In the Spirit

of trying not to be so negative, especially since I still haven't heard from graduate schools and am pretty sure my rejection letters have just been sealed and dropped in the mail, I'm going to try and read a poems daily (just open up books and read whatever page I've opened to), and appreciate each of them. I want to savor them. I want them to sit deep in my chest. I'm so used to reading a poem, and either analyzing it to no end or using it's goodness to degrade my own writing. I often read my favorite poets' pieces with this feeling of, Oh how could I ever live up to that. What I forget is that those pieces are their art. Not mine. I have my own voice in this body. And it has its own plans. And they are good plans. And above anyone else, I must love those plans and that voice. Soooo...I'm going to stop for a while and just love other poets voices. I'm not going to interact with them. I'm going to sit in awe and appreciate.

Here's my first one.

I found this poem in the Winter 2008 edition of The Florida Review, last night, during my Contemporary English Lit. class. It's by Tony Hoagland.


Elegy

It's easy to write an elegy.
All you have to be is sad.
It's more difficult to drive a car, or open a can of soup
than write an elegy.
It's easier than keeping the ones you love alive

or trying to tell them how crazy they make you
with their stupid, self-destructive ways,
and their refusal to change.

To love people feels often like a battle,
but to write an elegy is easy.
An elegy comes after the battle is over

and the soldiers are sitting around on the ground,
their faces dirty and relaxed,
telling stories and taping up their wounds.

To live is to pay the rent,
to have dishes dirty in the sink,
to start a fight with the one you love
in the car on the way to the store.

To write an elegy is to move out
and leave only the elegy behind,
like a sponge or a mop, or a roll of towels

or a bowl of fresh wter
you place on the cleaned-up floor
after your precious dog has gone.



I felt this poem in my throat and behind my eyes. Even in class, a roomful of people, I almost cried. This is a big poem. So encompassing. It is hard--blue--dark--but also comforting. It doesn't make me feel foolish for having written an awful elegy about my father. I am inspired. I feel closer to the truth of life--of moving out and the fact that I am still in.