Poetic Healing: How Poetry Saved my Life
On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
—Pablo Neruda
Poetic Healing: How Poetry Saved my Life
The day I discovered a slim volume of poetry called Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows by Rod McKuen, I realized that poems didn't have to rhyme. You can use them to talk about anything stripped of pretense or sentiment to say what's in your heart, and that can be amazing- in fact, it can save your life. If he could write the truth about waking up on Stanyan Street, then I could write the truth about waking up on Fairacres Drive. At about the same time, I started listening carefully to song lyrics and realized that they were all made up of poetry. And poems kept finding me like contemporary poet Naomi Shihab Nye says in an excerpt from her poem “A Valentine for Ernest Mann”:
You can't order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter, say, "I'll take two"
and expect it to be handed back to you on a shiny plate...
I'll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping.
They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up.
What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.
Poems Have Been My Lessons From the Universe
In looking back over my life, I can now see that poems have been showing up for me, like messages in bottles washing up on my shores, at just the right times in the strangest places. I discovered my Grandma Claytie had not just ridden her 3 wheeler around Burrton, Kansas selling insurance. When she wasn't crashing into ditches with only a spinning wheel as a signal of where to find her, she had been a poet. She'd written a poetry column for the Burrton Graphic called Claytie's Corner back in the early '50s. Although her poems were filled with sentimentality forced into a rhyme scheme, the beauty of everyday life shone through them - the perils of not enough soap for boy's ears, crying children, sore and beautiful hands. They reminded me of an old picture of her hand holding mine up to the camera to show off my wedding ring. Later, the scene rang out in my poetry about how the spirit in her hands transformed my life. And then I stumbled upon retired insurance executive from Nebraska, Ted Kooser, who wrote these exotic lines about merely peeling a potato: "Pablo Casals should see me now, bowing this fat little cello, peeling off long white chords…". He later was named the US Poet Laureate in 2004 and 2005 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His poetic scenes of everyday existence included an elderly tattooed man's perspective at a yard sale, pantry shelves, and even the kitchen sink. My favorite was about giving a love poem he hoped was still warm from sitting in his back pocket. And these all made me look around and see the world differently. I began to see beauty and poetry all around. I saw love in how my husband handled roadkill, passion in a dirty hat, displaced grief for my mom in trying to love a cat, compassion for my Father's simple need for a comb in the ICU, and on it grew.
Without studying poetry or learning about it, I found myself living within it. It opened my heart up to deeper sacred truths found in the most mundane things. The ordinariness of the poetry of McKuen, Grandma Claytie, and Kooser reflected the poetry in every movement and every moment: true mindfulness at its best. I could also feel a nurturing assurance that their words somehow watched over me. Thomas Moore explains that if our fathers can't father us, sometimes literature and art can, and poetry did that for me. As a primary school teacher, I rediscovered the legacy of nursery rhymes and made it my mission to make sure every 2nd grader I knew became intimately acquainted with them. I purchased a collection of 45 classic rhymes read by English children that I played repeatedly to ensure that my students could use them at night to put themselves to sleep. I knew that even with a free breakfast, lunch, snack, and weekend backpack program, some of my students would still be going to bed hungry. And yet, if poetry is like bread, as Neruda said, I wanted it to feed their souls like it fed mine.
Reading Poetry Expanded my Wisdom About Unrelated Things
In 2009 I made a trek to Boston. Every day I walked from Beacon Street to downtown and curled up in front of floor-to-ceiling windows in the loft of the biggest Borders store I had ever seen. On the first day, I came upon a book entitled Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions by Robert McDowell, and it curled up with me. It spoke of poetry connecting us to the two most profound conversations possible- that which we have with ourselves and the one we have with the greater mystery out there -the divine. It talked of how reading poetry can make you into "…a tuning fork of the Divine". It spoke of how it can be used as an integral part of a daily spiritual practice that can lead to a stillness or calm center where we can be most open and alive. And it talked about poetry being that "collective celebration of the sacred" that I indeed had felt but didn't yet have words for. It talked of how "Our mother's rhythmic breathing, heartbeat and physical rhythms, which we know in the womb, are our earliest experiences of poetry" and how these "Shards of simple poetry…lodge in our physiology". I took comfort in knowing that with all my mother's shortcomings, she started me off with poetry as even the most broken mother does. We all come from rhythm and magic.
The book also talked of how writing poetry "…opens windows, doors, and opportunities." I kept writing and reading each day. In doing all of this, I found myself amid a profound and nurturing conversation that put my heart in a holy place. It was healing, and poetry can open us up. When we write our words down, we get to live longer. I never tired of hearing my students' shock when I told them their words could live longer than they could. Showing them how my grandmother's voice is still alive even though she's been dead for over 30 years was amazing. The truth is, I didn't even get to fully know her until I discovered her writing, and that was long after her death.
Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris- the seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish- you find an unlikely looking bottle…. You bring it home and discover a message inside…thus it is for all of us who read poems.... I am at home in the middle of the night and suddenly hear myself being called, as if by name. I go over and take down the [poem]- the message in a bottle- because tonight I am its recipient…its heartland.
–Edward Hirsch from How to Read a Poem, and Fall in Love with Poetry
Whether we write poetry, memoirs, or anything else, we can all read poetry- and there is poetry on every topic imaginable. Millions of messages in bottles are all around us waiting to be found washed up on the beaches of our lives. Everyone can take a poem, a lyric, or a sacred text and get out of it something they need. The range of magical, lyrical poetry with all its metaphoric images holds something for each of us in whatever form it takes. It simply means there are words we need to hear out there to counteract some that have merely been thrown our way. We can find them, craft them, and intentionally internalize them to build lives we choose full of purpose and love.
Poetry Even Helped me Connect with my Son
I often think of my son and how even in the days when our minds and hearts were miles apart, we shared an iTunes account, which meant our music was entangled. I found incredible delight in hearing that he would find himself at work with his hands elbow deep in hot water, and one of my English nursery rhymes would come blasting into his head and he would be helpless to hit the forward button. I am not sure if he understood that he used to play with those tunes like silly putty, turning Old King Cole into Old King Soul while throwing his head back in a belly laugh like only a 3-year-old can. I can see the threads of his love for those words into creating the lover of words that he is today and that I am so fiercely proud of and admire as a person and as a poet in his own right.
I suppose it was poetic justice that I would find myself driving across town with B.J. Thomas blaring and suddenly be overcome by the earthy rhythm and lyrics of “Dear God 2.0” by The Roots:
Dear God, I'm trying hard to reach you
Dear God I see your face in all I do
Sometimes, it so hard to believe it…
But God, I know you have your reasons, too
We used to have these "face-offs" where we would try to understand each other by playing our best lyrics to see if the other could appreciate them, and that was my only glimpse into his heart for years. I didn't want to understand his lyrics. As cool as I wanted to be, I had trouble looking past the profanity, but I had to admit, they would slow me down by the side of the road to take in some of the most profound poetry I'd ever heard like a sharp gasp of breath. They broke my heart and broke me down. Then he wrote me a Mother's Day poem entitled “Deadline” that started off:
As time goes on, the ticker keeps tickin’,
The image of younger me in your mind is still stickin'
There is no replacing what you say to me,
And the truths that I get to see
Coming alive in front of me…
And I wrote back in my journal:
You are a sun, my son.
A ray spot of light.
Honing your blade with words…
In that silent exchange of words, we were partaking of bread together and meeting in a holy place; the windows and doors were opening.
In this season of strife where unkind and even untrue words are like hammers pounding into our temples every day, don't we need more poetry? Don't we need more ways to reach across divides, to translate our love and longing into something we can see and feel; something real? Don’t we we need some magic and some healing? Then let their be more poetry in our lives.
May it please be so.