Samuel Tongue

And constantly avoiding the risk of settling onto one emotion or one form of understanding.

and allowing that pathos and humor and ridiculousness and absurdity and infinity into what is now unfortunately quite a mundane experience and situation.

We were also very struck by how the poem that proceeds in couplets ended on a single line.

It again feels like, I mean, you can overread it perhaps as a, yeah, the poet has decided to end on this single line as a mark, a kind of epitaph or a mark of, this is the message you're supposed to head out of the poem with.

But it was just very gentle.

It was a gentle kind of Finnish denouement to the poem.

And it came after the couplet, Will the afterlife be harder if I remember the people I love or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

And that helped us to find a conclusion to the poem where it's not as simple as a binary, it's non-binary.

It becomes a either way and either or, please let me remember, please let me still have that connection.

And with all of these poems and actually with a lot of Andrea Gibson's work, it's worth, if you're interested to find more of their work, is to find them on YouTube because they were a very proficient slam poet and winner of lots of slam competitions.

So their performance of their own work is really, really powerful.

Obviously, the poems live in other people's voices and in other people's understanding, but it's really worth seeing them performed as well.

A second poem that we looked at was a very short one, but apparently, again, looking at dates, this was written many years before a kind of terminal diagnosis, but without trying to use the poet's biography as a...

necessarily a way of fully understanding and getting to an exact meaning.

This one was written quite a while ago, according to dates.

But when you bring the poems together in a group, they speak to one another, of course, and our brains and minds make those links.

So this one is a short poem called Instead of Depression.

Instead of depression, try calling it hibernation.

Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing.