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Poetry and Personal Wellness

So, April was National Poetry Month. For a lot of people, that’s National “Who Cares?” Month or National “Ughhh, Poetry” Month. For friends and family of poets, it might double as National “So, when are you going to get a real job?” Month. But for readers of poetry and poets themselves, April is an acknowledgement and celebration of the practice of living life inquisitively, of not taking things for granted, of the struggle to comprehend the world on a deeper level, and of the personal rewards that a handful of metaphors chopped into a string of lines can bring.
As a poet myself, I can say that poetry is also a lifesaver.
The other day, I told my wife I’d written a new poem. Her response was, “Is it good? Is it terrifying, like always?” Fair point: one of the complaints – or, let’s call them observations – I get about a lot of my poems are that they are bleak, especially considering how upbeat and optimistic I tend to come off as as a person. But here’s the thing:
Neurologically speaking, I’m at least minorly depressed most of the time, even when I’m having a generally okay time of things. Despite lacking any desire to take self-harmful action, my mind feeds me thoughts of suicide on an alarmingly regular basis (a couple times a month at minimum). In middle school, I almost listened.
I am not a natural-born communicator, so before I committed myself to the study and practice of writing, living was a much scarier prospect. Like most adolescents, I had a great deal of painful things on my mind and very little means of expressing them. My bottle of emotions was shaking and building in pressure with perfectionism and self-hatred and uncorking it without some intervention would have been impossible or catastrophic.
But then: Poetry.
Fifteen years ago, probably during National Poetry Month, I had to do a 10th grade report on Li-Young Lee, of whom before which I had been completely ignorant. I devoured “Persimmons” and “I Ask My Mother to Sing” (Just typing the title of the latter waters my eyes). It was the first time poetry really connected with me personally. “Persimmons” expressed the struggle to communicate and the malleability of language in a way that resonated deeply. “I Ask My Mother to Sing” was vibrant and sad and triumphant all at once, and its quick, simple language planted someone else’s experience in my head forever after. I got one of my worst grades on that paper, but I gained something far more important: an appreciation of a genre that so many scoff at or view as archaic.
When pop culture remembers that poetry even exists, it typically reduces it to a couplet of trite, overly sentimental rhymes. If not that, poetry is used as a punchline in a comedy, usually to belittle whichever hapless fool expresses interest. The year before my epiphany, Newsweek published an opinion piece called “Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” That was just 2003’s entrant in a long tradition of clickbait statements perpetuated across news outlets for decades. It’s an appealing headline, for sure, and one that reinforces the stigma against poetry, but it turns out that people do care. Even the cynical writer of the Newsweek article got around to touting poetry’s value by the end of the piece, but who read that far?
The majority of people may not care about poetry, but perhaps that’s because it has long been introduced in classrooms with an anchor strapped to its ankle, sucked into the impossible depths of confusion by too much focus on overwhelming, ancient poems by the long-dead “Masters.” I can relate. For me, poetry was nothing but an abstract until I read the right poems. There are hundreds of exciting, relevant contemporary poets addressing, with extraordinary clarity, the challenge of living in the modern world with all its disparity, fear, and changes. These poets manage to find joy and hope amidst the struggle – they speak to the disenfranchised and afraid, the hopeful and alone who are yearning to know that someone else “gets” them. During these past few years of heightened social tension in the US, poetry has seen a resurgence. Perhaps, miraculously, more people are finally finding the right poems. To me, it’s fitting that National Poetry Month immediately precedes May, National Mental Health Awareness Month – I’ve struggled for a long time with mental health and poetry has been a constant companion, through the best and the worst. If you or someone you love is lacking poetry in your life, seek help. Poems are easy to find and many of them take less than a minute to read. One might make all the difference.
And if you or someone you love is facing mental health challenges of their own, you’re not alone. There are a million resources out there, but here’s a few:
The National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255
National Alliance on Mental Illness: 1-800-950-6264
Be well,
~Gabriel
The Birth of a Press Part 2: “Starting Your Own Press; The Challenge”
The Birth of a Press Part 1: “No Room at the Inn”
Harriet Levin elaborates…
My Water Bottle
Croix de Bouquet, Haiti
The real thing he pulled was greater than the water bottle
turned toy—bottle cap wheels attached to a string—
as it followed behind him across the cracked cement.
In it had been rivers and rain. The strong force of a waterfall.
A stream winding through certain bodies. Another child came running out
the door asking to play with it. I watched the string exchange hands,
loop a finger as the children outran it and their creation rolled,
wobbled, tipped forward on its neck.
The speckled wings fluttered and rose, even as I hid somewhere
in my childhood basement, my mother shouting from the kitchen
to pick up all my toys scattered from their boxes,
toys I held in the darkness of night, clutched close in whispers.
The child without any stood beside me, followed me around,
stayed near, waited until my last sip and my bottle was empty.
He tapped it lightly and my heart burst. It took time
for me to understand. What did I not offer?
The water bottle my fingers gripped in heat so extreme
each knuckle swelled, my breath grew slow, my head pounded,
walking was difficult, thinking, how far can I make it
with nothing to pull along? I’ve nothing,
nothing behind me. No bottle turned toy,
no container empty enough to transform
into a caterpillar’s sixteen bouncing legs,
waiting to grow the wings to support it in air.
In a matter of moments, I could shed my old skin,
pupating my greediness over what I did not offer,
though the boy did not consider me greedy. He waited
so patiently for me to hold the bottle to my lips
and drink the very last drop, having waited under rubble,
himself a survivor, overwintering in ash.
He sat next to me on the cracked cement steps,
leading to the collapsed second floor.
Water could not sustain him. He required nectar
sweet between leaves. It was all over the news.
The water was contaminated. Peacekeepers defecated in water,
bringing cholera to the Artibonite River.
The world’s carelessness now set afloat.
I know. I was ready to discard my bottle,
set it on its journey of decomposition,
strip it of its corporeal form. My bottle,
held in the hands of so many people who will never
drink from it, those who delivered it from earth,
mined it, heated it, spun it a long while to become the axis
on which the day moves, wholly imaginary.
A boy waiting with a string in his hand.
Commentary:
Apart from the 2010 Haiti earthquake which caused an unprecedented natural disaster, the population suffered a man-made disaster when waste from a UN base leaked into the rivers and introduced a cholera epidemic. When I wrote “My Water Bottle” I wanted to depict the resilience of the people I’d met in Haiti. While Haiti is a victim of poverty and corruption, (according to a July 17, 2018 Miami Herald article, 80 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day), it is a place of beauty where everyday people engage in great acts of courage.
Since 2013, I’ve been traveling to Haiti as the leader of a Drexel University creative writing study abroad trip. On the trip we attend workshops at PEN Haiti and meet with renown Haitian writers, poets, artists and musician activists whose life and work cannot avoid representing change. Haitian literature has been compared to Russian literature before the Revolution, because it is that gorgeous, that rich, that filled with foment and despair. One great example is Marie Vieux Chauvet’s masterpiece Love Anger Madness. The early pages depict one of the main characters touching herself in her bed while she hears through her open window the screams of political prisoners who are being tortured in the nearby jail. These two actions are juxtaposed in a way that is uniquely Haitian and characterizes much of Haitian life and consequently its literature. Forrest Gander’s words in his new book, Be With, “the political begins in intimacy,” resonate here.
Besides meeting Haitian artists, our study abroad group fundraises for Love Orphanage, where we engage with the children for days at a time. Love Orphanage’s director Gabriel Fedelus is a father to eighteen children who were orphaned after the earthquake. Unlike the US, Haiti’s governmental agencies do not fund its orphanages. All assistance is received from overseas. The children lack basic needs such as soap and toothpaste not to mention medicine and meat. Needless to say, the children don’t own toys or games. Every penny that the orphanage receives goes toward sustaining the children’s basic needs. I was particularly awakened to this fact when I returned to the orphanage the following morning after one of the children, a six-year-old boy named Olson, asked me for my water bottle, to see he had constructed a pull-toy out of it. I could not help comparing his childhood to mine with its many toys. Are toys a kind of armor or shield against the imagination or do they give root to imaginative impulses? I think of Rilke’s idea of how necessary it is to be bored for the real imagination to grow.
Love Orphanage accepts donations at http://www.loveorphanage.org
No donation is too small.
Jeanne Marie Beaumont reads “Yet”
Save 20% TODAY on Letters From Limbo.
January Gill O’Neil elaborates…
THE CATHEDRAL
—After Rodin’s The Cathedral
I watch my daughter imitate
the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral.
Her arms curved in slow gyration.
It is her way of understating
the dark bronze, how two arms
can captivate the imagination
in their dizzying swirl,
find balance between
light and shadows. In truth,
the hands are both right hands
turning in on themselves, an architecture
almost sacred, serpentine, yet protective
of the space within, of what the
bronze cannot hold. My daughter bends
uncomfortably away from me, resistant, as if
her whole body is questioning
what it means to be a girl.
She sees—maybe
for the first time—what is there
and what is not from the hollow
her hands make, all the empty angles
that never touch,
the almost-grasp of the intimate.
Her wrists slight and glistening
with summer’s patina,
her fingertips conjure her being
and becoming,
body and soul
closing and opening
at the same time.
A few years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem hosted an expansive exhibit of sculptor Auguste Rodin. My daughter and I fell in love with his sculp