Out of the night that covers me...

Writing into the chaos

When my father was dying he asked me to lean in closer to him, because he wanted to tell me something important. I was confident it would be an apology for all the things he had done, using force instead of language over the years, but instead, he said I’m so sorry I never took you to Paris.

As a family, we rarely traveled further than Asbury Park, New Jersey, where my grandmother and her siblings lived, some of them raising grandchildren, others broken down souls drowning in alcohol - but there was always laughter at the small kitchen tables, baked cookies and summer watermelon cut into smiles.

I reassured my father summers in Asbury Park were perfect - the smell of cigarettes and Coppertone, burned skin, boardwalks and hoagies, and of course Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at The Stone Pony.

Still, my father said, I should have taken you to Paris, you needed the whole world.

One year we took a family road trip in the tan Ford station wagon from New Jersey to Belleville Illinois, where my cousins had relocated, crossing state lines and swimming in chlorinated hotel pools until our skin turned to crepe.

My mother bought me an anthology of children’s poetry for the road trip - The Golden Treasury of Poetry, and I went into that book and found love, courage, hope, whimsy and acceptance. Robert Bly was in those pages (then am I a happy fly, I I live or if I die?)

I had never thought much about miracles outside of the Catholic over dramatized version of them, with Jesus feeding the multitudes and walking on water - but right after reading Walt Whitman’s poem Miracles, my two brothers kicking me in the back seat, I heard my mother say to my father pull the car over, as she lit another cigarette, her hands shaking.

I looked up from my poetry book and out the window. There it was - something none of us had ever seen before - a twister, picking up cows and pool water and trees, and barreling across a field toward our full station wagon.

My father turned around and said, put on your seatbelts, kids.

I shut out the chaos happening outside the car by opening my poetry book and reading the last poem in the book, Invictus by William Ernest Henley as if it was a prayer that could save us all:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from the pole to pole, I thank whatever Gods may be for my unconquerable soul.

I can still recite that whole poem today by memory. Maybe fate saved our lives that day, but I know it was poetry that calmed me. Reading and rereading poetry, focusing on the words instead of the chaos - this balm is still the balm I turn to in these turbulent times.

I know the world is a fucking chaotic mess right now, and that’s why I still read far more poetry than I read the news.

We can choose to become part of the chaos - and yell at each other, or run away to another country - or, we can turn to writing and reading, and use our poems and stories to do our part during these turbulent times.

I find myself answering argumentative people on social media with poems or essays, because sometimes the only thing that can help anyone understand anything is a story - one different from your own story. Recently, a woman told of her immigration story on Facebook - she came to become an American citizen through marriage.

In response, I posted Warsan Shire’s long poem Home. The poem begins:

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well.

When my father asked me to forgive him for never taking me to Paris, I held that statement in my pocket like a punch line, and every time I think of it, I'm reminded of that road trip and all the poets in the car with me and those who are with me now - Walt Whitman, Rilke, Ellen Bass, Sherman Alexie, Lisel Mueller, Mary Oliver, Dorianne Laux and Galway Kinnel.

I didn’t need to go to Paris, because I travelled the world as a child through poetry and stories of real people, called autobiographies then - now called memoir. I craved true stories more than fiction, and I still do.

This is why I teach memoir through poetic inspiration.

Stay out of the chaos as much as you can, my friends - by writing, by putting your stories and poems in the world and by finding new writers to feed your soul. Find a community where you can write bold or sad, where you can be a warrior on the page or a philosopher or describe a blue Heron skimming across a lake.

What if we answered every political question or statement with a poem or a story? Maybe In this way we can all build a bridge of understanding back to each other, and at the least soothe our soul while chaos reigns around us.

Lisel Mueller said it best in this excerpt from her poem Alive Together

This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who–but for endless ifs–
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.

<3

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LAURA LENTZ is the author of the essay book Freeing the Turkeys and STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey, a workbook for writers based on the Hero’s Journey. She is the founder of Literati Academy, a live international community of writers creating stories in themed six-week workshops in small, intimate groups.

Signups for the next 6-week series begins February 24th - Writing with Resilience: Stories from the Body Part Two. Email Laurawriter@me.com to learn more about this upcoming series.