Poetry Isn’t Therapy. But It Isn’t Its Opposite Either
"The nurse brought me questionnaires, reams of pages. Each question seemed more confusing than the last. Did I feel a sense of dread while passing through a tunnel? Did I get messages from the television?"
Towards the end of last week, fearing relapse after two and a half years of sobriety, I packed a bag, got in a taxi, and checked myself into hospital.
Admission was slow. I sat in a small room in the emergency department and watched as an old man, his head bruised, was wheeled in on a stretcher. “Bad day?” he said, glancing over at me, his arms strapped to his side. “I guess you could say that,” I said.
Hours passed. Eventually, a tall man with greying wisps of hair — the registrar — wandered into the room to assess me. He had questionnaires, reams of pages, and watched closely as I struggled my way through them. Each question seemed more confusing than the last. Did I feel a sense of dread while passing through a tunnel? Did I grow irritable at the sight of empty bottles? Did I get messages from the television? I was stumped. Moral messages, sure. Didn’t everyone get messages from the television?
“Try and answer as truthfully as possible,” he said, tapping two fingers against the side of his leg. But I couldn’t concentrate. My mind drifted aimlessly to a poem titled ‘Patient Intake Questionnaire’ I had read months before by the British writer Caroline Bird, herself a veteran of the machinations of the modern mental health system. “Does your hair hurt?” reads a line from the poem. “Do you peel bananas fearfully in case there is no banana inside?”
My bag looked very small, propped up against the desk. There were no windows.
When I was done scratching crosses into a series of boxes with my lead pencil, I was led to a small room with a bed in its centre. The walls were bare save for a shatterproof mirror and a tiny, A4 laminate painting of a forest. My bag looked very small, propped up against the desk. There were no windows.
The ward’s living room was no different: sterilised floors, strip lighting, a collection of secondhand DVDs that, inexplicably, was mostly made up of scratched seasons of Scrubs. Next to the television, blu-tacked to the wall, was a giant piece of paper with the words, “GOOD VIBES” etched across it in black marker.
My phone pinged. It was my mother. “Can we bring you anything?” she asked. I thought about it for a moment. “Yes,” I wrote back. “Poetry.”
The next day my parents came with a bag of supplies: biscuits, a glass bottle of kombucha that was immediately confiscated, and Bird’s In These Days of Prohibition, a slim book of verse. I put the book under my pillow, and I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling.
I was 16 when I first decided that poetry might save me, sitting in the corner of a classroom I went spectacularly mad in, my nose always bleeding — literally always bleeding. I don’t remember the name of the teacher who handed out the photocopied pamphlet of the work of Sylvia Plath, but I remember reading ‘Mushrooms’, and ‘Sheep in Fog’, and ‘Lady Lazarus’. I remember being changed somehow, in a way that wasn’t immediately apparent to me.
It wasn’t that Plath’s work seemed easy. It was that Plath’s work seemed hard. She had performed some kind of magic trick; made the personal universal, transformed a lifetime of struggle into lines that seemed to say both everything and nothing at all. Her work reduced the scope of the world. Suddenly, all that mattered was the words, the words, the words. She had saved herself, I thought.
And so I dressed in black, and I sat through a thousand poetry readings, and I styled myself as a writer. I filled up notebooks. I papered myself with rejection letters from every journal I could hunt down, and I became convinced that if I used the right words, I could make the long, sleepless nights, and the aimless despair that pressed against the back of my eyes like a tumour, go away. Writing, I had decided, was therapy, as it had seemed to be therapy for Plath.
I was 16 when I first decided that poetry might save me.
But something went wrong. The poetry readings I had so wanted to slip into for the rest of my days — that I thought might save me — were awkward affairs. I got drunk beforehand, and stood up the back, alternating through sickly cycles of jealousy and despair. One thickened evening, I shook and listened while two well-known poets read bad break-up verse about each other. The room couldn’t withstand the harm. People looked at the floor.
On other nights, poets I admired sat around at dinner with one another, trading insults. It was all so tiresome. A man who had written a great book of verse about monuments of suffering slipped in and out of coherence, seemingly unsure of where he was, or whether he liked the people he had spent a lifetime surrounding himself with.
“What’s the point of all this?” he asked at one point, staring down at a soup he had not touched. Everyone laughed. But the poet didn’t. The poet gently moved the plate out of the way and lay his head down on the table, like he was locked in prayer.
For several years, I lived under the cloud of a simple mistake that altered how I lived my life. The mistake came in two parts. The first was that I thought that black clothes and addictions make great poets. Easy to dismiss. They don’t. A simple mathematical equation should have proved that to me, the rangy boy who, when very young, had wanted to be a logician: there are far more people who live with mental illness than there are writers of verse. Poetry makes poets. Nothing else.
The second mistake was more curious. I thought writing about pain would end pain. I was saddled with mental illness; by then I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, an affliction that snakes downwards through the family line. I believed I was fated, in some way, to always live in a manner that courted strange looks from strangers. What do we do with the things we are fated to live through? Write about them, I thought.
That, after all, appeared to be what Plath was doing. “I feel I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death,” she wrote in one of her very last letters, when she was on her own with the children, trying to convince herself that she could be freed from the fog expanding in the corner of her mind. I read these words, and I imagined that poetry was part of this ritual.
I would be a good writer when I had described my agony accurately enough to make it stop.
And so when I hurt — when I got stuck both in fears that I was deeply unloveable and in patterns of behaviour that made people love me far less — I wrote about it. “Oh,” I thought, after another mangled, slurred piece of poetry failed to make me better. “I just have to try harder.”
Louise Gluck, a writer of great verse, says that there is a foolhardiness to describing oneself as a poet; there are no markers of success for such a profession. There’s nothing you can do: other people are the ones who call you poet. I lived with a different metric. I would be a good writer when I had described my agony accurately enough to make it stop.
But poetry doesn’t save you. Not by itself. It didn’t save Sylvia Plath, who spent her life trying to do something with an agony that hindered rather than helped her poetry. Poetry is not meant to lock you away from the world. It is meant to open you to it.
It took me many years to learn that. It took me taking a break from poetry; from reading it and writing it. It took me doing the actual work of saving myself, which is hard, and tiring, and requires making a thousand seemingly inconsequential decisions every day. It took me realising that poetry isn’t a locked room. It took me realising that poetry, good poetry, the poetry that thrums with a golden electricity, opens the space between two people, the writer and the reader, and says: I feel this way. Do you feel this way too?