Fleda Brown and Teresa Scollon discuss writing into grief, including the grief of the planet.
Fleda Brown: You could say we’ll all die, so everything is useless. You could say that, but nonetheless we build houses, have babies, plant flowers, and write novels and poems. The way I’ve always written—the only route I know—is to look closely, to remain with what’s there, to see it in detail. But when I immerse myself in the honey locust tree outside my window, here comes the deep grief of loss, not the ordinary grief of things passing, my own life passing, but the fathomless grief of the entire planet, all the beings I’ve loved, no longer able to sustain themselves, to thrive. This is no ordinary grief. It can leave me speechless. How do I then write? What do I write?
In Maria Popova’s online column today: “The thermodynamic collapse of physical systems into increasing levels of disorder and uncertainty. The dissolution of cohesion along the arrow of time. Inescapable. Irreversible. Perpetually inclining us toward, in poet Mary Ruefle’s perfect phrase, ‘the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love).’ Perpetually ensuring, in poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s perfect phrase, that ‘lovers and thinkers’ become ‘one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.’”
Yes. My god, how do I then write? What do I write? Why do I write?
Teresa Scollon: Aren’t we always unwillingly launched into elegy? At least, that was my experience. At the same time that I was getting schooled in poetry, my beloved father was dying. His loss threw me completely. Nothing had meaning. I wanted to get on a horse and ride west, and never let words pass my lips again. Poetry school is pretty weak tea when you feel like that. I took a year, then another six months off. When I finally got back it was elegy I had to study. Because it was elegy I had to write. And there were some lessons, some shards of wisdom there. The ancient Greeks, misogynistic as they were, were good at putting structure around chaotic human experience. They delineated grief ’s journey: the descent (kathodos—from which we got the English word cathode) into sorrow and the subsequent ascent or way upward (anodos—from which we got anode). Go down, the Greeks said, but make sure you come up again.
And Freud said essentially the same thing: grieve, but reattach. All very tidy, yes?
But here’s something: The Greeks feared grief, and in particular they feared women’s grief, because it was destabilizing to the state. And what were women grieving, do you suppose? Women were grieving the results of war. Stupid, bloody war. Just imagine the world if those women had been allowed to fully voice and act on their concerns. Imagine destabilizing the state’s ability to conscript young men into war. Imagine a world without war. All those young men, home, underfoot, lying around, cracking penis jokes and eating all the snacks in the house. But still, no war.
All this to say, Fleda, what happens if we allow ourselves to be drawn into “the fathomless grief of the entire planet, all the beings I’ve loved, no longer able to sustain themselves, to thrive.” What ideas might come to us? What might we then destabilize, what new or deeper ideas might we shake loose from the usual sentiments?
F: When I was in therapy, I realized I was afraid of my own grief. I was afraid of the depths of it, that if I sank into the “fathomless grief” I wouldn’t be able to emerge. I think it is not only the Greeks who fear grief. After a while, I find I turn away from the ruination of coral reefs, the slaughter of elephants, the bodies in the rubble. I can only hold so much. I am not one who goes numb; I am one who absorbs and suffers.
It was a long haul, but therapy taught me not to turn away, except only enough to stay healthy. Grief is like a thing. It has a pulsing life. If watched carefully—and here I also turn to my years of Buddhist practice—it breaks into minute bubbles. It joins the rest of the pulsing universe. That is to say, it doesn’t disappear. Is your grief for your father gone? Is my grief for my brother, the mess of my parents’ lives, gone? Doesn’t seem so. I think it may join up with everything else, part of the mix. And whoever said the mix was to be happy?
It is, though, oddly. I would say just being alive, feeling things, is a ghastly, bittersweet, intense joy. So what does this say about our writing during this time? You asked “What might we then destabilize, what new or deeper ideas might we shake loose from the usual sentiments?” I think that is a brilliant question, by the way.
I visualize it this way. I might be Gilgamesh, I might be Persephone. I might be Christ. I climb deep into the pit (or dive into the wreck, in Adrienne Rich’s words). I see that the pit is created by boulders jammed against each other with certain breathing spaces between. I realize that if I am going to make it to the bottom, I will have to move some rock. The rock has been there a long time and is satisfied with its various positions. I will need to put my shoulder to it. I may die in the attempt. But I must get to the bottom because the buried seed can’t sprout unless some light and air strikes it. Now I’ve changed images maybe! But at the bottom of the pit is somehow, I’m pretty sure, the source of life.
What that might mean for me as a writer I’m not entirely sure. I think it means— and this is where you were going, I think—that it’s the specific task of the poet to break apart the cliches, the received thinking, to open a new route. And I suspect that any touch of polemics, of scolding, of righteous indignation, closes the route again. It is pure seeing that’s needed.
Of course, that’s a bit impossible. We carry our prejudices so deep within us that they manifest without meaning to. Still, intention is all. To see clearly. To see our own prejudices and see through them. I return to your question: “What new or deeper ideas might we shake loose from the usual sentiments?” I don’t know the answer to that. What was forming in your mind as you asked it?
T: By the way, I love this image of the pit, and I want to carry that around with me for a while. But in answer to your question about what was in my mind: I was thinking about power. I was feeling my anger—most recently at the specter of Joe Manchin, that corrupted man, standing in the way of any progress on a climate change bill. I was thinking how untouchable he and others like him seem to be. Somehow these guys, who are driven not to the bottom of pits but to the top of metaphorical mountains, who spend their lives and their ambition to get as far up there as they can, appear to be one dimensional. I know they have families, they have lives, presumably they have souls—and spiritual leaders assure us that they do—but their public lives seem to be like spears pointed in one direction, and that direction assures them of continued power. Even if they are standing on a dying mountain. I am always thinking, lately, how can we shake that up? How can we possibly shake them from those perches?
My sense of the country is that we are on a slow boil right now. I visualize that old chemistry diagram of molecules, when heated, moving farther and faster and bouncing around and smacking into each other. Anything could happen. Any new combination is a possibility right now.
How quickly I move away from thinking about poetry. I am thinking about the world. But paradoxically, as you know, this is thinking about poetry at the same time. Can I find a way to write what I see, what I feel, what I wish for? I return to your words: “It’s the specific task of the poet to break apart the cliches, the received thinking, to open a new route. And I suspect that any touch of polemics, of scolding, of righteous indignation, closes the route again. It is pure seeing that’s needed.”
Yes. Absolutely. Whoops. My mind keeps going. And here’s another fear to add to the fear of grief: I fear no one will hear or want to listen to what I have to say. Cassandra’s fear. No one would believe her. And she was right all along. Don’t poets tell each other all the time in workshop: too political, too angry, too this, too that. Because we are afraid of scaring the reader away from listening to us.
Someone once told me if you are going to have a cat, you should have two cats. Because one cat will get into trouble, will jump out the window, will escape out the apartment door, will roll around on the roof. But two cats will moderate their wilder impulses, will whisper to each other: “It looks scary out there, better not go! Better stay in here with me.” Is that what poets do to each other?
F: Does anyone listen? That’s the question of the hour. I think of monks (I’ve spent some time with them). They meditate hour after hour. Or chant or pray. Sometimes they’re cloistered. Does anyone benefit from any of this intense dedication? When I was doing some of that myself, I couldn’t explain it to doubters. The best I could say is, the world is listening. The heart of the meditator is like the flap of a butterfly’s wing, readjusting the world. The heart of the meditator is a small poem. We’re not separate, not at all. To imagine the only route to change is marching, signing petitions, and voting seems like an incomplete view.
You wrote a poem that is a perfect example of effecting change by breaking apart the boulders of our prejudices. It’s called “I Want to Be Joe Manchin’s Momma.” If I were his momma, you write, he would come home and I would be sitting there, so disappointed. My quiet would “scare the shit out of him.” I would tell him I raised him better than his power-hungry behavior.
In this poem, you break through the boulders of our thinking to find a new route. By seeing Manchin with his mother, somehow our adult rage is undercut. He’s only someone’s son, gone wrong. Our own mothers see who we really are. The mother still loves him. She makes him breakfast, but she’s heartsick at what his actions are causing.
The politics are fierce, the anger is there, but instead of floating up there where the big ideas are at war, it sits down at the table with his mother. It gets under Manchin’s skin and under ours. If you’re a poet, you want to get under the skin, where the changes can happen.
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T: Thank you, Fleda. I appreciate these comments. It’s been a while since you and I were able to talk. I’ve been away, being with my family. And my headspace is different now.
This morning, all I want to hold in my mind are the recently refreshed images of my family members, scattered across the state of Michigan and the world. For example, there is my mother, eighty-five, who told me last night that she was sitting on the back deck with a book and a glass of wine, waiting for the deer who come about that time in the evening to graze under her pear tree and drink from the bird bath she fills every day with fresh water. I can imagine her, sitting on the favorite bench that she’s positioned for the best view of the yard and the trees and birds. Sometimes she takes naps out there, curled up like a little feral cat under the shade of an enormous silver maple that my parents planted to mark the birth of my youngest brother, who is now fifty-two. The glass of wine surprises me—that is not a ritual I associate with Mom. But the timing of her day with the rituals of the deer—that does not surprise me. She has always loved the world. There is a little flower growing in a crack of the sidewalk just outside the breezeway door. It grows there, just a wee bit shy of the place where human feet land. “Look,” said my mom. “I love to find things like that.”
Likewise, my eighty-seven-year-old Uncle Bob, my mother’s older brother, arranges his day around all the beings for whom he cares—my cousin, their pet cats, stray outdoor cats. When he feeds the outdoor cats we take pictures, snapping him bent over several plush animals, stroking their backs with an arthritic hand. What the outdoor cats don’t eat, the raccoons and then the squirrels finish off. He lives like a monk, my uncle, in service to others. In one spot of the spacious front yard, there is a vegetable garden close to the road and fenced off for protection from the woodchucks. That is Bob’s relaxation—to grow organic vegetables which he gives away to his neighbors. It gives him joy.
All this to say that I am noting and feeling all the ways people are alert to others, and all the different ways we care for each other—and I am including non- human beings in “each other.”
F: Anne Reeve Aldrich, a brilliant poet who died of a debilitating disease at twenty- six, wrote to Emily Dickinson: “I believe it is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.”
I’ve been at our lake this summer as usual, with many visiting family members, one group at a time. Last night I sat at the end of the dock with my son and the woman who is his long-time partner, and my grandson and his boyfriend, as the two young men talked about coming out, the pain of silence as well as the difficult transition to openness. I listened, I watched their faces, the faces of the others, in the dimming light, and the space of my heart/mind expands to take in what I can’t know, myself. Articulating that as best I can, which is what I’m trying to do here a little, is what we do as writers. It has always been thus.
Another small example: I have an image of my mother on the tall metal kitchen stool with its white padded seat and back, sitting in the bedroom they shared with my profoundly brain-damaged brother. She’s leaning over his bed, spooning cereal into his mouth. He no longer speaks, and no longer walks. He grunts and still smiles. She, and sometimes my father, did this every single day, three times a day, as well as changed his diapers, cleaned him up, rolled him over to put clean pajamas on him. Just that one moment of her sitting there, holding the spoon, contains a lifetime of writing material because it is so profoundly felt by me, the writer, and is so emblematic.
I focus on that one moment, not because I’m ignoring the plight of all humans, but because it carries the weight of all humans within it like a locket with a piece of hair saved in it. I don’t know what else we can do as writers as we pass “through the gates of suffering,” as Aldrich wrote. Our writing “saves,” not by a deliberate intention to do that, not by exhortation or polemics, but by showing how a channel can be carved from one heart to another.
“Save” shows up in most religions in one way or another. The Buddhists vow to “save all beings.” They don’t for a minute believe they can rescue everyone from their suffering. The vow is an intention to attend to suffering, forever, and for everyone. To pay attention. Not to ignore, not to grab onto it as our own property, not to push it away, but to see. Nothing can ever change if it isn’t seen. If I unconsciously interrupt every conversation, for example, the only way I’ll ever change that habit is to become conscious that I’m doing it.
If we become conscious—again using your words here—“What ideas might come to us? What might we then destabilize, what new or deeper ideas might we shake loose from the usual sentiment?”
That’s it, as far as I can see. Keep looking and writing what we see. Allow the destabilization to begin to happen in response. Be courageous in what we’re willing to see/write.
T: Yes. And three more thoughts:
First, the idea of seeing can be both an obligation, but also a freedom, can’t it? The beloved family therapist and thinker Virginia Satir articulated five freedoms that were necessary for humans to become fully human. The first is the freedom to see and hear, or perceive, what one sees. That freedom is followed by the freedom to think what one thinks, rather than what one should think; and the freedom to feel what one feels, rather than what one should feel. And so on. Actually, all five freedoms are germane to this discussion. Of course! Because we are, if nothing else, on the path to becoming more fully human. Satir would say, yes, yes, yes, see and feel and think what you see and feel and think! And then say it.
Second, the poet W. H. Auden, in his poem “September 1, 1939,” a poem written at the end of what he calls “a low dishonest decade” and in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland—truly a frightening moment which followed years of worry about what was happening in Germany, and which was only a sliver of the evil that was to come—says there really isn’t any such thing as the state. There is only the individual, and the individual must speak. Here are the last two stanzas of that poem:
All I have is a voice
to undo the folded lie,
the romantic lie in the brain
of the sensual man-in-the-street
and the lie of Authority
whose buildings grope the sky:
there is no such thing as the State
and no one exists alone;
hunger allows no choice
to the citizen or the police;
we must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
our world in stupor lies;
yet, dotted everywhere,
ironic points of light
flash out wherever the Just
exchange their messages:
may I, composed like them
of Eros and of dust,
beleaguered by the same
negation and despair,
show an affirming flame.
From Auden we get the imperative: speak, because no one else and no collective else can do it for you. And, further, by speaking, we create a little spark of light and, if not hope, connection, with others who are also trying to do the same.
And finally, an idea I have been carrying around with me for a while, I can’t remember where I got it. That’s the idea that humankind is on a raft on a turbulent river. The artists are at the edges, working to expand the raft, working to create more space that other humans can then comfortably occupy. I think about that idea sometimes, when I feel alone in my work.
Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and is an Indie finalist. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her new memoir is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State University Press, an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir). She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.
Teresa Scollon is a poet, essayist, and educator. Her third collection, Trees and Other Creatures, is out from Alice Greene & Co (2022). She is also the author of To Embroider the Ground with Prayer, an Indie finalist, from Wayne State University Press; and a chapbook from Michigan Writers Cooperative Press. Scollon is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and alumna and former writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. She won the 2018 Moveen Poetry Prize. She teaches the North Ed Writers Studio at Career Tech in Traverse City and is co-editor of the literary journal Dunes Review.
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