Celeste Rose Wood: Poetry Heals
By Christine Potter
Almost everyone I know is hurting right now—tired, sad, anxious—which makes me wonder about the true definition of mental illness. Sometimes I think the worst thing in this worn-down-but-not-out country is the relentless barrage of abuse coming out of the nation’s capitol. Because of it, we are tearful, sleepless, prone to anger—but it’s not some insulting “derangement syndrome.” Likewise, some of us used to think people with mental illness were somehow less. But (as reasonable Americans have learned this past decade) some of us can be very, very wrong.
What I’m trying to say is that humans with depression—or agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders—find those conditions disabling, but they are by no means lesser beings. Rather, they are our antennas, tuned in to things not everyone can hear. Lovely things, painful things, too—but important things. I speak from experience. There’s nothing romantic about about it—I don’t buy the tortured poet stereotype any more than Denise Levertov did—but I do believe that poetry heals. It heals the poet writing it and the people reading it.
So it’s not too surprising that Rockland’s Celeste Rose Wood admires Denise Levertov, and that Wood is frank and exact about grief and disability in her own poetry. Celeste Wood started writing poems in junior high. In her own words, “in seventh grade …we had to assemble some sort of poetry related project which included writing a couple of our own, picking poems that spoke to us, and even lyrics to a song or other. What happened was that everything I chose and wrote sounded so depressing that I was sent to the guidance counselor by a concerned teacher, after which I came to terms with the fact that I was, in fact, experiencing depression.” Wood was hospitalized for it a few years later, graduated high school with a GED instead of a traditional diploma, and earned two degrees while living with severe depression and anxiety.
Here’s an extraordinary poem by her about those disorders. It’s in the shape of an official government form meant to evaluate disability.:
Excerpts from Disability Evaluation Under Social Security (12.00 Mental Disorders – Adult)
12.4 Depressive disorder, characterized
by five or more of the following:
- A disembodied wing;
- Flapping with no intelligible purpose;
- Attaching between the shoulder blades;
- Beating the back of your neck with;
- Something unseeable;
- And wrong;
- Breezes widen their mouths;
- To take your body in;
- To take you in.
12.06 Panic disorder or agoraphobia, characterized
by one or both of the following:
1. A severed tail fin, a twitching without
traveling, sutured to your tailbone, flicking
the backs of your legs with the secret
geometries of your spine; or
2. Flowing water tightens on your ankles
to reel your body in,
to reel you in.
I love how this poem gets at the dual nature of both anxiety and depression: a fin or wing that is “unseeable and wrong” or something “twitching without traveling.” There’s real power there—and also something surreal and even magical as well as quite dangerous: breezes have mouths “to take your body in” and “flowing water” can “reel you in.” There’s an invisible wing in the wrong place, a fin attached where it shouldn’t be. “Disembodied” and “sutured” do a lot of work in this piece.
I also admire how this uses not stanzas, but an outline, as a form. Shaping the poem after a government definition of disability due to panic disorder and depression is brilliant. The whole thing becomes a metaphor. It’s a wow, both disturbing and beautiful.
I asked Celeste Wood about the best thing that happened to her because of poetry and she said it is the community around readings, open mics, and publication, and joked that her therapist called her the one of the most socially active people with social anxiety ever.
That’s another way poetry heals; in the practice of it, you stand in small groups of people, read what you’ve written about things near to your heart—and by so doing, comfort and are in turn comforted. If only the rest of life were like poetry readings!
Celeste writes often but not every day—first drafts longhand—and enjoys the practice of revision, seeing it as solving a puzzle. Like many of us, she has a small group of poet friends that help her workshop new writing. And I especially love this fact about her: of her two degrees, her undergraduate work is in biology from SUNY Purchase. She wanted to be an arachnologist—someone who studies not only spiders, but also mites, ticks, and scorpions!
Here is another wonderful (and I truly mean full of wonders) poem by Celeste Wood:
Lost Tarot: Knight of Stars
Expect an accordion wind from the south-
southwest tonight. It will fold stars
between the gills of water in your fountain.
Stars are breathable and stars are also
inaccessible currency. Sometime after nine PM,
you arrive at an epiphany as the epiphany
arrives at you: The moon is a large nose.
“Those aren’t craters, they’re nostrils,”
you’ll whisper sometime after sometime after
nine PM. Before midnight, expect the neighbor’s cat,
Sue Ellen, to walk the spine of your fence
like a marble rolling up an incline.
The moon can smell everything you’re doing,
so be as imprecise as possible.
This poem is a joyride! First of all: Tarot. I love poems about the Tarot. This one has imaginative leap after imaginative leap: the stars folded into “gills of water” and being “breathable,” but an “inaccessible currency.” My head is spinning, but I like it. And the moon as a nose! Noses are comical. But they are also dead serious: we breathe through them as well as receiving boops on them. Add to that the the business about breathing stars and gills earlier in the poem. And of course, the fact that Tarot readings contain prophesy and/or advice. Here, after an epiphany collision, Wood is saying the moon can smell “everything you’re doing!” And the best way to deal with it is to “be as imprecise as possible.” That made me laugh. What a close!
This poem is almost merry—and I’m thinking of the old definition of “merry” also: brave. It takes courage to tap into this kind of lucid dream. And the matter-of-fact tone makes it even better. It sits in its couplets very nicely. And sounds a bit like the poems of Patricia Lockwood, whom Celeste also admires, but “Lost Tarot: Knight of Stars” is one hundred percent her own voice.
Celeste’s mom died last year after a lengthy battle with a degenerative disease. Because of that, she’s putting together a chapbook of poems about grief. I hope she includes this one:
Thoroughly Washed
This sealed up bag
of Brussels sprouts is
thoroughly washed, it says.
I pick it up, the plastic and leaves
crinkle at once. Other vegetables
are naked to the air,
verdant and vertiginous piles.
My head plays an underwater
song as I part the mouth
of a tear-off produce bag,
the song a platform under-
neath a lake, on which I try
to stand, breathing out, breathing
out, trying to sink. I have yet
to count the aisles on this horizon.
I see them shrink and splay
and draw a life-size drawing
of perspective, unobtrusively askew.
In my cart I’ve placed,
this afternoon’s gray sky,
four sticks of butter,
vegetables that sigh,
my mother’s illness,
learning to shop alone at forty-one.
I like the truth in this writing: that grief is in the Foodtown, in the sealed Brussels sprouts, “thoroughly washed,” of course. And again, there’s water—somewhat threatening water. Water that washed the sprouts—and an underwater platform, with the narrator exhaling, trying to sink. Except she’s also trying to open one of those impossible plastic bags on a roll in the produce department. The aisles are like a perspective drawing exercise, “unobtrusively askew.” I nodded when I first read that. That was what it was like for me when I was losing my own mom: floating, sinking, trying to find a foothold.
And so you go through the motions, filling the cart with butter, “vegetables that sigh” and a mother’s soon-to-be fatal illness. The last line hints at the poet’s frailty and her strength at the same time. Another awfully good poem. I’m thinking of the word “merry” again; there’s whimsy here (those silly plastic bags!) but also courage. There is a tenacity in Celeste Wood’s work. She started work on her BA at RCC at age 25 due to her disability, and often cannot work a regular job or leave the house alone. But she has an MFA from Manhattanville’s excellent writing program. And she has written—and continues to write—magical, brave poems, usually about one a week, she says.
Celeste is another poet we are lucky to have with us here in the County. When I asked her if there were any teacher or poet-influencer she wanted to shout out, she said Juan Mobili, who (thank Heavens) is our Poet Laureate for just a little longer. Good choice!
A little news from yours truly: I have three poems in Nyack Library’s Lit By the River anthology, and was at the launch of that book on Saturday, October 10th at 2:30. Meanwhile, here’s a really old poem that I just came across. It originally ran in The Peacock Journal, and it’s about being bored stiff at church as a child and liking it. See you next month with some poems from Clarkstown North students and a local poet/writer of video memoir.
Zion Episcopal Church, 1962
I was in choir already, my purple, overcoat-heavy robe
weighting me nearly into sleep. The scent of brass polish,
the scent of lemon oil, Father Carsten’s white hair like
baby bird fluff on his nearly-bald head in stained glass-
bronze light at the many-times-varnished pulpit. I
thought of his wife’s fur stole: two or three little foxes
with their heads still on, each biting the other’s tail to
hold it around her neck. Maybe I wanted one exactly
like that. How pleasant to be bored, pleasant to be
too warm, fading in and out of the snore of so many
words. It might even take until Christmas to get to
Communion. But suppose it only took until summer?
We’d be in Cape Cod then, where we never went to
church. I looked at Jesus with His lap full of children
in the window over the high altar. His hair was golden
brown, like my mother’s and sister’s. In waves. Waves
on the beach at Cape Cod, biting each other’s tails, like
Mrs. Carsten’s stole. In Joseph’s lovely garden, the Lord
Christ’s tomb was made. Easter scared me more than
Halloween, all those lilies growing out of what? Michael
the acolyte passed out last year, but only for long enough
to brag about it later. Father Carsten didn’t even notice.
The service went on. The service always went on. Bells,
the hoot of the organ, that endless, Zen, Episcopalian hum.
