Sometimes I watch time-lapse videos of continental drift, a bit of Paleozoic melatonin, when I need an escape from grief. It’s remarkably soothing: Pangaea stretches and oceans break in; islands float for ninety million years or three seconds; Europe blossoms, Alaska stretches a pinky, and all seven continents straighten their ties. I refresh then replay time, and push the continents back into a mother dough; seconds later, South America abandons its African nook; seas grow, lands drift away like lost beach balls, and I drift off to sleep, to dream of some other place, some other year, any other year, any other sorrow.
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Much like plate tectonics, poetry is a measure of time, decades and seconds felt equally, refreshed until we pass out or think of better ways to explain what this means.
My best way to explain poetry is that it’s an invitation to, or a distraction from, grief. A poem is a reminder that I am human, it offers permission to be human. Sometimes I hide my sadness in continents’ crashing coastlines, but often I seek companionship in poets’ sorrows, and when time allows, I unearth my own, pull them from lithosphere to page.
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While all of us experience sorrow, I wanted my Poet Laureate Fellowship project to offer a platform for those of us who experience it through the lens of mental illness. I’ve commissioned a group of twenty-five diverse poets and artists, including high school students who self-identify as affected by mental illness, for a poetry and art exhibit, opening with a public reading and community art piece at our Historic Chateau Theatre. Rochester, Minnesota, home of a branch of the Mayo Clinic, is world-renowned for treating the physically unwell. We know grief and love. Our rich hospital architecture forms our skyline, and our blue wheelchairs line our skyways. This project is for the illnesses we can’t see.
Mayo Clinic houses a Dale Chihuly glass chandelier, a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, a series of Andy Warhol prints, works by Joan Miró, Yaacov Agam, and Ivan Meštrović—and I love it all, the science of art as healing. But you have to walk through the hospital to see these pieces. The fellowship is a chance for our community members to see one another. When there is camaraderie in our struggle, there is permission for vulnerability and healing in a common space. For this same reason, some of our pieces will be made into broadsides, available for free around the city.
I named the exhibit Trust the Hours, borrowed from a poem Galway Kinnell wrote for a student who was considering suicide. As a teacher who has lost students to suicide, I did not anticipate the stinging optimism of “Wait,” but I was certainly familiar with the tone of its private conversation. Kinnell writes, “Distrust everything if you have to. / But trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” This poem doesn’t fill me with platitudes, but it’s on my side: my “music of pain” is the only one of its kind, and we mustn’t sugarcoat, as the act of playing my “whole existence” is one of “total exhaustion.” Make a new kind of tired, Kinnell suggests, the kind from living hard rather than giving up—still a sorrow of sorts, but a reclamation of it.
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Time never pretends to be something it isn’t. Sure, I’m afraid of wrinkles and the end of the world, but those are both the sun’s fault—not time’s. If there’s any constant in life, it’s time—by my side, in my pocket, on my wrist, ready to refresh if I want to relive a memory or a geology lesson.
Writing poetry, especially about trauma, is an act of discovery and recovery, in that order. This is my job as a poet: I find metaphors in my landscape and attempt interpretations to make the complex world, and the heaviness that comes with it, accessible. I break it down, move it around.
I can’t always do this. First of all, mental illness is often paralyzing (a severe understatement); and secondly, it’s difficult to surrender ourselves to time, to trust the hours, especially for writers who are afraid they’ve nothing left to say and have emptied the reservoir.
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One of the first time-telling devices was the water clock, which measured the hours by draining.
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My first time-telling device was the paper-plate clock I made in second grade. It had messy numbers and backwards twos, and the brass fasteners affixing the hands to the plate allowed us to adjust accordingly—to practice time, to choose our time, to win the race of time and hold the clock over our head in victory. Now I teach high school, so for nine months, I am forced to live in rigid time, by a schedule of bells. At the end of long days, students watch the classroom clock’s second hand spin closer to dismissal and inch their toes out the door until the final booooop. (Our bells are digital. Rather than ding!, they sound like you stepped on Eeyore’s tail.) The entire building waits for time’s release then pours out all at once.
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Once you know this, you cannot unsee it: analog watch advertisements set their faces at 10:10 to form a smile, a subconscious good feeling, so you buy them. Urban legend says 10:10 was set to commemorate Lincoln’s death, or Kennedy’s death, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s death. But Booth found Lincoln during the biggest laugh of the show, at 10:15’s open arms; and the bullet hit Kennedy’s brain at 12:30, hands nearly separating a watch’s face, save for the hour’s slight bow; and King was hit at 6:01, splitting time and circle in half, each hand at full attention. Trust me: poets and horologists will make meaning out of anything.
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I hadn’t heard of “Wait” until I needed a title for this Poet Laureate Fellowship project, meaning I came to this poem twenty-five years (about 214,600 hours) after my own suicide attempt. For years I tried to write about that “enormous emptiness,” but nothing was meaningful until five years and an afternoon later, while listening to “Moonlight Sonata.” A memory returned, pianissimo.
“Trust the Hours” doesn’t mean that time heals all wounds—not at all. This project can mend, but its focus is expression and empathy. I write to understand, to win a figurative game of hide-and-seek and show you what I’ve found. We experience grief subjectively, but because it is the human condition to grieve, we never do it alone. This is why some of my most intimate experiences with a poem are in the middle of an event, and why other times, when I’m reading at home, I am surrounded by a shifting world.
I trust that, eventually, the universe will offer me metaphors to make sense of my sorrows, and they will change shape in my body like moving continents—or they will find their way out. Let the heartache be the heartache, the grief be the grief, then let the poet do her job to reclaim and rename the sorrow. She hasn’t fixed it, but she owns it.
Jean Prokott is the author of The Second Longest Day of the Year (Howling Bird Press, 2021), winner of the Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of many awards, including scholarships from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prokott serves as the poet laureate of Rochester, Minnesota, where she teaches high school English. In 2024, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Prokott will examine how mental health impacts groups differently, including teenagers, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals, veterans, and underserved populations. Working with Rochester’s writing, art, education, and medical communities, she will develop an exhibition of work at the Historic Chateau Theatre by poets and artists who self-identify as affected by mental illness, distribute broadsides with magnets that list mental health resources, and display poetry window clings throughout the city.