Father, since always now the death to come
Looks naked out from your eyes into mine,
Almost it seems the death to come is mine
And that I also shall be overcome.
– Donald Justice, “Sonnet to My Father”
In 11th grade English, Mrs. Lake assigned us to memorize a soliloquy from Hamlet. I chose the ‘inky cloak’ soliloquy, where Hamlet compares his inner sorrow to outward trappings of grief. You know the story. His father has died, and his mother and stepfather, having taken less than a month to shed their show of mourning, are telling our prince, in a variety of ways, to get over it. Death is common. His father lost a father who lost a father, etc. Hamlet, of course, rejects and rebuts their pretended logic with brilliant poetry. (Say “windy suspiration of forced breath” aloud and you can feel it pull the air out of your body.) But I wasn’t a great reader of poetry, or Shakespeare, in 11th grade. I was drawn to Hamlet’s words not by sound but by sorrow. I have that within which passeth show. Hamlet’s words described my own unhappiness.
As it turned out, I had botched the assignment. These lines weren’t a soliloquy at all. A soliloquy, Mrs. Lake reminded us, requires solitude. It is an aside. By the time Mike P. got up and started talking about his rank offense (which earned him some giggles from the back of the room), I was afraid Mrs. Lake was going to give me a zero. But she didn’t, and even though I’m no thespian, I imagine that had something to do with the way I said my lines. They weren’t a soliloquy, but they came from a place aside. The difficult voice was my own.
At this point you might suspect that I, like Hamlet, was dealing with a death, perhaps the death of my father. I wasn’t. My father was alive. And let me just get this out of the way: he is still alive, and he is quite well. But you wouldn’t know that to read my poems, which often deal with the loss of a father. It’s hard to explain why this is. For me, poems come rarely, but when they do, they begin with an image or a sound or a single word that breaks open something inside me. When it happens, I drop everything and write, and I hope I have enough craft to shape what is rising. I don’t mind admitting that I don’t usually enjoy this. When I say break open, I don’t have in mind a seedpod gently cracking into flower. I’m prone to melancholy, and writing poems hurts me. But poems are my only way of giving shape to ineffable emotions. I don’t want to open up a can of Jacques Lacan here, but for some reason this otherwise nameless sorrow often enters my poems through the name of the father. Sometimes that father is dying. Sometimes he is already gone. If I were writing about an absent father in a play or a novel, no one would question it. But in a first person poem?
Hamlet tells his mother that demonstrations of grief can be false, mere “actions that a man might play.” Are my father poems disingenuous? Deceitful? I no longer think so, but there was a time when I feared they might be. I have dear friends who have lost a parent. Two of my closest colleagues, both of them fine poets, have fathers in decline. They have written movingly about this, and I have worried that they might think my poems inappropriate or unseemly. On occasions when I have read these poems to an audience, I’ve never begun with a disclaimer, and when people have said kind things like “I’m sorry for your loss” and “Thank you for the poems about your dad. I lost my father three years ago,” I have felt guilty. So I stopped reading them. My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent.
And the intent had been strong, hadn’t it? My poems always come from an uncomfortable but honest place. First person lyrics can be fictional, too, I told myself, often returning to Wallace Stevens: ‘Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. / Take the moral law and make a nave of it / And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, / The conscience is converted into palms…” It was not my fault, I told myself, if a reader conflated the speaker with me. But my conscience was not converted. The poems didn’t feel fictitious, and the father who haunted their lines did resemble my own. Twisting myself into an anxious knot, I eventually took the only path I could see: I stopped writing poems. Between 2010 and 2013, I didn’t write a single line. In those rare moments when my insides began to break, I blocked the emotion. I stifled myself. The only writing I could manage was literary criticism, which was more cerebral and wasn’t haunted by the ghost of my living father.
A few years ago my family visited Charleston, and in the wonderful Blue Bicycle bookstore, I came across a 1981 anthology called Divided Light: Father & Son Poems, edited by Jason Shinder and published by The Sheep Meadow Press. I bought it for a song, and I finally read it last year. I spent about a week in its pages, and every day I found I was able to untangle myself a little more. I could do this because I discovered I didn’t care at all if the poems in the book were factual, embellished, or completely made up. I cared that they moved me, and that they were releasing something in me. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they were releasing me from something.
I don’t claim to have all of this figured out, but I am no longer worried by what happens in my poems. The only thing harder than writing them, I’ve found, is not writing them. I have always tried to write true poems, and that truth will always require fidelity—not to facts, but to the emotional space where poems come from. The world is full of ugly things, sorrowful things, and sometimes I am too, and I often confront these in my father’s name.
John Shakespeare died in 1601, right about the time his son William was finishing Hamlet. I don’t know if John had already died when his son finished the play, but I’m convinced it is haunted by his ghost. I don’t believe the Bard could have written as he did about the death of fathers without internalizing the death of his own, even if it hadn’t happened yet.
I’m still worried about the day my dad reads the poems in which he dies. He won’t be angry, but he will probably want an explanation. I wish I could give him one. Maybe reading this will help him understand, and I hope it does, but in the end, the poems are the only answers I have.