Ep. 105: “Among the Losses”: Remembering the Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver, with Andrew Silver, Mercer University

My mother died when I was 15, on your died when I was 49. Those were obliterating moments in my life and I do not want to be sentimental about this. I would rather they were in the world still, but despite loss, and this is not a prescription for everybody in my life I can speak to this, loss is not only privateive, loss is not only negative, there is a way in which loss is transformational, which is kind of the heart of the Christian message I think to. Andrew Silver is a page more than 100 Professor of English at Mercer University where he's taught since 1998. He's a scholar, playwright, musician, fiction writer, and was named the state of Georgia's Professor of the Year in 2003. I'm talking with Andy today about his late wife, the poet Anya Krugavoy Silver who died of cancer in 2018. Andy found his wife's last collection of poems on her computer the day of her death and he brought that collection into print as St. Agnastica, a bracing and beautiful and soulful account of the end of life. Andy and I discussed his collection his perspective on his creation on themes and living on in its aftermath, a Matthewicman of the BYU Faith and Imagination Institute. Andy it's an enormous honor to have you on the podcast, thank you. Thank you it's an honor to be here in an honor to have you teach Agnast poetry. I love Agnast poetry, so let me just say at the top here we could be talking about several things here, right? We could be talking about your scholarly and creative work, we could talk about the state of higher education, we could talk about teaching Christian literature to college students, not all of them at your university I assume are Christian and a lot more and we'll get to some of these topics certainly to your creative work but we're talking primarily as you mentioned here today about the collection of poems written by your late wife, Anya Krugavoy Silver and as I understand it, you found this collection on her computer the day she passed, is that right? If so, can you tell us how you brought the collection to print? Yeah so Anya had had a diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer, the most aggressive form of breast cancer that was supposed to kill her within two years when she was pregnant with our son. And then so she had 14 years to live with her head inside a guillotine essentially. But when she finally died, although we knew things were gathering, it was very sudden and it was a complete shock for me. And so I came home, I sort of collapsed to my knees, I went upstairs just sort of lurching about to try to hear her voice again in some way, I knew she had a manuscript that she was going to send me that next week and there was on her desktop saying agnostic, it was, she had just received a Guggenheim award to spend the semester off and revise this manuscript. So she was at the beginning of the process and she was going to email it out to her closest poet friends and me and then she was going to revise for that whole semester and she never get the chance to do that. So it wasn't, I didn't think it was quite ready yet. And so I decided, well, I'll look back in the last, since she went metastatic, she's been in a similar mental space in some ways. And so I went back for those around maybe five to eight years and I thought well, she's published four or five books of poetry in that space of time, but maybe there are poems in there that she didn't get published. And what I found was 500 poems, five years or maybe it was eight years, I can't remember now. But hundreds and hundreds of unpublished poems, basically writing a poem every three days, many of them incredibly powerful and she had just moved on to different space in her life. And so I compiled the hundred strongest of those poems in an alternate kind of document and then I reached out to her poet friends and we would read them over and go through them slowly and eventually kind of we know that down to 25 that made sense in this volume. But I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of unpublished poems that are still unpublished right now. And some of the strongest poems I thought were in that unpublished collection. And so the merging of those two things created this text. Okay. Wow. That is. I worked with my co editor, Lori Wattell, who's a wonderful fiction writer too. And so she was so helpful to me. And that process of reading her poems with other poets sometimes at night when my son would go to sleep and I'd be all alone, that was really helpful to me in grieving it felt like you know, on you was present in some way or another while I was reading those poems. Okay. So I just say that's an amazing story Andy and I, I'll just, we'll get to this, I'll talk about this a little bit later in our conversation. But I, you know, as you mentioned, I've taught these poems in a class I teach, that couple classes I teach that are fact. And the students are so taken with these poems, but they're drawn to these poems because these poems are really unflinching looks at life that are incredibly honest. And still come at life from a place of genuine searching and sometimes anger and sometimes pleading and often still with a great sense of the meaning and purpose of a life that is ebbing. They are, they strike the students in a place where they are deeply moved by authentic experience that really speaks to them in their own difficulties, often not nearly as extreme as what Anu was experiencing, but nonetheless are extreme for these students. And so it's incredibly powerful poetry. I'm so grateful you did what you did in bringing these poems to light. I mean, I think Anu would feel so, so much satisfaction knowing that her poems are out there and are being felt by people and that they help people in some way. She herself was helped by the Psalms, the Book of Job, you know, these George Manley Hopkins is poetry. People who can give fullness to the turbulence sometimes of faith when you're in the worst kind of duress that you can be in as a human being. You know, loss, I mean, it can be such a delicate subject, right? And I imagine many listeners here who are listening to this conversation have experienced loss, some quite poignantly and recently. You have been someone who've been, been very brave and able to talk about it. I think with great depth and courage and candor and the, as I was reading up on your work to prepare for this conversation, I learned that after Anu's death, you began interviewing women and men who've been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and that you, that you ought to play based on these interviews and assembled a cast of cancer patients to perform this play. And I also read that you began playing music when you were a teen and your mother was terminally ill. Is that right? Yes. Yes. My mother died when I was 15 of metastatic breast cancer. Anu died when my son was 14 of metastatic breast cancer. There's some really strange kind of mirrorings going on. Yeah. Wow. That are, I think, well, a couple of things. First, my mom died all alone with a family, but all isolated from the metastatic breast cancer community. This is in the 1980s. Breast cancer hadn't had the benefit of a lot of awareness campaigns just yet. And she was frightened of other metastatic breast cancer patients because they were dying. This is so crucial to understand her poetry, she began, especially in 2015, an onward to get plugged into a social media network of strong, strong women with metastatic breast cancer who encouraged her to express everything that she was feeling. These are, these are women who allowed her to own her own rage to some degree. And they sustained her and they lifted her up when I was sleeping and she had an anxiety attack. She would go in and somebody would be up somewhere. That community became lifesaving in some ways for her while she was living with metastatic breast cancer. And so I wanted to give back something to that community and that's why I started this documentary theater piece. I had talked to Anya about it and she had thought it was a good idea, a couple of years before I started it. And when I started interviewing people, I saw that they had this huge love for Anya and her poetry. And that metastatic breast cancer community, those two, three hour conversations that I would have with people in that community, it was so helpful while I was grieving. I honestly think that that was the key thing that kept me grounded and hopeful. Those conversations mean the world to me, that metastatic breast cancer community means the world to me and it meant the world to her too. I mean, I can understand a little bit at least why that would be the case and what's a huge blessing that they were there for each other. And what a blessing to them to have had first Anya as like their poet laureate, you know, in a lot of ways. And now you, right, to help also give voice to these stories as experience. I mean, I've not experienced that. I've not had someone close to me die from metastatic breast cancer. But watching part of this play as it's performed here, as you sent it to me, it's incredibly powerful. And this must be deeply meaningful to these people who appear on the screen there. They really are. And I should say that to understand Anya's poetry, you have to understand that not only is that community a source of vitality and resilience and just the deepest kind of love, like she had real soulmates in that community. We call each other soulmates, but she had soulmates in that community. But there's just one as much as that community gives when your soulmate dies. And you live for a long time with metastatic breast cancer. And when your soulmate dies, and then another soulmate in that community dies and the people that you love, you see dying one after the other, that experience is what fueled her questions about God more than her own death. Oh, wow. And that's really important. And I think that she came to see the spirits. There were a few things that remained consistent in her turbulent journey through faith. And one of them was, she couldn't work it out rationally, but she really felt the presence of spirits and that people in that community, including my mother, who had died, were helping to guide her in some way. When she was, when I brought her into the hospital the last day of her life, we didn't know what was going on. Somebody had misdiagnosed pneumonia, but it was a pericardial effusion, the cancer had gone around her heart. And so she was being deprived of oxygen. She said, she looked at me and she said, this is the worst day of my life. And I said, I hope it's not. Because I was still hopeful that we could treat it with antibiotics. And then I said, call upon Kawana Gaden, because a close close friend of hers had just died a couple of weeks before writing some of the most powerful poetry in San Agnostica. And she looked at me and she said, I already have, you know, those were portals into divinity for her and into the next world. And she believed very strongly that she would one day act in that way too. That's extraordinary. You know, for listeners, so when I was seven years old, my five-year-old brother died and at that stage of life, you know, the closest life ally, and that experience affected me and shaped me profoundly through all through my life, still does, deeply shaping. You experienced loss as a child and then as an adult. And then you watched your son go through this in a way that was deeply in some ways retrospective for you, given your own experience of loss at about the same age. Did you reflect on the difference between experiencing loss and different seasons of life? You know, what it's like to experience as a teen versus a fully grown mature adult? Or is each loss so unique that you almost can't categorize in terms of early life or later life? I have thought about this and I do think I can speak to my own experience, grief is so varied and so diverse that it's difficult to say anything about it for other, on behalf of other people. But for me, I was so close with my mom and when she died it was devastating and destabilizing. But I had watched her in agony. I mean, there weren't the drugs around that could help in some ways mitigate pain. So she felt she had breast cancer moving into her bones and liver and she felt almost like a drill bit going into her bones and she would, you know, howl and cry and, you know, I remember one time her, I would come in, she, we didn't put her in hospice, she had hospice in the home. And so I watched that process really close up and she would call me in and hold my hands and say, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you while she's, you know, crying and I saw her beg to die getting taken away by paramedics and her father begging her to live and get a platelet infusion, it was hell. That experience was horrible and I saw her, when she, by the time she died, I was relieved for her that she was a piece in some way. So with Ania, it was different. I didn't see her suffer in that acute way physically. Although she suffered physically, of course. But the other difference is that when you, when you have your mom die, the understanding is as you grow up, you're going to leave your house, leave your mother and have a life on your own, right? And so, and then one day your mother dies and you outlive her. And so I think when the grief I felt with Ania was so much more variant and diverse, I think in some ways, because I expected to live the rest of my life with her, you know, that's what that song that I wrote, "Fade With You" was about. That was my one ambition in life, was to just grow old and to die with Ania. And so I expected her in every facet of my life. I expected to spend every evening with her and we were so, so close. She used to talk about us like two trees that had grown into each other. And so I remember saying to somebody, maybe six months after she died, I've never been single since I was 23 and she's like, you're not single, you're halved, you've been halved. And that just really resonated. I was like the trees that had grown into each other were just sort of split in half. The grief was, the only image I could come up with was like wetlands with grief as the sources of water coming from every direction, rivers and streams and bios and, you know, coming up out of the ground. You could not name the amount of places that grief was seeping into my life. The only thing that was a blessing was that I could sleep. I think I was able to sleep. I would just sleep and time slowed down in a way that it didn't when my mom died. Every day felt like weeks, every weeks, but felt like months, months felt like years. And so when people like judge widowers, I didn't, I didn't start, you know, I was, I grieved for a year and a half, two years before I saw another person. But when people judge, as they sometimes do inside the metastatic breast cancer community, widowers who like quickly kind of find love, I'll just confess, I really, really, really wanted to be in love again, because it was like I wanted to feel that amputated space fill up again. And I purposefully did things like posted social media every single day and meditations on on you so that people would stay away from me because I felt like I needed to grieve in that space. But I would never judge my father started dating a couple of months after my mother died. I didn't judge him because I knew what that time was doing and I knew what danger he was in and how relieved I was that he finally found somebody. So yes, it was different and though both of them, and I guess it's incomparable, it hit me from every single direction when on your diet, for sure. I didn't judge him because I felt like I needed to grieve in that space, I really wanted to grieve in that space, I really wanted to be in love again, because I felt like I needed to grieve in that space. Thank you for sharing that, that's such a perspective, I mean, I don't have that perspective. I've had friends pass away as an adult, but not my spouse, not my wife, and to see that the way you have is incredibly painful to think about, but it's such an amazing perspective that you have to be able to sort of understand others in their grief, which is incredible. Let me ask you about these, some lines in Anya's poetry, there's a poem in St. Agnostic titled "Reading Poetry in Illness." I read this poem the other night to one of my daughters who has had a terrible chronic pain for two thirds of her 23 years, and she's also an extremely talented writer, a very creative soul, and at this poem, "Reading Poetry in Illness" describes the creation of poetry through like this, vivid, but excruciating image of God, subjecting poets to intense suffering. These are the lines I wanted to ask you about, this is quoting Anya here, "God took them, get these poets, and held them before a dry wind, and their helpless bodies swallowed all the swirling sand, rocks, and blood, and from this poems forced their way." That's an amazing description of a creative process, and hearing from you that you found some 500-ish poems including this one. This is hardly the stuff of the muses swinging, swinging, sweet, nothings into a poet's ear. Could you see this in Anya's own creative process, and in your creative process, in grieving, was this also your experience, or was it different, either way for Anya or for you from what these lines capture so painfully and vividly? Well, I mean, I think the first thing I know about that poem I think is that I'm pretty sure she's writing that in reference to as a rejection of what she sees as an American poetry that has grown too snarky, too spiritually barren, too kind of postmodern, and so she started looking to Eastern poets, and looking to. sorry, Eastern European poets and Russian poets, who were wrestling with God in a way that seems antiquated to a lot of poetry editors now, and that felt to her that this is kind of what poetry should be like, and so yeah, it's powerful. What Emily Dickinson calls the gift of screws, you know, you can't express perfume without mashing up the rose petals, and you don't want to romanticize it, like Anya would resist that. She would have chosen not to suffer if she could, but she knew that cancer was what she called after Emily Dickinson, her flood subject. She knew that cancer did, she always had a gift with images, brilliant, amazing images, but cancer did bring her poetry to new heights, and she knew that, she understood that. And so I think that that poet helping others live with their sadness and suffering, I think that is one of the most important places for art to operate in someone's life, and that was really important to her. You asked if she was aware of that, is that the first part of what you were asking? Yeah, was she aware of this, and did you see this as, could you recognize that kind of pain as part of her creative process, and is that part of the process that you shared? Because the image of creative inspiration is often one that's associated with kind of burst of inspiration, it's light bearing, light giving, and that opens things up in ways that are deeply cathartic. It's a different kind of image from what Anya is describing in that. Again, these lines, again, to repeat them here. God took them and held them before a dry wind, and their helpless bodies swallowed all the swirling sand, rocks, and blood, and from this poem's forced their way. So vivid. I'll just say about that, that again, though her spiritual life was turbulent, one of the things she always took solace in was communion. And what is that, if not suffering made iconic and ingested, taken into the body? I think she found that idea incredibly powerful. And so I think any time that you find the Anya felt this way for sure, and she has poems about this, when you shape trauma, you gain perspective in a little bit of a distance so that you can regard that trauma and you transform that trauma into something beautiful. It's a defiant gesture that has joy in it, I think. Any time you can shape things to a line, to some kind of order, it's a triumph over disorder, chaos, death. And so I do think that that was really, really important to her. It's important to me as well. I think sometimes people mix up, like when I play those songs about Anya, they mix up, "Oh, he must be still experiencing trauma." If you're experiencing trauma, you're not writing a thing because trauma doesn't, it cannot be expressed in language. The minute you can express trauma in language is the minute you're no longer experiencing direct trauma. You could be grieving, but you have already made it aesthetic, you're both participating in trauma and you've also have one foot outside of that trauma as well. And if, in the case of singing, you're in a community when you're doing it, well, that's really, really healing. I think for Anya getting up in front of an audience, even if it's an audience of two or three people, and reading, you know, those poems, that was so powerful to her, listen, this is one of those poems that hasn't been published. You know, it's a small poem, and she started getting interested in small, simple poems. This is called Sad Poems in Small Rooms. Give me a small room, hung with saffron curtains. I want to see the faces of those gathered to listen. Dim the lights, we are a circle of motives. The others take my sadness and let it run through them. In other words, they hold to me and return me to myself. The poems, or a gummy roses, fold up in my coat pockets. I am no longer choking. I am human again. Oh, yay. Beautiful. Yeah, yeah. That's so great. You described it. Express is brilliantly, Andy, really, this is so great, and it rings so true. You know, I had, you mentioned that Anu was kind of reacting against the kind of a spiritual barrenness of a certain kind of post-modern American poetry, and that, and that she turned to sort of Eastern Europeans. I had a student in my class write a great paper about one of those poems, the meditation on a 13th century icon, which has a great, one of those great poems about Eastern European religious figures. Even the, even the, the title poem of this collection, St. Agnastica, another student wrote a great, a couple of students actually wrote great papers on that, on that poem. There are a couple of lines in here. We'll get to reading a couple of other poems in here in a minute, but there's a, a couple of lines here I wanted to ask you about, and I'm asking you about this, you're, you're, you're, you know, Anu's husband, you are a scholar in critic, you're a writer yourself, so even you can manage this in lots of directions. But there's a great, a couple of lines here. She says on your rights, she, the saint, St. Agnastica. She would understand my desire to love God, but shrug when I say, I'm not sure I do. You know, I love those lines for their honesty, and I really believe in a God who would appreciate that honesty so much more than an empty profession of love that was actually closer to been difference, right, empty religious observance. You mentioned that she, on you, understandably went through, you know, kind of like a trial of faith through their experience 14 years with this breast cancer. Did she remain religious in the, the conventional, you know, kind of practicing sense, and, and was her religion late in life, similar to what it had been, say, 10 years earlier? Did you notice it changing? Yeah, so she was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church, I think, forms the bedrock of her creative imagination in some ways. In the Russian Orthodox Church, of course, is sort of deeply metaphorical. You, you can have an icon, and, you know, the criticism is, though, they think they're praying to their icons. They're not praying to the icons, but the aesthetic provides a portal through which you can reach out to divinity. She never stopped believing in that. I mean, there are poems in this last book. I want to be like the icon weeping for the world, she says, in one of these poets, I think it's called the work, one of the ones that I love. Yeah, she says, I want to be like the icon. My father visited the Mary who wept oil, all the world's oils, someone must weep it. I mean, that's that idea, that pain can somehow be transformed into something beautiful that can help people. That's all, I think part of that Russian Orthodox background. She was estranged from the Russian Orthodox Church in part because she was excommunicated from marrying me, I grew up Jewish, and she then went to, like, society of friends, quaker meeting houses, which felt, I think, a little bit more secular to her. And then it just kind of slipped from her life for a while. I think she was still a spiritual person, but she wasn't practicing. And she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer while she was pregnant. She went to St. Francis, the place where she eventually started worshiping. This is an episcopal church. So it wed a kind of progressive theology with ritual that she loved so much. And it was the day that they're baptizing all the children. And she felt so alienated from that joy that she ran from the chapel. And while she was crying in the bathroom, she felt God's love for her and in her suffering. And that's where she discovered, like, a kind of feeling that God is with those who suffer. She wrote a poem about that called "Persemin," which is one of her great poems in her first volume, "93rd Name of God." And I think even though in the last week of her life during an interview, she reasserted that God is with us when we suffer, I think it became harder and harder for her to understand how he was with people and why people who were innocent had to suffer, why children had to suffer, why these women had to leave their children behind. And so I think she was a practicing episcopalian and would consider herself Christian. She went to St. Francis, took Noah and me to St. Francis to worship. That continued, but her ideas about God and suffering got more and more complicated. Almost to the point where, at times, it became a kind of Buddhist idea of a God that doesn't resemble our emotional lives. So love is impossible because love is human. It's not like the way that God is. God is as distant as algebra she wrote in one of her poems. And so this really troubled her. She wrote in her journals, which she told me to read after she died. She wrote about her feeling of distance from God. But it wasn't, it wouldn't remain, she'd come a couple entries later and say, "I was talking about God before and this is what I think now." So she's turbulent, it's difficult, things are not assured all the time and there's definitely a room for anger. This is important. Anya really, truly felt as though anger is a part of faith. She has a poem called "Praying While Young" where she says something like, "I didn't have anger so it wasn't real faith and praying while a child," I think it's called. She often points it out that Jesus on the cross doesn't say, "Hey, thanks God." He says, "Although I suppose at the end, He says, let it be your will, or your will be done." He says, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" I mean, one of the Psalms and that was really important for that to be in the holiest book, the most sacred scripture and for nobody over the years to cross that line out as you know some people would if they had the chance today. That expression of anger would seem like it's heretical or sacrilegious, no, no, at the end of Job, she knew that God forgives Job and not Job's friends, so she felt like, "Look, when Noah is angry at me, when I don't give him what he wants, sometimes that recognizes my solidarity more than when he loves me, when I'm giving him what he wants. If I, the mother, can handle my child's anger, God can surely handle our anger, so that's part of the journey for her for sure." That rings so true to me. That story has got many turns to it, I was, I mean, I started welling up and you told this story about a she ran into that, into that restroom at the Episcopal Church and felt God's love for her in her suffering, but how that would grow more complicated. That rings so true and that seems so authentic and I, that's what draws me and draws my students to these poems, it's the, it's the authenticity of the spiritual life and the depth of it. Let your love fall down on me, let your love fall, let your love fall, let your love fall down on me. One of the poems I talk about loves, would you read this poem for us, this is a, the poem Open, it's on page 39, St. Agnosticye, I think this poem, the last couple lines just, I are, strike me, it's really hard. Should I read the second Corinthians? Yeah, if you'd like, this is the, there's an epigraph, the second Corinthians, yeah. Okay, yeah, I think she would want that. Open. Our heart is wide open to you, there is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return, I speak as to children, open wide, your heart also, second Corinthians, 611-13. My heart narrows and narrows like the Rio Grande pinched between cliffs. Like any wide path suddenly ruined in rubble, I shouldn't be able to count the people who my love on my fingers. In a photograph, a child stands and wails for his mother, rejecting the stiff, strange sleeves that reach for him. Love gashes the scarred heart, takes on the patterns of pain and hopelessness, the helplessness I felt carrying my infant son for hours as he wailed and I couldn't comfort him, wanting nothing more myself than sleep, yet when I tired and put him down, he held his arms out for what comfort I could offer. Whoever thinks of love as happiness hasn't really felt it. Wow, those lines, when I first read those, and I still want to read them, I mean, this is probably the 50th time I've read this poem, when I read them still, they always just come to me, such a gut punch. My experience of love as a parent, as a member of my family, as a citizen, as a friend, as a husband, right, love is not all caught and can. And as someone who loves God, I'll say this too, I am a true lover of God, but love that love is not all caught in candy and unicorns, not by a long shot. I should, too, please, you mentioned a citizen. It's really important, I think, and she would want us to know that the image there of a child standing and whaling for his mother, rejecting the stiff, strange sleeves that reach from, that's an image of a child separated from his mother at the border. Her poems, I think, she was moving towards a more political poetry. I have to say I removed some of those political poems because I didn't think they were quite revised enough yet, but I think she felt very strongly as a citizen that this separation of families went against God's will in some way, and it was certainly heartbreaking for her. I think she had her heart broken by America during those final couple of years. She saw an America becoming more hateful, less loving, less compassionate, more vulgar. And it ripped her father came here and it would often talk about the generosity of spirits. So her father is coming from the Ukraine to America, and he found Americans so warm and generous in the late '60s when he got here, mid to late '60s, and her father also remarked about how that generosity of spirits seemed to be draining from American life. Yeah, so I think that's the genesis of the poem, but it also touches on one reason she couldn't be Buddhist, though she loved Buddhism. This idea of relinquishing craving means that you have to relinquish in some sense your craving for the life of your child to remain untouched by harm. And she could not give that up, you know, that her love did contain craving for her son. And you can see that here because that kind of craving will lead to suffering, as the Buddhist understood, will lead to sadness. Absolutely. I find that craving, first of all, as the parent in me recognizes that profoundly, poignantly that kind of craving. But I think that her ability to remain in that state of craving, even given the pain she felt from the illness and the very real prospect of room mortality, I find that to be heroic, that disposition in her. I love it. And it mung other things, it makes really powerful poetry that does so much good for so many who read it like me. Yeah, when I. Go ahead. No, no. When I first found St. Agnostic on her computer that I guess is what struck me was it felt as though somebody was writing unflinchingly about what was happening to her. And there was a kind of deep, deep resilience in that form of witness. That's beautiful. Another poem. I actually may name the episode after this poem, Among the Losses, it's on page 17, I wonder if you would read this poem also for us, it's a short poem but so powerful. This is one of the ones that was not originally in the manuscript, one of the ones just was unpublished among the 500 or so that I found among the losses. My lamentations have shaken loose locusts. They were in the burned out nave of my body. In the shower, whole decades wash from my body, a girl's hairless limbs emerged naked from the spray. Among the losses, tube tops, demi-cups, skin kissing, chocolate lace, dreamy clutter of the desired body, obsessively I imagine Christmas photographs without me, gold and crimson, my son, another woman's body. Among the losses, death as metaphor, as my body floating in salt waves carried back to the waters, many days I want to throw my fists against God's body, but nothing, nothing. Hold me, all you saints and angels, don't let life like a child struggling in my arms climb out of my body. I mean, again, wow, among the losses, death as metaphor, I mean, align like that brings attention to how frequently so many of us myself included, you invoke the death of this or the death of that without really having any kind of experience of what that actually entails. Yeah, or that this is the cancer on the body politic or what, not exactly right, yeah. The lines there, this poem here is written in these two line unriomed stanzas, and that stanzas that reads, "Many days I want to throw my fists against God's body, but nothing, nothing." Such powerful and painful lines, when I read this poem and I talk to you, I think about the losses that on you describes here so, I mean, powerfully, the loss, even the body that you'd known has a good riddle with cancer and chemotherapy and everything else. What I also think about your loss in this, and I'm wondering whether, as you thought about it in the years since, was this a loss that simply is a loss and must be allowed to remain in the category of loss, to do dignity to it, or did you find that there were things that you've almost gained from your experience with her in light of the loss? I'm asking kind of a layered question here, right? I mean, it's like, do you see her in ways now as it was difficult to see her in ways when she was still alive and with you? And is that almost a thing that it's one more perspective that you've almost in a way gained or is the loss truly just loss and must be called nothing more? Well, I feel like there are a couple of questions, and the first question I think is really important to me, and I try to tell this to the metastatic breast cancer community too. My mother died when I was 15, on you died when I was 49. Those were obliterating moments in my life, and I do not want to be sentimental about this. I would rather they were in the world still, but despite loss, and this is not a prescription for everybody, in my life, I can speak to this, loss is not only privateive, loss is not only negative, there is a way in which loss is transformational, which is kind of the heart of the Christian message, I think, too. You know, for me, if my mom hadn't died when I was 15, I wouldn't have had existential crisis after existential crisis and majored in religion. I was going to go and be a lawyer. I'm a professor because my mom died, and because it sent me on a spiritual journey that I was not really interested in as much before. On you died, and I grieved wordlessly for a long time, and then I shaped that grief into song, and I told you I wrote every day, and just by writing on Instagram or social media little paragraphs, it was healing, and so to me, whenever you take trauma and you shape it into beauty, and I think on you would agree with this, you are defying trauma with life, and there's something that is so triumphant in the ability to live through and witness to your suffering. A poem is not trauma, a song is not trauma, what it is is a witness to your ability to live through trauma, and so that's a really important thing to remember that your child, your husband, it's possible to bring something like a volcano that explodes and everything is blackened, and then you wait for, you know, months to a year or two years, and all of a sudden things start growing in the ash, and this can be the way that grief operates in a life. We'll go ahead and finish your thought please. I was just going to try to answer the second question, which is harder for me to answer, which is, do I know Anya in a different way? I mean, I think I learned, I just, I guess when I read these poems, I'm so much an admirer of her craft and of the person who crafted, and I am in awe of the poetry, and I feel like I would be in awe of the poetry regardless of whether or not I had been her husband. I remember the first time that I felt true, she had had pancreatitis, we didn't know it was pancreatitis at the time, it was a sharp pain in the abdomen, she had been in the hospital for a week, we thought she was dying, and they ordered her gallbladder removed for no reason at all as it turns out. Anyway, she got back from the hospital and started writing these poems and sending them down to me, including stage four, leaving the hospital, things in, you know, I watched you disappear. And it was like watching, well, I don't know, the greatest baseball player just hit balls out of the park. It's just like, I can't give you any feedback on this stuff except for, you know, whatever it is that Jack Keroux said about watching fireworks across the night sky, it was, I knew that something had been born out of this acute suffering that was a source of triumph for anybody who would read it. So I don't know, when I read these poems, when I teach the poems, I am just so deeply admiring of her as a human being, as a searcher for spiritual sustenance, and as somebody who's a craft's person, yeah. Oh, it's so great. This is an extraordinary conversation. I've got to say, Andy, you have such wisdom in this and perspective that's been so hard earned, and you're so articulate in talking about it, I'm really blown away. As I am by Anya's poetry, which strikes me as poetry, a tremendous intelligence and courage and hard earned, but deeply authentic spiritual insight. This is what drew me to the poem and drawn my students. You, though, I'm going to talk here about your creative work. You sent me graciously to some of the links to music you and your band have recorded, which is great music, and what you sent me were songs that have kind of, songs that help you process grief, or they were about the grief process, or about loss, and one of the songs opened my heart like water, has some extraordinary lyrics, and I'm thinking of these lines. You and I walked through hospital doors like lovers strolling hand in hand. And at the dawn, I walked through those doors with nothing but your wedding band. It's just a devastating image of loss. I'm drawn, though, in those lines, to where the image begins, with the two of you walking into the hospital holding hands. The image of young love amid late life circumstances, and how that song that lyric brings those two together, can you tell us a bit about your experience, not just of the experience that may have happened just that way in the hospital, but again, as you pointed out here, to speak to trauma, to give voice to this kind of thing, is to trampily, in some ways, assert a victory over it. It's to speak back to life in a way that brings life, both to the creator and to others who hear this work, and I'm interested if you can talk to us about that image, it's song in the image in the juxtaposition of young love with late life. Yeah, I mean, I was actually sort of ambivalent about whether I should include that line because I wanted the song to be so stripped down and so kind of universal that anybody could plug their own life, feel their own lives in it. But I went with that anyway. It's so specific, and I also thought it might overwhelm the song with sadness, because it's such a hard line. I mean, it is literally what happened when she walked in. She was on my arm. We were walking like old-fashioned couples with it into the hospital at 8 p.m. thinking that she had pneumonia and an antibiotic would wipe it out. And then this is the most unreal thing in the world to have things that the most absolute terror unfold in front of your eyes. It's a sense of total unreality to emerge from the hospital in the next morning, early early with her things. I was the most disorienting thing I'd ever experienced in my life. I remember when the head of ICU called me in. I had to wait. They said, "Oh, we'll stabilize her and you can come back in." And she'd never stabilized her. So for hours and hours, I was pacing around in the hospital, somewhere around 3 a.m. They invited me back or 4 a.m. and the head surgeon or doctor said she's brain dead. And I remember just throwing up my hands like in slow motion, stretching them out and not being able to process that enormity of loss. And for a long time, I couldn't write music for sure. I could play music after a few days and that was really healing. And that was a song that I had started writing before she died. But I feel like it references at the end, I think, this Hebrew prayer, Ossetia, Shalom Bermab. Ossetia, Shalom Alina, Veil, Koli, Israel, Bermab. And at the end of this song, at the end of this prayer, it says, "May God's peace reign down upon us," all over the world as it is in Israel, something like that, I'm watching it and it's great poetry. But I remember just this sort of, I think, sometimes all you have is ache and the ache becomes a prayer. And to me, this is like what the minor key is all about, you can feel one thing missing and you're leaning into the fullness, even understanding it's not yet with you. And so I think in that song, I'm asking for something, I'm asking for peace to come from somewhere. It is a very healing song to sing. And I think that's, I hope that that's what people might feel instead of the overwhelming trauma of that night. There is a piece in it. I felt that when I heard it, again, it's the power of bringing expression to things that otherwise are just traumatic and that defy expression, but therefore remain deeply unresolved. There's no resolution, no, it's not to say that creating art is to resolve all of it, but it is to kind of give it the form of resolution to bring something to some measure of, if not closed, it's kind of expression that allows for us to process it, right? Now, that one more question about your music here. It's about the song "Bereal Ground," which is a song you wrote for your mother to commemorate her death. There's a great line in the lyric, you're right, and saying, "I dance with a devil himself, just to feel your song break my fall." [Music] I love the image of the song "Breaking a Fall," and the line also strikes me because I love the guitar part in that song, and it's a great guitar part, and it raises the question for me when you're writing these songs, how much of the healing is in the music, and how much of it is actually in the lyric, these are put together in a way. You have kind of the conceptual part, the lyric, the sentence, the phrasing, but you also have the music part, which does its own work in the creative process, and in the process of grieving. Yeah, so sometimes when you're writing a song, things sort of pop in subconsciously to you, which is always the aim, you know, you want something to not be so, you don't want strain, you don't want to strain for a lyric, and I think that one just sort of came to me for some reason. There is a level of defiance there, I think that's, you know, you can feel in some of Anya's poems to this, I would dance with the devil himself, you know, if I could feel your song break, my fall. What you just point out though about music, this is so difficult for people to understand. As a widower, you know, I want to be open to the present moment, and I want to be open to love, and it's hard for somebody to love a widower, especially when he's curating his wife's poetry, easily a wife's poetry. And I try to explain, because I had been recording, I still sing these songs. When you're singing a song that's traumatic, you're not, at least for me, I'm not singing this as a method actor, I've acted before, and I'm, it's not method acting, I'm not doing emotional recall, it's, it's, or else I wouldn't be able to sing the song, you know. I think, I do think there's a level of abstraction there, where voices become voices, lyric becomes let loose for meaning, and becomes pure sound. And because when I open my mouth, my voice is coming out of my head, but I also hear Erica Carr's voice, the person that I sing with, the harmony with, and I hear when I'm playing the guitar, I'm hearing the guitarist in the band, and it becomes collective, you know. It becomes so much bigger than the specific, it's specificity of that traumatic moment. And it becomes pure sound, pure healing, pure laying on of hands, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a magical feeling to, even to sing the saddest song, to feel lifted up by the music, and lifted up by the other people in the band, it's just such a, a, a, a lifting of that trauma and it into a place where, you know, only the sort of faint echoes of that trauma remain because the beauty is so deep. I love that. That's me of the poem you read of Agnes earlier, right, about she, she pulls back the saffron curtains, right, and reads the poem to others who receive it, and who carry her, and it's, it's that process. I love that. It's beautiful. I've got someone to ask you one more question here, and this is such a great conversation. You're so great to do this, Andy. Thank you so much. It's about, it's about the, the play for which we're making into a documentary film, and there's a character in that, speaks early in the, in the, in the film, Trilisa, and again, the characters in the play as characters actually have themselves have metastatic breast cancer. And Trilisa says that when her cancer advanced, she felt she had nobody to talk to, no one to understand her play. She says, quote, here, I was a community of one, she says, now you've described how Anja had a community of people she could talk to who had a stage four breast cancer, and yet she was closest with you, you did not have that illness. And I'm wondering, I guess question is multi-purpose, how did you make space for Anja there in what she was experiencing that you could, you're close to it, but about going through the, through the same thing yourself? And I ask that now that you make this play or film, like, like four, for people who've not had cancer, are you making it to help those who have not had it like me understand it better? Or do you see the film primarily being for those who are undergoing it, themselves? These are great questions. I remember she has an image in one of her poems as cancer, an image of cancer as a suit full of coal, burning coal with the zipper yanked shut. She did it so much better, so sorry that I couldn't get that better, but like that was the image. And I'm not in that suit of coal. The other women in the metastatic breast cancer community are, I think for me it was to be open to all of her feelings, to not judge those feelings. And to try to help her as much as possible with the sort of day-to-day living of cancer, I came across a poem, I'm trying to go through more, even farther back in her poetry to see if I can assemble another manuscript. And I came across this poem where she's talking about true love is when your husband gets up in the morning and lets you sort of sleep late, and that you can call him back in whatever you want and he'll come and you know you can rest your head on his chest or whatnot. It's just like these little moments, you know, she forgets her coffee going to teach, so you go and grab a coffee and run off to her. I don't know. And it's to also just, you know, continue to, she was so loving to me through all of this. And the experience of the illness can be like an ice storm that in a marriage can break off where any fissure is, it'll find the fissure and it'll break you into, but it can also act to draw you together, and as long as the love for each other remains, I think it's hard sometimes to not get bitter at a healthy person who's your mate. On you was certainly bitter at the world of the healthy, and that bitterness could be directed towards your mate as well, and sometimes probably was, but there was this sustaining love and partnership and deep, deep friendship that was there entire time, um, yeah, yeah. Okay. On you, that was, that was great. Thank you. You know, on your poetry is such a gift. And Andy, you are a gift, and this has been a gift come of this podcast and talk with me. Thank you so much for doing this. But I do one thing here, you, you had one question that you didn't ask. Okay. Would you mind answered that question? Would you please? Okay. So the question that you didn't ask is, read us one of your favorite poems. That's true. I told you I might want you to do that. I did not. Would you please read us one of your favorite poems? Yeah. And okay. So there's a difference between what I think is her greatest poem and the poems that move me for other reasons, the reasons of context. So I want to share with you that she wrote poetry up until the last days of her life. One of the, there are two final poems that she wrote. One of them was metastatic, which is one of the most powerful poems that she's ever written. One of the greatest poems that she ever wrote. And the poem that my co-editor really wanted to end this volume with. And it ends. I'd let someone ring my neck if only I knew it would hurt God, just one bit to watch me die. Well, the original manuscript, it wasn't God, it was, I knew if I knew it would hurt the healthy, just one bit to watch me die. I thought that was such a fascinating sort of substitution, but it's an, it's an, she came down when she wrote this and plopped herself in the big red chair. She always said, and it said, I've just written a really angry poem. It's a brilliant angry poem filled with, with rage, but I find it so meaningful that as her oxygen levels were going down, the very last poem that she wrote was not metastatic as great a poem as that was. It was, um, home repairs, uh, where's it? Yeah, home repairs. And I just think of a person with that white hot rage being able to express that white hot rage. And then the next day writing a poem like this, so this is the last poem she ever wrote. And on the, the same page that she's journaling this poem, she's writing down her oxygen levels. So just to let you know where she was, this is maybe two days before she died, home repairs. Our house is rotting around us. The carpenter pokes his finger in the porch eaves and a whole piece of fish aboard swings down like a disturbed bat. He chuckles as he rambles around the house, noting the broken window into which a boy crashed his tricycle a decade ago. The clogged gutters in which a miniature pine has rooted herself into rich brown mulch. The began branches bend toward the roof, a dancer who longs to collapse into his partner. The bill comes to $8,000. The last of our small inheritance scuttles through the porch fissures. You know, some neighbors would call the police on house like this, he adds. But there's so much he hasn't calculated. How vines growing over the side of the house shadow this study so we can read in the morning. How much I love the fat purple crepe myrtle blossoms, knocking against the bathroom window, and the way one loose board rattles in wind as though they were a mouse scratching at the sill. And there have been mice, a family, in our sofa. For over a hundred years, these rooms have held in, kept out, muffled arguments, darkened for love-making. Our house is not an iced cake, but a cobbler, buckle, crisp, dump, cake, slump, a mess of peach slices, strawberries, blueberries, however much brown sugar and cinnamon are left in the cabinets, spoon, foals of butter. Never mind what it looks like, I might say, handing a warm bowl to a guest. But first, let me put a scoop of vanilla ice cream for flavor. It's me, like, first of all, our house, our insurance company was about to drop our house because of various things so they gave us no warning and we had to immediately address all of these things. And it was really a source of pain and anxiety as she was in the hospital for treatment. And she took that moment of anxiety. And right after writing this great poem, Metastatic, about her rage, the last poem she writes is this act of pure grace, I think, or less, for me and for Noah, because the falling apart house is her body. And she still says in that poem, this has stood me in good stead and I've enjoyed this world. And the last little bit is almost a little act of communion there too. And it's filled with humor and warmth. It's so moving to me that this was the last poem that she wrote because it's so onion, filled with warmth and humor and a kind of sensual attachment to this world and the people she loved. It's beautiful. Thank you so much, Andy. Thank you. [Music] Thank you for listening to this episode of the Faith and Imagination Podcast. This podcast is sponsored by the Faith and Imagination Institute, the BYU Humanities Center, and the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University, and is produced and edited by Starlie Pratt. The music for this podcast is composed by Ethan Wickman and is performed by Nicholas Phillips and Albany Records. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on your podcast platform. And if you're interested in other episodes, check out our website at HumanitiesCenter.bYU.edu. Thanks again for listening. [Music]