Labyrinthine Journeys
Loss is inevitable, and how a person responds to such occurrences can vary considerably. When Pamela Wax’s brother Howard ended his life abruptly, she, like many who have experienced such an event, turned to writing as a way to process the multitude of emotions that began to flood in. As Wax mentions in the conversation that follows, writing became a catharsis for Howard’s death, a way to heal and leave behind, as best as she could, the uncertainty and regret that lingered. I had the honor of sitting with Wax to discuss her poetry collection Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022), and in speaking with her, I was constantly reminded and reassured that there is always a way forward, that regardless of what we have experienced, there will be an opportunity to find a new and more meaningful way to live.
Esteban Rodriguez: Thank you for your time, Pamela. Despite the autobiographical quality of poetry, there always remains a distance between the poet and the speaker of the poem. Readers, however, still have the inclination to see the two as one in the same. A large and important focus of your book centers on Howard, your brother and his suicide. Could you speak more about who Howard was and what made it necessary to celebrate him so elegiacally?
Pamela Wax: I’m so grateful to you, Esteban, for reading my book with such attention and for your question. My brother Howard was a kind, gentle, loving soul, and I felt his love as a sustaining force in my life. He was an empath, which I’ve come to believe may be a common denominator for a certain cohort of people who take their own lives– a particular kind of sensitivity to the emotional lives of others. In hindsight, I wish I had written a poem that had celebrated that part of who he was. But I’m not sure that the “necessity” you refer to came from the need to celebrate my brother. I believe the necessity of this book was primarily to serve as a catharsis for me, a means to my own healing– not only to get me to the other side of my grief, but also to help me forgive myself for not knowing how much he was suffering – for not being as sensitive to him as I believe he would have been to me. Many of the poems refer to my own sense of guilt and regret.
ER: Additionally, how did you go about deciding what aspects of Howard to include and exclude in the collection?
PW: I was writing my way through grief, which included some strong and indelible memories about Howard, but I wasn’t intentionally including or excluding material. Though the book comes together as a collection, there was never a sense of having to write certain poems to fill in gaps. I wrote to write, and the arc of the book came later. Ultimately, I do feel the book is more about me than it is about him.
ER: As I read and reread your book, I found that it was easy to situate myself next to the speaker, to witness the slow and sudden tragedies that occur in her life (beyond her brother’s death) while attempting to find joy in the face of constant uncertainty. “Ethical Will” is one of the poems that stands out as such, and throughout we see a speaker wondering what steps she should take when the answers aren’t presented with the clarity she would have liked:
It wasn’t the oncologist’s fault
my mother’s tumor triumphed
before she could leave me
a roadmap to the promised land,
that place I thought all adults
knew well. I was already grown-up
myself, but when she died, I whined
to the doctor, She didn’t tell me yet
how to do it!—it being
anything about navigation.
If only that grocery list she wrote
for us in her last hours
had been to-do’s for me alone,
I would have decoded its secrets
and found my way sooner.
What is your approach to writing about grief, from both a thematic and craft standpoint? Do you hope it provides the same catharsis and invitation for others to heal that it does for you?
PW: It’s so wonderful that you ask this question, Esteban, because I was writing, as I said before, out of my own need to find meaning. Writing held me together and made use of the flood of memories and the torture of questions. Writing was a compulsion, a catharsis, and even a sort of an exorcism. Now that there is a published book, I’ve been utterly amazed and heartened to learn how it has landed with readers who find that it speaks to their own experience of grief, that it has universal appeal. That said, the craft of my poems came very late in the game. I had spent many years writing memoir and expected that I’d be writing prose in response to Howard’s death. It surprised me that what ended up on the page was poetry. So I went full in, and once I had a lot of poems (most of them bad, and on the cutting room floor) I hired an editor/coach with whom I started working privately. This one-on-one relationship was a game-changer in terms of my work. He has taught me most of what I know about craft and helped me hone my poems into the form you find in the book. I still consider myself a newbie poet. Though I did write poetry in the 1980s (and even read at a poetry event in 1986 that featured both Adrienne Rich and Ellen Bass, as well!), the idea of being a poet terrified me then, and I gave it up. I really started writing poetry seriously –in contrast to dabbling –since Howard’s death four years ago.
ER: Do you think you would have been the same writer you are now had you started earlier? What perspectives has your life given you that can now be incorporated in your writing?
PW: (You ask hard questions, you know that, right?) Sadly, I’ve lost most of the journals in which I had some of my earliest work. One poem that’s survived, though revised, will be in my forthcoming chapbook, and the final long poem that is in Walking the Labyrinth, “Gleanings from the Field,” was actually written in the late 1980’s, which remains one of my favorite poems. While two poems is a small sample, I think I see a clear thread from the writer I had been to the one I am today. Clearly, I now have more life experience, and hopefully more wisdom, to draw upon. Having been away from writing poetry for so long, I’m sad that my brother’s death is what brought me back to it, but that tragedy, in addition to the rather early losses of my both of my parents, has certainly deepened me and my writing.
More directly to your first question about the distance between the poet and the persona narrator, I think that is also something that has come as a byproduct of some of my professional training as a clergy person and a counselor—that ability to create a persona on the page might be enhanced by that clinical training and distance. For example, I have a certain persona narrator who appears in several of my poems, both in this collection (e.g. “Jewish Geography,” “Approaching Zeal: A Run-On Abecedarian,” and “Superhero Rocket Raccoon”) and in other of my poems. She is me but not me–she’s certainly funnier than I am, brasher, bawdier, more talkative, probably smarter. I get joy and pleasure out of writing from her perspective. I couldn’t have accessed her when I was younger.
ER: When that persona character doesn’t present herself on the page, what or who does? What new poetic avenues have you found yourself exploring lately?
PW: While I called attention to that particular persona narrator, there are, indeed, others—though they aren’t quite as much fun for me to write. There is the social justice warrior persona who is enraged by and grieving for the devastation of the earth and the savage demolition of women’s reproductive rights. My newer work deals a lot with extinction and climate change in addition to the processing of my rage about the fall of Roe v. Wade.
There is also the philosopher/theologian persona, asking big questions about morality, God, the universe, and my place in it. And there is still the mourning sister coming through in some of my poems, even though that is no longer the “triggering town” of what I write about. As for poetic avenues, I have written a few sonnets, a couple of odes, a couple of sestinas, and find them very satisfying. I do like the constraint of form, how it forces me to write differently and really surprise myself on the page. And the other poetic avenue is to create a daily practice. I wrote a poem “draft” every day in July through the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project and now that July is over, I’m really craving that daily practice of pushing towards a goal of a poem each day. I feel really ungrounded now without it!
ER: How does your work as a poet influence your work as a clergy person and counselor?
PW: Sometimes when I wear my poet hat into my rabbinic life, I end up objectifying my clients or congregants, turning everything into potential “material” for my poetry. So that’s the shadow side of my being a poet – I can’t always turn it off, which is neither healthy nor appropriate. I think that the question in reverse (how does my work as clergy influence my work as a poet) has a more satisfying answer: there is an intellectual challenge about writing poetry that stimulates me in the same way that studying Torah does. I’m used to mining sacred text for meaning and writing poetry provides that same thrill, uncovering layered meanings, probing a word or phrase, playing with language. And it also influences the kind of themes I’m interested in – finding the spiritual in the everyday, issues of integrity and morality, looking head-on at suffering and injustice and mortality.
ER: I can relate to that sentiment quite a bit. At times, I have struggled to refrain from seeing everyday things and interactions through a poetic lens, and a person or a situation might become unintended material for a poem or essay. At the end of the day, I must step back and know that while I’m always a poet, I also occupy various other roles, and as such I enjoy doing other things: playing basketball, watching movies, spending as much time as I can with my partner. They too bring me joy. What other aspects of your life bring you joy?
PW: In fact, work brings me great joy and IS my passion. I have a dear friend who expressed concern for me that I don’t give myself enough “down” time, that I’m always working. But my work is tremendously fulfilling, offers a great sense of meaning—whether my “rabbi” work–counseling, studying, teaching, writing, or my “poet” writing/revising work. So, for instance, almost every book I read (so-called “down time”) is fodder for sermons or poems. So is every walk, swim, or bike ride, every concert, movie or theatre performance. All of those “other” things I spend my time doing bring joy and what I call chiyut in Hebrew–aliveness–but, for better or worse, I do have a hard time turning off the brain of the rabbi, the brain of the poet, who is almost always wondering, “What could this look like if I turned the Rubik’s cube of it a little this way or that?” or “What am I meant to do with this experience, how can I pay it forward in another form, through another lens?”
ER: The last poem in your collection, “Gleanings from the Field,” is a beautiful elegy to your father and brother. It’s set across the four seasons and the ending lines capture the longing for renewal that is prevalent throughout the book:
I fear fallow fields, my blood in drought,
the absence of seed for fertile ground.
I ache to sink my toes into loam damp with earthworms.
and, taking root, believe myself lush like spring.
Everywhere, I am growing. Again comes the harvest.
The yield this year abounds boundless.
I drop sheaves of grain for someone else
on the edges. Winter comes, then spring.
Can you speak more about this poem and how you seek or come upon renewal? What do you hope to leave for others to learn?
PW: As I mentioned earlier, this particular poem was written in the 1980’s long before Howard’s death, and yet it was prescient on so many fronts. In the excerpt you’ve quoted, my fear of mortality, of infertility, of not being a mother comes through, which is a secondary theme in the book, referenced in poems such as “My Firstborn, Annually” and “Extinction or Therianthropy.” (Not being a mother is a theme that is even more present in my forthcoming chapbook, “Starter Mothers.”)
This poem relays an earthy spirituality that has been part of my faith, long before I was a rabbi. Elsewhere in the book, I refer to more conventional spiritual practices as key to my healing – “Nacre” is about writing; many poems reference my prayer life; there is, of course, the labyrinth of the title poem; and then there is the poem “The Day After He Called,” in which I wonder if even just making the bed might be ritual enough to center and hold me. This poem is earthier, about the parade of seasons, about my embodiedness. As my spiritual director reminds me, we are finite beings in a world of infinite needs, and this poem seems to grapple with that horrible truth.
Primarily, I think the book demonstrates my labyrinthine journey from grief to joy, and this one poem captures that trajectory. If I can offer others hope that there is life and joy on the other side of grief, Amen! And if it inspires anyone to take spiritual practice seriously, Amen to that, as well.
