Introducing Jill Bialosky Brattleboro Literary Festival, October 14, 2017   Baseball has its utility infielders — players who can do it all. Literature has people like Jill Bialosky. She’s an executive editor at W. W. Norton, where she works with such writers as Adrienne Rich, Mary Roach, Rita Dove, and none other than Major Jackson. She’s the author of three novels, most recently The Prize. She has published four collections of poetry, including Subterranean and The Players. She’s also a memoirist, the author of History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life and, most recently, Poetry Will Save Your Life.       This is a remarkable book. The project began as a compendium of more than fifty classic poems of the past two centuries, poems that she credits as being not just influences but her personal life companions. In a way, these poems are her life. Explaining how she made her selections, she told the poet and critic Matthew Zapruder: “I stepped back and began to think about when I encountered a particular poem and what it meant to me and means to me now, and I found that telling my own stories gave me access to do this. And then the form found its voice. Or the voice found its form.” The form she eventually hit upon is fascinating. Each short chapter consists of one or two poems that illuminate, and are illuminated by, vividly recalled incidents in her own life — tragedies like the losses of her father and her sister, blessings like the birth of her son, serendipities like the discoveries of particular teachers, or particular poems. Chapter by chapter, poem by poem, the whole of her life emerges and coheres, not quite in strict chronological sequence because that’s not necessarily how memory works, or how poetry works. Chapter by chapter, we see how discovering poetry, as she has said, “may indeed have saved my life from a less interesting one had I not discovered it, and it gave me a path forward.” That path forward was nothing less than the gradual, patient cultivation of a poetic sensibility — being more observant, more attentive, more insightful, more alive.       Poetry Will Save Your Life is as much about being alive as it is about poetry. As any English major knows, with education we can learn to appreciate something like a song or a painting or a poem, even to admire it . . . but not to love it — that can come only with the realization that the song or the painting or the poem has become a part of your life, something that has changed you and helped you find meaning and beauty in the reality of what you have experienced.       The poems in Poetry Will Save Your Life are a Norton anthology in their own right — a greatest-hits collection of the poems that saved Jill Bialosky’s life, and just might save yours, too. As she has said, “We need poetry now more than ever, if only as an antidote to the corruption, dishonesty, and constant noise surrounding this political moment. If fifty-word tweets can excite people, think of what a poem might do!”       In Poetry Will Save Your Life, she shows us exactly what poetry might do. Please welcome Jill Bialosky.   © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont October 2017   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page