Kim Addonizio's "Solace"

Thoughts on care.

Solace

–for Terrance Hayes

Once when my coat
was too thin, and one torn
pocket was all I had left of
a great love, I found
a blue canto
that calmed me. A pine
tree was in it, and crows.
In my head: one ant
after another, carrying
its burden. Art
sometimes can enter
through a sliver.
Give it a broken fence, it
will trellis over. Once,
when no one was near,
a split tree
calmed me,
and a crow’s cry tore
the air, and my ear
found an oar,
and I rowed.


from Exit Opera (W.W. Norton, 2024)

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The last time I wrote about a Kim Addonizio poem, I was sitting exactly where I am sitting now, not far from the Annisquam River in Gloucester. Then, I had picked up Addonizio’s The Philosopher’s Club in a used bookstore — Dogtown Books, an absolute gem — and read it while sitting in the back of a live music bar, before the live music ever came on. Now, I am sitting by a window watching a parade of boats float back from the harbor — dinghies and pontoons and Boston Whalers — after having read Addonizio’s newest book, Exit Opera. Any Addonizio book is a cause for celebration. Her work is a treasure.

I love this poem today. I love it for eighty million reasons. The first is that it led me to the journey of trying to snoop out which Terrance Hayes poem the “blue canto / that calmed” Addonizio’s speaker must have been.

He has a handful of blue poems, but I imagine it must be “The Blue Terrance,” mostly because of these lines:

Suppose you were nothing but a song
 
in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe
sweat from the brow of a righteous woman,
but all you owned was a dirty rag? That’s why
 
the blues will never go out of fashion:
their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of
consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in

trouble. Especially if you love as I love
falling to the earth. Especially if you’re a little bit
high strung and a little bit gutted balloon.

I find this poem calming because I find it permissive. Who hasn’t felt like a song in a busted speaker? Someone who wants to try being someone, only to feel like the end result isn’t ever quite right? A chord played on an out of tune piano, the fingers feeling out the minor keys, only to hear something flatter or sharper than one can make sense of?

This poem is from Wind in a Box, which came out almost twenty years ago. I first read it in 2010, I want to say, when one of my college professors, Constance Hassett, who I adored, assigned it in a class where we critically studied, but did not write, poetry. Hayes came to our school later that year, and I attended his reading. It must have been the first poetry reading I ever attended. I remember sitting there, enamored by both his voice and the absolute enormity of his posture as he loomed over the microphone, holding the podium with both of his hands. I loved him; I loved his work. I would watch Youtube videos of his readings in lecture halls across the country, videos captured by the shitty, live-streaming camera tucked into some far off corner of some big room.

And it’s funny, because these lines from Hayes’s poem remind me of another poem by a poet I love: Steve Scafidi. In his poem, “The Sublime,” he writes:

You do it every day.
Walking too early, driving to work, working and returning.
Reading poems of great beauty and crying at the movies.

Touching the hair of your niece who laughs at water. Flying
over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake
there is silk in your beard.

That line — “Flying / over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake / there is silk in your beard” — is singsonging the same song as Hayes’s line: “Especially if you love as I love / falling to the earth.” They are both lines of great permission towards romance, lines that say it is okay to be obsessed with this world and everything in it, lines that tell the story of what it is like to be brought to some great big marveling wide-eyed wonder at what might be the smallest thing: the way I sometimes touch the nose of someone I love because I cannot believe that there is someone I love, and that they have a nose at all. Great big marveling on my part, yes. Of such a small thing, yes. But never is anything so small as it seems. That’s the great mistake we keep always making, isn’t it?

It’s like how, in the final moments of Olive Kitteridge, that sad and beautiful and lonely story of a sad and beautiful and lonely woman, Elizabeth Strout writes:

She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

Here’s another reason why I love this poem today: earlier in Exit Opera, Addonizio has a poem, “This Too Shall Pass,” that details, in Addonizio’s words, “the ways we try to offer solace in heartbreaking circumstances and the inadequacy of our attempts.” In that poem, Addonizio writes:

When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you.

I love this admission on the part of a poet — the willingness to admit what poetry cannot do, and to admit, too, the ways that art can feel trite and inadequate. I love that today’s poem offers proof of the ways we carry a whole mess of contradictions inside of us, that, even when one page of our soul — or whatever you want to call it — has no use for the haiku about the moon, there might live, on another page of our soul, these lines:

Once when my coat
was too thin, and one torn
pocket was all I had left of
a great love, I found
a blue canto
that calmed me.

Now, I do think that there is a distinction Addonizio is making with these two poems, and that distinction is evident in these lines from today’s poem:

Art
sometimes can enter
through a sliver.

As in: sometimes we are not calmed or soothed or moved by what is offered to us — the seemingly-trite line shared right in the midst of grief — but instead we are moved by what we are surprised by, if only we allow ourselves just the smallest sliver of opportunity to be surprised. That sliver that Addonizio mentions — it’s the old note a friend once left me that I keep tucked into the smallest pocket of my biggest jacket. It’s a butterfly on a bench when you think of your late grandmother as a butterfly. It’s the cardinal on the balcony’s railing. The sun’s fire-shimmer on the water. It’s a murmuration of birds; it’s a toddler in mismatching shoes. It’s the sliver in ourselves that we keep open, even when we are more than halfway to being gone. It’s not hope, I don’t think. But it’s not full-blown despair. It’s remembering, whether we are resigned to it or not, that we are alive.

That act of memory is, in part, what art helps fuel. Memory is one of the ways we most notably spend the present tense of our lives. Sometimes we remember what has kept us alive so that we might stay alive. Memory is a noun that represents the past, but remember is a present-tense verb.

Notice, too, how what calms Addonizio’s speaker is not always what seems, on its surface, outwardly calming:

Once,
when no one was near,
a split tree
calmed me

Sometimes, it is what is broken that offers us the permission to feel noticed in our brokenness. What blooms can often feel unattainable, and what breaks can feel more like who we are. That’s why fragility, to me, is a more peaceful concept than immortality. The split tree — struck once by lightning, burned and scarred by fire, ravaged by disease — has something to say about wholeness, having once been whole and having now the opportunity to reimagine what wholeness means. You’d stop, wouldn’t you, to touch its bark? To watch the light shadow itself through the frayed branches?

So much of art — and life — is the image that Addonizio offers at the end of this poem:

my ear
found an oar,
and I rowed.

I think I am thinking of all of this because I spent the better part of a train ride writing the acknowledgments section of my forthcoming novel, Pilgrims — an act which I found myself wildly grateful for the chance and opportunity to do. And while I was writing it, I found myself thinking of a quote which I will probably mention in the acknowledgments themselves — this short passage from Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had. In that book, she writes:

The poets I knew made their money like everyone else, as teachers or bartenders, but what they did for poetry, and for each other, was most often given away.

And so yes, riding on the train, I was thinking of people who had given away much of their time or their attention to me. What a wild thing to think about. I was thinking about my friend Bud, who taught me how to format my pages on my computer so that it felt like I was literally typing a novel each time I sat down to write, and who printed out a few hundred pages of it and marked it up with thoughts and edits and hand-drawn guitars alongside passages where he thought I was doing something well. I was thinking about my friend George, whose beautiful mind lives inside the book, filled as it is with ideas and idealism and the offshoots of poetry that we’d sit, nearly a decade ago, in the backyards of almost-certainly-gone bars and talk back and forth to each other about. I was thinking about my friend Jimmy, whose sincerity feels like a balm, like the tilted-head smile of a dog who can’t help but remind you that the world is a thing worth marveling about, and how he reminded me — when he first read a draft of the thing — that it was a thing worth sitting with again.

I was thinking about a whole world of people. Poets I spent years listening to when I hosted readings in New York City. The people I hosted readings with. Editors from journals that may not exist anymore — just like those bars I mentioned — and how they believed in my work and the work of others, in a way that made me feel like something I was doing was important to someone who was also doing something important. You’re kept afloat in the world of art, I think. I don’t know if you can keep yourself afloat. I’ve had so many people remind me about myself when I have forgotten about myself. Tell me: is there a greater gift than that? I don’t know if there is. Anything that might be greater is simply tied for first.

Tomorrow, I’ll board a flight, land, and then board another flight that will drop me off an hour away from California’s Death Valley, where I’ll be reporting for Outside Magazine about the Badwater 135 — an ultramarathon that begins in Badwater Basin, where temperatures achieve some ungodly level of heat, and ends in a climb up the road to Mount Whitney. I’m writing, if all goes well, not necessarily about the runners, but about the people who support the runners — their crews. I’ll be sleeping in a van and watching people tape sweaty and scarred parts of other people’s bodies, wrap ice bandannas around necks, caress tired ankles, and change melted shoes. I’ve been both in a crew and on the receiving end of such a crew. I know what it’s like for someone to hand you a Snickers bar that you didn’t know existed forty miles into a day. It feels, in that moment, like some trick of the senses. Magic of the real.

But, look. For all that our culture likes to glamorize about suffering, I’m not so sure we do it alone. Or, maybe it’s not quite that. Maybe we do sometimes suffer alone, but I know that we are cared for together. I’m interested in that. Not just in Death Valley, in some extreme sport for some niche few, but also amidst all of us, in this world of constant cruelty that we often feel and that we certainly consume while sitting in the strange and absurd loneliness of our individual lives. A bill passed that wrecks people’s access to healthcare. An ongoing genocide. The violence of the real. People in power want us to think we are responsible for each of our individual lives. This is a great lie. We are responsible for one another. We say self care, but care, I think, requires more than just ourselves. It requires someone else. We are broken, with just a sliver of openness remaining. Someone peeks through the crack. I’m here, they say. Let me help you.

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1. My novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

2. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

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