Matthew Nienow's "For What It's Worth"

Thoughts on showing up.

For What It’s Worth

I’d repeat my sons exactly 
as they are, even the one

with the now blue hair still asleep 
at the foot of my bed. I’d repeat

the night I met my wife and even
the middle years of purgatorial sorrow.

Three times, at least, I’d repeat last 
night’s sunset, of which I could see

a framed square of downy furrows 
deepening from rose to bruise

while I sat in the filling tub, book 
in hand, already part way out

of this world. Though it would not 
bring me any joy at all, I would

repeat three times the day I did not 
pull the trigger, or the day I almost

pushed the sharpest knife 
we owned between my ribs.

Three times, at least, I would 
enter the water, walking toward

the sun, the water needle cold, 
all of it, in its own way, surging

toward an epic repetition— 
I may be on the other side

of some things, but I have not 
yet seen the longest night.



from If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025)

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I have probably told this story before — seeing as I have been writing this newsletter for awhile, and seeing as I tell the same handful of stories over and over again — but a long time ago, maybe over a decade ago now, I was at a going away party for a not-very-close friend. He was a friend of a friend, really, but a sweet guy, and we were close in the way that people are close in that hazy aftermath of just-after-college, when everyone you seem to know is trying to figure out their life, to varying degrees of success.

Anyways, he was going off to teach basketball to refugees in Greece, and a group of friends who lived in a basement apartment we called the den, or the cave, or, actually, I think it was the cellar, threw him this party to say goodbye. That apartment, by the way, kept changing hands. There were always five people living in it, but never, year after year, the same five. Maybe two would stay and three would leave. And, for all I know, right now there is someone I sort of kind of maybe know a little bit — a faint name from a distant land — living there. I wish that person well.

I only remember one thing from that party so many years ago, which is that, when I arrived, my friend Dennis saw me and pulled me really close. He had a great big bearish grip, and an unbelievably warm face, and in college, our friendship mostly consisted of standing near each other at parties and showing each other our ever-updating lists of the top one hundred Bruce Springsteen songs of all time. (For what it’s worth, the live version of “Thunder Road” from the Live 1975-1985 album is number one). He was sad that night, not just because his friend was leaving the country, but also because one friend of his didn’t show up to the going away party. And something about my arrival triggered this sadness, because he grabbed me the moment I arrived and said you showed up, man, you showed up. And then he proceeded to tell me about how mad he was — truly enraged — that his friend hadn’t shown up. And he said — and I’ll never forget this — that most of life is about showing up.

It was one of those things that, thinking about it now, seems to have been scripted and almost cliche for its seeming-scriptedness, but it happened, and, like most things that happen that you never forget, it still feels almost unbelievable in the retelling, as if everyone else at the party was a hired hand, an extra, someone meant to simulate the conditions of a party so that I might, in the setting of a party, be delivered these lines that I would never forget. But the truth is that I never forgot that moment, and I don’t think I ever will. I think about it all the time. I tell it to students I teach. I tell it, sometimes, to my wife, when she asks me if I want to go to an event — a wedding, a funeral — that, maybe, I don’t really have to go to. I hear it in Dennis’ voice: most of life is about showing up.

I think of that story when I read this poem today, and I think of that story when I think of my dad.

Here are the poem’s opening lines again:

I’d repeat my sons exactly 
as they are, even the one

with the now blue hair still asleep 
at the foot of my bed. I’d repeat

the night I met my wife and even
the middle years of purgatorial sorrow.

When I hear that phrase I’d repeat, over and over again, what I also hear is something like I’ll show up. I’ll show up, over and over again, even it means reliving heartbreak, or loss, or grief, or suffering. I’ll show up. I’ll repeat. I’ll live.

My dad showed up. It has been, consistently, for all of my life, the way he has shown his love. He drove, each weekend when I was in college, up I-95 from Washington, DC to New York City to watch me finish in the middle (or back) of the pack in collegiate cross country races. He sat across the table from a suited man in a small building in Rochester and figured out all of the details of his mother’s funeral, all while I sat next to him, learning — as I listened — about all the details there were to sort out, and all the prices to pay. And he paid the prices. He called, and still calls. And he answers the phone, nearly always, when I call. And almost ten years ago, when I published a book of poems on a tiny press, he was sitting in the back of the bar where I gathered a bunch of friends to launch it into the world. He could’ve been any man, sitting there, but he was — and is — my dad.

I think of all of that when I think of today’s poem, which offers us the word repeat five times before we are offered these lines:

Three times, at least, I would 
enter the water

Here, repetition becomes immersion. What feels like going backward becomes going forward. What seems, sometimes, like banging your head against a wall might also mean opening a door. I love how this resists the shitty motion of that old cliche: two steps forward and one step back. Here, in this poem today, there are countless steps back, and then a step forward. But it’s not about progress as some linear thing, is it? Instead it is about acceptance as some holistic thing. When Nienow writes I have not yet / seen the longest night, he is acknowledging that the very fact of loss, or suffering, or grief, is not something we can just do away with. It lives with us every day. And waking up, each day, means we might encounter such pain. And yet still, we show up. We open our eyes to the world.

Part of the way my dad showed up was by driving my brother and me to Alateen support groups nearly every Wednesday for a few years, as we worked through our family’s struggle with addiction. My dad didn’t talk that much to my brother and me about any of this at all, but he insisted that we talk to someone. He showed up by driving us there. There was never a week that he didn’t. And in those meetings, which followed the protocol of Alcoholics Anonymous, I remember leaning my chair against the wall, drinking the same hot chocolate that I dunked the free cookies into, and hearing the phrase it works if you work it over and over again.

That phrase, a kind of showing up. That phrase, a kind of repetition. That phrase, a kind of repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat — until something happens, and, instead of doubling backward, you are moving forward. You are entering.

Our lives are, as Nienow writes in today’s poem, “an epic repetition.” It’s a phrase he clarifies through the poem’s ending:

I may be on the other side

of some things, but I have not 
yet seen the longest night.

It’s also something he clarifies about the ongoing journey of recovery. In his poem “Five Years Now,” he writes:

without a drink, but in dreams
such timelines do not

exist. I can be 12 again, or 20,
I can be in the middle of hurting

myself for the final time, 
in the middle of waking up

to whatever wounding meant
to that man almost gone

from every world I've known.
The ghost exists, then,

to reinforce apology. I see
a trace of his blue, and fold.

In other words: we are never fully over ourselves, or this world. We are always doubling back, and even as we enter new possibilities, we carry ourselves — which means all of ourselves — into these possibilities. We repeat and rewind. We move forward and look back. We are never fully out of the past, even as we dream of the future. Part of showing up, then, means viewing the past not as a place to live, but as a place to remind us of the present where we do live. Sometimes that ghost we carry with us reminds us, as Nienow writes, to apologize. Sometimes it reminds us to cherish. Sometimes to wonder. Sometimes to laugh. We show up with all of that knowledge. It has the benefit, too, of making, most days, the laughing louder. And that’s a beautiful thing.

In thinking of all of this, I can’t help but think of the stunning, brutal, tragic poem by Matt Rasmussen, “Reverse Suicide,” a poem that does the unbelievable work of trying to re-imagine the tragedy of the speaker’s brother’s loss. It begins:

The guy Dad sold your car to
comes back to get his money,

leaves the car. With filthy rags
we rub it down until it doesn’t shine

and wipe your blood into
the seams of the seat.

Reading this, you might think of its conceit as the opposite of Nienow’s poem today. One poem about repeating, the other about reversing. But, I’d argue, they speak toward the same truth. Unspoken and yet fully present throughout Rasmussen’s poem is the fact that such reversal of loss is impossible. And so, why even think about the possibility of reversal? In the same way that Nienow considers the possibility of repetition? The truth is that both poems make clear that futility is at the heart of our lives. That we can only do so much. We cannot repeat our lives. We cannot reverse them. And we cannot really ever erase our griefs. And so we live with them. These poems remind me that one reason why I turn to poetry is because of the ways that some poems acknowledge, so often, our ever-present inability, and, in doing so, they perform exercises of coping. They reimagine lives. They repeat. They open doors. They enter.

We cannot turn from the page of a poem and reverse our lives. But, after a poem that enacts the trauma and difficulty of doing such an impossible thing, we can look at our lives and wonder what it might look like to accept, or acknowledge — to have one more conversation than we were planning to. Love doesn’t look the same for everybody. I cherish the way that language gives me models for what it might look like to love. Sometimes, we haven’t learned such language at all.

And so when I think of showing up, I think of not moving away from the fact of loss, but rather stepping into it. Journeys of recovery and grief acknowledge uncertainty at their heart. Today’s poem holds the awful and painful difficulty of simply being alive at its heart, and yet it doesn’t turn away. I don’t think that poems imagine worlds where the pain of hurt does not exist. Journeys of love, just like poems, do the same work of the imagination. We are not fixable; nor are we entirely defined by our brokenness. When my friend told me that most of life is about showing up, I thought, for a long time, about the physical. About showing up to going away parties and the various main events of people’s lives. But now I know that showing up is also about seeing yourself as you are, and the world as it is, and insisting that you live, and keep living, another day. No matter the awfulness, the wreckage, the difficulty. Showing up insists you are here today, and that you want to be here tomorrow. For yourself and for others. For the world as it is, and for the world as it could be. You’d repeat it all, and you’d enter it all. You’d know that there is no other way.

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Some notes:

1. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here. I am ranking him first this week.

2. 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.

3. Annie Dorsen put together a spreadsheet of presses, organizations, and other institutions of the arts who have been affected by the loss of NEA funding. Here’s a helpful guide for how to support small and independent presses who have lost their funding, put together by Deep Vellum Books.

4. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.