Heather Christle's "The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part"
Thoughts on mystery over clarity.
The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part
you have to live where the house lands on you what else can you do your bones are all broken and somebody loves you who is it tell me who loves you not as much as I do I mean I even built you a house and found you why won’t you live in it from The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011)
It is with great surprise that I realize, as I write this sentence, that I have been writing this little newsletter for years (years!) and have not written once about Heather Christle’s poetry. I am surprised about this because of the fact that Christle’s book The Trees The Trees is one of those books that, well, just does it for me. By which I mean, well — it just does it for me.
I think of that when I think of today’s poem, which has been dog-eared in my copy of Christle’s book for at least five years, if not ten. One of the great pleasures of reading a poem — any poem — is the immense joy and surprise you feel when a poem just does it for you, and when it does this without reasonable explanation. When it moves you even if you can’t quite describe how. When it serves as the catalyst for some feeling in your gut — a lumping, a blooping, a tossing, a turning — without a seeming reason. This is, in many ways, how I feel when I read Heather Christle’s work. To read Christle’s work is to engage in an act of encounter more so than an act of reading — like meeting someone you’ve never met who is able to articulate a feeling you both share, with language you don’t have until you’ve listened.
In her book The Crying Book, Christle writes:
They say perhaps we cry when language fails, when words can no longer adequately convey our hurt.
I think, too, that we sometimes find meaning in a poem when our own language — as readers — has failed, and when we still stay open enough to find in another’s language those words that can adequately convey our lived experience. This is one beauty — of many — of art. It makes sense, briefly, and almost fleetingly, of no sense, catapulting us into a world of slightly more advanced language to deal with even more of what we still have no language for.
Earlier today, at school, one of my former students came to visit. He’s spending some of his time teaching kids at a community center. Mostly little kids. Elementary and middle schoolers and the like. And I asked him. I asked him how it was. And he told me. He said it was hard in some ways and easier in others. But what he said that I really remember is that it was surprising. He said that teaching kids is really surprising. That you never quite know what they’re going to do or say.
That act of being surprised is one of the great joys of reading. It is an act of encounter that only occurs when you’ve allowed yourself to be surprised, when you’ve said, just before you’ve turned the page, that you’re ready to meet something you’ve never met before. And what more beautiful act is there than that? To read is to continually open a door to a landscape that might — truly, might — stun you with its light and beauty.
And so, when I think of today’s poem, I think of how it feels more like feeling than sense, which is to say that it feels more like life than anything else — a series of actions and observations and things both actively and passively consumed that inspire in me so much emotion and yet still don’t quite give me, at all, the language to readily handle all those moments of encounter.
Christle, at least, gives us a title to ground ourselves:
The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part
I think of this title — and I mean this — maybe once a day. It is one of the most succinct ways I have ever heard to describe what it feels like to live, well, a life. The whole thing is the hard part.
And then the poem continues:
you have to live where the house lands on you what else can you do
Here, the poem becomes both pep talk and magic lesson, both sermon and mystery. It becomes deterministic (you have to live) and yet still somewhat mystical — as in, when has a house ever landed on you? This is one of my favorite aspects of Christle’s poetry. It engages with the feeling of being in the world while still offering images of a world that feels slightly (or very much so) unlike this one, where houses fall on people and where people use starfish to scrub their hands and where people can live inside a painting.
That in-between-ness is at the heart of so much of Christle’s work. In her poem, “Mistake,” she writes:
I have found myself with this excess of grief I have made with no object to let it spill over
These lines feel like the poem-version of her sentence from The Crying Book above. They offer a sense of what it means to live with feeling that has no language for such feeling. In a brief blurb on the making of this poem, Christle writes:
What if a poem were a place where you could put an idea—and, were you to do so—the idea would no longer remain present in your own body? Would the poem contain the idea, or try to shift it elsewhere?
Here, in this question, Christle offers forth one potential definition (of many, obviously) of poetry. Something like one, or all, of the below:
A poem is a place where you put what you no longer want to hold, and let it take whatever shape it wants to take.
A poem is a structure you create to hold something that your body cannot hold for long.
A poem is an act of freedom-creation, where you make a place (call it another country, call it another world) that allows your most untenable thoughts and feelings to live whatever lives they choose, speaking a different kind of language.
In one of her poems, Christle writes:
Every day I let my body out this far and no further—
A poem, then, can be the act of furthering. Letting ourselves out more than just a little further. All the way. Wherever that goes. Whatever that looks like.
I love this language of permission that Christle’s question offers above. It makes me think back to the first time I read today’s poem, where I glanced at the title, felt immediately moved, and then read the rest of the poem, and felt wildly moved — teary-eyed. Here’s the poem again:
you have to live where the house lands on you what else can you do your bones are all broken and somebody loves you who is it tell me who loves you not as much as I do I mean I even built you a house and found you why won’t you live in it
Like I said earlier, I don’t quite know how this poem moves me. I know that it does. I’ve never had a house land on me. Or one built for me. But yes, metaphorically speaking — I have. I’ve had moments of great, weighted grief. I’ve had moments of unbelievable grace offered to me. I’ve had moments of denying that grace. I’ve had moments of accepting such grace. I’ve had the sense of life feeling deeply, annoyingly unfair. I’ve had this sense many times before. And yet, I’ve felt unimaginably lucky so many times in my life that I cannot possibly believe the joy and love I have access to. I think today’s poem is, in part, about such things. But I don’t quite know that for certain. And yet, why does this matter? Heather Christle put her ideas in a place where they were free to become a kind of language that put some sense into the nonsense of my life. And maybe yours, too. That’s one of the mystical, often-beautiful things about a poem.
As I write this, I can’t help but think about how some of my students are working on these essays about a book of poems we’ve been reading in class. They’re engaging with a pretty classic kind of test-aligned prompt, one that asks them to tie authorial choices to a theme they notice in the poems. I assigned the prompt because it ties in with some curricular standards we have to touch on. And it’s a fine prompt, though a little boring and limiting. But I can’t help but think, as I read today’s poem, what we get wrong — myself included — about reading and thinking about something like poems.
Sure, it is true that a poem like today’s does work with some kind of extended metaphor, that it uses what some might call a sort of defamiliarization in order to allow the reader access to some themes related to the difficulty of life, and the impossibility of managing such difficulty, even when one encounters love and grace. I think that’s true. But okay. Now what? What do we do with that other than notice it? I’d rather wonder more about those moments of immediacy that a poem creates in us when we first encounter it, those brief, sometimes charged, moments of feeling for which we have no language other than the language that prompted such feelings. Christle’s poetry moves me because of its surprise and strangeness, the way I know there is something being said about sorrow and grace, but don’t quite know exactly how. I think that this is how something like tenderness works when we encounter it in our daily lives — when we are surprised by the softness of a kiss, or by how small a baby’s feet really are, or by the way a dog kind of smiles in between the many breaths it takes as it tries to catch its breath.
Tenderness is a kind of surprise. Its beauty arrives, in part, because we don’t always expect it, or know exactly how it works. Or why. If I spent my days trying to break down the machinations of the world rather than allowing myself to be surprised by them, I don’t think I’d smile as much as I do. Maybe I should go revise that essay prompt. I’ll think about it.
There’s a Eula Biss poem I’ve always loved that feels in conversation with Christle’s style of poetry. It reads, in full:
My father told us stories every night about strange little animals that came out in the dark. When my father was away, my mother read us fairy tales that always ended in marriage. Sometimes, when I missed my father, I slept under my bed in mourning and the mice crawled all around me. * I stand at the window of a bridal shop where huge dresses hang ghostly in the dark. At the back is a collection of veils like a row of sleeping jellyfish. One whole wall of the shop is a mass of white cloth. The wedding dresses are enormous. They are twice as big as me, and bigger than any woman on the street. * This is the year that everyone is trying to fly around the world in a balloon. I don't know why.
I think about those last two sentences all the time. I don’t really know what they mean, or how they mean. But they do mean, don’t they? I don’t know why. No. I don’t know why.
This not-knowing, this okay-ness with not-knowing, this willingness to let oneself be shaped by mystery rather than trying to wrestle mystery into clarity — I think this is one way to approach the difficulty of life. I don’t know if it makes it any easier. But it allows for something more. It’s like building a window to the house of your body. And it’s like making it wider. You can’t escape the house. But you can let more light in.
Some ongoing notes:
If you’re in New York City this week, I’m reading for the cool folks at PATIO on Tuesday at TJ Byrnes at 8:00pm. Details below:
I am really excited to be teaching an online class with the Adirondack Center for Writers (thank you, Tyler Barton) on getting away from a prescriptive language when it comes to reading and writing poetry. We’ll read a bunch; we’ll write a bunch; we’ll talk a bunch. It’ll start in February. If you’re interested, here’s the link to register. And here’s a class description: A poem is an offering. In this five-week class, poet and critic Devin Kelly will introduce students to a language of generosity for modern poetry. Instead of talking prescriptively about a poem’s quality (“good” or “bad”), students will take an expansive and holistic approach to engaging with poetry and crafting their own. Works by Larry Levis, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, and many others will serve as models for developing and practicing what Kelly calls “a vocabulary of grace”. Think of a poem as a window, a room, or a landscape—something that expands the more you pay attention to it. Students will discuss and write new poems weekly, and twice over the course of five weeks everyone will receive one-on-one feedback from Kelly on their work.
You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.
Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.
If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.
Thank you for the gorgeous piece, Devin
Thank you for this poem, this poet introduction and the ways you articulate things that are so difficult to capture in words. Thank you for giving me so much to wonder about. My brain seeks clarity, but my heart and spirit want to dwell in the land of mystery and surprise. Thankfully, poems dwell there with me.