The Poetry of Pain

Now, she said, do you know

How I feel? No, he said,

I know nothing.

I ' m only, as you ' ve described me,

Ash in a box …

The poems in "Elegy" were not written for publication, but when editors asked her for new work, this was all she had to show them. To her amazement, they were a success. "What does it mean, they 'loved the poem'? I was talking about wanting to kill myself. What made these poems acceptable? T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind. I'm not hiding behind much here." "Elegy" stands outside the avant-garde tradition in which Bang had worked. Contemporary poetry is often just about language itself, a syntactical shell game in which the reader never gets to uncover the "meaning." "My critical self would say, you can't write these poems. We disdain the whole confessional thing now, the romantic poetry notion that I stand at the center of the world and I can speak for you, because I know how things are. Earnestness fails. Earnestness looks like a distillation of the wrong part of suffering, so what was I doing, weeping on the page?" But out of her misery, she wrote:

There will be no more of time and time ' s corruption

For the ash in the box. The love of her life.

She notices how quiet he is in there.

Out here, she says, I talk

But always to a mirror

Where a face looks out like a clock that says night

Is coming and then it comes like a coat of silted black.

Thank you, she says, as she slips into bed.

She was living as two selves, the suffering mother who yearns for the oblivion of sleep, and the poet who observes her suffering and then pulls back to where she can see night falling. It's not Bang's fault she is such a good poet, but when "Elegy" was published and became what passes for a minor sensation in the world of serious poetry, her reaction was confusion and discomfort. Was the poet self outstripping the suffering self? Had she managed to create, out of the death of her child, a personal triumph? These are not easy questions for her, even now. She takes refuge in the knowledge that Michael was proud of her success. He was an aspiring artist himself—an abstract expressionist, wouldn't you know—and one of his paintings serves as the cover art for "Elegy." When she does a reading, Bang says she feels Michael's presence on the stage with her.

It is now almost four years since Mary Jo Bang walked under that bas-relief that said MORGUE and made a mental note of it to use later. As time went on she resolved to stop her exercise in elegy after a year, because otherwise, she says, how would you ever know when to end, except by your own death? So she wrote a poem called "C Is for Cher," which will go into her next collection. She no longer weeps on the page, at least not visibly. But she still weeps, just as Gunther, no doubt, went to his grave thinking about those beautiful hands.

© 2008