I ran up the escalator at the Los Angeles Public Library. When I got to the third floor, I sped through the stacks, searching for 811 — the call number for poetry.
I was looking for a particular poem in a book by that great absurdist heart-wrencher James Tate. I’d been a grad student in one of Tate’s last poetry workshops. I didn’t know this poem. I didn’t even know this book. But when a poet friend recommended it to me, an alarm rang in my mind, sounding through noisy life.
I was poetry deficient.
Pharmaceutical companies depict the depressed person’s day as staticky and silent, gloomy gray, downtrodden and overcast. But at its worst, depression makes my world glare and blare. I want to do everything and nothing. The sun shrieks off stop signs. Bubbles of carbonation in a glass of seltzer are too loud.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), as many as 60 percent of people with anxiety also experience depression. I’m one of those people. Often, I think that’s why I’m a poet. Poetry, perhaps more than other forms of writing, lets me “contain multitudes.” Poetry accommodates — even extols — the refractions and flips of a split mind.
Speaking of splits, the word for splitting an idea or phrase over lines — enjambment — comes from the French verb for “to stride over.” Striding over my triggers (i.e., escapism) is never my express aim in reading poetry, and yet it’s a noticeable effect of being mesmerized.
When I read Tate’s poem in the library that day, the world calmed down. For a moment, I was clipped out of the capitalist cityscape. For a moment, I wasn’t thinking about work or bills, or being a player in the gamified attention economy of the internet. The poem cost me nothing; it didn’t beg a retweet or like. I read it while walking on campus (and collided with a bike rack). Then I read it again. As I drove toward the freeway, I had to stop myself from reading the poem at each red light.
A near physiological urge brought me to the poem, a mark of my faith in poetry: not as a genre but a perspective. I read it, and I needed to read it again.
Now I pick up that particular book and have the same reaction: full body goosebumps. That invisible shiver the French call frisson. The body’s response reminds me of what George Steiner writes in Real Presences:
The meanings of poetry and the music of those meanings, which we call metrics, are also of the human body. The echoes of sensibility which they elicit are visceral and tactile.
Yoga, tai chi, meditation — activities rooted in visceral, tactile sensibilities are such commonly prescribed mental health aids that those pharmaceutical companies often feature beaming downward-doggers in the “cured-or-at-least-feeling-better” segments of their ads. Body scans — rolodexing from toes to nose, tuning into the sensation living in your bits and parts — are another homegrown practice for managing stress. And there it is, a word reminding me of another word, another gift from poetry. Stress begets scan, scan like scansion, the act of analyzing the meter of a line of verse, counting each syllable and foot.
Only I hadn’t scanned the poem. My husband’s the house prosodist; he can recite “Ode to a Nightingale.” As twitterpating as that parlor trick is, I don’t think memorizing (or meter-mongering, for that matter) is necessary for experiencing a corporeal response to a poem.
Not like it wouldn’t help. Committing a poem to memory, to borrow Steiner borrowing William James, is a way to “ingest” the work. Most poems, after all, are pocket-sized. I could memorize this poem, if I tried — a daffy, devastating prayer.
What does help? Pressing pause on external stimuli for a minute or five. Finding poetry in physical books or literary magazines might be preferable. No retargeting ads, no email chime. For that matter, no tabs — unless you’re the sort of person who dog-ears. Guilty.
Bring your attention to bear on the language of the poem and get primed for “the music of those meanings.” During a body scan, the invisible elbow can be a site of strange beguilement. Read stickily, lingering on areas of the poem where you notice sensation.
Speaking of reading, I like to think of reading a poem silently as feeling it in your brain and reading a poem aloud as feeling it in your heart — almost always, something surprising happens when I speak a poem. Especially by myself.
Another one of my writing teachers liked to say, “Poetry will always be there for you.” The way he said this made poetry seem not only dependable but rebellious, insouciant, and counterculture, a reminder that poetry offers (little to) no monetary value: Poets write novels or memoirs to have their work adapted to film. You don’t read poetry to go to book club or pregame for a new series, and you don’t write poetry to get rich. If I’m being cynical, it’s because I agree with what Stephanie Burt said in her TED Talk: “Poetry helps me want to be alive.”
Several years ago, when I was pregnant, my depression flared up. My mild depression (dysthymia) intensified. I grew apathetic and unable to write; I was often suicidal.
In a brief flash of fortitude, I journaled about what I could do to help myself. Not writing made me feel worthless. And feeling worthless made me feel like not writing. Nothing made sense. I had to break the cycle. What was a small, manageable something to write that didn’t need to make sense? I started writing a poem every night, before bed. The poems weren’t exactly therapeutic — often the poems were more about the movie I’d watched in cinema club than about anything else — but they helped me press pause.
And that’s the crucial thing, the reason to keep poetry in your glove box or your bathroom. To press pause. To enable yourself to go through the portal into another world, where the echoes are not for sale.
Develop enough reverence for an art, and the work can be anything you need it to be. The Tate I’m currently enamored with is a prose poem, complete with setting, characters, and dialogue. It involves dream logic, that askew causality late 20th-century prose poets inherited from the surrealists. Shoulder pains, cancer, dying, mistaken identities, fractured family bonds: It soothes and electrifies me.