Poetry Can Help Us Live with Death

"Poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that. Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another. Poems are easy to share, easy to pass on, and when you read a poem, you can imagine someone's speaking to you or for you, maybe even someone far away or someone made up or someone deceased. That's why we can go to poems when we want to remember something or someone, to celebrate or to look beyond death or to say goodbye, and that's one reason poems can seem important, even to people who aren't me, who don't so much live in a world of words."

~ Stephen Burt, from "Why People Need Poetry," TED Talk, June 2013 

See also:

• "LIKE: A speculative essay about poetry, simile, artificial intelligence, mourning, sex, rock and roll, grammar, romantic love," by Stephen Burt, The American Poetry Review, January/February 2014 
• "Poetry’s Cross-Dressing Kingmaker," by Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, September 14, 2012

Some Unprotected Desire

Skybox Imaging HD Video of Burj Khalifa on April 9, 2014 (1080p) from Skybox Imaging on Vimeo.

Mergers and Acquisitions
by Edward Hirsch, from The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

Beyond junk bonds and oil spills,
beyond the collapse of Savings and Loans,
beyond liquidations and options on futures,
beyond basket trading and expanding foreign markets,
the Dow Jones industrial average, the Standard
& Poor’s stock index, mutual funds, commodities,
beyond the rising tide of debits and credits,
opinion polls, falling currencies, the signs
for L. A. Gear and Coca Cola Classic,
the signs for U.S. Steel and General Motors,
hi-grade copper, municipal bonds, domestic sugar,
beyond fax it and collateral buildups,
beyond mergers and acquisitions, leveraged buyouts,
hostile takeovers, beyond the official policy
on inflation and the consensus on happiness,
beyond the national trends in buying and selling,
getting and spending, the market stalled
and the cost passed on to consumers,
beyond the statistical charts on prices,
there is something else that drives us, some
rage or hunger, some absence smoldering
like a childhood fever vaguely remembered
or half-perceived, some unprotected desire,
greed that is both wound and knife,
a failed grief, a lost radiance.

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See also: Alfred A. Knopf's Poem-a-Day 2014

There is Always a Gust of Wind Somewhere

Pass On, Poem by Michael Lee from Runner Runner on Vimeo.

Pass On
by Michael Lee

When searching for the lost remember 8 things.

1. 
We are vessels. 
We are rooms.
We are so much less important than the things inside of us.
We are circuit boards
swallowing the electricity of life upon birth.
It wheels through us creating every moment,
the pulse of a story, the soft hums of labor and love.
In our last moment it will come rushing 
from our chests and be given back to the wind.
When we die. We go everywhere.

2. 
Newton said energy is neither created nor destroyed.
In the halls of my middle school I can still hear 
my friend Stephen singing his favorite song. 
In the gymnasium I can still hear 
the way he dribbled that basketball like it was a mallet 
and the earth was a xylophone.
With an ear to the Atlantic I can hear
the Titanic's band playing her to sleep,
Music. Wind. Music. Wind.
If you listen to the wind and don't hear a thousand years of music, you're not listening hard enough.

3. 
The day my grandfather passed away there was the strongest wind, 
I could feel his gentle hands blowing away from me. 
I knew then they were off to find someone 
who needed them more than I did.
On average 1.8 people on earth die every second.
There is always a gust of wind somewhere.

4. 
The day Stephen was murdered
everything that made us love him rushed from his knife wounds
as though his chest were an auditorium
his life an audience leaving single file.
Every ounce of him has been 
wrapping around this world in a windstorm
I have been looking for him for 9 years.

5.
Our bodies are nothing more than hosts to a collection of brilliant things.
When someone dies I do not weep over polaroids or belongings,
I begin to look for the lightning that has left them,
I feel out the strongest breeze and take off running.

6.
After 9 years I found Stephen.
I passed a basketball court in Boston
the point guard dribbled like he had a stadium roaring in his palms
Wilt Chamberlain pumping in his feet,
his hands flashing like x-rays,
a cross-over, a wrap-around
rewinding, turn-tables cracking open,
camera-men turn flash bulbs to fireworks.
Seven games and he never missed a shot,
his hands were luminous.
Pulsing. Pulsing.
I asked him how long he'd been playing,
he said nine 9 years

7. 
The theory of six degrees of separation 

was never meant to show how many people we can find,
it was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.

I found your voice Stephen,
found it in a young boy in Michigan who was always singing,
his lungs flapping like sails
I found your smile in Australia, 
a young girls teeth shining like the opera house in your neck,
I saw your one true love come to life on the asphalt of Boston.

8. 
We are not created or destroyed,
we are constantly transferred, shifted and renewed.
Everything we are is given to us.
Death does not come when a body is too exhausted to live
Death comes, because the brilliance inside us can only be contained for so long.
We do not die. We pass on, pass on the lightning burning through our throats.
when you leave me I will not cry for you
I will run into the strongest wind I can find
and welcome you home.

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See also: "Michael Lee's 'Pass On' and Why Spoken-Word Continues to Matter"by Guante

Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Excerpt from "The Trauma of Being Alive," by Mark Epstein, The New York Times, August 3, 2013:

"I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster. One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us. Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it...

...The willingness to face traumas — be they large, small, primitive or fresh — is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it."

Read the entire essay...

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See also: Epstein, M. (2013). The trauma of everyday life. 

What It Means To Love You After You Are Dead

From Letters of Note, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012:

In June of 1945, Arline Feynman — high-school sweetheart and wife of the hugely influential physicist, Richard Feynman — passed away after succumbing to tuberculosis. She was 25-years-old. 16 months later, in October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife the following love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988. 

(Source: Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman)

October 17, 1946

D’Arline,

I adore you, sweetheart. 

I know how much you like to hear that — but I don't only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. 

It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you'll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. 

But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can't I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the "idea-woman" and general instigator of all our wild adventures.

When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.

I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don't want to be in my way. I'll bet you are surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can't help it, darling, nor can I — I don't understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don't want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you. 

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address.

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Pre-order the Letters of Note book, out May 2013.