Months 9&10: Figuring Out the Good Part

The title for this month springs from an essay, “The Good Part,” written by Dennis Covington and found in the anthology, The Healing Circle. Covington’s essay is such a good essay, funny and sharp. It asks and re-asks what I think are terribly relevant questions to writing and healing: What’s the good part? Have you gotten to the good part?

The challenge, I think when figuring out the good part in regard to some difficulty or pain is to figure this out without glossing over or suppressing what is painful and difficult.

Mary Oliver, I think, strikes this balance in her poem, The Wild Geese.

But you may also want to start with some research on figuring out the good part:

Asking a New Question: More Research on Writing and Healing

Writing and Healing and Breast Cancer

Research on Shifting One’s Point of View in Writing

Photo of a Scarlet-Chested Parakeet by Ltshears at Wikimedia Commons

The Healing Circle Anthology can be found here.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens

In a letter about his poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens writes that the poem “is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations.” The poem is made of up thirteen stanzas—thirteen sensations—each marked by a Roman numeral. Each stanza has the word blackbird in it. I like the second stanza. Number II: I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. I also like the ninth. Number IX: When the blackbird flew out of sight,...