What if I never love again?

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What if I never love again?

In college, I took my first Poetry Workshop. The whole thing was a sanctified affair, and in addition to writing, it required a good deal of memorization. Once a week, we would gather around a heavy wooden table in the basement of a building with antler chandeliers, and [insert famous poet here] would hold a paper cup of chamomile tea in one hand and a coffee in the other. She would nod. We would recite.

Once, one of my classmates—an intensely earnest biology student who occasionally compensated for his craft’s clunk with devoted memorization—selected some very long, very bucolic piece. It was something about boys becoming men. Something about summer camp. His performance was sweaty and concerted, and we listened intently to his stumbly progression through this most vulnerable of assignments. Halfway through the piece, Jorie put up her hand. “Stop.”

I thought my classmate would die. I thought I would die. “This poem is meaningless. Let’s move on.” We opened our workshop packets. I’m pretty sure the biologist melted.

Look: I started reading poetry because of James Taylor. Because of the easy rhythm of “Stopping in the Woods.” Because YouTube spoken-word understood my angst, and also Taylor Swift. Poetry meant barricading myself into a room with a piano and complaining about my brother. It meant covertly-recorded recitations played over black-and-white videos of fire. If it weren’t for the way Anne of Green Gables extemporized meaninglessly on cherry blossoms, I wouldn’t be a poet. If Rupi Kaur had been publishing when I was in high school, I would have loved her.

This was the foundation of my writing life: sentimentalism, musicality, an insurmountable tendency to fall in love too quickly. “Taste” wasn’t in the equation. Much less “refined.”

But of course, after the Biologist Incident, I only recited Ashbery, Eliot, and Ammons. I began to use absurd adjectives like Kafkaesque, Rilkean, and Miltonian. On The Road was facile. I made sure that each poem was more James Wright than Mary Oliver. I made sure to never ever sound like the Beats. For years, my primary poetic concern was the line between “Is it smart enough?” and “Does it seem like it's trying to sound smart?”

Granted, I benefitted from [professor’s] intellectual calisthenics. In a world where the party line is, “I mean, can’t anything be poetry?” my professor insisted that this work has weight—that it must have weight. That poetry is not entertainment, but a vortex that must shift minds, interrogate reality, and, often, have stakes high enough that the poet destroys herself in order to attain them. She taught me to find my season of writing. To record constantly, but to publish sparingly. She slashed at my love poems and insisted, “Write about the world.” She meant the whole world—everything it could possibly be and mean. This is what spurs powerful work (and I mean work). I don’t believe I could have spent this much time thinking about poetry if I didn’t find it terribly hard and wildly impactful.

That said, since graduating from my MFA, poetry has felt impossible. Nothing I write sounds smart enough; does enough. I find myself scrawling notes: “How framing places are always filled with framed things. Is there no where else to put them? Did people forget them? Are they for sale?” and “Fear: the bottoms of tables,” then scrapping them. Writing new notes: “Ulysses!!!!” and “Find out about Wittgenstein?” It’s difficult to chase the tail of the Muse while ruthlessly navel-gazing.

Last week, I was on my way to coffeeshop (or a coffeeshop-turned-horror-movie where the barista had been shuttled to some back closet and replaced with a remote-worker-friendly printing station), and Adele’s “All I Ask” came on. I had a Big Sad last year, in the wake of which I had entirely stopped listening to sentimental music. When I was younger, it had been the music that I loved most—the music I wrote to, the music that created a coziness and rustled bursts of nostalgia out of my inner landscapes. But when danger came, that plastic sadness became less of a trinket and more of a pinprick; nostalgia turned into raw-blooded memories. Adele dropped off the playlist. Some Joni. Even T Swift was hazardous.

This time, when Adele warbled herself into my ears, I braced myself. But there was no pang. I looked again, down into my feelings-space, but nothing moved. Like the little claw-game aliens of Toy Story, my many-eyed gut looked up at me blankly: Who, us? So, I listened like a masochist. I leaned in. I reveled in wandering close to the flame, but never feeling its bite. When Adele asked, “What if I never love again?” I asked it with her with the flagrance that comes from not needing an answer.

I doubt Jorie (oops) would have tolerated this melodrama in her workshop. I don’t know what she would have tolerated. But the emotion felt good, and I was oozy and full and delighted. And I wanted to write.

Last week, I went to two poetry readings:

One was a reading at the Morgan Library—a conversation facilitated by the UChicago professor and Poetry Editor Srikanth Reddy to celebrate the latest edition of The Paris Review. Outside of the auditorium, a glass case exhibited archival letters from eminent poetry editors and poets whose names I didn’t recognize. There was a coat check, which people used. Timmy Straw stole the show with a swaggerly intellectualism that could only come from being an Oregonian with a soft Brooklyn accent whose first word may or may not have been “Brezhnev.” Later, Victoria Chang analyzed an ekphrastic poem about Kandinsky. The conversation was brilliant, civil, and I understood about half of it.

The other was a rumplier affair at P&T Knitwear: an event for the new release of José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold. A gaggle of us climbed into the straircase seating to cheer on José’s brilliant agent whose name can be found a whole four times in the book, both right side up AND upside down and who also is my friend. We squished into rows, crossing our legs or flopping them over jackets. The reading opened with a high school student's performance of his “Ode to Harlem,” which obviously received a standing ovation. José read his poems casually and freely, the audience participating in realtime with claps, chuckles, Woo!s. While most pieces would benefit from a second read, their choruses landed easily on a first listen. When asked about his literary influences, he paused, then spoke of contemporary poets Danez Smith and Fatima Asghar. While the Paris Review contributors debated Derek Walcott’s application to contemporary art, José answered questions like, “How do you get into the flow?” and “When you play Fortnite with your wife, who wins?” I’ll admit—I had more fun at P&T Knitwear.

The contrast here is not one of intellect or education. In the battle of Ivy League degrees, José wins out over Timmy with a whole 1 Harvard AB. But Promises of Gold is not afraid of sentimentality, while The Paris Review is afraid of nothing but.

I don't know what my point is. What I do know is that on my way home from the Paris Review event, I walked onto a train car in midtown and happened to sit directly next to a dear friend. We picked up a conversation that we had left off last week about holding babies. That moment also felt like poetry.

Timmy Straw & José Olivarez

Note: I think I’m just going to put these here.

Quote of the Week

“Why do we have heads?” -Three-year-old eating yogurt with his fingers

Poetry in the News: (Just Kidding)

I don’t know if poetry’s in the news in terms of news. Other than the article that comes out every few months that declares that POETRY IS DEAD, and which well-intentioned friends text to me all: "Whaaa? ”

Also Amanda Gorman’s Prada campaign. (Are you even a poet if you’re not in a Prada campaign?)

• Check out this beautiful article from the New York Times called “A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight” by Elisa Gabbert (whose Normal Distance is also great).

• Listen from 1:08 to this unedited On Being episode that talks about holding babies (see last week’s newsletter). Basically: “Who else do you sit down with and immediately it’s like, should we make eye contact forever? Should we just like stare at each other in wonder? Is there a better meditation than that?”

• Stephen Marsh, A Writer’s Lament: “The next time you’re rejected from some grant or some job, remember James Joyce in 1912. He had just turned 30. He was living in self-imposed exile in Italy, with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and a couple of kids. His landlord was threatening to evict him for rent arrears. In desperation, he applied for a job teaching English at a local technical college, but he didn’t have the necessary qualifications—” (He had already written Dubliners.)

• Phew!!: Even if AI can try to you to get a divorce, it can’t write poetry. Check out What Poets Know That ChatGPT Doesn’t, Walt Hunter.

• Poetry NFTs?? I have a lot of feelings, most of them being: PLEASE NO. With a sprinkle of of: we’re not trying to make money. That’s why we’re here.

• If the words “Virginia Woolf,” “Bluets,” “Lydia Davis,” and “ambient zooms” make you tingle just a little bit, check out Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood. It’s a quick read and exactly the opposite of a plot-based narrative.

Turtle Tears: More

Okay. I need to say more about the turtle tears. If you didn’t engage in the writing prompt of last week, here’s what I’m talking about. Doesn’t it seem like the turtle is offering up its tears to the butterflies? Isn’t there a nobility to his little elbow head? His lifted chin? Do we suppose that out of despair he has found solace in these butterfly visitations? OR perhaps he has forced himself to cry out of compassion for these thirsty ‘flies? Is it a toxic relationship? Are they both satisfied? What makes a turtle cry anyways? And which was the first butterfly to spot the orbing boule of a saline tear in a little beady eye socket and to give drinking it a go? Do the butterflies induce turtles’ crying for nutritional purposes? Has this beautiful exchange turned malicious? Are the butterflies becoming tear fiends, turning the turtles into exhausted emotional serfs?

This week’s assignment: Cry in a butterfly sanctuary. I don’t care if you write, but just let me know if the butterflies come to drink your tears.

Are you enjoying this thing? Send it along to to your favorite friend. Like, for example, an aunt. Or your friend whose first word was “Brezhnev.” Or Ada Limón. Or to my friend Neil, who refuses to subscribe because he didn’t like the word “observeds” in the first edition. Fair enough, Neil. Fair enough.

Schmaltz ahoy,

Robiny

Croissant of the Week:

Maman, Multiple Locations

• Freshness: 8.5

• External Texture: 7.5

• Internal Texture: 9

• Flavor: 8

• Overall: 8.25