"Streams of stars have been dead for years."

One summer between semesters of graduate school, I found it difficult to read; I started novels but couldn't finish them. I was teaching -- of all things -- reading classes in Richmond, and on my time off I wandered around used bookstores hoping to discover a book that would allow me to enjoy reading again. I bought novels and story collections but still couldn't see them through. I sat in the garden of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum and listened to a spooky recording of "The Raven" playing in one of the old house's stuffy attic rooms. My roommate and I spent a hot July day exploring colonial Williamsburg. We swam in the James in the middle of the night. I drank raspberry-flavored lattes in a coffee shop that served vegan cookies. My students made me braided yarn bookmarks and crayon drawings and still I could not read.

Finally I opened a book of poetry by Phyllis Janowitz, which I had brought with me for the summer. Phyllis had been a professor of mine, but I had not yet read this collection. When I did, the words in Visiting Rites were like medicine, a kind of anodyne for whatever was making the normally pleasurable act of reading so painful. Phyllis' poetry brought me back to words in a way that helped me come back to myself.

Her poetry was playing in my ears again as I walked home from work today. From "Facts and Figures":

She will imagine a baby,
a toothless red mouth and a howl.
Newborn it will look like a pig.
She will allow no illusions.

She will give up her imaginary
plan for driving a subway
through measureless caverns
while moonlighting at Dunkin

Donuts, dipping heavy
crullers into honey, dusting
powdered sugar from her hands,
Or she will not imagine a baby

The frantic creature, like so many
others, will never be born.
Whatever she does will be wrong.
She finds this odd fact comforting.

One day after the poetry workshop I took with Phyllis, I stopped to talk with her. I remember her saying, "You can't help who you are."

I wasn't sure then if she meant that as a judgment. Now I realize the good or bad of it is irrelevant. Perhaps she is right, and there is comfort in that as well. What we make of poetry and stories -- of words -- is affecting because the writing speaks to each of us differently, depending on what we are going through when we read it. Books in this way have offered comfort, even the darkest ones, because the best literature gets at something inside of us and reminds us of who we are, regardless of whether we can help it.

--C