In writing “How to Read This Poem,” Niina Pollari’s choice was honesty. Cuteness, rhetoric, and devices had no place in a project about conveying the truth of personal tragedy, she explains to me in Episode 10 of Multi-Verse. She cut those parts out.
How can we live with a past so painful we don’t want to remember it? “How to Read This Poem” takes the reader through the deep water and rip tides of grief; it offers truth rather than answers. I find myself repeating its sentences like subtle philosophical problems. They’re not necessarily reassuring, but they become more familiar, even as their meaning shifts.
Or, as Niina puts it:
Sometimes what you need is to imagine
Your memories taking a different shape
Or changing and becoming different memories
In order to let them sink into your skin
Like an emollient
At first it’s superficial
And of dubious benefit
But you do it because you believe
In its power to make you better
And over the weeks
As you look in the mirror
You can convince yourself
That it has
Listen—and listen again.
Niina Pollari’s “How to Read This Poem” can be found in her second poetry collection, Path of Totality, published by Soft Skull Press in 2022.
Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear more poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe to Multi-Verse on your favorite podcast app, or visit multiversepoetry.org.
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Episode 10: Niina Pollari on truth's heart of stone