Further Injury: Surviving Poetry

I had often seen this or that poet saying on social media that writing poems had saved their life. The sentiment made me curious. I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t comprehend what the function of saying it was, and I felt jealous. Was it something evangelical, a way of spreading the gospel of poetry, a message to non-poets that they too could be saved? Was it essentially something private, an affirmation? (Does what is privately of value become more valuable if its value is stated in public?) Or was it more a kind of hope, a prediction, wishful thinking? And which part of the writing of poems was the life-saving part – the act of writing itself, the finished poem, the published poem, the read poem, the reviewed, prized (or unread, unreviewed, unprized)? Can one’s life be saved by one’s poetry if it is never read, or never published, or if published, never prized?

When I saw these kinds of posts I would think about my own poetry and how I did not feel it had saved my life. In fact sometimes I felt the opposite – I wondered if my life would be better (more ‘saved’) if I stopped writing poems. I had written a book that compelled me to delve deep into a festering wound, and when I was writing it I kept saying to myself (and sometimes other people said to me), ‘Is this a wise thing to be doing?’ 

Lucie Brock-Broido was asked in an interview, ‘Is writing for you a means of retrieval or exorcism?’ and she said, ‘Neither. It counts as further injury. Insult to injury.’ I felt like that. And I felt guilty about it, as if my poetry was a sentient being who could be hurt by learning that its value to me was not of the life-saving kind. Brock-Broido also said, ‘a poem is troubled into its making.’ Maybe my poetry was hurt. Maybe this way it would try harder to prove its worth to me. 

I sometimes asked other poets for their thoughts about the connection between wounds and poetry. When I interviewed Shane McCrae for The Poetry Review podcast, he said,

You have to have this very strange relationship with your woundedness in order to make art. You have to find a position from which, even if you’re writing about something that was at the time very painful for you, you are nonetheless feeling the joy of making. There’s Robert Frost’s adage: No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader. Even while you’re allowing yourself to experience the joy of making a thing, you also have to be able to recognise what the emotional resonances of the thing that you have made are. So you have to somehow both experience joy, but also recognise where the tears are, etc, etc, etc – you essentially have to figure out how to be very clinical about this stuff.

It’s a fine balance to strike. Is it any wonder that on occasion things slip, and the wound starts weeping through its dressing?

When I finished the manuscript that came out of my festering wound, I printed it and hid it somewhere out of sight. The thought of it terrified me, but even so I sent it to my publisher and went through the various stages one goes through before a notional book becomes an actual one. Why did I do that? (‘Why, why, why do we do it? I don’t know!’ cried Selima Hill when I interviewed her for the podcast.) When this book became an actual book I prayed it would not be shortlisted for any prizes because the horror of the exposure a prize might bring felt like something I couldn’t survive (my first book had won a prize and I lay awake all night after the awards ceremony, gripped by an inexplicable dread). Whatever value the poems had for me was complicated and unspeakable, I was in a ‘strange relationship’ with them, they could not be accounted for within the framework of an external value system that has no capacity for accommodating complexity and ambivalence, is actually hostile to such things, in the manner of what they call hostile architecture, which is designed to repel or restrict users deemed undesirable, such as the homeless. 

For a poet to be desirable within such a system – by which I mean, broadly, the institutions within mainstream literary culture responsible for assigning value, such as prizes, the media, and funding bodies – they must allow themselves and their work to be shorn of complexity in order to become sum-up-able, their person and subjects, the psychic sewage of their traumas, rendered ready and digestible. So much (though of course by no means all) poetry is wrought from intolerable experiences, from personal and collective wounds, the things we cannot speak about in plain language or perhaps in any language. This source by its nature cannot be translated into press releases, acceptance speeches, ‘How I did it’ articles and the like. It can only be gestured towards. The gesture itself may be beautifully done, but the gap between the gesture and the source can be a painful space to inhabit. One may find that the external value of one’s poetry and its internal (personal) value have no place to meet. Their values are totally different. To live in this gap one must turn to liquid, or gas, as Holly Pester demonstrates in her (beautiful) gesture, an article for The Poetry School about her Forward Prize-shortlisted collection Comic Timing:

[F]eelings of stress and tiredness, bodies, friendships, houseshares, dates, social relations, hungers, fantasies… Industrial action, storms, Tory governments, crushes. This is stuff to write with, none of it should be out of the frame, or removed from the substance that is in the frame. (I refuse to know the difference between the frame and the substance.)

To refuse to know the difference between the frame and the substance in and outside of it is one way of surviving in the gap – it means learning how to seep. Another is to remain in the frame, to temporarily disown whatever does not fit within its architecture, to be ‘clinical about this stuff’. Practically speaking this might involve preparing stock ways of introducing or accounting for one’s work if its true source feels too unbearable to relate. A third way is to stay entirely outside the frame and refuse to participate in any of the byproducts of publishing, to say ‘I prefer not to’. For a few people, this may be the only way to survive. And of course there is a fourth way: to not, or hardly, publish at all, like Emily Dickinson, who published only ten poems in her lifetime and wrote, ‘Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man –’. One cannot forget the source of one’s poetry, the injury that the poem insults. Sometimes success can feel like further injury.

When the source of a poem is apparent, as for example with elegy, it may become a part of its critical reception. One cannot fail to notice that an elegy arises from death. It’s hard to account for, but poetry about death can seem to attract a kind of excitement. It might become a literary event (it might not, which is a different problem). The relationship between death and poetry is often treated as something essentially wholesome which goes in one direction only: loss into beauty. The poet is praised for their success at turning base metals into gold, ‘the end of night / the dull gold of transforming suffering’ (as Fanny Howe wrote in her poem ‘The Angels’) – for finding a way to survive death, but they may not feel as though they have survived. A veiling has occurred in the process; the death is still going on. In response to Denise Riley’s acclaimed elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’, the critic Barry Schwabsky wrote something that was not at all wholesome:

Now there is a cruel, selfish, and repellent thought that I am nonetheless going to set down here in the belief that the writing of criticism demands honesty more than it does good character. It is the thought that without her son Jacob’s death, we who have been longing for the return of the poet Denise Riley might still be waiting. What becomes of the love of poetry when it takes this to create the conditions for its satisfaction?

Such a remark tears away the veil, exposing the injury behind the poem, exposing the poet and the reader to its merciless light. It reveals what we already knew about this strange relationship, that whatever value a poem has is inextricable from the injury that caused it. ‘and there / the angels hang out / limp and gold / but suddenly anxious / if told // what trembling joy / their suffering has brought.’

My book, the one I was afraid of, was shortlisted for a prize, and when the winner was announced and it was not me I felt the euphoria one presumes a winner might feel, but my prize was relief. I was reminded of something an older poet, a veteran of awards ceremonies, had said to me at a similar event some years ago. He said that being up for a prize and not winning was like standing in front of a firing squad and not getting shot. These do not seem like ‘normal’ responses to the possibility of receiving a prize, but I have not done a survey. The Austrian writer and poet Thomas Bernhard, wickedly outspoken about his contempt for prizes, referred to one of his many awards as ‘a despicable act, a beheading would be putting it too strongly, but…’. Probably most writers do not feel like this. They feel that not winning is like being shot and they need help to recover from that mortal wound. The perceived lack of success is the further injury, and they fear that the value of their work, its potential to save lives – their own or other people’s – has been severely compromised. 

Of course with a prize there is usually money. Whatever one feels about prizes, and the wounds that winning or not winning them may disturb or inflict, most people are not opposed to receiving a large sum of money. I personally have nothing against it. Such a sum could certainly go some way towards saving your life, especially if it came at a time when you were really in need. Even Dickinson, whose anti-publishing poem concludes ‘reduce no Human Spirit / To Disgrace of Price –’, concedes that ‘Poverty [may] – be justifying / For so foul a thing’. Bernhard accepted all the prizes he was offered – purely, he claimed, from financial motives. ‘I remained too weak in all the years that prizes came my way, to say No’, he writes in My Prizes (as translated by Carol Brown Janeway), a very funny account of all the prizes he was awarded and his savage responses to them:

There is, I always thought, a hole in my character. I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all an offence, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated the ceremonies, but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money.

Prizes rarely come for free. Bernhard was known as the Nestbeschmutzer (one who dirties his own nest) in Austria, since he had only vicious things to say about his homeland. It would be entertaining to see more enfant terrible writers voicing their bitterness and ingratitude towards the system, which – however kind and well-meaning the individuals involved – ultimately fails to locate the true value of the work it celebrates. But that’s a fine thing to say when you’re not prepared to be the terrible infant yourself, and in any case, I too have so far failed to locate the true value of writing poems. I have treated my poems the way Thomas Bernhard treated Austria, saying they insult me, saying, to use Brock-Broido’s words again, that a poem is ‘a thing that wounds’, that poetry has not saved my life even though all this time I have been living off it.

What does it even mean to say something has saved your life? On one level, in the context I’m describing, it’s obviously hyperbole. One cannot rescue oneself from a burning building by writing a poem, or surface from the bottom of the river when your pockets are full of stones. A poem could, perhaps, prevent you from filling your pockets with stones and stepping into the river in the first place, but there are countless writers whose writing did not save them from that at all, except in the sense that it saved them for us. Maybe a life can be saved even after the person has died, the way we sometimes still sing happy birthday to the dead. Poetry is, in and of itself, a kind of survival, like Auden said: ‘it survives / A way of happening, a mouth.’

Something I hadn’t considered: to have one’s life saved is probably not generally a comfortable experience. It might be an adrenaline shot plunged into your heart after which you wake up screaming, or a tube shoved down your throat. It might entail a profound and agonising spiritual transformation. It might require amputation, medicine that poisons you, untold sacrifices. It might feel physically as if the top of your head were taken off. The life-saving project might only be confidently described as such months or years after its conclusion. It might add insult to injury. After all, people who have endured terrible physical or psychological trauma (a word that means wound) describe themselves as survivors. 

If having your life saved wasn’t in fact about unalloyed happiness, a luscious infusion of relief, I started to think, then maybe writing poetry had saved my life after all. Why else would I devote myself to something whose value I couldn’t explain, which was rarely lucrative, required continual self-examination, was likely to wound, an occupation better described as a preoccupation – unless it had some vital, sustaining role in my existence? If you can’t live without something, does it not follow that that thing has saved you from dying? All the times I wasn’t sure I was alive, and then poetry stabbed me in the heart and brought me back from the dead. At the hour of my death I did not die, / but was born again in this life.

Emily Berry is a poet, writer and editor living in London. She is the author of three books of poems published by Faber & Faber: Dear Boy (2013),  Stranger, Baby (2017) and Unexhausted Time (2022). Her lyric essay ‘In the Secret Country of Her Mind’, on dreams, agoraphobia and the imagination, appears in the limited edition artist’s book Many Nights by Jacqui Kenny. She is editor-in-chief at the bedtime story app Sleep Worlds.