On Returning and Being Returned

This is not the post I started writing yesterday. I returned from a week-long poetry conference yesterday afternoon, and have spent the hours since trying to describe this singular experience. I don't know that I can, partly because its singularity involves so many aspects: it's homegrown and self-managed (we have no leader, though we do have a fulcrum who knows who she is even if she doesn't want to admit it); it's the most respectful—and therefore trustworthy and therefore trusting—group of writers I've ever been privileged to work with; have I mentioned the sheer talent? and brains?; it's focused but free; it's serious but never self-important. These are some of the smartest, funniest, most talented people I've ever met, and it's a blessing to be included in their company. We started at the Frost Place in New Hampshire, and developed our own conference from there. We just completed our third year together in this configuration, and we have the dates set for 2014. But the ins and outs of the way the week works (and it does work, beautifully) are not important to anyone but those of us who were there, and perhaps some of the people who love us.

If you've been reading, you know I've been struggling to come to terms with my cousin Turquoise's death last spring. I have had times of clarity and times of utter bafflement, been knocked down by how funny she was and how beautiful, been blindsided by waves of grief that come from nowhere in the middle of an otherwise pleasant encounter—while reading a book, say, or having a laughter-filled conversation with friends. It's been further complicated by the fact that Jed lost his dad almost exactly a year before Turquoise died—a death I also grieved, and continue to grieve, deeply. When Turquoise died, Jed found himself asked to relinquish his mourning in favor of mine—not a spoken request, not even an implied request, it was simply his understanding of what I needed. Neither of us was capable of fully making this switch, of taking on the roles in the grieving process into which we would have naturally fallen otherwise.

As a poet, the past couple of years have left me a little stranded. I spent an intense two months writing poems for Turquoise, as if I needed to get everything said as quickly and fully as possible despite the fact that time suddenly and terribly became a non-issue at some point during that process and the fact that I never had any intention of her reading them—though addressed to her, they are about my grief, not about her, and I wanted our last interactions to be about her, or at the very least about us. The writing was an internal drive, one that I didn't bother trying to understand or direct. And then I was done. The relatively few poems I've written since then are decidedly different from what I think of as my "regular" work—more sparse, more desperate, more exposed (as are the poems I wrote for Turquoise). I knew as I was choosing poems to bring to the workshop part of the conference that my recent work made my struggles clear in a way that I was not sure I was comfortable with, but I also knew that I trusted the people I'd be working with to respect the work, and to handle it with a view towards making it as strong as possible. Lesser poets, even—or perhaps especially—ones who love me as these poets do if such a thing is even possible, might have been intimidated by the task of doing justice to the material without hurting me on a personal, not artistic, level. Not these poets. Treating me like the dangerously fragile person I was trying not to become would have undone me, the way a hand placed in solace on an arm or a shoulder can make me cry when I am trying not to, only, I feared, in a much more fundamental and potentially permanent sense. I knew these poets would treat the poems not just as they should be treated, but as I needed them to be treated. And so I sent them. And when it came time to choose poems to read for the group, I saw again how stark I had become in my work, how much tension my poems held in an effort to contain grief and fears and my own conviction that some things needed to be spoken aloud (as it were), but that doing so had the power to unravel me beyond repair.

God, I've been depressed, I thought.

I spent an hour or so one afternoon sitting with a friend by the frog pond at the retreat center, talking poetry—his, mine, some of the work we'd seen in the workshop that day. As we talked, I realized that part of the difficulty I was having with these newer poems was my inability to distance myself from them in the way I usually can. I firmly believe that there is a clear and essential difference between the speaker of a poem and the poet, and that to assume otherwise is a recipe for disaster as a reader. I flaunt this belief as often as possible, creating personas who allow me to explore other perspectives—even the poems I have written about real events and real losses often contain lies or details included because they strengthen the poem, because they make the poem feel more honest even if they are not themselves honest. Those invented details are often enough to give me—the poet—a distance from the work. And I have poems where having a non-me speaker allows me to explore human failings in a way that I would not be able to if I had to rely on my own direct experience, again because it creates a distance between me and the page (and if you know me at all as a poet, you know that I do love me some human failings).

The poems I've written over the last year and a half or so do not contain this distance, and most of them have no persona, no "speaker" that I can point to and say, "That is not me." And when I realized this during the conversation—a realization that came almost simultaneously with the emergence of the words from my mouth, as if someone else were speaking for me—I was flooded with the enormity of the potential of what I'm doing now. I saw possibilities in the work I'd created, and the tiny cracks of insight that had been forming on my work as a whole as I try to craft it into a new manuscript began to widen with a ferocity that was a little intimidating but also comforting. I am high from the relief of it, from the sudden certainty of what I am doing (although the how of it continues to elude me, and might well do so until one day I realize that I've simply done it and how doesn't matter).

It was good to be with poets who know me and my work, and who honor in me things I don't always honor in myself. It was good, for example, to be shown the hope in my recent poems—hope I did not deliberately include and did not recognize. It was good to be returned—and allow myself to be returned—to the giddy creativity I'm capable of when I am in the right place at the right time, and when being in love with the universe feels right and true instead of like a burden that carries with it the constant awareness of the overwhelming potential for staggering losses. And, on a side trip while driving my friend to the airport, it was good to return to the ocean, to my ocean, to the place that has been the seat of much of my grief, yes, but also the place that has been my source. There is solace there again, and maybe even peace. Yesterday, as we climbed around on the rocks, picking up seashells and stones, there was even joy. At any time over the past two years or so, if you had told me I had forgotten joy, I would have said you were wrong. But I was the one who was wrong, as I learned repeatedly over this past week. As we were leaving the beach, my friend thanked me for sharing it with him, this place that is my home ground and unmistakably the home ground of my poetry, and I told him I used to bring all the people I loved there. So above everything else, it's good to be able to do that again. You come, too.