Well Bottom Blues

“Sufficient anxiety is its own / persistent meditative state.”. – K.S.

Reading an MFA anthology of a program I’m interested in and halfway through I come across a poem that makes me think: bipolar disorder. Most students have two or three poems and she has only one.

I hope she made it.

I recently met another local poet who spoke on a panel about her own bipolar disorder, and had a brief discussion with her after telling her beware risperidone…the jaws that bite the claws that snatch.

I started this blog not long after reading Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison examining the relationship between bipolar disorder and artistic creativity. It led to my own decision to discontinue my use of risperidone chronicled in the earliest posts of this blog.

The poem is titled Palo Alto and it made me think of that feeling of being the tallest tree in the forest when cycling manic. The poem is mostly about adolescents with the illness, those years when it’s not recognized. “Sufficient anxiety is its own / persistent meditative state. // The years between 13 and 17 / were the time I felt most alive, / mostly because I felt flayed.”

Since the poem is about adolescence and to be in the MFA program she made it through that time and on to college, I trust she’s made it. But BP can go into abeyance for a very long time. I had 20 quiet years in my first marriage until Katrina in New Orleans triggered it once again.

The poem opens with a quote about what I take to be Japanese railroad suicides suggesting the period of youth (“a botched quiz, a breakup” as triggers, and talks obliquely about suicide in a conversation in the present tense.

I only know she made it as far as this brilliant and beautiful poem. I hope she’s still out there writing.