Healing Poetry

Sweetness

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 8, 2007 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry

One of three places that I’ve come across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Wild Geese, in the last month or so was as a kind of epigraph—before the table of contents—to the poetry anthology, Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley. The anthology, first published in Britain, is one I would recommend, and I’ll probably get around to writing about it more here on this site one of these days. Meanwhile, today, I wanted to draw your attention to one particular poem that I found in the anthology—a poem called “Sweetness,” by Stephen Dunn. The poem is freely available on the web, this because of a project–Poetry Out Loud–which encourages high school students to memorize and recite poetry. The poem can be found here. (Incidentally, if you want to browse the poetry on their site you can click here. They have a fairly extensive online collection—) But back to the poem, Sweetness—the first seven lines— Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it. . . Nice, huh? The poem makes me think, among other things, of that bag of tomatoes and that rotisserie chicken in Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer. But any way you look at it, I think maybe he’s onto...

Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer: A Featured Piece

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 4, 2007 in Featured Pieces, Healing Poetry

EIGHTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT CANCER by Eleanor, Louise, Lydia, Nell, Rosetta and Sandra I I love my mother, my brother and my grandmother But I’m not ready to go and be with them yet What about my three children? II Questions: How are we going to proceed? What is my chance of recurrence? How did this happen to me? Why am I even in this picture? III A lot of people think, “Why me?” I never did go through, “Why me?” IV Pure and simple fear Fear of what? Pure and simple fear of pain Fear of the next thing, and the next V Depression. Sometimes you don’t recognize when you’re depressed. There are some days when you just don’t want to talk on the phone. VI I felt like a marionette My strings being pulled in every direction They want me to have this scan, and this test, And this bloodwork. Where do you want me now? VII I left my body and the treatment And the doctors– I left them to the guidance of God VIII The whirlwind, the disruption The chaos it created in everyone else’s life— My husband’s, my three sons, their families, my friends, and mine. Like a tornado had come through It kept getting bigger IX When is this going to end? Where is the end? X Lost in this never-ending struggle or tunnel The struggle is the tunnel On and on Never-ending Dark XI I want to say something about sickness Not being able to keep anything down Sickness on top of sickness Complications of a weakened immune system XII So much information Overwhelmed with information Three bulging grocery bags (And you’re sick. When can you read?) XIII Sleep What’s a good night’s sleep? Waking up exhausted The lack of energy is indescribable XIV Burning, Burning And more burning During radiation XV So tired doing basic things Will I ever be normal again? XVI With all of that you have to deal with generalizations And stereotypes: “Oh, you still have your hair?” XVII Other people’s insensitivities: “We’re not talking about cancer.” XVIII Other people’s kindnesses: A bag of tomatoes A rotisserie chicken. [This piece was written at Cancer Services in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at a writing and healing workshop in...

Wild Geese: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 14, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Healing Images, Healing Poetry

Three times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a radical line. Maybe a radical poem. It goes against the grain of business as usual. (The way the mind and the will are so often, for so many of us, yanking the body around to places it doesn’t really want to go—places even, sometimes, that can make the body a tad sick—or sicker.) (And sometimes maybe this is one of those silver linings of getting sick—or so people will sometimes tell me—the small good part—how a person can begin to learn to quit yanking the body around. The stakes are too high anymore to do all that yanking. Sometimes illness is the beginning, for some people, or so they tell me, of beginning to pay closer attention to what the body loves and needs—and what it doesn’t.) I’ve been carrying the poem with me this month, looking at it now and then, and now, today, there’s one particular word that seems to jump off the page: meanwhile. MEANWHILE as the good part? Because after the speaker of the poem tells us we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles, repenting, we only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, after that she invites us, the reader, to tell her of our despair and she will tell us hers— And then there’s this shift—this leap—and she writes: Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. . . It’s as if the camera had been close in—a history of despair—or a history with some despair in it–but then—a shift—the camera pulls back—a shift to a larger landscape—a leap—meanwhile—somewhere—those wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading...

Whatever Leads to Joy

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 22, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry, Recommended Books

The book, What the Living Do, was written by Marie Howe in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS. It’s a book that, perhaps better than any other book I know, walks that delicate balance between making memorial—remembering who and what has been lost—and choosing life in the wake of such loss—figuring out, day by day, what it is that the living do (after). There’s joy in the book—and in the poem—but it’s that bittersweet kind of joy— The poem, “My Dead Friends,” can be found here. The poem consists of only thirteen lines. Here are six of them: I have begun, when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. . . They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads to joy, they always answer. ....

Notes in Bathrobe Pockets

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 15, 2006 in Forms for Writing and Healing, Healing Poetry

Foggy this morning. I’m thinking (again) about those pieces and images that can pierce through fog. For a writer. Or for a reader. The kinds of things that Janet Desaulniers is talking about, I think, when she talks about collecting. In his book, A New Path to the Waterfall, a book about, among other things, navigating loss, and navigating the approach of death, Raymond Carver includes an apparently simple poem: “His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes”. The poem is made up of of thirteen fragments. Here are three: Those dead birds on the porch when I opened up the house after being away for three months. “We’ve sustained damage, but we’re still able to maneuver.” Spock to Captain Kirk. The rabbi I met on the plane that time who gave me comfort just after my marriage had broken up for...

A New Path to the Waterfall: A Recommended Book

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 8, 2006 in Healing Poetry, Recommended Books

This book is the most beautiful example I know of a written mosaic or collage. It began, as near as I can tell, in September of 1987 when Raymond Carver, a gifted writer of both short stories and poems, was diagnosed with lung cancer. The following March the cancer metastasized to his brain, and, then in June, lung tumors recurred. These are the facts that initiated his illness and which Tess_Gallagher, his wife, and a gifted poet herself, describes in the introduction to this, Carver’s last book: A New Path to the Waterfall. Tess Gallagher also describes in her introduction the literal making of narrative in the grip of these facts. First, there are the poems—the elemental pieces of the narrative. Some of these poems Carver had written before the onset of his illness. Many, like “What the Doctor Said,” and “Gravy” and “Late Fragment,” were written and revised during the illness itself. Also during his illness, Tess Gallagher began reading stories by Anton Chekhov and then she began sharing the stories with Carver. During this same time, Carver was reading a book, Unattainable Earth, by Czeslaw Milosz, the polish poet and Nobel laureate. Milosz’s book is a kind of patchwork quilt which incorporates passages from other poets, and this book, according to Gallagher, was key in inspiring Carver to want to find for his own book “a more spacious form”. Then, at some point, something clicked. A new path? First Gallagher, and then Carver, began to see how certain passages in the Chekhov stories could be reconfigured as poems and how these pieces, as well as pieces from other writers, could serve as elements in the narrative that he was trying to make. Finally, the last step: taking all of these pieces and putting them together to make a narrative. In the introduction to Carver’s book, Gallagher describes spreading poems out on the floor of their living room and literally crawling among them on hands and knees and beginning to arrange them into a pattern: “reading and sensing what should come next, moving by intuition and story and emotion.” It’s a vivid and tactile description of finding a pattern—finding a form. And the result—this book—illustrates (among other things) that a narrative does not have to be linear in order to be beautiful. The gaps become part of its beauty. The breaks. The fault lines. The juxtapositions. The pieces reflecting and refracting, one off of another. And all of that white space around and...

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