Expressions of the Ineffable: How Poetry Might Temporarily Soothe the Void of Permanent Loss

Anyone ever see that annoying saying on Tumblr in around say, 2013?

“There is such thing as good grief”

I know it’s from The Office, but teenage girls took that quote, slapped it on a pastel pink background, added some minimalistic sketches of teardrops on it, and then reposted it after their boyfriend of six weeks named Brandon removed them from snapchat. 

It was literal bullshit! Whoever reposted that clearly hasn’t lost someone close to them. Or maybe they have and know a secret remedy to grief that I evidently missed out on. Six years later and I still can barely get through Thanksgiving without a full mental breakdown. When it happens to you, it seems like everyone wants to talk about it, while you’d rather speak of anything else. When it happens to someone you know, you want to be there for them, and reach out, but you cannot find the line between trying to get them to open up and completely crossing a line. 

Grief is the unfathomable puzzle that surrounds each and every one of us, ebbing and flowing throughout our past, our present, and our future. How does such a universally shared experience feel so idiosyncratic, so intimately personal and impossible to describe? Death is the only certainty in life, the inevitable end of consciousness that constantly lingers around us. Death is a temporary action with infinite influence. We know it is unavoidable, that people must go, with no say over when. Yet here we stand, forever unable to cope. Never fully accepting these absences, a gaping hole forever rests in the heart, pricking the insides of the body on special occasions, or new life milestones, as a cruel reminder of what forever remains missing. Most of us either are already familiar with, or will have to face later on, this inexplicable deficiency. Nevertheless, there has always been a common struggle to express grief to others. So maybe we will never quite agree upon such interpretation of our losses, but we can come to a mutual conclusion that we all must grieve somehow and understand that we all must at some point in our lives, face one of the harshest realities of the human experience. I believe abstract forms of art speak to this paradox of grief, and poetry’s shifting modes of representation alongside its abstract and subjective quality demonstrate a unique approach to portraying our particular coping mechanisms. By doing so, it opens up new spaces, and builds that connection between individual and universal feeling that so adamantly characterizes loss. 

Maybe my own experience with poetry and grief might speak to others, so I will try and justify my thinking here. Recently, I have found myself writing poetry as a means of therapeutic outpour. This might come off as somewhat cheesy, but I find the nonconcrete nature of the composition of a poem, these strings of lyrical phrases strumming out chords of vast meanings, soothing to the soul. They are readily malleable to my peculiar emotional needs. The act of writing a poem simply allows me to pinpoint tiny pieces of my mental puzzle, centering on the minuscule parts to clear the dusty webs that have clouded my mind for ages. Now, poetry isn’t necessarily a new concept; however, I believe I always found numerous reasons to be fearful of actually creating it myself. I have always admired the art form deeply, from Hafez’s voice in my early childhood to my later appreciation for Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, to name a few. I guess to pursue a task mastered by these incredible people felt idiotic, as was the point in even trying. Of course, this is ridiculous. Art is for everyone. To hold back because something wonderful and nearly perfect has already been done is silly. Many people worldwide, from all sorts of backgrounds, write poetry and do so wondrously every day. I guess that’s why it works so well with grief, as poetry represents a similar paradox, it’s pure subjectivity somehow attracts people everywhere in a shared desire to project their voices out into the artistic realm. No poem is quite like another, but poetry itself has been a universal art form since the origins of language. We cannot generalize grief in the same way we can types of poetry, but the endless possibilities of these poetic categories might allow us better opportunity to identify our specific narrative of loss through artistic expression. 

In any case, poetry has allowed me to artistically uncover fragments of my life that I could not conjure into simple phrasing previously. You see, like many others who suffer from the insurmountable loss that follows the death of a cherished love, I can barely speak of it. My mouth tries to perform utterances on the subject but seems to only release air, or worse, tears. I can manage the basics: descriptions of who I lost, when they left, and how the amount of time that has passed since has not changed the sheer depth of my sorrow. Even then, these are only brief tidbits and could never encapsulate how I genuinely feel. I have tried simple prose, writing the facts of grief down in stories and reflection. In these failed attempts to characterize suffering as an unwanted stranger who knocks on your door at the most inconvenient times of the day, I struggled to actually describe my personal experience, the way I interpreted my relationship with death. The specifics of the individual time I spent with grief remained chained inside the prison of despair I built as a false layer of protection from reality’s biting blow. 

Another issue with trying to unite a universal relationship to loss lies in accidental narrative erasure. I don’t want to speak for anyone buy myself, but it seems grief becomes so intensely personal, we forget that when someone dies, many grieve.  Before utilizing poetry, I sought refuge in trying to follow the patterns of my fellow family members that suffered from the same loss, the same tie that once brought us all together. Some of them had actually successfully been able to discover their coping mechanisms through the written word. They rationally explored grief further through an in-depth analysis of their relationships to the deceased. Looking through windows of the past to more clearly witness the present. I was glad to see my close family members finally speaking about the people we lost. 

Unfortunately, I was soon quite discouraged when I realized that this self-discovery made by my immediate family was not enough to help me personally. It seemed their ability to come to terms with this hardship through analytical prose meant cutting my voice from the narrative. The writings showed a story of loved ones slowly perishing with one person as their sole witness, and I was left entirely on the periphery, forced to wonder whether my experience as a child spectating theses painfully gradual deaths meant nothing to anyone but me. It seemed I was not a part of the story of those I had lost, their end of days, and final breaths. It felt as if in order for others to grieve, my absence was essential. 

I do not blame anyone for these circumstances. Yes, the isolation from the narratives that seemed to affect my life so vividly broke my heart. I cannot come to terms with the cold hand that turned me away from what I possibly needed most in my healing process: recognition. Despite this, grief is all too fragile and inconclusive. I have no right to order someone to grieve a certain way, and if that was the best path to their recovery, who was I to rob them of that relief. Thus, I needed to find my own means of output before I turned numb.

Alas, there I was six and ten years later, respectively, still concealing my early life’s tragedies in the same storage unit hidden in my lonely being. How could I possibly explain to someone the very niches of my interpretation of loss? How was I to express the way grief is personified to me through sound, these definite noises appearing randomly throughout the day. I obviously felt I would never be comfortable writing any specific articles because my story has been unconsciously invalidated by other narratives. Even if I could reach that confidence, my views felt too absurd to express analytically or through a story. So, one day, when I heard the wind sound out my grief on West Sands once again, I sat down and wrote a poem. I don’t have a clue whether it’s okay, or artsy, or original. Maybe it’s too cliché or simplistic, or cheesy, or dull. Hell, it might not even make sense. The abstract method opened the space for me to feel. To comprehend the sensations and musical quality of unshakable sorrow. When I read it aloud to myself for the first time, I felt the breath of my own story. The confirmation was there, and I could see with my own eyes the validity of my grief. Through poetry, I allowed myself to speak into existence my own narrative, my intimate sorrow. 

You might be wondering “if you feel so personally connected to poetry, why is it then, you consider it something that speaks to the universal quality of grief?” Again, I think that lies in the abstract nature of a poem, and its endless possibilities. Robert Frost loves to discuss nature and seasons, always comparing the dying leaves of the autumn tree to old age, the cold bite of winter snow to a death closing in. However, winter can easily symbolize hunger, poverty, or cruelty to name a few other things. We determine these symbols based upon our specific perceptions, thoughts, and understandings. Alliteration and rhyme schemes are wonderful techniques that manipulate the way we hear, but our own minds do the most manipulating, as our conscious encounters constantly determine our sense perception, whether we realize this or not. The Road Not Taken might be a regretful choice rather than the reason behind one’s success, despite what readings of this all too famous Frost poem at high school graduations might try to tell you. 

I don’t believe poetry has to have symbolic rules, as long as it fulfills a greater artistic purpose, conveying some abstract thought through lyrical prose. So, when we make a choice to perform this ourselves, we engage with our individual experience. We write these symbols based upon our own thinking, and then engage with the universal experience by sharing our work with others, adding different interpretations each time someone new perceives it. The dialogic capability of the poem is exactly the reason it can accommodate the grief paradox so well. As I cope with my own sense of agony through these stanzas, I have failed yet to appeal to the collective of loss, as I still haven’t decided whether I shall share with you my meek poem, it’s simple wording, it’s unsophisticated rhyme scheme, and its bittersweet tone. The potential is evident, but it seems the choice to prove my own argument here becomes a difficult one, and once more exposes the vulnerability of the mourner, the difficulty of moving past internal experience into a ceaselessly grieving world.

My self-contradictory nature here likely revolves around my inability to voice my trauma beyond my foray into poetics. I still struggle profusely to talk about them, to tell people the story of the two deaths that haunt my life, and forever mold my sense of self. I don’t like to say to people who they were or what my relationship to them was, as when you use simplistic familial labels people tend to assume your closeness before you can express it. They won’t know the deeply special bond you shared, the undying light that beamed from their very souls, that which still guides you through the damp and murky tunnel. These labels seem to lead people to accidentally lessen my connection to the deceased, trying to define the terms of my loss into tangible meaning, and this effort lies at the center of why we fail to unite on such a shared fact of life. These layers seem to take away from the critical fact that I lost the two people most important to me in my life when I was relatively young, only four years apart. 

Thus, poetry seems to accomplish what other forms fail to, validating the existence of grief narratives without setting defined terms, and without a deliberate search for specific meaning. Simply put, poetry sings the melodies and harmonies of a story that I myself cannot, and maybe then, it might comfort the ears of others who still cry as they fail to sleep the pain away, a lullaby specific to each individual, yet one that all can hear. 

___

Artwork by Guglielmo Castelli