Divorce is not just one thing; it's not just the moment of making the decision or signing a piece of paper. The events before, during, and after hold rage, heartbreak, pain, fear, freedom, and many more emotions and qualities, as poet Carmen Bugan documents in her new collection, Tristia.

Yet, even from the start of the book, the poet makes clear that this pain does not define her but rather serves as an experience to surmount:

Those who caused us pain
Will be left holding the chains
They have fashioned for us.

We are rising on the back of the wind.

The rise demonstrates that more than one thing can be true at once—pain exists alongside cultivating resilience, finding joy in children and nature, traveling, and reimagining how life looks. “It’s Possible,” says the poem by that name, that “Like an egg, the soul / Is ready to break again. / Like a river, the soul is ready / To rush over the banks.”

The path through the dark woods of divorce and a father’s death does not cut straight or clear. As the poet shares, “Today I met an old man who was lost,” the similarities between these two people emerge on “Archer Street”:

I wonder if and how
The gap in remembering …

…

And this freezing street, where we met
Have something to do with how we lose thoughts
And bits of ourselves along the way,
And find company
And gratitude even when
The road behind us disappears
Leaving us waiting, confused
Away from home.

The path may be uneven and wild, but the hurdles do not exclude the comforts that also appear.

Once the marriage is done, it turns into something else. In “Sea, Wind, Moon”:

I did not bury the ring as I said:
In the end, a burial is meant for those we love.

I threw it in the turbulent sea the same way
People topple statues of dictators.

The ring no longer represents what it once did.

The poet carries on and journeys to another country, where she bids the desert to “Keep the pain of life I brought / To you. White hot sand, / You called me, and I came. / Abu Dhabi August 4-12, 2023.” Trying to give away pain and healing from it proves to be different things, though, as “Two days ago, a bald eagle danced above / My rented house. Grief finds us / In one place and takes us to another.” The long shadows of grief and pain hound the poet.

Sometimes there is nothing to do but wait for delight to return and for life to look up. Alongside the exclamation of “What joy this is, a full fresh cherry pie / And people singing Happy Birthday / in the morning by the lake!” in the poem “Birthday at Sleeping Bear” celebrating a daughter’s special day, the poet also enters “The Toy House” where “The skin continues to learn / of solitudes year after year.” A daily routine provides a lifeboat in the waves when:

I find the mornings at the kitchen
Windows and cling to them

As a child cries and grabs
The mother’s skirt, following her.

It is time for “The truck that soon will / Bring battered memories to us” and time to begin again.

Bugan teaches writing and is based in Chelsea. She will teach the poetry workshop “A Quest for Innocence in a Troubled World” on Tuesday, April 29, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm at AADL's Downtown branch.

Before her workshop, we talked about her new collection Tristia that follows her earlier collection Time Being, writing autobiographical poetry, and places in her poetry.

Q: We had interviews in 2020, 2021, and 2022, but it has been a few years since we last talked. Now you are based in Chelsea, Michigan. What have you been up to lately?
A: Martha, it’s wonderful to be in touch again, and I am delighted about the continuity of our interviews: It feels like all the threads of various stories are gaining that time substance we all appreciate.

So, I have been spending some time reconnecting with Michigan! It’s great to be back as an integral part of my family, especially since my father died in 2022. Lake Michigan is such a powerful presence, and I am glad to be back with my children within a shorter driving distance from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Walking around the Pinckney woods near Chelsea, exploring trails among small towns such as Dexter, walking from my mom’s house to my sister’s house on weekends feels like the old times when we lived simpler lives. It’s so green and beautiful here! We’ve seen the Northern Lights right here in the fields, and there are all these huge sandhill cranes everywhere. Though the circumstances of my return to Michigan are unhappy, it’s a comfort to go out for coffee or lunch with my mom or my sister, visit my brother just an hour away, and spend time with them.

My son gained admission at the University of Michigan in the Honors Program, so he is continuing a family tradition—my sister, brother, and I graduated from U-M. And I am getting to know the Chelsea Public Library very well, since I use their bright and peaceful individual study rooms almost daily. I’d say the library is becoming the largest part of my mental furniture.

I am also looking for university teaching jobs—this is a long, fruitless, frustrating part of life. As part of ongoing divorce upheavals, I was forced to resign an amazing job at New York University in Abu Dhabi, and I am trying to pick up the shattered employment pieces. Leaving a visiting professorship in the middle of a contract is hard to explain to prospective employers, and everyone remains at an arm’s length. This is another opportunity to test my stamina—and hopefully, show my kids what I am made of!

Q: Your poetry collections are autobiographical. Your new poetry collection, Tristia, continues the thread of your divorce that began in your earlier collection, Time Being. Does this book pick up where Time Being left off? What draws you to writing poetry as your life unfolds?
A: Yes, Tristia, begins where Time Being left off. This collection—in the spirit of Ovid’s Tristia—remains the love letter that returns to the “lost country” of a fulfilled family, without me; it is essentially a lament about exile from various states—literal and symbolic. At the same time, as the first poem expresses, the book is also a prayer for healing, for truly leaving a state of hardship behind and looking at the life ahead with pleasure. I quote here Ovid’s beginning lines:

Little book, you will go without me—and I grudge it not—to the city, whither alas your master is not allowed to go! Go, but go unadorned, as becomes the book of an exile; in your misfortune wear the garb that befits these days of mine. You shall have no cover dyed with the juice of purple berries—no fit colour is that for mourning; your title shall not be tinged with vermilion nor your paper with oil of cedar; and you shall wear no white bosses upon your dark edges. Books of good omen should be decked with such things as these; ’tis my fate that you should bear in mind. Let no brittle pumice polish your two edges; I would have you appear with locks all rough and disordered. Be not ashamed of blots; he who sees them will feel that they were caused by my tears.

What draws me to poetry as life unfolds? It’s the freedom in language. Poetry allows me to write myself into clarity. I suppose I am repeating what most poets say, which is: Reading and writing poetry is a way of making sense of experience.

Q: Aside from being about different time frames, what makes the poetry in Tristia unique from your other collections?
A: I don’t know if these poems are much different from the other collections in tone, register, or engagements with experience. But they engage more directly and precisely with private loss: my father, one of my aunts, a friend from my doctoral days at Oxford, the sense of old insecurities triggered by the devastating war in Ukraine, the shattering of my own family that provided stability as I moved countries, languages, and continents in my continuous wandering and searching for a sense of home. It’s a book about pain cutting straight into the bone.

Q: Tristia engages deeply with the pain that you have endured from the changes in your family and life, from your father’s death to your divorce and its effects. Tristia’s poems have an immediacy from their dates, and you capture moments as they are happening or shortly after. Your daughter turns 12 and 13 in these poems. The last poem in the book, “Sandhill Cranes,” has a note that says “Chelsea, Michigan, September 9, 2024.” This intimate collection sits very close with your recent experiences, as you noted. You are accustomed to sharing about your life, but I wonder if it is difficult to release these poems and their accompanying emotions into the world. Tell us about what it is like to publish this book and share it with readers.
A: This collection of poems was an exercise in self-restraint regarding lamentation that could—if allowed—become self-centered. While I know what’s in it for me to write—the “kick” I get from language, to allude to Brodsky—I had to also think about what might be in for the reader, because, ultimately, this is an offering of language, about difficult experience. The creative process—or rather the articulation of feelings—can easily border on self-censorship, or, at the other extreme, can verge on blaming others. Both self-censorship and expressions of excessive anger do nothing for language, and my first responsibility as a poet—to allude to Mandelstam now—is to poetic language. That is, despite whatever experience I choose to write about, I seek to maintain the integrity of true independence: I got to write things my way. How to do that when there are so many people involved? I hope I got the balance right, and that the readers will find in the language of the poems a mode to interrogate the larger experience of loss. The language in Tristia is a bit more formal and more precise than my other poetry, but only marginally: there are plenty of “blots” that show the marks of the tears. Divorce, especially with children, is brutal.

Q: The poems in Tristia do not wallow but rather observe, as you have written about in your essay collection, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, as well as above. The poem “Last Night” faces the grim reality of how:

The hospice doctor will step
On the cleaned porch,
Walk into the house
That has been cursed with thunder
And lightning all night long.

July 2022

This poem takes place near the time of your father’s passing. Are the poems—and the process of writing them—a way of remembering, of making your own records?
A: My father going into hospice care was absolutely devastating. I was terrified about losing him, because he had a stubbornness about strength in the face of adversity that I wanted to have around me: like a cocoon. All my life I wanted to be a “badass” just like him. My father pushed me to believe that I was never, and I will never be, anyone’s prisoner. In those last few months, I did not want to forget anything, so I wrote the poems that later functioned as stepping stones in dealing with the grief of his dying. I wrote this particular poem to always remember that there was an awful thunderstorm the night before the hospice doctor walked into the house and sat down at the table with us, and helped us all understand that my father was going to die.

Q: Tristia once again demonstrates your resilience. Resilience comes at a cost: “Like an egg, the soul / Is ready to break again.” Do you ever wish you could say “Stop. Enough!” as life forges more resilience in you, or do you see the moments that you write about as par for the course of love and life?
A: Oh, I always say, “Stop. Enough!” However, while long-term hardship can blunt the soul, as they say, running away from the hard times is running away from life. I am reminded of this wonderful excerpt from Virgil’s “First Georgic” in David Ferry’s brilliant translation, about doing all the right things with the earth and the planting, and all the while hoping for a bountiful harvest. The poem—an instruction on farming on the surface and on living at the figurative level—is very wise:

Not till the earth has been twice plowed, so twice
Exposed to sun and twice to coolness will
It yield what the farmer prays for; then will the barn
Be full to bursting with the gathered grain,

So, I am taking the perspective that I am being “twice plowed.” I keep thinking of the moments of joy, the beauty of the natural world, the irrepressible joy of my kids, and the kindness of people as the seeds that will yield the harvest.

Q: There is a mix of advice and joy wrapped up in the devastating and stunning circumstances throughout Tristia. The poems addressed to or about your children recognize the agony of enduring the divorce process but also light on hope. The poem “Happy Is the Heart” puts forward lines that read like proverbs:

Happy is the Heart that learns
Tranquility early in life,
Keeps off the dangerous path
Where every turn brings injury.

The lessons, gladness, and peace that bubble up in these poems are surprising but also sustaining. In what ways do these poems provide sustenance during difficult times?
A: I want my children to know how to be pragmatic, to understand that there will always be joy, sorrow, and the mess in between. But, just like my father taught me, I want them to be absolutely certain that, to quote Whitman now:

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the
            earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
 

The poems help me articulate all this.

Q: We have considered your poetry’s connections to places, seasons, and nature in previous interviews. Tell us about the places and nature in Tristia. Why does nature keep surfacing in your work?
A: West Meadow Beach in Long Island, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, as well as the stunning landscape and seal choirs at Lindisfarne, England, are transporting, illuminating, revealing, refreshing, and healing. They are gifts and resources of poetic language. The natural world bridges the gap between normative statements and day-to-day reality.

Q: In our earlier interviews, we wrapped up with a similar set of two questions that I would like to ask once again because the answers change: What are you reading and recommending this spring?
A: Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo, a fabulous memoir. Going to read The Butcher’s Grand Daughter by my compatriot Adela Sinclair. Re-reading The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi, and Memories Look at Me by Tomas Tranströmer.

Q: And, what is next for you and your writing?
A: A book of poems called Flying With the Aurora. I caught the Northern Lights on a flight, or they caught up with me, and it was this incredible dance of lights between Greenland and the Faroe Islands right out the wing of the plane. You wouldn’t believe it: I woke up half the people on the flight and we all took incredible pictures with our phones. There is a lot of symbolism stirring in there.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian. 

Carmen Bugan will teach the free poetry workshop “A Quest for Innocence in a Troubled World” on Tuesday, April 29, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm at AADL's Downtown branch.