By Dana Henry Martin:
Why do we read and write poetry about trauma?
Like life, death, love, and loss, trauma is a nearly universal experience. Worldwide, seventy percent of us will have a traumatic experience during our lifetime. Thirty percent will have four or more such experiences. Trauma comes in myriad forms. It can touch us at any age, in any place, at any time, and in any culture. There’s a universality to it even as there’s something incredibly personal about it: the way we react to what’s happened, to the unspeakable, the way it shakes and remakes us. In her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), Cathy Caruth says those who experience trauma carry an “impossible history within them,” meaning the burden of a past event or events is overwhelming and unable to be processed, which makes it difficult to integrate the trauma in the present. Trauma can linger like a haunting: fully felt though poorly perceived, poorly understood, at once there and not there, unable to be fully seen or fully eradicated.
Ultimately, we can connect with one another through and against a backdrop of trauma.
That’s where healing lies for ourselves and for each other. We heal our way through trauma by going into it, giving it a shape, contextualizing it, expressing it, moving it from the dark, the unnamable, the immutable out into the open—and onto the page.
Why do poets do this work? In his poem “Why Bother,” (from The Second O of Sorrow, BOA Editions, 2018) Sean Thomas Dougherty gives his answer to that question:
Dougherty beautifully expresses why at least some poets write at least some of the time: to give shared pain a voice, to bring us out of our sense of aloneness within our private experience of suffering.
Have you ever experienced an emotional wound so terrible you thought you had to carry it with you secretly for the rest of your life—but then you see it in the lines of a poem, and it makes those wounded parts inside you stand up and cheer at being recognized? That’s what Sharon Olds's work did for me early on. And Audre Lorde's. And Adrienne Rich's. And Anne Sexton's. And so many more who made a world out of wounds, who threw beauty up against pain, loss, injustice, despair—and against our “little size of dying,” as Anne Carson calls it (from Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, Vintage Contemporaries, 2006).
“When did I become repulsive?” asks Yanyi in his prose poem “Beauty” (from The Year of Blue Water, Yale University Press, 2019). He continues, “Repulsion is a feeling that you can direct to your own body. But someone has to teach you first.”
In just twenty-four words, the poet connects with every reader who’s ever experienced the trauma of self-hatred, self-rejection, or self-loathing. They let readers see that they aren’t alone in having those feelings. They also provide extremely important context about feeling repulsion for ourselves, which is that someone else must teach us to feel that way. That knowledge, that insight, so clearly stated, so clearly lived, is like a supple branch on coarse wood, something new that can grow out and away from what’s hardened: the old way of thinking, the old way of seeing, the old way of feeling. This new branch grows in the direction of love—self-love and self-acceptance—and away from deadened and deadening pain. It may be a small move, but it’s a move. It matters.
Yanyi describes a similar move in his poem “The Kiss” (first published in Memorious), one that is literal and figurative, told partly through the body and party through nature as a body. The poem opens with these lines:
I guided these fires
from a body of islands
burning and unable
to reach each other
These are the disparate internal parts that exist in isolation even though they are all part of the larger body. What guides them is the line that directly follows, “every day of needing,” the connection with someone outside the body, the “sudden heat” that will:
open snow’s first eyelid
to violet iris
and pupal stone
like the sprig of air
between our cheeks
There’s that sprig of new growth that’s possible even after years of living in a body full of islands.
Islands can occur within us when what we tell ourselves is distorted by our trauma. New growth occurs when we unlearn those distortions, and poetry gives us an important tool for unlearning and relearning: metaphor. In her essay titled “Essay on What I Think About Most” (Men in the Off Hours, Knopf, 2000), Anne Carson discusses errors in our thinking and what we learn from them.
Not only that things are other than they seem,
and so we mistake them,
but that such mistakenness is valuable.
Hold onto it, Aristotle says,
there is much to be seen and felt here.
Metaphors teach the mind
to enjoy error
and to learn
from the juxtaposition of "what is" and "what is not" the case.
This insight applies to the errors intrinsic to trauma. Caruth says trauma can’t be located in the original event. Thus, it can never be fully known in the instant in which it occurs. What survivors know is the ways in which it returns to haunt them later on.
The more we work with trauma, and in the case of poets who do so with language, metaphor, rhythm, structure, and other poetic and literary tools at our disposal—the more we can soften that unknown event by finding the errors in how we think about it. That it’s our fault, for example. That we deserved it. That it’s not as bad as what someone else experienced, so our feelings are invalid. That we should feel shame about what happened. We can be groomed and gaslit and confused into not being able to see the event(s) clearly, let alone know how to go about processing them. Poetry can help. Poets can help.
But what about a very different type of trauma, one that originates within the body? The diagnosis of severe chronic illness can be an extremely traumatic event, as can living with a chronic condition. Can poetry help those living with chronic illnesses?
In her essay “Poetry Is How We Heal,” Ashley Asti writes about the medical trauma that can accompany living with or caring for someone with a chronic and degenerative disease such as Parkinson’s. You can feel like your world gets taken over by it, she says:
“But when we write, we can reclaim our stories: I am everything I have ever been, everything I am, everything I will be. I am.”
We can live in our words and the worlds those words create. We can have fewer limitations or none at all. We can remember who we are beyond our constraints, such as the medication regimens, doctor visits, tests, and the other things serious illnesses and diseases foist on us daily. We still are, and we still have a will be ahead of us: in our humanity, in our voices, and in our presence. In her essay, Asti talks about awe. It may seem like a strange thing to couple awe and illness and trauma, as I’m doing in this moment—but it isn’t. I feel awe at those who write about their trauma and teach me through the vulnerability they share, the insights they reveal, and the hope that rings true in their work.
Asti says what awes us most is each other. “What emerged from the lips of those who shared their poems that night awed me,” she writes. “Not because people with Parkinson’s are heroes. Not because they're extraordinary. In fact, precisely the opposite: because, that night, they let their humanity fill the air; they let us see it. Not what it means to live with Parkinson’s, but what it means to navigate this life.”
And what about another form of trauma, one that’s so woven into the fabric of our culture that many of us fail to see it, fail to acknowledge it, and fail to understand that it has profound, life-altering effects? It’s the psychological trauma of experiencing racism and racial discrimination.
In Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), Claudia Rankine shows us what it means to navigate life as a Black person in the United States. Her research for the collection included asking her friends to describe a moment when they were doing something ordinary and suddenly somebody said or did something that made them realize they’d been reduced to the color of their skin. She includes these experiences as well as her own in the collection. Here, she writes of one such moment:
You smell good. You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on
White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to
the right during exams so she can copy what you have written.
Rankine invites us into that microaggression through her poem, so that we are in that classroom. We are in that past. We are part of that childhood. As James Hall observes, we are positioned “… as the body upon which harm is done in micro and macro aggressions.” Even if, as children, we were those engaging in aggressions, here we are—the speaker living or reliving an experience as the child who’s aggressed against.
Rankine’s speaker leads us straight to that moment of aggression:
You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person.
This documenting of trauma, this portraiture of specific moments where racism enters the situation, exposes it, lays bare its effects, allows readers to better understand those effects—to better see them for what they are—and gives voice to everyone who has lived with and endured racism across their lifespan. That’s powerful work for Black and non-Black readers.
Rankine says visual artists are succinctly able to portray how racism hits the body. In Citizen, she achieves the same effect in poetry. Those who live their lives against a backdrop of discrimination see similar experiences represented in Rankine’s work, which is both supportive and validating. Those who haven’t had those experiences can enter into them because of the space Rankine opens up, one that allows for greater understanding and compassion. Rankine deftly communicates about traumas on a personal and social level, brings them home to poetry, where they are, as she writes in Citizen, “reconstructed as metaphor,” and conveys her essential message to everyone: those who are harmed and those who harm alike.
“If survivors retain control over the interpretation of their trauma,” Kali Tal writes in Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (Cambridge University Press, 2014), “they can sometimes force a shift in the social and political structure.” Rankine’s work exerts that control, not only over her own trauma but over shared trauma, the larger chorus of voices that speak through her writing.
What does it mean to navigate this life and address the traumas that accompany it? Or—to pose the question the way Kim Addonizio does in her poem “Therapy,” (from Tell Me, BOA Editions, 2000)—what is it for, “this ordering the noise / the past makes into music”?
What is it for? Maybe Addonizio herself can answer that question. “Therapy” starts with an ominous, punctuated first line: “My brother’s in the house. I close my door.” She voices the experience of familial violence, which enlists time itself in the form of a cuckoo clock keeping track of the physical attack on the speaker that’s underway. The story is being told for readers but also for a therapist, whose response is to nod like a toy, a head on a spring. Readers are the ones who listen more than the therapist does. Readers are the ones who appreciate the ordering of noise into story, into poetry. Addonizio does in the poem what she can’t do in the past, in the therapist’s office, or outside of her writing. Making the story public lets us see through doors that would otherwise be closed to us and lets Addonizio open doors that might otherwise remain closed to her.
Addonizio also invokes doors in her poem “Dream the Night My Brother Dies” (Mortal Trash, W. W. Norton and Company, 2016):
Dream the Night My Brother Dies
Whichever way I turn there is a door.
I run in and out of the doors.
In one room, inconsolable weeping.
In another, a sad animal regards me.
In a third, a hole in the floor.
I lower my bucket
a long way down on its white rope.
These feel like real doors as well as doors to the past and the future: somehow at once representative of the holes blown through us while also serving as portals out of our blown-out pasts. Addonizio’s speaker lowers a bucket into one of those holes with a white rope, which brings to mind something scrubbed clean, something antiseptic—or perhaps the white is a sign of surrender to that past and what we need to understand about it: that the way through is down and in.
Maybe we can’t not lower the rope. Maybe we can’t not order the noise of the past into music.
As Addonizio, Carson, Dougherty, Rankine, Yanyi, and Asti show us, writing about trauma means reconciling impossible histories and impossible situations so we do not become a symptom of our past, present, or future. It means saying I’m here, I matter, this matters, you matter. Here’s what I’ve lived and what I know. Here’s what I’ve lived and what I feel. Here is the beauty in the making and the having made—around the corner, in the line, in the life, on the page, and in the world. Let’s figure this out together because we aren’t alone in any of it. We don’t have to be alone. That’s why we write about our trauma. That’s why we bother.
Notes:
Ashley Asti, excerpts from “Poetry Is How We Heal.” Reprinted with the permission of University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Claudia Rankine, excerpts from Citizen: An American Lyric. Copyright © 2014 by Claudia Rankine. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.
“Dream the Night My Brother Dies,” from MORTAL TRASH: POEMS by Kim Addonizio. Copyright © 2016 by Kim Addonizio. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Essay on What I Think About Most" from MEN IN THE OFF HOURS by Anne Carson, copyright © 2000 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2000 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of Knopf.
Kim Addonizio, excerpts from “Therapy” from Tell Me. Copyright © 2000 by Kim Addonizio. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org.
“Why Bother,” from The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Doughtery. Copyright © 2018 by Sean Thomas Doughtery. Used by permission of BOA Editions.
Yanyi, excerpts from “Beauty,” from The Year of Blue Water. Copyright © 2019 by Yanyi. Used by permission of Yale University Press.
Yanyi, excerpts from “The Kiss.” Used by permission of Yanyi.
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Mad in America, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other journals under the names Dana Henry Martin, Dana Guthrie Martin, and M Ross Henry. They are a poet, weaver, and musician who advocates for humane, holistic health- and mental-health care and LGBTQIA+ rights. They believe the arts and poetry in particular can heal trauma at the individual and collective levels. Their chapbooks include No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Martin lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Toquerville, Utah.
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