I remember opening The New Yorker one afternoon and seeing a poem by Yehuda Amichai. Beneath it was the year of his birth, followed by the current year. Amichai had died? I hadn’t even known he was ill. I felt as if I had lost a good friend, a beloved uncle, a teacher, my older brother.
I had never met Amichai. I was living in the same century as one of the greatest poets. Why hadn’t I found a way to get to one of his readings? I didn’t have the funds or desire to travel to Israel, but Amichai gave readings in New York City. I had been living in Nova Scotia for years and raising two young children as a single parent. Travel was not part of my life.
I envied Chana Bloch, who translated his poems. She must have been like a spiritual daughter to him. I knew from his poems how much he loved his children. I wanted to thank him, to gaze into his face. And then I realized that I’d never even seen a picture of him. I didn’t know what he looked like. But I knew him. I knew, from his poems, how disappointed he had been at the end of a love affair. Escaping Nazi Germany and coming to Israel with his parents when he was 11, anxiety never left him. In one of his poems he wrote, “My father built a great worry around me like a dock/ Once I left it before I was finished/And he remained with his great, empty worry."
I read that Ted Hughes co-translated Amichai’s poetry, preserving the cadence, and promoted the poet’s work. I loved both these writers. Amichai’s poems are sweetened with his tenderness and compassion. Each time I read one, I hear the sob in his voice, see his look of surprise, glimpse him sighing or laughing. In one of his poems, he wrote:
“If now in the middle of my life, I think
Of death, I do so out of confidence
That in the middle of death I will suddenly think
Of life, with the same calming nostalgia
And with the distant gaze of people
Who know their prophesies come true.”
And were his prophesies realized as he lay dying? Who handled him in the Chevra Kadisha, those community members who helped perform burial rites in accordance with Jewish law?
When I read the poem in The New Yorker. with the year of Amichai’s birth and death, my children were in the room with me. They were surprised and worried when I started to cry. Caleb was eleven at the time. He asked what was wrong.
“I was just cutting onions,” I said.
“You were cutting onions?” Caleb looked at me, incredulous.
Why was I trying to hide what I felt? I told him that a great poet had died.
“Did you know him?” Caleb asked.
I said I’d never met Amichai, but I knew him. As I said this, I realized that when a poem makes you feel that you and the poet are intimate friends, this is the mark of a poet’s greatness. It is hard not to want to embrace the person whose art so fully embraces you.
Many years later, I gave writing workshops in a prison in Nova Scotia. Each week I handed out a poem that I found deeply moving and we discussed what the poem was about. Then I asked participants to write a page in prose that dealt with the same theme, but using their own personal experiences, as the poets had used theirs.
When we read Julie Bruck’s poem “The Trick,” I asked participants to write about a memory they had from childhood, as Bruck did in her poem. It did not have to be a dramatic incident, but they might ask themselves why this memory persisted.
When we read “How I Go To The Woods” by Mary Oliver and “Don’t Do That” by Stephen Dunn in the same session, I asked participants to describe a favourite place they went to, and then introduce an animal into the scene. I suggested they imagine the animal telling them something, telepathically, that they needed to know and to include this in their page of prose.
I did not intend to write a book about these workshops, but the brave, generous and smart men and women I worked with made the experience so moving, that when I got home from each session, I wrote down what happened before I crashed from exhaustion.
I only gave the workshops for a year, but I had so many notes that I decided to put them together cohesively. I called the manuscript “Doing Time,” and when it was accepted for publication, I wanted to include poems that I used in the workshops. I wrote to these poets to ask permission to reprint their poems.
I explained that the independent publisher of Doing Time could not afford to pay to reprint poems, but I hoped that if the poems were in the back of the book, they would influence readers as they had moved and influenced me and the participants in prison.
In fact, when the book was published, many readers told me they rarely read poems but were glad to read the poems at the back of Doing Time.
Writing to these poets gave me the opportunity to tell them how much I love their work, and them. Most of the poets I wrote to were generous and gave me permission to reprint their poems.
Li-Young Lee wrote back, “Thank you for your interest in my work. Thank you also for the work you do in the world. I am honored to play a small part in such meaningful undertakings as yours. As for using lines from my poems, if it were up to me, I'd say without a moment's hesitation to go ahead. Unfortunately, however, I'm afraid I don't know what copyright laws are involved, and my publishers own the rights to the poems.”
How humbling to get a response like this from a poet of such astonishing work.
The poet, translator and essayist Anne Carson is a writer hard not to adore. She emailed:
“I would be honoured to be part of your book. congratulations!
regards...”
Julie Bruck gave permission to reprint her powerful poem.
I could not reach Campbell McGrath, whose poem “Two Songs” was pivotal in all the workshops I gave. I sent a letter to the university where he taught, and wrote to his home as well. As the publication date approached, I was brazen enough to call him.
Yes, he said, he’d received my letters and was sorry he’d been too busy to respond. Then he asked how I got his home number. Embarrassed, I admitted I’d found his resume online and it contained his phone number. Luckily, when I name the very funny poems of his that made me laugh, he laughed too. Before we got off the phone, he told me he would write to his publisher, who owned the rights, and would ask that I be allowed to reprint the poem at no cost, especially since I only asked to reprint the first stanza.
Thich Nhat Hanh's assistant let me know I could reprint the poems I requested, and that Thich Nhat Hanh would appreciate if I sent three copies of the published book to Plum Village for those who came to the Buddhist Monastery and Retreat Centre which the poet founded and where he was living. I felt such gratitude for this gift.
Impossible not to love Stephen Dunn after reading his poems. He emailed:
“You have my permission to use part and/or all of my poem ‘Don’t Do That’. However, I suspect you'll also need permission from my publisher as well. Thanks for the lovely letter.”
He died in 2021. How glad I am that I had the opportunity to tell him how much his poems meant to me.
It was moving to receive these generous responses from such remarkable poets.
It is a truism that writing is considered a lonely occupation. But writing a poem takes so much focus and attention, when composing each line, each word, there is no room for loneliness. Moreover, when poets share their poems and a reader responds enthusiastically, the poet feels a profound connection. Again, the opposite of loneliness.
Although several poets I wrote to, and who responded, are no longer alive, they remain very much alive to me, as does Yehuda Amichai, a poet who feels like a relative whom I did not get to meet in person. Poets remain alive when we read their work and feel as if we know these poets intimately, as they know us.