Remembering Carolyn Bush (1990-2016)

Today marks the anniversary of the altogether too-soon passing of Carolyn Bush, a young poet, independent thinker, and active member in recent years of New York City's literary, activist, and poetry communities. Carolyn moved to New York in 2012 upon graduation from Bard College, eventually co-founding the nonprofit event space, library, publisher, and work collective Wendy's Subway, and befriending many. "In the weeks before her death," it is written in her obituary, "Carolyn was passionately engaged in a group project focused on theories of community in literature and philosophy. The project, titled 'How to Live Together,' will be continued by her colleagues at Wendy's Subway." It goes on:

Carrie is remembered as a loving daughter, sister, and friend. She nurtured a curiosity in mysticism, astrology, and holistic self-care. A close friend described her as "honest and conscious about her state of being," and many have remembered her as present, curious, thoughtful, witty, fun-loving, and brilliant. 

Wendy's is reportedly also working on a collection of Bush's poems and writings. In the meantime, as we reflect on her fondly today, we'll point you gently in the direction of poet and WS colleague Gabe Kruis, whose poem "Regression," published in a summer issue of The Brooklyn Rail, starts with an elegy for Carolyn ("1, // fall //  for Coco (1990-2016))," and incorporates, gradually and gracefully, some of her own words. A quotation from that, for example:

Still longing to see what the future holds,

           How can I employ reason 
to make me feel what I know to be true, 
when you’re the one who animates my disbelief, lingering 
like the day that’s over 
but clings to your nerves a while, “Still wading 
sentimentally in a year 
That ended sentimentally in the middle of a season,” 
is how you put it, 
Like lying still on a summer’s evening 
w/ the vestibular impress of 
the pool’s blue sway 
rippling through your equilibrium, 
An intaglio of motion, It washes over you, 
& you wake w/ a start,

           Lift your face from the floorboards 
to return to the freezer to freshen your drink,  
& you read, 
as if by instinctual misprision, “You surround me,” 
to be a kind of dysphoria, As in, 
“Who is this body 
I’m embedded in,” it leaves you breathless, 
“Who are these people,” 
That old refrain, “This can’t be life,” 
How it must feel to find your own words in quotes, 
“the body’s body,” That feeling 
as if, if you’re anything, 
you’re the flattening of so many 
into one being, Possessed, 
not relinquished, 
their spell cast & lingering in muscles’ memory, 
as if drowning in, 
or swaddled by them, A channel through which 
grief returns refreshed, 
the way the river traces the bed it carves, 
on the surface unchanged, 
yet deepened,

           “You surround me,”

As her friend and former roommate Masha Mitkov wrote in the fundraiser held for Bush's family after her death (the donations were in turn generously given to Wendy's Subway in her honor), Carolyn has been missed by "a sea of anguished people." Hopefully some of that anguish is, a year later, relenting, changing.