100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  Everything in Justice’s poem is interwoven; everything seems to rhyme. There is an echo chamber reverberating through all nineteen lines. The first and third lines rhyme off the letters ry (“story” / “glory” / “sorry” / “fury” / “hurry” / “Bowery” / “fiery” / “poetry”). The middle lines rhyme off the letters ly (“finally” / “alley” / “magnificently” / “completely” / “sadly”). There is not a single harsh one-syllable, or masculine, rhyme in the entire poem.

  Justice’s skill in employing the villanelle form seems to be effortless. Pause a moment over a few of the local effects. For example, in the third stanza, he references a famous speech in Macbeth (act 5, scene 5, lines 19–28) by slipping in Vaughn’s love of jazz (“It would always be his story // Blown on a blue horn”) and attaching it to Shakespeare’s declaration that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” But instead of completing the line with the phrase “Signifying nothing,” Justice defies expectation and exclaims that Vaughn’s story was indeed signifying something: “O signifying magnificently / The boredom, and the horror, and the glory.” Justice thus wrings a fresh meaning out of Shakespeare’s well-worn declaration.

  There is something clear-eyed and unblinking about the way that Justice imagines how his friend was kicked to death in an alley: “I picture the snow as falling without hurry / To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely.” The first line is, as the poet Robert Mezey puts it, “calm, steady, almost nerveless.” Mezey finds something dry and nearly cruel in the phrase “without hurry.” There is also an intricate pattern of sounds in the next line, a weave of repeated c’s and a few well-timed and plosive pl ’s. These are threaded together by the quiet o’s and a’s (“To cover the cobbles and the toppled ashcans completely”). This stanza is followed by a description of his friend’s sad last days. The last phrase bites down on the letters mu: “Lately he had wandered between St. Mark’s Place and the Bowery, / Already half a spirit, mumbling and muttering sadly.” This is followed by the only modification in Eliot’s phrase, the tiny but telling open-mouthed exclamation, O: “O the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”

  A sad resignation begins the final stanza: “All done now.” Vaughn’s troubled life is over. But this recognition is somehow countered by the sublimity of memory, the recollection of a friend vividly alive: “But I remember the fiery / Hypnotic eye and the raised voice blazing with poetry.” This is a moment rescued out of time. Donald Justice elliptically tells the tale of Robert Boardman Vaughn’s sorry death in this high lyric, but he also gives great distinction and even majesty to his friend’s story. He counters his loss with an unforgettable poetic music.

  Gerald Stern

  * * *

  “The Dancing”

  (1984)

  Gerald Stern is an American original—a Romantic poet with a sense of humor, an Orphic voice living inside of history, a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary crying out against imprisonment and shame, singing of loneliness and rejuvenation, dreaming of social justice and community. He is like some ecstatic Maimonides writing his own idiosyncratic guide for the perplexed, converting his losses, transforming death and sadness into beautiful singing.

  Here is a one-sentence poem that appears in his fifth book, Paradise Poems (1984):

  The Dancing

  In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture

  and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots

  I have never seen a post-war Philco

  with the automatic eye

  nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did

  in 1945 in that tiny living room

  on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did

  then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,

  my mother red with laughter, my father cupping

  his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance

  of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,

  half fart, the world at last a meadow,

  the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us

  screaming and falling, as if we were dying,

  as if we could never stop—in 1945—

  in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home

  of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away

  from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—

  oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

  “The Dancing” picks up velocity as it goes. It begins in the present tense—the speaker is rummaging through thrift shops, looking at discarded items, discovering what he can never find again. He is nostalgically searching for something ineffable that can never be recovered, his past. Many of Stern’s poems begin in places that have been worn out, such as out-of-date stores, empty restaurants, abandoned city lots, the waste places of nature. They begin in the ruins. There is, by implication, a long life that precedes his poems, which often start in a state of exuberant exhaustion.

  “The Dancing” turns on the memory of hearing Maurice Ravel’s one-movement orchestra piece “Boléro” in 1945. The idea of regeneration through music is one of Stern’s central motifs. “It’s only music that saves me,” he asserts in “Romania, Romania.” So too dancing with joy, but with an undercurrent of sorrow, is one of the recurring features of his work. One of his later collections, for example, is called Save the Last Dance (2008). A book of his quirky drawings is titled Dancing with Tears in My Eyes (2014).

  In the poem “The Dancing,” the dance rhythms of Ravel’s piece suddenly catapult the speaker back into his adolescence. He was twenty years old in 1945 and, like some euphoric Proust, he recalls a paradise of three, a young man and his Old World parents, losing themselves and dancing wildly in their tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard in Pittsburgh. The specific place matters. In their frenzied joy, the world is transformed into a “meadow,” a place of harmony.

  But then the poem takes an unexpected turn. The year 1945 has vast historical significance. The lyric vibrates and turns into a Holocaust poem. The speaker remembers the city of his childhood, which he describes with an oxymoron: “beautiful filthy Pittsburgh.” He can’t resist taking a potshot at the barons of his hometown, “the evil Mellons.” But he also summons up what he terms that “other dancing.” Dancing now becomes something metaphorical, not just an experience in America, but also a liberation in Europe. By swerving this way Stern becomes a political as well as a personal poet, turning his attention back to the historical world, remembering that one family’s heaven exists alongside another’s hell. What seemed to be a strictly personal remembrance takes on greater historical resonance. For while one branch of the family was dancing in Pittsburgh, another branch was experiencing the liberation of Poland and Germany.

  The poem concludes with a sudden invocation of God, which gives it the feeling of prayer: “oh God of mercy, oh wild God.” This line presses together a strangely split or two-pronged God. The first phrase invokes the traditional merciful God. Recall that Kadya Molodowsky borrowed this same phrase, El khanun (“Merciful God” or “God of Mercy”), which most notably appears in Exodus 34:6–7, for the title of her bitterly ironic Holocaust poem “Merciful God.” Stern invokes this benevolent presence as a figure who enables a family’s ecstasy, who lets a small apartment be transformed into a momentary paradise. But the second phrase invokes some other darker and deeper force, a “wild God.” In his poem “Hurt Hawks,” Robinson Jeffers states, “The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those / That ask mercy.” But whereas Jeffers progresses from wildness to mercy in thinking about God, who is not a transcendent figure but one “of the world,” Stern does precisely the opposite. In the last line he binds together a merciful God with a more uncontrollable one, an incomprehensible transcendent force and figure who will never be contained or understood.

  This world is our only paradise, Gerald Stern teaches us in “The Dancing.” It is a world of ironies and ecstasies, a world with a long memory, a world
of joy tempered by sorrow and suffering.

  Joy Harjo

  * * *

  “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (for we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live)”

  (1985)

  Joy Harjo is an American poet with a generous gift for storytelling. As a citizen of the Mvskoke tribal nation, she believes that every story she tells links her to her ancestors and connects her to us. She tends to think of each poem as a ceremonial object, which has the potential to create change. Here is an elegy with a magical title that appeared in her book In Mad Love and War (1990). Harjo subsequently released a dramatic recitation of it with her band, Poetic Justice (1998). It was her first song.

  For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars (for we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live)

  Beneath a sky blurred with mist and wind

  I am amazed as I watch the violet

  heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth

  after dying for a season,

  as I have watched my own dark head

  appear each morning after entering

  the next world

  to come back to this one,

  amazed.

  It is the way in the natural world to understand the place

  the ghost dancers named

  after the heartbreaking destruction.

  Anna Mae,

  everything and nothing changes.

  You are the shimmering young woman

  who found her voice,

  when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away

  from you like an elegant weed.

  You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars.

  (They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us

  through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them

  nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks

  on the corner.)

  This morning when the last star is dimming

  and the buses grind toward

  the middle of the city, I know it is ten years since they buried you

  the second time in Lakota, a language that could

  free you.

  * * *

  I heard about it in Oklahoma, or New Mexico,

  how the wind howled and pulled everything down

  in a righteous anger.

  (It was the women who told me) and we understood

  wordlessly

  the ripe meaning of your murder.

  As I understand ten years later after the slow changing

  of the seasons

  that we have just begun to touch

  the dazzling whirlwind of our anger,

  we have just begun to perceive the amazed world the ghost dancers

  entered

  crazily, beautifully.

  Joy Harjo and Anna Mae Pictou Aquash were close to the same age. Aquash, the most visible woman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was a much-loved community member. She was the sort of First Rights Activist—knowledgeable, funny, hardworking, and courageous—that Harjo and many of her friends looked up to. The two probably met briefly at a Native rights meeting in New Mexico or Arizona. They were both working toward a more compassionate and just world for Native peoples.

  Aquash was brutally killed in December 1975. The murder was hard to process. Harjo wrote “For Anna Mae . . .” for an event honoring her memory ten years later, in Boulder, Colorado. The long and elaborate title gives the poem the feeling of a ceremonial text. It can be broken down into two parts. The first operates as a dedication with an indigenous sense that the spirit lives on beyond the body and dwells in the universe itself: “For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, Whose Spirit Is Present Here and in the Dappled Stars.” The second half of the title, set off in parentheses, is an insistent reminder: “(for we remember the story and must tell it again so we may all live).” Like Holocaust poems by Primo Levi and Anthony Hecht, such as “Shemà” and “The Book of Yolek,” this poem ritually obligates us to remember and retell the tale, not just for the sake of the dead, but for our own. Harjo’s poem then becomes just such a necessary retelling.

  Harjo’s note to the poem is helpful, though reading even this bare narration of the facts is enough to arouse feelings of unresolved fury:

  In February 1976, an unidentified body of a young woman was found on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The official autopsy attributed death to exposure and alcohol. The FBI agent present at the autopsy ordered her hands severed and sent to Washington for fingerprinting. John Trudell, one of the leaders of the American Indian Movement, rightly called this mutilation an act of war. Her unnamed body was buried. When Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a young Micmac woman who was an active American Indian Movement member, was discovered missing by her friends and relatives, a second autopsy was demanded. It was then discovered that she had been killed by a bullet fired at close range to the back of her head. She had not died of exposure and there was no alcohol in her blood. Her killer or killers have yet to be identified.

  As she notes in the poem, Harjo was writing this poem of remembrance a full decade after the execution. At the time it was thought that Aquash had been killed by the FBI. Based on recent investigations, however, it appears that she likely was murdered by her AIM brothers after being falsely accused of being an FBI informant.

  Harjo’s memorial poem uses much of the page as, to use William Carlos Williams’s phrase, a “field of action.” Charles Olson called this approach “composition by field.” Formally, Harjo ventures out into the open, and the lineation gives her poem a feeling of spaciousness. It is as if by breathing these long lines she could give breath again to the person she is memorializing. The long, extended lines are roughly similar in number of syllables and beats. By lowering and indenting lines, she also isolates and thus emphasizes certain phrases and thoughts.

  Harjo has said that while composing the opening of the poem she kept thinking of how a young woman’s body was found at the first thaw in a ditch in South Dakota, at a time when crocuses and other green life were breaking through the freeze. That is the doorway through which the memory of Aquash entered. Thus, the poem begins with a sense of wonderment at the resurrection of the natural world: “I am amazed as I watch the violet / heads of crocuses erupt from the stiff earth / after dying for a season.” Williams captures a similar sense of violent rebirth in his iconic poem “Spring and All,” where he observes how things “grip down and begin to awaken.” Harjo’s speaker links this natural awakening to the way she gets up after a night of dreaming: “as I have watched my own dark head / appear each morning after entering / the next world / to come back to this one, / amazed.” The word “amazed” is emphatically given its own line. This feeling of astonishment will recur at the end of the poem.

  The next sentences further connect the natural to the human world through a reference to the ghost dancers: “It is the way in the natural world to understand the place / the ghost dancers named / after the heartbreaking destruction.” Harjo compacts a history here and connects it to the natural cycle. The Ghost Dance was a ceremony created by Plains Indians in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate their culture in response to the Indian Wars. It supposedly ended at the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, though, as prophesied, it was revitalized in the 1970s. It stands as a reclamation of values, of tribal spirituality and unification. As it is for Gerald Stern, dancing is an important motif in much of Harjo’s work—she elsewhere has noted that “Dancing in the Bible was a celebration of life”—and here she connects it to “naming,” the traditional work of the poet. It signals her grief-stricken determination that the world will be renewed “after the heartbreaking destruction.” She must bear a heavy grief for the destruction of a people and a culture.

  At this point the poem addresses Anna Mae Pictou Aquash directly—“Anna Mae, / everything and nothing changes”—and praises he
r great determination and courage:

  You are the shimmering young woman

  who found her voice,

  when you were warned to be silent, or have your body cut away

  from you like an elegant weed.

  Harjo tells an alternative story about Aquash and refuses to let her be defined by her murder and mutilation. She praises her beauty and righteousness, her militant determination. Aquash refused to be silenced. The present tense is crucial here because it suggests that there is something in Aquash that will never be killed: “You are the one whose spirit is present in the dappled stars.”

  Harjo introduces an indigenous image of nature and contrasts it to the modern urban world. Something spiritual still infuses our degraded planet. Hence the parenthetical comment that compares the dappled stars to colored horses, as if they take bodily form:

  (They prance and lope like colored horses who stay with us

  through the streets of these steely cities. And I have seen them

  nuzzling the frozen bodies of tattered drunks

  on the corner.)

  Like horses, the stars “nuzzle” the drunks awake. The poem then returns to a dawn light:

  This morning when the last star is dimming