Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx, as in a poetry "prescription," is a column the The Paris Review. Readers write in with a specific emotion, and resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing poems for them. Once a weekly feature, it now monthly.

For May, the topic was "Then the Letting Go," One reader wrote in asking for a poem because she had come out to her parents and gotten a bad reaction.

Claire Schwartz replied:

"I'm sorry your family did not respond with the affirmation you deserve. Your queerness doesn’t need to be validated. It is valid because it is. You need—you deserve—to find a way to enter the truths of yourself regardless of how other people see you. That is difficult, beautiful work. I want to offer you a poem I hold very close because it stabilizes me to do just that: Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck.” 

In another column, when a reader asks for an encouraging poem for her job-hunting partner, Sarah Kay suggest one that isn't about job hunting biut about "loving someone exactly as they are, and wanting them to know that they are enough. It is a poem called “Ordinary Sex,” by Ellen Bass, which begins:"

If no swan descends

in a blinding glare of plumage,

drumming the air with deafening wings,

if the earth doesn’t tremble

and rivers don’t tumble uphill,

if my mother’s crystal

vase doesn’t shatter

and no extinct species are sighted anew

and leaves of the city trees don’t applaud

as you zing me to the moon, starry tesserae

cascading down my shoulders,

if we stay right here

on our aging Simmons Beautyrest,

dumped into the sag in the middle,

that’s okay...