Poetry Will Save Your Life

  Advance Praise for Poetry Will Save Your Life

  “This is the only book you will ever need on poetry. It tells you not only how to read poetry, but why to read it, lovingly illustrated by portraits from Bialosky’s life so intimate that every passage feels like a private gift, tenderly crafted for the reader’s memory, to be cherished for years to come.”

  —Hope Jahren, author of Lab Girl

  “Poetry Will Save Your Life is one of the most moving memoirs I’ve ever read, but it’s so much more. Bialosky does something miraculous: as she shares stories from her life, she shows how specific poems can help all of us make sense of our own lives and the world. Here are classic and contemporary poems that help us see and hear one another more clearly; that speak to us in times of loss and grief; that guide us through our every days. If you’ve always loved poetry, this book will captivate you. And if you want to love poetry, then this book will open worlds. Poetry Will Save Your Life is itself a life-saving book.”

  —Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club and Books for Living

  “Poetry Will Save Your Life is a remarkable and compulsively readable book, one that combines the poignant moments of lived life and the reflected life of words in a wholly original way. Jill Bialosky writes with as much pristine skill about her personal story as she writes about the poems that nurtured and inspired her. The intersection of art and life has rarely been so vividly rendered.”

  —Daphne Merkin, author of This Close to Happy

  “This charming and captivating book ties each moment of the author’s development to the transformative verses she read. She allows these poems to organize her deliberate candor about a complex and compelling life.”

  —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

  “Jill Bialosky writes with a sincerity that would have made Dickinson herself weep. She fights to keep poetry from being lofty and academic; she takes it out of the clouds and brings [it] down to earth. Having an expert guide you to a subject with the humility and enthusiasm of a beginner is as moving as her prose, in which she reminds us that she has also been a woman who needed saving, and poetry swept in and gave her back a pulse. She achieves something remarkable in that it feels as though she is revealing herself for our sake, the readers: basically, what all the best poetry strives for.”

  —Mary-Louise Parker, author of Dear Mr. You

  “Empathic, wise, humane, and consoling, Poetry Will Save Your Life is an engrossing celebration of poetry for any curious reader. Bialosky tells us about the poems that have kept her company over the years—and along the way, she joyfully illuminates both poetry and life itself.”

  —Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye

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  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE

  DISCOVERY

  “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

  DANGER

  “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks

  “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson

  WONDER

  “The Star” by Jane Taylor and Ann Taylor

  SELFHOOD

  “My Shadow” by Robert Louis Stevenson

  “The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson

  MEMORY

  “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

  SHAME

  “You and Your Whole Race” by Langston Hughes

  “I, Too” by Langston Hughes

  ANCESTORS

  Psalm 23: “The Lord Is My Shepherd”

  WAR

  “My child blossoms sadly” by Yehuda Amichai

  PRAYER

  “Have You Prayed?” by Li-Young Lee

  IMAGINATION

  “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

  DEATH

  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

  POETRY

  “Ars Poetica?” by Czesław Miłosz

  FAMILY

  “January 1, 1965” by Joseph Brodsky

  “Childhood” by Rainer Maria Rilke

  FATHERS

  “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

  FAITH

  “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” by Emily Dickinson

  “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson

  “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson

  FOREBODING

  “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke

  DEPRESSION

  “Poppies in October” by Sylvia Plath

  ENVY

  Sonnet 29: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” by William Shakespeare

  “Confession” by Louise Glück

  SEXUALITY

  “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure” by Sharon Olds

  ESCAPE

  “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

  FIRST LOVE

  “Bright Star” by John Keats

  “A Blessing” by James Wright

  MOTHERS

  “My Mother’s Feet” by Stanley Plumly

  FRIENDSHIP

  “Taking the Hands” by Robert Bly

  “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings

  PASSION

  “The Red Coal” by Gerald Stern

  “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

  “The Tropics in New York” by Claude McKay

  “Heat” by Denis Johnson

  LEGACY

  “fury” by Lucille Clifton

  “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich

  MARRIAGE

  “Song for the Last Act” by Louise Bogan

  GRIEF

  “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden

  “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

  SUICIDE

  “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath

  “Waking in the Blue” by Robert Lowell

  MOTHERHOOD

  “The Pomegranate” by Eavan Boland

  “On My First Son” by Ben Jonson

  “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden

  “Nick and the Candlestick” by Sylvia Plath

  TERROR

  “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski

  MORTALITY

  “The Child Is Father to the Man” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

  “My Heart Leaps Up” by William Wordsworth

  MYSTERY

  “Teachers” by W. S. Merwin

  “Youth” by W. S. Merwin

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  PERMISSIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOTES

  For my mother, Iris Yvonne Bialosky

  What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?

  —from “Dedication” by Czesław Miłosz

  PREFACE

  I fell in love with poetry when my fourth grade teacher, Miss Hudson, read us Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” I’ve memorized that poem, and often, when I’m at a crossroads—both literally and metaphorically—the lines come to me. Since then, other poems have become guideposts. When it begins to snow, I think of Wallace Stevens and “The Snow Man” and the line “one must have a mind of winter
.” I’ve said that line frequently enough in my head that it has become a part of me. When I’m slightly down or feeling overlooked, I think of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody” and smile at my lapse into self-pity. When I’m perplexed by how someone has behaved, I remember T. S. Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” When I’m suffering a loss or heartbreak, I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and its sly irony makes me feel less alone.

  Stand by a window at night on the middle floor of a high-rise in an urban city and watch the lights go on and off in the apartment buildings across the street. Each building contains a set of mini compartments, and in each compartment resides a person . . . or perhaps a man and a woman, or college roommates. A family with young children. Or an elderly person and her aide. A pair of lovers. Some of the windows are easier to see through and others are more opaque. In each small compartment, people tend to their daily rituals. They make love, drink, eat, and sleep. Curled into the cushions on a couch, they cry from bereavement or a broken heart. Or out of loneliness. Sometimes, on a hot day when the windows are open, you can hear strangers arguing or laughing. In these rooms, babies are conceived; people get sick and even die; someone might take his own life. Imagine in each of these small spaces, poems are taking shape, poems written from the experiences that occur inside and outside those rooms. Experiences that are both common and unique and a part of everyday living. Poems are made from the lives lived, borne out of experiences and shaped by solitary thought. Like a map to an unknown city, a poem might lead you toward an otherwise unreachable experience; but once you’ve reached it, you recognize it immediately.

  For years I’ve flagged poems in individual volumes or anthologies with paper clips and Post-its. I have xeroxed poems and stuck them on my refrigerator or on bulletin boards. I have collected poems as someone else might collect stamps or coins or works of art—amazed by the many human experiences, large and small, that find their meeting place in poems. Poetry has given me more sustenance, meaning, joy, and consolation than I could hope for in this life, and in return, it is my hope that this book might open the door to poetry for others. My method is to offer some of the poems that found me along certain crucial moments in my coming of age, or poems that later brought back a particular memory or experience to locate the ways in which poems document the mental and emotional, conscious and unconscious processes that lie underneath the everyday actions of men and women.

  Poems are composed of our own language disordered, reconfigured, reimagined, and compressed in ways that offer a heightened sense of reality and embrace a common humanity. A poem, in fact, possesses a consciousness, the consciousness of the maker, and I have found that in that sense, a poem in its condensed form casts its own light on the ways in which we live in the world.

  How did I fall in love with poetry? As a young girl living in the wake of my father’s early death, I was desperate for tenderness and love. Poems were a source of comfort, once I discovered them. I was aware that another person had spent time writing them, and I felt that they were an act of generosity and devotion to other human beings, to other readers. I found love and tenderness in certain poems, in others cruelty and brutality—no matter what they took as their subjects. And I felt, in a strange way, that poetry saved me from the less interesting, emptier life I’d have lived had I not discovered it.

  Poems are a form of mythmaking, as they seek to create a unified vision of cosmic, social, and primal life order. Because of their compact and compressed form, they are immediate and intimate. A poem enters the reader or listener, inhabits her, so that its meaning is, in a sense, superfluous to the experience of encountering it. This memoir is also a form of mythmaking, for experiences are heightened, altered, and shaped by the form in which they are told. Poetry Will Save Your Life is not a full telling of a life, nor can a memoir ever be such. Oxford describes a memoir as “a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources.” My sources are poems, and the poems I present provide—to a certain extent—a window into my way of thinking and associating. Such is the mystery and wonder of a poem. This book might have collected a hundred poems, or a thousand poems. The possibilities are infinite. Like viewing an album of photographs, I can chart my history by the poems I’ve chosen to write about, remembering exactly when and where I first came upon it and what it meant to me then and means to me now.

  But I have also shaped this book with the clear awareness that a poem doesn’t just have one life or one influence on a single life—like mine—however lasting. It also has an afterlife. That after-existence in the memory of the reader can be intellectually, analytically, even technically focused, while still preserving the integrity and wonder of the first encounter. And so I have organized this book to try to suggest both existences in my mind and my memory because, in the end, both are necessary to honor the art.

  DISCOVERY

  THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

  Robert Frost

  I am a child sitting in my wooden flip-top desk in my fourth grade classroom listening to Miss Hudson read Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” a poem about two paths and a crossroad. Miss Hudson is in love with literature. She reads aloud to the class, gesturing madly with her arms as she recites the verse, revealing the sweat rings on her dress underneath her armpits, saliva forming in the corner of her mouth. I look at my classmates sitting in identical desks, the sunlight showing the ink stains, carved initials, and cracks in the wood. One girl is tall and big with a beautiful face and curly white hair. Another has skinny legs and wears knee-high socks. Another girl is the class bombshell. The boy in the back row has a “Vote for Kennedy” button pinned on his peacoat. I imagine my classmates lead perfect lives with perfect families. Are they equally mesmerized? My face is round and my hair is cut short around my face, bangs held back with a bobby pin. I am an awkward, uncomfortable child, ill at ease among others. The humiliations are growing: I’m embarrassed at how ridiculous I look in the short, blue, one-piece gym suit. I worry I’ll stumble in my attempt to straddle the horse in gym class, or that I’ll be picked last for Capture the Flag. I am embarrassed by the agonizing weigh-ins. In music class I dread having to sing scales aloud and hitting the wrong note. I can barely keep my chin up or will myself not to blush when I’m called on. And then Miss Hudson reads us this poem and I’m transfixed.

  THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

  Robert Frost (1874–1963)

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  Then took the other, as just as fair,

  And having perhaps the better claim,

  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

  Though as for that the passing there

  Had worn them really about the same,

  And both that morning equally lay

  In leaves no step had trodden black.

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  My father died when I was two. He suffered a heart attack while bowling in a couples’ league at the local alley. Once, I thought it was playing basketball. The stories morph into their own memory and shape. I imagine him thrusting the bowling ball up against his chest, cradling it, letting it go, the ball spinning down the aisle, knocking down all the pins, and then, in an instant, all the lights go out. I cannot imagine any further. At night, I lie in my bed and think about my father, as if to will him into memory from the pictures my mother keeps in a photo album. When I look at his fac
e in the photos I try to find mine in it. Do I have his eyes, his mouth, his intellect? I know I don’t possess his athletic prowess. My mother is a young widow with three children under the age of three. There is no language in my home or my sheltered suburban world to help me understand why that one event marked my life.

  As a young girl, I read my own story in “The Road Not Taken.” There are two roads one might travel: The road where families are whole and not broken, and fathers don’t die young, and mothers are happy—where everything seems to fit together like pieces in a puzzle; and the road I travel, which is crooked and not quite right, with bumps along the way. I know it is important I choose the right course. I struggle in math and science. Reading books has already trumped all else, and through Frost I discover a language where words are organized to convey feeling and meaning. The clear voice of the poet comes through the mouth of Miss Hudson. The voice is intimate and commanding and through the verse’s descriptive powers, I read my own experience in its narrative. In essence, I intuit the poet in solitary thought and take to the richness and layers of meaning hunkered in the words.

  My father’s early death separates me from my peers who I presume have not experienced an early loss, who have not borne witness to sorrow in a house—a mother grieving, a world torn apart by tragedy. Though of course they too must have suffered their own private losses and tragedies. A child always thinks she is alone in her sorrow. In our small circle of family and friends, we are known as my mother’s poor daughters. Tragedy makes us self-conscious. When we enter a room people stare. I wonder if our faces are somehow marked by our father’s death in a way I can’t see. If only someone would talk about what’s happened to us, but fear keeps conversation at bay. Tragedy is a hush-hush topic, something nice people don’t discuss.

  When Miss Hudson recites “The Road Not Taken,” I form a picture in my mind of two roads diverging. One road is worn and tended and it is evident it is the road most traveled. The other—overgrown, shaded, and magical—calls out to me. If I travel it, what life might I discover? There’s more than one way and suddenly I’m included. I belong.