SPRING

The loveliest
thing:

a man
moves slowly
through the crush

holding a full
trimmed sheet cake
above his head.

--Susan Hutton

What It Looks Like Here

I was just rereading the brilliant and heartfelt conversation you robots (hello! dear robots! I miss you!) were having awhile back about sentimentality and emotion in fiction. I'm on hold with the insurance company that's taken 6 weeks to decide if I'm eligible, meanwhile I'm paying an arm and half a leg and a few toes for medication I need, dear god do I need it. Anyways, the insurance company is not the point, though in a way it is relevant in the way that it represents the soulless writing that is out there without a soul and lacking souls and stuff. I can't bear to read that stuff--who can?--and do anything to avoid it to the point of wanting to read the saddest possible words with saddest possible music on the record player (Songs: Ohia, anyone?)... just to feel something, already. Lately I've been working on putting together a poetry manuscript for my dear friend who died 2 years ago and came across a spontaneous journal-like passage about not wanting to write sad poems, not wanting to write about death. (Yes, it's striking that she would say such a thing considering what happened--all her poems are like this, eerie and sad and prescient.) It reminded me of a moment in the prison workshop a couple summers ago when one of the inmates asked me why my poems are so dark. I didn't know what to say, though I did know that my poems are often kind of dark, if not expressly so, then suggestively. I'm not such a sad person--I like to think of myself as relatively positive, considering the state of the world--but my default emotion in my poems seems to be sadness, or some sort of grief, something darkly dark. What I'm wondering is--why is this my default emotion? I'm not looking for psychoanalysis, though lord knows it might be helpful. I guess I'm just curious as to whether or not sadness is the easiest thing to approximate in poems and/or fiction, and if it's the easiest thing to respond to, or the easiest emotion we recognize in ourselves and therefore in the writing we read. I too want to weep, sob even, at the end or beginning or anytime in a novel and though it happens less in poems, I think, I gravitate toward the poems that leave me feeling a little hollow or sad... What's interesting here, of course, is that there are many kinds of sadness and sometimes the tears at the end of something are more about the beauty or the happiness or just the depression of having to pick out a new book. Housekeeping is perhaps the most memorable book to have had this effect on me--I was paralyzed for days by it and couldn't put my finger on what was so crushing about it. And perhaps, or of course, that was why it was so moving. BUT there was sadness there... And I'm more often than not crushed or moved by the expression or imagining of that emotion in anything I read than anything else. I'm also interested in what my friend Greta said: She didn't want to write about death. But she did, and so have I and I'm willing to bet we all have, even it's just been in failed attempts that seem sentimental or unreal. And some of us (I include myself among you) feel a little morbid in this sense, fascinated with literal and physical death and the grief that accompanies it. I don't necessarily want to write about death, either, but maybe I could forgo this and be more comfortable with it if I understood my compulsion to do so...