Can Poetry Save Your Life?

A Brief Investigation
by David Wojahn
from Blackbird, Spring 2015

Those of you whose interests have been piqued by my titlewhether you are poets
yourselves or practitioners of another disciplinealready know the answer is, sad to say, no. To the best of
my knowledge, poetry literally has saved someones life on only one occasion, and this example may well
be apocryphal: Ben Jonson, the great Elizabethan poet and playwright, was also famously truculent.
Although his best poemsconsider his heartbreaking elegy on the death of his infant sonare work of the
deepest sort of tenderness, Jonson was renowned as much for his mean-ass streak as for his conviviality.
His admiring introduction to the First Folio of Shakespeare is a work of justified renown, but his reputed
put-downs of the Bard of Avon are also the stuff of legend. Jonson reportedly claimed that Shakespeare
knew small Latin and little Greek and his writings wanted artin other words, they were awkward.
This is a bit like those guitar players who in order to mask their envy feel compelled to snootily dismiss
Jimi Hendrix because he couldnt read music.
Remember that the sixteenth centurys equivalent to the smartphone, insofar as you carried it with you
everywhereand you were apt to finger it nervously in every public spacewas your rapier. No
gentleman in London went out without a sword at his side, a fact that law enforcement may not have liked
any more than, in my native state of Virginia, policemen like the fact that you can carry a holstered
handgun into a restaurant, a bar, or your church. As Ive said, Ben Jonson was renowned as a hothead, and
it seems almost inevitable that sooner or later he would kill a man in a duel. The London of Elizabeth and
James was slightly more enlightened than contemporary Florida and other statesyou could carry your
sword wherever you went, but there was no such thing as a stand-your-ground law. Dueling was OK, as
long as no one was killed in the encounter. Killing someone in a duel was in fact a capital offense,
punishable not by beheadingthe dignified form of execution reserved for reprobate nobilitybut by
hanging. So, in 1598, after killing the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel, Ben Jonson was condemned to hang.
But, if youll pardon my pun, there was a loophole to the laws regarding capital punishment in Jonsons
day, a Get Out of Jail (or scaffold) Free card, as it were. Thanks to an old English law, whose origins
were obscure even in Jonsons time, if a condemned man could recite what was charmingly called the
neck-verse, a.k.a. Psalm 51, he would be allowed to go free.
Imagine the scene: Jonson stands before a magistrate, several witnesses having affirmed that during his
altercation with Spencer in a tavern or on some muddy London lane, Jonson got the better of his adversary
and stabbed him through the heart, killing him instantly. The judge reads his verdict, condemning Jonson
to be hauled off to the gallows at Tyburn, the site of Londons public executions. (Fortunately, Jonson
would only be sentenced to hanging, unlike another Elizabethan poet, Robert Southwell, who three years
earlier had been hung, then drawn and quartered while still alivebut Southwells crime had been more

severe: hed been outed as a Jesuit.) After being asked if he has anything to say in his defense, Jonson
raises his bowed head, looks the judge in the eyes, and without introduction commences his recitation.
Jonson is, after all, a man of prodigious learning. (To recite any of the Psalms would probably have been a
piece of cake for him.) Since he is also a bit of a show off, Jonson might render the neck-verse in the
Latin version of the Vulgate, but its more likely that he recites the English translation found in the
Coverdale Bible, first issued in 1535.
Haue mercy vpon me (o God) after thy goodnes, & acordinge vnto thy greate mercies, do awaye myne
offences. Wash me well fro my wickednesse, & clense me fro my synne. For I knowlege my fautes, and
my synne is euer before me. Agaynst the only, agaynst the haue I synned, and done euell in thy sight: that
thou mightiest be iustified in thy saynges, and shuldest ouercome when thou art iudged.
Beholde, I was borne in wickednesse, and in synne hath my mother conceaued me.
But lo, thou hast a pleasure in the treuth, and hast shewed me secrete wysdome. O reconcile me with Isope,
and I shal be clene: wash thou me, and I shalbe whyter then snowe. Oh let me heare of ioye and gladnesse,
that the bones which thou hast broken, maye reioyse. Turne thy face fro my synnes, and put out all my
mysdedes. Make me a clene hert (o God) and renue a right sprete within me. Cast me not awaie from thy
presence, and take not thy holy sprete fro me. O geue me the comforte of thy helpe agayne, and stablish me
with thy fre sprete. Then shal I teach thy wayes vnto the wicked, that synners maye be conuerted vnto the.
Delyuer me from bloudegyltynesse o God, thou that art the God of my health, that my tonge maye prayse
thy rightuousnesse. Open my lippes (O LORDE) that my mouth maye shewe thy prayse.
For yf thou haddest pleasure in sacrifice, I wolde geue it the: but thou delytest not in burntofferynges. The
sacrifice of God is a troubled sprete, a broken and a cotrite hert (o God) shalt thou not despise. O be
fauorable and gracious vnto Sion, that the walles of Ierusalem maye be buylded. For then shalt thou be
pleased with the sacrifice of rightuousnesse, with the burntofferynges and oblacions: then shal they laye
bullockes vpon thine aulter.
Jonson sits down. Doubtless a few of his friends and admirers are in the courtroom, many of them theatre
folk like himself, and surely they understand after a few lines of the speech that this is the performance of
Jonsons life. At any rate, Ben Jonson walks, probably after having first been admonished by the judge to
henceforth keep that rapier in its scabbard. Poetrynot just any poetry but some of the earliest and most
venerable verse of the Western canon, supposedly composed by the Ur-Bard King Davidhas saved the
life of poet and playwright Ben Jonson. He will live on until 1637, will continue to write poems and plays
prolifically, will become a favorite within the court of King James I, and his peers will regard him as a
writer second only to Shakespeare.

This scene Ive conjured is, I admit, a bit Hollywood-sy, and one can imagine it in a
Ben Jonson biopic, where a pretty-boy actor of the pompous hack varietyJames Franco, say, or Mark
Wahlbergplays Jonson, somberly intoning the psalm, which for dramatic purposes will be edited down
to about a fifth of its actual length. Its also worth wondering what Jonson thought of the Coverdale Bibles
rendering of the psalm. Let me further speculate that even as he was delivering the speech of his lifetime,
Jonson was going over the lines in his head and thinking, I can do better than that. Sure, the poetry of the

Coverdale Bible is serviceable, but only just so, and the version of Psalm 51 which appears in the King
James (published in 1611, over a decade after Jonsons trial and acquittal) is superior in several respects.
The sinning speaker of the Coverdale version rather prosaically enumerates both his own failures and the
largesse of the Almighty. The phrasing is bland and theres little thought given to the languages rhythms or
rhetorical possibilities. Compare the opening few lines of the Coverdale to these from the King James:
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender
mercies blot out my transgressions.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when
thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.
Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
The emphasis in the Coverdale is largely upon the sinners abjection, which may indeed befit the language
required of a neck-verse, but not that of poetry. The King James, in contrast, underscores the mysterious
serendipity of receiving divine forgiveness: its no accident that a phrase such as tender mercies is found
with such frequency in modern English, or that we think of lovingkindness as the most deeply profound
sort of generosity. (The Coverdale employs this word elsewhere but misses a wonderful opportunity to
insert it into Psalm 51.) Mind you, it is also possible that Jonson could have recited a version of the psalm
done in rhyme and meter. Many poets of his day were attempting this, most notably Jonsons
contemporary, Philip Sidney, who had set out to render all of the psalms in received form. Upon Sidneys
death in 1586, hed finished only forty-three of them, but the project was completed by his sister, Mary
Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Although what has come to be called the Sidney Psalter was not
published until the nineteenth century, copies of it were circulating in manuscript, and Jonson may have
encountered it. But if Jonson used Lady Herberts version in his performance, I suspect he would have
done it for comic effect, for her rendering is unabashedly dreadful, not least because it replaces the
abjection of Coverdale with something amounting to sadomasochism. The following quatrain suggests the
spirit of the translation: For I, alas, acknowledging doe know / My filthie fault, my faultie filthiness / To
my soules eye uncessantly doth show / Which done to thee, to thee I doe confesse. What an irony that in
the only case I know of in which a life was literally saved by poetry, that it was likely saved by indifferent
poetry.
I suspect, dear reader, that you have already guessed what comes next. Because I am a poet, and because
poets are fond of metaphor, you have every right to expect that I will now offer up examples of how poetry
can figuratively save ones life. Here, though, Im on more shaky ground, insofar as when a person asserts
that a poem, a song, a novel or a dance performance saved her life, we want to take that person at her word.
Of course we never can: Rescues at sea by the Coast Guard are dramatic and quantifiable. Having your life
saved by Jeff Buckley whispering and keening his astonishing cover of Leonard Cohens Hallelujaha
song whose life-saving properties have been attested to so often that an entire book has been more or less
devoted to the subjectis a claim we have to take on faith. In preparing this talk, I sought to find examples
of some poems that saved their authors life, both figuratively and literally, or with such figurative
persuasiveness that the poem may just as well have literally saved its authors life. But I have to report that

my list of poems which perform this task is a very short one, and of course none of the poems on my list
are quantifiably lifesaving. Here is a poem which comes close:
The Idea of Ancestry
1
Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grandfathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.
I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).
I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say). Hes discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space. My fathers mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbodys birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."
2
Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown
hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric
messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr / like a salmon quitting
the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birthstream / I
hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my pocket and a
monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks.
I walked barefooted in my grandmothers backyard / I smelled the
old
land and the woods / I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the
men /
I flirted with the women / I had a ball till the caps ran out
and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother
and split / my guts were screaming for junk / but I was almost
contented / I had almost caught up with me.
(The next day in Memphis I cracked a croakers crib for a fix.)
This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when
the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk/
and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them,

they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children
to float in the space between.
The author of this poem is Etheridge Knight, who died in 1991. He was a poet of gravity and passion, very
well regarded in the 1970s and 80s, but sadly underread today: you can find his work in the first edition of
the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetrythe book that for better or for worse sets the poetry industrys
standard for who is hot and who is notbut hes been dropped from subsequent editions, and only one of
his several superb books remains in print. Perhaps some of Knights neglect has to do with the fact that his
poetry was always rather reductively labeled. As you can surmise from the poem, he wrote it while serving
time in prison. Hed been given an eight-year sentence to the Indiana State Prison, on the charge of armed
robbery, and his first collection, Poems from Prison, appeared shortly after his release from jail in 1968. So
those with a passing knowledge of Knights work are apt to call him a prison poet, a faintly
condescending term that bespeaks a kind of noveltysomeone serving a sentence for armed robbery
wrote that? Knights work has also been somewhat inaccurately linked with the aesthetic of the Black Arts
movement, the dominant school in African American poetry in the late 60s and early 70s. Amiri Baraka
and Sonia Sanchez are among the best-known poets associated with the movement, who in the words of
critic Charles Rowell asserted the right to commit their art to Black Americas political, social, and
economic struggles. This commitment tended to create a poetry based more on ideology than on the
character portraits and self-reckoning that characterize Knights best verse. In The Idea of Ancestry there
are self-reckonings aplenty. And they are deeply fraught ones. Some obviously stem from the poets guilt at
being separated from an extended family for whomas with so many African American families in the
century and a half since the Emancipation Proclamationto possess and record a detailed family
genealogy is an act of necessity and piety (and no easy one when the only record of the existence of many
of your forebears can be found in slaveholders account books that record the acquisition and sales of
human chattel.) The grandmothers scrupulous entries in the family Bible, and her decades-long concern
for the disappeared uncle are seen by the poet as a kind of sacramental activity. And clearly the poet,
separated as he is from his family and its annual reunions, and suffering the guilt from his unsuccessful
attempt to kick his drug habit before his visit to the family, has come to see the importance of his familial
community in a way he never has before. He does not want to follow in the path of his disappeared uncle,
and his act of fetishistically taping the 47 pictures of family members to his cell wall is itself a
sacramental act, akin to the grandmothers custodianship of the family Bible.
The poems emphasis on the grandmothers Bible and the family photographs suggests that the function of
the poem is meant to be their equivalent. The family is kept alive, and thus the poet, through his act of
writing, is kept alive as well. The poem ends with the poet bemoaning his incarceration, but he has also
been offered an epiphany: I pace my cell or flop on my bunk / and stare at 47 black faces across the space.
I am all of them, / they are all of me. I make no claims to say even provisionally that The Idea of
Ancestry saved the life of Etheridge Knight, but Knight himself likely did. In a short biographical
statement, Knightwho served in the army and was wounded in the Korean warsummed up his life this
way: I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison
sentence and poetry brought me back to life. After his release from prison, Knight went on to a successful
career as a poet. He received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and taught at several universities, among
them Pittsburgh, the University of Hartford, and Lincoln University. Knights resurrection through poetry
was not an unalloyed successhis struggles with drugs continued for the rest of his life. But Knight was a
man of charm and immense generosity, as I can attest from having for a short time been his student. (By
the way, he once told me that the weapon he used in the robbery that sent him to prison was a toy gun.)

So, dear reader, a poem can, in some extremely rare situations, save ones life. But as
these situations are so very rare, you have the right to ask what sort of other functions poetry can perform.
After all, contemporary poetry is endlessly accused, even by many poets themselves, as a marginal
activity, a cultic endeavor that puts it on a par with people who attend Star Trek conventions or engage in
Civil War reenactments. And make no mistake, dear reader, there are quite a few instances of poetry not
saving your life, but shortening it considerably or simply making you miserable. The great British
Romantic poet John Clare, after his poetry career had tanked, was condemned to live the second half of his
relatively long life in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. (He once opined to a visitor: Literature
destroyed my head and brought me here.) And when the word got out that the greatest of modern Russian
poets, Osip Mandelstam, had written a scurrilous epigram about Stalin and recited it at a party, Stalin
himself eventually found out. And in a story that is probably apocryphal but characteristic of Stalins brutal
sense of humor, the dictator supposedly phoned Mandelstam and asked him for a recitation of the poem.
Imagine Mandelstams fright at this moment; the most ruthless man in the world is asking him to intone a
piece which notes that Uncle Joes famous mustache is in fact made of huge laughing cockroaches, and
that he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. At any rate, the epigram was the cause of
Mandelstam spending several years in internal exile, to be followed by a sentence to the Gulag. He was last
seen in 1937, scavenging a prison camp garbage heap in search of food.
So what, then, is salutatory about poetry if it can only save your life in the rarest of circumstances? One
glib answer would be that readers may find some poems entertaining. I suspect that the number of
limericks set down during any given year vastly outnumbers the number of Miltonic sonnets. Besides, ours
is a culture in which we have entertainments aplenty, ones that entertain in no small measure because they
offer immediate gratification. Good poems rarely offer immediate gratification, at least not in the way that
this term is regarded in contemporary society. After all, poems are not meant to be read as much as to be
reread. I doubt if even the most stalwart fans of TV shows such as Survivor or Jersey Shore ever find
themselves watching reruns of this fare: a single encounter with such a program is usually more than
enough. But the pleasure and instruction I derive from a sonnet such as Robert Frosts Design, which I
surely have read hundreds of times and have taught on scores of occasions, is a satisfaction that has no
shelf lifeeach time I read the poem new vistas and interpretive surprises confront me. The poem beguiles
and, given its grim content, also terrifies me, and does so each time I encounter its fourteen lines of bile
and wonderment. But the pleasures derived from this poem, and other great poems like it, derive from hard
interpretive work. One has to practice to make sense of genuine poetry, just as a speed skater must practice
in order to qualify for the Olympics. So, to be honest with you, it must be said that poems have little
entertainment value in the commonly understood sense of the term.
But they can help you to endure your life, even when they most emphatically cannot save it. Witness a
poem Id like to discuss by Hungarys greatest modern poet Mikls Radnti, who lived from 1909 until
1944. As a stylist, Radnti was something of a shape-shifter, a prolific writer who managed to, on the one
hand, introduce surrealism and a particularly fluent sort of free verse to Hungarian poetry and, on the other,
excel in strict meters and rhyme schemes, and to deftly modernize venerable classical forms such as the
eclogue. But his death was hastened by something that surely also hastened the death of Mandelstam
Radnti was a Jew. With the outbreak of World War II, Hungarys fascist government aligned itself with
the Nazis, enacted anti-Semitic laws, and became an Axis puppet state. From 1940 onward, Radnti was
conscripted to serve on various forced-labor details, often performing tasks thought too dangerous for

regular troopsclearing minefields, for example. By 1944, as the Nazis faced defeat, conscripts such as
Radnti came to be seen as superfluous. So the poet was shot, and his body thrown into a mass grave.
What makes his story more than simply another of the tens of millions of tragedies connected to the
Holocaust is this: after Radntis body was exhumed, a small notebook containing seventy-two poems was
discovered in the poets raincoat. This work was subsequently published by Radntis widow, Fanny, in
1946. Forced March, the poem which I present here, was among those poems, and is above all a love
poem to Fanny. But it is also a powerful testament to the endurance of the spirit and the imagination even
in situations of incomprehensible duress.
Forced March
Youre crazy. You fall down,
stand up and walk again,
your ankles and your knees move
pain that wanders around
but you start again
as if you had wings.
The ditch calls you, but its no use
youre afraid to stay,
and if someone asks why,
maybe you turn around and say
that a woman and a sane death
a better death wait for you.
But youre crazy.
For a long time now
only the burned wind spins
above the houses at home,
Walls lie on their backs,
plum trees are broken
and the angry night
is thick with fear.
Oh, if I could believe
that everything valuable
is not only inside me now
that theres still home to go back to.
If only there were! And just as before
bees drone peacefully
on the cool veranda,
plum preserves turn cold
and over sleepy gardens
quietly, the end of summer bathes in the
sun.
Among the leaves the fruit
swing naked
and in front of the rust-brown hedge
blond Fanny waits for me,
the morning writes
slow shadows
All this could happen!
The moon is so round today!
Dont walk past me, friend.
Yell, and Ill stand up again!
The privations described here defy the imaginationexhaustion, starvation, brutality. It is no wonder that
early in the poem the speaker wants simply to let go and die ignominiously in a ditch. But the memory of
his beloved exerts a powerful counterforce to this impulsesay that / a woman and a sane death
a
better death await you. The poet in fact seems to literally die as the poem unfolds, only to be resurrected
by his fantasy of home and of his museblond Fanny waits for me. She is Dantes Beatrice, Petrarchs
Laura; she is both Clio, the muse of history, and Mnemosyne, the muse of memory. And the poem ends
with the speakers certainty that her intervention will resurrect him. He will rise from the ditch, as surely as
Lazarus from his crypt. Left for dead, he will cry out to his companions, be pulled up by their sturdy
hands, and live once more. He will crawl the field of land mines, zigzag the labyrinth of barbed wire and
bomb craters, all in the hope of reuniting with Blond Fanny. That this fantasy is understood by the poet to
be unattainablewhat John Webster called a vain poetrymakes it no less poignant. Without that
notebook, Radnti would surely have been a goner long before a Wehrmacht corporals bullet entered the
back of his skull, and his body teetered forward into the ditch.

This poem fills me with awe, and to use it as a means to traffic in clichs about the
indomitability of the human spirit does it a great injustice. The poem leaves me awestruck because it is
tragic, but just as importantly it moves me because it alludes to experiences deeply tangible and at the
same time deeply mysterious. There is a home to come back to, a place of pastoral wonder where plum
preserves turn cold / and over sleepy gardens
quietly, the end of summer bathes in the sun. / Among the
leaves the fruit swing naked. All great poems, it seems to me, must reckon with the tragic, but they must
also reckon with mystery. How should we seek to comprehend the militantly incomprehensible enigmas of
creation? The great Polish poet Czesaw Miosz insists in one of his early poems that we must ask to
understand them not out of sorrow, but in wonder. Poetry may not save your life, but it surely can enable
you to understand how the wondrous and the sorrowful must inevitably commingle. Let me use, by way of
example, a poem by Thomas Hardy that I cannot imagine living without, a poem that is completely
inscrutable, immensely melancholy, and at the same time so lucid as to be self-evident.
During Wind and Rain
They sing their dearest songs
He, she, all of themyea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss
Elders and juniorsaye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat. . . .
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all
Men and maidensyea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of themaye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs. . . .

Ah, no; the years, the years;

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
Hardy wrote many remarkable poems, many flawed but interesting poems, and many poems that are
overwhelmed by their flaws. But his greatest poems are utterly original thanks to the inventiveness of their
strategies, their quirky verse forms, and their radical tonal shifts. And they can be
compellingly strange while at the same time having the descriptive acuity and narrative breadth that
characterizes Hardys fiction. During Wind and Rain is my favorite poem by Hardy, and it beautifully
exemplifies all of the salutatory characteristics I have listed above. What are we to make of the poems
abiding weirdness on the one hand, and its utter tonal and prosodic control on the other? We have no clear
sense of who is speaking in the poem, but he has a capacity to exquisitely evoke moments of visionary
intimacya family singing, a family gardening, a family breakfasting outdoorswhile at the same time
offering Cassandra-like warnings that such bucolic moments are invariably fleeting. And yet these
warnings are offered in a tone of astonishment, as if the speaker himself cannot quite bear his
understanding of how final our fates shall be: Ah, no; the years, the years; How the sick leaves reel
down in throngs! And what is the relationship between the speaker and the group he is describing? We are
never told, although we sense that a family saga is unfolding, a story of upward mobility of the sort we see
so often in Victorian novels. After all, they change to a high new house and the brightest things are
theirs. But it all ends in the boneyard, and in a final line that I would go so far as to say is one of the most
remarkable in English verse: Down the carved names the rain-drop ploughs. Its a prosodic tour de force:
the line is composed almost entirely in spondees, and the spondaic movement is so relentless that we find it
hard to read without almost involuntarily placing an accent on the second syllable of carved. And the
image of the rain ploughing into the gravestones names is, like so much of the rest of the poem, both
delicate in its precision and unspeakably brutal. Clearly, During Wind and Rain is not the sort of poem
youd choose to recite at a friends wedding: its not a poem one can love. But my astonishment at the
poem grows each time I read it. Poetry may not save your life, but it has the means to render wonderment
and awe in ways that are different from that of any other art form.
This function of poetry is one of no small importance, but I worry, ladies and gentleman, that I have at the
same time painted myself into a corner, for I have yet to make a strong argument for poetrys ability to
save ones life, save to claim that sometimes it can, but only sort of. Instead, Ive told you poetry can, as in
the case of Mandelstam, quite literally get you killed. It can help you to endure traumas and privation, as it
did for Miklos Radnti, but so can Xanax, Zoloft, and a couple shots of Makers Mark on ice. Ive told you
it can entertain you, but only in rather specialized and esoteric ways, ones that are not for the most part
amusing. Ive told you, by way of the example During Wind and Rain, that poetry can inspire awe and
wonder, but so can a view of the Grand Canyon. I also made a promise, when I agreed to presenting this
talk, that I would try to find some examples from my own life and work that addressed my topic. But if
poetry cant, generally speaking, save your life, and if most of us would rather down a couple of stiff ones
than read translations of Radnti, or if wed prefer to marvel at the fact that we have paid several hundred
dollars to sit with 50,000 others in a football stadium to be assured that the tiny spotlit reptilian figure
onstage with a Gibson strapped on his scrawny shoulders indeed is Keith Richardsand he seems to be
more or less ambulatory!then what, finally, is poetrys ultimate value, and how can I draw from my own
life to help to answer this question?

Here is my answer: The primary function of poetry is not salvation, not instruction,
not diversion (even of the most breathtaking variety) but consolation. A poem such as Forced March
allowed Miklos Radnti to endure at least another day of horrific suffering, but even the most heroic
efforts of endurance invariably end in mortality. The purpose of almost all great poems is, fundamentally,
elegiac. Not all great poems are elegies, but nearly all great poems must reckon with the elegiac, whether
the elegiac is approached through a meditation on transience and how fruition invariably leads to decay
and deathas in the case of Keatss Ode to Autumnor whether the poem is a straightforward elegy for
a specific individual, as in the case of Jonsons epitaph to his infant son, which I mentioned at the start of
this talk. The elegiac spirit arrives in many forms in poetry, but the purpose of elegy is above all to
console, and to do so both by seeking to memorialize the departed and to ease the travails of those who
mourn. But it does not end there. Elegies operate within a complex admixture of motivations. Ironically,
the primary audience of a successful elegy is the dead themselves, an audience who cannot hear our
addresses and entreaties.
And while elegies must above all seek to memorialize the dead, their makers cannot help but seek to
memorialize themselves as well. After all, we read Lycidas because it comes from the pen of John
Milton, and not because we care to better know of the life and demise of its subject, Miltons college
buddy Edward King. So the consolation a good poem so often seeks to offer involves those who have
passed before us, those of us who are present and who suffer and mourn, and whatever conception we
might have of a readership and of posterity. This all sounds immensely complicated, but in fact it is not:
Allen Grossman claims that the task of poetry is to preserve the memory of the person. Grossman slyly
declines to identify who that person is, and thus implies that the act of preservation (which, to my mind, is
an act synonymous with consolation) involves writer, reader, the individual being recalled or elegized, and
last but surely not least, humankind in general.
There are times in history, both in our cultural histories and our personal histories, when the task of
preserving the memory of the persona task which poetry may have some special abilities to address
becomes especially urgent. Readers often turned to poetry for consolation in the days following 9/11. And
American poetry of the 1980s and 90s was deeply informed and haunted by the AIDS pandemic. Many
important poems emerged in response to that event, and I would like to discuss with you one that speaks
with special importance to me. It was written by Lynda Hull, who in many ways possessed the most
formidable lyric gifts of all of the poets born in the boomer era. The poem, titled Rivers into Seas,
appears in her third and final collection, The Only World. It is an elegy for a victim of the AIDS plague, the
poets friend Wally Roberts, who passed away in early 1994. The poem is set in his place of death,
Provincetown, Massachusetts, the outermost community on Cape Cod. It is important to mention this
locale, for anyone who has spent a winter on the Outer Cape knows the eerie fog-bound majesty of its
landscape. On winter mornings the divisions between sea and land invariably blur; one seems to dwell in a
liminal place that is neither wholly terrestrial nor wholly nautical. The opening of the poem is an elegant
description of such otherworldliness, and is lush and unsettling by turns.
Palaces of drift and crystal, the clouds
loosen their burden, unworldly flakes so thick
the border zones of sea and shore, the boundless zones
of air fuse to float their worlds until the spirits

congregate, fleet histories yearning into shape.

Close my eyes and Im a vessel. Make it
some lucent amphora, Venetian blue, lip circled
in faded gold. Can you see the whorls of breath,
imperfections, the navel where it was blown
from the makers pipe, can you see it drawn
up from the bay where flakes hiss the instant
they become the bay? Part the curtain. The foghorns
steady, soothing moanwarning, safety, the reeling
home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories
theres this one of the cottage nestled into dune
snowed into pure wave, the bay beyond and its lavish
rustle, skirts lifting and falling fringed in foam.
But Im in another seasonmy friends house adrift,
Wallys last spring-into-summer, his bed a raft,
cats and dogs clustered and were watching television
floods, the Mississippi drowning whole cities
unfamiliar. How could any form be a vessel
adequate to such becoming, the stories unspooled
through the skein of months as the virus erased
more and more until Wallys nimbused as these
storm clouds, the sudden glowing ladders they let fall?
Hull conjures a universe that seems beyond time and beyond form, exquisite but also menacing. And so
intricate as to defy our attempts to give it dramatic clarity: The foghorns / steady, soothing moan
warning, safety, the reeling / home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories. When the speaker
finally focuses upon a specific memory of her departed friend, this too is fraught. They are watching news
footage on television, presumably of the Great Midwestern Flood of the summer of 1993: Wallys last
spring-into-summer, his bed a raft, / cats and dogs clustered and were watching television / floods, the
Mississippi drowning whole cities / unfamiliar. This recollection in turn sparks another story within a
story, further removed into the past. As the next few stanzas unfold, the speaker finds herself recalling
another flood story, related by a former husband, an immigrant from China, and told in a halting
monotone.
scarlet watermarks,
the Sinkiangs floodtides murky brown, the village
become water, swept away. Three days floating on a door,
his sister, the grandmother weaving stories endless
beneath the waxed umbrella canopy shes fashioned,
stories to soothe the children wrapped in the curtain
of her hair, to calm the ghost souls blurred lanterns.
How rats swam to their raft, soaked cats, spirits
she said, ghosts held tranced by the storied murmurous
river
What binds these narratives? Perhaps it is only that they so acutely represent our helplessness before the
forces of nature and what Richard Hugo called the inescapable drone of our mortality. But how does the
poet fashion from such a desolate realization something which serves as adequate memorial for her friend,

and a respite from her own grief? The next few stanzas of the poem pose this question in several ways, and
every answer, no matter how fluently expressed, seems provisional: And isnt it so / were merely vessels
given in grace, in mystery, / just a little while, our fleet streaked moments? How to cipher where one life
begins and becomes / another? But the final stanzas of the poem do seem to result in a resolution. The
speakers relentless interrogations cease.
Part the curtain and heres my voyager
afloat, gentle sleeper, sweet fish, dancer over
water and hes talking, laughing in
that great four-poster bed he could not leave
for months, a raft to buoy his furious radiant soul,
if I may so hazard to say that? Yes,
there was laughter, the stories, the shining dogs
gold and blackhis company. Voyager afloat
so many months, banks of sunflowers he loved spitting
their seeds. Tick. Black numerals on the sill.
A world can be built anywhere & he spun, letting go. . . .
The last time I held him, the last time we spoke, just
a whisperhoarsethat marries now this many-voiced mansion
of storm and from him Ive learned to slip my body,
to be the storm governed by the law of bounty given
then taken away. Shush and glide. This tides running
high, its silken muscular tearing ruled by cycles,
relentless, the drawn lavish damasksteal, aquamarine,
silvered steel, desires tidal forces, such urgent
fullness, the elaborate collapse, and withdrawal
beyond the drawn curtain that shows the secret
desert of bare ruched sand. Ive learned this,
Ive learned to be the horn calling home
the journeyer, saying farewell. And heres
the foghorns simple two-note wail,
mechanical stark aria that ripples
out to shelter all of us
our mortal burden of dreams
adrift in the seas restless shouldering.
What knowledge can the dead impart to us? Only the stark understanding that each death we are witness to
must be a rehearsal for our own deaths: and from him Ive learned to slip my body, / to be the storm
governed by the law of bounty given / then taken away. Yet this knowledge does not leave us
inconsolable, if only because of the exquisite lyric grace to which the final passage of the poem
aspires. The purpose of poetry is to preserve the memory of the person. Through the alchemical properties
of language, properties which Lynda Hull controlled with unerring refinement and expertise, the dead are
countenanced.

This poem was finished in the winter of 1994, twenty years ago, almost to this day. It
was the last poem Lynda Hull ever wrote. I know this because she read it to me over the phone on the
morning she felt the poem was finished. I know this because Lynda Hull was my wife, and because in the
ten years of our marriage, she and I were always the first readers of one anothers poems. What I did not
know at the time was that in a few weeks Lynda herself would be dead, just short of her fortieth birthday,
that her car would careen off a sleet-slick highway en route from Boston to Provincetown, killing her
instantly. What I did know at the time was that Lynda was in a bad way, and our marriage seemed to have
no future. Lyndas story, like that of Etheridge Knight, is one in which travail alternates with triumph.
Trauma figures in the narrative, as does substance abuse. This is not the place to dwell on Lyndas
biographythe salient details are there in the introduction to her Collected Poems, which Graywolf issued
in 2006, and on the websites of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation. But I will say
that in the winter of 1994 we were living apart, she on the Cape and I in Chicago, and for how long neither
of us knew. Reconciliation seemed unlikely. But every day we talked on the phone. Our last conversation
took place on the afternoon before her death. She was trying again, after more stays in rehab, to stay clean.
Shed found a psychiatrist in Boston whom she trusted, and on that day she had an appointment. She
vacillated about keeping it, mainly because the weather looked bad. But the last few days had been
difficult, and she believed that talking to her shrink might ease her sorrow. She would be leaving for
Boston in a few minutes, and she asked me to do something to cheer her up. I wrote a poem this
morning, I told her. Surely its a bit absurd and self-congratulatory to think that this particular piece of
information might shake a loved one out of abjection, but this information delighted Lynda.
You never write a poem in one sitting, she told meand this was true: most of my poems take a long
while to compose. Read it to me before I leave.
What follows is the poem I read to her. Id written it, in some respects, as a response to Lyndas poem for
Wally, and for Wallys partner, the poet Mark Doty. I wanted it not to be a poem of sympathy, but a poem
of something more intangible and mysterious. Not a poem about mourning, but a poem about how, in time,
we can be relieved of the burden of mourning. Id been reading David Ferrys brilliant translation of the
oldest major poem in existence, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Id marveled not just at the miraculous
circumstances of how the text of the poem had survived on cuneiform tablets unearthed in the ruins of
King Sargons palace in Nineveh, but also at a breathtaking passage in the epic, in which the hero
Gilgamesh travels to the underworld to meet the Lord of the Dead, and asks that the deity resurrect
Gilgameshs great friend and companion Enkidu. But the Lord of the Dead is adamant in his refusal of the
request. The Companion Enkidu is clay, he tells the hero. My poem, which is titled Before the Words,
is about the finality of death, surely, but also about the possibility, however unlikely, however
serendipitously, of something like rebirth. Much of the language of the poem is archaic, for to employ such
language felt befitting of the subject matter. Thus the word selaha term found often in the Old
Testament.Selah is sometimes translated as amen, but it more accurately seems to be a kind of
interjection within a text. Consider it a way of saying pay attention or stop and listen closely.
Before the Words
for Mark Doty
The companion Enkidu is clay. Sharp March dawn

at my study window, at my view of twenty-seven

budless lakefront elms. By May the water vanishes,
blurred green, embowered, lost beyond
the fat arc of the leaves. The companion Enkidu is clay
and not even the godlike Gilgamesh
shall retrieve him from the world below.
I set the book down, to the white cats
white-noise purr, and half a continent away
my friend wakes alone, to Cape lights blue-glass sheen,
and one more morning beyond his lovers death.
There the dogs nails click the wooden floor
and the sun through the curtains
in the hypnogogic dawn begins
its etches and erasuresnightstand, dresser,
photographs, ox-eye daisies in a fluted jar.
The bright diagonals lap the room. Is this
how the day prepares its naming, the hesitant tongue
to the gateway of the mouth?
Before the words can be inscribed
they issue from the throat, and song of a kind is invented,
a crumbling harp from the burial pits at Ur,
to testify first to lamentation.
From the throat to the tablets, crosshatched
to point the way, crosshatched in clay and baked
in Euphratian sunlight. The voice
raised first in lamentation, and the voice
entombed, seven hundred generations buried.
But also the voice reborn, its dry bones ablaze.
To cleanse the tablets with a fine horsehair brush
selah. To photograph by silver emulsion
the excavation where theyre piled selah. Burnooses
of the grinning Fellaheen. To sort the lamentation
onto wooden crates, catalogued and labeled,
hoisted on a river barge for Baghdad, its sky
a hundred years from the black, infernal poppy heads
of antiaircraft fire, elided wail of siren
selah. Istanbul, then London selah or Berlin.
A basement room, the lamentation shuffled

under gaslamps. The sudden pince-nez glint

as Herr Von Dobereiner rubs his eyes,
the inkwell dipped, the letters molten
on the notebook page, unscrolling as the cry
emerges selah from its clay. The Elamite,
the Hittite and the proto-Babylonian,
and the cry as it hovers and its music sweetens.
And the lamentation selah fills the pages,
fills too oh lord the vaulted caverns of the world
below. The companion Enkidu is clay.
Selah selah selah. The tablets have been broken
and the tablets now shall be restored.
I like that, Lynda told me. It makes me happy to know you wrote it. We spoke a few minutes longer,
about what I cant remember. It was Tuesday, the 29th of March. The year was 1994.
The poet who in some ways I regard more highly than all others, C.P. Cavafy, reportedly said this: If
poetry is not remission, then lets not expect mercy from anything. That statement once filled me with
wonder. Now, Im not so sure. I sometimes think that uncertainty began at the end of March, twenty years
ago. But thanks to my friend Cynthia Huntington, I encountered a statement about poetry that I can
unequivocally endorse. It comes from John Berger, whose powers of observation and awareness of the
intricate relationship between observation and politicsamong other thingsis unparalleled in recent
literature.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending to the wounded, listening to the wild
monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy
reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it
had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The
promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which
cried out.
That promise, when I allow it to, sustains me, sustains me in a way that may not have saved my life, but
has certainly offered me comfort in a way that is unlike any other kind of comfort, and a comfort that I am
only beginning to understand.
*

About the Author

David Wojahns eighth collection, World Tree, was published by the University of Pittbsurgh Press in the
spring of 2011. His previous collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 19822004 (University of Pittsburgh, 2006) was a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O.B.
Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has received numerous awards and honors,
among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry
Scholarship, and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize. Wojahn teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University
and at Vermont College of the Fine Arts.