Banner for the Paris Review’s regular online column – Poetry RX
If I break a leg, I’ll go to a doctor. If I break my heart or if the world breaks my spirit, I will go to a poet…… The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy… For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry…..cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to heal it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself.
— Jeanette Winterson from her Website, 2007
from On This the 100th
Anniversary of the Sinking
of the Titanic We Reconsider
the Buoyancy of the Human Heart.
My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told
Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the
iceberg coming?
I did, Titanic said.
And you sailed right into it?
It was love, Titanic said.
And the band just kept playing? And the captain
stayed at the wheel? What did it feel like to swallow
seawater? Tell me, Titanic, how did it feel?
It felt like a hole in my side and then it felt like
plummeting face first into the ice-cold ocean.
She’s a straight talker, the Titanic.
Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie from Alight, August 2013 in Association with Lit Slam
American poet, performer and urban farmer Laura Brown-Lavoie
The healing power of poems! One of my favorite topics. And happily there are many others that agree with me. Have any of you been reading Poetry RX online at the Paris Review? There three poets take turns answering a concerned person’s letter, describing a personal challenge, with a poem! The poets are Kaveh Akbar, Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz. I discovered the Titanic poem excerpted above through Sarah Kay at Poetry RX last year! Thank you Sarah!
American spoken word poet Sarah Kay
Of the three writers and responders at Poetry RX I have known Akbar and Kay but not Claire Schwartz. But in a recent post during the time of Covid-19 on Poetry RX she celebrated a poem by the great Brazilian poet Adelia Prado as translated by the American poet Ellen Dore Watson. That was enough for me to feel I know her now a little better! For a previous blog post I wrote on Prado in 2014 and reposted today please click here.
I first came across Sarah Kay, American spoken word and so-called page poet, through her poem B which she wrote in 2007 . It went viral after she performed it during a Ted Talk back in 2011. A free-moving mother poem. A praise poem letter by a woman to a not-yet born child and inside the poem a praise poem to that woman’s mother. A passing on of a mother’s wisdom to a daughter and from that daughter to her daughter to be. Instead of Mom, she’s going to call me point B./ because that way she knows no matter what happens,/ at least she can always find her way to me!
Just a little more than a year ago on March 14th, 2019 Sarah responded on Poetry RX to a letter by a woman feeling the impending loss of a her lover who was moving away based on a plan he made before they met. The woman was overwhelmed by this impending huge loss and the uncertainty of what would happen to their relationship. Sarah responded with a poem from 2013 by spoken-word poet and urban farmer, Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie. To hear Laura perform the poem please click here.
The Titanic through Laura’s voice is one great counsellor! She seems to echo the great Buddhist teach Pema Chodrun who talks a lot about living with uncertainty and staying inside discomfort! Not trying to get back up to the surface right away to use Laura’s metaphor! I have been caught under a waterfall unable to breathe so I know this advice can seem terrifying! And Laura’s one-of-kind description of the human heart, the music and energy and declarative in that description! And these stunning lines: There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with/everyone you’ll ever love. I have discovered the truth of this , too! My two divorce sinkings made me feel I would never resurface. But I did. And I have more ballrooms in me than I ever knew!
The trouble with you humans is that you are so
concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged
open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves.
You’re not a boat, you can go under and come
up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard
kicking legs.
And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that
floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable,
though it is sinkable. Embark, embark.
There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with
everyone you’ll ever love.
That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying
next to her on the ocean floor.
There are enough ballrooms in you.
Sarah calls this poem one of her all time favorites. And I get it. For one thing the metaphor is so wonderfully outrageous. Chatting to a sunken ship that represents loss in so many ways! Titanic as a grief counsellor. And in spite of its sunken state, Titanic giving the human who came down for a chat a big dose of hope! Reminding her of human buoyancy! Of coming back to life from Loss! Not a bad theme this day after Easter Sunday with the theme of resurrection in the Spring air! Now, Laura’s poem:
On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart. What’s wrong? Titanic asked me this morning, when she found me lying on the ocean floor with all my suitcases strewn open. Oh, I dunno, I moaned, I was looking through National Geographic and saw some pictures of you, and thought I might come and chat. You looked great, by the way, in the pictures. Me? No. Titanic smiled. If anything I seem to have become a Picasso. and I have a beard. It was true; she looked more like a collage of a ship. Strangely two dimensional, in a crater of her own making: French doors, boilers, railings every which way. And she did have a bit of a beard-rust icicles hanging in red strands from her iron engines. Sitting up in my own little crater, I sort of blushed. To be honest, I told Titanic, My honey’s leaving town soon and I’m afraid it’s gonna wreck me, so I dove down here. Well come on in, Titanic said, but I’m not sure I’ve got what you’re looking for. So in I climbed, through a window between two rust stalactites, and began to pace her great promenade. (Which should have been awesome, by the way—walking by the ghosts of all those waving handkerchiefs—except that I was in that feeling-feeling-sorry for-yourself state where every hallway is the hallway of your own wretched mind, every ghost your own ghost, so I didn’t take a good look around.) When I got to the Turkish baths, I sat on the edge of a barnacled tub and watched weird crabs scrabble at my feet. I was hoping you’d teach me how to sink, I said. You who have spent a century underwater with 1500 skeletons in your chest. I don’t know, said Titanic, I’m kind-of a wreck. Exactly! I said, Me, too! I’m here to apprentice myself to wreckage. I’m here to apprentice myself to you! Great bearded lady, gargantuan ark, you floating hotel. With enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone I’ve ever loved. My heart has an iceberg with its name on it, I told Titanic, so I need your advice. Tell me, did you see the iceberg coming? I did, Titanic said. And you sailed right into it? It was love, Titanic said. And the band just kept playing? And the captain stayed at the wheel? What did it feel like to swallow seawater? Tell me, Titanic, how did it feel? It felt like a hole in my side and then it felt like plummeting face first into the ice-cold ocean. She’s a straight talker, the Titanic. Alright, I said. Now let’s talk about rust. When my love leaves, I’m planning to weep stalactites from my chin. I will wear my sadness in longs strands. Like you, I will be bearded by it. Then I made a terrible noise. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrkkkkkkkkkkk! I’ve been practicing the sound of wrenching metal, I told her, for when my love leaves. But you aren’t made of metal. Titanic said to me. I’m a writer, I said, I could be made of anything. Well then, be a writer. She said. Be a writer? I paused, anemones between my toes. Okay. When my love leaves I’ll start with SOS. I will Morse code odes as the whole world goes vertical. I will write nosedives as my torso splits in two. And the next day I will write the stunned headlines, and the next day I will write the obituaries, and the next day I will write furious accusations, and the next day I will write lawsuits, and the next day I will write confessions of my wrongdoing, and the next day I will write pardons, but i won’t really mean it, and the next day i’ll write sonnets, but they won’t fit the schema, and the next day i’ll write pleas, please, please come back. The next day I will write epitaphs, navigation maps, warning for future generations about the hubris of human love. I will write quotas and queries and quizzes, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense, I will write nonsense all the way down and no diving teams will find me, no robot arms will retrieve me in pieces. never will I be reassembled in plain air. No, I will remain whole, two miles down, with my suitcases strewn open, and in 100 years I will still be writing about this feeling, though my heart be a Picasso, though my heart be bearded at the bottom of the sea. The Titanic let me cry for a while, my sobs echoing off her moldy mosaics. Then she said: Girl, you’re too young for a beard like this. You’re never gonna get some if you rust over now. I sniffled a little and scratched my name into the green slime of the tub. The trouble with you humans is that you are so concerned with staying afloat. Go ahead, be gouged open by love. Gulp that saltwater, sink beneath the waves. You’re not a boat, you can go under and come up again, with those big old lungs of yours, those hard kicking legs. And your heart, she said, that gargantuan ark, that floating hotel. Call it Unsinkable, though it is sinkable. Embark, embark. There are enough ballrooms in you to dance with everyone you’ll ever love. That’s what the Titanic told me this morning, me, lying next to her on the ocean floor. There are enough ballrooms in you.
Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie from Alight, August 2013 in Association with Lit Slam