Susan Cook’s sonnet is a more abstract and general approach to process, and it suggests something about the nature of endings. How do we know something is finished? How do we end a piece of writing? Or know a painting is complete? What do we have to give up of ourselves, our egos, to really honor the work? Among writers there is the grim advice to “kill your darlings,” that is, to detach from any particular element in a work that doesn’t serve the whole, no matter how clever or otherwise felicitous it is. I think that is what this poem is getting at—being willing to absent ourselves in order to see the work.
Susan Cook is a poet and psychotherapist who writes and produces two series available on PRX.org of essays and poems that speak to the troubled times we live in. Her collection “Breathing: American Sonnets” calls upon the sonnet form for its emotional tenor.
—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor
Every Piece Is Still, Everything Is There
Sonnet 1156
Every piece is still, everything is there
lying in its place. Nothing knows I am
not there, just me, imagining what’s bare
now, what’s been taken, exactly why and
when, and in which way, mine to know. Is
this where loss is felt, in things we leave as
if there’s nothing left to have, as if this
leaving as it is, with no regret, last
gesture of goodbye, is this how people
manage endings, knowing we’ll all have
some. It’s human nature, what we keep, fill
up lives with, sometimes broken up in halves.
Ending, leaving, not returning just the
way, unknown as ever, what we fail to see.
Image at top: Susan Cook, photograph.