Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about writing poetry is that sometimes you don’t know what it is you’re searching for, what it is you want to explore... but the poem knows. The poem is smarter than the poet. You might begin with one word and then suddenly the poem transforms and opens and there’s what you were feeling, what was circling in you, all that time, without you even knowing it.

I suppose what I mean is… I love how poems reveal us to us. Once, I wrote a poem about my bird feeder (surprise, surprise, I know) and of course it began with the feeder and then it moved and moved until it wasn’t about the feeder at all, but about naming our pain, recognizing when something wasn’t love, but suffering. That is not at all what I had intended to write about. But clearly that was what was occupying my mind. And I wouldn’t have known that if the poem, word by word, or bird by bird, hadn’t unraveled it for me.

For me, that’s why not just reading poetry, but also writing poetry can be so powerful. It can help us name our wounds and in doing so help us begin to heal them, or fight our way forward, or transform into something even stronger.

Today’s poem is a perfect example of starting a poem in one place and ending it in another, unexpected place. I admire how this poem reveals a truth and a desire that pulsates under each stanza.

Trash
by Joshua Bennett

The Knicks were trash. Head colds
at the outset of a South Bronx summer:

trash. The second hour after she is gone,
the moment the song you both used to slow

-dance through the kitchenette
to comes on, moving on: all trash.

Death is trash. Love is a robust engagement
with the trash of another. 

Monthly bills of any kind are trash,
although access to gas and electricity

is not, so there is that to consider.
Blackouts are incontrovertibly

trash. Much like student loans, or the fact
that we live in a culture of debt such that one

must always be behind to make some semblance
of what our elders might have called living.

My friends often state in the midst of otherwise 
loving group chat missives that life is trash, though

we all keep trying to make one for some reason
or another, and the internet says my friends are trash,

that black men and boys are trash, and it makes me think
of the high Germanic roots of garbage—which

is perhaps the first cousin of trash—that part of the animal
one does not eat, and we are sort of like that, no?

Modernity’s refuse, disposable flesh
and spectacular failure, fuel and fodder,

corpses abundant as the trash
on the floor of the world.

Aging is trash. I am years past thirty now
and so any further time qualifies

as statistical anomaly,
you can’t expect good

results with bad data, trash
in, trash out, they say,

and I’m really just searching
for better, more redemptive

language is the thing,
some version of the story

where all the characters
inside look like me and every

single one of us escapes
with our heads.

"Trash" by Joshua Bennett from THE STUDY OF HUMAN LIFE copyright © 2022 Joshua Bennett. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.