Rebecca Elson's "Myth"

Thoughts on five years of writing about poems.

Myth

What I want is a mythology so huge
That settling on its grassy bank
(Which may at first seem ordinary)
You catch sight of the frog, the stone,
The dead minnow jeweled with flies,
And remember all at once
The things you had forgotten to imagine.



from A Responsibility to Awe (Carcanet Classics, 2018)

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I first heard of Rebecca Elson’s name (and her work) in a recent essay published in The Nation by Kaveh Akbar. That essay — which speaks to resisting the powerful’s constant justifications of war and thinking instead of what it might mean to call for accountability while imagining a future that isn’t reliant on genocide, or violence, or cruelty to enact the aims of those in power — ends with a moment inspired by Elson’s poetry:

We are making a light that proves the existence of a meadow you can’t yet see. It’s a green bright place where children everywhere are allowed to grow old. You can join us there if you like.

And so amidst airstrikes and justifications for said airstrikes, and amidst the wellspring of cruelty that has come to dominate our discourse, I read Elson’s poetry. And I felt enamored and inspired and enlivened for it. One of her poems, “Let There Always Be Light,” navigates the most ceaseless searching for the faintest star. It ends with these lines:

Let there even be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close that we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.

A prayer for our times, I think. As today’s is, as well, with its ending:

And remember all at once
The things you had forgotten to imagine.

Around this time every year, I write a long essay on here, one that reflects on what it has meant for me to write these weekly essays about single poems over fifty times each year. Today marks, roughly, the fifth anniversary of the day I started this little newsletter. And so today marks five years of writing, every week, about poems. Wild.

I started this newsletter in the midst of the pandemic, feeling far-too-terminally online and far too distant from the kind of thoughtful, attentive approach to reading I had felt like I had once enacted. I felt like I needed to practice, to really practice, what it might look like to pay attention to one thing for an extended time each week. I also felt lonely and isolated and at a loss, despite being so active on what used to be called twitter, and I wondered what might happen if I spent more time with a single poem, rather than so much less time with so many poems. I did a lot of this selfishly, to be honest. I simply wanted to feel better — about myself, about poetry, about how I filled my time. And I wanted to practice. I’m still practicing. And it’s been a joy and a honor to know that so many of you keep reading these words. So, thank you. Truly.

I think that I am thinking about Elson’s poetry on this fifth anniversary because of what it says about possibility. And I think it is possibility — and permission, and imagination — that I am thinking about as I consider what writing this newsletter has meant for me over these years.

Just yesterday, I attended the graduation for the high school where I teach. This year’s students marked our fourth graduating class, and I have been at all four of these graduations. I love graduations. They are — perhaps without comparison — my favorite celebratory events. I love the families who arrive, arms loaded with huge stuffed animals, siblings trailing behind with hands squeezing the strings of a million balloons. Our graduations are raucous. When the emcee inevitably asks our students how many of them are from the Bronx, and when all of our students raise their hands, the entire crowd stands up and cheers. When it is time to hand out diplomas, it takes an hour to get through all of their names, and the very idea of organized seating absolutely demolishes itself, as people abandon their chairs and flood the wings of the tent, screaming the names of their children, their brothers, their sisters, their cousins. They hold up phones and crane their necks. Kids dance across the stage.

I sit behind the students who are graduating, with all of the other teachers. It’s my favorite thing in the world. I watch the seniors hug each other, and rehearse what they’ll do as they walk across the stage. And most of all, I look at their caps, which are so often meticulously decorated. Just the sight of one makes me weepy. I think of the hours spent the night before, with glue and glitter and beads and stencils, trying to make something perfect. I think of this thing that they are designing that they will not see and yet know that other people will. That’s one definition, I think, of a gift.

Here is my favorite cap from this year’s graduation. Perhaps it will make you weepy, too.

This, here, is possibility. Isn’t it? I am gonna grow wings. This, here, is what comes before Elson’s poem. Isn’t it? Not the memory of what you once imagined. But the permission to imagine in the first place.

And I think that is why I love graduations so much. They feel like these sacred events that are bookended by what we call the real. And the real sometimes hurts, and the real sometimes fucks us up. This, by the way, is our fault. And by our, I mean adults. Before graduation, we pepper our students with questions about what they will do next. We police their answers, and I am sure we often make them feel ashamed or scared or fearful or not ready yet. The system of education does that disservice to kids everyday. It treats the future less as a space for imagination and more as a space for limitation. And after graduation, whatever is next will happen. And it will probably be full of so many of those same questions and annoyances of before, this constant reminder that people simply are not there yet or are not ready yet.

But during graduation, for a brief period, there is nothing but joy, and relief, and pride. I am proud; I am proud; I am proud. I kept saying these words, over and over again, to these students. And once, while one student walked across a stage, I looked to my right and saw, phone held up in the wings, that same student’s older brother, who I taught three years ago. He had come back from college, where he is studying to become a teacher. In high school, he was the kind of student who did everything near-perfectly, who had a boundless curiosity that was satiated by a commitment to learning, which, in turn, inspired that same curiosity once more. His younger brother, though, was different. Off the walls and angry and anxious. He had a short fuse and sometimes wouldn’t come to school for days on end. But he made it. He graduated. I don’t know what will happen next, but for that moment, on graduation day? He smiled so wide as he walked across the stage; he had new sneakers; he wore a custom stole in the same colors as the Dominican Republic’s flag. I stood up to cheer for him, and that’s when I turned. His brother was there — phone ready for the photo, eyes wet from crying.

Hold that moment there, and you are given a language for possibility. I love you; I’m proud of you; we are both smiling. What do you hold onto when the world’s cruelty seeks to limit the possibility of your future? How do you speak to someone to let them know you believe in their right to be who they are, forever? You take the train down from school; you hold your phone up in the wings; you don’t want to miss a thing. Come on. Fuck the real world. Our love for one another makes what could be possible, possible. We offer this language to each other every day, if only we are willing to listen for it, to read it in the everydayness of the world.

Reading poems, and sitting with poems, has reminded me of what it looks like to cultivate, as Elson writes, “a mythology so huge.” The tent at graduation — it, too, reminded me of this. It was not big enough to hold all that joy and all that pride. People eventually spilled out of it. We would’ve needed a tent so huge to contain all that love.

But the truth is that our very existence communicates that hugeness. We have so many models for what might be possible in this world. They are not — and they don’t have to be, as Elson writes — extraordinary. In fact, they seem quite ordinary. I am reminded of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination in the city where I live, and where I voted for him. I am reminded of how it was a testament to the work of many people — knocking on doors, donating small amounts of money. These ordinary actions gave room for the possible to grow. They literally opened doors to possibility. In the meantime, the extraordinary sums of money donated by billionaires looking to maintain their power did nothing to widen people’s conception of possibility. In fact, such sums reinforced a sense of impossibility — the doom of subservience that comes when the ultra-rich demand we limit our conception of the world in order to live in theirs.

One can see, in the reaction to Mamdani’s win, the immediate and cold and often-cruel limitation of the possibility he seeks to enact. It comes not just from the right, but from the left. It comes from all around. Whether the way he has been painted as someone in cahoots with those who organized the 9/11 attacks, or whether he has been interrupted by CNN hosts who seek to question and question and question him about his proposals without even seeming to listen to his calm, organized, methodical, and far-too-kind responses. I think of Elson’s poem today when I think of all of this. We would do well to remember what we “had forgotten to imagine.”

The joy of Mamdani’s campaign is that it — through ordinary action — reminds us of what we may have forgotten to imagine. That we can care about each other. That we can see in one another a greater possibility — that one person doesn’t have to suffer because another has to prosper. That our future may look like, as Akbar writes, a meadow we can’t yet see. A tent big enough to hold everybody. It is hard for me to understand why anyone might dismiss such a possibility. But people do, I know. This is in part because, I think, the language of cruelty has become one of the most dominant forms of expression that our world offers us. But there are other languages out there. I read them every week. I see them every day.

As I have written these newsletters, I have experienced, each week, the grace of possibility. Poems offer me such grace. They remind me of what is and might be possible. Consider the poem, “I Asked // I Got,” by Gabrielle Bates, which navigates a newer, more generous understanding of the world, and how she writes that she asked:

for another life, adjacent, and wilder:

And received (and can you imagine the clouds here, how they hang beautifully above her, framed by plants?):

                trapped clouds in the plant conservatory

Or consider how Linda Pastan writes, pushing against a cliched idea:

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

Or consider Harryette Mullen’s insistence that:

Native or not, you're welcome in our gardens.

Or consider Bernadette Mayer’s ode to the very idea of tomorrow, a day of pleasure and sheep and ricotta cheese, and a day that affirms — more importantly — this idea:

war what is it good for?
absolutely nothing

Or consider how Jane Hirshfield writes, simply:

To be a person may be possible then, after all.

I have spent time with each of these poems in the past year, and each of them has offered me a sense of possibility. They have offered visions of tomorrow that are rooted in joy, reimaginations of our lives that are steeped in awe, moments of grace that give permission for people to be who they are and how they are.

Poetry is a springboard to the possible. Just as ordinary conversation is. Just as looking, really looking, at anything is. And it’s funny, because I’d argue that most of our widely-circulated discourse about the “possible” is steeped more in ideas that hold us back from a different world, despite all the language around the unlimited, the limitless. The language of the possible that I encounter in poetry is a language that reminds us of our fragility rather than dismissing such fragility as some fool’s game of the mind.

The truth is that we are limited. And so, a language of the possible that affirms such a thing is also a language that then asks us to find wonder rather than certainty, to find joy even amidst the cruelty, to seek ordinary change for a greater number rather than extraordinary change for a select few. What is possible has to do with the fact that we are here for such a short time, and that we are here together. What is possible has nothing to do with us being unlimited. It has everything to do with us being bounded together in this short time. We are together, so briefly. But we are together. We are not alone. Can you imagine how awful it would be, how fearful, if we truly were alone? But we are not alone. We have each other for this short time. We would do well to act like it.

And so, I think I will keep writing these little newsletters for a little while longer. At some point, I will probably stop. In a few months, or in a year, or in five. But for now, I need my weekly encounter with the possible. I need to turn to language that enacts something I might not see all of the time in this world. I need it because I need my own reminder, quite selfishly. I need it because I get scared. And I get angry. And I worry, all of the time, about this world, and what we do to it, and what we do to each other as we live on it. And I need, especially, what Elson’s poem teaches me today — that reminder to imagine. This reminder doesn’t just exist in poetry. But poetry turns me back toward it. And then I see it. I see it everywhere. A brother taking a photo of his younger brother walking across a stage. A felt caterpillar against a pink background: I am gonna grow wings.

You get hardened to the world, don’t you, in all the in-betweens. But then you are reminded of the possible, and you soften a bit. It feels like my wife squeezing my arm. Like the gentle pad at the bottom of a dog’s paw. And what could be, could be. Wings you know you will grow. A hug you’ve been dying to give. A city that feels sacred. A world that feels safe. And the language that makes it all real. I’ve never met you; I love you. You deserve it all.

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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.

3. 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.