Under the Cover with Isabella Wang, author of November November

Two Kinds of Grief by Isabella Wang

Launching November, November at reading events this fall, I introduce my second book of poetry as a long lyric of grief. Grief became a meditative and sustaining energy throughout the writing of this book and in my life. At times, I was the one who clung to it. It wasn’t healthy, my refusal to let the grief leave my body as time went on, but this was a numbing kind of heaviness that settled and made my head feel floaty and withdrawn. Compared to anger, screaming, or opening up in therapy sessions, grief felt like a safer way to coexist with my emotions without letting them break me. My grief matched the silvery, cold November sky and mist that I was describing in my poems and my sense of loss. This book is one of grief, though despite what I tell my audiences, it is not one long lyric of grief that composes this collection but many. Some forces of grief kept me prolific. Some robbed me of my words and ability to write. Each November while working on this book was different. For all of 2023, and in the latter November when I was completing the manuscript, I wasn’t writing poems at all.

Remembrance Day week, 2021, the poetry community mourned the passing of three poets synchronously: Lee Maracle, Phyllis Webb, and Etel Adnan. Though Adnan was a poet whose name was new to me, I felt the collective heaviness among poets and how even the climate was leading its atmospheric rivers through solidarity and mutual understandings of grief. I had just polished a poem that began in a workshop with Maracle earlier that summer, a poem that for eight months toyed with me and resisted completion as I offered it different options for its remaining stanzas. Webb, or Phyllis as friends loving called her, had read my first book and phoned to say that I was a “traveller.” What did she mean by that? I did not see myself a traveller compared to other facets of myself I more readily revealed to my readers. I was an undergrad student toiling multiple job. I couldn’t afford tickets for travel! Pebble Swing, my first book, roots faithfully in the Vancouver locales where I grew up and reside. What “travelled” were my emotions, and my belongings. Could Phyllis sense that all the way on Salt Spring Island? I was in between homes, couch surfing. Phyllis was in the hospital. I was witness to those who visited her weekly in her home, ferried to see her on the island regularly for over two decades, read beside her at literary events, or are present in the pages of her poems…Grief was a palpitating presence among us who loved her, even before her death.

It was hard to sleep when Phyllis died. Poet friends phoned a lot. We did readings online to honour and share memories of Phyllis. My community shared our mourning for all three poets in correspondences exchanged by email. For a month, I was writing one or two poems a day. I wanted to offer the departed a send off, the grieving a comfort. Words, poems, were the only way I knew how. When another poet loses their ability to compose language, hushed by circumstance of their physical demise though not their writing, which lives on, there are poets like me in the corporeal world posed with our eulogies, our lyrics of longing, sadness, and love, ready to carry them forward. But this grief also masked physical symptoms in my body. I was nauseous a lot, fatigued, had no appetite, lost body mass. I thought it was because I was grieving. The thrill of releasing Pebble Swing was often overshadowed by my inability to keep up with promotion for the book. My professors lecturing in class were often disrupted by me having to run to the toilets to throw up. 

A month after the poets’ passing, grief spurned me to produce half of a second full-length manuscript—all as letters for my friends’ inboxes. Close to Christmas I was diagnosed with an aggressive and rare renal cell carcinoma: kidney cancer. If I did not get surgery in time, which was a very likely possibility due to OR shortages during COVID-19, I would not live very long. I’ll have to work faster. Get this book done, I told myself. But upon learning of my own sickness, perhaps at once overwhelmed by the sleet of medical discourses—my doctors’ words keeping me informed—and my own concerns ricocheting a spiral of anxiety: language inundated me. I had nothing of myself to give. My poor poet friends entered another stretch of mourning because of me. Phyllis’s passing left many inconsolable. Then I got sick too. Phyllis Webb and I gave our friends no break from grief in between. Every few days, they would send me a poem they had written, the same way they were writing to Phyllis after losing her, now directed at what they feared would happen to me. In this way, they carried on our routine of poetry correspondences. Lying in a hammock I set up in my bedroom, gaunt, afraid, waiting for surgery, I read their poems. I could not write anything to send back.

Anne Boyer, in an interview with Rachel Zucker, gives honesty to the space of the rage she feels getting a cancer diagnosis. Her life was good before breast cancer. Not easy, but good, she explains in Zucker’s podcast. I struggled to be as honest as her in the aftermath of my cancer surgery because I was ashamed of some of my own responses to my cancer. What I felt after was relief when it should have been rage. I was even delighted that finally, there was an answer to explain the ill effects of my body. Cancer was proof that after years of going to a doctor’s clinic and misdiagnoses, I wasn’t just anemic, depressed, attention seeking, insane, or paranoid. Surgery was the resolve that would give me my energy back to complete certain obligations again. I couldn’t wait to feel better, to resume my poetry and complete my second manuscript.

Rage only came after I lost my lump. I had no more clinical reasons for struggling anymore. I simply struggled. The surgery that cured my cancer did not cure my body of its cancer symptoms, so rage hit. I was weaker in remission than as a cancer patient. I had proved the medical system wrong for locking me in psychiatric units when I had cancer symptoms, for treating my concurrent asthma with anti-depressants for a year before I convinced doctors to send me for breathing tests. Yet, bedbound for two years in the aftermath, I relied on sedatives to keep my mind calm. Too weak to read, eat, watch TV, listen to music, I was stuck in my own head, and it was not a kind place to be. I did not know if my condition was going to last another month, year, or lifetime, if I was going to lose my poetry. I grieved writing the most. The long duration of my illness had irreparably damaged my critical thinking and short-term memory. I called the crisis lines. I lashed out at my plain white bedspreads. I longed for food I could not eat. I got upset at myself, something I promised I wouldn’t do anymore if I got a second chance at life.

I want to say that it got better, that one day I got up and could write again, and that’s how November, November came to be published. But I’m actually not sure how I got it done. My publishers were the most patient angels on earth. I’m a writer without a writing process now. I no longer have neat lines inscribed as drafts in a numbered notebook. Hours where I love the collaborative process of working with a poem, moving the seeds of a draft onto a Word document so I can play and experiment with the words and with form. I no longer have the stamina. I’ve been diagnosed with chronic fatigue disorder, amnesia, and dissociation. The trajectory of my grief and the fogs of four Novembers have travelled to take residence in my body. To finish November, November required that I approached poetry the way I approached all aspects of my life after illness. It’s like learning to find foods that were at once tasteless, textureless, and drinkable to quell duelling forces of hunger and nausea. A lot of trial and error, play and experimentation. And patience. Letting silence and fragmentation perform such grief on the page. Going back to old drafts of poems I abandoned and do weird “surgery” to them until I have workable stanzas on the page. A lot of time spent not writing, while trusting that when I’m ready, I will. Once in a while, brief poems came in the form of a few words at a time, jotted messily into the phone’s notes app. It might take me a few months to feel well enough to return and make something out of them. But all the while, writing or not writing, I am talking to Phyllis. Keeping her updated about her friends, my writing, my grief.