July: Taking Comfort in Poetry
When I was nineteen, I took a class called Writing from the Margins. The professor stood in the windowless basement classroom and told us that poetry saves lives. He was a soft spoken gay man who wrote encouraging notes on the papers and poems I turned in. If he believed poetry saved lives, I wanted to believe it, too.
It was the same year that 9/11 happened, and I had somehow found a poetry reading at Cooper Union, where I first heard the poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” It was a tall order, but easier with books of poetry crowding my desk. Later, when I lived alone for the first time, I would spend nights memorizing poems: Adrienne Rich and Mary Oliver, Richard Siken and June Jordan. I copied poems on the backs of envelopes and taped them to my walls. I carried poetry with me as much as I could. I had once been a teenager in a small town, and when the Sister Spit spoken word album came out, I drove three towns over to special order it from an indie record store. When it arrived, I sat in my mother’s car and let the speakers fill with queer poetry. I listened to it on my discman, on my stereo, in my friends’ houses, in girls’ cars. I can still hear Eileen Myles pronounce “particle board” in a poem so thick with Boston vowels that it’s the only way I think of that noun now. There was a world outside of mine where queers wrote poetry and hopped in vans and traveled the country, reading their poems on microphones, in bars, in basements. When that professor said that poetry saves lives, I had evidence in my own young life that it was true.
Whenever something truly awful happens, my first instinct is to look up the poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” It doesn’t always work. Maybe there’s a maximum amount of tragedies you can assign to a poem before the darkness outweighs the light. When I woke up to the news about Orlando, I didn’t even look for the poem. These were beautiful black and brown queer folk, gunned down on a dance floor. They were so young. I’d spent my twenties seeking queers, seeking queer bars, closing my eyes on dance floors. To process this tragedy felt raw in a way I had no capacity for. That Sunday, when Emily and I turned on the television, the coverage was immediate. We saw video of handsome latino queers carrying the bodies of other latino queers in a dark night lit by camera crews, and my stomach flipped. We turned it off but we could never un-see it. Try to praise the mutilated world? I sank into hopelessness.
The first comfort I felt was when someone passed around the Maggie Smith poem, “Good Bones.” From there, I started carrying poetry with me again. I read Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith and Marie Howe. I slipped thin volumes in my tote bag, even just as a talisman, as we opened our doors and walked the sidewalks every day in a world more and more and more grim. Poetry is the only action I can take right now. I want to take more actions, and I will take more actions, but for the past few weeks, I’ve built a fort around my own fragility with books and books of poetry.
Try to praise the mutilated world. I now put the emphasis on try.
xo,
c
TRY TO PRAISE THE MUTILATED WORLD. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. —Adam Zagajewski (Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh) Good Bones BY MAGGIE SMITH Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.