The Poetry of Grief

I was listening to NPR's Morning Edition on my way into work yesterday morning and heard an interview with Kevin Young, a poet and editor who has just published a new anthology of poems  called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Young began work on the collection after the sudden death of his father.

I was tempted to switch away from the interview. Getting through a work day is a big task for me these days. This was the kind of story that could derail me before the day had even begun. But something made me stick with it. After Emma died both Peter and I reached to poetry for wisdom, comfort and hope. This was natural to Peter who was an English major in college and wrote his thesis on the poetry of John Keats. But I have never been particularly drawn to poetry either as a reader or a writer. Nevertheless, I was compelled not just to read poetry, but to write poetry also. My first attempts to put into words the enormous loss I had experienced were in the form of poems.  Poetry allowed me to express the raw, random images and emotions of early grief without trying to put order to them or make sense of them. Poetry could be just about what I felt, and not about what I thought, which was good, because I didn't know what I thought in those early days and weeks. I still don't.

Perhaps it also made me feel more connected to Emma who was a wonderful poet. She wrote poetry freely and easily and all of her poems were full of rich imagery and musicality. Several of her poems were published in children's anthologies and she even won a cash prize for one of her poems. My attempts were not nearly so deft, but it gave me a new appreciation of why Emma found poetry therapeutic.

During the NPR interview, Young read excerpts from several of the poems in his new anthology. One immediately struck a chord with me. It beautifully and perfectly described the reason I had started my blog. It is the first stanza of the poem Grief, by Stephen Dobyns. It goes like this:

Trying to remember you
is like carrying water
in my hands a long distance across sand. 
Somewhere people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.

That is what I have been trying to do - carry Emma across the barrren desert of grief to all who are thirsty to have her back in their lives.