blog

Introducing this poem, I’m reminded of a quandary that ghosts through my mind before a reading. I think: “This is obviously about the consequences of sexual abuse (or something like it), so why preface it? Do I need to?”

Well, it depends. Though I admire the way Sharon Olds, for example, doesn’t explain anything—the audience by now knows what to expect and so nothing extraneous needs to be said—I still spell it out at times. The main reason is to combat shame. The other reason I do it is more public. It isn’t that the poems can’t speak for themselves. It’s because I’m thinking of victims or survivors who are silent. But when I introduce a poem in this way, with words that appear in newspapers or courtrooms, there’s another danger: official terminology could establish a mask that’s hard to see past. That’s another reason why I sometimes prefer to let a poem speak for itself. I do this because one of my goals in my poems is to go beyond the official language to the experience itself.

The writer in me loves the nighttime. I imagine creeping up on the sleeping world to take it unawares. The night tells us its secrets, and demands the same of us, unheld-back. It’s a space for reflection. It feels hidden enough for a young couple to “go in for their first kiss.”

But the night can also be a time when the young couple “knocks front teeth” and feels the sudden terror of that. The night can be rife with danger: dark, too quiet, supine, riddled with the regrets of the day’s long life. It can be fraught with desires and the futility to act on them. A wished-for futurity that won’t come. It can be a time when the heart races, and the only way to slow it is to get up, open the front door and, as if enacting Nietzsche’s nudge to “Remain faithful to the earth,” step out into the world and take a deep breath under the little afterlives of its street lamps.