Over the weekend, I attended a seminar at Poets House by Naomi Shihab Nye on elegiac poetry. She's in the process of working on a collection about her late father -- perhaps for publication, perhaps not -- and she shared some of the things she's been reading and writing since he died. Like many people there, I had come because I'm also tentatively working on an elegiac work of some kind, in my case, for my mother. Shihab Nye started by opening up the floor to us, asking if we were working on similar projects and what our process has been. It was so comforting to be in a room with people who were also working with loss, and to hear that they, too, struggled to find the right form for their grief.
She also offered a number of book recommendations that I want to pass on, for readers here who might be engaged in a similar project or who recently lost someone: Beloved on the Earth, an anthology edited by Jim Perlman; Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr; The True Calm Keeps Biding Its Story by Rusty Morrison; and Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, to name a few. I haven't had a chance to read these yet, but they're on my list.
She also gave us an exercise: 1) Write down three questions you'd like to ask someone who's lost to you, either through death or estrangement. 2) List three to five physical items that come to mind when you think of this person. 3) Write down three to five quotes that you associate with the person. Then take bits and pieces of what you've written and work them into a poem of a few lines. You might find that those few lines are enough on their own, or you might expand them into a longer poem or even (for the purposes of this site) a prose piece.
I found Ginny’s post on Writing and Loss cogent and very pertinent to me. Loss has profoundly colored my life, an attempt to lose my own life. In writing about this in my poetry and so far unpublished memoirs ( I am now 54) I have tried to avoid being confessional and narcistic and celebrate the gift of my life.I have a bipolar(manic depressive) syndrome whose onset was in adolescence. In late adolescence I made an extremely serious attempt at suicide, shooting myself in the head with a .22 caliber rifle to survive virtually unscathed. I simultaneously try to be realistic. My suicide attempt and illness is not something I am proud of, neither is it something I am ashamed of. It is a reality, a reality I find majestic, terrifying at times and ultimately mysterious. a reality I want to express in my writing. So in my writing and in my life I give back what was given to me, life itself. I want to share the closing lines to my poem “Awakening” :
Hope
Despair
Renewal
This is the promise.
This is the fulfillment
This is the way I know life
Thank you and good writing!
Thanks for writing, Tom, and for sharing some of your work. I’m sure that your memoir will be a great help to others who are struggling with bipolar. Best of luck with it.
Thanks for this. It is always a poignant and beneficial reminder when you think about the way writing has helped suffering people deal with there emotions. People who understand pain and disappointment often write with more humanity and depth then those who go through life with rose colored glasses. Again, thanks for this, and all your other great writing advice and support. (a href=”http://fromsarahwithjoy.blogspot.com/”>my own creative writing blog.
Thank you for your comment. It is good to remember the importance of taking the rose-colored glasses off. Not everyone appreciates that.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us. As I was reading it, I wondered if I really had lost anyone and couldn’t deal with. Because I am quite at peace with the inevitable death. But then you wrote of loss by death or estrangement ,that really hit a cord deep inside me. My brother and I, am estranged siblings trying to deal with it somehow from the past 15 years or so and still neither of us seem to find the strength to put our best foot forward to reconcile. That is indeed a loss, since so much can be done as we both still live and still have a genetic bond.