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Experiencing tragedy is often correlated with creative genius (take a look at the biography of every other famous poet and you’ll likely be able to find tragic circumstances lining up with what is now the stereotypical artist’s plight, for example, the life Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allan Poe).
However, I’d like to argue that heartbreak can be one of the most creatively stifling experiences to navigate through, not because you’ve “lost your muse,” but because for days or weeks or months after you wake up feeling like your whole body, once human, is now a piece of soft rotting fruit with sick yellow edges, or a series of heart palpitations, or the slate grey color of the atmosphere when it can only muster a snow-less winter—any way you feel, you sometimes are something that cannot speak, write, conjure words.
Emotional nerves exposed, wouldn’t this make for poetry? Maybe, but I’d say more often than not, not right away. You may feel anything you write is overdramatic, a reflection of the time stopped in your world when you know everyone else’s is moving and they cannot stop and wait for you.
And while poetry is fueled by emotion, poets aren’t completely void of anything else but emotion, night and day. Heartbreak can make you feel as if emotion is all that is left of you, and often eventually leaves you in a state of exhaustion and numbness. Not ideal circumstances for writing. Luckily, while all your creativity runs dry to deal with grief, there are other poets and other poems that can help breathe life back into you and assist in the healing process.
Take a breath and let a few other voices carry the weight for a few minutes.
Noelle Kocot, The Peace That So Lovingly Descends
‘You’ have transformed into ‘my loss.’
The nettles in your vanished hair
Restore the absolute truth
Of warring animals without a haven.
I know, I’m as pathetic as a railroad
Without tracks. In June, I eat
The lonesome berries from the branches.
What can I say, except the forecast
Never changes. I sleep without you,
And the letters that you sent
Are now faded into failed lessons
Of an animal that’s found a home. This.
Sarah Kay, The Type
Lucas Regazzi, Small
You’re not doing well and finally I don’t have to
pretend to be so interested in your on going tragedy,
but
I’ll rob the bank that gave you the impression that
money is more fruitful than words, and
I’ll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain.
I’ll walk you to the hospital,
I’ll wait in a white room that reeks of hand sanitizer and latex for the results from the MRI scan that tries to
locate the malady that keeps your mind guessing, and
I want to write you a poem every day until my hand breaks
and assure you that you’ll find your place,
it’s just
the world has a funny way of
hiding spots fertile enough for
bodies like yours to grow roots.
and
I miss you like a dart hits the iris of a bullseye,
or a train ticket screams 4:30 at 4:47, I
wanted to tell you that it’s my birthday on Thursday
and I would have wanted you to
give me the gift of your guts on the floor, one last time,
to see if you still had it in you.
I hope our ghosts aren’t eating you alive.
If I’m to speak for myself, I’ll tell you that
the universe is twice as big as we think it is
and you’re the only one that made that idea
less devastating.
Carrie Rudzinski, The Bed
Christopher Salerno, Is It Better Where You Are?
The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE
or NOPE. But hope and results
are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats
voiding his unreasonable lung.
Getting off the medicine
completely means light again
blinking to light. Device returned
to its factory settings. The complete black
of before the meteor shower
above the bakery. If you lose the smell
of leather, lemon, or rose,
studies show you will fail at being,
like Keats. I keep watching the same meteor
shower videos on YouTube
where awe is always a question of scale.
Night can be moths or weather, pulled in the dark.
The bakery, now, is beginning to close.
My arrhythmic heart
aches for the kind of dramatic arc
one can’t shop for. Or else to lease
what’s real for a while—
is this the good kind of consumption?
I wonder over the weight
of meaning. The difference between
hull and seed. The sugary
donut and its graceful hole. The greasy
bags that everyone leaves
in the alley leading to my door.
These scraps I work at like a crow.
Anna Binkovitz, On Being Left
Sarah Messer, Spark of the Sky Stag’s Great Heart
strung from a thought arrived through the keyhole grasping
the hand of another
I will begin with my mouth
then live with antlers remembering the light inside, always to
breathe this unforgetting
and his body shaped like a crabapple tree
or a mother raised by a wolf looking back at the mirror
and trying not to break anvils on the bottles of blame
in another life: smell of moss, stream water, depressions of dark
orange rocks which trap tiny fish
the consequence of silence: a field beneath opening clouds
on that morning I woke to the sound of the blue jay and used a
small silver key
some day we will all be gone from this place
now that the live oak has thrown down all its caramel-colored
leaves, thought lives in the ear-shaped idea of this only
Neil Hilborn, Future Tense
Maureen Thorson, excerpt from Applies to Oranges
At first heartbreak made me beautiful.
My skin fluoresced. I hypnotized trees.
The orphans followed me around town,
drunk on my pain. I ate only my own
hunger, gave off a scent like bitter oranges
or chlorine. Loss left me strangely whole,
as if my sadness, were it strong enough,
could turn your ship around. That was back
when I aged. Now, like an astronomer
who seeks no first causes, but only to map
the connections pinned out over the sea,
I want to diagram the light that shines out
through the holes you pricked into me.
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