Life
‘If you’re grieving poetry has power beyond words’
In National Grief Awareness Week, a Jewish poet explains how verse can help us process personal and collective loss
December 4, 2024 16:05
In National Grief Awareness Week, a Jewish poet explains how verse can help us process personal and collective loss
December 4, 2024 16:05It is National Grief Awareness Week and Eve Grubin has things to say. The American-born, London-based poet has not only published poetry about personal and communal grief, she also teaches courses on how to write it.
“Poetry is where we turn when we are going through something overwhelming and difficult to express in everyday language,” she says, adding that it allows people to capture an experience or moment in a concise way that does not need a literal explanation.
Grubin, who grew up in a secular Jewish home in New York, credits her film-maker father, David Grubin, for her interest in writing poetry. “My dad loved and still loves poetry and often shared his favourite poems with me when I was a child. He was a crier: I would see the tears well up in his eyes when he read some poems. Seeing how poems helped him connect with his inner life, made me understand how poetry can connect very deeply with our emotions.”
She was inspired to write about the subject of grief when, aged 18, she attended the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey, which her father was filming for the 1995 documentary series The Language of Life with Bill Moyers.
“I listened to some of the most prominent contemporary poets read poems about grief, trauma, and suffering and I was fascinated by how they found ways of addressing painful subjects in their own lives. I thought it must be empowering to bring their hurts and fears to an art form.”
After completing a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry in New York, she did a doctorate in creative writing in Britain. Her subject was “the poetics of reticence, exploring how writing in a restrained style generates meaning in poetry”.
She now has three published collections of poetry with a fourth, Boat of Letters, due for publication in 2025. But it is Grief Dialogue, a pamphlet, published by Rack Press in 2022, that deals with grief, her own, head on.
“When my mother passed away suddenly in 2014 it was such a shock. I found comfort in Judaism and being a part of the Jewish community helped me, but complex and bewildering feelings and thoughts were still swirling inside me after the shiva and the shloshim and that is when I turned to poetry. Putting my grief into verse gave me a space to hold and dignify my pain, the poetic techniques helped me express difficult feelings.” Grubin’s poetry includes language from Jewish texts, and her poems illustrate how the rituals of mourning support us in the grieving process.
Her poem The Laws suggests that Jewish customs around losing someone “provide a channel for the grief to move through.
“From sitting shiva to the yarzeit, the Jewish grieving process is a journey. During this year of mourning the mourner has opportunities for expression and moments for quiet.
“Writing poetry provides a similar space to move through the stages of grief from articulating suffering to evolving forward.”
Crucially, Jewish mourning practices and poetry can both allude to grief, without addressing it directly. “Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, does not specifically speak about grief; rather, it praises the Divine, which is a way of accepting what has happened,” she explains
As well as writing poetry, Grubin has taught an online poetry and trauma writing course at The Poetry School, the largest provider of poetry education in the UK and at the New York literary centre and poetry library, Poets House. The fact the courses exist and are popular is testament to their effectiveness, she says.
“Writing poems about trauma and grief resonates for so many people; they want to find a place to explore what they have been through. They want to understand it. And they want to read great poems on grief.
“My courses are for everyone, regardless of education, and I know they can be transformative. I am not a therapist but I know that writing and reading poetry can help us process difficult emotions. One student told me that my poetry course on writing about trauma allowed her for the first time to write about experiences she had never spoken about. She said she was finally able to access feelings and experiences which she had been too afraid to bring to light.”
And verse can also be an effective way of dealing with collective trauma, she says citing the digital platform Writing on the Wall, set up by a religious American man and a secular Israeli woman in the wake of October 7, which provides a space for people to share their experiences of antisemitism through poetry. “Many Jews are grieving and feel alone and scared right now. Poetry offers connection, community and a place to channel grief.”
National Grief Awareness Week
December 2 to 8, 2024