After her mother died, the poet Joy Katz stopped reading verse – it “felt false” to her, and she distrusted the ability of words to capture what she was experiencing, words that too often “reduced death to a salvo.” And then she stumbled upon Sarah Ruhl’s play, Eurydice:
The play said: elegies are false. They think they can talk to the dead, but dead people speak in the language of the dead, and we can’t.
Eurydice is about the playwright’s own bereavement. After dying and traveling to the underworld, Eurydice sees her father, but she does not recognize him. An ocean of sadness opened up in me as I watched. This play understood what the loss of a person means. I couldn’t speak to my mother not because I didn’t know where she was, and not because I had too little faith or imagination to envision where she was. I couldn’t speak to her because I could not recognize the Her she had become.
For me, the vital part of grieving was not to try to “resolve” or cross this distance. It was the distance. Eurydice led me back to poetry because it is not an elegy. It is about being left behind.
What all this taught Katz about poetry and grieving:
In the years since, I have found poems into which I can take my remnant grief. It took me a while to sense what kind of writing I could trust with it, because my relationship to poetry was shifting. Owing to my mother’s death, I had become uneasy with closure and impatient with poems that offer epiphanic “truths.” Poems of sorrow, especially, needed to do something else.
The ones that sustain me, I find, have to do with living people, humans who mourn, rather than with the departed. These poems are not “like” grieving—they are not lamentations—but instead open up the isolating process of mourning. They translate sorrow through poetic form rather than confining it to a metaphor.
The Dish 