Poetry Is All That Wires Us Together: A Conversation with Garrett Caples about LOVERS OF TODAY

Garrett Caples is a poet and writer. He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco. Lovers of Today feature poems that generously place the reader in a particular poetic moment that is both elegiac and also wildly entertaining.

Tiffany Troy: Why name your collection after a bar? How does the title poem, “Lovers of Today” open the door to your collection?

Garrett Caples: Ultimately, it’s really naming it after a poem, because that’s the title of the poem. And that was probably the first thing I wrote in the book because my last book came out in 2016, and I wrapped it up maybe a year before. “Lovers Of Today” is the newest of the new batch.

It’s a cool title and that’s a title of this poem and it was an exciting poem to write. But the poem got the title from the bar, and the bar—ultimately, it’s from a Pretenders song. At a certain point, I listened to the song to make sure everything is okay. It’s a good song.

There’s a reason why you can’t copyright titles, because they circulate in these different ways. It’s kind of more of the poem, but it was an earlier part of the book. I get married in the middle of the book. So the early part of the book is certainly about a type of bachelorhood.

It’s just a good title. I tried some other titles, and it didn’t really come off. It’s the first line of the first poem, too. I used to be very against that idea of having the first line of a poem be the title. But when I come up with these little prejudices about poetry, I try to break them. I make myself do things that I don’t like and ask what do I do with that.

I always didn’t like taking a book title from a poem. It’s just more real estate to have fun with. None of my other books had a title poem. This is the first one. I did that partly to push against my own prejudices.

Tiffany Troy: I think that’s so cool and wonderful. Especially with the epigraph by Alli Warren: “I enjoy my drink, but not enough to name a book after a bar!” Right after, you have your title poem. Sometimes you really can believe two things at once, which really goes to how you go against your little prejudices.

I loved how your poems are rooted in place, in New York, California, Russia, and travel to these places. I see the surreal and how everyday observances in your poems become strange and beautiful, like with the onion-shaped dome or your dream about Ra. Could you speak to your writing process?

Garrett Caples: I am very much of a collect-the-poems-when-they-are-done type of poet. I don’t worry about having enough poems for a book in advance. Inevitably, books have their own personalities to them. It’s neat in a way because on the one hand, putting out a book artificially stops whatever you are doing. You might be on a roll in this way, and just out of necessity, tie a knot. There is something kind of artificial about that process vis-à-vis your own creative processes, so sometimes you like think a book correspond to more natural rhythm of where you’re like.

In terms of how the poems all relate to each other, it’s just where I’m at in a given point. But I keep on changing. If I start to get into a thing, where I’m like a certain sort of poem, I just get bored. I don’t want to have a style. In a way, the poems declare their own style and their own form. In my earlier books, there was a lot of formal striving that’s all gone now. I just figure it out as I go along and it declares its own format. I never have to think about it too much anymore, which can be good or bad. I look at some of my early books that I find kind of amazing. But because they were so formally driven and that’s relaxed, I just become more of a human being, I suppose. I just am a poet now so I just don’t worry in making individual pieces of art.

Tiffany Troy: My next question is directly tied to being attuned to being a poet. Do your poems find their form or vice versa? I am wondering if you could describe how the poems find their form?

Garrett Caples: It’s one of those things that’s almost different every time. Discussions of process break down because I don’t think I have a process. On some level, each poem has its own thing. Each one feels like a painting. It has its own life. I don’t have a process as such: a lot of it is that I just get irritated with myself.

My poems tend to hew to the left-hand margin. Ultimately, as creative as you can be with layout, ultimately you should be able to do it with no layout. The form of the poem “Lovers of Today,” is ultimately about forcing myself away from the left-hand margin. The way it came through with that poem, in a certain way it’s the feel of the trip I was on in New York, which lent itself to it. I went to New York a million times, but it was a particularly exciting trip.

There is a line from a John Lennon song “New York City.” “Que pasa New York” is a line from that song. That song had that kind of feel too. A London guy in New York and loving it and being blown away. It wasn’t a new thing, just like it wasn’t new thing for him either. He wrote the song in the 1970’s, and he’d already been to New York a bunch. But you can be there and suddenly the city just opens up in great ways. I was trying to get some of that headiness into the poem and have it swirl in that way.

There aren’t that many of these types of poems in the book. Ultimately, though, poetry shouldn’t depend too heavily on layout. I’m trying to get the words down and not worry about the layout so much.

That said, layout for me is a lot about line breaks. There’s so much action in my short line poems, that I do not feel the need to scatter words all over the page. The break itself is doing the work. That got weird on me in this book. In the poems, “Emotional Rescue” or “Hairy Sniff,” some lines started breaking in the middle of words. It sounds silly but it wasn’t a conscious decision, but that’s how it came whenever I tap into when I am writing poem. For those poems, I would practice reading them to make sure I remember how the syntax goes vis-à-vis the line breaks.

The way I became a poet ultimately was realizing that poems are just sentences laid out a certain way. I’m always working on setting the syntax against the line break. I’m not reinventing the wheel there, but that’s how I figured how to be a poet at all. Realizing that I knew how to write good sentences and use that against line breaks what you’re doing for line break. Sometimes, the line breaks are just deeply motivated and sometimes it’s just size, and you are just making a column of some sort.

Tiffany Troy: Thank you for sharing that eureka moment with us, the idea of writing sentences and tapping into the poet inside of you and doing the line breaks as they go. Something that I love about your collection is the rambunctiousness of your voice that is at once complex and wry with humor. Could you speak about how you construct and maintain this voice?

Garrett Caples: The voice is the whole thing really, on a certain level. I don’t have any problems with that. Maybe I should have greater ambitions.

I write a great deal of conventional, exposition prose, like for let’s say the New York Times. But unless I’m not allowed to, I have to write in first person.  It’s not like it’s one voice either. You make different voices with it. I realized that so much of what’s compelling about the literary experience is ultimately not the stories or the plot or anecdotes or the sentiment even of poetry, it’s the way of talking and finding a compelling way to put things.

We’re in a cultural movement where there’s not much to do in terms of formal innovation even though I studied a lot of modernist poetry and it’s all modernist innovation. But it’s almost all been tried at a certain point, and so, what’s the next thing after that? I don’t have an answer to that, except I know as an editor of poetry as well as a writer and reader, I just need the poetry to not sound like everyone else. There’s a lot of poetry that is pretty good and accomplished, but it all sound the same. I’ve heard that sound before.

It’s probably hard to have any kind of real perspective on your own poetry, but I don’t think anybody’s poetry sounds like mine. And I feel that in this cultural moment, that’s the measure of becoming a poet, if it sounds like you and there’s no other person you can slot in there. For the poets that I really admire, that’s just the case: you won’t be able to mistake one poet for another poet.

Tiffany Troy: I think that is exactly right. And that’s what community building, gathering, and celebration are all about, which are the different voices and what makes us different.

Garrett Caples: But there’s a lot of pressure to conform at the same time. The poetry community tends to favor a certain range of individuality and so you’ve got to push back against that. Because of the MFA system, so much poetry comes through that system. So inevitably, there is certain amounts of homogenization that goes on. I’m not knocking that world because many of my friends and people I admire come through that. But you’ve got to figure out how to get through it and break out of it.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I became a poet. I just knew I wanted to be a writer, and I found myself studying to become a professor at Berkeley. I wasn’t really interested in becoming a professor, and I just didn’t know how you can become a writer at all. So even though I did finish the degree but I abandoned the profession. But I don’t regret getting this PhD, because it got me out to San Francisco, you know, and put me in a writers’ town. For poetry, I feel like, besides New York, it’s the best town to be a writer in. San Francisco’s got such a center of gravity and literary tradition to it, and it still maintains that character even in this Silicon Valley age. So much poetry of great import of the second half of the 20th century originates here.

I was lucky because I didn’t really know this and went to Berkley because it was a highly-ranked grad school. I went to Rutgers as an undergrad, but they were all very bad. They wrote mainstream, hip stuff, and I just wasn’t hip enough to know where in New York you could get some good poetry. I stumbled through the English department at Berkley and that led to the rest of my life.

My other poet friends, like Jackson Meazle from Little Rock, Arkansas went to San Francisco State and Micah Ballard went to the University of Louisiana in Lafayetteas an undergrad but used that to become a grad student at New College of California. Both of them came to San Francisco because San Francisco is the poetry mecca, and they already knew that. I just stumbled out here and got lucky.

Tiffany Troy: I really love that story and isn’t everyone so excited about San Francisco. Your poems have this specific sense of humor that also cuts against yourself. It’s self-deprecating but at the same time you also glow.

What are some themes in your collection in your collection? What do you want the reader to get out of it?

Garrett Caples: This book is a funny book because part of is I’m pushing 50 and people start to die on you, especially if you are in the arts. You meet people at the top of the mountain, they are old people, and they die. Philip Lamantia was like 71 when we met and I was probably 26 or 27. But it’s what I love about poetry: there is so much intergenerational hanging out that I find very stimulating among the poets in San Francisco, Some of the people who I’ve met have been the most important and the greatest experiences of my life.

But if you’re any good at all, a real poet can see that. You get access to the top people in poetry quickly in a way that doesn’t happen in other more money-driven art scenes, because there’s no money in here. You get to hang out with Ashberry and Creeley as a young man. I was good enough that I could do it.

There’s a lot of deaths in the book, and at one point I thought about calling the book, Death. But it didn’t quite fit. The death material is fairly celebratory, and I try to speak of the people who meant the world to me. Some of the people are very old too, but it almost makes it worse when someone really old dies because you just get so used to relying on them being there. It doesn’t feel better when the person is in the 70’s or 80’s when they die than if somebody younger dies. It’s not a book about COVID, but it fits this time because it has this undercurrent of dying to it.

The last piece in the book, “Soul Book” is a poem I wrote for an art book called People Are a Light to Love: Memorial Drawings, 2004–2016. The artist, Veronica DeJesus, was a San Francisco artist who is now in LA. She worked at a well-known bookstore called Dog Eared Books. When somebody personally connected to her or a famous person that she was interested in would die, she would do a memorial drawing and stick them in the window. Over the course of several years, Veronica ended up doing around 300 drawings. She was looking for someone to write a text for her art book that wasn’t essay, but creative. So I wrote a sample, the first two or three paragraphs based on her drawings. It’s a first-person sentence for every drawing. The piece appeared as prose paragraphs in People Are a Light to Love. Then, for Lovers of Today, my editor at Wave, Joshua Beckman, suggested splitting the paragraphs into individual lines, which gave a second life to the piece as a long poem. It’s all about death, because all the photos are based on someone dying.  

There’s obvious overlap in our tastes. But Vernoica and I come from very different places and with different lives, so she had plenty of figures in there I knew nothing about. I would read around about X, Y or Z person until like some sort of luminous detail emerged and put it in the poem. That was a years’-long process of hers, and we published our book pre-COVID. But it feels like for this time because it feels like we’ve gone through so much death.

The book’s last poem or two before the long poem were from the very beginning of the pandemic. I was actually in France when the pandemic happened, doing my first and thus far only writing residency. I was in France at the time, in February and March of 2020. In mid-March 2020, I had to leave very suddenly. The last few poems are set in France and then ends in San Francisco.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today and do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: I’m always working on something. I’m an editor at City Lights, so I do a lot of other people’s books. To me, being a poet gives you permission to apply yourself to any literary endeavor. Sometimes that means editing somebody’s book, and sometimes that means writing your own book.

Since I finished writing the collection, I’ve done a McMclore book at City Lights. During the pandemic, I wrote around 7 prose pieces that I’m trying to see if I can turn into a book. I don’t want to think of it as a book of commercial fiction, because it doesn’t have anything to do with that. I think of them as fables or parables. I would like to publish with a poetry press and not worry about that.

Tiffany Troy: Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Garrett Caples: What I’m trying to do as a poet and editor of poetry as I do a contemporary poetry series in City Lights is to try to maintain the integrity of collections of lyric poetry. There’s at least one school of avant-garde thought that lyric poetry is retrograde, and they are incorrect. The books I publish at Spotlight are hard to market, because I pick poets who can write good poems, and I avoid project-oriented poetry for the most part. Project-oriented poetry is easier to market and come up with clever things to say about them. There are a lot of poets out there, but ultimately you are only as good as a one-page poem. If your poem depends too much on sequential, serial stuff, I’m skeptical. There’s plenty of great poetry like that, so I’m not trying to make a blanket announcement.

What I’m trying to do is to carve out a space for real lyric poetry. I still feel like I publish avant-garde poetry. There’s no contradiction between lyric and avant-garde. That’s the type of thing I’m up to. The great bits of poetry are microscopic, so you want to preserve the arena that happens in versus all the pressures to write a book. It’s all ambition-driven, and not driven by the poem. I’m trying to do things where the poem is driving everything you do. It might hurt you career-wise, but you have to not care about that and think about the art.

In Any Case, I Am No Longer Counting the Days: A Review of Maggie Nelson's Bluets

From the moment I began reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I knew I had found a very important book. Or perhaps that a very important book had found me:

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.

The mention of excrement brought me up short and I read that sentence several times before I could move on. We are so grounded in the body from these opening lines. There will be little, this passage makes clear, that will be held back.

Bluets is composed of 240 numbered passages. Some are longer than a page; some as few as four words:

46. Disavowal, says the silence.

Maggie Nelson is as concerned with the body and its limitations as she is with loss and with the limitations of love in its many forms. Bluets is a meditation on love. This love of the color blue, introduced in the first line, becomes the vehicle by which she can examine many times of love. Erotic:

18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence. It was the only time I came. It was essentially our lives. It was shaking.

Devotional love. Following a passage that discusses women, who were later canonized as saints, who blinded themselves or plucked out their own eyes to maintain their chastity, she explains:

57. In religious accounts, these women are announcing, via their amputations, their fidelity to God. But other accounts wonder whether they were in fact punishing themselves, as they knew that they had looked upon men with lust, and felt the need to employ extreme measures to avert any further temptation.

She also examines the love between friends. A friend is in a terrible accident that leaves her confined to a wheelchair in constant pain. Nelson considers love through the lens of this pain:

104. I do not feel my friend’s pain, but when I unintentionally cause her pain I wince as I hurt somewhere, and I do. Often in exhaustion I lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much I love her, that I’m so sorry she is in so much pain, pain I can witness and imagine but that I do not know. She says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and J, her lover). This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

There is love here too of ideas, of abstractions. Nelson calls on philosophers and intellectuals to shed light on her state of grief and pain and obsession. She invokes Wittgenstein and Goethe. Emerson, Thoreau. Jacques Derrida. She calls on the writers and artists: William Gass and Gertrude Stein. Marguerite Duras. Stephen Mallarme. Cezanne and Cornell and Warhol. She turns to science. Isaac Newton.

She inquires of her colleague, whom she refers to as the “expert on guppy menopause,” whether biologists consider the question of the existence of color. His response proves as insufficient and as limited as all others. “In the face of some questions, he says, biologists can only vacate the field.”

Throughout, the pulsing heart of this book is the obsessive quality with which she approaches the color blue – her collections of blue objects, the travels she takes to sites of blue, the time spent in contemplation of it – and with which she attempts to grieve the loss of her lover.

I suspect that Maggie Nelson might flinch to hear me say “the loss of her lover.” I think she might consider that too sentimental an expression. Here is her piercing assessment of what others might consider to be romantic love:

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

And yet, in one passage, she defines a “blue rush” as when lapis miners use dynamite to bleed a vein, and then in the next she says:

81. What I know: when I met you, a blue rush began.

It is hard to see this as anything but an admission of a profound falling into love, whatever limitations it – the love, the falling – might have.

Bluets is an urgent book. It is alive in its pain and its struggle. It pulses with vitality. It provides a kind of antidote to the toxic conditioning of the cult of happiness. To the dominant exhortation to “fake it till you make it.” To “get over it,” to “move on,” to “self-help” our way into recovery from the condition of human struggle. As if we could set ourselves free from what it means to be human: to feel profound pain and sadness, to experience unspeakable loss, to feel isolation and loneliness. To despair. And to be compelled to continue in the face of that despair.

Here’s what Maggie Nelson has to say about moving on:

100. It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. But really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. “There is simple no way that a year from now you’re going to feel the way you feel today,” a different therapist said to me last year at this time. But though I have learned to act as if I feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven’t really changed.

As a reader, I am always looking for redemption. Redemption in Bluets is quiet and beautiful, but stunning in its power:

237. In any case, I am no longer counting the days

and then:

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not a consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

What we are left with is only this: Perhaps the beauty we find in our struggles, in our grief is not so much consolation as it is light.

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is a bright and shining light.

Joe Wenderoth's No Real Light

I don’t get to read much anymore; or, when I do, it’s more often scholarly texts such as this. This is all fine and good until I can complete my doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, which will enable me to find a job somewhere far far away and buy loads of nail buffers.

Still, as a non-academic academic, there is a cultivated divorce in me, and I miss my people — the first time I walked into a Borders (ha) after my initial PhD semester and picked up a poetry collection, I actually wept.

Recently, though, I hid under my pink desk and found Joe Wenderoth’s collection No Real Light (Wave Books, 2007.) Wenderoth is best known for his Letters to Wendy’s(Wave Books, 2000), which sold a legendary fuckton of copies and contains things about thick drinks and meat all like:

May 20, 1997

I’d like to have my muscles removed. Resume the inanimate. Wendy’s allows me to extract myself from the retarded narcissism of animal thrivings. I sit still in a warm booth and get thought. All movement wants, in the end is stillness. The animate is just the failure of movement to get what it wants — one sleeping body. The road to heaven is paved with meat: the road to meat is not paved at all.

Reading No Real Light is a different experience. Rather than being flashy miraculous as Letters to Wendy’s can be, this book gently and quietly peels the skin from the face in layers. You don’t even know. Given my schooling, I found this particular piece wildly appropriate:

 Advice To The Dissertator

Quit the brilliant dream plot and stand on knives
until all the god-costumes have been lost
and hang in Museums.
Exercise, then, upon the Museum Grounds,
knowing more or less what hangs inside
and why.

And on the nights when you can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and you’re all appetite or lack and my my, whose house is this that you’re living in, poems like “Luck” will save your ass with pretty screaming and you will be grateful. Really. Just get to it:

Luck

So a screaming woke you
just in time.
An animal’s scream, or animals’.
What kind of animal it was
doesn’t matter, and cannot,
in any case, be determined.
The point is you are saved.
Your mouth has been opened.

A Conversation with Dorothea Lasky

When we asked Dorothea Lasky for five books that were similar to Black Life, her second collection of poetry from Wave Books, she immediately mentioned the late, great Biggie Smalls. As a native New Yorker and obsessive hip-hop fan, I felt like I needed to get to the bottom of this. I sat down with Dottie for a couple of minutes and asked her a couple questions about the black Frank White.

* * *

Mark Cugini: First and foremost, I think it’s worth mentioning that you said if someone liked Black Life, they’d probably like Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death. I couldn’t agree more, but I’m sort of curious — how do you think they’re similar?

Dorothea Lasky: I would say the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die is more like Black Lifethan Life After Death. Life After Death, for me, is more like my next book, Thunderbird. Nevertheless, Black Life is indebted to Biggie’s album because in both the speaker is a “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner.” And also, in both, the speakers give you the sense (I hope) that it was not a choice to be so, but more a condition thrust upon them by life itself. On a formal level, I am interested in how Biggie folds all kinds of language and voices (some so not his own that they can’t help but become so) into short, clipping lines. They have a casual air, but of course, they couldn’t be farther from casual if they tried. The essence of coolness.

MC: Oh, ok, that makes a lot more sense — especially the “born sinner” line. Not to get too liberal-arts-school here, but Biggie was raised by a single mother in a low-income neighborhood that was overrun with gang violence and drug use. I do think it’s obvious that the speaker in Black Life was thrust into situations where she lacked control, but those are instances of a different nature: it seems as if she’s addressing interpersonal relationships instead of class issues. If that’s the case, how does it end up that both speakers end up with such swagger? Does it maybe have something to do with owning their personal tragedies?

DL: Thanks for saying that about swagger! What an important word for what we are talking about. Of course, content and the socioeconomic background of poets affect how they craft their personae and what those voices say. I do think, however, that class issues and interpersonal ones are inextricable. Class is rife with everything we do and vice versa. Biggie, to me, is like any poet who takes pieces of life and weaves it into his work. He includes the people he meets and how these people affect him and what they say. I think this is where swagger comes from. It is the craft, the skill, the flow, that connects all of us as poets. The ability to take the muck of the everyday and make it beautiful.

MC: I completely share that sentiment about Biggie, and I think you’re absolutely right. Let’s talk a little bit about where your swagger is coming from: one of the threads that runs through Black Life is the deteriorating (mental?) health of the narrator’s father. Is this something that you had to were pulling from your own experiences? Do you think that makes your swagger similar or different to Biggie’s, and in which ways?

DL: A lot of the experiences in Black Life are from my own personal experience and I think this is like Biggie. But isn’t that true for all poetry? Or all writing and all art? Or all thought? Science is a set of ideas made by people. What poem isn’t at least in part based on the poet’s personal experience, even when we know that I in a poem is not always the I of the poet? I as a person haven’t done everything in the exact way the I in my poems does things, but he/she/it still comes from me. The mask is there on the face of the poet with the reading of the poem, but the eye come through however disfigured and distant the costume.  I don’t know, just yesterday I visited a friend’s poetry class and one of the wonderful students there asked if I ever felt embarrassed by the personal details I put in my poems. I told her that I wasn’t embarrassed, because for the most part there was a lot of mediation and craft there — a lot of control. Maybe the control has to do with swagger. To feel the pain or joy and hold it transfixed. To transfix a reader with the dead emotion, somehow alive and always alive with the listening/reading. That’s how I feel when I listen to Biggie. When I hear his voice, I know he is in some way still alive. Do you think this has to do with swagger, too?

MC: Oh, totally. It’s funny, I was listening to “Things Done Changed” (my favorite “first-song-on-an-album” in hip-hop history) and the last line of that song is “my momma’s got cancer on her breast / don’t ask me why I’m motherfucking stressed.” I always found that to be such a beautiful deviation: rappers are supposed to be cocky and full of bravado, yet here’s this incredible admission of weakness and self-consciousness. Do you think that’s the definitive difference between rappers and poets — that rappers are supposed to control this concept of “swagger,” while poets are taught to operate within their self-consciousness?

DL: That is probably my favorite Biggie line ever. That and “Girls used to diss me / Now they write letters ’cause they miss me.” The way he wraps the rhyme around to give us something so sweet and sad. I think that the admission of weakness and self-consciousness amidst swagger is what makes rappers and poets the same. There might be some places where we are taught to operate differently, but when we are writing poems, we operate language for exactly the same purpose. And I think that whatever places there are that make us feel as if we are not doing the same thing should be obliterated.

MC: If Black Life is Ready to Die and your next book is Life After Death, does that mean Puff Daddy is going to take all the poems you’ve cut and make a Reborn album? If so, is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening?

DL: If there is anything we can do to *make* this happen, then I would be very happy. He is a saint that Puffy.

The Poetics of Our Suffering

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Dorothea Lasky read from Black Life, her most recent collection from Wave Books and a collection I'm absolutely in love with. She introduced a poem to a crowded auditorium of writers by saying "This poem is titled 'It's a lonely world,' but it feels a lot less lonely being here with you guys tonight." It was true -- even though she had just read a heartbreaking poem about losing her father, there was a sense that everyone in the room had come together to support her. It was just one of those nights.

I've frequently heard writers and readers say that the best poems always end up being sad poems. It's weird, isn't it -- the human tendency to let another's misery be a therapeutic vehicle? I'm not one to make lofty statements about such a broad demographic, but I can say that I personally enjoy sad poems because of how I react to them: something about their gut-wrenching nature always leaves me with a strong urge to be a better reader, a better writer, and a better person. Maybe I'm being a little too romantic here, but I believe that in this shared sense of sadness, we're empowered to be more compassionate and understanding individuals.

I mention all this because whether she's writing about the mathematicians she's loved or the living rooms she's imagined, you always get the sense that Dottie is the type of person that understands suffering. The thing that's most important about Black Life, I think, is that Dottie can get down in the mucky, muddy underbelly of human existence and sculpt it in a brutally honest way that reminds us of our own disappointments and shortcomings. There is, of course, solidarity in sadness.

Not to over-share or anything, but the last couple of months have been pretty hard on me. The thing, though, is that Dottie's poems always seemed to remind me that I wasn't alone in my misery. In this one poem I really like ("How to Survive in this World"), Dottie reminds us that "There is a lot to be sad about/but no point in feeling that sadness."  I've grown very attached to this line over the last couple of months: in the moments where I've felt defeated and powerless, I've thought about what little could be accomplished in my wallowing. I've taken that negative energy and applied it to more important things; I've kept my head up, and I've moved on.

And maybe that's why I find myself so frequently in Awe of Dottie's poetry: maybe the poetics of our suffering are the only things that bind us together; maybe if we can see through life's repulsive moments, we can be better to one another and (more importantly) be better to ourselves.

I promise you that there's a lot more worth talking about in Black Life. I plan on getting there and I certainly plan on being less dramatic, but I want you to know how important this collection is to me. From the little I know about Dottie's ideals and aesthetics, I think she'd be happy to hear that Black Life reminded me of how sad and ugly this world can sometimes be; she'd probably be happier to know that  while I was reading Black Life, I felt a strong urge to never let that sadness and ugliness defeat me. And that's why I think it's such an important and awesome book: even in her moments of absolute weakness and disparity, Dottie found a way to remind me that there still is a lot of beauty out there -- I  just had to sort through all the awful stuff first.