The Best American Poetry

Writing from Grief [by T. J. Banks]

Many years ago, when Tim and I were first dating, I wrote a poem called “Dulcimer.”  In it, I tried to capture how the “muted mauve&gray sky” of a winter’s afternoon, the dulcimer music on the radio, and our lovemaking all came together to create a beautiful outside-of-time moment.

            Tim always liked that poem and not just because it was sexual.  “That’s the way it really was,” he’d say.

            We married and had a child, Zeke.  We were not a picture-perfect couple by any stretch of the imagination, and we both had pretty good ones.  But we got each other.  He was my toughest critic and my fiercest supporter.  “If I’ve done nothing else in my life,” he told me, “I’ve tried to be supportive of your writing….I believe you have what it takes to be a great writer.”

            So, when he was killed in a car accident, I was lost and not just because I suddenly found myself a 34-year-old widow with a three-and-a-half-year-old child.  My best friend, my cheering section, was gone.  And for what seemed like a long time afterwards, I could not write.  Then a poem came to me.  It wasn’t a very good one. But it let me know that there was a survivor in the wreckage.

            More poems began to appear.  One of them was “The Wild Things”:   it deals with the weeks after the tragedy and two “small good things” that happened, bringing me out of the fog….

            One muggy afternoon, I walked listlessly out into the backyard.  There, at the edge of Tim’s vegetable garden, stood a doe. I stopped. Time stopped.  In that space, only the deer and I existed. I stared at her, and she returned my gaze without fear. Never had a deer – or any other wild animal, for that matter – looked at me like that. I felt oddly comforted despite my grief.

             Not long afterwards, I was going out to the shed when a hummingbird flew by, drawn to the red bee balm alongside it.  We’d never had hummingbirds before despite all the fancy feeders I’d hung to lure them into the yard. And, once again, the pain inside me loosened its hold for a bit.

            Both deer and hummingbirds have a rep as messengers, symbolically speaking.  Tim and I had both loved animals, birds, and just being out in nature.  Among the many things he had given me over the years were a river otter sculpture, a book – America’s Favorite Backyard Wildlife – and a beaver-chewed stick that he’d picked up by the river, knowing that I’d like it.  And once, during the holidays, I’d picked out a wildlife calendar for my mom to give him.  He’d thanked her, then said, “I suspect Tammy had something to do with this.”

            So, when the deer and the hummingbird appeared so soon after his death, I couldn’t help suspecting that Tim had something to do with it.  That it was his way of letting me that he was O. K.  Both creatures lifted my spirits – made me feel as though, yes, he was out there somewhere – and then they went into my poem.

            Writing that poem – and the Tim poems that followed – gave me a way of processing all that grief that I didn’t know what to do with.  But doing so also gave me a life-line.  Slowly, I drew myself up out of the sad, dark place his death had sent me to.

            I haven’t had a lot of contact with the other contributors to The Widows’ Handbook, but I get the sense that their poems have worked in much the same way for them.  Patricia Savage speaks in “How Could I” of “turn[ing] toward the light, the children in the kitchen, bound to the care of the living, choosing alchemy to create cold sense out of the molten lead of your passing.” In “Wonderland,” Gail Braune Cormorat writes about being “shaken, transformed” and then “stepp[ing] through the door once again.”

            Because it is a transformation, a going through the looking-glass into a world where nothing makes sense.  And we use – we need -- the alchemy of poetry to make something transcendent out of our wanderings there.  That is what characterizes the poems in The Widows’ Handbook for me and why it’s ultimately an inspiring and not a depressing book.

            The landscape of grief is an ever-shifting one, and no two people experience it quite the same way.  Those moments out in the yard – the doe greeting me from the garden, the hummingbird whirring about like a tiny jeweled miracle in a world gone gray – have stayed with me.  At a time when I hurt too much to cry, they were a connection with Tim and more.  They took me out of myself and brought a kind of healing with them.

            When I read “The Wild Things” now, I find that I tend to skip over the opening, which deals with Tim’s death.  Instead, I focus on that last section…on the deer, the hummingbird, and the messages they brought me.  On the gifts that came to me when my hands felt hopelessly empty.  I read those lines, and it all comes back to me in a rush.  Because that’s the way it really was.

T. J. Banks is the author of Sketch People: Stories Along Way, A Time for Shadows, Catsong, Derv & Co.: A Life Among Felines, Souleiado, and Houdini, a cat novel which the late writer and activist Cleveland Amory enthusiastically branded “a winner.” Catsong, a collection of her best cat stories, was the winner of the 2007 Merial Human­Animal Bond Award. A contributing editor to laJoie, she is a columnist for petsadviser.com and has received writing awards from the Cat Writers’ Association (CWA), ByLine, and The Writing Self. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Guideposts’ Soul Menders, Their Mysterious Ways, Miracles of Healing, and Comfort From Beyond. She has also worked as a stringer for the Associated Press and as an instructor for the Writer’s Digest School.

Different Life/Different Poems [by Ellen Steinbaum]

It’s one of those clubs you don’t want to join, but since I didn’t get a choice, I am proud to be among the voices--brave, diverse, honest--in The Widows’ Handbook. Some of the writers were widowed only recently, while others, like me, write from a loss much farther behind us. In fact, my husband Carl died in 1996 and my contributions to the anthology are all in the section called “A Different Life. “ And that’s what I have, a different life. Different poems, too. 

A few years ago I was invited to write an essay on “why I write.” It was one of those moments writers know so well of writing to see what it is you think. I’m not sure I had recognized it specifically before, but what I realized was that I write to notice. I have always felt that one of the pleasures of writing was its demand that you pay attention in the world. I had even written about noticing as an act of consecration. One poem in which I write about tending plants, says, “apply attention--plainest form of love” Another ends, “what is holy in this life/is noticing.” 

So it came as a shock to realize that despite all that noticing I had missed a kind of big thing--mortality. Looking back I am stunned by my innocence. I was left alone after 33 years of marriage and what shocks me now is how I didn’t see it coming. Not just Carl’s death, but Death. 

I had lived a fortunate life in which several beloved people had died, but not really before their time or out of generational sequence.  When they died, I felt sadness and I missed them, but I wasn’t railing against fate. And, although I had certainly read and written poems that dealt with mortality, what I find hard to believe now is how I had never really gotten it before, never thought about how death is the most real thing about life. Somehow that had escaped my notice. I had never thought about how death is not waiting somewhere out there, distant, but is, rather, something we live side by side with every day, every minute, intertwined. Never thought about the ending rules our lives and elevates them. Never thought about how it is the dirty secret and the sacred gift. 

But now it really had my attention. It became my subject, my muse.  My poetry had usually been grounded in the details of my life and I couldn’t stop writing about this. My first book, Afterwords, is specifically about Carl’s illness and death.  I wrote the poems in real time, as I was going through the experience, from the early days of diagnosis through to a point a year or so after he died.  

Sometimes people said to me, “That must have been therapeutic for you to write.”  It was never poets who said that, of course. Poets know that, while it may be “therapeutic” to get down a first draft, the next step is to make it poetry, to take a dispassionate look at it and revise it into something more. I was definitely aware that I wanted to put together a collection that might speak to others thinking about loss.  But the goal I had in mind was for the book as companion, but also--maybe primarily--as poetry, without compromise. The reason I am so pleased to be part of The Widows’ Handbook is that I think it, too, holds both those objectives.

I may not have given much thought to mortality before Carl’s illness but the shadows were there all along. In both of my subsequent books there is at least one older poem--written before my life changed and before his ended--that fits right in. Just as we make discoveries in other poets’ work with each reading, we see new things in our own. I may not have noticed, but, yes, the shadows were there all along. 

“Of course,” my husband, Jim, would say: he is a psychoanalyst. My life is different now and part of that is my new marriage.  Jim was also widowed, and he and I are, every day, aware of our good fortune in finding each other and sharing a life that is a blurred mix of past and present. And so my poems are in the “Different Life” section of the anthology. This poem of mine is one I think of as symbolic of what that looks like:

Last night his late wife

came to him in a dream
then slid away, kept
slipping out of reach
down foreign streets
while I slept beside him
in our bed where my husband,
gone more than a decade now,
calls to me from time
to time, wants help
finding his cufflinks, keys.

 I see mortality as a more explicit presence in my work now. It creeps in no matter what else I think I am writing about. In my most recent book, Brightness Falls, I have a poem called “Getting the Picture,” which began as kind of a silly musing on how, when Jim and I were dating, we couldn’t find good words to refer to each other. (Boyfriend/girlfriend? Lover? Partner? Um...no.) But then, at the poem’s end, what presented itself was:

know this: it will
not last. Best not to hesitate. Hurry.
Don’t waste the time before
the light runs out.

 It could be simply part of getting older, this difference in my writing. I find myself drawn most often these days to work by older poets. There is energy and insouciance in youthful writing that I love, but I really treasure the perspective that age and experience bring. For those of us whose lives have been shattered, it is heartening to see, for ourselves and through the words of others, that there is more. 

At readings from the anthology, we read our own entries and also work by other contributors. It’s a privilege and a delight to read their words. It’s also a reminder that, though we have each been through very different experiences with a single common core, we all have survived and we continue. We go forth and live our lives. It’s not the same life. It’s a different life.  New and different work grows out of it.

 Ellen Steinbaum is the author of three poetry collections, Afterwords, Container Gardening, and Brightness Falls. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is included in Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems, American Places, and The Widows’ Handbook. She has also written and performed a one-person play, “CenterPiece.”  A former literary columnist for The Boston Globe,  she writes a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe,” which can be found at her web site, ellensteinbaum.com.

Trusting the process [by Christine Thiele]

(Ed. note: This post is part of series by contributors to The Widows' Handbook. You can find previous posts here. sdh)

Writing is a very tricky thing.  It takes courage and surrender. It requires initiation and patience and I run short on both in most the areas of my life. When writing begins sometimes I don’t, well, most times I don’t know where it will end or where it will take me.  Blogging has become a life line for me.  It has transformed my inner world into an outer world. It keeps me sane.  It connects me to those I may never know and deepens my love for words.

Trusting my intuition is the most difficult part.  Many times I begin a piece and then let it go.  I put it aside because the depth the intuition was begging me to delve towards is painful and I don’t like pain!  My writing began years ago as a collegial sharing of words during my years as a youth minister. Now, it has transformed into an outlet of my deepest hopes, fears, longings, and all the stuff I couldn’t say out loud to those around me.  My intuitions kept bringing me back to the words.  Intuition kept dropping the words in my head and poking me to bring them to life with my hopes, fears, and longings.

It has taken form in many, many words…

Resolve.

Change,

Hiccups,

Wipeout,

October,

Treading,

Icing over (well, that’s two words)

Longing,

Hope, and

Lunacy.

 

So many words, so many thoughts, so much to let flow through me…surrender…that’s another word.  Surrender. I really think when I trusted my hands to let the words flow through them my writing became a life line.  I let the words flow from brain to fingers without stopping the honesty, hurt, love, hope, and fear. It became the artistic expression I had hoped it could be.  It became a way to connect with the unconnected.  It became a way for me to see the beauty of my pain.  It continues to allow me the grace of reflection on my journey merely by rereading words from my past.

Trusting my new muse, the grief I lived with after my husband’s death, has been a tricky endeavor.  Grief is a raw, somewhat intolerant muse.  Its depth feels like I will drown in it at times. It challenges me to take the feelings, wrap them in words that I struggle to find and then arrange them in some sort of meaningfulness. Many times I think the meaning is present only for me, but I am often surprised that the work I struggle the most with, and that I feel has no sense to it, is the work that touches the wider audience.  Somehow, I think the struggle adds to the meaning…even when it feels inadequate to me.

Trust the process.

Up and down, back and forth, the words force their way through me and compel me to put them together.  I have had words help people and infuriate people.  I have had people believe me to be a crazy person and others find wisdom.

Words have pulled me through the dark and lonely days and nights of widowhood.  Years have passed and one thing has been there for me every time I need it…writing.  When I could barely breathe because he was gone, I could write.  When I didn’t want to get out of bed because he was gone, words would float through my mind. When I was overwhelmed by my role as sole parent, I could put my frustration on a page and reach beyond the walls of my home that seemed to be suffocating me in what could have been.  Blogging brought me a place of expression, release, and empowered me to endure my broken heart, my broken life. 

Blank pages on a computer screen became a mirror of my journey through grief.  The words gave hope to my journey.  The words became a point of growth and propelled me toward the future.  They helped me see the worthiness of my pain and that life was still very worthwhile too.  Even a future, a future without my husband, a future I never wanted to think about again, was worthwhile.  Not only was it worthwhile, it would become a life full of joy and compassion…two things I thought were gone forever. 

Through my journey, I have been blessed to be included in a collaboration of courage.  I have met others who were also willing to share their stories for others.  I have been connected to projects that encourage the broken-hearted to mend their hearts and continue to strive for love and a new normal.  When I was first widowed, this was not something easily found.  I am so proud to have my words included in the revolution of how we acknowledge grief.  To be included in creative, works of art that take the remarkably raw, painful, yet hopeful and courageous, takes my breath away and humbles me greatly.

The thought of my words being included alongside the beautiful poems and prose of The Widow’s Handbook is amazing to me. When I think of my journey, my loss, and the solidarity that my words bring me, I feel incredibly fortunate…believe me, I see the irony in it…the worst moment of my life leading me toward those feelings…is not lost on me.  Intuition, surrender, and trusting the process…both of writing and healing from the unhealable…astound me and I have trouble wrapping my mind around it all.

I will continue to trust, though.  I will continue to surrender.  I will continue to miss him and heal my heart when it aches.  I will continue to write and let the words take me where they will and when I get to other side of their plan, I will feel lucky to have them floating within me…always.

Christine Thiele is a free lance writer, high school history teacher, and a former professional and volunteer youth minister. She has written for The Journal of Student Ministries, YouthWorker Journal , Grief Digest, OpentoHope.com and is a contributing author in Open to Hope, Inspirational Stories of Healing After Loss and several other essay collections.  Along with her writing, Christine is raising her two sons.  Since her husband's death in 2005 from pancreas cancer, her writing has been focused on grief and healing issues.

The Healing Nature of Grief Poetry (by Tammi Truax)

 (Ed note: This is the second in a series of monthly posts by the editors and contributors to The Widows' Handbook. Read the previous post here.)

     It is believed that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was mourning her brother when she wrote this Victorian era poem. Sadly, it seems that she had to justify her feelings.

Grief

            By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death—
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

 

(1871 engraving of EBB, artist unknown)

       There are poems, more than can ever be counted, about death and dying. That are about the act of becoming dead, an experience none of us can actually give a first-hand account of. Such poems are about something the poet has not really experienced, and so is drawn to write about it. In many ways death is the great unknown. It has often been said that Emily Dickinson was obsessed with the subject. These poems of death may or may not be comforting to a reader.

     There has evolved another body of work sometimes called bereavement poetry, from which poems to read at funerals and memorial services are often culled. These poems, then, are read and often written to bring comfort to the grieving.

     These death and bereavement verses may or may not be poems of grief which are, and should be thought of, as a completely distinct category of poetry. And a wide body of work it is. I have even found a substantial sub-category within it that are poems all about the loss of a pet. I suspect that we have been writing grief poems as long as we have been writing. Some of the great Greek lyric poet Sappho’s surviving fragments are of mourning a lost loved one (though it is unclear if her lover had died or walked away).

       Grief poems are first-hand accounts, they are always about what has been experienced by the writer. They communicate in some way the experience of loss by a poet connected, probably intimately, to a death. Often the poet is speaking directly to the deceased. They are not about understanding death necessarily, they are about bearing witness to it, and the bearing is usually visceral and intense. The poet’s intention is not to bring comfort to anyone else. Similar to the great body of poetic works on the subject of love, grief poems are often written while the poet is in an altered state of psychological being. But unlike the fleeting euphoric experience of love, the defeating experience of loss fundamentally changes us psychologically from the way we were before the experience. Profoundly and permanently. Also unlike love the experience of loss can and does trigger depression, physical illness, and even hallucinations, which are normal reactions to it.

    More than any other emotion or experience a poet may be writing about, the experience of grief is strangely acute. It is like no other. It is a physical, emotional, social, and perhaps even financial, life alteration that one has little or no control over. It is most likely perceived as pain. For some it progresses into what is called complicated grief, for some it may even develop into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Loss of a beloved is a shocking raw wound one might equate to a disemboweling, but that medicine cannot really heal. And though there is some truth to the old dictum about time, grief obeys no temporal boundaries.

                 It is so vast, and so consuming, that it is simply human nature to want and / or need to express it from oneself. And poetry can be one of the safest and healthiest ways to do so. The therapeutic value of poetry is well-documented in medical literature though scientific study is hardly necessary. I am just one of so many thousands who can testify to it.

                   In fact, I was so assisted in my healing process by reading and writing poetry that together with a friend, poet Kyle Potvin, I founded a little non-profit foundation we call The Prickly Pear Poetry Project simply to share the profound healing power of poetry in processing the cancer experience as survivors or caregivers of those who lost their battle. We had both experienced those battles and we had found solace in poetry that quite literally helped us to endure it. We designed a writing workshop that we team-teach at oncology and community centers. We mentor participants from diverse writing backgrounds in tapping into their experiences and releasing them onto the page. We share the work of well-known poets as well as our own. We prompt participants to produce work that we often share in the group in a work shopping atmosphere that is always filled with light even as we go into the darkest places. And getting into the light is what it is all about.

                 As can be found in The Widows’ Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival (Kent State University Press, 2014) grief poetry is as varied as the writers themselves. Just like the experience of grief, it is all over the place. Some experts claim that the bereaved go through five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Naturally all of these emotions, and many more experts probably can’t attest to, will show up in grief poetry. In the Browning poem that I opened with it is believed she was waylaid by guilt when she wrote it, another big one the experts rarely mention. Some emotions, like humor or relief, may be as hard for others to read of as the saddest admissions of suicidal ideation or roars of rage at God.

       There is I believe only one thing all grief poetry has in common; that it is not what Browning wrote of, it is not hopeless grief, and that is evidenced by its passion. That is what is behind the healing power of grief poetry. It is in that searing anguish of deepest despair when we,

            “beat upward to God’s throne in loud access

            Of shrieking and reproach”

that we find hope. That is what grief expressed is and does. It extinguishes hopeless grief. And allows us to live, which we may have previously thought impossible.

     And still, though we have come so very far since Browning’s era in allowing the demonstration of normal human emotion, we remain undeniably uncomfortable dealing with the bereaved. Here grief poetry helps both the writer who can express their deepest truth, and the reader who can process it in his or her own time and way. And thus we are all served - those of us carrying the weight now and those who care about us.

       The Widows’ Handbook is a book of hope. Please know it and share it as such, with hearts not heavy, but light, like a thing with feathers.

     And thus we get to this; one of my favorite poems, from The Book of Light, (Copper Canyon Press, 1992, page 20).

she lived

        By Lucille Clifton

after he died
what really happened is
she watched the days
bundle into thousands,
watched every act become
the history of others,
every bed more
narrow,
but even as the eyes of lovers
strained toward the milky young
she walked away
from the hole in the ground
deciding to live.       and she lived.

Tammi Truax spent twenty years working with children, specializing in literacy. Recently she was editor of a re-release of Lady Wentworth; A Poet’s Tale and published her debut novel Broken Buckets, as an eBook.  In addition to The Widows’ Handbook Tammi's work has been included in several anthologies, and can be found in journals and online. She works as a newspaper columnist and historical museum teacher. In 2013 she was a participant at AROHO’s retreat for women writers at Ghost Ranch in NM. She is writing a novel about race in colonial America. Reach her at at www.aintiawriter.blogspot.com

Words that do work: Creating The Widows’ Handbook: Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival [by Lise Menn]

(Ed note: Today we begin a monthly series of posts by the editors and contributors to The Widow's Handbook, which we first learned about when Bruce Kawin joined us a guest author. The first post comes from the volumes co-editor and contributor Lise Menn. Lise is professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of Psycholinguistics: Introduction and Applications (2010) as well as a lifetime's worth of research articles on language development and on aphasia. Earlier poems appeared in anthologies of poems by linguists. In 2007, she began writing about the loss of her husband, linguist William Bright, encouraged since 2008 by her new partner, poet and film historian Bruce F. Kawin. Subsequent posts will appear on the third Friday of the month. -- sdh)

I haven’t sweated over enough words to deserve the title of ‘poet’; I’ve made my living as a linguistics professor, raised two kids (with help from partners, not the feat of single motherhood). Not much time for anything else. But just the other day one of the poems I wrote made a man cry, so maybe I’m not an impostor. Anyway, how The Widows’ Handbook happened was that my husband whom I had loved passionately for twenty years died six months after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  I felt like the still-standing half of a tree split by lightning, raw heartwood blasted open, looking down at my other half lying on the ground. Friends took care of me. Eventually, I realized that I might get seriously ill if I couldn’t start eating again; I asked my way to a good shrink, went on anti-depressants, went to his office every week and soaked handkerchiefs. The sense of being robbed of love and joy, and of not knowing what I was supposed to be, how I was supposed to be, was overwhelming.  There’s no handbook! I wailed at him one day. He nodded.

            Words started coming. I’d write one, two, three poems every week or so; I’d hand them to him when I walked in. Here, read these, it’ll save time, then we can talk. Like this:

    March Ninth

    The days getting longer, suddenly booted by daylight savings time,
    Makes me sadder this year. I want to hide in the darkness,
    Close the blinds, light the lamps, bury my heart under my work.

    Suddenly it’s almost dinner time and the sun is bright,
    The crocuses are out there, and the tulip spear-tips,
    Purple-edged against the brown mud.

    I am supposed to be feeling stronger and happier and all that,
    But the long beautiful evenings that used to be ours
    Stretch ahead of me desolate.

    Darkness was better.

We talked. It helped. So did Time.

Two years later, off meds and out of treatment, dating a good man (poet, English prof; bitterly divorced, encouraging). Mostly done with crying, but not with mourning. Took my poems with me to visit my classmate Jacqueline Lapidus, who’d spent her life in the publishing world. Also widowed, also someone who’d written poems all her life. Struck by what we had together, she proposed putting out a call for submissions and creating an anthology of writing about widowhood by widows.  What would I know about that? I say. Anyway, I’m in the middle of a big project with the publisher breathing down my neck. Leave it to me, she says. A year later, I find myself helping her choose the 200-odd that we can’t possibly turn down from about 450 poems and short prose pieces.

            Why am I telling you this? Because of what I learned; about poetry, and about putting together a collection of poetry. What I knew before starting to work with Jacqueline was only this: Some words are beautiful; some words evoke beauty, some lines have it both ways. Thou art more lovely, and more temperate.

            What I learned: some words have another kind of  -  is it beauty? Maybe. Forget that debate for now. Truth is what they have, intense, hard, no bullshit. No fat on them, and not much in the way of clothes. Like this one, by Ruth S. Rothstein:

    Cemetery Haiku

    If I could, I would
    crawl in under the dirt and
    cuddle up with you.

Here are excerpts from The Golem[1], from Jessica de Koninck:

…desiring, as I do, to recreate you from clay,
dry grass, beach glass and sand,
wood shavings, graphite, the earth
around your plain pine box.  Anything,
to bring you back.

…. I would sit beside you.Breathless,
we would drive away. In our silence
I might forget, golem do not speak,
cannot differentiate the living
from the dead and out of ignorance
do harm.  No one in this room
has risen from the dead.  No one’s
kiss tastes of maggots and ash, 

 The Widows’ Handbook has a purpose: to tell the truths of widows’ experiences; no waste, no clichés, no recipes.

As Jacqueline and I considered the submissions, along with published work by widowed writers that we might request permission to reprint (Tess Gallagher, Sandra Gilbert, Mary Oliver, Patricia Fargnoli…), dozens of individual experiences emerged. There were widows with young children; women who had lost lovers, female and male; widows whose husbands died slowly, whose husbands died suddenly, whose husbands had killed themselves, selfishly or generously. Widows snubbed by old friends, widows surrounded by idiotic well-wishers, widows whose grown children moved out or (messily) back in, widows annoyed by matchmaking friends.

Here’s Jacqueline’s fury:

    With friends like these . . .

She says I don’t know what to say, as if
she’d been raised in the woods by
wolves.  Did he leave you anything?
Now he’s at rest, he’s with God, I’ll
pray for him.  He wouldn’t want you to
feel miserable, why are you wearing
black?    Here, have a drink, it’ll cheer
you up.  You’re lucky he didn’t linger.
Can we talk about something else?

….

Memories sustain and drain.

From Patricia Savage’s ‘Departing’:

I miss your feel,
your flat hand
on my back,
then squeezing
my shoulder,
then folded over
my own hand
while we sink
into the sofa.

Longing becomes a kind of presence. 

From Jane Hayman’s ‘Cross-Country Lines’:

I wish I could
play with the wires
and put back the sound

that song
you sing in my sleep

 From Ann McGovern’s “Maybe you are here”

    ...here in San Miguel, church bells
ring your name from dawn to deep night
You are the courtyard treasures
hiding behind carved doors

 The bed becomes the emblem of loss:

    “an empty hollow/in the wide bed/they shared,” (Helen Ruggieri); “i wander the house/in the darkest hour of night/staring out blackened windows/onto wet pavement,/wind-whipped leaves./there is still/ a big hole/in the bed” (Carolyn Stephens); “It seems like forever/since you’ve slept in our bed,/but our mattress remembers./It saves your place,/a long, narrow trench./Like a grave (Pat Parnell).

Objects left behind become powerful, totems.

From Holly Zeeb’s ‘Shoes’:

    …I heave
two lumpy bags into the trunk
for the Salvation Army.
A furtive mission,
this disposal of effects.
Hunching over, eyes averted
as if I’m guilty of something,
I hear you protest—Wait!
I might need those again.

Some widows dream, like Tess Gallagher (from ‘Dream Doughnuts’)

I tell them how I read Ray’s
book of poems cover to cover until he entered
my dream as through some side-door in the jazz club,
some loophole in time.

 I’m so glad to see you again, I say.
He’s carrying a bag of powdered doughnuts
and two paper cups of black coffee.

Was I gone too long? he asks, fresh from the bakery.
Too long is if you don’t come back at all, I say.
Time is funny, he says, biting into the doughnut
so the hole breaks open to the entire air supply
of the planet.

But some dreams, like Sandra M. Gilbert’s (from ‘Anniversary Waltz Again’), make things worse:

Three nights now since we met in sleep,
and I told you sorrowfully

that you were dead--
three nights since you wept in rage,

lifted your handsome shadowy head and howled.

Most of us eventually find a sense of humor again, sometimes grim:

From Jessica de Koninck’s ‘Pillow Talk’:

At the burial I worried.
         Perhaps you will not like the Rosenfields.
         After all, we never met them.
Even if they do not argue
        there is so little room.

If only you would dig yourself up,
walk back home, all bone,
         a bit of flesh,
        a tuft or two of hair or beard,
        and talk to me.

 We change, and in different ways.

From Katherine J. Williams’ Still Life:

 … I set the table for seven,
specialize in the anthropology of three.
I’m an accidental citizen of a country
where things stay put; where I sleep
when tired.

Some of us want partners again, some find them. 

Here’s some of Phyllis Wax’s The Young Widow Revives

    ….

I find myself moving the ring
to my right hand,
eying male faces.

The indolence of winter
drops away.  Birds gather twigs
and build, start over each day.

Buds loosen, dogs race
and play.  I think I’ll shave my legs.

The shape of the book (Part I: Bereft, Mourning; Part II: Memories, Ghosts, Dreams; Part III: Coping (more or less); Part IV: A Different Life) grew from the piles Jacqueline sorted the poems into. Each poem tells a different true thing. That’s the work of this book: to show many truths, so that readers can see there are this many and therefore surely many more. Its work is to help widows find their own ways out of stereotypes, out of bewilderment about how they are supposed to feel. And, maybe, to put a bookmark at the piece that gets it right so they can shove it at their dolt of a son-in-law or their clumsily well-meaning cousin and say “Read this”.

From my ‘Tar’:

       Your buried grief seeps to the surface,
Like oil under tar sands.

 Let it go. It’s the rich black residue of the past,
Dead life become this stuff that sticks to the soles of your feet
Welling up when it damned well pleases.
Let it go.

There’s a season for delighting in words that are games and celebrations, that tell tall tales, sagas, and stories rich with digressions. But not in this book. Its beauty is in the work that the contributors’ words do and how they move in doing it.

---

[1] A creature of Jewish medieval folklore, a golem is a figure made into the form of a human and given life.

The Widows' Handbook [by Bruce Kawin]

For the rest of the week I'll be writing mostly about survival:  what it means to keep writing even if it looks as if your work will never get published and the difference it makes if it is or isn't professionally published, self-published, read to a group, or left in a drawer.  It seems appropriate to start by looking at a forthcoming anthology of poetry (and some prose) by widows—survivors—many of whom have had no training as poets and are being published for the first time.  The book is called The Widows’ Handbook, and it will be published in a few months by Kent State University Press.  You heard it here first.  Putting this book together and getting it published was an inspiring commitment to survival, particularly considering how many publishers declined to read the manuscript.  The book was edited by two bereaved women, Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn.  I wrote some questions for them.  Lise answered first, then Jacqueline. 

Bruce:  Are you both widows?  Do either of you have experience as editors or creative writers?

Lise:  I am a widow; my second husband and I had been happily married for almost twenty years when he died in October 2006. The other editor is Jacqueline Lapidus; she lost her beloved partner, but he was not her husband. Not having the legal status of a widow added in many ways to her burden.  As for my editing experience, I’ve co-edited some academic books, but this is my first time editing poetry.  I’ve published a few poems in collections of poetry by linguists.

Jacqueline:  Not only that, but there was a wife—the Lawful Awful, from whom  he had been estranged for years.  I have been a professional editor for 50 years (not counting high school newspaper) and have been publishing poems in literary magazines since 1963.

Bruce:  How many publishers did you try before finding Kent State Univ. Press?

Lise:  Fifteen queries to likely-looking places, resulting in five submissions, all rejected; that’s not counting the publishers who wouldn’t look at a manuscript unless it was submitted through an agent.  But after we were in negotiations with KSUP, one of the ones that just didn’t respond eventually showed serious interest.

Bruce:  Did you consider self-publishing?  Did you reject the idea, and why?

Lise:  I did consider it, but Jacqueline, who has been an editor, author, and translator for many years, was unwilling to consider that except as a last resort. She felt that a work this substantial deserved to be a "real book." And now we have it both ways, because KSUP will make it available as an e-book.

Jacqueline:  In fact, I wasn’t willing to consider it at all—not even as a last resort!  Promoting the book is hard enough without having to do distribution as well, even with online bookstores available. And I couldn’t afford to put any money into such a project.

Bruce:   How did you attract manuscripts?  Where did you place ads or notices and what did they say?

Lise: Jacqueline is very experienced in this area. She placed ads in Poets & Writers Magazine (print and online) and the Seacoast Writers Association newsletter, worded like this:

WIDOWS: Seeking women’s poems and short personal essays (max. 500 words) about experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure). Bereavement (sudden or following illness/long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people’s responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, support systems (or lack thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), rebuilding (including but not limited to finding new love or focus).  We are a published poet/editor and a scientist/professor, both widowed.     Manuscript will be submitted to trade publishers. Payment: contributor’s copies. Deadline: June 30,     2011. Send with SASE for reply to: The Widows’ Handbook, [followed by Jacqueline’s address].

Jacqueline also contacted numerous poet friends and asked them to spread the word.  Some of those friends helped put her in touch with well-known widowed poets (O’Hehir, Gallagher, Gilbert).  She also selected a few widows’ poems from the anthology Love Over 60 (eds. Chapman & McCormick, pub. by Mayapple Press in 2010—we both knew Robin Smith Chapman from college and Jacqueline had a poem in that collection) and from their own books.

Bruce:  Did you rule out widowers, and if so, why?

Lise:  Most women who are widowed – especially older women – face a much harder time financially, socially, and in finding new partners – than men of comparable ages and personal histories.  For many women, the social isolation (because some married couples stop inviting widows to join them, leaving you not only lonely but wondering if they ever really liked you at all) and the financial hardship compound the devastation of losing their partners.  My late husband had been widowed twice before we met – he lost one young wife in a car accident and the next young woman to breast cancer, and he was deeply traumatized for years by those losses.  So I would never consider a man’s grief to be less deep than a woman’s.  But…he found new partners as soon as he was ready for them, and it seems that people are always eager to play matchmaker for a nice man who wants a wife.  That said, I wish we had included some older gay men who have lost their partners, because they also often experience social isolation and a very limited circle of possible new partners, in addition to their grief.  (The "beauty trap" catches them as much as it catches women.)

Jacqueline:  As Lise says, in our gendered society the social situation and status of widows differ from that of widowers. There are other books that include both, but there had never been an anthology of poems by widows. I wanted to showcase the aspect of widows’ lives that nobody wants to admit.  I conceived The Widows’ Handbook as an anthology of women’s poems, not an anthology about bereavement or grief in general.