Welcome back to NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). It’s Day 19.
This is a subject I’ve been wanting to tackle for a while, but I didn’t want to jump in with it right away, because I was concerned that the tone might leak into the entire project. Still, the subject matter is one that is so intimate, such a thoroughly interwoven part of our lives, that I would be remiss to continue to avoid it.
In fact, in The Poet’s Companion (pages 39-45), Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux devote an entire chapter to the topic: Death and Grief.
One of the great curses of knowledge human beings carry is that they will at some point no longer remain “being” but will become “was”. If anything, I believe this is one of the strongest undercurrents of the Garden of Eden myth, that the knowledge of mortality signals the end of innocence. Surely life was better when, in childhood, everything seems perpetual, eternal, and no one dies. Edna St. Vincent Millay echoes back at us.
Addonizio and Laux say this:
The mystery of death—whether one imagines it as a great nothingness, a transformation to another state, or a prelude to the next incarnation—has inspired poets to some of their most profound meditations. Each of us has our own relationship to death, a relationship that starts in childhood with our first awareness of it. And throughout our lives, we experience the grief and loss that another death brings.
I chose the title of this diary because for some reason music connects deeply with me when I think of or try to contemplate death. The concept is so both inside and outside of myself that the most immediate way for me to experience and understand it is through a different medium. Music serves as a bridge.
Now I don’t know exactly what ultimately was the inspiration for the lyrics or the composition of “The Long and Winding Road”; all I know is that when I hear it, I’m taking in a dirge, an elegy, a lament for something lost:
I came to the Beatles late and first encountered the song in this iteration, without the strings. This version is much softer, quieter, and I feel more plaintive. It elicits that hair & skin prick feeling I spoke of before. Surely I cannot be the only one who listens to this and feel almost as though I should weep at the sound.
The wild and windy night
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day
Why leave me standing here?
Let me know the way
Many times I've been alone
And many times I've cried
Anyway, you'll never know
The many ways I've tried
And still they lead me back
To the long winding road
You left me standing here
A long, long time ago
Don't leave me waiting here
Lead me to your door
The words in this excerpt are simple but the arrangement profound, tapping into a universal desire to return to a state of wholeness.
Addonizio and Laux continue:
Writing can be a way of working through those emotions, an act of catharsis on the page. Poets are often people who must write in order to process their experiences and feelings; writing is, in a very real sense, a mode of perceiving the world, of taking it into ourselves as well as trying to externalize what’s inside. Nothing can erase grief or speed up the process of healing, but writing can keep you aware as you go through it, and offer some solace. If you’re dealing with a loss, we suggest that you keep a “grief journal”; write in it as often as possible, and use it as a vehicle for exploration.
Such writing, of course, may not result in terrific poetry; in fact, there’s a good chance it won’t. But it’s probable that you’ll find the seeds of poems when you’re ready to go back to that raw place and try to shape something from it. Whether or not you return to the actual writing, you will have unearthed ideas, insights, questions, memories. These can be the starting points for poems that express your loss, or explore philosophical concerns, or vividly recreate those who have died.
For those who so follow the religious tradition of Christianity, just this weekend believers observed the Easter holiday, which is one that examines death in a very particular way. Much like a New Orleans funeral, the mourners are exhorted to discard abject grief and to rather celebrate, to, as Stevie Wonder once intoned, find joy inside one’s tears. Easter encourages us to imagine a different relationship to the inevitability of the endpoint, of our loved ones or that of ourselves. It asks of us a fundamental reordering of the universe, simply by incorporating symbols and entering into a relationship with those symbols. And isn’t that what poetry asks us to do?
Another song that evokes the ambivalence of the Easter celebration is a rather recent contribution. This piece from MGMT begins with the evocative sharpness of a requiem, but then broadens out—changes tone—as the song progresses, finally ending in a major key and with a completely upbeat tempo.
There is widespread speculation in the fan community that the lyrics allude to resurrection:
Someone's telling the toll to me
I'm cut and I'm weeping like a rubber tree
But I don't care who's left behind
Lost revelations that I'll never find
In the long hall pipes are whispering
Blues prepared for anti-christening
Somewhere there's an honest soul
To mirror teeth where neon lures troll
And what's extinct might come alive
A purple smoke in some internal shrine
With a long sigh let the hissing in
Stones deformed by gentle kissing and
All the closed eyes start to glisten
But it feels like someone's missing
Yeah it feels like someone's missing….
The stone is rolled back in the mind’s eye, and the graveclothes folded up and empty. (It’s really quite a remarkable song for such a short piece.)
So one’s relationship to death and to grief can be transformative, I believe these songs and some of these traditions are saying. Still the immediate sense of irretrievable loss upon the news that someone we love has passed cuts quick and can linger for months or years. It is the human condition.
“Ours isn’t a culture that accepts death or encourages much thinking about it. It’s important that we as poets work to avoid such denial,” Laux and Addonizio say.
On whatever level you are presently concerned with death (and we assume you are; after all, death is concerned with you), you should feel free to write about it. Whether you are obsessed with the subject of mortality, or consider it only occasionally, it can be a source of moving and illuminating poetry.
Their parenthetical immediately brings to mind an immortal poem by Emily Dickinson. All of her poems were published posthumously.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –
Dickinson manages to humanize Death in her anthromophization, where they (the speaker and Death) interact as associates do, and even grow somewhat close in an almost wincing intimacy. There is a wistfulness toward the things of the world the speaker has left behind, but there is no animosity toward her interlocutor, nor toward the journey’s inevitability.
Addonizio and Laux conclude their chapter:
If you are writing about your own grief, don’t try to get it all into one poem, to make some single pronouncement. Though death is a large subject, the way it enters our lives is often small: an object left behind, the memory of an offhand gesture made one long-ago afternoon, the smell of a T-shirt, the silly joke or absurd irony someone would have appreciated. In your writing, try to capture those intimate details that are the emblems of your particular loss.
Your prompt for today? Choose from one of these three:
- Write about the first experience with death that you can remember, whether it involved a person or an animal. Then write about your most recent experience with death. Combine the two in a poem.
- What can the dead do: go through walls, see the future, move objects? What are their powers and limitations? What are their desires, fears, pleasures? Describe them in a poem.
- Write a poem about a ritual that accompanies a death. It might be about a traditional funeral, a wake, or some more private or individual observance. If you find an occasion for joy or beauty in the midst of mourning, include it. (Do this last part only if it feels true to your experience.)
OR, if those are too personal to contemplate, take this exercise from The Practice of Poetry (pp. 66-67), Maura Stanton’s “The Widow”:
Write a poem in the voice of a widow whose husband has drowned. Invent any story you like. Perhaps the woman’s dead husband was a fisherman who was washed overboard in a storm at sea. Perhaps he was canoeing on a neighborhood lake.
Imagine that the widow, who now hates water, is forced through circumstances to confront it in some way. Her house is located beside the sea, perhaps, or her grown-up children insist on taking her on a vacation trip to the beach. Decide on how long it’s been since her husband’s death, and choose a specific location for the dramatic situation of the poem.
How does the widow feel about this particular river or lake or the ocean? Try to express her feeling through concrete details and images as much as possible. It might help to imagine the poem as a letter to someone.
Best of writing to you!
➡ IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:
- National Poetry Writing Month: an invitation | NaPoWriMo: a short exercise
- NaPoWriMo, Day 2: Telling a Secret | NaPoWriMo, Day 3: Still Life
- NaPoWriMo, Day 4: One out of many | NaPoWriMo, Day 5: Hanging together
- NaPoWriMo, Day 6: Home and introspection | NaPoWriMo, Day 7: Like this or that...
- NaPoWriMo, Day 8: No more short shrift | NaPoWriMo, Day 9: Poem as voicebox
- NaPoWriMo, Day 10: Caught between the horns
- NaPoWriMo, Day 11: Living in the spaces in-between
- NaPoWriMo, Day 12: What’s the occasion?
- NaPoWriMo, Day 13: They say it’s all about timing | NaPoWriMo, Day 14: Mad Libs
- NaPoWriMo, Day 15: The bizarro world next door
- NaPoWriMo, Day 16: Now hiring | NaPoWriMo, Day 17: Short and sweet
- NaPoWriMo, Day 18: Step by step, inch by inch….