In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 243.
It can be intense and challenging to write—or read—poems that grapple with grief. Even if the poem is its own kind of healing, a successful poem delivers an experience, and when the experience is grief, we feel the pain.
Jericho Brown, in his inimitable way, has spoken about this. In a podcast interview with Lewis Howes, Brown said: “All poetry is going to give back to you is your life. Poetry is about feeling better—you will feel your pain, your anguish better. What poetry asks us to do is to become more human because we can feel those things better. We need that here more than ever…. The poems I love most speak to that which is the joy of my life and that which is the pain of my life...both of those have to be in a single poem.”
I love the truth of what Brown says, and I love the surprise in the way he tells us that you can’t feel better without feeling everything better. Most of us would prefer to feel the good feelings and avoid the suffering. That’s so natural it can seem inevitable. But it doesn’t make for strong poetry. Nor does it make for an enlarged life. My own goal is to become more capacious in both my poetry and my life.
In her autobiographical writings, Virginia Woolf articulates this same idea. She writes about the “shock-receiving capacity” necessary for being an artist—the willingness to see the totality of life, in all its syncopations of grief and gladness, of beauty and brutality, and feel the shock of it all, and make of that shock something that shimmers with meaning.
But how can we write while we’re in shock? How do we write heart-wrenching absence and loss? One strategy that many writers have used is coding.
In a coded poem the source of the pain is not made explicit. If you read an entire book by that poet, you may get a tonal sense more than a narrative sense of the transformations the poet is making. If you read their biography or know their life story, many metaphors, images, and references may become clearer. But without that additional research, you can still understand that the poetry is intentionally or unintentionally speaking in code or “coding” the painful experience in the process of transforming it.
There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson that I think is a brilliant example of the way that, with severe experiences of pain, we sometimes repress the memory so that we can go on. She writes:
There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.
This poem is written in Dickinson’s signature style of short staccato phrases and dashes that break up the sentences in a way that mirrors the fragmentation of severe pain. It’s also striking to me as an extraordinarily succinct and accurate expression of the way dissociation works to make it possible to live through trauma.
I’ve turned to coding in my own writing when I’ve wanted and needed to grapple with an experience but couldn’t address it directly. When telling the story directly would violate someone else’s privacy or disclose something you don’t want to make public, this is an especially valuable strategy. My poem “When You Return” is an example of this.
When You Return
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters unwrite themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the unsplit seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
Through this series of images, I was able to express my longing and the enormity of my loss without revealing who the “you” of the poem is or where or why that “you” isn’t there. It could be that the “you” being addressed has died. It could be an estrangement of any kind. One reader told me she thought it was addressing God. Another thought the speaker was addressing herself as a child. So not only does coding provide an avenue to write indirectly about some situations, but it also has the advantage of leaving a lot of room for the reader to interpret the poem according to their own sensibility or need.
I encourage you to write a coded poem, a poem informed by a painful experience of your own, but in which you don’t directly talk about that experience. You may want to experiment with a staccato, fragmented form and use dashes like Dickinson does to interrupt the poem’s flow. You may want to address an unidentified “you” and express your feelings without revealing the situation as I did. Or you may discover your own form that allows you to explore your grief through coding. Although it may be difficult to approach your suffering in words, the process of feeling everything better, as Jericho Brown says, helps us to be more human and to live a more capacious life.
Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Among her other poetry books are Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002). Her poems appear frequently in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and four Pushcart Prizes. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and jails in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. This Craft Capsule is adapted from her online Living Room Craft Talks. To learn more visit ellenbass.com.
“When You Return” is reprinted from Like a Beggar. Copyright © 2014 by Ellen Bass. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
image credit: Wil Stewart