Image: Winslow Homer’s Snap the Whip at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
As a kid, I spent summers with my cousin Nina in Morgantown, West Virginia. We didn’t have smartphones or laptops or social media to keep up with. In the mornings, Aji would do yoga while watching Murder, She Wrote, and we’d stumble downstairs and eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch and refuse to learn any poses. In the afternoons, Nina would watch Disney Channel, I’d read novels that I was too young to appreciate, and we’d both go outside to ride our bikes around the neighborhood or shoot hoops in the driveway or go on a picnic down by the stream, where you could see wild turkeys or deer, if you were lucky. At night, we’d play card games Aji taught us. Some weeks my aunt would enroll us in day camps for arts. But we were often bored, as I now think kids should be. We whiled away those small-town summers, and it was marvelous.
Because we spent our days so simply, we grew to appreciate what now sound like small interludes — accompanying my uncle on a run to Kroger, going to get ice cream at the downtown Dairy Queen, spending the afternoon walking up and down the Rail Trail, getting to spend five dollars on whatever our hearts desired at the local Dollar General. (I always bought stationery, and occasionally bubblegum.)
Some days, I’d be so bored that I’d pick up the local newspaper and try to find an article that could hold my attention. Inevitably I’d end up on the last page, reading Dear Abby or Miss Manners. I didn’t much like the advice they gave or the tone in which they gave it, but I did enjoy reading about people’s problems. There were the typical mundane inquiries — was it too late to send thank-you notes for wedding gifts? (it’s never too late) — but also more complex questions about fraying friendships or abusive relatives. In my innocence, I always hoped for ever-more complicated quandaries.
I didn’t think again about advice, the asking for and giving of it, until college. My junior year, a friend recommended I read Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Wild is a memoir, an account of Strayed’s hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Southern California to Oregon shortly after her mother died. I had just biked from Texas to Alaska to raise money for cancer research and patient support services, and so I found a lot to appreciate in Wild. Curious about Strayed herself, I looked up her other work, a big part of which were her Dear Sugar columns for the online literary magazine The Rumpus [1]. I read her archive and bought the anthology and subscribed to the podcast she launched with the original Sugar, the writer Steve Almond, in 2014.
The premise of the Dear Sugar brand was that Sugar would practice “radical empathy”. This practice resulted in the column and the podcast having a tone at odds with traditional columns, whose authors would dictate the proper course of action from on high. No, Sugar had been in the trenches, and sometimes she still was in the trenches right beside you. She had been poor and self-destructive and doubting and yearning and too-cool and orphaned. She knew of what she wrote.
It seems like advice columns in the Dear Sugar mould — discursive, empathetic, often tender — have only grown more popular since 2014. I can’t offer you quantitative evidence, just my own observation: I used to rely upon Emily Yoffe’s Dear Prudence at Slate, but now I’ve got at least one advice column for each day of the week (see below for a full accounting).
What hooked me about advice columns was, for a long time, the idea that there was someone who knew how to solve any problem you might encounter. My feelings about advice columns have grown more complicated since then, due in no small part to the larger ecosystem in which they exist. What does it mean that advice columnists make money from other people’s pain? What are the ethical obligations of an advice columnist vis à vis all the letters they receive and do not answer? What gives one person the authority or even the confidence to offer others advice?
More recently I’ve realized that what I want from an advice columnist is less a solution to my problem and more the sense of someone bearing witness to my situation. Of all the columns I read, I find that the premise of Poetry Rx does the best job of delivering on this desire. The premise is simple — people write in with requests for a poem, and three poets answer with poems they think address people’s needs. And this works beautifully, because poems bear witness — they give us words and stories and structures for the experiences we don’t, for whatever reason, know how to talk about.
One of the editions of Poetry Rx I love and think of most was published July 19, 2018 [2]. Claire Schwartz was on call that week. Having just been through a bad friend break-up myself, I was eager to know how she would answer the first letter, copied below.
Dear Poets,
What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever and ever no longer feels the same way? Or perhaps never even did? Is it just time to move on? What do you when you’ve promised yourself, and her, that you would love her forever and ever, no matter what? Was that a ridiculous promise?
Thank you,
Lost
I could have written that letter myself. So I was heartened to read on and see that Schwartz wrote back in a way that both honored the letter writer’s pain and reaffirmed her belief in the worth of investing in friendships and loving people. Schwartz recommended “Poem” by Langston Hughes:
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.
As an admittedly uneducated reader of poetry, I might be insulting poets everywhere to say that it’s poetry like that, like Langston Hughes’ “Poem”, that I have found the most rewarding — poetry that has made me see my experience in a new way, or expressed exactly what I have felt and not known how to explain.
Those feelings aren’t always particularly nuanced or sophisticated. The earliest poem I recall loving is Shel Silverstein’s Us [3]. It starts with a weary narrator grumbling,
Me and him
Him and me,
We’re always together
As you can see.
I wish he’d leave
So I’d be free…
But the line that got me as a kid — and still does now — comes later, when our narrator says
I want to sleep
He has to pee.
As a kid, I thought Silverstein understood just how frustrating I found bedtime — not because I didn’t want to go to sleep, but rather because I dreaded having to get up to pee after having ensconced myself in my warm bed.
Post-Silverstein, I spent a lot of time avoiding contemporary poetry. I read epic poems like The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno for school, and while I learned to appreciate them, it wasn’t until a bad break-up in graduate school that a poem captured my attention. That poem, or collection of poems, was Maggie Nelson’s Bluets [4].
I had put a hold on the library copy of Bluets when I first started my graduate program — it had been on the edges of my literary consciousness for a few months, but I didn’t have much idea of what it was about or why I should read it, only that others had found it interesting. In one of those coincidences that feels meaningful, it became available for pick-up at the circulation desk just after the break-up. I had already decided to not try to outrun the quicksand sadness I was feeling, but I didn’t know what to do with that sadness either. So I read the books I thought would show me a path through it.
I first read Bluets — raced through it — in a single sitting. I curled up on my blue couch in my new home on a rainy day and read. It’s one of the few books I feel compelled to periodically reread. Each time I do, I learn something about writing and heartbreak and laughter, even the history of science. And though I am not and may never be a quote person (one of those people who can perfectly recall the most apt quote for a situation), I copied two of Nelson’s propositions (nos. 19 and 207) in my journals so many times that I’ve committed them to memory.
Months before this afternoon, I had a dream, and in this dream an angel came and said: You must spend more time thinking about the divine, and less time imagining unbuttoning the prince of blue’s pants at the Chelsea Hotel. But what if the prince of blue’s unbuttoned pants are the divine, I pleaded. So be it, she said, and left me to sob with my face against the blue slate floor.
Reader, I laughed out loud the first time I read that 19th proposition. I found it then — as I find it now — perfectly funny. It expresses both my profound sadness and how alone I felt in that sadness and, with that mythic tone, how silly I was to feel alone in an age-old feeling. Back then, I wanted to pour out my sadnesses to anyone who would listen, and I also shied away from sharing anything with anyone, aware that the words I would use would inevitably be insufficient to convey the truth of that inner state we all hope and fear others will see. Which is to say, it all felt entirely too melodramatic for words. But Nelson’s poem gave me the mythic language in which to concisely express it all — my desire and abandonment, and my self-awareness and self-deprecation, too. I felt seen by Maggie Nelson in a way I’d never before felt as a reader. That’s all we can hope for from other people, after all — that they’ll look closely at us.
Back then, I thought a lot about love because life had broken down all that I’d previously believed about the subject. I wrote in one of my journals, like a hypothesis in a lab notebook — “The fundamental quality of love is attention.” And isn’t that the fundamental quality of the best science and art, too?
I can remember a time when I took Henry James’s advice — ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’! — deeply to heart. I think I was then imagining that the net effect of becoming one of those people would always be one of accretion. Whereas if you truly become someone upon whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either.
the main post
Dear Sugar archive at The Rumpus
Poetry Rx: I Loved My Friend, by Claire Schwartz at The Paris Review Daily
Us, by Shel Silverstein
Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
from pillar to post
all the advice columns I read, organized by frequency
Daily
Love Letters by Meredith Goldstein at The Boston Globe
~Weekly
Dear Therapist by Lori Gottlieb at The Atlantic
Ask the Ethicist by Kwame Anthony Appiah at the New York Times
Ask Polly by Heather Havrilesky at The Cut
Poetry Rx by Claire Schwartz, Sarah Kay, and Kaveh Akbar at The Paris Review Daily
Ask A Practical Wedding by Liz Moorhead at A Practical Wedding
Social Q’s by Philip Galanes at the New York Times
Ask The Salty Waitress at The Takeout
Care and Feeding by Carvell Wallace and Nicole Cliffe at Slate
Beast Mode by Nick Greene at Slate
Biweekly
Ask a Fuck-up by Brandy Jensen at The Outline
Tough Love by Blair Braverman at Outside Magazine
Monthly
Ask an Author at Bustle
the shit post
No poo this week, as our family email chain has been dominated by the news that chuddies — a word many Indians use, meaning underpants — has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.