“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”

Six is my favourite number. It is the number of years between my younger sister and me. It looks like the lovechild of zero and “C”. The only single digit that is divisible by two as well as three, it seems to encompass both even and odd with a swirling, round-bottomed equanimity.

This tadpole, half of a yin-yang symbol, is also the number for idealists. Six years ago today, I counted myself among them when our son was born. I was determined to be the ideal father to an ideal son. Three days, eight hours and forty minutes later, when the doctor pronounced him dead, that idealism shattered, not by twos and threes, but into innumerable pieces.

His death certificate reflects that he was never issued a US Social Security number. The boxes for “years of education” and “years in country” each contain a single zero. Other boxes: “white”, “male”, “never married” all increment statistical records somewhere. His occupation was listed as “infant”. I wonder how often that column gets a tick.

Recently, strolling through a nearby Victorian cemetery, I was struck by how many headstones were laid for infants and children. In the developed world, in modern times, losing a child is unexpected. I was told that what happened to my wife and me only affects one-in-one-thousand like us these days.

We are now living approximately 5,500 miles away from the Santa Barbara harbor where we scattered his ashes, and from the community that so lovingly supported us through the long, dark aftermath. (The only constant–change.) I miss them terribly.

In the heart of a London winter, in the middle of my life, I am facing down problems for which the answers are not numbers, but a way of life. Throughout the upheaval of the past six years, a few things have remained invincible in me. Among them: a need to make art, and a desire to give back.

Once again, I take this day to be grateful for my son’s short life, and the ways in which it has taught me about how to more courageously live my own.

“How can I tell what I think ’till I see what I say?”

Once again, I have taken a look over the past year, and selected one post from each month that stood out in some way.

January: The Fifth Year

Today, I said goodbye two our two-year-old Australian nephew, not sure when we will see him again. As we near the sixth anniversary of our son’s birth and death, I realise how far we have come, not only geographically, but psychologically as well. Passing the fifth year was a milestone for us.

February: Human Shade

In February, my debut short collection Human Shade was published by Lost Horse Press in America. It was extremely heartening to see so many orders arrive in such a short time. I brought a few copies with me to England.

March: London Calling

In March, we made the decision to move to London. Having lived my entire life in California, I had no idea just what a leap this would be for me.

April: Adieu, America

In April, I said goodbye to America, but not to being an American. In fact, living here, I have never felt so American as I do now. My father also bid me farewell in a very special way.

May: Through the Looking Glass

In May, we arrived with just our suitcases. We had one week to find a place to live before the start of my new job. After the whirlwind subsided, I began to feel like Alice, down the rabbit hole in a world that only superficially resembled the one I had known.

June: Notes on Contemporary British Poetry

In June, I began to take advantage of my circumstances by way of comparative Anglo-American poetics. So began an effort to overcome what I have deemed “poetic culture shock“–and come to understand the subtle differences between British and American poetry.

July: Discovering an Artistic Ancestor

In July, I discovered a remarkable book by another poet named Peake, which had a profound effect on me.

August: The Nature of Peace

In August, the London riots exploded not far from our home while we were on holiday in Wales with my parents. The contrast prompted this meditation.

September: An American Werewolf in London

In September, I began to put my finger on the sense of otherness that had been haunting me, and let myself howl a bit at the moon.

October: “On Being Straight (A Thought Experiment)“

I wrote this piece in October, and within a short span of time my “thought experiment” turning the tables on identity politics had received over 95,000 views on StumbleUpon, and been republished in The Good Men Project.

November: “The Invisible Father“

A colleague’s casual remark set off this mini-essay for The Good Men Project about the being a father without a child.

December: “British Matches“

In December, Aperçus Quarterly published this short poem, inspired by the warning label on a pack of matches. Along with comparative Anglo-American poetics, I seem to be studying semiotic estrangement–the effect of “everyday” signs and symbols on a cultural outsider.

It has been a remarkable year. Wishing peace to you and yours in 2012!

In response to the recent news that my wife’s health condition had worsened, a coworker kindly offered to babysit. “You must have mistaken me for someone else in the office,” I replied, “We don’t have kids.” Being a considerate person, I expected her to respond to my email as others had before–with apologies, saying she meant no offense. But the next part of her message took me by surprise. She said something to the effect that I seemed grounded and settled, and that this is a quality she often admires in dads.

As a child, I always thought invisibility was the best possible super power. To be able to see and know what is going on, without being seen yourself, was something I craved. So much so that I still am taken aback when others share insights about me that they have gained from observation. But the idea that I was behaving in a visibly father-like way struck me as both poignant and profound.

The death of our infant son, and our subsequent inability to have another child, cast me into not only grief, but a longing to understand what my life is about.

Continue reading the full article online at The Good Men Project…

“Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.”

I have been previewing Facebook’s upcoming Timeline feature. It turns one’s profile into a scrapbook-style autobiography, arranging multimedia posts in a chronology from birth to present. It is part of a larger strategy to promote information sharing that has been intelligently criticized in general terms. But it was a specific moment in my exploration of Timeline that pulled me up short. Clicking on the small heart icon for “Relationships”, up popped a menu item for marking one’s timeline with “Lost a Loved One.”

Though we have memorialised our son in many ways, the thought of posting his photo on Facebook beneath the small flower icon to make it part of this music-video-all-about-me of a web application struck me as painfully absurd. He is deeply and irrevocably part of my life. But a biography is not a life, much less an online profile. We have become a society obsessed with crafting our image–so much so that we almost believe, and sometimes attempt to inhabit, these spun self-tales.

The antidote to the future we now inhabit, wherein everyone has their own Wikipedia page for fifteen minutes, is art. Mark Twain called biographies “the clothes and buttons of a man,” deciding, “the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But something approaching what it feels like to be a man can come across in the literary arts, and especially poetry. Poetry is the anti-wiki, striving for truths that need no citation, encompassing contradictions rather than devolving into fact-slinging “flame wars.”

And so, when it is released next month, I will use Timeline. But for matters that transcend time, and excavate the inmost reality, I’m sticking with poems.

Mark Burnhope

The two poets mentioned in this collection–Wallace Stevens and Zbignew Herbert–are both poets of rich imagination and lyrical intensity. The former generally relates to more abstract thoughts and feelings, whereas the latter treats difficult personal topics such as the Nazi occupation of Poland. What do you see as the role of personally difficult subject matter in your own work? How does this inhibit or fuel your creative power?

That’s a fantastic observation, that thoughts and feelings / topics and issues paradox. I am interested in what happens when thoughts and feelings, beliefs and doctrines (which are abstract and elusive, however much we argue about it) bump into authentic, concrete experience; how faith or religion helps and hinders social change, and how the desire for change sometimes necessitate a revision of personal belief systems.

To take one hot potato for example, homosexuality and homophobia: there was a point when I decided, “Stuff all this in-fighting, I’m tired of being part of a religion which fails to recognise and offer love wherever it finds it. God doesn’t exclude, he welcomes.” I’ve always identified with the ways the LGBT community has been maligned in the Church, because a lot of disabled people experience the same thing; for me, it finds its crux in talk of ‘healing the sick’. A lot of people want to heal us, believing that God made us this way by accident, or that we’re the handiwork of Satan. Even in completely secular contexts, there are feelings of pity and the desire to see us fit a more able-bodied norm in order to be accepted. Inclusiveness and equality are essential values to my faith, and that finds its way into my poems.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. I’m hoping I depersonalise it, make some of these received notions less romantic (and Romantic, even though I quite like the Romantics).

I quite like the Romantics, too. Who are some of the poets who influenced you early on? Who are a few more recent favourites?

Early on, I’d read and enjoyed things by Keats and Coleridge. I was fourteen when Wordsworth and Blake grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. It’s difficult to remember what I thought of them then, but Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” is something that all of us who wrote poetry as teenagers know too well (and which “Romanticism” has sadly been reduced to, sometimes). Wordsworth qualified it by saying that poets should think long and hard to ‘earn’ the right to pour out feelings. I liked that, and wanted to have a go at it. Blake attracted me because he was full of irony. The Romantics revelled in irony. Even their name is ironic, because, far from being fluffy, they had balls: a social and public vision. They wanted revolution. But they knew that revolution begins in the heart, and the pen. Songs of Innocence and of Experience was children’s nursery rhymes for grown-ups. That musicality and magic was offset by harsh social criticism, anger, and corrective satire.

Most of my reading-for-pleasure has probably fallen into the metaphysical or ‘religious’ (whatever that might mean), pastoral / landscape / nature, the ‘anti-poetries’ which are either slightly experimental, or deal with difficult personal and public subjects, satire. I’m generally quite flummoxed by the separation of ‘mainstream’ from anything else. So, I love Ted Hughes, Heaney, McCaig, the Thomases. Recently, I’ve been inspired by Mick Imlah, Peter Didsbury, Alice Oswald, Andrew Philip, Luke Kennard, Lisa Jarnot, Tony Williams, A.B. Jackson, Angela Topping, Michael Symmons Roberts. Experimental writers such as Tim Atkins and Ira Lightman, and various things coming out of The Knives Forks and Spoons Press: Steven Nelson, Bobby Parker, Joshua Jones. Disability seems quiet in contemporary poetry, and I’ve found few poets writing from it. But Laurie Clements Lambeth’s brilliant Veil and Burn encouraged me that it’s out there.

Lastly, he’s not exactly contemporary, but Larry Eigner, a Black Mountain poet, is a recent discovery. He had Cerebral Palsy, and although his poems rarely mentioned it, they were filled with his particular physicality in the way they were shaped and formed. That’s exciting, to me.

You mentioned Confessional poetry. What are some of the challenges of this mode, and how do you navigate them?

Confessionalism is rife with hazards, so I’m careful to make it one of several streams I draw from, rather than a focus. Disability and faith are big themes in this pamphlet. Both are potentially fraught with personal therapy and soul-searching, or political soap-boxing, and that’s all well and good, but poetry fails if it’s only that. Plath has inspired diary-scribbling teenagers everywhere, and I love that. I want to deal with suffering and difficult feeling – poetry which avoids suffering can be less than human – but this is poetry; it has to draw me in and keep me because it inspires reflection, needs mulling over, not because it forces an agenda down my throat.

If I flirt with confession or argument, I might temper it with irony and humour. The most emotionally honest poems might be ‘The Snowboy’ and ‘Shinglehenge’. Even they have their own ways of restraining their feelings. Some say that irony removes emotion, but actually it can serve it, I think. It’s true in life, isn’t it; making light of things is comforting for us. And if we make jokes, others can feel we’re hiding things, but that can be when our pain seems most palpable. I once read this advice, on writing fiction, but I think it’s still relevant: ‘If your character cries, your reader doesn’t have to.’ I’ve always been mindful of that.

There is a massive tendency to see Confession as autobiography. It’s a fallacy that Confessional poetry is necessarily about the poet, though, even if it explores the self. Plath and Sexton often situated themselves in landscapes, imagined and real; made mythical figures of themselves, or others. Lowell felt free to draw from experiences not his own in order to get to the emotional truth of the matter. Ai, who you might call Confessional, spoke with invented characters’ voices to create angry, painfully difficult poems. So when I use material from life, it’s often fabricated, exaggerated, made mythical in a slightly irreverent way. One or two poems are based on dreams. I’m not shy about my disability but use it inadvertently, because it ‘just is’, it’s not ammo for an agenda. Similarly, if religious poetry only cuts the mustard for religious readers, it hasn’t worked.

Why poetry? Of the myriad ways one could express oneself, why this one? What drew you to it? What keeps you coming back?

I always did various other creative things: painting and drawing, playing drums in bands. I was with a rock band for ten years or so. But I seem to have settled on poetry as the major preoccupation. It’s got multi-sensory effect: imagery, sound. Poems are made things, and I love their sculptural quality. They’re an almost three-dimensional ‘landscape’ the reader can live in for a while, eventually getting to those feelings, thoughts and ideas between the cracks, underneath the layers. There are rudiments, techniques, a need to have subtlety and tightness in a similar way to drumming. Poets are in control of several creative activities at the same time. They’re one man bands, sound technicians.

I’ve never fully trusted prose, or my ability to write it. I like R.S. Thomas’ ideas of poetry as sacrament, vessel for incarnation, because words fail me. I can’t fully expect them to ‘express’ anything, and I find the concept of poetry as self-expression fairly problematic for that reason; it seems rather arrogant to think that I can imagine it, and get it down exactly. So I like the idea of language as pliable; that words can be manipulated, set next to and against one another, juxtaposed. They can contradict and disagree.

I’m not a big novel reader. A poetry collection gives depth, but allows me to view a kaleidoscope of themes and ideas. I’m not confined to a definite number of threads. Poems are as absorbing as songs. I still remember my favourite poems from years ago, and still visit them time and again. Two or three collections are beside my bed because I’m still reading them, years later. They allow skim-reading, but also beg to be given sustained attention.

Personally though, poetry has been central to my emotional life, intellectual and spiritual life. I’ve lived in it. I have one of your books here, Robert, and in it you say that poetry has been your ‘lifeline’ in everything you have been through. I completely relate to that; poetry has centred me, kept me sane, even at times when I couldn’t stomach religious faith, it was too painful. So I want to try and pay that forward in poems or critical writing about poetry. I hope to overcome my reluctance with prose, one day.

Mark, this exchange has been a pleasure. Any parting thoughts?

Thank you for having me on the blog, the pleasure was all mine; and thanks for your interest in The Snowboy. I should have a wise or pithy comment to leave you with here, but I don’t, so I’m going to use this old chestnut, which possibly touches on a few things we’ve spoken about: “Before you criticise someone, try to walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them you’ll be a mile away, and you’ll be wearing their shoes.”

Mark Burnhope

How does theology inform your poetry, and vice-versa (if at all)?

It definitely does. But rather than speaking about theological subjects in abstract, theoretical terms, I try to ground them in my experience – as a disabled person in an admittedly broken religion, or more metaphorically, in imagined and fabricated settings where splinters of my life might be buried in the words, somewhere. One thing I’m interested in is how much biblical language doesn’t sit right in a contemporary disabled context: words like ‘sick’, and the well-meaning but ignorant obsession with physical healing. It means well, but it’s totally antithetical to how disabled people tend to see ourselves, as differently but definitely fully formed. (Isn’t everyone different? What is ‘normal’ anyway?)

So, my faith leads me to identify with other groups marginalised by the Church / the world (That’s another thing I like / don’t like: unhelpful dualities. Religion and disability rhetoric is full of them). Other poems are about love, marriage: ‘The Ideal Bed’ and ‘Christogamy / The Centre’ for example, are kind of companion poems. One of them touches on how certain Christian ideas and doctrines — saving oneself for marriage in order to later enjoy inevitably perfect heterosexual sex, and have perfect children, for example — can be totally deflated and undermined in real life. There is no sense of ‘one size fits all’ in doctrine or disability. The other tries to situate a theological idea, which one of our lecturers liked to remind us of, in a landscape.

‘The Snowboy’ is the central poem because it touches on that experience which doesn’t meet such hopes. I’m drawn to and inspired by quite a bit of confessional poetry, even if the anger in my poems is often offset with an ironic joy and humour. Having a joke is sometimes the best way of debunking ideas.

The poem “The House, the Church and Fisherman’s Walk” begins with the arresting line “The non-discriminatory town accepts me,” and later invokes the colloquialism “lame.” How have attitudes toward disability shaped your life and work?

There are the obvious clichés: disabled people either exist to inspire everyone towards ‘triumph over adversity’, or to make them rethink their dark nights of the soul and remember that well, it could be worse, you could be crippled. I’ve heard people say ‘Wow, I’m not sure I could cope if I was in the position you’re in.’ Of course they would. What’s the alternative?

Those extreme positions so rampant in literature (Wilfred Owen’s ‘Disabled’ is so well-meaning, yet reads as clumsy now) have disintegrated, I think, but now we seem to have a bigger problem. Society seems so bored of social commentary, confession, and especially the suggestion that you or I might be prejudiced, that we don’t want to talk about it; we find it very hard to stomach in art. We believe that everything’s been said. All the work was done during all those civil rights movements, we think. The issues are still there, but our polite and politically correct language-play, which doesn’t want to offend anyone, has just got better at making excuses for those issues, or brushing them off.

I can’t change these problems, but they get into my poetry, however true it is that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. If I can make something happen for one reader, that’s alright.

So many of these poems invoke Biblical figures: Jonah, Joseph and his brothers, Job, Saul on the road to Damascus, the tax collector Zacchaeus, and the Serpent. How do biblical stories, and particularly your modern retelling of them, enter in to your personal or artistic ontology? How do they function?

It’s difficult to generalise. I’ve tried to call them out of the mythic contexts I’ve encountered them in; to invite them into my, and the reader’s, experience of the poem. Our Jonah appears as a nutcase tourist, ‘our’ being an affectionate way of identifying a relation, especially, but hardly exclusively, in Northern England (‘our kid’). I read this story on a Boscombe Pier plaque, of a tourist walking along a beached whale’s back, around the middle of last century. In the poem, the man desires some mythic, religious experience; he’s a plain old bloke wanting to step into Jonah’s shoes.

I’m very glad you noticed Joseph’s brothers. They appear in a poem I wrote during a high fever and depression. It’s a straight retelling of a fever dream, so was jotted on paper quickly and without much tinkering (dreams will always have their own interpretation and logic, no need to fiddle). It’s still allusive to me now, though I have this feeling that the images are cohesive; but generally, I was grieving my partner’s miscarriage. The well is an old symbol for the self; lots of poems have been written about staring into wells, meditating on the self.

So in a way, the brothers force me back into my own birth, which had its problems. I survived, but I’m contrasting that with my child that never lived, who we saw as a ‘miracle child’ (I’d been told I was unable to father children). The brothers throw ‘me’, the begrudging survivor, ‘miracle child’, back into the dark. It’s confusing, but it’s a fever dream, so I like that.

‘Saul returned to Paul’ was a helpful image for understanding the post-healing journey of ‘Parochio’. I haven’t covered all of your characters, but I hope that’s helpful.

Other figures, such as Queequeg and Pinocchio, feature large. What drew you to these figures?

These epistles, directly addressing a set of fictional characters, provided a way to explore a range of issues, generally revolving around discrimination, prejudice and stereotype.

I wrote them when I was starting to think about how to respond to my disability, and those related things, in a way which wasn’t directly or uncomfortably confessional, and didn’t just appear to the reader like dirty laundry. I wanted to invite them into my questioning and experience, not tell them about stuff, which might have inspired curiosity, but when it comes to disability, curiosity is something we don’t need more of. I deal with them in different ways.

My version of Pinocchio is too shy to say that actually, he doesn’t want to be a ‘real boy’, mythical miracle fodder. But he’s healed, and consequently goes and does a whole bunch of things that the church wouldn’t approve of. Those things are mostly left to the reader to imagine, but I’ve mentioned that he goes and loses his virginity out of wedlock. He has a new-found freedom, of a kind that no one round him is going to like. I’m questioning what the obsession with physical healing really accomplishes for the church itself, without implicating anyone real in my doubt.

The stories of Queequeg and Quasimodo, again, encompass so much of these things. Moby Dick is a story in which, through his extremely intimate friendship with Queequeg, Ishmael is eventually able to confront his doubts about this once-ugly, tattooed savage (‘I too am tattooed’ is the one fact in the poem). His friendship leads him to consider his feelings on difference, whether they be on faith – Christian vs. Heathen – xenophobia, white supremacy, or love and sexuality. His full loving acceptance of this ‘monster’ involves a total U-turn in his thinking. The eventual (politically incorrect) defeat of the White Whale is richly symbolic of Ishmael’s transformation. In my poem, I try to develop and live for a while in this kind of relationship with Queequeg myself. I become Ishmael, really.

In “Twelve Steps toward Better Despair” you invoke the slippage, “Tried dying–sorry, died trying.” How do vernacular idioms and language-play enter into your creative process?

I’m conscious that a lot of poetry I’ve loved and want to work with is traditional and already well-represented. I certainly love a lot of poets and poems which have been anthologised all over the place, and thrown into the bookshops. I want to honour those poetries which first fired me up. But I’ve had to temper my interest in that ‘traditional stuff’ with who I am: I’m relatively young. I have no desire to be ‘trendy’, ‘edgy’ or whatever, but I like a good laugh and irreverent tomfoolery, and I want to freely use slang – as I would in conversation – even in my efforts to be sincere and poignant.

So those language slip-ups are a way to take a poem potentially full of pathos and ‘instruction’, and admit my hesitation to deliver a message (couple that with the title, which I hope incorporates some of that doubt in a comedic way; despair is a serious thing, and who am I to properly address it for every reader, or instruct them on how to wade through it? The tone is ironic, like in the song ‘Everybody’s Free [To Wear Sunscreen]’ by Baz Luhrmann).

I like to play with a reluctance to put forward ideas, the humility to admit that I might be wrong (Wallace Stevens was so good at the hilarious questioning of received knowledge, or poetic truth). Maybe there is a disability element there as well. I have Spina bifida and Hydrocephalus. The latter means that short-term memory is a small problem, as well as a tendency to lose my train of thought, or get a word wrong here or there, and have to correct myself. Sometimes I use that to construct poems: an aesthetic of confusion, maybe.

Click here to read Part II of this interview.

I have my own relationship with each of these poems. The first poem in this collection tells a lot about the purpose I have found in writing poetry. That is why I put it first. The Scottish poet Andrew Philip, who also lost his first-born son, says near the end of his poem “Lullaby,” “this is the man you fathered.” Indeed, my experience with the birth and death of our son James was an initiation into fatherhood–that I was “fathered” by him, just as one might be “knighted” by a sovereign. I came away with a charge.

But how to fulfill the charge of fatherhood without a child of one’s own? This is a question I have been answering in many ways. One of those ways is poetry. James did not get to experience this world with me. One of the most difficult aspects of grief is not that he is gone, but that he is everywhere. And so, I have decided to go on “speaking” to him–about the beauty and poignance of this world–by speaking to everyone.

What began as a language for processing grief has become a language for processing the mystery and paradox of the world in which I live, and of sharing it. I experience it as a paternal act, an outlet for everything I would have wanted to show to our boy. More than going through the motions, this “speaking” to him by speaking to others, to myself, and to the world around me, is a reason to keep writing poetry. It is a way of fathering the one I am with, even when I am alone. And that is something that I know will go on–as long as I live.

The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly. (Proverbs 20:27, KJV)

Two days ago, our next-door neighbors marked the birthday of the adult son they outlived. Yesterday, my wife’s childhood friend commemorated what would have been her son’s Bar Mitzvah. I feel for them deeply. And tomorrow, had he lived more than three days, our own son would have turned five.

It is a significant age in our culture–the beginning of more than a decade of compulsory education, and also therefore the end of the need for full-time care. It is when most parents place their child at the top of a long chute ending in adulthood, by taking them nervously in hand to their first day of kindergarten.

Late last year, in response to a wave of teenage suicides, the It Gets Better project reached out to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-gender (LGBT) teens with its simple message of encouragement. After five years of complicated grief, I am here to say it can get better for bereaved parents, too. I say “can” because I credit not only time but a number of important activities for bringing me increased solace, including: community service, counseling, meditation, nutrition, exercise, supportive friends, and, of course, writing. While all of this has helped, both in the moment and over time, it has not been some steady upward progression. Far from it. Some days, just getting out of bed in the morning is still my greatest victory.

In March, my debut short book will include several poems about infant loss, subsequent infertility, and the poignancy of so much beauty and sadness that somehow coexists in this world. While many of the poems touch on other topics, it still feels like a “coming out” of sorts about my grief–a way to describe, in the only language I know to do so, some of the emotional landscape I have traveled these past five years.

Like any attempt at art, I can rest assured that some people won’t like it. But like those LGBT teens who will later come to discover thriving communities of support, I, too, have found in fellow poets and poetry-lovers a sense that I am among “my people,” and accepted. It is for them, and for myself, that I go on trying to write, and be, most fully who I am.

I am not looking forward to the next three days–the memories, and the longing. But I do look forward to the rest of my life, and the ways in which our son, by his too-brief visit, has showed me how to live it–embracing more fully the paradox and complexity of being human, located in both an inner and outer landscape all at once. Once again, I say, “thank you” to my much-loved son.

“Hope is the thing with feathers”

Try courage instead

This Thanksgiving, I was keenly aware of my gratitude for an absent member of our family. Had he lived, our son would have been four years old. I am truly thankful for his brief presence in our lives, which activated my paternal instincts, and gave me a deeper respect for my own forefathers. The three days I spent with him in the hospital, and the subsequent years I have spent coming to terms with his short life, taught me something important about how to live my own life. My wife put it succinctly one morning: “You don’t need hope if you have courage.”

We admire saints and martyrs (including the secular ones) not because they hoped for success in their own lives, but because they faced the circumstances of their lives with a sense of higher purpose, and great courage. And while they often had visions of a better future, they were prepared to act courageously whether or not they would ever see these visions realized in their lifetime. Likewise, our American ancestors, whom we honor by feasting at Thanksgiving, may have hoped for a better future for their children. But it was their daily application of courage that I admire most.

I was talking with a friend recently about how perilous it may have been for our current president to have run his election campaign on a message of hope. My countrymen now seem determined to ignore whatever progress he has made so far, and I believe this illustrates one of the dangers of hope. The problem is that hope is an expectation of something we desire in the future. If it is a personal desire, and it is not met, we feel disappointed, even disillusioned. And that seems to be the case with so many Americans right now–that their own individual hopes have not been met, and so they feel disillusioned with a president who could not live up to their expectations, no matter what else he has done.

Buddhist philosophy tells us that desire leads to attachment, and that attachment is the cause of human suffering. Hope is a form of desire. And so, instead of riding the constant swings of hope and disappointment, I choose instead to focus on the inherent value of courage. I can still be optimistic, even inspired. I can exercise my preferences in the present tense to influence the future. But I choose now to abide in the strength that comes from knowing that whatever my life brings to me, I will face it with courage. Because according to the most courageous woman I know, with courage, you don’t actually need hope. And so, I will take one more step along my journey with courage, by clicking “publish” on this post.

“Then what are we fighting for?”

There has been a furor over recent cuts in humanities education at the university level in America. Most of the counter-arguments for keeping the humanities alive play out the “transferable skills” angle. My wife, a piano teacher, knows these arguments all too well–that learning to play an instrument accelerates childhood brain development, and that music actually teaches certain kinds of mathematical reasoning (such as fractions).  Likewise, with literature, English departments often underscore the importance of “soft skills” like communication.

But in the end, this line of thinking only lends strength to the argument to, for example, replace courses in Shakespeare with more practical courses in business and technical writing. It is also not difficult to imagine games designed by psychologists to more effectively deliver specific, developmental results than learning to playing Bach partitas ever will. Clearly, the argument that the humanities can deliver practical, bottom-line results is problematic. Why, then, are they so critical in difficult times?

When I transferred out of the computer engineering department at a top university during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead, many thought I was crazy. Several years later, after the death of our infant son, poetry became the only language that made sense. It kept me sane when nothing seemed sane anymore. I credit my being here to write this now in large part to all the Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton I read back then–which opened the door to Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and Li-Young Lee. I found a means to embrace some of the greatest paradoxes of living, and transcend human suffering, through their words.

It is the centuries-old tradition of humanities education that passes down the words of Socrates to us, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Humanities examine what it means to be alive, and human. And now more than ever, after market crashes, environmental disasters, and seemingly endless and intractable wars, we must ask ourselves: do we really have an excess of humanity? Is our ability to embrace the complexity of living with dignity and compassion at such a surplus nowadays that it should be the first thing to go?

Any text can teach you to read, and any topic can teach you to write. Only literature can teach you why to read, and why to write. Science can measure how well you hear and see. But visual and performing arts teach us why these senses matter. Do not support the humanities because they will give you the means to an easier life. Support them because they will quite simply make life worth living, no matter how difficult it gets.

Do not sign your child up for piano lessons because you want to give them an edge over other kids. Do it because they may wake up one day somewhere in suburbia, surrounded by all the symbols of material prosperity, with a deep and gnawing hollowness that negates every grade or promotion they ever won. And if, in that moment, a bar of Bach or a line from Shakespeare returns to them, they might just have a reason to go on being human, and alive.

One day, this poem came to me. I was nervous at first to share it with them. But they told me that they read it over and over in private. On that night, I read it to them in person for the first time. Needless to say it was difficult to keep reading through strong feelings. Kevin Wallace, director of the Center, videotaped the evening, and captured this moment.

Here also is the text of the poem:

Jonah
in memoriam J.B.

It is large, they say, this life,
and however could a dove alight
on the barnacle-armored hull of it
and not fear his own consumption?

You live on through the love
you left behind, in the eyes
of those who speak of you
at the distant whaling outposts.

Although we never met, your story
is all-too understandable,
since all of us are stowaways, deep
in the hold, tossed on a storm.

How could you not have wanted more?
The rafters creaking overhead,
only a swinging lamp to guide you.
You went out on deck alone.

And when the world found you,
and rammed against your hull,
they say you looked it in the eye
before it swallowed you whole.

Fugue

My beloved wife is also a recovering pianist. An injury in her mid-thirties brought her successful concert career in Europe to an abrupt halt. I know intimately that, whether the circumstances of prevention are physical or psychological, dedicating one’s life to the difficult task of becoming a successful pianist, then having to stop, can surface painful memories and profound questions. Bobo approaches these with an almost archaeological curiosity, interspersed with biblical grandeur, and scraps of dear-diary-like confession.

The mother figures large throughout the collection, imposing discipline and transferred hopes. In one of the early poems, “The Recovering Musician and the Parable of the Mustard Seed” (after Matthew 13:31-35), the mother pronounces, “The kingdom of heaven is like a daughter, which a single mom bore and enrolled in piano lessons.”

This intensity of expectation manifests more fully through “Dear Piano,” which begins innocuously with the line “Mother has said that I can play with you today.” Permission quickly becomes demand in the next line, “Mother has said that I must play with you until dinner.” The idea of “play” becomes increasingly sinister, though the straightforward tone continues:

Brother does not like to hear us play.
Brother has said he wants to break our ivory teeth.
So let us pretend we are gold-colored fish in dark water.
Let us not play anything that will betray our anger.
Let us pretend not to have the power.

We can infer from the collection as a whole that some time after the death of a much-loved piano teacher named Ruth, the “recovering musician” gave up playing. In fact, in the seven-part long poem “The Recovering Musician Quit the Piano Because,” Part III stands out with only two words: “Ruth died.”

The collection unfolds a complex tangle of inner and outer relationships, through parables involving Father, Mother, and Satan reminiscent of Louise Glück’s Ararat; to a series of letters, including one “Letter to an Ex-Stalker” which speaks of obsession in musical terms, then declares, “Yours / is the lid I cannot / let close, the wound / I tend with salt / and carefully.” Throughout this collection, Bobo “tends the wound” of not playing piano through parable, epistle, and child-like declamations, layering rich contrapuntal melodies sung on the theme of loss.

Fugue is available in New Poets | Short Books Volume III from Lost Horse Press. Read more reviews from the Lost Horse Press New Poets series.