In his 2006 poetry collection Rain, Jon Woodward teeters through managing the loss of Patrick, pausing along the way to look at sidewalk cracks, broken eggs, the wrong size running shoes—the strangeness of the quotidian. His poems live in uncomfortable spaces where energy resides, often beginning in the middle of a line or ending in the middle of one, floating away into the ether. The collection intertwines moments of clarity with the disorientation of grief, growing increasingly disjointed and yet ending in disjointed triumph. I have always been attracted to poetry that challenges me and resists literal interpretation, pushing me to abandon my well-trained analytical impulse. In my marginalia-ridden copy of Rain, there are some pages without any notes, indicating moments where I held myself back from interrogating the poem for “meaning.” While my interest in experimental art extends as far as the OuLiPo, I prefer Woodward’s work for its simple elegance on the page.
The poems are visually quiet and yet emotionally explosive, like my favorite on page 54, which surprisingly breaks the form that Woodward created for this book: five words per line, five lines per stanza, and three stanzas per poem. Within this form he employs heavy enjambment, creating fluidity, double meaning, and momentum, constantly urging the reader forward towards an often nonexistent conclusion, mimicking the nature of sudden loss. Sometimes a line breaks oddly, jerking the reader out of a lull, like the moment of Patrick’s death: “in a terrible / accident I hope you’re not / in a coma at the / hospital…” Woodward is careful and intentional about the use of his own form. The poems are also untitled and in lowercase, which formal choices contribute to the quiet, intimate feeling of the narration.
Woodward keeps his secrets in this book, hinting at the inadequacy of language to express the speaker’s true feelings. I agree—language is often not enough to express the true nature of grief, if we can even get the words out. It took me years to write about my friend Tess Majors, whose elegy you will see in my writing sample. Woodward’s clearest expression of grief is when he writes: “it’s not that he died / it’s that he won’t stop / dying and reemerging fully ordinarily / through ordinary doors saying in / his own voice hey brother” (p. 16). In my experience, loss reoccurs every time you think about it, which I think Woodward would agree with. I admire Woodward’s bravery to write throughout this unique but universal experience, crystallizing snapshots, depicting concrete moments that live in a greater macrocosm. These moments range from the real to the surreal—for example, Patrick grabbing the speaker’s arm and declaring “Jesus Jon I fuckin’ loveya” (p. 15), compared with Patrick floating out of the cemetery and following the speaker around the supermarket (p. 28). The speaker lives through mundane moments in Patrick’s wake, questioning the efficacy of language to express unspoken truths and clinging to human interactions amidst chaos and isolation.
On page 37, Woodward mentions the namesake of the book: “the stairs will require explanation / require rain cascading down them / you sit on a stair / rain sits down beside you / she finds out about you …” The rest of this poem turns even more mysterious as we ourselves become a stair and the droplets cascade over us. The most I could say for now is that the rainfall suggests inevitability and predictable chaos of emotions, or death, or experiences, or anything. More importantly, I’ve chosen to abandon my search for “meaning” and simply love the poem.