The Report of My Death

Once again we celebrate National Poetry Month during these mellowing days of April. Once again many don’t understand why. Here’s why. Last week I gathered with twenty people at a Connecticut conference center to guide a day of writing and sharing poetry to heal emotional trauma. Participants came from as far as New Zealand. They were highly engaged, participated eagerly in writing about and sharing their feelings and experiences, and several acknowledged breakthroughs over emotional issues they’d been struggling with. All done with a lot of laughter. It was not so much an academic program as a contemplative one. Not a lesson in writing better, but writing to make yourself feel better. It was the second such program I have led, in addition to the weekly session I offer at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in New York City. I also hold a Zoom meeting each Thursday evening for cancer patients who can’t travel. Why? Here’s some of the research into the health benefits of reading and writing poetry: The Journal of Consciousness Studies says poetry sparks emotional response similar to the way re react to music. Contemplating a poem’s word pictures and layers of meaning activates some of the same areas that help us interpret everyday reality. A study by the Max Planck Institute: Every participant claimed to feel chills at some point when reading poems, and about forty percent showed visible goose bumps. While listening to poems they found particularly evocative, participants subconsciously anticipated the coming emotional arousal in a way that was neurologically similar to the anticipation of unwrapping a chocolate bar. A study of hospitalized children finds that providing opportunities for them to read and write poetry reduces fear, sadness, anger, worry, and fatigue. Beyond the science, what about the art of poetry? Poetry itself dates back to the Gilgamesh verses of the late second millennium BCE. But the world’s first author is acknowledged to be a Mesopotamian priestess, named Enheduanna, who lived in the twenty-third century BCE. She composed works of literature that included forty-two hymns. The Torah, written about 1500 BCE, depicts Adam’s first words as poetry: Here at last the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman, for she was drawn forth from man. Poetry is in itself a way of thinking about the world and making sense of it. Poem comes from the Greek, meaning a “thing made.” A poet was defined as “a maker.” We “make” a thing out of words, out of language. We write a poem to make a story out of our experiences and feelings. It’s a way to use words instead of pictures to freeze that fleeting moment in time when the universe causes us to pause in awe. Poetry, in other words, is a way to stop time. The terse, three-line haiku form of Japanese poetry arrests incidents that seem to interrupt the flow of time. Like flashes of lightning, haiku dispel darkness for a moment. For example, the haiku I wrote when I left home to drive to Vermont to experience the eclipse last year. Capturing in poetry the first minutes of an ordinary road trip caused me to put a name on how short our lives on this planet are: off chasing the sun final eclipse of my life all is brevity Poetry has reverberated down through eons of recorded history because it forces us to notice the little things that help us make sense of the big things. A great poem, Robert Frost said, ends in a “momentary stay against confusion.” A momentary stay against confusion. Because a poem, even if it lasts a thousand years, is all about the present – all about time. Ursula K. Le Guin is known best as a sci-fi novelist. She also wrote eleven books of poetry, including her Hymn to Time: Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance. Time makes room for going and coming home and in time’s womb begins all ending. Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding. People have credited poetry not only with changing their lives, but also saving it. One is Kevin Powers, who wrote in The New York Times how poetry kept him from suicide. This is the place poetry occupies in our lives. This is what we celebrate this month. And why.