Sara Pirkle and Anya Krugovoy Silver

Alan May: 00:02

Welcome to The Beat. Today we’ll hear Sara Pirkle read her poems “Dancing with the Red Devil,” “Sixteen Rounds of Chemo,” “Weighing the Options,” and “Snowbade.” Pirkle will follow with a tribute to her friend, the poet Anya Krugovoy Silver, who died in twenty eighteen.

Sara Pirkle: 00:30

I just wanted to give a little context for the poem "Dancing with the Red Devil." The Red Devil is a nickname for a chemotherapy drug named doxorubicin, which was the main chemotherapy drug that I took during my year of cancer treatment. And it's nicknamed The Red Devil because it's bright red. It's also highly toxic, and it turns urine reddish for up to forty-eight hours after the infusion. It has also been found to cause cardiac damage, tangled neurons, and holes in brain cells. So it ends up causing "chemobrain" or "chemofog" on the individuals who take it.

"Dancing with the Red Devil"

I mistook so many things that year, every morning felt as unmade as a motel bed. A boy waving a miniature flag along a parade route turned out to be a box of blue pool noodles in the Target shopping aisle, and what I thought was the pope in his bullet-proof popemobile was merely a snow globe ornament. Half a year had passed since I’d started chemo and it as Christmas already. I sat in my sister’s car outside the hospital looking at a baby’s ankles poking out of pink socks but they were just bare branches shining in the sunset. I believed my brain had betrayed me, but it was the Red Devil playing tricks on me. A ceramic pitcher of orange Kool-Aid was just a toilet bowl full of rust-colored urine, and after relieving my stained kidneys, I stood to see an old bald man scowling at me, but it was my own reflection, a woman in her thirties with a head like a newborn chimp’s and a grimace painted on her clownish face. I never ran a fever, though months of doxorubicin had fogged my brain, and when I stood in front of a classroom, PhD tucked safely in my backpack, I couldn’t remember Poe’s name or the word anaphora or what time the class should end. Understand, I never wanted pity, just a world that made sense, something to believe in. Sometimes I slept all day, only to wake at dusk, the day’s hours having disappeared like grains of rice down a kitchen sink. It seemed every glass of water was an IV bag full of poison waiting to flood my veins with millions of icy stars, stars strung like barbs along the invisible wires of my nervous system. How else can I explain pain, how carefully designed it can be, intricate as a beaded corset around a waist? I can only say women kept me sane that year, that the man of my dreams whispering in my ear wasn’t there, but my mother was, rubbing my feet. I was not hearing a handful of coins dropped into a mason jar on the dresser—it was my twin sister’s voice reminding me to breathe.

"Sixteen Rounds of Chemo"

After a nurse plucked the IV from my port like a wasp stinger and the rubber-tire taste of Taxol faded—After the victory picture was snapped and posted online for throngs of strangers to like—After fake smiling while a chorus of nurses serenaded as I dutifully rang the treatment bell—I sank into the gravity of my twin’s Honda Civic and watched bare trees—grey as veins—cower in the January wind—knowing my tumor was growing again and in six hours the bone aches and vomiting would begin—my body host to one hell of a party—a drunken rebellion of malignant cells fighting for their lives.

"Weighing the Options"

When I thought I was going to die, I said to myself, as if I had the right, Sara, because you are suffering and will die soon, your choices are to be a tomato vine in your next life, or an astronaut. Perhaps the astronaut sounds better. But consider the icy wind of Mars, how lunch in a rust-frozen tundra wreaks havoc on the nerves, not to mention surviving on pastes made to taste like roast beef. Besides, I could never remember to pack thermal underwear for trips. The tomato’s life is brief, no botched biopsies, no data to collect, no aspirations beyond growing and feeding a farmer’s wallet. I said to myself, Sara, whichever life you choose will be right, believing the choice begat an infinite daisy chain of choices. At my next ending, my tomato self could choose between a giraffe and a mechanic, my astronaut self could reincarnate as a grasshopper or a seamstress in New Jersey. Sara, I said, Don’t worry. I once held the idea that happiness happened in the absence of grief. Chemo cured me of that notion. All lives feel long and full of longing to the one living them, for an hour is equally a lifetime to the mayfly and the woman who has just woken from being sliced open, her hollow chest scraped clean of cancer.

"Snowbade"

When winter unfolds her thick white duvet on the yard, and a loaf of fresh snow rises on the mailbox, I wonder, Is this new life mine? Three years without cancer has lulled me into a clean dream of freedom, decades left of choices in a body scarred, but intact. For instance, the choice to love a man who left my bed at dawn to snap photos of the snowy lawn. He doesn’t know I’m standing at my window, watching him plunge through knee-deep powder. In his dark coat he chugs like a stark boat through a frothy sea. I can still feel last night’s soft kisses on my shoulder, his shower-damp hair pressed to my cheek. O immaculate morning, sealed like a Christmas package, brimming with potential! Do I—does anyone—deserve to be this satisfied? Have I earned this shimmering day by surviving the lame weeks writhing in sweat-sick sheets, chemo careening through my veins? Have I earned this sweet man pecking up the downy driveway like a wild turkey, who stoops to pat out a fat snowman beside the front door just to make me smile? I’ll take today, knowing all seasons pass. For the man I see through my icy window, I’ll sway like the willow in her crystal gown, a maiden draped in a heavy sequined skirt.

When I was offered the opportunity to choose a poet whose influenced mine, I chose Anya Silver because she and I began our journeys at Mercer University the same year, back in nineteen ninety-eight. My first semester as a student was her first semester as a professor, and I took as many classes with her as my schedule would allow, in my four years of undergraduate work. She was the rare professor who was simultaneously brilliant and approachable, and I took every opportunity I had to linger in her office, desperate for some of her intellect and talent to rub off on me. Our student/professor relationship evolved over the next two decades into mentorship and friendship, for which I've always grateful. Anya showed me a path I could take in my life. I'm a poet and a professor because of her. After my own breast cancer diagnosis ten years ago, Anya's poetry took on a deeper, more visceral meaning for me. I was able to inhabit her poems in a way I'd not been able to before. As I went through sixteen rounds of chemotherapy and three surgeries, I returned to her books, time and again, for comfort, insight and emotional support. Anya's empathy and advice, both in her poems and in person, helped me process the grief and fear of being diagnosed young with a serious illness. And I am confident that her five collections of poetry have or will permanently change the lives of countless women living with breast cancer, among others impacted by her talent. I hope that listening to some of her poems will encourage the listeners to go out and buy her books and read them. Because they're magnificent.

“Blush” by Anya Silver

It’s much better to be thirty-four than fourteen, to speak, now, without the blood pooling in my cheeks, the skin stained pink like fingers seeding pomegranates, the lack of control over veins’ hot flush and flame. Then the waiting, waiting for the blood to calm and sink the way the parachutes we shook in gym class ballooned before falling, gently, back to flatness. Eventually, my face recovered its paleness, people stopped staring or joking, and boys wouldn’t think I liked them with a word as simple as “hello.” Longing hasn’t stopped since then, or breathlessness, or the pause that comes from looking at a stranger’s lovely face. But at least I’ve hushed my body’s murmurs. I’ve wet my fingers and stilled the heat of that smoking wick; I’ve left you, my blush, my teller of truth and lies, my unlocked diary of vessels and tissue, my burning sister.

“The Poem in My Childhood” by Anya Silver

The poem was the wood and the way out of the wood, the dog I summoned with my tears, my father’s proof for the efficacy of prayer. My mother wove a ribbon of poetry into my braids, looped them around my ears as doorways for images. When I looked for a muse, a frog climbed the steps of my house. The voice of crickets, cicadas, wind, and the several voices of winter. Poetry grew right up to the porch of our rented house. My grandmother sent wolves to chase me home in dreams. In church, the poem, male and female, stood half with my father and half with my mother. When I tried to sit, an old woman pulled the chair out beneath me. Later, when I took the Eucharist, she pressed candy into my hands. My father played chess, my mother rubbed honey into the joints of her fingers, my sister and I floated face up in the mountain’s green shadow. The poem was a glass I filled with light sipped through my eyelids. A woman had planted her garden with pinwheels. She served us potato soup and peaches from her tree. We were greedy girls, to pluck those whirling silver flowers. Can’t you see she’s poor? Shopping bags of empty bottles turned into coins in my hands. I met a girl who controlled spring and summer. Her favorite ice cream was strawberry. When I laughed at her, she made it rain. I was afraid at my grandmother’s funeral to lean down and kiss her face. The poem growing inside me shriveled. It had grown fat on my grandmother’s butter and icons. In the picked-thru cornfields, cawing the secret names of rot and apples, ravens alit. The poem was tangled in the seeds of a pumpkin like Sleeping Beauty’s suitors. At school, I suffered from mysterious aches. The poem hid in my pocket. The teacher accused me of daydreams and stealing pencils. When the sidewalk broke open my forehead, a butterfly healed me. The poem was the book my father took down from the shelf before I could read, the engraving of a girl beneath silver firs. The poem kissed me on both cheeks like a matushka. It draped a stole over my head and heard my confession.

“There’s a River” by Anya Silver

There’s a river that’s not near us, flowing through a city we’ll never see. Thousands of cars drive back and forth to and from the center each day, planes land from faraway places. Millions of people work in the shops, factories, banks, the tall new buildings— people who have never heard of us, and never will; neither in the schools will our names appear on the rolls. The theaters will perform comedies, the community band play on holidays, and none of these will hear our applause. To parties there, we’ll never be invited. There’s an ocean that’s not near us, too, just an hour from the town’s outskirts. At night, its black waves absorb the stars into its great depths, and the fish for which we will never acquire a taste swim placidly through the weeds.

“From Nothing” by Anya Silver

This poem begins with an epigraph from John Dunne: "I am rebegot/ Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not" from “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day.”

"From Nothing"

Again and again, from nothingness I’m born. Each death I witness makes me more my own. I imagine each excess line of mine erased, each muscle shredded, each bone sheared. One day, my spine’s long spar will snap, ribs tumbling loose; my face will droop and drop. Then I'll be rebegot—the air will shimmer and my molecules will vault, emerging free. From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.

"Being Ill” by Anya Silver

There's no heroism to it. Like getting dressed in the morning, it's just practice: force my head past the collar, squiggle to pull up the zipper behind my back, slither into tights and distinguish blue pumps from black. I pour the cereal in my bowl the same way each morning because that’s how it’s done-life, the whole scribbled mess of it. There's no bravery in habit Even waiting for the doctor to arrive, knowing she’s holding scan results, requires no striving, no grand strength. I'm just a limp sock in a dog’s mouth. Fate drops me in my life and I land. It's the only way 1 know to survive.

Alan May: 18:38

You just heard Sara Pirkle read her poems “Dancing with the Red Devil," "Sixteen Rounds of Chemo," “Weighing the Options," and "Snowbade.” She followed with five poems by Anya Krugovoy Silver: “Blush,” “The Poem in My Childhood,” “There’s a River,” “From Nothing,” and “Being Ill.” Special thanks to Louisiana State University Press for their permission to record Silver’s work. Sara Pirkle's first full-length collection of poetry, The Disappearing Act, won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry and was published by Mercer University Press in twenty eighteen. In twenty nineteen, She was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, and in twenty twenty-two she was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net Anthology, and the Independent Best American Poetry Award. Pirkle earned a PhD in English from Georgia State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College & State University. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Anya Krugovoy Silver was born in Media, Pennsylvania in December of nineteen sixty-eight, and she grew up in Swarthmore. The child of immigrants, her first two languages were German and Russian. She graduated from Haverford College, and she earned a Ph.D. in literature from Emory University in Atlanta. In nineteen ninety-eight, Silver and her husband began teaching at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. While pregnant with their son in two thousand four, she was diagnosed with and treated for inflammatory breast cancer. After five years of remission, her cancer returned as bone metastasis in twenty ten. She published four books of poetry and one book of criticism in her lifetime. She won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in twenty fifteen, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow for Poetry in twenty eighteen, the same year in which she died. At the time of her death, she was in the process of editing her fifth book, Saint Agnostica, which was published in twenty twenty-one by Louisiana State University Press. You can find books by Sara Pirkle and Anya Krugovoy Silver in our online catalog. Also look for links in the show notes. Please join us next time for The Beat.