poll dance: it’s not easy

by Carolee Sherwood

Kermit said it best: “It’s not easy being green.” It’s hard to be who you are, sometimes, and if who you are is a writer, you face some difficult choices when it comes to writing about intense subjects. What do you share? How much do you share? With whom do you share?

Many topics are considered intimate (not to be shared in mixed company) or private (dirty laundry not to be aired in public). Other topics are simply so edgy or raw it’s challenging to capture them in writing. Often these themes are painful, but that doesn’t have to be the case. It can be just as hard to write a piece in homage or celebration of something particularly personal.

In our poll, we identified some subjects that may be hard to write about. The tricky part of putting them in writing goes beyond the regular fears of disclosure; risk lurks in the necessity of the poem itself (the craft) to deliver. If the form or the language or the metaphors flop, it’s especially obvious in the face of such weighty material.

There are as many ways to handle delicate subjects as there are poets, and we can discover a lot about ourselves as writers by reading other writers. So this poll dance is going to take a different angle than our prior chats. For this discussion, I am offering some examples of poems I found on the very subjects we mention in the poll.

Each poem addresses the subject from a different angle, some shocking, some humorous, some gut-wrenching, some delightful. Each poet exhibits skill and grace. Each reading experience should bolster your own courage as you face the bold life you’re living and seek a voice for the stories you want to tell.

Sex

• “The Elephant is Slow to Mate” by D. H. Lawrence (It begins, “The elephant, the huge old beast, / is slow to mate; / he finds a female, they show no haste / they wait.”)
• “Erotic Energy” by Chase Twichell (It begins, “Don’t tell me we’re not like plants, / sending out a shoot when we need to, / or spikes, poisonous oils, or flowers.”)

Difficult family relationships

• “Be Near Me (link may or may not be working; see note below about technical difficulty at poets.org)” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Naomi Lazard (It begins, “Be near me now, / My tormenter, my love, be near me —”)
• “Brother” by Mary Ann Hoberman (It begins, “I had a little brother / And I brought him to my mother / And I said I want another / Little brother for a change.)
• “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds (It includes the lines, “I want to go up to them and say Stop, / don’t do it — she’s the wrong woman, / he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things / you cannot imagine you would ever do.”)
• “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson (It includes the lines, “My mother speaks suddenly. / That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? / You aren’t getting over him. / My mother has a way of summing things up.”)

Marriage or dating

• “I Married You” by Linda Pastan (“I married you / for all the wrong reasons”)
• “50-50” by Langston Hughes (It includes the lines, “If you had a head and used your mind / You could have me with you / All the time. / She answered, Babe, what must I do? / He said, Share your bed— / And your money, too.”)
• “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” by Galway Kinnell: ” … as now, we lie together, / after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, / familiar touch of the long-married, / and he appears — in his baseball pajamas … “)

Abuse or violence

• “The Body” by Frederick Morgan (It begins, “The body frozen in the lake / rose up again in spring. / It could not be identified / at first, despite the golden hair, / despite the ruby ring. / Its finder could not shake the chill / and suffered sleepless nights.”)
• “When the World Ended as We Knew It” by Joy Harjo (It includes the lines, “Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched / the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry / by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed / by a fire dragon, by oil and fear. / Eaten whole.”)
• “Incident” by LeRoi Jones (It includes the lines, “Pictures of the dead man, are everywhere. And his spirit / sucks up the light.”)
• “The Fearful Child” by Carol Frost (It includes the lines, “I quaked at the sound of my voice whispering, No, /or turned my face to the wall / and wept salt onto my knuckles.”)
• “The Search Party” by William Matthews (It includes the line, “I feared I’d find something.”)

Mental wellbeing or illness

• “Letters from an Institution” by Michael Ryan (It begins, “The ward beds float like ghost ships / in the darkness, the nightlight / above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse / with a little man inside who wears / a sailor cap and tells good old stories/ of the sea.”)
• “Solitude” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (It begins, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; / Weep, and you weep alone;” and ends “But one by one we must all file on / Through the narrow aisles of pain.”)

My body

• Homage to my hips.” (It includes this gem: “these hips are magic hips, i have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top.”)
• Of course, on this subject, you must consider Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric.“
• “Body” by Alissa Leigh (It begins, “Map of terror and pleasure, / ardent junk, passionate congress / filled with the arguments of chemicals.”)
• “Question” by May Swenson (It begins, “Body my house / my horse my hound / what will I do / when you are fallen / Where will I sleep / How will I ride / What will I hunt.”)
• “Washing My Hair” by Anne Stevenson (It includes the lines, “none will know me better when I’m / words on stone / Than I, these creased familiar hands / and clumsy feet.”)

Physical wellbeing or illness

• “Bedside (link may or may not be working; see note below about technical difficulty at poets.org)” by William Olsen (It begins, “Because it turns out the world really is a hospital.”)
• “Mastectomy” by Wanda Coleman (It includes the lines, “forget cool evening air kisses the rush of / liberation freed from the brassiere / forget the cupping of his hands the pleasure / his eyes looking down / anticipating / forget his mouth. his tongue at the nipples / his intense hungry nursing”)
• “His Stillness” by Sharon Olds (It begins, “The doctor said to my father, “You asked me/ to tell you when nothing more could be done. / That’s what I’m telling you now.”)

Death (not in our poll, but still important)

• “Eyes Fastened with Pins” by Charles Simic (It begins, “How much death works, / No one knows what a long / Day he puts in.”)
• “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (about a seemingly terrific guy who kills himself “on one calm summer night.”)
• “The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton (It begins with quote from Vincent Van Gogh and includes the lines, “This is how / I want to die: / into that rushing beast of the night, / sucked up by that great dragon.”)
• “Writing in the afterlife” by Billy Collins (It includes the lines, “I knew I would not live forever, / jumping all day through the hoop of myself. / I had heard about the journey to the other side / and the clink of the final coin / in the leather purse of the man holding the oar.”)

In the comments section, please join me in sharing poems you’ve found to be brave or unique in their handling of difficult subjects.

Remember to honor other poets’ ownership of their words. Small excerpts or short quotes are permissible, but no full texts. When possible, link to the full text on a website that publishes it with permission. My own quest for these poems lead me to The Poetry Foundation and The Academy of American Poets; both sites have databases searchable by theme or subject. (At “press time” poets.org, The Academy site, was experiencing huge problems. Wherever possible we redirected the links to other locations, like poemhunter or Famous Poets and Poems, so you may have to contend with pop-ups or ads the poets.org site generously allows you to avoid.)

Here’s how the poll dance works: We post a poll and let it ride for a week and a half, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the topic and the results. The poll will stand for a few days after that to allow additional participation. The rotation gives each poll two weeks in the white-hot spotlight.