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Poetry of Grief- Jerusalem Post

 “The Poetry of Grief”

By Elizabeth Levine, M.A., M.P.H, M.F.A.

 

 

 

It is said that there is nothing worse than losing a child. This I know is true. My daughter Charlotte died on January 3, 2009, for no medical reason. No medical reason. When I rise in the morning and open my eyes to the flat grey of a winter’s day, these are the first words I hear. When I fall asleep at night, it is her face that flashes before my eyes before they shut.

What then to do with all this grief? For me, the answer came from writing both poetry and creative non-fiction. I would stay awake all night, night after night, after she died and write and write and write, because when I went to bed at night I would hear her cry.

For poets, we have long known the therapeutic value of writing to heal trauma and we often say, “Writing our way back home.” Research conducted by Dr. James W. Pennebaker, PH.D. at the University of Texas at Austin’s Psychology Department in his book Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal has proven empirically that writing about trauma and emotional upheaval improves health outcomes and helps patients recover from traumatic events.

But for many writers who have lost children, we already knew that expressive writing was therapeutic. In particular, the Poet, New York University Professor and Guggenheim Foundation staff member Edward Hirsch has transcended grief in his book of poems, Gabriel, “in which a short life, a bewildering death ,and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines-“The funeral director opened the coffin/And there he was alone/From the waist up”- Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/finding-words

As an English Professor at William Paterson University and Montclair State University, I always teach my students two of his poems, “Execution” and an excerpt from Gabriel, page 73

I had the personal good fortune to study with Edward Hirsch at the Distinguished Poetry Series on October 3, 2015 at the Poetry Center of Passaic County Community College, www.poetrycenterpccc.cpm, which is directed by the renowned poet and champion of Poetry and the Arts, Director Maria Mazziotti Gillian, www.mariagillan.com, whom I have also had the honor of studying with.

We spoke briefly in the dim lighting of the Hamilton House, where the mood outside the airy classroom is lugubrious, as though so much sorrow and so many poets have written there about their own losses and their own healing.

In fact, Hirsch and I exchange hugs and he inscribes in my copy of Gabriel: A Poem “ For Elizabeth, with a shared sense of grief. May poetry help us.” For Hirsch, myself and countless others, writing poetry allows us to “enter the broad stream of human grief and raise in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation.

Some nights, I dream of Charlotte, of Gabriel, of Edward Hirsch and I holding hands as if we were lovers for many decades, bound by the same grief; I dream of Brooklyn, where I was born and where Hirsch lives, and I think of the primal need to go home, to a place and time before our children died, where we once were happy and innocent and knew not what the future had in store for us. In other words, I dream of writing my way back home.

 

For those of you who are interested in the therapeutic value of writing, I encourage you to subscribe to my online newsletter “The Writer’s Rant” at https://paper.li/f-1453218661#/ or facebook/thewritersrant

 

Empowerment: Witing Our Way Back Home

 I am a sixty-two year-old trilingual poet and author living with disabilities. My novel "All That Remains" deals with issues of trauma and resiliency, as does much of my poetry. Most of my poetry addresses themes of mental illness, substance abuse and grief/bereavement, following the death of my daughter Charlotte Clear. I use her name as a pseudonym because in Judaism, we say, "May her memory be for blessing, and I do not want her name to be forgotten or erased. She died for no medical reason, which made the grieving process more protracted and painful.

I returned to creative writing following her death, no longer capable or, perhaps, more accurately, willing to continue my career as the author of scientific technical writing as the Founder and Executive Director of ECQ Group, Inc., a small minority non-profit consulting firm specializing in public health. Instead of writing grants for millions of dollars to protect the most vulnerable and fragile of our populations, such as people living with HIV/AIDS, the mentally ill/homeless/, inmates, undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ clients, I found myself entering the fragmented, dysfunctional and woefully inadequate mental health service industry, now as a client of services, rather than a provider or funder of such social service safety-net services.

Speaking from, own personal and professional experience, anti-depressants, therapy, grief counseling, outpatient trauma therapy and one voluntary inpatient hospitalization did more harm than good in my journey back to wellness. On the contrary, it was the therapeutic exercise of writing my way back home that produced my strongest work. To that end, I am working on a curricula "Poetry as Sanctuary" in which I combine my M.P.H. and M.F.A. degrees to reach traumatized populations across multiple modalities, but with a primary focus of bereaved parents and siblings. It is my sincere and profound belief that it is in telling our stories and our losses and our struggles, we empower ourselves. "Empowerment" has become a word that has left a bitter taste in my mouth; no matter how well-intentioned service providers and therapists might be, survivors, in company with one another, are truly the only individuals capable of "empowerment". Through writing, we empower ourselves, moving from the darkness back into the light.

 

Point of View- "Gay Geography"

 Point of View- Gay Geography

My editor advises me that the reader needs more information about the narrator, her intentions, and what drives her into the company of gay men. I cringe. To me, it is painfully obvious why Eliza doesn’t like straight men. I am Eliza.

I resent his suggestion that I dig deeper into my subconscious to better articulate why I feel safer in a gay environment than a straight one. For me, this is a therapeutic issue, not a character development problem. Although he tells me the writing is beautiful, he wants more information. Why do I always feel that people ask of me more than I am willing or able to give? Whatever setting, dialogue, scene, character development, or narrative arc, so obvious to me, as the writer, is unclear to the reader.

Know your audience. In my first novella, “Gay Geography”, my audience is the large tent of LGBTQ readers and straight readers who are intimately familiar with gay life. Perhaps they have a sibling, a parent, a child who is queer. Perhaps they are queer and have not made peace with it, or are simply too young or too repressed to know who they are in the world, whether that be straight or gay. In the end, the only thing that matters is that my audience is familiar with and respectful of gay life, because that is the world I grew up in, that is where I feel most myself, and therefore, most at home.

Still, I have paid for his critique, and I need to at least appear willing to consider his suggestions, when what I really feel is irritation. He is a gay man; he of all people should understand why a fag hag is an integral member of any gay family and deserves her place at the table. I resent defending my right to sit down at the kitchen table in Rehoboth Beach, surrounded by my five gay roommates. I earned my place at that table, and I belong there. Why do I have to delve into Eliza, the narrator’s motivation to eat at that table?

I go through the pretense of being open- minded to his editorial critique. He suggests I change the POV from third person to first person singular, the standard pronoun of all memoirs. I explain that the manuscript was originally memoir, but to protect my family’s privacy, I have spent an entire year manually changing and double-checking every pronoun and fictionalizing the story. So, that suggestion is a rule out. Then he compliments me on the writing and how poetic it is. I explain that I am a published poet. Then he dares to suggest I rewrite it as a prose poem- a form of poetry I dislike. So that, too, is a rule out. His last suggestion I take begrudgingly, and I write a two-page single- spaced explanation of why Eliza loves her gay family and avoids straight men whenever possible. To be responsive to his advice, I painstakingly take that 2-page synopsis and change just those two pages from third person singular to I. And when I re-read that explanation, shifted to the pronoun I, then and only then, do I remember to cry.

The Middle of Nowhere: Tivoli, New Yok, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park

 What a great escape! An artist's retreat at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York. I would highly recommend this retreat for dancers, writers, composers, actors and visual artists. Check the website  www.kaatsbaan.org for 2026 Retreat dates and registration.

Through a generous scholarship from the Fountain House Gallery, I was lucky to be selected as one of five artists to spend a November weekend in the Hudson Valley doing what I love- writing and editing my novel All That Remains.

I arrived on Friday and found a lovely Italian restaurant, and ate lunch with my translator, Theresa, who served as my chauffeur and adult supervisor. "I brought you a chocolate protein shake," she told me, as we smoked one last cigarette before driving the hour and a half to our destination- a 153-acre estate for artists who wanted a weekend away from the daily grind to find inspiration in their respective fields.

When Alice, the Program Manager at Kaatsbaan, told me I was the only writer, I started to panic. The night before I left I had a massive anxiety attack when I discovered I would spend the weekend with dancers, performing artists, and a composer. Suddenly, I had visions of going to summer camp, but with children half my age. Was I simply too old for an Artists retreat with such creative, youthful artists? Would I have to "mute" the "kra-kra" button we poets are so familiar with? Would I have to be "normal" in the company of such talent? I shut my laptop off, packed my suitcase with six packs of Winston Select 100's, nicotine gum, nicotine patches, folders of poetry, a flashlight, and three changes of clothes. Alice had warned me that it was COLD and DARK in the Hudson Valley. I am not a fan of COLD or DARK and again, I briefly thought to myself WTF was I thinking? This could be the perfect location for a manic episode or a relapse!

But I was determined. I had been working on this novel for five years when the copyeditor I hired told me it was not publication-ready. This plunged me into an artistic depression, and I did not touch the manuscript for a year. However, I wasn't making a living as a poet, and I knew my best chance of finding employment, if not fame, as a fiction writer would be- that's right- to publish my 250 page novel. 

Writing the first draft of the manuscript felt like birthing a giraffe. I found a literary agent who read the novel. She told me that "it is beautifully written but needs more work." We need to know more about the narrator and her relationship to her family." Hell, no! I was NOT going there.

So now a literary agent and a copyeditor from Simon &Schuster both stated, albeit in different tones, that my novel needed more work. But who the hell wants to do more work?

I came to Kaatsbaan with five separate folders and the willingness to DO MORE WORK. I wasn't getting any younger, and although I had two poetry chapbooks published, The Ribbon Around the Bomb" and "God Doesn't Live at Our House Anymore" published under my pseudonym Charlotte Clear, I needed to find motivation, if not inspiration and dive back into the novel. Procrastination and sloth dodged every step. I vacillated from thinking "It's never too late" to "I will never finish this". From optimism, if you will, to abject despair. This is the writing life. It is solitary and unforgiving-both muse and master. It is like running a marathon without water, leaving me permanently dehydrated.

It took coming to literally "The Middle of Nowhere" to get my writing groove on. After a lovely dinner with the five other artists at the "Farmhouse" where everyone drank wine except for me, I actually began to work. I realized that the novel was overly ambitious in scope, location (it covered five countries) and multiple storylines. It read like an ADD self-help manual combined with a written confession and a touch of Mea Culpa. UGH. I felt like an ice sculptor chipping away at a larger than life block of ice, uncertain as to what I wanted to create or how I would get there. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted the writing to be beautiful, poetic and I wanted my novel to mean something, but what, exactly?

And then the moment of clarity came. I had tried to do to much, all at once, and the result was chaos. I had to put order into an overyly ambitios manuscript. I was trying to tell too many stories simultaneously. I needed less, not more.

After I recognized my own creative tendency for overkill, I pondered how I could simplify my project. Then it hit me. Divide the manuscript into four separate, but interrelated novellas, each with its own narrative arc. Easier to say, harder to do, but at least I felt like I had an editorial "road map" of how to approach the editing process.

I started with the novella about the AIDS epidemic, entitled "Gay Geography" because this chapter had already been published by MAPLiterary, (www.mapliterary.org), William Paterson University's English Department online journal. I culled three chapters out of the original 18-chapter manuscript that focused on my experience living with gay roommates at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. What ensued was a four chapter, fifty page novella: Chapter 1, "Gay Geography", Chapter 2, "Strange but Not Dangerous", Chapter 3 "We The Living", and Chapter 4, "The Inheritance of Pronouns". There is an Epilogue and a Prologue, which might need to be tweaked in the other novellas. Or perhaps keeping the same Epilogue and Prologue for all four novellas allows the reader to see the connection between the four novellas, all of which are written from the point of view of Eliza, the unreliable narrator.

For I am nothing, if not an unreliable narrator, here in the Middle of Nowhere, the gorgeous Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, where I have managed to be on my best behavior when fraternising with the other younger, talented, successful artists. We are all staying in the Dancer's Inn. My room sleeps five- I could have brought my family with me. But, on the contrary, it is the silence and the isolation which afforded me the time and the space to focus and settle down to work. It is Saturday morning, and I have read Gay Geography and made final edits. I added a poem and a table of contents for the novella. Transferring the handwritten (I am a dinosaur and can't edit on the screen) to the computer version is tedious. I am up to page 10, and I will be lucky if I finish this task by the time we leave tomorrow afternoon. But I am grateful I came, and I would highly recommend a weekend retreat in Tivoli, New YorkKaatsbaan Cultural Park Artists Retreat  for all artists who need to step outside of their daily routine and find a beautiful, supportive environment to help them forge ahead with their creative project- whether it be dance, musical theatre, acting, composing and yes, writing and/or editing.

Reading the Names

Here is the poem that I wrote about twenty years of working in the field of HIV/AIDS and the collective trauma that we have all experienced from losing so many friends. I was watching the reading of the names on 9/11 and it triggered the association of when, at the beginning of the epidemic, we would read the names of the people who died that year on December 1, World AIDS Day. Obviously, this was early in the epidemic when the list was short enough that it was possible to do so.

I lived in New York on 9/11 and my brother and sister in law worked in the World Trade Center that day. I was pregnant with my second son, Alex, and every time I took the subway, I thought, this could be it. There was an anthrax scare in New York at that time as well. I often think that those of us who were living in NYC when the World Trade Center fell also have a collective PTSD from having lived through that experience. We became kinder to one another. Tragedy does that, forms unusual bonds that spread, like a spider web, across unfamiliar terrain.

The poem is long; I will probably make it into a few separate, shorter poems, but that is my process, I write and then I edit.

I will post the poem as a separate entry.,

Shloshim

Shloshim