by Woody Woodger

Pre-Op Thot is a biweekly column by Woody Woodger. “As a transgender anarcho-commie poetry slut, I’m here to derail the economy with my ethically sourced avocado toast and ruin every Thanksgiving with my colonialism PowerPoints. This column will have that same vibe, but I’ll jam poetry and Camus somewhere in there, and you can’t stop me. Through this column, I intend to do bite-sized deep dives into underrepresented aspects of the contemporary Zeitgeist, grounding my discussion with theory, research, and poetry that I think relative to each topic. But don’t worry, it won't all be fun. My teachers, Youtube commenters, and therapist all say my writing is a “huge bummer.” So if you're looking for a column that says “Last-Week-Tonight-but-make-it-discount-Contrapoints,” I’m your gal. So good luck out there, Gorge! God’s dead, smash the patriarchy, and remember sunscreen. Love you!”

Part I | The Impossible Lesson of Grief.

Part II | 7 Poems for Grief, Reevaluation, & Healing.

In my last essay, I used my grandma’s death to interrogate my grief and the ways we as a culture often wish to compartmentalize grief in a way that we are led to believe quickens the healing process. Rather than confidently dwell in grief as the humanistic response that it is, we are pressured to either remove ourselves as quickly from a state of grief and the lack of external productivity that often accompanies the grieving process – yes, I was subtweeting capitalism in my grandma essay, that’s my hole vibe, my whole deal. Death to the parasites, am I right? Yes, I am.

The essay was even more specific, however. As artists, there is an incentive to capitalize on grief and make a painting, a sculpture, a poem in response. While this is not inherently condemnable as art is often a necessity for those grieving, what I do find necessary to probe is the commodity fetishization of grief as a consumable product in the marketplace – Szymborska’s “Photograph from September 11” serving as an example of the dearth of poems written in response to 911.

Let me reiterate: there is no issue with the writing of grief poems. In fact, I don’t know a poet that doesn’t write about grief alarmingly often. What I take issue with is that genuine grief embodied by art must be filtered through publishing’s competitive marketplace. By actively pitting artists and writers honest expressions of grief against one another, we degrade the community utility of empathy development that grief provides and that art communicates.

So why not a little praxis? A little signal boost to writers who absolutely do not need my poultry help. I’m honored to share with you all a few pieces that have resonated with me in this time and helped me reevaluate my own grief. Hopefully, this serves as a good starting point for those who feel overwhelmed with initially seeking out poems, or as a brief nostalgia-fest for those more familiar with the scene.

May your tears briefly water this salted capitalist hell-scape. May I be your monstrous guide back through the long untilled ache still sprawling across your heart. Enjoy!

1. “Sorrow Is Not My Name,“ by Ross Gay

I wanted to begin with Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow Is Not My Name” because it is just one shining example of Gay’s peculiar genius to ultimately uplift a reader without an ounce of saccharine. Unflinching and unsettlingly earnest, Gay’s poetry frictionlessly vacillates the reader between praise of “something like two / million naturally occurring sweet things” (12-13) and life’s incalculable everyday anguishes.

It is this Frankensteining of grief and bliss that has always comforted me about Gay’s work. In “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” the speaker refuses to allow their grief to become consumptive, though it should have every power to do so. It is through Gay’s linguistic contortions that we see how the speaker reframes their world and refuses subjugation to it. With the vulture, the speaker finds themselves “admiring / the sickle of his beak” (6-7). They have admiration for a looming specter of demise, and through meeting the world with reverence rather than despair, the speaker gives themselves the opportunity to revere the blessings when they come.

If we frame the world as forever teasing out our grief, using it as a leash to yank our bare paws across December sidewalks, then the miraculous only ever feels like equilibrium. Our inevitable lows should always be met with unreasonable appreciation, Gay says. Respect your grief, of course, but allow yourself the stubbornness of joy.

2, 3. “Letter from my Heart to my Brain,” “Letter from my Brain to my Heart,” by Rachel McKibbens

Read in concert, these two poems avail more to me about the body-mind split than any psychology classes ever did. Often when we think about healing from grief we only conceptualize it in terms of abstract, rational thought (because enlightenment era thinking thought feelings were for ladies and capitalism already co-opted the body as industrial material yah dah yah dah, I’m pinko commie scum, you know the drill). But grief, of course, not only exists in conscience thought – I’ll never hear my grandmother’s voice again, some people no longer exist, why does my boyfriend’s cat smell like Sunday donuts with her?

All this is to say, grief deserves our holistic attention. Our bodies communicate to us more than we are aware, as Gestalt Therapy recognizes, and it is our responsibility to listen when our body wants to share.

I return to these poems in times of grief because seldom do you find poetry that so explicitly demands the reader consider body / mind dualism. I love how the tension between thought and feeling is made so physical in these poems. In “letter from my heart to my brain” the heart’s voice is captured in repetitive chanting. The musicality and affective abstraction of “It’s okay to brick to fuck to flame to church to crush to knife / to rock & rock & rock & rock…” (18-19) communicates grief in its verb form. Take “to brick,” for instance. Rather than describe in detail the weight grief leaves on the body, or the immobility of the body during grief, or the stalwart outward expression the body must perform when grieving, all these possibilities and more are compressed into the image of a brick.

As we see the heart speak in its totality, we find the continual compression of grief’s hardships begin to overwhelm both the reader and the speaker and by the time we reach “to rock & rock & rock…” (19), we become entranced more by the body’s rhythm and sound than by whatever we could intellectualize.

In “letter from my brain to my heart”, the speaker makes their thoughts physical by taking inventory of their space — crooked doors, angry children, “the lost house key, a spoiled egg, a howling dog” (6-7) and intentionally or mistakingly weaving them with memories and their lyrical self-reflections. Through this conflation, we see the speaker abstracting much of what they experience as they become preoccupied with how they experience the world rather than the experience the world provides. In contrast, the body’s approach of beginning with abstract language counterintuitively creates a more stable world, as it offers us to more easily appreciate poetry’s physical qualities. The brain’s meditations eventually lead it to apologize to the body and to itself for its mistreatment.

Both pieces focus on the theme of, as the brain says, “...permission not to love me.” (14). The brain’s apology, the body's refrain that “it is okay” communicate that pain is necessary, but also dimensional — as physical as mental — and that every dimension influences, and is influenced by, the other. To focus on healing one only one fraction of my grief, these poems remind me, is to ignore it entirely.

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4. “Robin’s Egg,” by Kieth Leonard

Birds are terrible things in poems. Their prehistoric delicacy and our clumsy pity about their dethronement. Dinosaurs were my first obsession. I was enthralled with their efficient, thoughtless elegance. Effortlessly adaptable, killing machines, formidable pray. They were a mythic civilization that one day evaporated by a universe playing by their own rules – always larger jaw.

Birds are their angels haunting us. That same elegance, the impossible efficiency. Reminding us always of the assurance of cataclysm. Birds are terrible things in poems because they are a shorthand for poetry’s feeble penchant for eulogy. How we wish to preserve, to fossilize our people in our verse. How our dead resist, do not deserve our earthly binding.

Leonard is aware of this futility. In “Robin’s Egg” we have the absence of our bird, that hole (a hole made literal by the “fissure” in the egg) where our dead must have crawled through. The speaker asks “But how did it trust / that leaving one world would, / in fact, reveal another?” (11-13), but we as the reader are then meant to realize that the world that was revealed to the robin was our own – this dinky purgatory cluttered with angels and fossils and our grief singing back at us somewhere past the thunder.

“I listen / to the wind and hear / only wind.” (13-15), says the speaker. This universe spins off in its own little world like a toddler, unconcerned with our shouting. The lonely wind – our only confidant. And I am comforted by this, it’s not pessimism exactly, rather the desperate honesty of grief and loss. Birds in poems always remind me of grief, but few griefs are sweet enough to vanish before you can even toy with the idea that you can dig them up, put them back together like a puzzle.

5. “i once knew a man,” by Lucille Clifton

Grief has a perverse pleasure. I think it’s hard to admit for many people, but wallowing in sadness has an intoxicating intensity to it. There is a drama and passion that one feels while in mourning that, while perhaps not preferable, does tantalize and, often, leads to some great poetry.

Like every feeling, grief and sadness, even wallowing, is necessary in moderation. When it becomes problematic is when someone fully fetishizes their grief and begins to nurse it, and incorporate it as a fixture in their life.

Fetishization doesn't always mean what your annoying poly-couple friends tell you they do when you were just trying to have a nice double date. In Freudian psychoanalysis (I know, I’m not making it better), fetishization is anything latent (unconscious desire) that is made manifest. Sometimes fetish does look like fuzzy pink handcuffs, but in this the context of this sad gurl poem listicle, it means fetishizing Thanatos—our unconscious drive for death.

Thinking about the existential horror of death is a universal human experience, and is necessary and healthy. Fetishization of death looks like an obsession with the macabre. Think Poe, Hemmingway, Stephen King, My Chemical Romance. The only outcome with that Thanatos fetishazion is wearing eyeliner in middle school and then being trans come your 20s. (Actually, it’s great. Highly recommend.)

All scene-girl self-congratulations aside, the man in Clifton’s poem illustrates fetishazation pushed well past the point of manic-pixie charm. The man is so overcome by his grief for having had the horses killed that it has overtaken his persona. Clifton offers us no other name for this man besides “...a man who had horses killed.” (1) and with descriptions like “the words came galloping out of his mouth” (3), Clifton suggests that when the man speaks of this moment, he unwittingly avails to the audience how he has internalized his grief. This is punctuated by the ending “they rode him to his grave” (12).

The man who had horses killed is a perfect example of the dangers of an essay like this—this fork in the woods that might bring a reader either toward healing, or toward unconquerable rumination. Clifton’s poem reminds me of the need to be careful with my grief and not allow it to curl up so deep inside me i lose it in the dark.

6. “An American Poem,” by Eileen Myles

Well, it wouldn’t be an essay from me if I did not soapbox. But earnestly, I think it is important to be reminded that grief, while absolutely personal also deserves to be put into a public conversation. I often (wrongly) feel that my grief, without grounding it in some communal intellectual space, feels like useless navel-gazing and makes my personal issues too precious.

A poem like “An American Poem” helps me consider how my grief could be channeled and utilized as much as it exists to be experienced. Myles’ poem is especially helpful to me because it is regional. I am New England trash. I do talk like Bill Burr on Adderall and I know where Fleet Center is and I do like memes about wearing a coat-shorts combo in the winter. So Myles and her Bostonian “well-here’s-yah-fukin-poem-theah-pally” attitude resonates. And I think there’s few pleasures quite as unique or important as finding a piece of art that because of the hometown references, or accent, or color palette, you just remember living that person’s life.

But beyond the purely affective, “An American Poem” tells the story of a gay lady leaving her family behind as she looks to “have a life that / was clearly just [hers] / and independent of / the historic fate of / my family.” (8-12). As a Kennedy, the speaker tries, and ultimately fails, to not fall into her family’s apparently congenital need to campaign.

As for the poem, it suggests, quite sardonically, that genetic lineage is an inescapable fate, but alludes to the better truth that lineage does have material social influence. You might want to be your family’s gay black sheep, but if your last name is Kennedy, you’ll damned if you don’t end up on a campaign stump. Even if it is rainbow-colored.

As for me, I see my early 20s playing out before me. My egregious privilege and my petulant dismissal of it. My coming out, my rejection of a family before they could reject me (they really have not. I’m so fine. GOD, I’m such a brat). My ass-backwards tumble into success (being white, male-passing, upper middle, educated). My undeserved platform (which, thank you for the metrics, by the way). Switch every mention of the Kennedy’s for alcoholism, Olympic levels of alcoholism denial, and making women the butt of the joke at dinner, and honestly, I’m about to sue Poetry Foundation for not not giving me a byline on this poem.

I have had my struggles with alcoholism, depression, anxiety, confusing my mother for a dial tone when it’s convenient. When I came out as pan and trans, I resolved to be my family’s cure – the queer inoculation to send us reeling off into another corner of the future. One lousy with regular therapy and quinoa. When I came out as pan and trans, my grandmother was the only family member who couldn’t uncontort the love from her face. Now that she’s gone, I worry I’ll be Kennedy-ized, offered my uncle’s gin-soaked throne.

I know she’d never let me. Imagine that power. Imagine drinking all the doom just so the rightful heir can’t.

7. “A History of Everything, Including You,” by Jenny Hollowell

“A History of Everything Including You” is my boyfriend’s favorite poem. Or, at least, the first he shared with me because I made him think of it. What makes this poem impossibly expensive is how it narrows time and the ethereal down from the wild abstraction of the cosmos, to a CliffNotes history of one singular relationship. In only a few paragraphs, we move from “First there was God, or gods, or nothing. Then synthesis, space, the expansion, explosions, implosions, particles, objects, combustion, and fusion” to such meager miracles as “ears, and wings, and eyes.”

What I initially loved about this poem was just that: its ability to move swiftly through its themes. I loved how, unlike me, it allowed itself to take its existential anguish and channel that energy into the speaker’s love where it always belonged. I loved that the poet could set themselves and their (read: our [obviously, read: my]) need to catastrophize over ephemera, to end a poem always looking at night sky as if there was nowhere more worthy to go.

Erk immediately loved what I should have. He loved that the speaker knew humans really just want to dish about life's grimy ecstasy. What sex positions did you try? How are the kids? What language did you try to learn to pass the time before one or both of you die? These minutiae are what we remember when we pray to our dead, what we – like the speaker at the end of the poem – ask them to remember with us as we look into the sky and do not see heaven.

And this should be a shining example of why you should never trust a with poetry. Every recommendation, every criticism, always worms its way back to how else we wish we could write the world. How else we might describe our lives rather than live them. Perhaps that's just me. And as I rapidly find I have little else to offer, I wish you better luck.