I grew up reading most books I could get a hold of, but I hadn’t really considered reading a lot of poetry until I took a creative writing class in college. I loved the freedom to be found in writing poetry—of how the words have space to breathe on the page, the way a few words on the page, matched with various spaces between, could become something wholly new in their arrangement. I was hooked.
That summer, my uncle came to visit my family in Oregon from Pennsylvania, where my dad had grown up. I must have mentioned something about the class and poetry to my uncle—I can’t really remember now. Maybe it was more spontaneous and it was circumstance that I’m trying to make into cause and effect. But regardless, as he was leaving he gave me a copy of Amy Clampitt’s What the Light Was Like. On the first page, he had written: “Hoping you find this poet as engaging as I have—Uncle Bill.
Moments that have profound affect on your life are often the small gifts that you dont’t anticipate to reverberate over time—a conversation with a stranger, or the introduction to something you had never seen yourself reflected in before. Small occurrences that arrive unannounced, but grow into part of your own narrative identity. And I like to think now, in the clarity of retrospect, that the gift of that book began my love of poetry.
Clampitt’s poetry mixes language with precision and grace, commonality and music. In my favorite poem from that book, “Witness,” she writes:
An ordinary evening in Wisconsin
seen from a Greyhound bus—mute aisles
of merchandise the sole inhabitants
of the half-darkened Five and Ten,the tables of the single lit café awash
with unarticulated pathos, the surface membrane
of the inadvertently transparent instant
when no one is looking : outside townthe barns, their red gone dark with sundown,
withold the shudder of a warped terrain—
the castle rocks above, tree-clogged ravines
already submarine with nightfall, flocks(like dark sheep) of toehold junipers,
the lucent arms of birches : purity
without a mirror, other than a mind bound
elsewhere, to tell it how it looks.
Reading it again I’m struck by the line “other than a mind bound / elsewhere, to tell it how it looks.” The act of a mind elsewhere, bearing witness.
I’ve written poems for other family members who have died as I’ve grown older, and I wrote one for my Aunt, Bill’s wife when she passed a few years ago. My uncle loved it and wanted to read more of my work. I usually feel uncomfortable and shy with family reading my work, but because of my uncle’s reading of poetry, and his gift of Clampitt long ago, it felt like we always had this understanding of each other as readers of poetry.
I later read an essay of Clampitt’s where she wrote about discovering Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, writing that she wasn’t sure she could have been a poet without his work:
Last summer I was in England…One morning I came down to breakfast and found one of the teenage boys in the family with two kestrels (they’d been injured, and he was training them to hunt for themselves) perched on the back of a kitchen chair. To be that close to a wild bird of any kind is rare enough, but what made the occasion electric was that another name for kestrel is—the windhover.
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon . . .…the sight of those kestrels, those windhovers, was all the more precious because, years before, I’d discovered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I can’t be sure I’d ever have become a poet if I had never been introduced to his poems—but in any event I find it impossible to imagine the kind of poet I would have been if I hadn’t. It’s like imagining a world in which one’s own parents had never met.
After the summer that my uncle had given me Clampitt, I read Hopkins for the first time while studying in England—and like Clampitt, I felt my life as a writer and reader of poetry would never be the same.
Clampitt continues:
What does a writer need to know? In one word, I’d say, predecessors. I don’t know why it is that things become more precious with the awareness that someone else has looked at them, thought about them, written about them. But so I find it to be. There is less originality than we think. There is also a vast amount of solitude. Writers need company. We all need it. It’s not the command of knowledge that matters finally, but the company. It’s the predecessors. As a writer, I don’t know where I’d be without them.
I love the throughline of predecessors—the chosen ancestor, as well as the actual ancestor, and the turning point of shared discovery, shared thought, shared gift. I too don't know that I could write without receiving my uncle’s gift of poetry, and without soon after discovering Hopkins.
Growing up on the west coast, the east coast side of our family always felt a little novel—the familiarity in the timbre of my dad’s voice in my uncle’s, mixed with the slight difference of Pennsylvania culture. Uncle Bill was ten years older than my dad, and with my father’s parents both gone before I was born, my uncle was the patriarch of the family—a role he clearly enjoyed—we all weathered his tyrannical outbursts at times. But he was always curious, with a home lined with books and music. He would spend hours at one painting in a museum—it was a joke in the family that if you agree to go to a museum with him you’ll be there the whole day waiting for him to leave. He was a painter, always sketching and painting watercolors.
My uncle died early Saturday morning, after ill health for some months. He was nearly 87. Two weeks ago he was taken to the hospital and had to wait hours in the ER for a bed as his condition worsened—thankfully he grew stable enough that he could return home to die.
I texted him a poem and he said that he’d love to read more, so as he waited to return home, I sent him a poem each day. The last one I sent was this:
He wrote back that evening, as he was dying: “Loved it. Like a life not over, just interrupted.”
I had long felt a bit ambivalent of that ending, after I had read it to a few other poet friends who were unsure of it—I played with it, but in the end, I didn’t know how else to end it by getting across what I was feeling and what I hoped. That my uncle understood it meant the world to me.
I’m thankful that with all the isolation of death that we have witnessed in the last two years that he was able to return home for his last breaths.
Robert Pogue Harrison, in his phenomenal book The Dominion of the Dead, writes that the origins of poetry can be found in the lament—that it is in grief that poetry, and perhaps even human speech, took shape: “Human beings find their voice not in their own imminent death but in the other’s already transpired death.”
He goes on to write more about the relational aspect of death and mourning:
…mourning is the work of coping…not merely with the loss of a loved one but with the reality of loss in its irriducible, mortal extensions…. Coping does not consist merely in effecting a separation with the dead… but in complying with the ultimate obligation of all, namely the acknowledgement of death as the very condition and ground of life. This a lesson that only the death of others can teach.
He then cites the poem “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The child Margaret in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall” grieves “over Goldengrove unleaving,” yet in time she will learn that all grieving has a self-referential dimension and that, in the end, “it is Margaret you mourn for.
I’ve memorized lines from Hopkins’ poem and think of it each fall:
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Harrison goes on to write:
…Mourning rituals would be feckless if they did no provide the means, or language, to cope with one’s own mortality even as they help one cope with the death of others. It is because lament always has this element of self-reference that its voice is universal and its rituals are open to the participation of strangers and kin alike….To cope with one’s mortality means to recognize its kinship with others and to turn this kinship in death into a shared language.
While Harrison—and Hopkins—refer to our own recognition of our mortality, I also feel the emphasis on the broader kinship created when one dies—regardless of whether they are genealogical kin or not. Death points out the universal that we are all a part of, that we all belong to—the kinship of being human.
And it is in poetry that we have a shared language of mourning—because even the most jubilant poetry is marking or bearing witness to a moment that no longer exists. But by bearing witness, it connects those moments so that we can move on from and build on them—it allows us to move into the future by giving care, to place a moment in time, and keep it with us.
Harrison finally writes:
…human death must be understood not as the biological termination of life but as an immanent possibility that claims…existence before it claims…life. Finitude generates, rather than puts a limit on, our existential transcendence.
In mourning through poetry, we claim existence. We claim to be known, and to know. That’s part of the idea that I feel poetry—and the poem I sent my uncle—aims for: that in-between space, that once finite, we are freed to move into the infinite. Whatever or wherever that might be. Maybe it’s the infinitude of time that our existence moves into, something unavailable to us as mortals. The infinitude of so many experiences, moving into a future-past.
Fallen but unable to seep. Not over, but interrupted.
Thanks for the poems. Also interested in _The Dominion of the Dead_ will look it up. I also recently mourned through poetry. "We claim to be known, and to know." -> that's exactly what I was thinking a few months ago.
Moved by the Truth and Deep reflection Upon POETRY and the sense of writing to preserve Life..Writing is NOT a mere ability tobcollect right words and images, It represents a NECESSARY MEANS to be One with the world..solitude Is WHAT gives impulses to talk with Someone listening to your words! POETRY repreesent a sort of HOWL,..I still exist and I perceive this..I Will be glad if my words reach Your hearts..Lines often writtenJust to keep a bond with Someone then they Will reveal as pure art keeping the very secret of Life..
Hoping It Will be ONLY interrupted..as you dear uncle writes
Thanks Freya ever