The Clarifying Power of Poetry

by Dick Allen

The recent tragedy in Newtown, Conn., brings forth, understandably, questions about poetry.

Why poems?

Because poetry, particularly traditional rhymed and metered poetry, is at its best a heightened use of language. It’s a form of art that can “lock” a realization into place, seemingly for all time.

Being occasional, written in the heat and sorrow of the moment, sadly most often these terribly sincere poems are not very good. Why not?

Poetry, wrote William Wordsworth in his famous “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.” I’d argue that “recollected in tranquility” is what provides poetry’s greatest use: perspective.

In addition to containing considered, crafted and revised and uniquely put language, one does not likely have perspective when responding immediately to a situation.

Can one find solace or an answer in poetry?

I think so.

An answer may arise because in reading a fine poem, already well known, the reader is taken outside himself and encouraged to think clearly. The evocation may be as simple as in the lines from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,”

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

Or A.E Houseman’s observation on the brevity of human life:

And since to look at things in bloom,
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Or Emily Dickinson’s poem, quoted here in full — a poem among others that I couldn’t get out of my head following the horrific Friday in Newtown:

There’s a certain slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral tunes -
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are -
None may teach it -
Any -
’Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -
When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their Breath -
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -

Over and over, the great poems provide needed perspective. They remind us, as W. H. Auden did in “September 1, 1939,” that “we must love one another, or die.” This admonition was even more true when Auden later altered the line to read, “We must love one another and die.”

Reading poems, writing them, thinking about them, memorizing them are acts of devotion. Any good book of poetry, any excellent poem, focuses one’s attention. Poems clarify us. A poem may be an act of meditation, as it might have been for the poet writing it and as it is for those reading it. It may be a prayer. It can tell us that no matter what it is we’re feeling, others also have felt this way. It may gentle us. On occasion, with its ambiguity, it may make us see many ways at once.

Or it may instruct us. In T. S. Eliot’s words from his “Ash Wednesday,”

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will.
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.

Poetry causes us to be, in the Zen Buddhists’ term, “mindful.” And to be mindful is to become acutely aware of every moment. It is to cherish each individual moment even in our stunned lack of comprehension of the whole of life and death — as certainly the Newtown tragedy has caused us to be so stunned.

The Japanese poet Matsuo Bosho’s haiku, the most famous poem in Japan, lets us focus on this Present. No moment is trivial:

The old pond -
a frog jumps in,
sound of water

This focus on the acute perception that just to hear a frog splash, just to have a chance to be alive, even for a brief time, as the Newtown children were, is marvelous, a gift, an unforgetableness. It may remind us of a poetic admonition by a Zen Master, one expressed to his disciple as they were walking in the rain. It says simply what must be said always:

"Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere."

Dick Allen is Connecticut’s state poet laureate.

Reprinted by permission of the Savannah Morning-News, which published this essay on December 26, 2012.

Poet Marcia Slatkin NY Reading and Book Signing

Marcia Slatkin reads from her new poetry collection

NOT YET: A Healing Journey Through
Alzheimer's Care-Giving

December 15, 2012, 2-4 PM

Village Books, 48 Broadway, Tivoli, NY12573

Published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Nacogdoches, Texas

CONTACT: Kimberly Verhines, sfapress@sfasu.edu or Marcia Slatkin, mslatkin@juno.com, 917 597 4253

NOT YET: A Healing Journey Through Alzheimer's Care-Giving plunges readers into the four years Ms. Slatkin spent as her mother’s care-giver. The view is intimate. We sit beside the mother bathing, taking meds, doing exercise at her senior center. But we also see the transformation of the author, as the possibility of healing old wounds through role reversal is illuminated, the child now a kind parent to the infirm elder. Many poems rejoice in a newly-found “peace of closeness” that can arise when one uses touch, warmth and humor during prolonged, intimate contact. A difficult situation rewards both care-giver and patient as past anger dissolves. In sensual language, Slatkin uses imagery and music to fashion richly textured, accessible vignettes. The tone combines unflinching, unsentimental honesty, and tenderness. Although there is frustration, confusion and forgetting, times of lucid humor reveal the warm, zany personality still intact beneath the mother’s dementia. NOT YET will console and give hope to those with family members diagnosed with dementia. Please come and be part of the discussion and the refreshments that will follow the reading! And please consider that the book will make an inexpensive, deeply meaningful gift for people you love who face this situation.

PRAISE FOR "NOT YET"

“You will both cry and laugh as you read these poems that respect the person within the patient; forgive the sins of the past; find within diminishment, wholeness; and feel ‘the peace of closeness’ in times of intimacy. every caregiver, every family member, every poet should read these poems. Those who do will be humbled and changed. ”
—Cortney Davis, Author, Body Flute

"Slatkin is, as both daughter and poet, affectionate, obstinate, persistent, and brave."
—Mindy Kronenberg, Editor, BookMarkQuarterly Review; Author, Dismantling the Playground

"With keen intelligence, with curiosity and flashes of humor, with an eye for sensual detail, Slatkin's work is unflinching, compassionate, moving. This is a powerful book."
—Carin Clevidence, author, The House on Salt Hay Road

"Honesty mixed with tenderness, a triumph over pathos."
—Claire Nichols White, editor, Oberon Poetry Review, author, The Death of the Orange Tree

"The poems are honest, raw, close to the heart. They will console and inspire you."
—Philip Levine, poetry editor, Chronogram Magazine

“The abundance of life and love is celebrated."
—Alice Elman, Professor of Humanities, Suffolk Community College, Long Island, NY

"Anthem for a generation, and a critical addition to the new literature of Alzheimer's Disease."
—Tom Lombardo, editor, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events

Former teacher, farmer, care-giver, Marcia now plays cello, works for climate change mitigation, makes photo collages, and writes: poems, plays, fiction. Three of her one-acts will be read at Bard's Lifetime Learning Institute's intersession workshops, January 16th, 2013, 1:30 - 3:30, free of charge. Her collages/ photographs can be seen at the Tivoli Artist's Co-Op and at RHCAN, Red Hook. Her two daughters grown, she lives and cultivates many gardens with her long-time partner, Dan. See www.marciaslatkin.com for sample poems, photographs. Her poem “A Late Blessing” appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, which presented 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 nations.

"A Late Blessing" by Marcia Slatkin

I wake her
with touch, rubbing
her shoulders, telling
the time.

My hug fills
the curve of her chest,
arms circling warmth
through her length.

When she cleans dishes,
I reach to fill the kettle
by nudging her cheek
with my forehead,
then snuggling, and hearing
her squeal.

Despite grease
on her face at sleeptime,
I kiss her, wish her
good dreams.

This is the mother I battled
when young; the mother
who beat my defiance;
the one I hit back.

While we walk now,
she gives me her hand,
its back veined and grizzled—
but its wondrous palm
soft as persimmon,
warm and trusting
as a child.

Reprinted by permission of Marcia Slatkin.

Interview With Marcia Slatkin

How did you come to write this poem?

My childhood was full of intense drama. My ill father was angry. My anxiety ridden mother was intrusive and harshly critical in her desperation for her children to succeed. As I was rebellious, there were constant fights which, often physical, left everyone haggard.

It was thus not easy to realize, forty years later, my father long dead, that my mother, now paranoid and delusional as well as lacking memory, could no longer live alone. Perhaps this is a fearsome occasion for crisis in many families. How do grown children deal with aging and infirm parents, especially if the children bear the scars of early battle? But I was the oldest of four siblings. My children were grown, and I had a free bedroom. I was the only child who used vitamins religiously, so I knew I could keep her healthy longer than any institution could. And I had done "Re-evaluation Co-Counseling" every week for 25 years! It is a psycho-therapeutic modality where by you train, then trade counseling services with peers so that you help one another peel away layers of pain, thus freeing you to... see reality more clearly. I knew that it was fear that had caused my parents to act so harshly toward me, even thought my residual anger remained.

So I decided to give it a try, at least until the family could figure out another option. I gave my mother two Benadryl, told her we were going for a drive, and took her 70 miles east to my hi-ranch on the north shore of Long Island. Several lucky breaks made the decision a good one. I found a wonderful day care program for dementia patients nearby. Our M.D. prescribed two off-label psych meds for her, which cut down the anxiety and stopped the hallucinations/delusions. But it was the realization that I could write about our days together that induced me to keep her. It was like direct contact with the Muse of Poetry! We'd interact, I'd hear lines, write them down, and hear more. The simmering creative jolt that care-giving gave, sustained me through the 3 1/2 years of our journey together. And my own psychological transformation came within and during that "care-giving / creating" context.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

"A Late Blessing" was written relatively early in the experience—perhaps six months after my mother began to live with me. But things had gotten easier between us already. I found a zany, adventuresome woman beneath all that paranoia and anxiety. Sometimes, psych meds are miraculous. She responded beautifully to my silliness, and loved physical touching and hugging. I found myself amazed that I could be part of a happy relationship with this woman I'd warred with for so long. I didn't realize it until I reread what I had written, months later, but this poem marks the beginning of the melting of the block of scar that had encased my heart for years.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

Most of my poems are narrative. I would be struck by a detail of our lives together, and would write focusing on the emotional center of the story, the most intense moment, only later working to enhance language, whether with imagery or sound systems. Often I actually heard/thought of lines at the start -- which made me understand that our connection was an essential catalyst for my writing. Something that induced me to write this poem, but which I have perhaps not completely captured within it—I was struck when touching / looking at my mothers "guileless palm,/ soft as a persimmon, / trusting as a child," that it was the symbol of her current vulnerability. She was dependent on me and trusting that I would not harm her, even though I still harbored enough residual anger so that I was aware that I could hurt her as payback for past pain. She of course never knew such thoughts occurred to me. And I decided that I would never be vengeful, but rather kind and loving. Still, at that moment, there I was, knife in hand, bending over her naked exposed neck, and deciding to sheathe the blade. Perhaps the poem expresses my wonder at this decision. It would be a real writing assignment to try to get all of that into the poem!

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I was early attracted to the 17th century devotional poets -- George Herbert, John Donne. I love the muscular sound of their work, I love the often-complex "metaphysical imagery," which I find intellectually nourishing, and I love the yearning outward reach, the belief in and longing for a spiritual dimension beyond, even as the beauty of this life is appreciated, praised. I loved the lyrics of A.E. Houseman much as I love the piano music of Schumannn—simple unpretentious direct utterance, lilting and lovely. I loved Blake above all other writers for a long time, because of his fierce philosophical stance, his love of the pure and good, his hatred of pretense and hypocrisy. "Exuberance is Beauty," I'd write on my wall. "Prudence is an Ugly Old Maid Courted by Incapacity." I loved the lyrics of the early Joni Mitchell for perhaps the same reasons. And my reaction to Sharon Olds was so intense that for a long time I couldn't read her work without crying. That relentless moving deeper and deeper toward the center of experience is mesmerizing for me. She has a courage I wish I had. She goes farther toward the "whatness" of experience than any poet I know. I also love the poetry of Linda Pastan and Stephen Dunn—both of them accessible, beautifully evocative, wise.

What are you working on now?

I think humans now are suffering a very dangerous denial of climate change that perhaps stems from extreme fear and feelings of impotence. I've been writing poems about this issue for about four years, and want to begin to publish some of them as I work toward the completion of a volume I'll call "OP ED: EARTH!" Many of the pieces react to articles I've read about the issue, many are dramatic monologues (i.e. from the point of view of a glacier, or of a CO2 molecule.). The most important task for me, therefore, is to figure out in whose voice I'll tell my tale, then to imagine that entity and try to inhabit it as I write the poem. Compelling.

Former teacher, farmer, care-giver, Marcia Slatkin now plays cello, works for climate change mitigation, makes photo collages, and writes: poems, plays, fiction. Three of her one-acts will be read at Bard's Lifetime Learning Institute's inter-session workshops, January 16th, 1:30 - 3:30 P.M., free of charge. Her collages/photographs can be seen at the Tivoli Artist's Co-Op and at RHCAN, Red Hook. Her two daughters grown, she lives and cultivates many gardens with her long-time partner, Dan. See www.marciaslatkin.com for sample poems, photos.

A Poem by Alexa Selph

Leavings

by Alexa Selph

Let me leave you
     with the wish that someday
             your leaving me

will find its way
     into your own
             mixed bag of regrets, 

along with the unexpected
     notice of insufficient funds,
             the plate of food removed

while you were still hungry, 
     the poem you've always wished
             you could write. 

You I will scrape
     carefully into my compost
             heap, along with a few

potato skins, some used coffee grounds, 
     a little leftover chopped broccoli
             (gone bad), and some broken eggshells. 

Next spring I'll feed you
     to my daylilies, after  
             my memories have had time

to shift and turn,
     decay and change
             into something rich and good.

Reprinted by permission of Alexa Selph.

Interview with Alexa Selph

How did you come to write these poems?

The poem “Leavings” came more from observation than actual experience. In the poem I’m hoping to make the point that, over time, bitterness and anger can be transformed into something “rich and good.”

How did writing these poems affect your recovery?

I like W. H. Auden’s description of poetry as the “clear expression of mixed feelings.” Every stage of life presents new challenges, most of which we face with varying degrees of anxiety and anticipation. Poetry can help us come to terms with the inevitable ambivalence that we all experience as we move forward in our lives.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems come to life?

Those of us who are trying to wring poetry from this wired world of ours feel torn between the opposing messages of “Anything goes” and “Nobody cares.” When I start to write, my goal is to write a good poem, to discover unexpected connections within the realm of the real. As Shelley said in his Defence of Poetry, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” In my view, the best poems arise from deep emotion shaped by a reverence for craft.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you’d recommend to others?

I’m a longtime fan of David Bottoms, whose poems are represented in the After Shocks anthology. Among younger poets, I admire the work of Jeffrey Harrison, Patrick Phillips, and A. E. Stallings, among many others.

What are you working on now?

After the anthology was published, my mother died, and about six months after that, my husband had to have major heart surgery. Poetry—both reading it and writing it—offered solace as I recovered from both those experiences. I think my mom would have enjoyed the sequence of six haiku inspired by events surrounding the time of her death and published in Modern Haiku some months later. My husband and I are now able to find moments of humor as we recall the scary time before, during, and after his surgery, some of which I’ve tried to capture in poetry.

Alexa Selph, a native Atlantan, has an M.A. in English from Georgia State University. She has worked for many years as a freelance book editor, and since 2001, she has taught classes in poetry and has conducted poetry workshops at the Emory University Center for Lifelong Learning. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Habersham Review, Modern Haiku, Georgia State University Review, Connecticut Review, and Blue Mesa Review. Ten of her poems were published in the 2010 Press 53 Spotlight Anthology.

A New Collection from Steven Cramer

Clangings
By Steven Cramer
www.stevencramer.com

From Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
502.458.4028
info@sarabandebooks.org
Fax: 502.458.4065

About Clangings

Schizophrenia may be characterized by a surfeit of language, a refurbishment of our used up words with musical connections every day speech and sense cannot provide. These riffs are “clangings,” and Steven Cramer imagines them into a poetic narrative that exults in both aural richness and words’ power to evoke an interior landscape whose strangeness is intimate, unsteady, and stirring.

Two poems from Clangings

[Dickey’s death feels all over me.]

Dickey’s death feels all over me.
I try not digging at the thing. He died
before I could grow his hemlock seed.
Boyo, the tricksters of this cemetery,

long-sleeved shorts with their shirts off,
can’t tell a cow’s dead till it’s slaughtered.
He was a sublime Halloween snicker,
bat dark meat. Never watched golf.

Not much now but gum and minerals,
blue pods, tainted entertainments.
Our folder warps, drifts, frags, taunts.
Everest ground down to soil samples.

I’ve lost my sprite, my shot at distemper,
nobody’s rabies can pillow this blow.
Nobody’s but Dickey’s. My “he” is “O,”
who once flicked hearts, a lamplighter.

I could clang wish-bells, break out a dish,
but I know he’s the headache at the base
of my throat. He’s left ice in my voice,
foam round rocks where we used to fish.

###

[First I denied the no-seeums speckling]

First I denied the no-seeums speckling
my dead boy. Over here, they called.
I overheard there. My shoulder thawed,
felt fine. I exhaled my unson’s song.

Then came blame. Used up, I sued it.
Anger management? I nail-gunned
flies all over drywall. My tantrum
plucked a geshrunken dish; threw it, it

pitched back, thew! Pawed hardball,
return me his birthdays. I’ll be prompt,
to Commencement, promise. I’m unkempt?
I’ll kempt. But worms don’t dicker a deal . . .

I resigned my shift; I mean, took a break.
Blanket our dog wouldn’t even adopt,
I laid off apostrophes to the teardrop.
His name sank, forsook all heartache—

no more pantomime palominos.
If you can't stage miracles, curtain.
It’s not like you become Adam, even
whistling to the herd in widow grass.

Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books. Clangings (2012) by Steven Cramer

To Order Clangings

Order the collection at Sarabande Books, where there’s also a link to an interview with Steven Cramer, a Reader’s Guide, and a list of upcoming readings by Mr. Cramer.

Comments About Clangings
________________________________________

“… one of our favorite poetry books of 2012″ - Memorious

“‘Clangings' are specialized modes of speech schizophrenics and manics use to express themselves, and identify themselves, and communicate, so desperately and wittily and forlornly and with such resourceful energy. That's wonderfully registered here. But one gets to feel, reading it, that these diagnostically defined ways of using language are only extreme cases of how we all use language. Steven Cramer handles and contends with and profits from that extremely difficult, intensely compressed, stanzaic form, over and over, inventive all the way, hilarious a lot of the time, and scared, scary, distanced and objective, and very moving. Clangings is a wild ride.”

—David Ferry, 2012 National Book Award winner for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

“Humane from its aching heart to its flummoxed nether regions, whipsmart, formally acute but unfussy, and entertaining as all hell—Steven Cramer's new book shreds our airwaves with an inventiveness that is rare. Rare, as in once-in-a-lifetime-if-you're-lucky rare. It balances perfectly on the knife-edge of improvisation and necessity. Clangings is magnificent.”

—David Rivard, author of five poetry collections including Otherwise/Elsewhere and Sugartown

“Steven Cramer’s Clangings is a poetry not of madness, nor even the merely unspeakable, but instead irresistibly musical musings that reveal a command of language only achievable through fierce intelligence and the most piercing wit. A brilliant revision of the clinical term that describes speech that sacrifices sense to sound, here one finds that sound itself—'Two rhymes snagged between rhymes,/ spun puns, all my blinds up in flames./ The voices in noise are getting wise,' as Cramer writes, indelibly—is indeed sense. Poetry is healing here, the astonishing process itself laid out on these pages in all its utterly humane glory.”

—Rafael Campo, MD Harvard Medical School author of The Desire to Heal: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry

“Steven Cramer’s Clangings may well be the most disturbing book of verse ever written! Binding the warp of psychotic blurts into a poetic weft is one way to make all of language unbearably strange. But the poems here disturb and illuminate—that’s the magic.”

—Jean McGarry, author of Dream Dateand A Bad and Stupid Girl

To Order Clangings

Order the collection at Sarabande Books, where there’s also a link to an interview with Steven Cramer, a Reader’s Guide, and a list of upcoming readings by Mr. Cramer.

Clangings

A new collection from Steven Cramer (www.stevencramer.com)

From Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
502.458.4028
info@sarabandebooks.org
Fax: 502.458.4065

Everyone Who Left Us by Steven Cramer

Everyone who left us we find everywhere.
It’s easier, now, to look them in the eyes—
At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.
Of course, we wonder if they think of us.

It’s easier, now, to look them in the eyes,
Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk.
Of course, we wonder if they think of us
When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm.

Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk—
Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness.
When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm,
We think of calling them, leaving messages.

Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness—
No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction.
We think of calling them, leaving messages
Vivid with news we’re sure they’d want to know.

No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction:
We close our eyes in order not to see them.
Vivid with news, we’re sure they’d want to know
We don’t blame them, really. They weren’t cruel.

We close our eyes in order not to see them
Reading, making love, or falling asleep.
We don’t blame them. Really, they weren’t cruel,
Though it hurts every time we think of them:

Reading, making love, or falling asleep,
Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms.
Though it hurts every time we think of them,
Like a taste we can’t swallow their names stay.

Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms,
Then, they leave us the look of their faces
Like a taste we can’t swallow. Their names stay,
Diminishing our own, getting in the way

At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.
Everyone who left us we find everywhere,
Then they leave us, the look of their faces
Diminishing, our own getting in the way.

How did you come to write this poem?

I confess I don’t entirely recall. I know it was one of the first poems I finished after completing my third book, Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand. Writing is always a struggle for me, especially after a book is done. I remember, dimly, that I’d been reading some of my handwritten notes and fragments, and the sentence, “Everyone who left us we find everywhere,” seemed like a good sentence with which to start a poem. But I don’t remember when it occurred to me to explore the challenges and opportunities of writing a pantoum—probably after I’d written a quatrain with lines that seemed to merit repeating. All pantoums must develop that way, no?

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

The poem doesn’t pertain to a specific experience of recovery. Between 1987 and 1996, the year the poem was written, my father, brother, and mother died. Certainly the poem, in part, grapples with that sequence of losses, and the way such losses leave deep impressions. In retrospect, the structure of the pantoum—the insistent recurrence of its lines—seems like the right form for the way lost loved ones keep “turning up” in memory. Of course, had I been aware of that, I would never have written the poem.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I tend to “construct” poems rather than write them—that is, I generate material in the form of fragments, scribbles, lines or stanzas that go nowhere—then reread them and try to make something of the passages that show some promise as language. “Everyone Who Left Us” certainly developed out of that process. The other day I heard a friend describe writing a poem in one sitting, starting with a first line and then simply—simply!—following the verbal cues to a more or less serviceable first draft. I seethed with envy.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Well, the usual suspects in the English: Shakespeare of the sonnets and the great, introspective monologues (really, meditative poems in and of themselves); Keats, Dickinson (who loved Keats); the modernists except 90% of Pound (love that 10%, though). First hearing Eliot read out loud by my high school English teacher made me fall in love with poetry. I recently had the opportunity to write about W.S. Merwin, which re-introduced me to what I like and don’t like about his poetry. Decades after everyone else, I’ve just gotten around to reading War Music, Christopher Logue’s “account” of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of the Iliad. It’s as astonishing as everyone has said—every rift packed with ore, as Keats said poetry must be—and page-turningly readable. What took me so long? I hope it will not take me as long to read the other parts of this project which took him from 1962 until 2005. He died in 2011; I don’t know if there are any posthumous volumes forthcoming. I hope so.

What are you working on now?

My fifth collection, Clangings—a book-length sequence of poems comprising a single dramatic monologue—was released this month from Sarabande Books. I wrote it in a kind of white heat in 2009 and 2010. The speaker manifests the thought disorder known as “clang associations”–mental connections made between dissociated ideas through rhymes, puns, neologisms, and other non-linear speech, occurring frequently in schizophrenia and mania. I’m no more schizophrenic than Browning was the Duke of Ferrara; and the book, I hope, isn’t a fictionalized or versified case history. The clinical premise allowed me to write in a new way—more irrationally than is characteristic of my work.

Now I’m mainly trying to figure out how to write poems again. As I said, it’s always a struggle.

STEVEN CRAMER's new collection of poetry is Clangings (Sarabande, 2012). He is the author of four previous collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987); The World Book (1992); Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997); and Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Steven’s poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly; as well as in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets, The POETRY Anthology, 1912–2002, and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012).

Steven has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge. His new collection Clangings is available at Sarabande Books.

His poem “Everyone Who Left Us” was anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books, 2008).

Bogger’s note: A friend recently died, someone with whom I worked for several years, but hadn’t seen in subsequent years. She was bright and gregarious but progressively overcome by a demon. She died of a drug overdose earlier this month. After I heard the news, I thought of this poem, and as I read it, Steven Cramer’s pantoum drove home this point: The longer you live, the more people you know and love die, and if you are lucky enough to be one of those who continues to wake up each morning, then you must carry the responsibility of grief. Thank you, Steven Cramer, for helping me bear the grief through another day.
–Tom Lombardo, Editor, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events .

Rachel Tzvia Back’s New Collection

A Messenger Comes
by Rachel Tzvia Back

From Singing Horse Press
http://www.singinghorsepress.com
5251 Quaker Hill Lane
San Diego, 92130

An excerpt from A Messenger Comes appears below these words of praise.

Rachel Tzvia Back’s A Messenger Comes is poetry that, without apology, centers of grief and its faithful companion, memory. The reality of death—always a shock—pulls us inward and apart, but the messenger from the living insists that we mourn while we continue on with our lives. Back’s poems are moving, eloquent, and delicately honed.
—Irena Klepfisz, author of Keeper of Accounts, professor of Women’s Studies, Barnard College

A Messenger Comes is no simple book of consolation. It is a book of questions: Can grief be sustained? What can we learn from the grief of another? Can we know another’s grief? What can we say to console her? What if grieving is not something that we should get over? What are the connections between grief and memory? How does a poem intensify our memory of the ones we have lost? Lost to what? A harrowing and inspiring book of poems!
—Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit and Deathwatch for My Father, Editor, Contemporary & Modern Poetics Series, University of Alabama press

In the poet’s own words:

The title A Messenger Comes is lifted from a passage I read in Leon Weiseltier's seminal scholarly work Kaddish – on the history and evolution of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The extract – which is my new book's epigraph – goes as follows:

A messenger comes to the mourner's house.
"Come," says the messenger, "you are needed."
"I cannot come," says the mourner, "my spirit is broken."
"That is why you are needed," says the messenger

The book is a collection of elegies for my sister and my father. It is very much a book of a broken spirit.

Excerpt from A Messenger Comes by Rachel Tzvia Back

Lamentation

          (for my father, on his dying)

(1)

In worded a world
how broken
from beginning:

sunburst and blossoms all
subterfuges
of creation ruses

of beauty –
fragrant thicket no less
complicit:

we exist
in a shattered vessel
shards at our bare feet –

Someone’s mother cries out
Stand still or
you’ll get hurt – and

you try hard in the slivered
moment
not to move.

(2)

Day asks: What does it matter
putting this anticipated
loss

on the page our
un-readiness
for imagined emptiness

of after –
why
direct half-

worded sorrow to tell
his tale or
your own

inked in another – it's
just another
loss what

does it matter
it has always been
already

shattered –
Day asks
then asks again.

(3)

Because what
can be said?
In the end

the spoken stands
with bare spindly arms
around

its unspoken
brother what
fear

fastens
with tight knots to
your ravaged throat so

what you do
speak is always
poor and pale

shadows
of what
you do not.

(4)

You are dying.

But you do not say so
we do not say –
together

in steadfast
not-saying
alone

the winds orbit
echoing inner chambers where we
linger in

your researching
options thick
folders of studies

long letters to the scattered
family reports
of shifting numbers

platelets and neutrophiles
knotted
defiance of

your fall.

Reprinted from A Messenger Comes by permission of Singing Horse Press and Rachel Tzvia Back. Copyright 2012 by Rachel Tzvia Back.

Rachel Tzvia Back – poet, translator and professor of literature – lives in the Galilee, where her great, great, great grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include Azimuth (Sheep Meadow, 2001), The Buffalo Poems (Duration Press, 2003), On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005 (Shearsman Boks, 2007), and A Messenger Comes (Singing Horse Press, 2012). Back's translations of the poetry of pre-eminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg, published in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press 2005) represent the most extensive selection of Goldberg's poetry in English and were awarded a 2005 PEN Translation Award. Back has translated into English poetry and prose other significant Hebrew writers, including Dahlia Ravikovitch, Tuvia Reubner, Hamutal Bar Yosef, and Haviva Pedaya. Back is the editor and primary translator of the English version of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (SUNY Press, Excelsior Editions, 2009) – a collection named "haunting" and "historic" by American poet Adrienne Rich. Ms. Back’s poems have been anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events .

Rachel Tzvia Back "what has anchored us"

In a world swarming with a species that always seems to be at war, somewhere at some level, poets have historically been writing about war, its glory, its gore, and its recovery. The Middle East, it seems, has been defined by warfare for millennia, and the hostilities never seems to be far from the edge of a poet’s pen. Today’s poem, by Israeli poet Rachel Tzvia Back, commemorates an incident at the town of Sakhnin during which 13 Israeli-Arabs were killed in October 2000. The incident sparks annual demonstrations and memorials. Ms. Back excellently crafts a metaphor for this incident, then induces readers to smell the grief of history.
--Tom Lombardo

Rachel Tzvia Back

(what has anchored us)

The ballast of their breathing
                  in the next room in the bed
beside in the darkened house
             enchanted
                    breath expanding

to the rhythm of our fantasy:
                     buffalo stars
stampeding through
          unblemished skies
above a sacred land we imagined
                            our own

The weight of the unwritten 
                          truth
at well-bottom: rabid fear
          perched on the back of the absent
buffalo

The certainty of migrating cormorants
        in massive flocks their flight
                         path and patterns
absolute: they return every year
    to rest here

in the Huleh valley around the reflooded
     swamp of the north   where
I walk     October 2001
     one year after
            the women of Sakhnin first

buried their faces
          in the rough wind-dried still
                   sweet smelling clothes of their
dead sons

From On Ruins and Return (Shearsman Books, 2007). Copyright 2007 by Rachel Tzvia Back. Reprinted by permission of the poet. Anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life- Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books, 2008).

How did you come to write this poem?

My poem "what has anchored us " – was written in the first years of the Second Intifadah (uprising) in Israel and Palestine. My family and I had just moved to the Galilee, after living for years in the Jerusalem area, and until the Intifadah erupted, there had been a feeling of hope, of the possibility of a new era in our very troubled region. In October 2000, the second round of violence began – fierce protest against the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. I was then a mother to three very young children, and at every moment I viewed and lived the violence that ensued – in Palestinian and Israeli territories alike –through the prism of young motherhood. This was, of course, the prism of my children's overwhelming vulnerability – indeed, all children's vulnerability. As the death ledgers began filling up with the names of children literally caught in the cross-fire, my poetry and heart became obsessed with the little ones who were living, and too-often tragically dying, in this bloody land.

The poem emanated from very specific moments in those years of violence – moments reported in the news, moments of deaths that were practically on my doorstep, and moments of terrible clarity of how the violence had changed and hardened me too.

How did writing this poems affect your recovery?

The word "recovery" is a hard one for me to connect to, so I answer this question with some hesitation. "Recovery" – such as it is – resides for me in telling the truth, my truth, and of feeling that perhaps my poetry speaks also for those who cannot. Recovery is in daring to speak at all. Recovery has continued for me in reading these poems at various venues, in Israel and the US, in an effort to reach others, in an ongoing desire and commitment to being a voice of dissent. Moments of recovery have presented themselves when I have felt my poems impact on another, when my poems have moved another's heart toward reconciliation and compassion.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems come to life?

The poems start, almost inevitably, from a single image or single sentence. The single image or line simmers and simmers (to borrow from Whitman), until it boils over. As for the rest of the process, I'm afraid I can't say much – I have a type of black-out regarding the exact process of writing most of my poems. I can't really remember how it happens.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

Emily Dickinson is always my favorite, my poetic buoy in the vast sea. And she is always new to me… Another poet who is new to me and whose work I've been reading recently is Antonio Machado – I've been reading his poems in Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Willis Barnstone, translator). And I've been reading a great deal of the Hebrew poet Tuvia Ruebner whose work I'm translating now – he's not new to me, but my current level of engagement with him is new. He's a wonder, well worth reading (new translations of his work can be found at Four Poems from Tuvia Ruebner).

What are you working on now?

My new collection A Messenger Comes, has just been published by Singing Horse Press (edited by the wonderful Paul Naylor). The title is lifted from a passage I read in Leon Weiseltier's seminal scholarly work Kaddish – on the history and evolution of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. The extract – which is my new book's epigraph – goes as follows:

   A messenger comes to the mourner's house.
   "Come," says the messenger, "You are needed." 
   "I cannot come," says the mourner, 
   "My spirit is broken." 
   "That is why you are needed," says the messenger

The book is a collection of elegies for my sister and my father. It is very much a book of a broken spirit.

Rachel Tzvia Back – poet, translator and professor of literature – lives in the Galilee, where her great great great grandfather settled in the 1830s. Her poetry collections include Azimuth, The Buffalo Poems, On Ruins & Return: Poems 1999-2005, and A Messenger Comes. Back's translations of the poetry of pre-eminent Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg, published in Lea Goldberg: Selected Poetry and Drama (Toby Press 2005) represent the most extensive selection of Goldberg's poetry in English and were awarded a 2005 PEN Translation Award. Back has translated into English poetry and prose by other significant Hebrew writers, including Dahlia Ravikovitch, Tuvia Reubner, Hamutal Bar Yosef, and Haviva Pedaya. Back is the editor and primary translator of the English version of the anthology With an Iron Pen: Twenty Years of Hebrew Protest Poetry (SUNY Press, Excelsior Editions, 2009) – a collection named "haunting" and "historic" by American poet Adrienne Rich.

Anthony S. Abbott "The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday"

A few years ago, I toured the Eastern U.S. to read from the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. In some cities—Boston, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, Charleston, Atlanta—poets from the anthology would join me to read their poems. In other locations, I would read alone. During readings by myself, I would generally select a variety of poems and poets from several of the chapters: Grief, War, Exile, Divorce, Illness, Injury, Bigotry, Abuse, Addiction.

In one particular group—a recovery group at Otey Memorial Episcopal Church, in Sewanee, Tennessee—the leader, a psychologist, had told me in advance that two of the 15 or so group members had lost children. So, I focused a few of the poems on that topic. And in a few words introducing those poems, I off-handedly said something like “this is the worst kind of loss—loss of a child.” I spoke from my own feelings not from any therapeutic expertise.

After my reading and the group’s quite lengthy discussion of the poems of recovery, I was corralled by one of the audience members, a lovely woman about 55 years of age, whose 17-year-old daughter had died when a train hit her car at a railroad crossing. This woman was a decade out from her life shattering event. And she said this: “My grief and recovery is no different than anyone else’s. It’s not worse as you have said. You can’t make that judgment, and I don’t accept it.”

Her diction was strident but her tone, though direct, was not angry. It was clear that I had offended her sense of fair play.

Through my work editing After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, I’ve met several poets who’ve lost a child and written about it. The anthology contains the heart-rending poems of William Stafford (“A Memorial: Son Brett”), Mary Jo Bang (“You Were You Are Elegy”), Stephen Rhodes (“This New Never”), B. Terri Wolfe (“Timbuktu”), and Farideh Hassanzadeh (“I, I Who Have Nothing”). Those poems present their open wounds just starting to heal, with pain still very deep, grief still on the verge of crippling. While they are excellent poems, worthy of high praise, I will present them later in this blog. The incident with the audience member above makes me think of a poem in After Shocks that I related to very personally. Anthony Abbott’s “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday” caught my emotions because the poet speaks from the perspective of years, his grief still alive, gut-wrenching and tense, but it has taken a different form as time has moved forward. I reacted strongly to this poem because of my own experience, having lived a quarter of a century past the death of my wife in a car wreck.

Here is the poem, followed by inteview with Mr. Abbott.

Anthony S. Abbott

The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter
on Her 40th Birthday
May 8, 2003

1.

“Poetry is the supreme fiction,” says Wallace Stevens.
I know. Then how to express the truth, simple
and unadorned as Stevens’s “dresser of deal.”

You see, I am already equivocating, ducking
behind the decoration of language. So, stop me.
Good. That’s better. Now, tell me where you are.

If that’s too hard, just tell me—something.
Or appear to me in a dream, or leave a symbol somewhere—
some mysterious talisman that lets me know it’s you.

Not the feather floating down trick, that’s too common.
Nor bumping around in the old house. Something original
like your name spelled in shells before the tide comes in.

2.

All right, let me try it another way. When you were
three, I let you go to school in the winter without
leggings, without anything to warm your legs.

The teacher told me at the end of the day
and I burned with shame. You were my favorite person;
I was yours. And what I really want to know—

now that all the nonsense about your ghostly reappearance
is out of the way—what I really want to know is
where we would have gone, you and I. I want

to think of you at fourteen or twenty-four
or even thirty-one, want to picture you, know
the clothes you would have worn and how

you would have cut your hair. Early this morning
I walked in the rain to your grave. The tree is gone.
You know I picked the spot because the tree

was there, and now it’s vanished like my images
of you. Damn it, anyway. I’m supposed to be
a writer, supposed to create you at twenty-five

or thirty-nine, give you a history. What would
you like? A husband, three children of your own?
A law practice in the suburbs of Boston?

3.

I’m such a romantic fool. That’s the problem.
The way I see it, I’m sitting in a tea room
in London, it’s raining, of course it’s raining.

Umbrella stand inside the door. Dripping coats
hanging on the wall. My hands cupped around
a hot mug of tea. I’m breathing steam. I look up.

There you are, at forty, looking at me with so
much love I feel my body rising from the floor.
You walk over. I try to stand. “No,” you say,

“Sit down and rest.” You place your hands
on my head and tell me all the years were
nothing—a grain of sand, one grain of sand—

that’s all. You tell me you’ll come for me
whenever it’s right, and then you’re gone.
The bell rings, door closes, flash of a heel

And then, nothing but the steady fall of rain.
They look at me, there in the shop, all of them,
and then I laugh and cry, too, I’m sure.

Pretty improbable, don’t you think? Wouldn’t
sell even in Hollywood, or would it? Still,
dammit, I wish you’d talk to me.

Anthony S. Abbott’s poem “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday” from The Man Who (Main Street Rag 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Anthony S. Abbott. Reprinted by permission of the author. This poem was anthologized in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events Sante Lucia Books, 2008)

How did you come to write “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday”?

My daughter died when she was just short of her fourth birthday in 1967. I began writing poems for her in the 1970s. I wrote “The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat” to celebrate her college years. So, “The Man Who Speaks to His Daughter on Her 40th Birthday” is part of a series of poems I have written celebrating her life as it might have been. I have one for her 45th birthday, and will celebrate her 50th in 2013.

How did writing this poem affect your recovery?

This poem and the others I have written in her memory have kept her alive in my imagination, which is critically important to me. Recovery is in part the result of turning something painful into something that heals. The writing of these poems has been a central part of the healing process.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped this poem come to life?

I think I have already alluded to the process of consciously celebrating her life in poetry every five years. So I being to think quite consciously of what she might have been like at 40, 45, or 50. That conscious imagining is central to the whole process of crating the poems, but the poems also must come in and of themselves. I can’t know everything in advance or there is no surprise, no surprise no emotions. So the whole last scene in the poem at the English tea house is pure imagination, pure surprise, pure joy of having her appear.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you’d recommend to others?

Poets I have worked with in recent years who have meant a great deal to me include Jane Kenyon (absolutely essential), James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, William Carlos Williams, and Walt Whitman.

What are you working on now?

I published two books in 2011—If Words Could Save Us, a book of poems with accompanying CD, and an anthology I edited, What Writers Do, which celebrates the writers who have been part of the Lenoir Rhyne University Visiting Writers Series. I am very busy teaching and doing readings from these two books this year.

Tony Abbott is Professor Emeritus of English at Davidson College in North Carolina. He is the author of two novels, including the Novello Award winning Leaving Maggie Hope. He has written six volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is If Words Could Save Us (Lorimer Press, 2011). He is the 2012 winner of the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Award of the North Carolina Writers Network.

Diann Blakely's Remembrance of Jimmy Pitts

Thank you for remembering Jimmy Pitts in this special way; and yet, how strange to find your message in my Facebook inbox, which is checked so rarely, since the very last message in my box is from Jimmy. I don't think I can ever bring myself to erase it.

[Note: see "Scar Inventory" below by Jimmy Pitts.]

I "met" Jimmy in the very best manner: standing up in Nashville's independent bookstore, reading and re-reading this intriguing prose poem--with a Confederate flag mysteriously waving in its lines!--of his in Gordon Lish's The Quarterly. Of course, on my next trip to Oxford, I felt compelled to look him up, and as the years passed, we became correspondents and friends. I still have a heartbreaking sheaf of correspondence from him; toward the very end, he wrote of how energetic he felt, how he wanted to put together a new and selected poems and asked for my help, also if I would succeed him as poetry editor of the Oxford American, since he wanted more time to pursue his painting and music. In fact, he wanted to send my husband, Stanley Booth, his new CD for this collaborative column we had planned, for Stanley, who is the harshest of critics, had listened to some samples and expressed admiration for Jimmy's gifts.

I literally fell to my knees when I heard the news.

Neither the poetry editorship nor the collaborative column happened; but while I also would have liked to have had a group of poems--I could have plucked a half-dozen from the OA itself to prevent copyright problems--and written a tribute to him as a poet for the magazine's pages, which seemed appropriate to me, given his longtime service there, as well as Jimmy's highly gratifying trust in my discernment. Nevertheless, the outcome was the same.

So how good to know he won't be forgotten. Perhaps the new editor at OA will allow what I had originally planned; whatever happens, nothing is as important as the mystery of your choosing to have begun your new project linked to The Poetry of Recovery with him. His spirit lives on and always will, for his friends and admirers were countless, and we hold his person and work in our hearts.

Thank you again, Tom.

Sincerely,

Diann

Diann Blakely
104 Queen's Court
Brunswick GA 31523
USA

http://www.diannblakely.com

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J.E. Pitts "Scar Inventory"

Welcome to the Poetry of Recovery Blog

This blog presents poems of recovery in a number of topics: Grief, War, Exile, Bigotry, Illness, Injury, Divorce, Abuse, Addiction.

I first presented poems of recovery under those topics in an anthology that I edited After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books 2008), which comprised 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 nations. Events that shatter our lives leave us inevitably with a choice: either you recover or you suffer unto death. I hope that poetry leads you, the reader, to the former.

I’ll post a new poem weekly, on Sunday evenings, a good day to ponder recovery, along with the poet's bio and a short interview with the poet or other discourse about the poem.

To order the anthology, visit After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events

—Tom Lombardo
Editor
After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events

This Week's Poem

Scar Inventory
by J.E. Pitts

You look like a victim of a shark attack, a friend said,
when I took my shirt off during a long tennis match.
It was deep summer, and
I was two months out from the knife.
It’s true that from my collarbone down, the
white lines and bumps are the trail of
procedures recommended,
agreements reached, waivers signed in
the transactions of the flesh.
A slice here, a slice there,
they cut down through the sack we call the skin—
clamps are applied, what needs to be done is done,
then the stitch machine sews things up in a snap.
Others are not so blatant—
the goofball emergencies, clumsy days and nights.
The long one on the back of my right leg
where I slid down a ladder as a boy.
The car accident, where I broke my ankle
and a steel screw binds the delicate shattered bones.
The bicycle wreck, where the
pedal’s serrated edge came down
and almost sliced an Achilles tendon.
The high school fight at the skating rink,
where a class ring dug across my eyebrow.
Such an autobiography.
All the scars will heal one day—
at least that’s what the doctors say.

J. E. “Jimmy” Pitts, a native of Corinth, Mississippi, was a writer and visual artist. His poems, essays, and illustrations appeared in many magazines and literary journals, including Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Arkansas Review, among others. A graduate of the University of Mississippi, he was the poetry editor of Oxford American, co-founded and co-edited the experimental literary journal VOX, and lived in Oxford, Mississippi. He was awarded a literary fellowship in poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 2006. His first collection of poetry was The Weather of Dreams (David Robert Books 2007), from which his poem "Scar Inventory" was drawn for After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. His artwork, in oil and acrylic on canvas, wood panels, and non traditional surfaces is held in private collections, including musician Marty Stuart and the late film director Robert Altman. Jimmy died on August 19, 2010 at the age of 41. A tribute to Jimmy’s life and creativity may be found on-line in the September 3, 2010 issue of at Oxford-American , written by OA founder and editor Marc Smirnoff.

A Word from the Poet: “When Normal Returns”

In lieu of Jimmy’s own words about his poem, I’ll take the liberty of revealing my talk with Jimmy, by phone in 2007, about “Scar Inventory” while compiling the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. The poem opens with an image of a shark-bite scar that Jimmy displayed to a friend when he took off his shirt after a tennis match. The scar was from kidney transplant surgery, Jimmy told me, after one of his kidneys failed. The poem notes that he was “two months out from the knife.” So I asked him, “How could you play tennis two months after a kidney transplant?” He said that the scar was still a bit red and tender, thus the “shark attack” image, but his surgeon had assured him that everything was healing and that his side would not split open, spilling out the contents of his abdomen. Jimmy was an avid tennis player and for him, playing tennis signaled what he called “the part of recovery when normal returns—a new normal.” And that essence of Jimmy’s thoughts applies to recovery from all life-shattering events. At some point, you begin to feel some sort of normalcy returning to your life. It might not be the same “normal” as before your life-shattering event. Maybe it’s your “new normal,” as Jimmy said. He knew that he could never recover from the underlying disease of renal failure, but he recovered from a major event in his disease process.

Our discussion turned to Jimmy’s his new collection The Weather of Dreams (David Robert Books/WordTech Editions 2007), from which “Scar Inventory” was drawn.

The poem ends on a note that couples recovery with a tinge of cynicism borne of the poet’s own struggle within a system that had no cure for him:

All scars will heal one day—
at least that’s what the doctors say.