Loneliness

I hesitate to use the metaphor (here, in this age of pandemic), but it’s just so apt: poetry is a virus.  Only rarely does it spontaneously erupt inside an individual consciousness.  We catch it from someone who already has it. Beauty, too, is infectious and, once exposed, it insinuates itself into our nervous system.  We soon grow accustomed to those sporadic fevers, crave their presence; they become one of the ways the self comprehends its reality, locates itself within this physical and emotional world.  Beauty (and by that, I mean the intensity and clarity of experience that enlivens the senses and charges the imagination) is a kind of arousal which, in many cases, leads to the desire to make more beauty—whether in poetry or some other form.  The opposite is also true: when poetry and beauty are absent or dormant for too long, we suffer a malaise—because even that heartsick joy feels far superior to our old lowkey ‘normalcy.’  Can’t you remember the first times you came across poems that made your head spin?  In high school, Dylan Thomas’ mesmerizing “Do Not Go Gentle…” prompted me to dream that, one day, my own fierce thought could be embodied in perfect form.  Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windover” actually made me dizzy, and I’d read it aloud to myself over and over, praying it might induce some similar verbal ecstasy. Roethke, Plath, Bishop, Basho, Clifton, Rilke, Li Bai—with each new poet I discovered, I began to see how thoroughly (and thrillingly) poetry could infect a life.  We who loved poetry (and especially those who labored to produce their own) became carriers of this ancient evolutionary outbreak, grateful for the new understanding about our lives germinating inside.

Perhaps Anastasia Vassos first developed a case of love’s melancholy delight from her contact with poets like Henri Cole.  Certainly, she has now become a fine poet in her own right, and here she honors the process of how one poem, one moment, finds a new host.  In “Loneliness,” Cole’s unrhymed sonnet is breathing life into her own. How unlikely a setting for love or verse—the carwash—and yet first Cole, and now Vassos, each found both a haunting loneliness and a passionate solitude in the experience (not to mention the prescription to treat its condition.)  “I misread/ flesh-colored tentacles for desire/ in the lap of his mate”—but how can we not be a little overwhelmed by the churning tumult that is the carwash (and, at times, love itself)?  “suds squalling over the car—” and the “slap of rags on the windshield”—it’s all brimming with a kind of hormonal exuberance that makes the heart race and the toes curl.  But then we are suddenly not at the carwash; we find ourselves at home, sitting with a book in hand, staring out as “Night goes down/ on a garnet suture later and later” (and somewhere, Hopkins and Plath are smiling at such prosody.)  The fever of desire calls for the balm of a loving touch: the candle is extinguished, and we reach for someone we love.  But—at least in my imagination—Anastasia reached for her notebook first, scribbled a few inky lines that might also be prescriptive for her need.  A kiss on the page and then a kiss on the lips.

A fellow Boston-area poet, Anastasia has had work nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. She’s the author of Nostos (Kelsay Books) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate). Her work has appeared in numerous journals like Whale Road Review, RHINO, Comstock Review, and elsewhere. Her poems about the Greek-American diaspora have been translated into Greek versions, much to her delight. The situation depicted in today’s poem seems to represent a kind of I/thou moment—even if the thou in question may be at a distance and wholly unaware.  But like a viral outbreak, poems can produce a broad geometrical spread, a single poem infecting a hundred lovestruck readers at one time.  And those hundred new hosts. . .?  It’s how poetry and beauty survive, even in the darkest of times, when repressive forces do everything within their power to stamp it out.