Poetry Centered

Leila Chatti: How Lucky to Have Lived

• University of Arizona Poetry Center • Episode 53

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Leila Chatti chooses poems illuminated by a heart left often to life here on Earth. She introduces us to Linda Gregg’s fierce and incandescent honesty (“There She Is”), Lucille Clifton’s embrace of lightness amidst struggle (“sorrows”), and Jane Hirshfield’s distillation of silence and attention (“The World Loved by Moonlight”). To close, Chatti reads her poem “I went out to hear”—an affirmation for choosing a life that includes both beauty and pain.

Find the full recordings of Gregg, Clifton, and Hirshfield on Voca:
Linda Gregg (April 22, 1981)
Lucille Clifton (November 1, 2007)
Jane Hirshfield (November 29, 1995)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

Welcome to Poetry Centered, where we linger in the space between a poem being spoken and a poem being heard. This show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the poets' voices you'll hear come from Voca, a recorded collection of poetry readings given at the center between 1963 and today. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson. Our guide through the archive today is poet Leila Chatti. She's the author of Wildness Before Something Sublime, which came out about a week ago, and Deluge, as well as four chapbooks. She's currently a provost fellow at the University of Cincinnati, and she teaches for Pacific university's MFA program. In this episode, Leila introduces us to poems by Linda Gregg, Lucille Clifton, and Jane Hirshfield, through them approaching the astonishing truth of deep pain and profound beauty which occurs simultaneously here on Earth, even in a single life. You'll hear a poem from Leila's new collection at the end that speaks to these truths. Leila, welcome. Thank you so much for taking us into the archive today.[MUSIC PLAYING]

LEILA CHATTI:

Hello, listener. Wherever you are, I hope you're well. My name is Leila Chatti, and I am recording in my home in Cincinnati. It's April, spring, and the world outside is especially beautiful-- and especially cruel-- these days. Where I am, the trees are pink and smell of rain. Elsewhere, there are bombs. It is unfathomable to me that this is the same one Earth on which these things happen simultaneously. There is so much pain and so many determined, it seems, to make more of it. I think a lot about pain. I am lucky to be in a period in which I'm experiencing less of it than usual, or at least less of a certain kind. I live with a condition that has, for many years of my life, caused me such constant and severe pain that I could hardly think about much else. I have also lived years of sadness. These pains of the body and mind quieted after the birth of my daughter last summer. But now that she's here, I'm tender all the time. It is a new kind of pain to have my heart left open like this. I love her so much it hurts. I wanted to give her only peace, but I have never in my life seen an uglier world. I am bewildered by the enormity of my feeling so much and all at once. I know many of us are struggling. Some are suffering. Because of this, I have chosen poems that address, in some way, pain; poems that teach and mend me, and I hope they may do the same for you. These are also three poets who are major early influences of mine, part of my poetic DNA. The first I want to share with you is the poem "There She Is" by the poet Linda Gregg, recorded on April 22, 1981, nearly exactly 44 years ago from today. I first encountered Gregg's work on a shelf at the poet Dorianne Laux's house, where I lived briefly the year after graduate school. I just surfaced from one of the most painful years of my life. It was spring then, too, and the magnolias were in bloom along the streets of Raleigh, their petals lovely, soft and easily bruised. I was taken with the beauty and lyricism of Gregg's poems, but perhaps even more than this, I was stunned by their fierce, luminous honesty. Here was a poet who felt, who did not shy away from feeling, but also was not overwhelmed by it. There's great power in the vulnerability of Gregg's poems."There She Is" appears in Gregg's first collection, Too Bright To See, published the same year as this recording. In the poem, Gregg is confronted by a horrific female Specter, an apparition of embodied pain. The "she" is anonymous. She could be anyone. She could be Gregg herself. Her hands are gone-- not simply missing, but eaten off, Gregg tells us, and because there is blood on her face, Gregg understands this figure has done this to herself. The woman cannot tell herself. She is silent because of the agony. The figure reminds me of Lavinia, the brutalized woman of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, whose hands and tongue are cut from her following an unthinkably cruel and violent violation. Her father later kills her, quote,"because the girl should not survive her shame, and by her presence still renew his sorrows.""His" sorrows. But Gregg understands she cannot kill this woman, as painful as it is for Gregg to witness her. She must live somehow while this woman also lives, while she knows this pain lives. They exist simultaneously on our one Earth. It is the only one we have, and on it, horror and beauty, love and violence exist together. To be alive and aware is to face this truth."I am supposed to look," she writes."I am not supposed to turn away." Here is Linda Gregg reading "There She Is."[MUSIC PLAYING] [BEGIN PLAYBACK]

LINDA GREGG:

"There She Is." When I go into the garden, there she is. The specter holds up her arms to show that her hands are eaten off. She is silent because of the agony. There is blood on her face. I can see she has done this to herself. So she would not feel the other pain. And it is true, she does not feel it. She does not even see me. It is not she anymore, but the pain itself that moves her. I look and think how to forget. How can I live while she stands there? And if I take her life what will that make of me? I cannot touch her, make her conscious. It would hurt her too much. I hear the sound all through the air that was her eating. But it is on its own now, completely separate from her. I think I am supposed to look. I am not supposed to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail and all expression gone. My God, I think if paradise is to be here it will have to include her.[END PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]

LEILA CHATTI:

The second poem I have for you is "Sorrows" by Lucille Clifton, recorded November 1, 2007. Despite the poem's title and subject, Clifton is quite funny in her introduction of it. One of Clifton's many gifts is her humor, her lightness, her namesake, even in times of great difficulty. She balances humor while also speaking forthrightly about her many losses, loved ones past, and her multiple battles with cancer. She does not feel sorry for herself. She is matter-of-fact. I first read this poem long ago, only barely into my 20s, when I read Clifton's collected poems in its entirety, and when I was prone to sorrow and to feeling sorry. I had experienced a good deal of hardship. I believed myself the victim of a greater tragedy, subjected to forces more powerful than myself, forces that were deeply unfair. I was struck then by Clifton's imagining of sorrows as something like angels. They are winged. They are beautiful. They appear in our dreams and they hear what we only whisper. Angels are innocent, but they are unlike us, without will. They are helpless to do only what they are made to do. In this poem, Clifton flips the familiar mythology of sorrow. If we are haunted by sorrow, it is because they are as powerless and devoted as angels. It is because they cannot help but love us, not in spite of our wounds, but because of them. As scars attach and ride the skin, they are bound to us by this love. Like scars, they are inextricably part of us. And might we pity them for it, there is no beauty without sorrow. There is no living without sorrow. A life without sorrow was never promised and will never be. It's fruitless to desire this. And yet we cry out, each of us, choruses begging to be spared our individual suffering. Perhaps it is the desire for something impossible that causes us even greater pain. We cannot escape sorrow. We must, I think, learn to embrace it as part of us, as part of living-- all of this, which we must learn to love. Here is Lucille Clifton reading "Sorrows."[MUSIC PLAYING] [BEGIN PLAYBACK]

LUCILLE CLIFTON:

This is called "Sorrows." I've had a lot of losses in my life. I had cancer four times. I once had two cancers at the same time, and there were not a metastasis. Only I would do that. They think they're hot stuff. Metastasis nothing. I had two primary cancers, one breast cancer and one renal cancer. And the renal cancer came after I had a kidney transplant. I was on dialysis for a year, which I hated more than anything. And after-- I thought that they took the bad kidney out, or the one that wasn't functioning well, but they don't. They just put another one in there on top of that one. And the one, that seems to me-- I don't know. And they leave the other one there. And that one developed cancer, renal cancer. And I was kind of tired of that. Anyway, I had that and I have lost two of my children. I had six children. I have four living children. And my husband, my parents, my sister, lots of people. So I know something about loss, and I know the best thing I can do for them is to continue to live. Anyway, this is called "Sorrows." Who would believe them winged, who would believe they could be beautiful. Who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals, that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin. Sometimes we hear them in our dreams, rattling their skulls, clicking their bony fingers. They have heard me beseeching as I whispered into my own cupped hands, enough, not me again, enough. But how can they distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire.[END PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]

LEILA CHATTI:

The third poem I have for you is"The World Loved by Moonlight," by Jane Hirshfield, recorded on November 29, 1995. It's a tiny poem, only six lines long, so you must prepare yourself for it to slip by quickly. I suggest rewinding-- I don't really know if that's still called "rewinding," but you know what I mean-- the track and listening to it twice. Jane Hirshfield was one of the earliest poets I loved, and I love her work because of the quiet alertness present in it. Her poems are distillations of silence and attention. There's a clearness to them, a clarity in that spareness like air in winter. I also love how she fits so much and to so small a space, likely a gift she's honed through a lifetime reading and translating haiku. Hirshfield spent nearly a decade studying at the San Francisco Zen Center before the publication of her first collection of poems. Of this time at the monastery, in an interview, Hirshfield said,"When I returned to poetry, a rather different person in many ways, I brought with me two things particularly useful to any writer-- the monastic model of non-distraction and silence, and the desire to call forward a complete attention. The ability to stay in the moment, to investigate it through my own body and mind was what I most needed to learn at that point in my life, to stay within my own experience more fearlessly.""To stay within my own experience more fearlessly." Avoiding feeling, avoiding pain, is a fear reaction. To stay feeling is, at times, a daunting thing. In this poem, feeling is weighed against coldness, against distance. Who can love the world with all of us and our horrors and cruelty that comprise it? Only something cold could see us entire, as we are, and love us and bear it. Here is Jane Hirshfield, reading"The World Loved by Moonlight."[MUSIC PLAYING] [BEGIN PLAYBACK]

JANE HIRSHFIELD:

That's starting a little run of quite short poems. So be warned, they're over pretty fast."The World Loved by Moonlight." You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It is like the bodies of gods-- cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight."The World Loved by Moonlight." You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It is like the bodies of gods-- cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.[END PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING]

LEILA CHATTI:

Finally, I have for you a poem of my own, one from my forthcoming collection Wildness Before Something Sublime, out this fall. I chose this poem because it has a bit of all three of these poets and poems in its spirit. It's a short poem, like Hirshfield's, written in a moment of heightened attention in the natural world, standing at the edge of a lake in Ireland at dusk, watching the moon. There are winged things, beautiful things, as in Clifton's poem-- bats and a swan. And there is an echo of Gregg."My God." At the heart of this poem are beauty and pain both, which make a life, a life I would choose and choose again. Here is "I Went Out to Hear.""I Went Out to Hear." The sound of quiet. The sky indigo, steeping deeper from the top, like tea. In the absence of anything else, my own breathing became obscene. I heard the beating of bats' wings before the air troubled above my head, turned to look and saw them gone. On the surface of the black lake, a swan and the moon stayed perfectly still. I knew this was a perfect moment. Which would only hurt me to remember and never live again. My God. How lucky to have lived a life I would die for. Thank you so much for listening, and wishing you much peace and much courage. Be kind to yourself and be kind to one another. I'll see you around. Bye.[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:

You've been listening to Leila Chatti, and this is Poetry Centered. Leila, thank you so much for this episode. I love hearing the way poems speak to one another across the decades on Voca, and your poem was a beautiful addition to that conversation. Listeners, thank you for being part of that conversation as well. You're the reason we do this show. Two weeks from today, I hope you'll join us again for an episode hosted by Dawn Lundy Martin. In other news, Voca is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. That's 15 years of making these incredible recordings available for everyone, anywhere in the world online. Find your own favorites in the archive by visiting V-O-C-A.arizona.edu. We'll see you next time.

ARIA PAHARI:

Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world-class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari-- that's me-- and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive, online at V-O-C-A.arizona.edu.