Archive for the 'National Poetry Month' Category

Poetry and Medicine

Published on April 16, 2012 in Aging, Alternative Medicine, Author Blog, National Poetry Month, Poetry, writer blog, writing and Writing for healing.

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In honor of National Poetry Month, I would like to talk about the link between physicians and poetry. During the course of history there have been many physicians who practiced medicine and were poets. William Carlos Williams is typically the doctor who comes to mind as someone who wrote poems between patients on the prescription pad he kept in his pocket. One of my favorite quotations of his is: “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.”

Other physician-poets include John Keats, Chekhov, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. In my view, the connection is quite clear. Poets tend to be in touch with their deepest emotions and the best physicians are those who are also able to tap into the deepest part of the psyche. In other words, they have the innate ability to connect emotionally with themselves and their patients. Taking this one step further we can use the analogy of the rhythm of a poem being a metaphor for the rhythm of a breath and/or a heartbeat.

Poetry has been incorporated into a number of medical school programs, including Yale and Harvard Schools of Medicine. In a recent article in the New York Times called, “The Doctor as Poet,” (December 1, 2011), by Pauline Chen, M.D. explains how poetry can help physicians empathize and understand what a patient is going through. This can be done by both the reading and writing of poetry. Dr. Rafeael Campo of Harvard Medial school, who is also an award-winning poet, talks about Marilyn Hacker’s “Cancer Winter” which helps her colleagues understand a patient receiving a cancer diagnosis.

In his fabulous book, the Call of Stories, writer and physician Robert Coles, talks about how over the centuries poets who became ill were also inspired to share their experience through poetry. He says, “It prompted them to look not only inward but also backward and forward–to ask the most important and searching questions about life’s meaning.” Coles is an advocate of all narratives and in his book he accentuates the power of poetry and how he admires poets and the merging of poetry and medicine. “Like patients,” he says, “poets are probably holding on for dear life to some words.”

Here is one of William Carlos Williams’ poems, most probably inspired by one of his patients:

Complaint

They call me and I go.
It is a frozen road
past midnight, a dust
of snow caught
in the rigid wheeltracks.
The door opens.
I smile, enter and
shake off the cold.
Here is a great woman
on her side in the bed.
She is sick,
perhaps vomiting,
perhaps laboring
to give birth to
a tenth child. Joy! Joy!
Night is a room
darkened for lovers,
through the jalousies the sun
has sent one golden needle!
I pick the hair from her eyes
and watch her misery
with compassion.

Happy National Poetry Month !

Published on April 2, 2012 in Author Blog, National Poetry Month, Poetry, writer blog, writing, Writing for healing and Writing, journaling.

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April is National Poetry month, which has been in existence since 1996. In honor of the month-long celebration, I would like to mention my new collection of poems released this month, LISTENING TO AFRICA (Antrim House).

This book was inspired by a family trip to Africa in 2008. It was my first, but probably not my last trip to Africa, and in more ways than one, it was a life-changing experience. We were there for three weeks and visited Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.

During my travels, I typically keep a journal, and this trip was no exception. By the end of the safari, I had accumulated 62 pages of typed text, which also included an array of poems. After returning home, I transformed some text into poems and thus the birth of a new poetry collection.

First I would like to share some tidbits about the African continent that I learned before our departure:
• Africa is the second largest and second most populated continent.
• Africa straddles the equator and encompasses numerous climate areas.
• The climate ranges from tropical to sub arctic.
• The northern part is mainly dessert; central and southern areas consist of savannas and very dense jungles or rainforests.
• Animals found in Africa consist of both herbivores (deer, antelope, giraffes, buffalo) and carnivores (lions, cheetah, hyenas) and omnivores.
• Africa is one of the world’s poorest and most underdeveloped continents mainly because of tropical diseases, corrupt governments and international trade regimes.
• There are more than 1000 languages spoken in Africa.

Here is information from the back cover of LISTENING TO AFRICA:

In her quest for health of mind and body, Diana Raab travels to the heart of Africa with her family, experiencing the beauty of another world and the distress but also the delight and dignity of those, both human and animal, living in difficult conditions. She has recorded her observations in Listening to Africa, a collection of poems welcomed gratefully by early readers.
Susan Wooldridge, the author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words, has written that “Diana M. Raab makes a pilgrimage from the ‘familiar neon of home’ in America to Africa, bringing her family, her passion and her pen. Her moving words carry us with her in narrative poems replete with vision, humor and irony. In her inner and outer journey, the poet transforms fear and sadness into beauty and love as her heart opens ‘in this place which will remind you of your reason for living.’

And finally, a sample poem:

48-Hour Travel

Should you decide
to take a safari here

you might want to consider
packing some meager comforts of home,

even though they will do little
to protect you from

its haunting newness.
But still, take a two-day supply of patience,

ear plugs, sleeping pills, a few good books,
a thick journal and a pound of prevention,

the comprehensive pill bag
with compartments for each ail.

If you plan on foreign intimacy,
don’t rely on public bathrooms

to supply your protection—
be prepared with your own custom size.

For game rides, snatch volumes
of insect repellant and sunscreen

and a wrinkled ribbed hat,
to shield your neck

from the last blow
of the jungle’s sunset.
____________________________

You can order the book from the publisher, http://antrimhousebooks.com/raab.html

OR

from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Listening-Africa-Diana-M-Raab/dp/1936482185

In either case if you email me I would be happy to send you a personalized book plate.

Happy reading!
Diana

National Poetry Month: Yusef Komunyakaa : A Glimpse

Published on April 18, 2011 in Author Blog, Musings, National Poetry Month, Poetry, writer blog and writing.

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Happy Third Week of National Poetry Month

Yusef Komunyakaa

(1947 – present)

“I am the space my body believes in.”
Yusef Komunyakaa

If you have heard a poet read live, you have a deeper affinity for their work and I was fortunate to hear Komunyakaa read when I was in graduate school at Spalding University back in 2002. His reading moved me beyond words. His soft yet powerful deep voice is one which still resonates with me.

Komunyakaa grew up in Louisiana and served as an information specialist and saw active combat in Vietnam from 1968-1970. He served. He received the Bronze Star for his military services and also worked for a military paper as a journalist.

In 1973, Komunyakaa began writing poetry at the age of twenty-six during his undergraduate work at the University of Colorado. His first recognition as a poet was in 1984 for his book, Copacetic which fused jazz rhythms and syncopation with hip colloquialism. He used this technique in combination with poetic imagery. He edited several anthologies with Sascha Feinstein which were primarily devoted to “jazz poetry.” Jazz poetry, poetry about Vietnam and poems about his father is what he is most known for.

In 1994, Komunyakaa was recipient of the Kings Tufts Poetry Award for his very powerful poetry collection, Neon Vernacular. Presently, Komunyakaa teaches at New York University.

Here is one of my many favorite poems of his:

My Father’s Love Letters

On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams’ “Polka Dots & Moonbeams”
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter’s apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he’d look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

National Poetry Month – Anne Sexton : A Glimpse

Published on April 11, 2011 in Author Blog, National Poetry Month, New York Times, Poetry and writer blog.

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Happy Second Week of National Poetry Month –

AND

Congratulations to PAUL WILLIS the new Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA !!

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
~ Anne Sexton

(1928-1974)

Anne Sexton was born in Anne Gray Harvey, Massachusetts. She had a privileged childhood in a house staffed by servants, but admitted that she spent a lonely childhood. She was most known for her confessional verse, although she resented being called a confessional poet. She claimed that her poems told stories and admitted to telling lies in her verse. At the age of twenty-eight she had a nervous breakdown, signs of anxiety, and attempted to take her life. Her doctor at the time encouraged her to write poetry as a way of healing. “Don’t kill yourself,” he told her, “Your poems might mean something to someone else someday.” She supported the idea and said that writing poetry kept her alive and helped her understand herself and the world around her. Writing poetry grounded her and gave her a sense of stability. Like Sylvia Plath, she studied with Robert Lowell.

Her book, Transformations, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which the New York Times described as a “funny, mad, witty, frightening, charming and haunting book.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote the book’s foreword. Sexton was a popular poet in the 1960s and 1970s when readers of poetry wanted relevance and immediacy and liked to hear poets read live. Her writing is straight-forward and reminds me of the poetry of Billy Collins in that it is quite accessible. Much of the appeal is her use of forceful imagery. Typically she wrote about serious subjects such as family life, sex, isolation, despair, abortion, addiction, depression, mental breakdowns and suicide. Unfortunately, she was hospitalized on numerous occasions for these breakdowns and suicidal thoughts.

Some biographers claim that Sexton was sexually abused as a child and that her parents were hostile to her which lead to many of her psychological issues later in life. Sexton was friends with Maxine Kumin and the two critiqued one another’s poetry until Sexton’s death. They also wrote four children’s books together.

Here is one of my favorite poems by Anne Sexton:

Courage

by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
comver your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Poets, National Poetry Month and Keeping Journals

Published on April 4, 2011 in Journaling, Journals, Leaves of Grass, Matt Miller, National Poetry Month, Notebooks and Poetry.

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Happy National Poetry Month! Each Monday during the month of April I will discuss some of my favorite poets, a mix of men, women, Americans and Canadians, and particularly those who have used journals.

“Agonies are one of the changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I
myself become the wounded person,
My hurt turns upon me as I lean on a cane
and observe.”
~ Walt Whitman

It has been said that many poets use journals to craft the early drafts of their poems and literary icons, such as Walt Whitman, are no exception. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born on Long Island, New York to parents who supposedly had Quaker beliefs. He lived in Brooklyn where he worked as a newspaperman and printer. He was also a volunteer during the civil war. Whitman’s major work was Leaves of Grass (1855) and he’s been called the ‘father of free verse.’ He was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, using both in his own writing. At the time of its publication, Leaves of Grass was controversial, in part because of its overt sexuality. Whitman has been described as either homosexual or bisexual.

Some months back I wrote about the book, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass by Matt Miller where Miller brilliantly discusses the creative story behind Whitman.

There is no doubt that regardless of the type of poems poets write, it is a reflection of who they are and Whitman deftly says this, “Understand that you can have in your writing no qualities which you do not honestly entertain in yourself. Understand that you cannot keep out of your writing the indication of the evil or shallowness you entertain in yourself. if you love to have a servant stand behind your chair at dinner, it will appear in your writing—or if you possess a vile opinion of women, or if you grudge anything, or doubt immortality—these will appear by what you leave unsaid more than by what you say. There is no trick or cunning, no art or recipe, by which you can have in your writing what you do not possess in yourself. “(Journal entry, 1855-56).

Whitman’s notebooks informed his work but up until a year before Leaves of Grass was published he had no idea that he would be a poet. During that time he filled about 1854 notebooks which were written in both poetry and prose. The subjects he wrote were diverse and included astronomy, religion, linguistics, the natural world, the opera and New York. Walt Whitman has been described as a person who was intoxicated with life. His work habits reflected his interest in writing directly from living impulses or reactions to his immediate perceptions. Whitman pioneered the creative technique more commonly known as collage which has been traced back to Picasso and Braque. In this technique he pasted together fragments of text in his notebooks and manuscript drafts to form various sequences.

Here’s one of my favorites from Leaves of Grass:

To A Stranger

PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you, 

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a
dream,) 

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you, 

All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured, 

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only, 

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my
beard, breast, hands, in return, 

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone, 

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, 

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.