Poetry Will Save Your Life Read online

for what occasionally keeps

  them trained on something far.

  And staring up where no cloud drifts

  because your sock’s devoid of gifts

  you’ll understand this thrift: it fits

  your age; it’s not a slight.

  It is too late for some breakthrough,

  for miracles, for Santa’s crew.

  And suddenly you’ll realize that you

  yourself are a gift outright.

  * * *

  The more I read the poem, the further I read into it my own inheritance. “What is this? Sadness?” this poem asks. It is a poem of exile, opening with images of the Wise Men, the Kings who have forgotten one’s address and a star, perhaps the Jewish Star of David or Shield of David, with its hexagram shape that dates to the seventeenth century, “that will not flare up to impress.” Joseph Brodsky, born a Russian Jew and once a lauded poet in his homeland, was eventually persecuted for his fiery and individualistic poetry that challenged Soviet ideals. After standing trial for “parasitism” he was forced to live in a hard labor camp and then a mental institution until American intellectuals helped get him released. He came to America in 1972 with the help of the poet W. H. Auden to teach at the University of Michigan.

  “January 1, 1965” was written while Brodsky was in internal exile enduring hard labor in Norenskaia, in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia. In the Soviet Union, New Year’s celebrations came to be seen as a substitute for Christmas. Every year, Brodsky wrote a new year’s poem. “January 1, 1965” acknowledges the passing of time as represented in the opening stanza by the image of candles, the calendar, and the lurking fear of death. It contains allusions of oppression and persecution. Tones of resignation reverberate; the poet is too old to celebrate “Santa” and believe in miracles. His stockings are empty. “Devoid of gifts.” Ironically, Brodsky was only twenty-four when he wrote the poem. Even with its defiant note in the last line, “you realize you yourself are a gift outright,” the futility of escaping history is omnipresent. Though my ancestors were not exiled in this way, the aftershocks of being born a Jew and the legacy of oppression were part of my historical inheritance.

  We rarely know how or why certain events and experiences shape us in childhood or the way in which we absorb the atmosphere in ways that linger.

  CHILDHOOD

  Rainer Maria Rilke (1874–1926)

  Translated by Joseph Cadora

  Best to often recall—before we try

  to search among such abandoned ruins—

  those lingering childhood afternoons

  that will never return, and then to ask why.

  Still they call out to us, perhaps in the rain,

  but what this might mean we no longer know;

  meetings, comings and goings—never again

  with these things did life seem to overflow,

  since nothing ever happened to us then,

  except what happens to animals or things,

  and we felt then as something quite human,

  what was theirs—filled to the brim with imaginings.

  And we were prone to a shepherd’s loneliness,

  and so filled with great distances then,

  summoned from afar and rapturous

  while, slowly as a growing thread of yarn,

  into that picture sequence we were drawn—

  which, when we dwell on it now, baffles us.

  * * *

  Rilke was fascinated with exploring childhood: its loneliness, the sense of time passing, and its mysterious effect on character in his poetry. Like it was for many of us, childhood was a difficult time for Rilke. He was fragile and effeminate; his mother had wanted a girl and dressed him as one. His father was a civil servant, and his parents enrolled him in military school hoping he would become an officer—a highly unlikely profession for such a sensitive young man. It wasn’t until many years later, with the help of an uncle, that he left the military academy and pursued an education that would enable him to prepare for university and a literary career. Many of the images of childhood in his poems are inspired by his own memories. In the poem “Childhood,” Rilke describes how nothing really happens to us in childhood (“except what happens to animals and things”), with its implication that as children we are subjected to the whims and decisions of our parents or guardians. Of course this is meant ironically because these things have a profound impact on us, even though as children we don’t yet know it. In Letter 6 in his prose work, Letters to a Young Poet, an essential companion for any aspiring artist, Rilke writes of the loneliness, confusion, and solitude of childhood, and solitude’s necessity in forming an internal and creative life. It is that potent combination from which our consciousness evolves.

  Rome

  December 23, 1903

  My dear Mr. Kappus,

  You shall not be without a greeting from me when Christmas comes and when you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But if then you notice that it is great, rejoice because of this: for what task (ask yourself) would solitude be that had no greatness; there is but one solitude, and that is great, and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest. . . . But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows, for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes. But that must not mislead you. The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great, inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one—this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings.

  FATHERS

  THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

  Robert Hayden

  When I am in the fifth grade, my mother greets us when we come home from school, and before we can put down our books and rush into the kitchen for a snack, she ushers us upstairs to her bedroom and announces that she is married. She holds out her hand and shows us an opal-and-gold ring and gives each of us a hug. Where was the wedding? I wonder. Why were we not invited? She tells us they went to the courthouse and the justice of the peace performed the ceremony. That phrase stays in my memory. Who is this justice? And what does it mean? And who is this man who is now her husband? This moment marks a turning point in my life. Now there is a man downstairs who plans to move into our house, inhabited only by young girls and a woman. With our brushes, combs, hair clips, and crèmes in the bathrooms, my mother’s closets in the master bedroom filled to bursting with her dresses and shoes, her bedroom smelling like Chanel No. 5 and hairspray. I don’t know how he’ll fit in. Even the ceilings and alcoves seem too low for what we will soon discover is his over six-foot-tall frame. In a matter of hours everything changes. No more slumber parties stretched out on our mother’s king-size bed in flannel nightgowns watching Father Knows Best or Dick Van Dyke and eating bowls of Jiffy Pop while our mother gets ready for her date. There is a handsome man downstairs with two suitcases, we are told, who is waiting to welcome us as our new dad. Why didn’t we get to choose, I wonder? We soon learn that he’s Irish Catholic. I consider if my relatives will approve and if that is why my mother eloped, but this is not something ever spoken of.

  During the first few months of the new arrangement, it seems as if we are rehearsing for this new role of family. It is important to be on good behavior. Gone are the simple dinners of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and heated SpaghettiOs from a can, Sloppy Joes, grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna noodle casserole, and wiener goulash. Gone are the TV dinners my mother popped in the oven when she was readying for a date. I like Salisbury steak, with its little tin of mashed potatoes and peas. Sister number three prefers the fried chicken, and sister number one likes turkey and gravy with its cavi
ty of cranberry sauce. Now the refrigerator is filled with expensive meats and cheeses, and my mother’s new bible is Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  I like this new version of my mother, but there’s a slight desperation in her need to please. Instead of TV dinners and heated cans, my mother makes thick steaks and too-rare roast beef for dinner and slaves for hours to bake fresh almond cakes. On Sundays, I go to the bakery with my stepfather and together we pick out a box of jelly, chocolate, and glazed donuts so buttery they melt in our mouth. This new father likes his girls to dress alike when he takes us out to dinner. One day he takes us to Saks Fifth Avenue and buys us three of the same red-and-black checkered dresses. Not only are there new meals on the table but my mother comes to life in a different way. Every Saturday she goes to the beauty parlor to get her hair and nails done, and they go out. Sundays she cooks all day. Sometimes I watch my stepfather creep into the kitchen and kiss my mother’s neck when she’s huddled over the stove.

  The honeymoon period lasts a year or so before their spontaneous decision to marry begins to show its seams. My stepfather travels during the week, and when he comes home, he prepares himself a scotch on the rocks and sits in the new black leather Eames chair he had delivered when he moved in to watch the game or read the paper. He looks tired. God knows what he does when he’s away from us. God knows if he had any idea how deep the footprints were he would be required to fill, that of a husband and father to a household long in want and need.

  The strange world of husbands and wives is confusing. Sometimes he doesn’t come home from work till almost dawn and I hear my mother crying in her bed. The next morning they fight all day. My sisters and I seclude ourselves in the basement playing Candyland or Monopoly where all you have to do is roll the dice or twirl the spinner to determine your fate. It seems so simple, but it’s not. Through the floorboards that vibrate underneath his heavy walk, I feel my stepfather’s terrible power over my mother and hence over all of us. All I want is for them to stop fighting. Sometimes I even blame my mother. The next morning I slowly creep down the stairs. My mother is still sleeping. My stepfather is awake. I hear him in the cold kitchen and slowly my breathing returns to normal. I am certain that our well-being depends on his being there.

  THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

  Robert Hayden (1913–1980)

  Sundays too my father got up early

  and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

  then with cracked hands that ached

  from labor in the weekday weather made

  banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

  I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

  When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

  and slowly I would rise and dress,

  fearing the chronic angers of that house,

  Speaking indifferently to him,

  who had driven out the cold

  and polished my good shoes as well.

  What did I know, what did I know

  of love’s austere and lonely offices?

  * * *

  The landscape rendered in a poem through its specific narrative—a memory of a boy getting up on a Sunday to the crackling of a fire roaring in the fireplace made by his father to keep his family warm—has the ability to be universal and cut across cultures, religions, and economic backgrounds. Robert Hayden grew up in a Detroit working-class neighborhood whose specifics—“cracked hands that ached from labor”—inform “Those Winter Sundays.” His parents separated before he was born and he was raised by foster parents in a turbulent home marked by verbal and physical abuse. Shades of the trauma he sustained as a child resonate throughout his poetic oeuvre. Be that as it may, “Those Winter Sundays,” evokes memories and reverberations of the complicated “austere and lonely offices” of a collective childhood, whether rich or poor, where a father wields his tender and cruel power.

  FAITH

  AFTER GREAT PAIN A FORMAL FEELING COMES,

  I’M NOBODY WHO ARE YOU,

  and “HOPE” IS A THING WITH FEATHERS

  Emily Dickinson

  As a private and bookish adolescent, I retreat inside Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women seeking refuge in another time and place. The novel follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—narrating their passage from childhood to womanhood. Their father is away from home fighting in the Civil War. The novel depicts what it is like to grow up in a household of women. For obvious reasons, this book speaks to me. I read it after school, I read it in the morning. I read it late into the night when the moon presses its light against the pane of my window. I read it in the library at school until the dog-eared pages hold my finger marks, jottings in the margins, and my spills of tea. Why do I love it so? It makes me believe that maybe one day I might be like Jo, my favorite character in the novel who wants to become a writer. I dream and fantasize that one day soon this might happen to me, and with my books I might be able to support my mother and sisters. That book held power in its pages. Later I discover Laura Ingalls Wilder and her adventurous stories of settling on the wild prairie, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice about a mother and her many daughters, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and its dark reverberations of eternal love. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, a love story about a terrible accident, keeps me up for nights. For a week I am inseparable from my copy of The Red Pony. I ingest novels and stories by Dickens and Tolstoy and later Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and the characters in these different worlds inform my envy, my empathy, my courage, my consciousness.

  One day in our school library, I roam the poetry shelf and discover a large volume of poetry filled with untitled poems identified by first lines and Roman numbers. The poems belong to the American poet Emily Dickinson and I identify with them immediately. It is as if I opened a box that held my private secrets and desires. I love the playful, spirited surfaces of the poems similar to the verse of Robert Louis Stevenson. But they resonate with deep undertones about abstract concepts like love, hope, faith, and death. It makes me feel smart to think I understand them. Once I learn more of Emily Dickinson’s biography and her reclusive lifestyle, I am more enchanted. How is it possible that this poet, who had expected to become “the belle of Amherst when I reach my seventeenth year,” ended up a reclusive poet who had “not been outside her house in fifteen years.” It amazes me that a person who lived in seclusion could know so much about human nature. Since I was only two years old when my father died, I had always associated his loss through the world of my mother—it was her grief, not mine. Losing him meant my life was different. But reading Dickinson’s poetry in a little cubbyhole in the library of my school I let the dark undercurrent of loss pulsate in my own life and unleash a well of sorrow. It was as if I too were frozen, my heart stiff, ceremonious, living a mechanical existence. Suddenly a formal feeling pervades my being.

  AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING COMES (341)

  Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

  After great pain, a formal feeling comes —

  The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —

  The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore

  And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

  The Feet, mechanical, go round —

  Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —

  A Wooden way

  Regardless grown,

  A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

  This is the Hour of Lead —

  Remembered, if outlived,

  As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —

  First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go —

  * * *

  Many years later when I am in my twenties I come across a book called On Death and Dying by the Swiss psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In the pages she posits a model of grief that consists of five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I am reminded of Emily Dickinson’s poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” and recall the simplicity of its portraya
l of grief through the use of four words: “chill,” “stupor,” “letting go.” “A formal feeling” depicts that changed state obtained after having survived the death of an intimate. Now whenever I think of grief or suffering after a terrible event, I think of it as “the Hour of Lead.”

  Emily Dickinson never knew literary success in her lifetime, publishing only 12 of nearly 1,800 poems. After attending Mount Holyoke College for a year, she barely left her home and had few acquaintances outside of her immediate family. Those she held close had an enormous impact on her verse. One such figure was Reverend Charles Wadsworth, whom she met on a trip to Philadelphia. He left for the West Coast shortly after a visit to her home in 1860, and some critics believe his departure unleashed the wistful, at times heartsick, always profound flow of verse in the years that followed. From that time, Dickinson lived in almost total isolation from the outside world, speaking to acquaintances sometimes from behind a closed door. And yet behind that closed door was a desk, shelves of books, an ink pen, and paper. Poetry gave her solitary life purpose and meaning. In her sharp, clever, eccentric poems we discover a voice that embraced difficult and complicated circumstances. But her verse—whimsical, artfully composed—is also infused with optimism and faith. Her lines are clear and concise, distinguished by rhyme, sound, punctuated with her signature dash and exclamation marks, half-rhymes and surprising line breaks. Life, time, nature, grief, eternity are her themes. She accepted her private isolation and agoraphobia and chose to commune with humanity through her poems.

  I’M NOBODY! WHO ARE YOU? (288)

  Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

  I’m Nobody! Who are you?

  Are you—Nobody—Too?