You Stay Home Too

I have been exchanging poems with friends during this "shelter at home" time. We use email not some video programs, like Zoom, because these are not workshops. We have a prompt. We write on our own. We share the poems and comment on them.

The inbox got a bit full, which was why I suggested and then posted here a prompt where anyone could post their poem response as a comment. I hope some of you will participate.

One of my poet friends sent this poem by Wendell Berry which seems appropriate for this stay home time. (Thanks, Dana!)


Stay Home

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.


I didn't remember reading that poem earlier, but the first thought I had after reading it was the opposing view in a Robert Frost poem. In Frost's springtime poem, "The Pasture," he asks us not to stay home but to go with him.

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.


Of course, we can go with Frost - and Berry - through their poems. That (along with email, phone calls and video chat) is a very safe way to walk with other poets.

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Prompt: The Dance

I am, like Emily Dickinson, not a dancer. We certainly are not like the trained ballet dancers in the Impressionist paintings of Degas or Matisse's dancers.

As Emily wrote:

I cannot dance upon my Toes—
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,

That had I Ballet knowledge—
Would put itself abroad
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe—
Or lay a Prima, mad...

Perhaps, Emily and I are more like the dancer in "Danse Russe" by William Carlos Williams. who waits until his household is asleep

and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself

I can't quite imagine Emily dancing naked around her room, though I hope she did sometimes, but even non-dancers sometimes get lost in "the dance."

Was Williams thinking about the Ballets Russes, an avante-garde dance company of the time and its principal dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky? Nijinsky did not follow traditional ballet technique and often danced half-naked. In his Faun costume for the dance he created to Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune he was known to make gestures of orgasm to a scarf and it was a scandal on several continents.

The poem is, for me, a simple dance of freedom and joy that one can have in the privacy of one's own place. (That doesn't mean the poem hasn't been interpreted quite differently by others - check out this post.)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Dance at Bougival

But "the dance" does not even have to be about dancing.

We use the verb dance to mean "to leap or skip in excitement or joy." We sometimes describe animals or even objects as dancing, as with the mating dances of birds or a toy sailboats dancing on the water.

Figuratively, when we put off or don't address something directly, it might be said that we  "dance around an issue." To use another dance term, it might be said that in that situation we "sidestep" an issue.

The noun "dance" is an important part of many rituals and ceremonies from proms to weddings.

The American NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament is called "The Big Dance."

The Dance of the Planets is a phrase used sometimes in this late spring season when Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury all appear to be right next to each other in the evening sky. Over a period of time, they seem to rotate and change positions, like dancers, with each other.

In "The Dance by Wendell Berry, I think the poet combines the literal and figurative dances.

He begins with the literal:

I would have each couple turn,
join and unjoin, be lost
in the greater turning
of other couples, woven
in the circle of a dance,
the song of long time flowing

but then turns figuratively to asking

What is fidelity? To what
does it hold? The point
of departure, or the turning road
that is departure and absence
and the way home? What we are
and what we were once

Our writing prompt this month is simply "the dance" in any of its literal or figurative or verb or noun forms.

New to our site? Check our submission guidelines.

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2018

Poetry Therapy and Healing

Each of us has a unique part to play in the healing of the world. - Marianne Williamson

Readers of this blog and poetry contributors to Poets Online don't need to be told that poetry can contribute to healing. As readers and as writers of poetry, we can all think of instances when a poem helped us or someone we know to heal.

Healing can be taken literally, as in coping with diseases both physical and mental. And healing can be seen as that process that moves us through transformation and into growth from a bad place to a better one.

In "Finding the Words to Say It: The Healing Power of Poetry", Robert Carroll writes about his use of poetry (his own and others) to facilitate healing.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, poetry sprang up everywhere. A New York Times article on October 1, 2001, documented the phenomenon: “In the weeks since the terrorist attacks, people have been consoling themselves—and one another—with poetry in an almost unprecedented way … Improvised memorials often conceived around poems sprang up all over the city, in store windows, at bus stops, in Washington Square Park, Brooklyn Heights, and elsewhere. …” 

Some catastrophes are so large, they seem to overwhelm ordinary language. Immediately after the recent tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, the Los Angeles Times reported the witnesses were literally dumbstruck. Words failed them. They had lost their voices. 

In mainstream culture, there are subjects we do not talk about. They are taboo. For example, even though each of us is going to die, we don't talk about dying. Instead, we avoid it. Even physicians are reluctant to talk with terminally ill patients about the patient's experience... 

Poetry gives us ways to talk about it. My job as a poetry therapist is to use poetry and voice to help people get access to the wisdom they already have but cannot experience because they cannot find the words in ordinary language.

I wouldn't recommend poetry as "alternative medicine" or a substitute for traditional medicine, but I would recommend it as a supplement to any treatments.

For our writing prompt this month, I am more interested in the figurative sense of healing, but there are certainly many examples of poets who have used the more literal sense of healing in their poems.

You may not be aware of "poetry therapy" which is defined by the National Association for Poetry Therapy as "the intentional use of the written and spoken word to facilitate healing, growth and transformation." Their membership includes mental health providers, medically trained physicians, nurses, educators, and artists, writers and others who use poems or the writing process as a healing practice.

I have always found that being out in nature feels like healing to me. This feeling is captured simply in "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry.  He says "When despair for the world grows in me" that he will "lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds."

What is it that we find there that feels like it can heal us? I think we envy at moments like that the wild things "who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief" and want to be in that freeing place, if only for a short time.

Our September writing prompt is simply "healing."

Submission deadline: September 30, 2016

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There is a very good list of healing poems at writingandhealing.org, and the collection, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, also has good examples, and there are many articles online, such as "Poetry and Healing."

How To

Our February writing prompt asks you to write a poem that instructs by explaining how to do something, and also gives advice.

Most of us have trouble separating the two in our everyday lives. Ask me how to create a blog, and I will surely go beyond the practical, instructional steps and start giving advice.

I knew when I chose Wendell Berry's poem "How To Be A Poet" that it wasn't a perfect example of what I was asking in the prompt, but I like the poem. (We used another Berry poem in 2006 for a prompt on contentment.)

He says

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.

which is good practical how to, but he also says things like

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

and that is something else - not even advice.

On the site prompt I mentioned Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as also being a list poem of observations, and that both look at something from different points of view. Maybe I'm wrong about that last part. Perhaps, the Berry poem is all one point of view.

I knew that "how to be a poet" would be too limiting a prompt and perhaps there's already too much out there on how to read a poem, and how to write a poem. (see below) So I ask that you try a poem that instructs by explaining how to do something, and also gives advice. Feel free to choose topics poetic (How To Write A Sonnet) or not (How To Sharpen A Knife) or at the further end of practicality (How To Separate; How To Be; How To Tell Her). Use the how to as part of your title in some way (My Mother Tells Me How To Fix My Marriage).



More sites to inspire your how-to thoughts or muddle your mind:

• How To Do Things
• How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch - online article and also his book on this.
  
• How I Teach Poetry in the Schools by Jack Collom
  
• And if you want to be a good student, you can try this test on the Berry poem
  

This portrait of Wendell Berry is from the "Americans Who Tell the Truth" project. This collection of portraits & quotes was painted by Robert Shetterly.

Americans Who Tell The Truth is also a book of the first fifty portraits in this series printed in beautiful color with short biographies and an essay by Robert Shetterly about the intent of the project. The book is suitable for all ages, but its target audience is middle and high school. They have published a free curriculum on this website for teachers to be able to teach American history through the lives of these people.

Help support this project.

The quote from Berry on the portrait reads:

“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.”