a patch of sun and just let it warm me. I was thinking about going to acupuncture during that terrible time in Berkeley and how Dr. Ng was standing above me one day and placed a finger gently on my chest and said, “Your heart is like someone chopped it with ax. It’s an old wound. It won’t ever heal.” And then he smiled so wide and said, “So you make it a beautiful canyon!”

I am trying to make my life a beautiful canyon. I really am. Full of light and maybe some foxes and a ridiculous turkey or two just roaming around.

Mom, I think for a long time I thought your suicide was the wound but I wanted to say I don’t think that anymore. I mean, I’m not saying it was the greatest thing in the world. It was pretty much the worst. But you know (I think wherever you are) that there was also relief. That I felt that. It’s why I didn’t sleep for a month after you died. Because I felt so guilty for feeling relieved and I thought you’d know and be mad and come find me in my sleep. But you were so unhappy all the time and you were always in the hospital. And everyone on the other side of the family seemed to hate you which made me feel lost, like I didn’t have anyone if I loved you. Which I did. I did love you so much. I think that was the wound: watching you be worn down like that by poverty and loneliness and being so mad and so sad and relieved all at once when you died. I’m no hero. I’ve always known that. My father told me you died and I walked into the bathroom and ran hot water over my hands until it went cold.

It’s hard to write these letters. I’m not even sure why I do it sometimes. Anyway, Stacy came out and got me and it was a great session. We’re just getting to know each other but I like him a lot. I told him I’m thinking a lot about you this week and he said, “Why don’t we help you be present and sort of hold you at the same time.” Sometimes I wish there was some therapy where I could just go and be held for all the years I didn’t get touched by you. I remember in the worst times I’d lie on my analyst’s couch and wrap a blanket so tightly around me and she’d say, “There. You’re going to learn to self soothe.” Stacy put about eight needles in and then I just fell so deep into sleep. Deeper than I’ve slept in weeks. When he came in to see how I was I said, “So good. That was so good.”

Is this boring? It’s hard to know what to say sometimes. But I love these letters. I’m sorry I don’t write more. Life gets so busy. I’m a bit overwhelmed by it all to be honest. It’s been a couple weeks since I took a long walk in the pasture. Which you would LOVE. You walk along this trail and then the whole world just opens up. Usually some dog bounds past me right as I step into the field, which is like watching my heart leave my chest and just go. Sometimes the grasses are long and bursting with light like overfull grain sacks. Sometimes the pasture is mowed and you can see all the little birds feasting and the dogs just tear across the open space where normally they’d root around amidst the grass cover. That’s where I think of you most. Or where I wish for you most. We never got to take an adult walk or sit on a bench and really know each other. I feel like we were almost never alone, which I was grateful for at the time but now I think I’m older and even on your bad days I could make myself safe without anyone but us around.

I wish you were alive. But I don’t wish you were suffering. I went to school after seeing Stacy and after that I went to a movie about love and time travel. You know how I love the movies. God, I just laughed and cried and cried and laughed. About Time. That’s what it was called. The idea was that the main character could basically go back in time to any moment he wanted to change or relive again. And it was also kind of a love story about him and his dad. I have to admit I didn’t think of you during it. I thought about Nanny and Calvo and how I’d like to see them again. But after, when I was lying in bed, I did try to think if there was a moment that I could go back to with us. Not a moment that would change things (I don’t believe there’s a moment like that) but a moment where we were really happy and I wasn’t scared. And I thought about that time that you told me you wanted to show me something secret and took me up the narrow stairs of the old house you were living in until we came to the attic. You turned and looked at me and got this sheepish kind of smile. And then we walked in and there was this painting you’d done of the sun rising over a mountain. Just like when the dog bounds out of my chest in the open field. It was that gorgeous and surprising and like nothing you ever painted. I remember we stood in front of it and you said, “Do you like it?” And I said yes. And you said, “It’s how I feel about you.” And then you said, “Don’t tell my mom.”

I would go back there again and again if I could. It makes every inch of my canyon heart hurt when I write it but I bet it would feel so great to see you there.

I have to go to work now. I love and you and hope you have a great day or are a great day wherever you are.

From Carrboro,

Gaby

The Year I Didn't Kill Myself by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Detail of My Mother Many Years Before She Killed Herself

This photo was taken before she knew me. Before I was born. It was taken by her first husband, Ralph. I don’t think she’d been in the hospital yet.

I think she looks very beautiful. My eye first goes to the shadow under her chin and the way the light falls on the curve that leads from the top of her shoulder to the straight part of her neck.

I wish she was looking at me. I mean, I wish she was looking at the camera. I don’t have any photos of her looking at the camera. I don’t actually have any photos of us together at all. There’s one I remember where she’s in bed right after I’m born and her hair is really long and she’s holding me and sort of looking like she’s not sure. Her two cats are lying on either side of her. I lost the photo years ago.

I think she kind of looks like a hawk in this photo.

This is before she lost all her teeth. We used to sleep in twin beds on opposite sides of her bedroom in her mother’s house. At some point she began taking her teeth out before bed, which is when I realized she didn’t have her own teeth anymore. It made me uncomfortable.

I’ve never really noticed her ear before, which is crazy because it’s kind of big and makes me smile. We never knew each other that way. I don’t ever remember touching her. One night she came into my dark room and said, “I just want to hold you.” The next morning the man she lived with said he was taking me home ten days early.

But gosh, look at that ear! I’d like to be able to say to her, “You have big ears” and then both of us would laugh because we know she’s super pretty. I’m touching my own ear now. It’s bigger than I remember and I’m smiling.

Once she wrote me a letter saying it would be okay to have glasses but she knew how hard it must be to be the only bespectacled kid in my class. Bespectacled. What a word.

Once we sat on the couch in her mother’s living room and she said, “No one will ever trust you with eyes that shake like that.”

This is before she took too many pills and her mother had her stepfather drive her to the hospital in the trunk of his Cadillac so the neighbors wouldn’t see.

My mother’s name was Diane Jule Daw. If I ever had a boy I’d like to make his middle name Jule. I think it’s beautiful for a boy. I’m not sure about a girl.

It had been a good day. We’d gone to Ben Franklin and then come home and she made Dinty Moore stew from the can. I loved it. The way the beef just fell apart and how soft the potatoes were. We didn’t eat it at home. I’d gone into my grandparents’ cold closet to look for it but the closest I came was Campbell’s Chunky Beef Stew. It wasn’t the same. I’d sit at the kitchen table while she cooked it, letting the smell fill my nostrils. “Can we have it tomorrow, too?” She always said yes. I should be able to explain how intimate it felt for her to say yes but I can’t. All I can say is I’d imagine the next night with us sitting there and I’d feel so safe somehow. “Do you want bread?” I did. Crusty rolls or usually soft white slices. I’d tear off a piece and dip it in the sauce and let it soak like a sponge. “This is really good, Mom. I like this so much.”

This photo was taken before that.

I found out about my mother being put in the trunk of the Cadillac from my grandmother’s neighbor after my grandmother died. The neighbor said my grandmother told her once when she was drunk. I don’t know if my mom knew that story. She lived that time. That was a few years before she killed herself.

The last time I saw her I said, “I want to be friends but I can’t let you touch me. And I don’t want to call you mom anymore.”

This is before she had a daughter who said that to her.  We were at Friendly’s and she said, “I think that makes sense. Absolutely.” And then she drove me home and I never saw her again.

Today I read an article that talked about “Self-murder” and “Self-slaughter.” I think there was something about selfishness.

Dinty Moore is great to eat when you have no teeth because it tastes really good and you don’t have to chew it. It’s cheaper than dog food if you add water and make it last over three or four days.

Look at her. 

I can’t find the tape she sent me of ocean sounds. We used to listen to it before bed. Of all the things I wish I hadn’t lost, that’s the one that kills me. Stupid ocean. Making me miss you.

This photo was taken before my mother killed herself. Before I read an article that said people who kill themselves hurt everyone around them.

It hurt when my mother killed herself. Which is not the same thing as saying my mother hurt me.  As far as I can recall my mother never laid a hand on me in anger.

The Year I Didn't Kill Myself by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun 

The rule I made for myself most days was that I had to leave the house and smile at least three people that I didn’t know. I had to make eye contact and just say hello, which is to say even if I was shaking or had been throwing up from all the anxiety all day long I still needed to walk out on Claremont Blvd. and face the world.

This was the rule on weekends but also on weekdays after I’d get home from teaching at Stanford. I was doing great at Stanford. The students were fabulous, I was busy, I could make it through the day teaching my ass off and if I felt my heart start pounding I could breathe my way through it. I could get in my black Jetta and drive all the way home: over the Dumbarton bridge with its deep smell of algae, along the 880. By the time I’d get onto the 24 I might really be sweating or maybe crying a bit but it was okay, I could make it. I could get up the wide craftsman stairs and into my apartment and just make the bathroom before throwing up. I’d look up to see our sweet cat, Clemente, who had started to wait there for me to come home.

No matter how bad the day was or if it was dark I still had to walk back out the door. Turn right on Ashby and walk to College or keep walking down Claremont and go into Star Market and just say hello. To Nick, the owner. To the butchers. If I was on College I could go into Manpuku and get some miso soup and say hello to each person behind the counter. And then I was allowed to go home and throw up a few more times before going to bed.

This was my hard time.

Once I said hello to three people I needed to make my way home. Which was harder than you might think. I was so afraid I was going to begin hearing things that all I did was hear things. The doctor said, “You haven’t gone crazy. You’ve had a panic attack. You’re perfectly sane.” One of the branches on a giant rosemary bush would scratch my jacket and I’d have to sit on the ground with my head in my hands and beg my God not to have this be the start of the end of me. I remember how the eucalyptus trees smelled even in the coldest months in Berkeley. I remember how huge the spider webs were. Those were the things I focused on and breathed while saying to myself, “You are healthy and full of light. You can do this. You can get home.”

I needed another rule. Or I needed a companion. When I tell my students that I am terrible at memorization I’m not kidding. I can’t remember ten lines if I say them one hundred times over. It may be something to do with my nystagmus. I’m not sure. In other respects my memory is muscular and accurate to the point of distraction. I’m not sure how I came up with the notion that memorizing poems by Emily Dickinson would be the way to get myself home. And in the end there was just one poem, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun.” It took all the months of my shaking and not killing myself to get the poem down. Took the distance from College to Claremont and along the fire trails and up the hidden staircases in the Berkeley Hills. Over and over, “It is as a Vesuvian face” as I walked back from my analyst’s who said, You have to be like the bamboo. “It is as a Vesuvian face” at the bank and in the movies and with the steam from the soup dumplings hitting my cheeks. One poem for a year and now like a friend in every dark time.

Why did my mother kill herself and I didn’t that year and have not? This is a question I ask myself almost everyday, though never during moments of despair. The thought never comes to me then. I ask myself at the farmer’s market when David shows me the black radishes that I use in risotto or when Sarah takes me to the ranch and the horses press in on me so I’m nothing but warmth and breath and their snot on my hair. Is it this? Is this the reason? I ask myself at the rodeo and the rowdy square dance when the rain starts to fall. I don’t mean for it to sound romantic. I have questions about what keeps us alive. I don’t believe it’s a phone call or trying harder. I don’t believe it’s an act of cowardice to take your life. Or that it’s brave. I think it’s the most natural unnatural thing in the world. My analyst said, You have to decide her story is not your story. Even if it’s the last place you know to find her and you really have to say goodbye.

Over the next year, instead of writing the Sports Desk, I’ll be writing about the year I didn’t kill myself. Which is every year so far and one specific year and I think we probably all have one. And I’d like to start a conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764)

By Emily Dickinson

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Opon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master’s Head -
’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -

This week Gabrielle Calvocoressi will be writing every day. After that the column will appear on a bi-weekly basis.

The "Mad Men" Finale and the best commercials now on TV [by DL]

Some quotes:
"I have a hot tooth."
"Go to the Cloisters without me."
"Never cheap."
"I consider it a success: you didn't have to go a whole day wihout calling me an idiot."
"Why is this so hard? You only have to write 120 words and fifteen of them are Ajax."
"You just hate him because he voted for Goldwater."
"Will you take LSD with me?"
"You're really drunk. Sleep it off."
"This is what happens when you have the artistic temperament without being an artist."

Doors open, doors close, and an Old Fashioned with a beautiful stranger at a luxe Midtown bar is the way the evening ends.

The one universal truth linking all episodes of all seasons of "Mad Men" is that the client is always a shmuck.

"$50,000." That's the sum, the reccurent sum -- what a night with Joan is worth, or the life of Lane, or the collateral for a partnership in the firm, or the check Don gives to the angry widow. Fifty grand was a lot of money in those days. The most valuable stamp in the world was worth $50,000. Ernest Hemingway's story "Fifty Grand" was being read by aspiring writers in science-oriented high school programs in the post-Sputnik era of high angst. Sandy Koufax held out for one hundred thousand dollars. That was the really magic number in those days. That was the Joe DiMaggio number.

Peggy has come a long way, baby -- she's off to Virginia, slim  -- and Don's brother is going to "hang around. Get it?" Hang on for dear life, dear death, dear Adam. The suicide of one brother is the suicide of all. Dick Whitman gets to celebrate himself. His life's a toothache, and Canadian Club's the palliative. Meanwhile, lots of people get to sock Pete in the jaw.  Megan gets the part of Beauty in the "Beauty and the Beast" commercial for Butler Shoes. Who do you suppose is the beast in her life? And Roger hangs his hopes on the nudity of his life in bed with his French-speaking mistress, mother of his partner's wife.

Don, Peggy, and Ginsberg tell me that they dig two commercials on TV right now. The two, as paraphrased by me, who am too lazy to dig up the videos, are

(1) << A spot against cable tv, because the cable guy won't come, so you look out the window, and when you look out the window,  you see things you shouldn't see, and when that happens you have to disappear, and when you disappear you have to dye your eyebrows white, and when you do that you end up attending your own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly. Don't be Phil Schiffly. Switch to our dish or satellite or whatever the hell we're offering instead of cable. >>

Ginsberg said, "The visuals are funny, but the genius part of the commercial is the use of the name Phil Schiffly. (Oh, and btw, Phil Schiffly is the name of a guy who used to work in the ad agency's office before he screwed the pooch.)"

(2) << Car commercial. Attractive lady applies lie detector test to regular guy in shirt and tie. Nondescript q-and-a until she asks him, "Are you wildly and uncontrollably attracted to me?" He, emphatically: "No." Lie detector needle jumps all over the place. "Good," she says. "It's working." >>

At the bar waiting for his Od Fashioned, Don tells me he likes the car commercial because it takes the focus away from the car. "How much Bud would you sell if people tasted the stuff?" Then he excused himself to talk to the woman who approached asking him to light her fire. Come on baby light my fire. Doors open, doors close, and The Doors should sing. Hey, man, it's 1967. But James Bond is still in power, and "You Only Live Twice" is the song of the movie of the day. Don is on lifetime number two right now. The experience called "Vietnam" has not quite happened in the suburbs or on the New Haven line, the one-bedrooms in the East 60s, and the luxury flats in Midtown.  And the news is just months away. -- DL

The No Hemlock Rock [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Darling Bleaders,

It's a rainy sunday, all the clay tree jewelry I made for the tree out my window is whipping around in the stormy air. Much of it is essentially of pancake dimensions so spins in the wind.

I wrote to you Friday, and I usually write you every two or three weeks lately, so I'll just explain by saying that if this stage of my life has taught me anything it is do it when it's hot, and when it's not, don't even try. Also, I signed off saying that I'd tell you something later, so that left a pregnant pause. (Can we start a reality show called I Didn't Know it was a Pregnant Pause! It could be about the awkwardly officious.)

But what were we talking about? Ah yes. I promised you my poem in answer to C DdA's.

It's become the leap off point for my grand campaign. Campaign title-wise, I've been noodling around with "pro-living." It is a campaign against suicide. I don't mean end of life care suicide, I mean screw-this despair suicide.

As I said here the other day, an old friend killed herself in 2007. I wrote the below poem sometime after that, speaking to myself as much as to others. Then this past Christmas another old friend (also friends with the first) took her own life. I needed to post something to the community we all shared, poetry in America, but I didn't want to just post the poem, because over the two and a half years I'd come to see that people could read a lot of varied things from the poem, which is good for a poem, but not good for an open letter or a manifesto, which is what I wrote instead. Since than, this past year, I've been researching this subject and thinking about what it all means. Oddly, I still believe everything in the poem, but with much more context. Anyway here's my poem.

The 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.

Do not kill yourself.  I won’t either.

 

 

From this distance I'm just charmed to see how much I equate interesting rhymes with abandonless bliss.

I'm bringing all this up because December gets to be a difficult season for a lot of people and sometimes the blue comes out of the blue. So be prepared for it. Get through it to rue another day. The open letter/ manifesto is easy to find online. Well, I guess I'll link to it, I just fear seeming a barker on something too somber to bark for, but what can I say? I want you to stay. And I want you to have something ready to say if someone you love starts teetering near the neighborhood abyss. Say, We need you desperately. 

Love,

Jennifer

ps  The Boston Globe asked to publish a (slightly cleaned up) version, here, if you prefer.

pps While waiting to be seen by a professional, fill a notebook with color.

 

 

Don't Kill Yourself by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

SDH:  I was looking through my copy of Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 for the publication date of "One Art" so I could respond to Dean Rader's challenge when I found Bishop's translation of this moving poem: 

Don't Kill Yourself 

Carlos, keep calm, love
is what you're seeing now;
today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,
day after day tomorrow's Sunday
and nobody knows what will happen
Monday.

It's useless to resist
or to commit suicide.
Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself!
Keep all of yourself for the nuptials
coming nobody knows when,
that is, if they ever come.

Love, Carlos, tellurian,
spent the night with you,
and now your insides are raising
an ineffable racket,
prayers,
victrolas,
saints crossing themselves,
ads for better soap,
a racket of which nobody
knows the why or wherefor.

In the meantime, you go on your way
vertical, melancholy.
You're the palm tree, you're the cry
nobody heard in the theatre
and all the lights went out.
Love in the dark, no, love
in the daylight, is always sad,
sad, Carlos, my boy,
but tell it to nobody,
nobody knows nor shall know.

        by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)