How poetry heals
Cindy on May 6th, 2010
Poetry is such good company when no other form of human communication can touch the deepest parts of us.” — Sheila Bender
I was lucky enough to meet Sheila Bender early in my writing career. In two days I devoured her writing guide, Writing in a Convertible with the Top Down, then wrote to tell her how much it inspired me. To my surprise, she contacted me when she visited Detroit on business, and we met for lunch.
Seventeen years later, Sheila still inspires me. She’s a prolific author, poet, essayist, and master teacher — and I encourage you to visit her online magazine, Writing It Real. I was so deeply moved by her newest book, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, that I invited Sheila to be a guest blogger for the “Poems to Inspire” series this week. — Cindy La Ferle
Guest Blog by Sheila Bender
I started my writing career as a poet and I believe that poetry is my “home page,” the place I return to for investigating my feelings and perceptions and to recognize those of others that are so like my own. As poets, we write from joy, sorrow and wonder; our poems record our responses to being alive and they create a sense living intensely, rather than walking shut down through our days.
Many authors write about the way only poetry, both reading and writing it, has helped them cope with sorrows. Writing, even about the sadness of circumstances, is a kind of celebration of life — the pleasure of images and words to reconstruct even as we must let go.
And that ability to include opposites (something John Keats named “negative capability”) is exactly why poetry is such good company when no other form of human communication can touch the deepest parts of us. I realized this when I wrote about the loss of my 25-year-old son in a snowboarding accident in A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief.
Madge McKeithen wrote in her book, Blue Peninsula, how certain poems were the guides and solace she needed as she watched her young adult son dying of a terminal disease. Others have turned their attention to the way poetry helps when other therapies and conversations don’t: David Rico in Being True to Life: Poetic Paths to Personal Growth and John Fox in Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making.
Over the years, I have known I would start poems because of seeing the wet outline of my husband’s swimming trunks through his slacks as we drove after arguing, because of attending a traditional tea ceremony with my daughter as she was coming of age and the tea ceremony hostess’ mother was dying, because of awe I felt at the fragility of human life after looking down the Columbia River Gorge with my young son.
I’ve written a poem because a blue moon in August made me sit down and consider the feelings I had when my daughter left for studies in Japan. And certainly, when I was in the deepest grief, it was poetry I called upon to bring my son back to me, to make it impossible for me to forget him, to render pain into some sort of beauty so I could go on and be of service to my family and others.
Usually, I have only the feeling of needing to write and no knowledge of what I will write. But as I write each poem, I begin to understand the poem as a means of finding out what I might not otherwise have known I had to say. The more I write poetry, the more poetry I read, as absorbing other poets’ strategies for delivering perception always helps me find ways to explore my topics.
Here’s a poem I wrote under the influence of the cadences and repetitions in Walt Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking“:
Six Months After My Son’s Death, I Chant to Sing for Him
Out of daily steps and out of drives
on highways, out of hour’s rocky patches
and moments made of weeds, memories come.
I sing the evening I visited my son and watched
his friends working in his kitchen with hops and yeast
and recipes downloaded from the Internet.
I sing the carboys they showed me topped
with see-through tubes and shiny copper
for reading yeast’s performance.
I sing their logs of sugar content and bottled
batches, the way the young men sterilized the bottles
they used, invited people for the harvests
of oatmeal stout and porter. I sing each week
they went to school between their Sunday fests.
Long and deep, I mourn and wake to sing the sun
to rise, to thank my son for time he spent
inside my dreams. I sing, I sing and do what
he was doing, siphoning good spirit from sediment.
_________
I hope I have encouraged you to try your hand at poetry. Find a poem you like and read it several times. Then see what happens when you put your pen to paper (yup, I always begin poems on paper). – Sheila Bender
– Top photo: Detail from “What We Remember,” a mixed-media construction by Cindy La Ferle. For a closer look, click on the image. –
