100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  It’s not necessary to pathologize Schuyler’s enthusiasms or the way that he took pleasure in describing ordinary things. But looking at some of his work from this angle does help account for its psychological pressure, its odd intensities. The language is plain but seems psychologically lit from within. He looked hard at things, but he wasn’t an Objectivist poet, like Louis Zukofsky or George Oppen. There is an inner nervousness driving his work.

  Schuyler’s mental health was fragile, and he was institutionalized several times in the 1970s. In 1975 he wrote “The Payne Whitney Poems” while he was interned at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City. He published the entire eleven-poem cycle in theNew York Review of Books in 1978. The diary-like series subsequently appeared in The Morning of the Poem (1980). Here, as the poet David Herd suggests, “Schuyler presents in miniature many aspects of his work: the importance of observation, a fascination with the vicissitudes of weather, a fondness for the collage-like list (as in ‘Sleep’), and, throughout the cycle, a sense that in writing one might better make oneself at home in one’s world.”

  “The Payne Whitney Poems” are nervous, low-key, focused on the daily, and sometimes funny. The speaker keeps “wigging in” and “wigging out”; the wires in his head are always crossing.

  Here’s the poem “Arches”:

  Arches

  of buildings, this building,

  frame a stream of windows

  framed in white brick. This

  building is fireproof; or else

  it isn’t: the furnishings first

  to go: no, the patients. Patients

  on Sundays walk in a small garden.

  Today some go out on a group

  pass. To stroll the streets and shop.

  So what else is new? The sky

  slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.

  A gray in which some smoke stands.

  The title runs into the first line and the poem sets off on its own hesitant string of thoughts. As so often happens in Schuyler’s poems, the speaker is looking out the window and recording what he sees, as if the window serves as protection against what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard calls “exterior dizziness.” He is engaged but slightly removed from it all. The lines are cut short, the rhythm jittery. There isn’t much to hold on to. What’s striking is how immediately Schuyler’s speaker begins adapting (“Arches // of buildings, this building”) and correcting (“This / building is fireproof; or else / it isn’t”) what he observes. The buildings narrow to a single building. The poem itself is visually “framed.” The speaker is looking through the enclosure of his own window and through the arches that “frame a stream of windows / framed in white brick.”

  Everything is provisional; every statement leads to a revision. This building is fireproof or, whoops, it isn’t. There’s dry, grim humor in the recognition that in a fire the patients will go before the furnishings. The uncapitalized word “patients” is repeated, this time capitalized. This simple language indicates that the speaker has come through a great catastrophe and needs to remember how to use language again. It is very shaky and tentative.

  There is a tiny drama here. The speaker is looking at the windows of the other buildings, at the patients walking in the garden on Sunday. He isn’t one of them. They’re free, or somewhat free, to stroll about; he is not. He takes a moment to ask himself, “So what else is new?” It is almost as if he is trying to think of something interesting to tell a visitor. He seems slightly desperate to come up with something fresh in a place where life has come to a standstill, where nothing new seems to happen. That’s why he turns to the weather:

  The sky

  slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.

  A gray in which some smoke stands.

  Schuyler manages to capture the texture of a small moment in time, how the day darkens and dusk sets in, simultaneously slowly and swiftly. No other poet would have jammed those words together as “slowly/swiftly.” A person is sitting or standing by the window as the day closes shop. As soon as he describes the sky going from blue to gray, he immediately corrects this observation, noting a “gray in which some smoke stands.” The three alliterative s sounds—“some smoke stands”—enact the way that the day comes to a lingering and yet sudden close. Something can still be seen, something preserved. Something is left standing. But it is mist and vapor.

  The poet Michael Hofmann hears an undertone of nervous amusement in this poem, despite everything. He writes: “However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, however low, is merriment. The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, in the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire. It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary.” This is well said about a poem that is somehow hesitant and yet sure of itself. It seems quietly aware of its own construction, of being made in front of us. The speaker of this poem is ill, but the poet who crafted it was healthily—slowly/swiftly—making a new kind of poem.

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  * * *

  “Kindness”

  (1978, 1994)

  As a poet, Naomi Shihab Nye brings a fresh perspective to the world. Her poems are neighborly and hard-won, playful and instructive, canny and wise. She pays close attention to things that might otherwise be overlooked—sometimes by gazing at them directly, sometimes by catching them out of the corner of her eye. Nye, a Palestinian American poet, travels widely and often relies on Middle Eastern and Latin American sources. Her poems seem to have a sort of homespun clarity, though many bring back lessons learned on the road. She reminds me of William Stafford, one of her formative models, in the sly, unexpected way that she sidles up to a subject. Here is her poem “Kindness”:

  Kindness

  Before you know what kindness really is

  you must lose things,

  feel the future dissolve in a moment

  like salt in a weakened broth.

  What you held in your hand,

  what you counted and carefully saved,

  all this must go so you know

  how desolate the landscape can be

  between the regions of kindness.

  How you ride and ride

  thinking the bus will never stop,

  the passengers eating maize and chicken

  will stare out the window forever.

  Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

  you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

  lies dead by the side of the road.

  You must see how this could be you,

  how he too was someone

  who journeyed through the night with plans

  and the simple breath that kept him alive.

  * * *

  Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

  you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

  You must wake up with sorrow.

  You must speak to it till your voice

  catches the thread of all sorrows

  and you see the size of the cloth.

  Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

  only kindness that ties your shoes

  and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,

  only kindness that raises its head

  from the crowd of the world to say

  It is I you have been looking for,

  and then goes with you everywhere

  like a shadow or a friend.

  In lyric poetry, the topic of kindness has been consistently undermined by sentimentality—there are hundreds of inauthentic poems telling us to be nice to each other—and there aren’t many poets who have treated it seriously as something earned from experience. One of the few modern poems that stands behind Nye is Sylvia Plath’s “Kindness,” which Plath wrote in the last week of
her life. But Plath treats the subject with dark irony and mordant wit (“Kindness glides about my house. / Dame Kindness, she is so nice!”) and destroys the saccharine sentiment that sometimes surrounds it. Nye takes a different approach. She treats actual kindness as something that does not just glide along on the surface. Rather, it is shadowed by suffering. Like Guillaume Apollinaire, she wants “to explore kindness the enormous country where everything is silent.”

  The recognition that jumpstarts this poem is that the speaker did not know the true or real meaning of kindness until something disastrous happened to her. “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things.” In the first published version of this poem, she took an even more extreme position and said, “you must lose everything,” but later Nye decided that statement was too melodramatic. What’s crucial is how she complicates the idea of kindness. The “you” in this poem operates as a kind of double addressee. At first the speaker seems to be addressing each of us, an intimate but somehow generalized “you,” as if she is treating the reader as a confidant. The poem never entirely loses that feeling, but as it progresses it becomes clearer and clearer that the speaker is first of all talking to herself. That’s because the poem becomes anecdotal. The speaker is recounting the story of something that explicitly happened to her. The reader is then put in the position of a listener.

  “Kindness” appeared in Nye’s first book of poems, Different Ways to Pray (1980), where she dated it to “Colombia, 1978.” She has sometimes called herself the “secretary” for this poem and described the story behind it. One week after they were married, she and her husband set off to travel the length of South America by bus. At the end of the first week of their journey, their bus was held up, they were robbed of everything, and someone was murdered. They were naturally very shaken up. Afterward, a stranger noticed their distress and came up to them in the plaza where the bus had let them off. He was unexpectedly kind and apologized for what had happened to them. It was a simple gesture that helped them get their bearings. After the stranger had gone, Nye’s husband hitchhiked off to a larger city to see if he could redeem their traveler’s checks. That’s when she sat in a plaza in Popayán and transcribed this poem. She said that a female voice seemed to be speaking to her out of air.

  Just as Wordsworth’s sonnet “Surprised by joy” is as much about sorrow as it is about joy, so Nye’s poem is as much about sorrow as it is about kindness. The poem is an argument delivered with the confidence of hard experience: “Before you know . . . / you must . . .” The poise of each line, the way the first sentence breaks down, as if naturally, into four syntactical units, reinforces the sense of assurance.

  Before you know what kindness really is

  you must lose things,

  feel the future dissolve in a moment

  like salt in a weakened broth.

  Nye follows this pattern of breaking the lines into distinct end-stopped units through the poem, which hones down on the losses as it progresses. Notice the consonance (“feel the future”) that enforces the very large claim that one’s entire future simply dissolves like salt in a weak soup.

  The anaphoric repetition in the way the speaker describes money, “What you held in your hand, / what you counted and carefully saved,” and the consonance that binds together the words “held” and “hand,” “counted” and “carefully,” emphasizes that the loss of money stands for an even greater loss, and that this loss must happen, she suggests, so that you can experience the desolate landscape between “the regions of kindness.” So far, the landscape still seems generalized, though it immediately narrows to something more specific, more actual: a bus ride that seems to go on and on in a South American country. In just four lines, Nye creates the feeling of being on an interminable trip.

  But then the speaker abruptly comes up against an awful and very specific death, which stands at the heart of the poem.

  Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness

  you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

  lies dead by the side of the road.

  You must see how this could be you,

  how he too was someone

  who journeyed through the night with plans

  and the simple breath that kept him alive.

  The sense of sorrow in the poem is changed immeasurably by the death of the “Indian in a white poncho.” The speaker doesn’t even know his name. He’s the one who has lost everything. She recognizes that he was just like her, like all of us, someone with plans, a person with a life ahead of him. Nye yokes a force to a quality in order to describe “the tender gravity of kindness.” We don’t normally think of gravity, a natural phenomenon, as something that is tender, something dear or considerate. And we don’t typically apply that force field to a quality like kindness, which suggests a way of behaving toward one another. But kindness has a strong gravitational pull in this poem, an inevitability. It is something that must be earned by gazing at the death of another person and realizing that it could be you lying in that ditch by the side of the road.

  As a poem, “Kindness” is structured around three repetitions: “Before you know,” “Before you learn,” and “Before you know.” Notice the parallelism in the two lines that kick off the second stanza: “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” The speaker in this poem is certain of what she has just learned. That’s what gives her the insistence to keep repeating “You must.” One sorrow must come to stand for all the other sorrows; experience must be experienced and enlarged. Nye’s poem is a way of returning to first things. That’s why kindness becomes so elemental, something very simple and basic, like tying your shoes and sending you out to look for bread. The speaker doesn’t have any money and so she can’t really buy bread. Sorrow has singled you out, Nye argues, and now so must kindness, which “raises its head / from the crowd of the world.” In other words, kindness has been lost in the crowd, in the multiplicity of ev-erything we do, but now it recognizes you. A single group of people, the crowd, has been enlarged into “the crowd of the world.” The image has become allegorical.

  At the end of the poem, kindness is personified and talks both to the speaker and to us at the same time. Notice how the poet presses together the entities “I” and “you”:

  It is I you have been looking for,

  and then goes with you everywhere

  like a shadow or a friend.

  Nye closes the poem with a delicate simile. After kindness speaks, it never leaves you alone again. It always travels with you “like a shadow”—a dark figure, an inseparable companion or follower—“or a friend,” a trusted confidant, someone bound to you by mutual affection. Kindness is one or the other, not both. In other words, it goes with you all the time whether you want it to or not. Perhaps, then, it is better to befriend it.

  Henry James said that “three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind.” Naomi Shihab Nye suggests that such kindness must be earned by sorrow. There aren’t many poets whose lifework I would describe as kindhearted. But kindness has shadowed Nye’s work for the past forty years. She has gone on to other sorrows and other tragedies, but her empathic imagination, her shadow or friend, has always accompanied her.

  Allen Grossman

  * * *

  “The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River”

  (1979)

  Allen Grossman was a unique figure in postmodern American poetry. He practiced the high Romantic mode with remarkable confidence. Stylistically, he was an heir to W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane, his three major precursors, though in a sense he de-historicized Romanticism. He treated the impulse toward transcendence as a permanent feature of the lyric. Grossman believed that “Poems create poets,” rather than the other way around, and here is one of the poems that “created” him. It is the title poem of his second collection.

 
The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River

  Stars are tears falling with light inside.

  In the moon, they say, is a sea of tears.

  It is well known that the wind weeps.

  The lapse of all streams is a form of weeping,

  And the heaving swell of the sea.

  * * *

  Cormorants

  Weep from the cliffs;

  The gnat weeps crossing the air of a room;

  And a moth weeps in the eye of the lamp.

  Each leaf is a soul in tears.

  * * *

  Roses weep

  In the dawn light. Each tear of the rose

  Is like a lens. Around the roses the garden

  Weeps in a thousand particular voices.

  Under earth the bones weep, and the old tears

  And new mingle without difference.

  A million years does not take off the freshness

  Of the calling.

  * * *

  Eternity and Time

  Grieve incessantly in one another’s arms.

  Being weeps, and Nothing weeps, in the same

  Night-tent, averted,

  Yet mingling sad breaths. And from all ideas

  Hot tears irrepressible.

  * * *

  In a corner

  Of the same tent a small boy in a coat