In this episode of The Poetry Exchange, poet Rowena Knight talks with us about the poem that has been a friend to her: 'Grief' by Matthew Dickman.

Rowena visited us in Durham and is in conversation with Andrea Witzke Slot and Michael Shaeffer. We are hugely grateful to her for sharing her story of connection with Matthew Dickman's poem.

Rowena Knight’s poetry is influenced by her identity as a queer feminist and her childhood in New Zealand. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including Butcher’s Dog, Magma, The Rialto, and The Emma Press Anthology of Love. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize and commended in the 2019 Winchester Poetry Prize. Her first pamphlet, All the Footprints I Left Were Red, was published with Valley Press in 2016. You can find Rowena on Twitter @purple_feminist and Instagram @purple_feminist_

You can discover more of Matthew Dickman's stunning, reverberating poetry at www.matthewdickmanpoetry.com. 'Grief' can be found in the collection 'Mayakovsky's Revolver' from W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

The reading of 'Grief' is by Andrea Witzke Slot.

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Grief

by Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla

you must count yourself lucky.

You must offer her what’s left

of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish

you must put aside

and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,

her eyes moving from the clock

to the television and back again.

I am not afraid. She has been here before

and now I can recognize her gait

as she approaches the house.

Some nights, when I know she’s coming,

I unlock the door, lie down on my back,

and count her steps

from the street to the porch.

Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,

tells me to write down

everyone I have ever known,

and we separate them between the living and the dead

so she can pick each name at random.

I play her favorite Willie Nelson album

because she misses Texas

but I don’t ask why.

She hums a little,

the way my brother does when he gardens.

We sit for an hour

while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,

crying in the check-out line,

refusing to eat, refusing to shower,

all the smoking and all the drinking.

Eventually she puts one of her heavy

purple arms around me, leans

her head against mine,

and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.

So I tell her,

things are feeling romantic.

She pulls another name, this time

from the dead,

and turns to me in that way that parents do

so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.

Romantic? She says,

reading the name out loud, slowly

so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel

wrapping around the bones like new muscle,

the sound of that person’s body

and how reckless it is,

how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

Copyright: Matthew Dickman. 'Grief' by Matthew Dickman, from 'Mayakovsky's Revolver', W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

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