I.
When folks find out that I love fly-fishing, reactions range from reserved disinterest to zealous cross-examinations, and on occasion this discovery will end with a calendared plan to go fishing together.
When folks find out that I’m a poet who loves fly-fishing, most assume some very romantic craft connections between my angling and my writing. And that’s fair. Like fly-fishing writers before me, I’ve crushed on various phrases uttered in the fishing world—“keep a tight line,” “work your retrieve,” “change your drift,” “read the water.” These instructions for pursuing a stretch of water could very easily be guiding me through a piece of writing that’s taking shape. And I’ve published my share of verse and essays about my relationships to fishing.
But when folks find out that I’m a poet who loves boxing—who has trained as a boxer for many years—most express some understandable concerns for my body. For my brain in particular, given that’s the organ on which I’ve seemingly laid the bulk of my future bets. One dear friend even forwarded a flurry of medical studies on the compelling links between contact sports and head trauma. My mock demonstration of feeling insulted by the implication that I have poor defense skills or slow reflexes or that I misunderstand a major goal of boxing (not to get hit in the head, which I assure them I am working very, very hard at achieving) tends to do little to ease the fears of my loved ones. Whereas the art of angling offers impacts that are easy to imagine as softly nurturing to my writing and my life (never mind the number of times I’ve nearly been drowned in a river), the art of boxing apparently promises to knock all sense from my sorry head and life forever. The trouble is, the kind of breath and balance delivered by boxing has rivaled the deepest sighs that keep me returning to running water. I can still see myself in that introductory boxing class I took after starting graduate school, largely to offset the ways in which I was being asked to live inside my mind. As I panted painfully before the musty gym’s floor-length mirror, throwing slow-motion jabs as a trainer shouted cryptic commands and then adjusted the awkward angle of my sweaty arm, I could already feel the meaningful silhouettes rising between my life and the ring.
II.
I’m thinking about my first full sparring session, barely a year into training. As I performed the ritual of wrapping my wrists and fists in cotton bandages to keep anything from straining or breaking, waves of adrenaline quietly flooded my body and threatened to expel the oatmeal I’d eaten for breakfast earlier that morning. Only days before, I had felt thrilled and perhaps a little full of myself when my trainer approached to say he thought I was ready to put what I’d been learning into practice, that he knew an MMA guy about my size with an upcoming fight, and could I come into the gym that weekend to give him some good rounds to get prepared. But when my moment came, I found myself trying very hard not to look toward the gym’s heavy front door as my trainer slid a sour and flaking piece of protective padding over my head, a head that, as I ducked it through the thick sagging ropes, pounded with the purity of doubt and stupidity—stupid, stupid stupidity and not a boxing instinct in reach—what was my trainer thinking? What was I thinking? What a terrible idea boxing now suddenly seemed—and was it too late to go back to my life before this reality of the ring?
Then a loud burst of high-pitched bells from the gym’s omniscient digital timer cut through my questioning, and the first round began.
What I remember most clearly from that addled sparring session were the moments surrounding just one punch thrown by my opponent, a Mua Thai fighter who (I’d later learn) had a warm smile and tender voice. Not long after combat began, as we circled rhythmically and tested each other with mild combinations, all my movement felt wrong and deferred, like I was stepping and slugging from the bottom of a syrup-filled pool. The deep protests of my body after such little action scared me, and so I dropped my hands in exaggerated fatigue to signal that my breath was already giving out, a gesture meant to invite my sparring partner to reassure me that we were still in some strange contract of safety together, no need to really hurt me, especially given how physically pathetic I’d become. His instant reply to my growing sense of defenselessness was to shoot a nasty lead-hook toward my unprotected temple. The punch only grazed my headgear, but my memory of that round and those that followed is still buried by my body’s effort to linger inside the new panic that ensued.
What kept me from abandoning boxing forever happened right after the sparring had finally ended, as I sat on the stained canvas of the ring, slumped against the ropes, arms dangling unresponsively in my lap, my trainer gently loosening the headgear’s straps beneath my chin, sweat streaming from every pore, tears starting to mix with the moisture on my face, legs trembling with the aftermath of fear. “Let me tell you what I saw,” my trainer started, and I braced for his confirmation of the one clear never again echoing in the cave that shame had made of my mind. But, instead, he surprised me with pride, recounting a few worthy moves I’d apparently made inside the ring and mapping out the future training he was excited to focus on during our next workouts. Before I could correct him by admitting what I was feeling inside or just letting the tears come more freely, he told me to cool down with three more rounds on the heavy bag and that he’d see me on Monday. And like that, failure and possibility were sharing the same name.
III.
I once heard the poet Li-Young Lee say that all martial arts are a way to secure safety. And, as he claimed, an attack on our safety required two things: someone’s ill-will and someone’s daringness to act on their ill-will. Then he framed the scales of martial arts something like this:
Someone goes to do you harm, but you subdue them instead.
Someone goes to do you harm, but you make them afraid to act.
Someone goes to do you harm, but you refuse to become their target.
Someone goes to do you harm, but your presence moves them to show you love instead.
Perhaps, then, writing is the highest form of martial arts because of its ability to embody love.
It’s scary to learn how we can carry around a silent ill-will, secret even to ourselves, until a poem comes along and renames it as the new safety inside our voice. I’m saying that I’ve had poems subdue me or make me afraid to act. I’m saying that I’ve had poems refuse my desire for a target for my pain. I’m saying that, sometimes without first hearing the wish for harm begin in my own heart, I’ve had poems turn my ill-will into a force called love. Amen.
IV.
Newly graduated from high school, I was sleeping in upstairs when my father began a familiar final act to the desperation he felt with staying sober: he started a fight with my mother. I could hear the brutal sadness in my mother’s voice trading historic blows with him below the floorboards. My tearful sister came to my room, and I made space in my bed for her to escape the battle unfolding beneath us—until “No,” she said, “Dad hit her; he just hit Mom.” I could feel some dark internal wind banishing every remaining reason for meeting that man with anything other than mere violence. And I did not hide my breaking point, punching multiple holes into the stairway wall on my way down toward the freshly reopened wound of him. Before I could light the fuse of my betrayal against his body, my father fled the scene, and my final image of him for the six silent years to follow was my rage-blurred vision of him escaping through the back door, my mother demanding me to stop destroying the house.
That was also around when I started writing poetry. And my poems quickly became a way to finalize the distance I desired. I crafted images of fathers who were neglectful, untrustworthy, dangerous, pitiful. Each gave me permission to sharpen the silence between us. Each confirmed that the safest thing I could imagine my father being was just a little further away.
But then, under the graceful light of mentors and provoked by the published words of writers who also took on troubling parents, I began to fool around with my very first turns in poetry. Yes, my father was neglectful, he was untrustworthy, he was dangerous, he was pitiful—that fucking abuser; that fucking deserter—but he was also…unlucky. And he was hurt. And he was powerful. And he was beautiful. And he could be disarmingly goofy. My inner child hadn’t stopped pining for his presence. I missed him so damn much. If only awkwardly at first, I began to admit those perceptions into the rendering of my father—which is to say, I began to draw my father closer in poems. I was learning to keep the subject I feared most just at the other end of my wonder, only distanced enough to hold my voice steady, to know my breath and hands were still secure, to choose the contact that could come next. In boxing, we call this finding your range.
V.
Similar to the way certain fly-fishing motifs offer alluring applications beyond the stream, certain boxing expressions seem ripe with resonance beyond the ring. I especially love one command that my trainer will often holler between rounds: “Get your breath back!” Almost instantly (and without fully understanding why), I fell in love with that intention. And almost instantly (and still without fully understanding why), I began to share it with the writers I work with—“Get your breath back!” I’ll say now, somewhat to myself, at the close of a deep communion with art and artmaking.
Like all good turns, the phrase’s resonance remains a little untranslatable to me. But here’s what I’m willing to risk saying about the ways it might weave bodywork with writing:
Your breathing feels labored for a reason, for good reason; you’ve been hard at work, learning what the breath can and cannot do—Get your breath back!
Though it might seem difficult or distant or not quite yours right now, your breath is not lost and is yours to claim—Get your breath back!
Your rituals for recovery must be as intentional and as ambitious and as sacred as the efforts to push your breath toward a new story—Get your breath back!
I need to know that your breathing is becoming secure and safe again before the next round arrives to pull another not-yet-possible note from your heart—Get your breath back!
VI.
In his poem “The Right Cross,” on the verge of turning sixty years old, Philip Levine’s speaker reflects back on his personal history with boxing and, in particular, never having experienced that mythic “perfect” punch. Near the middle of the poem, he imagines the moment when this inspiration delivers:
They say it’s magic. When it lands
you feel the force of your whole body,
even the deeper organs, the dark fluids
that go untapped for decades, the tiny
pale microbes haunting the bone marrow,
the intricate patterns that devised
the bones of the feet, you feel them
finally coming together like so many
atoms of salt and water as they form
an ocean or a tear, for just an instant…
Levine could just as easily be mapping out a writing breakthrough here—our ongoing search for the singular line or image or sound that when leavened by the breath might, if only for a moment, make flush contact with the possible togetherness that both evades us and is us.
Of course, sometimes the elusive understandings we train and strain toward have conclusions or costs that worry us when they arrive. In her poem “Late Rounds,” Kim Addonizio’s speaker wonders about the parallels between a championship boxing bout and the end of romantic love. More specifically, she considers the risks of wind (boxing’s term for stamina), reflecting on how the ability to push our wind beyond the limits of human suffering might also work to set the stage for us to endure an anguish seemingly without end:
These men, you’d say, have heart—they keep on,
though neither remembers his strategy
or hears the shouts from his corner. And it’s true
you had more heart than I did, until that night
you gave us up, finally, and dropped crying to your knees
on my kitchen floor. The fighters stagger and fall together,
flailing against the ropes. They embrace
and are separated, but they don’t let go.
Though my third collection avoids making thematic contact with boxing, I know One Wild Word Away as a book also struggling to end an embattlement that it nonetheless grew to believe in, clinching what it faces on unstable legs that, for better or worse, refuse to give out, a book with poems that both trust and fear the perfection of their art as they await a relief that feels at once eternally close and increasingly not yet here. Or as Addonizio puts it, “throwing wild combinations/ at the air, at something between us that would not/ go down.” Or as Levine puts it, “fighting for nothing/ except the beauty of their own balance,/ the precision of each punch.” I must confess, a part of me has grown very tired of combat. More than once, the way this book went down made me reach for the towel. Which means, more than once, this book has gotten up from a canvas of my own creating. While the fighting inside keeps me questioning its security and safety, no matter the grace, Wild Word also reflects the bodywork I needed to voice myself back from a sense of too much loss.
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