Good Riddance: The Line is a Living Thing

On learning to trust your hands again, writing through aftermaths, and wisdom from Diane di Prima.

Welcome back to our weekly series, Good Riddance, where every Saturday we gather in the comments to let something go from the week before.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the late poet and feminist icon, Diane di Prima, who I was lucky enough to know for many years. If I ever called her landline while she was out, I would be treated to the answering machine recording of her reciting a short poem she had written featuring these words: Let the hand shake. The line is a living thing. As much as I’ve thought about Diane over the last several years, I’ve thought about these words of hers more. I’ve returned to them as a kind of mantra on writing and all the fear that comes with it—how the actual process of writing poetry can feel so unnerving, shaky, imperfect, and that maybe that’s the way it's supposed to be. It’s okay to be unsure of your own handwriting, your own process, even your own voice at times, as long as you do it anyway; Write the poem.

Diane, letting the hand shake at one of her last public readings in San Francisco, circa 2015.

Poetry is, indeed, a living thing that grows, changes, expands or contracts with its reader. Poems are, by design, open to interpretation, which is part of the reason they’re so uniquely powerful. Like all living things, a poem and its meanings can also change for a reader over time depending on where a person is in their life. Ada Limón’s poem, “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” will mean one thing to the twenty-year-old you and something completely different to the twelve-year-old you. It will mean one thing to a grandmother and something completely different to a young trans girl.

Diane reading poems to baby Marlow on a visit to her home.

Poetry is a living thing, and to keep it alive, we have to nourish it; we have to write through the terror of not believing in ourselves as writers, of being our own greatest naysayers. We must guide our trembling hands past fear so that we can shake a poem out and into being.

I’ve written a lot about my writing mentor, Jack Hirschman, who died suddenly in 2021, and who was also a very close friend of Diane’s. What I haven’t shared much is how, for years after his death, I struggled to write poems again (save for this one I began writing shortly after he passed which took me many years to complete). Jack was a father figure, creatively and otherwise, and the person who taught me so much about reading, understanding, and writing poetry. When he died, it felt like so too did my relationship to the art form, as if too painful to touch.

Jack contemplating a poem; any writer knows this kind of face well. Photo by Agneta Falk.

But slowly, I’ve been finding my way back to poetry by returning to my roots as a poet, remembering Diane’s words and all that Jack taught me. Part of this has meant going back to the basics: I started writing poems by hand again instead of on my computer and pulled my old typewriter out of the closet to type up some lines of poetry on it, just like I used to love doing as a teenager. The line is a living thing, Amber. Let everything shake into being.

Dusting off my old Smith Corona from ‘95.

This week for Good Riddance, I’m letting go of my resistance to the tremble, my doubts about picking up the literal pen and writing poems again in the aftermath of Jack’s death. Here’s to the fear and the immense beauty and joy that comes from shaking through any and all of it and to falling back in love with my first and most intimate art form: poetry.

What are you letting go of this week, friends? Let me know in the comments below.

• June’s The Short and Sweet, Saturday, June 14 at 1pm ET: Our June Zoom hangout for paid subscribers will feature a special guest: author, editor, and ghost-writer-extraordinaire, Ada Calhoun. Ada will be joining us to answer your questions and discuss how creating work and editing work for yourself differs from ghost writing and editing for others. If you’re working on a creative project of any kind, you won't want to miss this one. The Short and Sweet will take place Saturday, June 14th from 1pm-2pm ET. The Zoom link will be emailed to paid subscribers about thirty minutes before the start of the Zoom.

• A Dark Sparkler special: A couple weeks ago I shared the very exciting news that my book, Dark Sparkler, was celebrating the tenth anniversary of its publication with a beautiful reprint, thanks to HarperCollins. With that news I also shared a sweat-inducing, very direct ask for people to buy the book. (It always feels weird as a writer to hustle your own work!) To sweeten the deal, I’m sending anyone who buys a paperback copy of the book a little limited edition something as a thank you. Just send the receipt of your purchase, along with your name and mailing address to LITDSubstack@gmail.com.