Diane Morrow | Writing and Healing

A Secret About What a Poem Can Do to Us

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 2, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

I am returning to Antonio Machado’s poem, “Last Night As I Was Sleeping,” because I found yet another interpretation of the poem. In this case, not a different translation but a kind of collaboration with the poem to create something new. Michelle Bloom, a singer songwriter, has taken the poem and transformed it into a song. She’s used Robert Bly’s translation, but then twice, between stanzas, she’s inserted a chorus that she herself has written. She introduces her song this way: Inspired by the idea of making a moment, a “We” out of the quiet, internal act of reading a poem, this song seemed to come out of a dusty road in the Spanish countryside that Machado walked with the children he taught in a one-room schoolhouse. In the chorus I imagined Machado or The Poet, Universal, to suddenly interrupt the poem and turn toward the reader, eager to tell us a secret about what a poem can do to us, how it becomes not words on a page, but a living moment, embodied. I love this idea of an imagined interruption. She imagines Machado or a Poet interrupting. At the same time, it’s she herself interrupting and offering us something new. Here is the song: Lyrics and audio How lovely is that. She’s taken the “quiet, internal act of reading a poem” and used this to add another layer to the poem. That secret hinted at—what a poem can do—if we begin to sing it ourselves, and feel it. [photo credit from Michelle Bloom’s site, All Things Bloom] See also: Last Night As I Was...

Last Night As I Lay Sleeping

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 26, 2011 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

Twice recently I have come across this haunting and joyous poem by the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. In the translation by Robert Bly it begins: Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt – a marvelous error! – that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me . . . Looking around a little, I’ve seen some differences in the translation–especially in the second line. The original Spanish word translated as error is ilusion and can also be translated as vision. I dreamt – a marvelous vision! – a blessed vision! – that a spring was breaking out in my heart. Either way – so many possibilities here. I love the idea of the water inside. It reminds me of a retreat center I visited once. The place was a house with a central courtyard and in the courtyard was a garden with a pond. I’m not a good meditator. But I tried a couple of meditation sessions there and when I did, and sometimes in the weeks and months after, I found myself imagining having that kind of courtyard inside my own self, with a pond. In Machado’s poem I like the idea that the water is moving. A spring. A secret aqueduct. Here is a lovely video rendition of the poem done by Four Seasons Productions, part of their Moving Poetry series which you can learn more about here. (If you have trouble playing the video, let it buffer first. Or, you can watch directly at YouTube here.) [The photo at the top of this post is grabbed from the...

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 9, 2009 in Uncategorized

A book about the healing and restorative effects of nature The thesis of this book is directed toward children. It combines research and speculation to argue that exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and that many children now suffer from something Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.” He makes a good argument. Including an argument that nature is not only important for children. One argument he makes is that many tasks we engage in have a tendency to deplete our resources for directed attention. That we, in turn, get something he calls “directed-attention fatigue”. He then goes on to argue that being out in nature restores this fatigue by offering us involuntary attention or fascination. Non-task-oriented experience. To cite just one piece of evidence, he reports on a study done in Sweden. Hartig asked participants to complete a forty-minute sequence of tasks designed to exhaust their directed-attention capacity. After the attention-fatiguing tasks, Hartig then randomly assigned participants to spend forty minutes ‘walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music,’ the journal reported. ‘After this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proof-reading task. They also reported more positive emotions and less anger. Forty minutes in nature as an antidote to “directed-attention fatigue.” This sounds like good medicine to me. And now, with the beginning of spring—at least in my hemisphere—it would seem like the perfect time to try it...

from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 2, 2009 in Uncategorized

A novel about loss and home Last week I wrote about the movie, Finding Forrester, and the notion of using someone else’s words to ease one’s way into writing. Borrowing another writer’s rhythms as a way of beginning. So this week I found myself looking for passages that are particularly evocative. This is such a personal thing—finding passages that resonate. Maybe each person has to search for themselves to find the right piece of writing from which to continue writing—or from which to leap. But here, in any case, are two passages that I found. They’re from Marilynne Robinson’s lyrical novel, Housekeeping. She is probably better known now for her more recent novels, Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and a kind of sequel to that novel, Home. In 1980 she published this brief novel, Housekeeping, about which Doris Lessing says on the cover, “I found myself reading slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.” It’s the kind of novel that makes me want to pay attention to paragraphs and sentences, to reread them, to linger over them. Copy them. Learn from them as I type them in. First, the place, from page 9: It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element. At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. I love the sense of layers here. The layers of the lake, which fit well with a sense in this novel of layers beneath layers. The novel doesn’t so much move forward—though it does that too—but rather it lays down one layer upon another upon another. Here is a passage about the narrator’s grandmother, from the same page. A portrait: It seems that my grandmother did not consider leaving. She had lived her whole life in Fingerbone. And though she never spoke of it, and no doubt seldom thought of it, she was a religious woman. That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting. She accepted...

Finding Forrester

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 23, 2009 in Uncategorized

A movie about writing and transformation I don’t usually write about movies here but I stumbled across this movie last weekend and I find myself thinking about it this afternoon more than any particular piece of writing. The movie is about a young African-American man, Jamal Wallace (played by Rob Brown) who meets a reclusive writer, William Forrester (played by Sean Connery). It’s a feel-good movie, directed by Gus Van Sant, who also directed Good Will Hunting. (Personally, I like Finding Forrester better). The essence of the movie is this: Jamal meets William, they develop a mentor-student relationship, and both lives are changed. I won’t elaborate on the plot here, or give away the ending. I do think the movie is worth a look. Perhaps what’s most relevant here is a writing exercise that Forrester gives to Jamal. He sits the young man down at a typewriter and tells him to begin writing. Then Forrester waits. Nothing happens. No keys are clicking. Silence. Eventually, what Forrester does is to go get an old essay of his own and he tells the boy this (paraphrased from memory): Start with my words—type those—and then when you’re ready start typing your own. I like that a lot. That connection between reading and writing. Not just reading in order to begin writing—but actually beginning to take someone’s words on—at the level of the fingers—keying them in—and using that as a bridge into one’s writing. Choosing a passage that has the right rhythms—the rhythms one wants perhaps in one’s own writing—and beginning with those words. Hearing them in one’s head as one keys them in—and then at some point taking off on one’s own, like a swimmer going off into the water without being held up by someone else’s hands. It seems like such a simple idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually tried it. I think I...

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