292. Letters from Max - Sarah Ruhl
Melissa Carroll, Max (2013)
That winter, we pursued soup. And shared poems.
That winter, we pursued soup. And shared poems.
Max somehow got me to share with him my early poems, written when I was his age. I seldom share my poems with people. Emily Dickinson's envelope poems are to me the height of beauty—unshared, unfinished, written on envelopes—as partial as they are sublime, as hidden as they are revealed.
My plays get consumed by audiences in front of me; the audiences either laugh or don't laugh, clap heartily or not at all; the plays get reviewed well or badly; this was as much vulnerability, I'd decided, as one writer could absorb in one lifetime. The poems were private. I wrote them as gifts for other people—occasion poems, you might say, in the old-fashioned tradition. I wanted desperately to be a poet before I discovered playwriting, but once I wrote plays, I began to think there was a kind of equation for playwrights—indifferent-to-bad poets made good playwrights. The poems were a compost heap for the plays. And if you like your friends, you don't send them compost in the mail.
But Max asked for more poetry, and Max could be very persuasive.
In sharing our poetry with each other, I came to feel less and less Max's "teacher," and more his colleague and friend. I was certainly not the only teacher who had a close working relationship with Max. Max spoke often of the astonishing poet Louise Glück, who mentored him beautifully at Yale and afterward. Max would go on to charm scores of teachers who ended up asking for Max's feedback on their own writing.
That Max turned many of his teachers into colleagues in short order, as fast as you could flip a pancake, was not surprising. The transformation was immediate because it did not take long for a perceptive teacher to see Max as an equal. I was certainly not the only teacher of his to dissolve the formal boundaries between the teacher and the taught. And this reversal was not at all a lack of reverence for his teachers—quite the opposite. He would emphatically introduce me as his Teacher with a capital T long after he was my student at Yale. The transformation of his teachers into fellow writers was more to do with reciprocity.
Max's generosity could not bear to take without giving, could not bear to be read without also reading. Poetry was, to Max, a conversation. He didn't want to chirp his epic songs into an unsinging receptacle. He wanted them to answer back. He wanted a poem to answer a poem. He wanted his writing to beget more writing.
He told me that with the time he had left, all he wanted to do was write poetry. He was applying to graduate school in poetry. He asked me for a recommendation. I said yes.
*
January 18, 2013
Dear Sarah,
Your recommendation letters arrived. I am so deeply grateful to you. I nearly cried when I read the letter. Working with you and coming to admire you as much as I have from reading you, watching you, receiving the warmth in your human heart as well your literary heart, I felt a pretty fucking close to miraculous sense of joy to hear that the connection is mutual. You complimented my ear. Nobody ever compliments my ear.
Secretly, I am very proud of my ear. Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself, is dissolving. You are not. Maybe I am not? That's what your letter meant to me.
The cancer is very, very scary right now. It keeps changing the terms of the contract. I wept a lot today in the bathroom. I am now more terrified than ever of going back into chemoland, feeling like the chemo isn't even efficacious. I was starting to get really hopeful about my MFA plans, and the prospect of writing poetry full time. Now I'm scared I might not make it to that stage, or I will end up plugged into some experimental protocol after a semi-botched chemo attempt.
Thank you for your goodness and your kindness.
Max
*
February 16
Dear Max,
If it's poems you want, it's poems you shall have.
As promised, here is one poem I wrote. (Unpublished and largely unread but by my husband who I wrote it for.) How was your reading? I am having socks knitted for you by one Ms. Evelyn Love who lives on Pond Street. Let's make our dinner plan soon.
хохо.
Sarah
You know what a lee is; I don’t.
Behind a stone. No wind. Stop boat. A place.
Behind your back. My body. Stop the air.
Travel by stopping, full stop, just there.
A lee is a small word. Sail easy.
Lee and unlee, light is hot.
Rest here, a while longer on my
belly. A lee, a dry derry, a drought.
August: marsh sounds, marsh looks, a ferry.
Look for other words—lucid, pellucid
call a mind a pond? Call a pond a mind?
Lucid, penitent mendicants on a pond.
Words for clarity, words for light and heat,
words for charity—words for sleep.*
February 17
Sarah, I know I'm poetry biased, but this made me shimmer inside. I want to write with this kind of glow, and this kind of penetration/purity (and intelligence) one day. I have read it out loud so many times. I am going to use sounds. I am going to read out loud more, and have words fall back into one another and into one another's arms!
The first stanza ... makes me want to play peekaboo. I can't even. It's moving—I want to move. I want this miracle in my life.... The elisions. The life. Oh God, Sarah, seriously that first stanza I could read a billion times.
I'm excited for socks, and for dinner.
Love, Max
- Sarah Ruhl
