Monthly Archives: March 2024

12 posts

Suicide Is (Supposed To Be) Painless

poetry writing poetry

I just completed a poem about suicide. Well, tangentially about suicide. It’s about people who talk about suicide. (But as we all know, talking about suicide is a red flag that friends and family should pay attention to.)

Anyway, I shared my new draft with a fellow poet for feedback. Yes, I got my critique, but as occasionally happens, I also got a “this reminds me of” connection, which reminds ME of the fact that all writers, dead and alive, are part of a great, ongoing conversation, only the dead ones’ talking has to come in the form of words frozen in the amber of time.

In this case, the connection that my friend immediately thought of was Tony Hoagland’s poem, “Suicide Song.” Now here’s the thing about sending the author of a newly-minted poem a long-ago published poem to read. It creates unfair comparisons. Just when a writer’s feeling good about himself and his new poem, toiled over for 14 versions before being ready for a reading–BAM!–said writer gets hit upside the head with a finished product on the same topic, one that sings like a nightingale beside his newly-minted croaking crow. Caws for concern, I assure you.

But still, you have to admit, no matter what the situation, reading a good poem is inspiring, not only as a reader but as a writer. So come along, readers. Take a look-see not at MY suicide poem-in-progress (for that you’ll have to wait), but at the recommended Hoagland song of long ago:

 

Suicide Song
by Tony Hoagland

But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself
Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge

At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea
Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope.

But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way,
And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely.

No longer do I live by the law of me,
No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness,

And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude
For sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated

Pickles they place at the edge of your plate.
Killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil

At sea or not recycling all the kisses you’ve been given,
And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?

Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole
Because you haven’t been excused,

You haven’t finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness
To chew this food.

It is a stone, it is an inconvenience, it is an innocence,
And I turn against it like a record

Turns against the needle
That makes it play.

 

The poem, despite its heavy topic, takes a whimsical turn when Hoagland tells us that “dying you know shows a serious ingratitude / For sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated / Pickles they place at the edge off your plate.” A lovely particular, that. Saved by corrugated pickles!

Funnier still is the self-admonishment that follows the rhetorical question “And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?” The answer: “Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole / Because you haven’t been excused.”

Hoagland may be talking to himself or to someone else, but either way, poetry is a conversation, remember. He’s talking to everyone who reads his words. And if would-be suicides read them and chuckle and say to themselves, “He’s right, I need help and I’m going to get it,” so much the better. We chalk up another to the power of poetry.

 

 

“Forgive Me, Mother, for You Have Sinned”

poetry reading poetry writing poetry

Confessional mode. Like the first-person point of view in general, it is often welcomed by readers because they like to feel like confidantes. They also like to know that they are not the only ones.

The only ones what, you ask? It doesn’t much matter, I answer. The only ones with family trouble, marriage trouble, parenting trouble, love trouble, self-confidence trouble. There’s trouble in River City, all right, and the river flows under the good ship Readership.

For fraught poetry, you need go no further than Louise Glück, who takes a scientist’s eye (and even makes it part of this poem!) to her own life, then shares hard results with the poetry-reading world. Here, with “Brown Circle,” she overlays her own upbringing with the upbringing of her son.

 

Brown Circle
Louise Glück

My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don’t
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.

I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.

I must learn
to forgive my mother,
now that I am helpless
to spare my son.

 

It takes no small amount of bravery to write “I don’t love my son / the way I meant to love him.” People think those things but don’t say them.

Of course, we must realize that narrator and poet are not always the same voice. Thus, it is easier to express thoughts as a writer, knowing that you are impersonating a character of your own construction.

The other wonder is this: Is Mom alive reading poems like this? Some writers don’t worry so much about family reactions (see Karl Ove Knausgaard of My Struggle fame). Others would do well to.

Either way, though, there’s no denying the slight sensationalism offered by writing in the confessional mode, whether it’s a case of “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned” or “Forgive me, Father, for they have sinned….”

Readers like reading about sin. It distracts them from their own. It keeps their own company.