Poetry, The Bittersweet, and Literary Serendipity

Serendipitous. Elated. Energized. That’s how I felt when I read the title poem of Andrea Cohen’s 2019 collection, Nightshade. On the surface, the short poem is about a plant:

It trades in
poison and

balms. We
call it bitter-

sweet—what
living isn’t?

In the context of the collection, it’s also a love poem—or an out-of-love poem. Cohen transforms loss into beauty and insight. With only fourteen words. Six short lines. Three stanzas. Two sentences. One gutting turn.

The poem’s first sentence appealed to my fascination with paradox. How could a single plant both sicken and soothe?

And that second sentence! The word ‘bittersweet’ is divided in the middle with a hyphen, a line break, and a stanza break! Such emphasis on the bittersweet!

The word is then followed with a dash and a zinger of a question: “what living isn’t?” What is Cohen implying? Every living thing—plant or creature—is bittersweet? Every way of living, every lifestyle? Life itself?

What a perfect midway poem! I considered the space that Cohen created between ‘bitter’ and ‘sweet.’ Surely that had something to do with middles, with midway: the concept that fuels my blog.

But I did not immediately follow my urge to create a post about Cohen’s poem because I like to ponder before I write. This time my procrastination (or whatever) was serendipitous.

Literary Serendipity

Let’s backtrack and consider a series of fortunate events, starting with my acquisition of Cohen’s book. I was at Prairie Lights. (If a story starts in a bookstore, especially this one, you know it’s going to feature serendipity.) I was looking for poet Donika Kelly’s most recent collection, The Renunciations, so I could prepare for her visit to Mount Mercy, the university where I teach. I said hi to Jan Weissmiller, the store’s owner, herself a wonderful poet who has visited campus and sometimes helps me select other visiting poets. We chatted briefly about Donika’s awesomeness, I mentioned that I was teaching an LGBTQ+ literature course, and Jan asked which poets I included. After I told her, she recommended Andrea Cohen.

I bought Nightshade and fell in love with its title poem.

Then came Donika Kelly’s February 2023 visit to Mount Mercy. She started her craft talk/generative workshop on love poetry by summarizing some ideas from poet Anne Carson’s first book of criticism, Eros: The Bittersweet.

This famous 1986 text was completely new to me.

Kelly explained that Carson used a poem by Sappho to make the point that eros contains contain both pleasure and pain and that these emotions arise out of a triangle:

• the lover/speaker
• the beloved
• and what is between them.

I focused on that last part, the in-between. The middle! In my head, I reordered the three elements

• the lover/speaker
• the in-between
• the beloved.

Midway!

We usually think of the middle part of a love triangle as another person, Kelly explained. She used all sorts of pop culture references that delighted my students and went right over my head.

Donika Kelly at Mount Mercy
photo by Joe Sheller

Kelly continued, describing other things that could come in between the lover and the beloved. If they were lucky, they would be separated only by their skin. They could also be separated by geographical distance or something inside each of them.

Their own mixed feelings, I thought, their midway. That vast part of their emotional landscape that cannot be easily mapped.

I was thrilled to realize that Carson’s view of the bittersweet could apply to a lot more than eros, and Kelly’s next point heightened my excitement.

The in-between part is what gives love poems their tension and energy. Such poems may seem like they are about the beloved, but they are really about the lover, or more specifically, the lover’s longing. The lover’s response to the in-between.

In other words, I thought, the in-between, the midway, is central in every sense of the word. It is important. Vital.

Then one of my students raised her hand, and with a wistful voice, asked if there could be happy love poems.

Kelly offered up Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard At Close of Day.” In that poem, in a happy love poem, she said, the distance between the lovers is diminished. The poem opens with Whitman noting that despite his “plaudits” and “accomplishments,” he is unhappy. His mood lifts only when he anticipates the arrival of his “dear friend.” The poem’s final lines celebrate their union:

…the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

Kelly also pointed out the following lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To Be In Love,” in which the second-person speaker finds a way to close the geographical distance between herself and her beloved.

You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.

As my students breathed a sigh of relief, I concluded that Kelly and Carson were right about love poems. Even the happy ones are bittersweet. (Whitman is happy “that night,” not every night. And Brooks’ lover is “not there.” Later in her poem, she writes, “You are the beautiful half / Of a golden hurt.”)

Bittersweet.

Then I flashed on Cohen’s use of the word ‘bittersweet’ in her poem “Nightshade.” That poem—and the entire collection—could be read as a hat tip to Carson’s and Sappho’s ideas about the bittersweet! Pleased with that insight, I remembered how I intended to write about “Nightshade” as a midway poem. I reread it when I got home from Kelly’s reading. I pondered some more. The semester ended, I settled into summer, I read the poem again, and I revisited my first post here on Midway.

The Midway Revisited in Light of “Nightshade”

My initial take on the midway, written nearly five years ago, now seems too simple, too structured, too black and white. I started by idealizing the midway, and then I denounced it:

Sometimes, as a concept, the middle ground seems like paradise. Think happy medium, golden mean, sweet spot. The center. Feeling centered. Balance and possibility. Imagine embracing mixed feelings, ambiguity, complexity, and paradox. Win-win. Both/and. Collaboration. Getting things done.

But in practice—as a point in time, as part of a process—the middle can be a big confusing place. A place where it’s easy to get lost. To sell out. The middle often makes me want to flee. To quit. The middle makes me crave everything that it is not. A fresh start. Closure. Clarity. The said and done.

Clearly, I wanted to embrace the bittersweet, but I was much more drawn to the sweet. I wanted to protect or separate the sweet from the bitter.

This limited view of the Midway is clearer in a later post about mixed feelings and the pandemic: “That delicate balance—that sweet spot, that blessed equilibrium—is what I’m still seeking.” I wanted an “optimal midway point” as “a guide post for my life.”

Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting a sweet spot (especially in the context of the pandemic: how do you read enough news to be informed, but not so much that you’re terrified?). Yet Cohen’s poem suggests that if you seek only the sweet spot, a precise center between two poles, you miss lots of rich territory.

bitter-

sweet—what
living isn’t?

Cohen’s poem was begging me to expand my view of the bittersweet and the midway. To expand my view of myself. To expand my view, period.

I took a typically book-centered approach: I read some of Anne Carson’s take on the bittersweet for myself. Sappho, she notes, is the first to call eros bittersweet. Yet that is not precisely true as we can see from the passage Carson cites:

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up

image from sweetbitterpodcast.com

“It is hard to translate,” Carson notes. The word “‘sweetbitter’ sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering ‘bittersweet’ inverts the actual terms of Sappho’s compound” Greek word (in the image above). Carson wonders if Sappho is suggesting a typical chronology governing love: sweet then bitter. More interesting to me is this comment: “There may be various relations between the two savors.”

The many relations between the sweet and the bitter—that’s a big topic. Let’s focus on three interrelated places where the bittersweet dwells: our emotions, our responses to suffering and injustice, and our creative process.

Emotions: The Bitter Made Sweet

You can have a mix of emotional savors that you fully embrace and enjoy embracing. Or you can have a mix that disturbs or confuses you, a mix you reject or resist.

When you enjoy your mixed feelings is it because the sweet dominates the bitter? Or is it because you treasure the mix itself? Because the bitter makes the sweet more interesting and valuable? Or is the bitter sometimes experienced as sweet?

Even the most bitter and despairing love poems contain elements of the sweet. Often, these poems are tinged with a sort of triumph or pride. Let’s take poor old Thomas Wyatt “hunting” his inaccessible “hind,” Ann Boleyn. In that sonnet, he is in love with his “beloved’s” inaccessibility, in love with his own longing. Truly, he is in love with himself for having the moxie to pursue—even briefly—a “hind” that can never be his. Because he welcomes this bitterness, he makes it sweet. And in his failure, he is an emotional success. He is proud that he can savor unrequited love. His celebration of a doomed pursuit is a badge of honor, a sign of strength.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing courtly love. Nor am I merely making fun of it. Instead, I’m seeing in Wyatt a strange enactment of a lesson that various therapists, mindfulness coaches, and loved ones (including my partner) have been trying to teach me: you strengthen yourself when you embrace your emotions, even the bitter ones. Wyatt’s poem goes one better, suggesting that you can even take pleasure in your bitter emotions.

Inversely, Wyatt’s sonnet suggests that bitter feelings become more bitter the more we deny or judge or resist them. The sweet in bittersweet often depends on our acceptance or embrace of the bitter. Maybe, if we can’t embrace the combination of bitter and sweet, we end up with ambivalence. No pleasure, only pain and uncertainty.

Side-note on literary serendipity: how cool is it that a poem I don’t even like can enable me to reflect on human emotion?

A couple weeks ago, I attended the high school graduation party for the son of one of my friends. In congratulating my friend’s husband, I observed that he must be so proud and happy. He responded, “Yeah, but it’s bittersweet.” His sad smile told me that he took joy and pride even in the bitter part, the fact that he loved his son so much he’d miss him when he left for college.

Maybe all loss and grief can become bittersweet if we make it through the early overwhelming bitterness. Deep grief is a sign of deep love, a counselor once said to me. You see that truth in most poems about grief; the speaker treasures their grief because they treasure the love that fuels it. As Tennyson wrote, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

Most poems, with their requisite final turn, are in some way bittersweet. Most poets eagerly embrace their full range of feelings, and in that way the genre urges us to do the same. Most poetry models emotional intelligence.

Most poets are badass.

Donika Kelly and Poems that Bear Witness

Donika Kelly is a prime example. Because many of her poems depict healing, they also portray various types of pain or trauma: loneliness, broken relationships, racism, and, most notably, her childhood sexual abuse.

During Kelly’s visit to Mount Mercy, she did not use the word ‘bittersweet’ in conjunction with her own poetry, and it doesn’t feel right apply the term ‘bittersweet’ to any depiction of rape or sexual abuse, actions that are, of course, clearly wrong. Beyond bitter.

Yet poems that depict trauma—poems that bear witness to suffering and injustice—can spark two quite different sets of emotional responses in readers. Even (especially?) those that are singular in tone. First there is your initial reaction to the poem’s content, and then there is your reaction once you reflect on what it took for a person to compose and publish such a poem.

In The Renunciations, Kelly’s poems about her own childhood sexual abuse inspire strong bitter feelings, most notably horror and sorrow. Yet her courage and skill in writing them also inspire hope. In Kelly’s poems, we see that a child who endures trauma can become an adult who takes control of it, who gives it shape and meaning, who crafts her own pain into poems that can lift others up. We see that a child who once suffered alone is now an adult who writes poems that build community—not just for other survivors, but also for readers who leave Kelly’s poems with an increased empathy for survivors and a desire to learn more about them and help them. We’re left with awe and admiration for the poet.

Donika Kelly autographs a Mount Mercy student’s book. Kelly inspired this student to write his research essay about sexual abuse and to start writing some poetry of his own. —photo by Joe Sheller

In Kelly’s poetry, we also see another type of hopeful response to suffering and injustice. Read and listen to her love poem “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.”

What a perfect midway title! The poem is indeed tonally rich. Near the opening, the speaker encounters a dozen squid that died on the beach unable to make it back to the water. She, however, refuses to be destroyed or out of her element. These are the poem’s final stanzas:

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

Confronting the bitter, Kelly insists on the sweet.

She has this to say about her poem:

Often, I am thinking of how I can ground love—feeling it, being in it—and being present in my body and in joy, in my work. These moves feel so urgent to me as a black lesbian in this political and cultural moment, where the news each day seems to argue against my and my loved ones’ humanity.

To bad news, Kelly offers good. In celebrating the sweetness in her life, she refuses to let the world’s bitterness (its racism and homophobia) define her. While we need to bear witness to injustice, to grapple with it, while we need to wrestle with our bitter feelings about it, we also need to ensure that our view of the world and ourselves also includes sweetness. Rebellious joy.

During grim times, poetry often reminds us that we must seek the sweet.

Poetry also reminds us of its own limits. It shows us that both sweetness and bitterness are often inexpressible.

Inexpressibility and the Writing Process

Many of Kelly’s poems explore inexpressibility. One way that Kelly takes control of her painful material is via redactions, erasures, silences. The Renunciations includes several blackout poems and several poems with empty brackets. In an interview with Gabriel Fine, Kelly says

…the twinned strategies of erasure and redaction…are meant to remind the reader that they do not have access to everything. They signal that the speaker is withholding information, that there are things she is choosing not to say. The erasure, the bracketed space, also serves as a kindness to my speaker, a small relief from disclosure.

These strategies are most evident in the poems about sexual abuse, but in some of Kelly’s love poems, the bracketed spaces remind me that sometimes there are things a writer simply cannot say—things that are beyond words no matter the writer’s talent, courage, and tenacity.

In one of Kelly’s many poems titled “Dear—”, she seeks a metaphor to describe herself and her beloved. She opens with

I am not land or timber
nor are you
ocean or celestial body

She closes with

Here is how I
become a tree
[                            ]

and you
[                            ]
a body in space.

In this poem, not only is there something in between the lovers (a “threshold”); there is also something in between the speaker and her desire to describe their relationship. In Anne Carson’s sense, the poem is doubly bittersweet.

It makes me think of my own encounters with unchosen inexpressibility: the relationships, moments, feelings to which my words can never do justice.

Of course, it’s possible I’m projecting my own writing angst onto Kelly’s poem. She might have intended to reject metaphors for herself and her beloved. But either way, her poem celebrates the inexpressible. There is both privacy and pride in those final two stanzas. There is something special—maybe sacred—about that which cannot be captured in words.

Inexpressibility is often bittersweet. You’re pained that you cannot express yourself as you wish–you long to find the words—but you can also choose to be pleased by your “failure,” by the knowledge that you once imagined or glimpsed something that cannot be showcased (caged?) within language.

The writing process itself is sometimes bittersweet.

photo by Ben Thiel

Writing often evokes both pain and pleasure, and for those of us who favor planning over plunging, it can also call to mind Anne Carson’s love triangle. The writer (like Carson’s lover) strives to convey their initial vision (Carson’s beloved), but in between is the act of writing itself: drafting, revising, editing. Words, words, words.

• the writer
• the writing (the in-between, the midway)
• the writer’s initial vision

Before writing this post, I sometimes ached because because no matter how hard I worked on a piece of writing, it never matched my initial vision. The words I typed on the screen seldom thrilled me as much as the image or idea that set me to drafting.

I think a lot of writers are distressed by this gap, this in-between inexpressible part of writing, and that’s why so many of us are plagued by self-doubt.

Sure, we understand that if we persist, our drafting often leads us to other inspirations that may take us further than our initial vision. The act of drafting enables us to make new and different connections. We enjoy what comes to us along the way. We may even like the result when we call a piece finished. But still, the place we arrived is not the place we sought. And the map that we thought would takes us all the way only got us started.

Yet as I write this post, I see that it’s ridiculously self-defeating to focus on the bitter fact that I can never execute my initial vision instead of on the sweet fact that the act of writing offers exciting surprises.

For instance, if someone had told me that I’d include Thomas Wyatt in a post with Donika Kelly, Anne Carson, and Andrea Cohen, I would have laughed, laughed, laughed. Yet right now Wyatt’s sonnet encourages me. If he could take pride in the fact that he pursued an inaccessible woman, why shouldn’t I be proud that I chase creative visions I never reach? Why shouldn’t I see these visions as sweet enticements, as signs that my creativity is alive and well?

Why shouldn’t I take pride in the fact that I’ve kept “hunting,” that I haven’t let a penchant for bitterness and self-critique stop me from writing? And why on earth have I ever envisioned my writing process as a site of failure?

The writing process is filled with literary serendipity! What if I embraced it and loved it? Trusted it?

How about I reconsider my use of Anne Carson’s three-part structure when it comes to writing? Maybe this is a more productive and accurate way to see my creative process:

• me, the writer, the lover
• the unhelpful parts of my psyche: the unrealistic expectations, the clinging to the initial inspiration, the need for too much control
• my beloved writing: the process and the product

Here’s to your own creative process and to embracing the bittersweet in all its forms.

Here’s to literary serendipity. Here’s to all the places a few poems and our imaginations can take us.

Read more: Poetry, The Bittersweet, and Literary Serendipity