Saturday, April 28, 2007
Poetry can help us heal
Liza Field
Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.
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Hear the voice of the bard,
Who present, past, and future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walked among the ancient trees.
— William Blake
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.
— Virginia Woolf
The day after the Virginia Tech shootings, thousands converged at a convocation to mark an event no one quite knew how to mark. The stunned crowd looked for guidance from the assembled university officials, local religious leaders, the mayor, the governor, the president — and the poet.
“Old and young alike coalesced around Nikki Giovanni’s refrain at the end of her poem,” Margaret Klapperich wrote me April 22. “Perhaps that was the first moment when all students, faculty and family could feel a sparkle of unity, a connection with everyone else in that arena and across the miles. It was a moment of release from so much oppression and pain and sorrow of the previous 30 hours. That poem was the catalyst.”
“Poetry connects,” said Rob Merritt, a poet and English professor at Bluefield College. “It orders the chaos of love and death, and shows you are not alone in your despair or your metaphysical questioning or your joy.”
I often hear that Americans have little room for poetry today. Maybe it’s because we live such high-speed, horizontal lives, doing our best to hurry across a broad plane of the day’s information, commerce and barrages of communication more focused on the literal, urgent or sensational than anything of depth.
Poetry, after all, takes time — and a deeper kind of attention. It requires us to stop for a moment, as the poet stopped, to hear a message that falls through the floors of our surface life to deeper levels. This may be why we don’t have televised poetry shows or poetry sections in newspapers. And poetry writing doesn’t take up time on our students’ SOL or SAT tests.
Yet, we hunger for the poetic. Especially when something stops us in our tracks, upends our usual order of things, leaving us in a stunned feeling of “lost.”
“One of the greatest aspects of poetry is its therapeutic value,” said Gerry Anderson of Blacksburg, who began writing poetry in his late 70s. “This became evident to me when my wife died. I didn’t think I could ever get over it. But poetry became a tonic for grief.”
Because poetry occupies a vertical realm, it seems prepared to meet us in those standstill times of grief, awe, wonder and joy. Its deeper sense of time connects past, present and future, for it plunges through the particular moment into all moments and places.
Nikki Giovanni didn’t try to examine the psychology, the surface timeline or rescue coordination of the April 16 events. She acknowledged the mystery of pain and injustice, and connected it to others who suffer, all around the globe. The particular was linked to the universal — a poetic trait readers mentioned to me during National Poetry Month.
Responding to my request in a previous column for readers to send me their thoughts on poetry, Jamie Waldrop of Roanoke sent poems by her great-grandfather, Frank Monroe Beverly of Pine Creek in Dickenson County. This “Poet of the Cumberlands” celebrated the whippoorwills, creeks, oaks and dirt roads of Southwest Virginia’s mountains in a manner that revealed their link to the universal and the divine.
Klapperich, who recently moved to Roanoke from Augusta County, also appreciates poetry’s recognition of links between the sacred and the ordinary. She reads a poem every morning as part of her “wake-up routine.”
“Poetry calms and yet exhilarates me. It catapults me into an ethereal reality while keeping me in a conscious one as well, because it feels multi-dimensional. Yet it is the total antithesis of ‘multi-tasking.’ Poetry is tactile, allowing me to smell, taste, touch, hear, feel — not just with my body, but with my soul. It centers me and sets the pace for my day. Old routines take on new vigor.”
“You see beyond the mundane,” Merritt concurred. “I may sit through winter in a blue funk, lamenting the staleness of life. I read a poem by William Carlos Williams celebrating sunlight glinting from a piece of broken glass, and I look out of my self-absorption. Poetry ‘makes new.’ So National Poetry Month has to occur in spring.”
Merritt has been particularly struck by the healing qualities of poetry, for both poet and audience. First, “It forces you to slow down. Even reading or writing a little haiku, you have to step out of the frantic schedule of modern life.”
Then, “When I verbalize my anxieties, a weight lifts. Even by going into the darkness of loss, a poem lightens.”
Nancy Valle of Roanoke found that “writing poetry releases tension in us. It forces us to pay attention to details and emotions, whether we’re the reader or writer. Poetry reaches our hearts and minds — it is a transfer of emotion from the writer to the reader.”
Geraldine Plunkett of Northwest Roanoke has found that the poems she learned by heart, as much as seven decades ago, can even soothe physical pain.
“As a child, I was challenged or required to memorize poetry and scripture,” she said, while also being “encouraged to explore the natural beauty that surrounded me.”
She reaches for the visions in her memory before she reaches “for a pain pill to attack an ache,” and finds “this process often reduces the pain; it never produces unpleasant side effects.”
Plunkett wonders: “With the proliferation of electronic devices, will memorization of verse become obsolete? Instead of lingering to savor and ponder and absorb nature into memory, will humans only pause and push a button to record a snippet of nature that can later be minimized, maximized, amplified, or otherwise manipulated?”
Leonel Valle of Roanoke also had doubts about the flourishing of poetry in our time. He felt that “most people, as they mature in life, get grinded by the extreme toughness of our modern life, making poetry to them useless. Our present world is not a sensitive one, and individuals with the courage to express unique feelings are becoming very rare indeed.”
But Leonel and his wife, Nancy, are both avid readers and writers of poetry. “I love poetry because I need poetry to live, like people need air to breathe, water to drink, or food to eat,” he said. “The love of poetry cannot be explained. It is like loving the song of the mourning doves among the purple hills at dusk, or like that magnificent instant when a beautiful brown trout takes your fly and jumps in the surface of the creek.”
“To me, the most satisfying stringing of words together is in poetry,” said B.R. Culbertson, an award-winning poet from Blacksburg. “Only in reading poems do we find that ‘Oh, that’s exactly how I feel’ satisfaction.”
Billy Bob Beamer, a poet and jazz musician from Vinton, believes that so much bad poetry and art abounds, it could be dumped in the sea, which would then “overflow and flood the land … until out of the muck and mire a True Voice would arise and again cry out from the wilderness.”
But perhaps this “true voice” is what poets do hear and attempt to convey. Even if they would like to dump their own attempts in the sea, poets exhibit the courage to live in that vastness between the ideal and mundane, helping us — their audience — inhabit that uneasy crux between earth and heaven, which defines both a poem and human life.
These are just a sampling of the dozens of poems I received.
Water and Tears
In an attempt to gain
a sane perspective
from higher altitudes,
to search for refuge,
to hide from the horror
of the past Monday,
I drive up the ridges
that lie west of us.
As I go deeper into
the steep country,
water pours gently
from the hard ground.
It crosses the highway
in silver rivulets
and cascades softly
from ridge crowns
and joins other runs
down to the hollows.
Water surrounds me.
Never have I seen
so many springs flow
in these old haunts.
Creeks run full.
I cry with them.
— Leonel Valle
Procrastinator’s Lament
Wallow in today’s delight,
Forget about a better tomorrow,
For when it comes, if it does,
It may bring unwanted sorrow.
“Come,” she said, “To see my roses.
I’ve never seen such in the morn.”
He replied, “I’ll see them tomorrow.”
And he did, alone.
— Gerry Anderson, Blacksburg
