On a stormy night in 2011, poet Edward Hirsch lost his 22-year-old son, Gabriel. After taking a club drug, Gabriel had a seizure and died of cardiac arrest.
In life, Gabriel was exciting and energetic, but he also struggled, as his father remembers in his poetry:
I look back at the worried parents
Wandering through the house
What are we going to do
The evening of the clinical
The night of the psychological
The morning facedown in the pillow
The experts can handle him
The experts have no idea
How to handle him ...
Some nights I could not tell
If he was the wrecking ball
Or the building it crashed into
That's part of a 78-page elegy Hirsch has just published called, simply, Gabriel: A Poem.
Hirsch, who is also president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York, tells NPR's David Greene about the process of turning grief into poetry.
Interview Highlights
On what Gabriel was like and how Hirsch tried to capture that in these lines:
Like a spear hurtling through darkness
He was always in such a hurry
To find a target to stop him
Like a young lion trying out its roar
At the far edge of the den
The roar inside him was even louder
Like a bolt of lightning in the fog
Like a bolt of lightning over the sea
Like a bolt of lightning in our backyard
Like the time I opened the furnace
In the factory at night
And the flames came blasting out
I was unprepared for the intensity
Of the heat escaping
As if I'd unsheathed the sun
Gabriel was very wild. He was a wild spirit. He was very impulsive, impossible to manage, very exciting. Pure energy, really. And I'm trying to capture that feeling of his impulsivity — his speed, his quickness, his sense of hurrying through things.
On how he began writing as a way to cope
I was completely shocked when Gabriel died, and I tried to go back to work after a while and I couldn't really function at work. And so, in order to alleviate my grief, I began to write a document in which I wrote down everything I could remember about Gabriel. I suddenly became desperate that I would forget things — that I couldn't remember — and that because I'd lost him so suddenly, so completely, it all would sort of blur, and I wanted to remember. And I began to talk to my partner, to my ex-wife, to my sisters, to my mother, to Gabriel's friends. And every day I went to a coffee shop and I basically tried to tell the story of Gabriel's life. ...
After four months, I still was overwhelmed by grief. I felt that a tsunami had hit me and I had to try to stand up. I'm a poet and I spent my life in poetry. And so I began to try and take the stories about Gabriel, some of the anecdotes about Gabriel, and turn them into poems. And when I was doing that, I felt better. I felt as if I were with Gabriel when I was trying to write about him. And also, it was a kind of relief to be thinking about poetry and not just thinking about my own grief.
On how poetry and grief interact
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. I don't like the whole language of healing, which seems to me so false. As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn. And I found that poetry doesn't shield you from grief, but it does give you an expression of that grief. And trying to express it, trying to articulate it, seemed like something I could do. And it gave me something to do with my grief. ...
There is no right way to grieve, and you have to let people grieve in the way that they can. One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you.
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