Essays by DAR

The Wit and the Woe of the Suicide Hotline

(First published in Obit Magazine)

 

I never really grasped what poetry was…until I started manning a suicide hot line.

Like many writers of down-to-earth, workaday prose, I tended to find much poetry artificial: by turns flowery, vague, or too self-conscious for its own good. Poems struck me as hot house bouquets or museum pieces – precious objets of crabbed cleverness or forced profundity that rang false, most of the time, and rang irrelevant the rest. Poets themselves…I thought they did it for dubious abstract reasons; for poetry’s sake; to be part of an historical lineage of rarified language. Why put their product on a pedestal? Why not let the words speak for themselves?

And then at my local, run-of-the-mill, round-the-clock emergency suicide hot line, I picked up the phone on the fourth ring – always the fourth ring; we were trained not to sound overanxious – and got an earful of words so true and so raw and so immediate and so necessary that I understood. Poetry, at least the spontaneous verbal kind, is the opposite of artificial. It’s the natural utterance of people in extremis – extreme anguish and/or extreme wonder and/or extreme gratitude. Even when borne of extreme joy, as it sometimes is, poetry is the speech of people in pain.

The pain of love. The pain of loss. The pain of passion. The pain of boredom. Plainspoken pain. Fancypants pain. It’s all there for the listening.

This being America (specifically, Providence Rhode Island), the caller-poets on my particular suicide hot line came from all walks of life – they were Newport heiresses as often as New Bedford illiterates, drug dealers from Central Falls as well as Yankee bluebloods from Little Compton. Yet they were equal in the democratic realm of poetry: hookers and priests who shared the same toll-free zone and who, almost without exception, would have snorted into their receivers had anyone called them poets.

Yet the poignancy! The bravery! The wit and the woe! It makes me utilize exclamation marks like Blake or Whitman…because it was revelatory. I simply did not know, before manning the suicide line, the wrenching poetic power of ordinary folk. By taking down their words, verbatim, I had poem after poem that seemed to shape themselves. The suicide hot line taught me that poetry is none of the synthetic things I suspected it was, that it’s simply something in between what two acknowledged poets – i.e. people who had the self-awareness to realize that what they were writing was poetry – have said it is: “one person talking to another” (T. E. Eliot) and “taking life by the throat” (Robert Frost).

And so, no commentary required. Consider:

Hit A Tree And The Tree Won
I hate oak trees. they stink. whoever said
nothing so lovely as a tree — shit. That pussy
never had a 20 year old son wrap hisself around one.

$58
or
If It’s Not My Fault, How Come It’s Happening To Me?
He hurts me, hurts me
my mother’s boyfriend
— rapes me everywhere, then when he’s done
he slaps me on the private and calls me a whore.
I’m only 16, so I’ll go to training school if anyone finds out:
he told me. he laughs at me.
I have $58 to run away. do you think that’s enough?

Springtime
All winter everyone’s as miserable as me
Shivery. Dodging the rain. Cold grey sad.
I hate springtime. Know why?
Everyone’s in LOVE!

NewlyWed Game
When I watch the Newlywed Game
I almost cry
All my friends got a better life than me

Soup
Mourning keeps stalling out.
There is no closure possible
For me during this interminable
Limbo.
What a strange, strange period
Of Mom’s decline
Made even stranger by Dad
Having a girlfriend.
As the same time, I cheer Dad’s
Good fortune
Without rancor.
Quite the soup.

Stuff
Am I gonna kill myself?
Fuck no!
You think I’m stupid?
Everybody’d get my STUFF!

Shiny Tracks
I got two dead feet. If you ever put your feet in
the closet and closed the door and forgot about them, that’s
how it feels. Crushed ’em. Don’t ask me how. Sixteen years
I was a carpenter. Now can’t do anything. Sit at home. Try
to take care of my wife. She’s got a bad stomach. Some kind
of cancer: Six months to live. I want to take a bottle of valium, a
pint of whiskey, make that TWO pints, and just go out and lie
down on the Shiny Tracks. You know what they are, don’t you?
Amtrack. They’re a good train.
They don’t stop for nothing.

Quiet Country Girl
I’m a quiet country girl
clean and good hearted
I like to drink water straight from the well
cause it tastes fresher than city water
and cause this is where we got roots
everything’s great!
and tonight I get to shoot up smack
and sell myself to my mother’s friend for a whole
hundred dollars!
Guess that’ll be enough to fix the tractor!

Push Over
I was weak and he was strong
Then I got strong and he got weak and killed hisself
My question is: Did I weaken him.
Did he give me all his strength.
I’ll tell you one thing is ain’t so much fun
Being strong.
I went to the funeral.
His family wanted to kick me out.
But I went and talked to his wife.
She was a push over.

3:20 a.m.
Two boys, two girls. that’s the only thing that
stops me. Worrying about what they would do. What time is
it? 3:20? I worry about them. Two in high school. The
least one is nine. I would never touch them bad. Never lift a
finger against them. My father never touched me bad. Only
once in my life, he slapped me. Straightened me right out,
too. Never touch them. The thing of it is, I like ’em.