Again if an Adult Survivor Has No Outlet and Has Just Kept the Pain Bottle Deep Inside Them
Stacey May Fowles: The right selection of words
By Stacey May Fowles
Lying awake early on a Sat forenoon, it occurred to me that I accept recently endured some of the worst months of my life. They began with an unusually high onslaught of the trivial — those tiny items that plague you when there's nothing else to really worry about. And so the awe-inspiring happened, the kind of unwelcome news that immediately renders all else meaningless.
I tell you this not and so you feel sorry for me — pain and suffering are relative, of course. Each of the states has our own private tolerance for trauma. To some, my experiences might exist minor, while others may ache with sympathy. I tell you this only because enduring this time meant turning to poetry, or more accurately, turning back to poetry. While I was once the clichéd, broad-eyed English language undergraduate student with a domestic dog-eared copy of Endymion, there has been a decade-long poetic void in my life. Until this sweltering summer, verse seemed a distant memory, associated with a time of limitless optimism and endless manufactured drama. In the time in betwixt, I have mocked poetry in hush-hush, decided it was an opaque and deliberate try for writers to flex inaccessibly for a modest audition. I am ashamed of this now, simply for a long time I believed clear, sparse, concise prose to be the only valuable literary attempt. Poesy looked like puzzles designed to exclude the unworthy.When you run across your father in a hospital bed for the beginning time — see the homo who for your whole life embodied strength, struck down fragile by a jell in the lung — nothing can distract you from the feeling. In that location is no bottle deep enough, no prescription-pill-induced sleep long enough, to deny that he looks so small-scale and helpless lying there below the weight of excruciating pain. When a nurse tells yous the strongest man you've e'er known's percent chance of bloodshed, information technology becomes impossible to admission anything just right now. You lot try to fill your time with any possible diversion, yet none of them quite works as a salvage against the fearfulness. I felt real dread for the commencement time and learned it's different from the clawing anxiety that follows me when disappointment and failure are a possibility. Genuine fearfulness is cold, clean and numbing, similar being submerged in a deep lake against the darkness of night.
Quite by accident, I discovered that poetry is a place where feeling is monumental enough to snuff out despair. A hastily packed bag meant I arrived in the suburbs with only a T-shirt, one pair of underwear, and Anne Carson's The Drinking glass Essay, snatched from a shelf. I read its pages in the vacant, questioning moments in between whatsoever new development, in the moments I couldn't slumber, or eat, or even cry. I read it after throwing up bile in the infirmary parking lot considering there was no other reaction that seemed appropriate, read it in the latest and primeval hours when slumber refused to come.
into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce./ I wish I had been nicer to him…
Novels failed me because of their slow build — I was desperate for the immediacy of at present, for the singe of a cigarette burn, for the clean border of a blade, for something other than the void of that dim hospital room with its boring, dripping drugs and blinking monitors. Academy of Toronto English professor Nick Mount sums up that poetic stasis in a 2009 lecture on Sylvia Plath'southward Ariel: "When you lot're reading a novel, your attending is on the progression of time, the forwards movement of the plot through its complication and resolution. A lyric poem is less well-nigh the progression of time than it is about stopping fourth dimension." The poem, therefore, is convenient for waiting rooms, for closed-door crying jags, for moments when yous are as well tired to sleep or speak. "The lyric tries to temporarily cease fourth dimension in order to permit for a moment of perception, a moment of confusion or of understanding: sometimes emotional, sometimes intellectual, usually a fleck of both."
In that location is a clarity to the helplessness and agony of poetry, the same impulses yous feel when staring at the dissolution and death of those things you deeply beloved. Nevertheless poetry relishes in it, slowly unwraps information technology, lets you lot live there for a moment in an effort to observe comfort when none feels available. While narrative propels united states to a conclusion, poetry avoids the decision completely. It cares nix well-nigh closure, leaves you in its stillness, in that aforementioned place a nurse left me after she said, "You understand this tin be fatal, right?"
My father tilts least, I am proud of him./ Hi Dad how y'doing?/ His face cracks open it could be a smile or rage
In poetry there is no "what happens adjacent," as at that place is in a successful novel's momentum. While prose is the respond to "what tin can be done," poetry is the affair-of-fact and almost gleeful statement of "zip tin can be done." This surrender makes information technology infinitely soothing. It is words every bit acceptance, the very opposite of feet.
Then, after the chaos and uncertainty that necessitates stillness, life begins again as if it had never stopped. Like nada ever happened, appointments are rescheduled, messages returned. The days progress seamlessly from terrifying to merely irritating, and those old piddling concerns find their home in your head once more. The terror has generously fabricated room upon exiting.
A week to the twenty-four hours later on my father was discharged from the infirmary, a friend came over to sit on my balcony and drink king cans of cheap beer. After a few were emptied, we somehow ended up reading to each other from a book of John Berryman's poetry, together forming a covenant of acceptance. Berryman, in hindsight, was a sinister choice — a man who suffered from alcoholism and low, and who on Jan. seven, 1972, jumped from the Washington Artery Bridge in Minneapolis to his decease in the Mississippi River.
When worst got things, how was you? Steady on? he asks us in the darkness every bit we bleed our beers.
Reading his words aloud, at that place was a sense of final solace and closure that I hadn't yet felt. Poetry had given me the pause — and in that the determination — to keep despite the weeks, the months that came before, and the weeks, the months that inevitably lay ahead. Only poetry was capable of delivering that, and I was foolish for refusing to take its stillness for then long.
• Stacey May Fowles is the author of Be Skilful.
Source: https://nationalpost.com/afterword/stacey-may-fowles-the-right-choice-of-words
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