POETRY IS MY FAVORITE FORM OF HUMAN EXPRESSION ON EARTH. BREAKUPS ARE my least favorite. So why am I introducing a book that intermingles both splendor and ruin? Let me try to explain.
I have endured four major breakups in my life. Each one nearly killed me. Without a two-month grief regimen of inspiring poetry, unintentional dieting, weightlifting, sofa catatonia, and the potentially detrimental miracle of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication, I might never have survived. What’s more, a number of lesser disintegrations have compromised my brittle nervous system. By now, I’ve spent so much time in the throes of dissolution that I must certainly have achieved a keener understanding of the process, if not an advanced degree of expertise.
When I see a breakup on the horizon, I grease myself down for the inevitable descent into hell. I quickly arrange for a therapist and pills. I warn my friends. I stock up on bananas and peanut butter, and I place the elegant volumes of, say, Mark Strand and the poet Ai on the nightstand. I post the gym hours on the refrigerator. When I’m inside a breakup the business of life slows to a crawl, and the thought of one person occupies my entire imagination. I doubt the ragged wisdom I’ve accrued is worth the mental and physical toll exacted by the experience. It’s like saying you’re really good at getting struck by lightning.
Biographically speaking, Debra came first. We met in high school in Dayton, Ohio. We treated each other sweetly for a long time, but she grew to resent my weirdo literary aspirations, and the relationship turned gory. She started cheating on me with two different guys, and instead of getting rid of me she kept me around as a witness to her infinite need to feel wanted. I can remember lying on the floor with my ear to the telephone, consumed by jealousy and shaking like a condemned prisoner, as she recounted the prurient details of her betrayal. At the time, my parents were howling through a divorce. My father had gone bankrupt, and my mother and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment with my two older sisters and my three-year-old niece. My father ended up living in his car.
Around Christmas, the distaff side of my family kicked me out of the apartment, and I moved in with a friend. The depression that resulted from converging misfortunes brought me to my knees. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t breathe. I felt as though I’d developed a psychic tumor. I wanted to throw myself under a bus in order to annihilate the vessel that offered shelter to such unrelenting pain. Luckily, I’d been in trouble with the police (thievery, vandalism), and my court-appointed therapist put me on an anti-depressant that gave me cottonmouth and made my lower back hurt. The drug saved me from complete collapse, and I avoided the state mental ward, but the way I would now live in the world changed forever. Anguish had taken up residence in a dim, airless room just down the hall, and the door could fly open at any moment and suck my fragile life inside.
Debra haunted the fringes for a few more years—better the devil you know, I suppose—then she pirated off into her own separate future. I read a fair amount of poetry during this period, the only communication that could touch my panic and melancholy. I virtually inhabited Stephen Berg’s poem “Listener,” in which a man and woman end their relationship over the phone. The narrator’s frantic reaction to the facts rings true. His unraveling culminates in the contemplation of advancing shock troops and birdsong. Amy Gerstler’s “Fuck You Poem #45” reflected my rage. The precision of her language slashes her rival to ribbons. And Denis Johnson’s poem “After Mayakovsky” nearly gave me the strength “to address / the ages and history and the universe” and say to Debra, “I swear you’ll never see my face again.”
At the University of Dayton, I met Amanda, a political science major. We dated for a total of five years—nine months of which we lived together in Los Angeles. Much of the relationship was a disaster. I lied and cheated and punched walls, and I drank like a billy goat eats. We broke up three times, once in a parking lot in Las Vegas, once or twice through the mail during an interval of geographic separation. I kept telling myself that something was waiting for me around the bend or over the next ridge and when I found it I needed to be alone. Somehow, I followed Amanda to New Jersey when she got accepted to graduate school at Princeton.
Soon after we arrived, I found myself browsing the faintly-lit stacks at the university library and came across Robert Kelly’s book Under Words. The poem “I want to tell you why husbands stop loving wives” jumped off the page, grabbed me by the throat, and forced me to confess that Amanda and I needed to “die to each other and live.” I provoked the final disconnection as we sat in her car one evening, right around the corner from the library where I had recently taken a job searching for lost books. Three weeks later I tried to retract the pronouncement, but she was already seeing someone else. I cried and pleaded and confessed all my sins in a convulsion of jealousy—to no avail. Clearly, I got what I deserved: two years of isolation and celibacy. In his poem “The Pure Loneliness,” Michael Ryan describes, in his own blood, the nemesis I would face: “Late at night when you’re so lonely, / your shoulders curl toward the center of your body, / you call no one and you don’t call out. // This is dignity. This is the pure loneliness / that made Christ think he was God.”
When Amanda cut off all contact, I dug a hide against depression’s nuclear winter. I located a therapist and a pharmacologist, and I bought myself a good pillow. I started going to the gym in order to burn off the agitation that my agony produced, lifting weights and riding the exercise bike like a grim-faced, self-flagellating Travis Bickle in Scorcese’s Taxi Driver. At work, I would sometimes speed-walk down to the lockable restroom on B floor of the library, drop to the dirty tile, and rip through forty or fifty push-ups with my eyes tightly closed. The tasks I performed in my job required autonomy and quiet, thus my co-workers barely noticed that my speaking voice had dwindled to a stage-whisper. Sadness filled every crevice of every moment. At home, my body ached and my mind continually drowned in its own poison. The past and the future seemed to disappear in a haze of dread. I couldn’t remember a time when I felt right and I couldn’t envision a time when I would ever feel right again.
My therapist reasoned that breakups tapped into the privation of my childhood and triggered the mania, but awareness of this diagnosis only made the pain worse—because after a breakup or divorce knowledge is powerlessness. Rationality starves. At such times, poetry might be the only music we can hear. Each poem leads us out beyond our afflictions and sends us back to ourselves less saturated with fear.
In his lyric “Heavy Trash,” Mark Halliday suggests that “some endings never end.” The memento set ablaze in the kitchen sink goes on burning forever. On the other hand, the body will often allow the mind to heal, time being the only effective cure for a depressive illness. Consequently, I recovered. I made a list and mounted a belated effort to transform my life. I’d flunked out of the University of Dayton and if I didn’t want to labor at menial jobs for the next forty years, I had to return to school. Fortunately, Vermont College offered a low-residency undergraduate degree, so I boarded a train at Penn Station in the middle of January, bound for Montpelier and a vital second chance. Within two years, the college presented me with a diploma and a girlfriend, my dear Annie, the most beautiful person I had ever met.
After six brooding months of long-distance courtship, we decided to move in together. We took up residence in my perilously tiny apartment in a converted Victorian house in Princeton. She found work as a nanny, and I continued slaving away at the library. Crushing immaturity and an inability to communicate endangered the relationship almost immediately. Nevertheless, we lived together for nine months. The apartment walls started closing in, and no amount of occupying the space in shifts could alleviate the tension. Mistakes were made, as the politician says. When the University of Arizona admitted me to the M.F.A. program, I sent Annie back to her hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. I couldn’t bear dragging her westward for the sake of an ailing union. Ultimately, though, I regretted having made this choice, and I spent the next decade trying to recant and reclaim the first real love of my life—again, to no avail.
Getting ready for relocation to Arizona meant packing my belongings in the back of a used Ford Ranger and bungee-cording the mass of objects beneath a sea-green tarp. Pretending to adulthood, I included as many of my possessions as possible. Then, emotionally and physically worn out from all the lifting and dragging, I returned to the apartment one last time to take a quick shower and make sure I hadn’t overlooked anything. In the corner of the bathroom, a pair of Annie’s empty little running shoes set off a spasm of nostalgia, and I promptly lunged for the toilet and threw up. At that moment, I came to the realization that I would never survive the trip alone, so I invited my friend Alex Blare to join me and help keep me sane. Thankfully, he agreed. After the expedition, he planned to fly back to the east coast and finish work on his second novel.
I collected Alex at his parents’ house in northern New Jersey, where he’d been staying for the past few months. Once he stowed his backpack in the space I created under the tarp, we headed straight for Interstate 87; merged onto I-78; traversed the Pennsylvania Turnpike; and then picked up I-70, which would take us all the way to my long-lost mother’s government-subsidized apartment in Dayton, Ohio. We spent the night there and woke the next morning to heaping plates of homemade gravy and biscuits, a wonderful southern delicacy that reminded me of the anomalous pleasant expression of my childhood. After breakfast, Alex and I climbed into my royal blue truck and followed the recently constructed interchange to I-70. I started feeling agitated around Terre Haute,
Indiana; despondent in Decatur, Illinois; and completely wretched when the truck ran aground on the outskirts of St. Louis during a violent rainstorm. We disembarked at the first motel we could find.
That night, as my friend slept soundly in his bed, I lay awake and thin-skinned in mine. The closing lines of Kim Addonizio’s poem “Ex-Boyfriends” captured the expansiveness of my desolation. With burning eyes, I watched the grimy walls absorb “the faint restless arcs / of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks, // the big rigs that travel and travel, / hauling their loads between cities, warehouses, / following the familiar routes of their loneliness.” The loss of a loved one hurts differently when you’re on the road. The scenery moves by so fast you can barely tell one shape from another. When you finally drop anchor and look at the living world up close, everything seems as bereft as you are.
Alex had hoped to do some sightseeing during our crossing, so I made an effort to act the part of the adventurous companion, but an inner tremor and slack facial muscles gave me away. Despite the medication I dutifully consumed, a frenzied despair took hold of my tender physiognomy. I was sucking all the air out of the cab of the truck without even breathing. Poor Alex did his best to distract me, but misery mixed with transience turns out a mean cocktail. Regardless, we paused at some sort of Elvis Presley Museum in Missouri and later waded through an ocean of tall green grass in Kansas. At every possible stop, I rooted out the nearest payphone and called Annie collect. In the single greatest act of selfless compassion I have ever witnessed, she would stay on the phone for as long as I needed, devoid of spite or uncertainty, even though I had pulled up stakes without “the proper handling / of goodbye,” to borrow a phrase from Linda Gregg’s poem “The Night Before Leaving.” The pain of that memory is so perfectly and beautifully intact I cannot fight off a crying jag as I watch these words appear on my computer screen. No joke—Annie belongs in the Breakup Hall of Fame: the woman who offered comfort to a man who almost destroyed her happiness.
Interstate 70 led us to Boulder, Colorado, where we spent the night at a mutual friend’s house. In the morning, we crusaded west into Utah. Alex seemed so excited to see the unearthly terrain of the Beehive State, which I had described to him during a rare patch of clarity, having myself experienced the grandeur of the many canyons and salt flats on a previous cross-country drive. As we approached the Utah state line, my ass started to itch. I tried to ignore the irritation, but the itching evolved into stinging and the stinging into torment. I asked Alex to pull into a gas station around Fruita, Colorado, and I ran to the restroom, locked the door, climbed up on the sink, and inspected my posterior in the mirror. Both cheeks were inflamed and erupting. In my fog of sorrow, I assumed the worst: gangrene, leprosy, that flesh-eating disease everyone was talking about.
I toddled back to the truck in the blazing sun and informed Alex that I might need to go to the hospital. He suggested I call Annie, so I seized the payphone near the ice dispenser and jabbed in the numbers. She said, “Honey, it’s only a heat rash. Don’t be upset. Go to the closest pharmacy and buy some Desitin. Now, that’s for diaper rash, but you’ve got the same thing, essentially. And if you have a pair of loose-fitting shorts, put those on, and change your underwear.” Alex located a K-Mart in Fruita, and I grimaced through the main entrance and bought extra large sweat pants, boxer shorts, and a tube of Desitin. I retired to a bathroom stall in the rear of the store and applied cream to rump. Then I put on the boxers and sweats and tossed my old underwear in the trash. Standing next to the pickup in the parking lot, Alex maintained an appropriately solemn countenance. “I’ve finally hit bottom,” I said, “full-blown infantilization,” which made it okay to laugh because neither of us could have invented a more fitting comeuppance for our fleeing narrator.
Surprisingly, we did wind up visiting the high desert of Arches National Park. We listened to the overwhelming silence of Natural Bridges National Monument. We gaped at the enormous, isolated sandstone rocks rising above the Valley of the Gods. We purchased handmade jewelry on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation in Arizona. Although I remember feeling unable to experience this magnificence with anything approaching gusto, perhaps I’m a better man for not having bailed out altogether. Alex drove most of the way down the span of Interstate 10, and when we spotted Tucson in the distance the sensation of coming to the end of the world, the end of America anyway, threw my stomach on its side. I let myself surrender.
Alex lent a hand in unloading the truck in front of yet another tiny dwelling, and later I dropped him off at the airport, probably shook his hand, and that was it. Then, as in Steve Orlen’s poem “A Man Alone,” I tried “to summon up / Who I was before the bed was full with woman.” Two months of the gym, the sauna, the swimming pool, and the sun, and I felt almost human. Reading the verse of my future professors—Richard Shelton, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Steve Orlen—suggested a sense of approaching community. Annie helped by calling every few nights and acting like she was still my girlfriend.
I can even summon up a sort of fondness for those months now, a fondness for survival.
After graduating from the University of Arizona, I couldn’t get a real teaching position (not enough publication), and I couldn’t imagine looking for a straight job. In the past, I had worked as a landscaper, typist, bartender, delivery driver of automobile parts, cashier, telephone solicitor, and dishwasher. The idea of walking back into anything resembling that way of life frightened the hell out of me. Thus, I applied to the only creative writing doctoral program whose deadline for admissions hadn’t passed—Oklahoma State University. All my friends said I was crazy, and the woman I’d been seeing, a divorced undergraduate chemistry major named Melissa, expressed shock that I would consider leaving town for something so shallow as my career. Anyhow, I got accepted, and I decided to go. I flipped through the same road atlas that brought me to Arizona and located Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the map. I thought, How bad can it be? I’ll tell you how bad it can be: I feel like I got a tattoo of a dead horse on my back that took four years to complete.
A semester locked inside the poky of the Bible Belt, pining away for my girlfriend, and I agreed to let her transfer to Oklahoma State and move into the cheap two-bedroom house I’d rented near campus. I flew to Tucson and helped pack her Ford Tracer, and we took I-40, across New Mexico and Texas, directly to Stillwater. She started crying outside Albuquerque and pretty much didn’t stop for five months. She missed her friends, and she couldn’t believe she’d uprooted herself for a guy she wasn’t even married to. If someone follows you to a whole other state, the pressure brought to bear can destroy the relationship. She might blame you for anything from a long line at the post office to sour milk, and you will devotedly soak up that blame like a desert convicted of selling water to sharks—until you explode. Jack Gilbert’s poem “Walking Home Across the Island” mirrored our predicament’s bare-knuckled distress: “Again we have come / to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon / does not rise. We have only each other, / but I am shouting inside the rain / and she is crying like a wounded animal, / knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard / to understand how we could be brought here by love.” Sadly, I never got the chance to show these words to Melissa, words that might have halted our demise. She had already cried her eyes out.
In the month of May, Melissa and I decided that we should spend some time apart, so she retreated to Arizona for the summer. In reality, time apart turned into a half-assed breakup because she commenced dating her neighbor,
a fellow chemistry major, who had stopped by to put salve on her emotional injuries. Don’t be surprised if one day this guy wins the Nobel Prize for discovering a formula for consoling the inconsolable. Bitter humor aside, this new development opened the door to that dim, airless room of anguish just down the hall. I was in serious trouble. My dignity dissolved in a puff of lost hope, and I made a few beseeching phone calls to Melissa that I regret. I felt continuously aware of my declining mental state, and I am ashamed to admit that allusions to self-murder crept into the pages of my journal. Such ideation had nothing to do with Melissa per se, though I certainly remained obsessed. I had simply reached a point where I could no longer tolerate the suffering that my rusted-out romantic attachments provoked, nor the grueling, isolated gaps in between.
According to the many textbooks, depressive episodes get worse and worse over the course of one’s lifetime. Then again, my grief regimen had reached a level of grotesque perfection that would have impressed Emily Post. I borrowed a friend’s doctor and acquired the necessary pills. I subscribed to HBO, indented the sofa, and gazed at the television for hours on end, making sure to change the channel at the first sign of sex or sentimentality. I was starving, but the notion of food seemed revolting. Every morning, I drank a cup of coffee with my meds, drove up to the reservoir, and jogged its three-mile circumference. I went home and read Sharon Olds and Tony Hoagland with the TV on mute. In the afternoon, I hit the gym to lift weights. I suppose I actually wanted to harm myself, to bring the interior menace to the anxious surface.
Whether or not Melissa and I were compatible long-term, I refused to forgive myself for not utterly enjoying her company during our time together. Donna Masini’s poem “Longing” righteously portrays this way of thinking and then reveals the inevitable consequences: “But just / now I thought of him, I thought yes, the arm. / His arm. His arm. / Now that it’s over it is luminous again.” Comparable torturous contemplation brought me to the dank and stifling weight room day after day to receive the sacrament of oblivion.
By the end of the summer, my symptoms faded and my ability to focus returned. Over the next three years, I finished my course work at Oklahoma State, forked over my poetry dissertation, and fled with my degree in hand. After two years as a Visiting Professor at a small liberal arts college in Rhode Island, I finally published a book and landed a tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college in Manhattan—Mecca to the lonesome scribbler. While sitting in an aromatic coffee bar on Lexington Avenue one Saturday afternoon, I came up with the idea for this anthology. A seasoned proponent of turning ordeal into art, I marched back to my tiny studio on 65th Street and began paging through the dozens of poetry collections that dominated my shelves. I found half the poems you’re about to read in my very own living quarters. Subconsciously, I must have been preparing this anthology ever since I was sixteen years old and swiped my first book from the library. I’ve always been drawn to breakup and divorce poems. They have quite suddenly materialized in the middle of my life—always at the right time—like a forgotten five-dollar bill in your jacket pocket. I kept a mental catalogue.
When I decided to attempt this compilation of rescue poems, I established a few ground rules: (1) the poets had to be utterly contemporary; (2) they had to be female and / or male, gay and / or straight, minority and / or majority; and (3) the work needed to be non-therapeutic yet transformative, hard-hitting, enlightening, emotionally varied, wide-ranging technically, and either clear-cut or discursive. In the end, however, I simply went for the poems that “[make] the stomach believe,” to quote Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
After I finished off the books in my apartment, I took the subway to Poets House (when it was still located on Spring Street) and plowed through the collections of over a hundred poets whose work I loved or thought I might love. I quickly came to the realization that either you write breakup or divorce poems or you don’t; either you strip mine that land or you leave it to the trees. Perhaps art mirrors life in this instance. After a breakup or divorce, some people just pick up and move on—with dignity and healthful ease and a slightly mournful smile. Others return, over and over, to the cordoned-off nostalgic scene, like victims of a life-altering crime, asking the wind and dust for understanding.
I have arranged the poems in three sections for easy reference and self-identification: One Foot Out the Door, In the Middle of the Storm, and The Aftermath. I dearly hope you haven’t fallen victim to breakup or divorce, but if you have, or someone you know is suffering, I have done my best to make these pages sing and scream and darken and flash. Here, you will not find false hope, but the real hope of colliding with genuineness. You will find wisdom, redemption, anger, and plenty of gallows humor (so feel free to laugh out loud). Whether the unfortunate life experience of breakup or divorce dwells in your past, present, or future, the beauty of the language will take your mind off your mind and bathe your body in recuperative light. I have done my best to gather the poems that will always treat you right.