May 1, 2020: W.S. Merwin and Break up Poetry

On this episode of Poetry Isn’t Dead, host Jordan Moldenhauer interviews poet Amanda Julia Scott about her experience writing “Seasons,” a work inspired by W.S. Merwin’s “The Nails.”

SHOW TRANSCRIPTION:

(Music: “Silent Observer” begin for :12 seconds)

Jordan: Hi, welcome to poetry isn’t dead, a podcast featuring discussions with and about modern poets about  their favorite poems, processes, and inspirations. I’m your host, Jordan Moldenhauer, and I’ll be using my experience as a young poet to interview some of the academics, writers and readers of poetry who help keep the genre alive. 

Today we are taking a dive into post-breakup poetry. I’ll be interviewing a fellow poet and my best friend Amanda Julia Scott about one of her favorite poems, “The Nails” by W.S. Merwin, and how it inspired her poem “Seasons.” I am so excited to have my best friend joining me, with all the anxieties that can surround doing anything for the first time, especially in circumstances like the coronavirus, which threw some wrenches into my original plans. Because of the coronavirus, by the way, I am recording from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Amanda is recording all the way from Washington, D.C. But I guess all we can do in life is move forward with what we have!

Just to give you some context for “The Nails,” this poem was originally published in The Paris Review 1961, and appeared in his collection The Moving Target in 1963. It’s a poem about love, and heartbreak, but in a very Merwin like fashion asks more questions than it answers; the feelings around a breakup are murky, and multileveled, and Merwin brings some of these levels up without telling you which one he decides to stand on. So here is Amanda Julia Scott reading “the Nails by W.S. Merwin.

Amanda reads “The Nails:”

The Nails, by W.S Merwin

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall

Like a calendar in one color.
I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn’t as simple as that.

Between no place of mine and no place of yours
You’d have thought I’d know the way by now
Just from thinking it over.
Oh I know
I’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning
Like a mirror on a string,
Except it’s hardly credible how
It all keeps changing.
Loss has a wider choice of directions
Than the other thing.

As if I had a system
I shuffle among the lies
Turning them over, if only
I could be sure what I’d lost.
I uncover my footprints, I
Poke them till the eyes open.
They don’t recall what it looked like.
When was I using it last?
Was it like a ring or a light
Or the autumn pond
Which chokes and glitters but
Grows colder?
It could be all in the mind.  Anyway
Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

And I’ve been to see
Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,
The same film over and over,
And an old one at that, shattering its account
To the last of the digits, and nothing
And the blank end.

The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.

I’ve had a long look at someone
Alone like a key in a lock
Without what it takes to turn.

It isn’t as simple as that.

Winter will think back to your lit harvest
For which there is no help, and the seed
Of eloquence will open its wings
When you are gone.
But at this moment
When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye
And my only
Chance is bleeding from me,
When my one chance is bleeding,
For speaking either truth or comfort
I have no more tongue than a wound.

Jordan: So what was the context that you first read this poem under, and what spoke to you about it when you first read it?

Amanda: Well, I read this poem during my creative writing class last semester and we were asked to find some poems on Poetry Foundation and I stumbled upon this one. I honestly have no idea how, I just looked up random poems and while I was reading this, I discovered that it was a poem about a breakup and the experience afterwards, and the pain and the hope that you feel. This poem was especially meaningful to me because during that time that’s exactly what I was going through, so when I looked at this piece of poetry I saw all of my feelings reflected in it and I was able to understand the deeper meaning from what I was feeling, and that what I was feeling was natural and that everyone feels this every breakup they have.

Jordan: Can you tell me what are some of your favorite moments in this poem, like what especially speaks to you?

Amanda: hm, what especially speaks to me is the second stanza, um, I don’t know, this one, when I read the stanza I actually picture myself walking home and being stuck between the place of my ex lover and myself and not knowing where I want to go and just feeling so stuck. And he also says in the poem I have no excuse to be stuck here, and that’s exactly how I felt, but even though there’s no excuse you keep coming up with reasons to validate the way you’re feeling. When they’re talking about these places of mine and yours, it’s not just my place and your place, its throughout the poem, a place of understanding and reconciliation. 1:40

Jordan: The thing I think you’ll also appreciate from this is that there’s a lot of different answers that Merwin, like, wants to explore, and theres a lot of different, because theres a lot of different feelings for I know you during that, because Amanda and I are good friends, just for context for everyone whos listening.

Amanda: best friends

Jordan: um, best friends, um, I think like this, this kind of explores okay yes, I want to go back to the person who I loved so much, but at the same time, I know that what we did was the right thing to do, and, like we are making good choices and we are moving forward, but the way he does that, but kind of letting all of this thoughts blend together into one logic but also a lot of different logics. It leaves the question open ended still, which is kind of how you’re going to feel in a breakup regardless.

Amanda: yeah, that’s true.

Jordan: So when you were moving on from this work to create your own, what are some of the things that you wanted to take away from it?

Amanda: well, the first like “I gave you-” something, I loved that so much, so I wanted to use I gave you and then I continued the whole poem, but when I was reading this poem, I was really scared to start writing about my breakup, I was really scared what I was going to say out loud that I’d been thinking that I wasn’t sure if it was real. I was really scared to make things permanent so it was kind of challenging. I liked “I gave you sorrow” a lot and I loved “between no place of mine and no place of yours” and I took a little spin on each of the words, like took a sentence and changed the syntax of it all so it was like between my place and your place kind of thing.

Jordan: yeah it’s doing that like “steal like an artist” um, 

Amanda: yes!

Jordan: I’ll have to find what that source is, but it’s so good, essentially in creative writing classes they always teach us that when you read somebody else’s work that it’s okay to take inspiration because there’s no such thing as an original idea, so what Amanda has done in these things is she’s taken a line and kind of made it, it felt really personal to her because its what we would view as like a general human universal, and she’s gonna take that and apply it in a more personal way. So that’s what we will hope to read in her poem.

Amanda: yeah, and I also just wanted to make like I wanted it to be, I didn’t want it to just be a sad poem, I didn’t want it to be about me, you know, sitting in my bed I guess being upset but more of the moving forward and what will come so instead of it being a poem about despair it’s more about hope, and like how the seasons change, so do your feelings, and with seasons you move on. And I wanted to make sure I was, it was a poem I would look at and always know that I’m going to be okay later and I’m going to get through this and it isn’t forever.

Jordan: Let’s go ahead and read your poem!

Amanda, laughing: okay, let’s find it. 

 

Amanda reads her poem, “Seasons:”

I gave you guilt

in the shape of a necklace.

Everyday it will hang

from your neck,

A subtle reminder of the girl

you once

met

knew

loved

and finally,

broke. 

Winter will look back to 

that one summer,

your sun kissed shoulders

(those shoulders)

that you would never 

let me slather 

with sunscreen

 

Winter will look back 

To our autumn strolls,

Cigarettes twirling 

in our hands,

smoke dancing

around us,

littered between my place and his,

the cigarettes that know of our love story

almost like a trail

these buds

will lead me to you

these cigarettes lead me to

a place of love

these seasons I have known 

and loved you in.

But come spring I will grow and blossom

 

Without you.

 

Ending Interview with Amanda:

Jordan: and then we clap. Oh, one, two, three.

Muffled clapping and laughing.

Jordan: anyways. So, obviously this is a poem reflecting your breakup.

Amanda: yeah, very.

Jordan: Very much. So I guess in my first reflections of this, it definitely has Merwin’s meandering kind of tone, where you explore both the relationship in past and present and future, and you also don’t really come to conclusions about what any of these feelings mean to you.

Amanda: Yeah, I think I definitely did that with purpose. Like I mentioned earlier, writing this was very scary for me, this was the first time I was going to write about someone who literally ripped out my heart and ran away with it. So I didn’t want to talk about it. But I also wanted it to be a poem that someone would read and you might not always think, like, it was someone, wait, I don’t know what I’m saying. 

I purposely didn’t put any emotions in it, and I wanted it to be, I didn’t want to put any expository in it like I’m sad, I’m whatever but I thought that throughout all of this you could kind of, like Jordan said, you can see how I go from the past, the present, and the future of the relationship but I wanted it to be something everyone could read and anyone could relate to. You didn’t have to have this feeling for you to like this poem and for you to get it or for it to impact you. I just wanted it to be a poem that would, for some reason, make everyone feel, I don’t even, what am I doing, what am I saying. 

Jordan: No, you’re on the right track, I think what you’re talking about, what you’re trying to get at, is this is the universal human breakup that Merwin is discussing; when you break up with someone you feel a lot of things because that is someone that you used to call home but it’s also someone that you need to move away from and that’s okay.

Amanda: Yes, I know what to say. So throughout the whole poem, I didn’t want to put any of my emotions into it because if you’re going through a breakup, you know exactly how it feels. You know that pain. You know how much it hurts. And breaking up is something that happens with everyone and I wanted it to feel, I wanted it to be the reader’s. I wanted them to look at this and seem themselves and project their own emotions onto it instead of me projecting my feelings and pain and hurt onto them.

Jordan: That’s exactly what I was thinking about too, is that this evokes kind of the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, where it’s a very personal feeling that you’re feeling and it feels so individual, and you can also see it through the images. And what you do is you take images that represent these feelings to you but they could also represent those feelings to anyone else. I think that that is incredibly powerful in this poem, not that I can trace shoulders that I’ve never put sunscreen on, but I can feel that rejection that you must have felt in that moment.

Amanda: And throughout the whole, like throughout the poem, I kind of wanted that line to show how the relationship was, it was kind of one sided, it was always the other person wanting to do something for the other, the other person rejecting it and not doing anything back, so I thought, I loved putting in the shoulders and saying you would never let me slather them in sunscreen, even though this is happening during summer and you’re rejecting something that’s going to protect you from something else.

Jordan: And you kind of conclude with come spring you’ll grow again. And the spring is happening now.

Amanda: Look at me now!

Jordan: The springs happening now, how do you feel?

Amanda: I feel good, I feel good. When I look at this poem now, it was crazy, because when Jordan asked me to pull up some of my poetry and I read this one, I remember writing it and having so much emotion for it but now when I read it, it feels like a poem I will come back to in the next break up and read it again and I’ll be able to feel all of it all over again just a different story, and maybe not shoulders, and maybe not cigarettes, just the whole thing will be the same, when you love someone through seasons but ultimately you have to love yourself through all of that too not just the other person.

Jordan: That’s such a beautiful message to end with! Thank you so much for reading your poetry on my podcast today, it’s been so lovely talking to my best friend!

Amanda: Oh my God! Yeah, we haven’t talked in so long it was great!

Conclusion:

Jordan: In reflection of Amanda’s work, I think there are a few lessons we can take away from this on a craft level. I looked up that source by the way, from earlier, the book is called “Steal like an Artist” by Austin Kleon, and it talks about the proper way to take inspiration from another written text. The bottom line is that ideas are, kind of, on the free market, but you have to be careful because if you steal incorrectly, it’s likely plagiarism. But what Amanda did, taking inspiration from Kleon and Merwin, was to feel inspired by an idea, and personalize it to herself. When I am writing, and some great advice I’ve gotten from mentors, I emphasize the honesty in my work. Is what I’m saying applying to the subject as genuinely as I can convey it? Do the images work together to create that feeling and tone? Because at the end of the day, in describing your feelings that way, you create cracks of intimacy that a reader can enter, and really feel empathy with you, the same way Amanda does when she reads Merwin. 

To wrap it up for this episode, I’ll give you guys a break up themed prompt: write a poem featuring three key physical objects from a former or current relationship that signified different things about the relationship to you. Avoid making conclusions about what this means about the relationship. You can email your work for me to read on my next episode, and all of the podcast contact information is on the website. Thanks for listening, and remember guys, poetry isn’t dead, at least not yet. 

SHOW NOTES:

Music: Silent Observer by Sarah, The Illstrumentalist

Be sure to check out “The Nails” by W.S. Merwin on the Poetry Foundation!

And in the podcast, I mention a craft text called “Steal like an Artist” bu Austin Kleon, which I highly recommend to anyone seeking inspiration!