My mother’s brother

Lately, I haven’t been writing/creating/assembling/etc. any poems that I’m emotionally vested in. That’s not to say that the stuff I’ve been making means nothing to me, it’s just that they haven’t expressed any strong, difficult, personal emotions of mine. They’ve been observations or practices, not catharsis.

Original piece, in full color

This writing assignment asked more of me, though. My prof asked us to make an elegy out of scraps a la Anne Carson’s Nox, our poetic exploration for the week.

Nox moved me. It is an elegy for Carson’s brother whom she had an odd relationship with. From what I can understand from the text, he ran off to Europe and their communication was brief and broken. When he passed away, she met his widow and began to learn about his life. It struck a personal chord with me, as my mother’s brother went off to Europe and died tragically at 21.

I never met Philip, but I’ve always felt affected by his story. As a child, I wasn’t sure how to handle my unexpectedly strong emotions about him and I let them fester into a sore I only recently started tending to. Even now, I wonder why I am so affected by the life and death of a person I never knew but was better able to process (or, at least pretend to process) the deaths of those I did know.

Unintentional b&w scan

I thought maybe it’s because we share some similarities, from what I know of him. He went to the same university I’m currently attending and he loved poetry. I’ve heard that he read a great deal of poetry and I’ve read a few of his poems that he wrote as a teenager. But feeling vested in his story simply because we have two things in common not only seems wholly narcissistic but inaccurate.

I won’t try to articulate why I feel the way I do just yet because I don’t think I have it fully figured out. But I will say that I feel compelled to perpetuate his existence. Not his memory, because I have no memory of him, but his existence. Maybe my need to do this comes from a very basic feeling of wishing I could’ve known him; a confused, repressed hurt and anger I have at losing something I never had. Beyond myself, though, I’m equally as upset at the idea that someone who (from what I’ve learned) was so vivacious and brave would suffer such an awful early end.

Maybe what I’m doing is resurrection. I don’t quite know yet. Hopefully, through more work like this, I’ll learn.

It’s odd, writing an elegy for someone you never knew. After learning from my mother that her parents were grieving too hard to hold a funeral, I felt even more responsible for this piece. I don’t want to say much about it, other than that the discernible text (“caught in a net / you drop through”) is actually the final line in a poem that Philip wrote about a friend who died young playing basketball. It always struck me.

I feel that this piece can stand alone, but I don’t feel like my work elegizing Philip is anywhere close to being over.

My mom found Philip’s travel journal that he kept during his trip across the country by train and eventually his stay in Europe. She read me some of the entries last night, including one that he wrote 5 days before his death in Amsterdam. He lamented how lost he felt, that he wasn’t sure how he could get past this feeling of overwhelming loneliness; a plea with the universe to give him some sort of answers, directions.

Philip, I hope this helps.