Poetry and Trauma Recovery

 

In class the other day, Evan mentioned the intersection between politics and art, and Oliver and Mary mentioned the intersection of music and poetry. This got me thinking about the inherent healing power of the arts. I started thinking about the outcome of intersecting two distinct disciplines like politics and art—and how, many people view poetry as a way of writing about something in a “fluffy” or “softer” way—but it’s super interesting to me that the opposite is usually true. I like to think that what we hear in poetry is always more universally accessible because there is room to stretch across both imagination and interpretation.

But, I digress. I’m super interested in how poetry functions to highlight larger issues that may be political or sociological in nature; just as I am about the intersection of psychology or medicine to art and creative expression, specifically poetry.  Last class, we discussed which books we will be reviewing, and I didn’t have one chosen at the time. After much thought, and a burst of analytical thought sparked by my peers,  I’ve decided to include in my post a book I am leaning towards using for the book review. It is a collection of poetry (self-called a ‘poetic memoir’) that captures a lifetime of recovering memories erased by traumatic events, and is very self-reflective in nature.

The book is called “Overexposed: A Poetic Memoir,” written by Terri Muuss. Muuss is a poet from Long Island who is also a school social worker, inspirational speaker, and actor. I discovered Terri unintentionally—my best friend back home and I had gone to a poetry reading of Jeanann Verlee at a local bar in Patchogue. Terri was one of the performers—although she does not call herself a slam poet, many of her poems she acts out, which I found to be very animated and all the more poignant and emotional for the content of her poems. One of her poems, a litany called “If” describes all the ways we try to find a way out of our sadness or to avoid problems; for her personally, they are all the ways she tried to forget her trauma—her life.  After the performances and readings, my friend and I approached Terri after the show for some words of gratitude and appreciation, and I was struck by how HAPPY she was. Seriously. She had such a full, bright smile and it was entirely contagious, and she gave the biggest hug to both of us. I bought her book here, and met her husband, Matt Pasca, who is also a published poet.

Here is the book trailer that she released prior to the publication of her memoir. The video gives a great insight into the content of the book and also touches on how it was an act of healing and recovering:

Since this poetry reading I have kept in contact with Terri, who I like to refer to as one of my writing inspirations, or, rather, my powerful female friends that I want to be just like, in some aspect, one day. Ok whatever. Well, Terri and her husband would invite me to poetry events on Long Island all the time, so I got to see both of them perform many more times, met her children, and came to understand her story and history all the more.

Terri is an incest survivor, having lived a childhood where her own father was responsible for her first traumatic event. When she was an adolescent, Terri was raped four times. She battled addiction and alcoholism, depression, suicidal tendencies, and more. Knowing all of this and having read her memoir, and seeing where she is now, and especially how happy she is—it’s truly inspiring.

Terri Muuss and I have talked many times about the importance of art and therapy. Having undergone intensive therapy and treatment throughout her life, she can attest to the power of writing to open doors within our minds and to uncover a piece of information or memory that maybe we can’t find the words to express in regular therapy. Once we uncover these little pieces, we can start to talk about them out loud—facilitating the healing process.

I’m very interested in the connection between poetry and trauma recovery. Often times, distance is needed in order to write about something you have experienced; I feel it is this very distance that also makes it near impossible to retrieve memory about the experience, especially if it was a traumatic one.  But even free writing will resurface some things, not dependent on time or distance. I’m sure there are many more advantages of writing in relation to recovering from trauma.

I hope to learn more about this when I re-read Terri Muuss’s poetic memoir.

Taking Apart: “The Blindman” by May Swenson

As a lover of words and their many meanings, I spend much time surrounded by books–especially books of poetry. I like to randomly select a book off of a shelf and bring it home with me, so that I can expose myself to more poetic forms or poets I would’ve otherwise not found my way to for a while. I did this the other day, and I selected “Half Sun Half Sleep” by May Swenson. On flipping through the pages, I was drawn to one poem in particular, and I will go forth in taking it apart for the rest of this post.

the blindman

I think what originally drew me to this poem, aside from my enjoyment at spontaneity, was the shorter stanzas and lines. The poem is arranged as a series of tersets, the middle line tending to me the longest out of the others. There is an irregular meter which compliments the ruggedness of not being able to use freely all five senses as a human being. With each line, the line breaks created by Swenson gracefully facilitates the rhyming pattern that persists at the end of each sentence.

Each stanza brings a new layer to the poem, concerned with this blindman and the ways he tries to experience color without eyesight. However, just as the blindman is experiencing new sensory ways to experience color, the sighted person is left wondering what not seeing color is like– culminating in the end with “only ebony is mute”–an image which brings up darkness or emptiness.

The use of color in this poem is especially intriguing to me–we are spoon fed cliches from our kindergarten glue-eating days that teach us to associate certain things with certain colors–grass is green, the sun is yellow-orange, fire is orange-red, etc. These seem like very simple things to know and understand; but this poem forces us to consider how a blind MAN must feel, only ever being told what color the world around him is and not ever being able to fully experience it for himself. This is emphasized in the poem by the line breaks between each stanza’s first and second lines– the first line introduces a new method of sensing stimuli besides seeing, and the second line introduces us to the color that the blindman is trying to get closer to: “I have caressed/the orange hair of flames. Pressed” this obviously alludes to our sense of touch, and the flames of a fire. Further, Swenson’s line break after “Pressed” emphasizes the hardened actions of not just touching but ‘caressing’ a flame; capturing the vulnerability which must be felt by this person who is blind but so desperately wants to experience something as universal and integral to the world around us as color.

 

One of my favorite moments in this poem is the raw and visceral image of the blindman’s tears as “fallen beads of sight”- “In water to his lips/he named the sea blue and white/the basin of his tears and fallen beads of sight” (31). May Swenson does a great job of instilling a sense of empathy in the reader, capturing this man’s emotional difficulty but desperation, as well as exploring the abstract nature of color.

 

 

Thoughts on Form in Poetry/Reaction to Szirtes’s reading

 

Form is an adhesive element to the larger whole of a poem, for it microphones literary meaning and experience from within its vessel.  While there is a good mix of white and black, more often than not it is the white spaces that echo the song of poetry than anything else.  This is something I’ve become more and more aware of as I’ve developed as a person and as a writer, and it’s definitely something I want to learn how to control more.

I’ve always found a certain delight in manipulating line breaks, spaces, punctuation, and rhyme to change the way a poem is mentally read and received by the reader, and to alter the emotionality and experience the poem offers to its readers. I’m certainly into delving into this and uncovering new techniques for formatting poetry.

In George Szirtes’s prose piece, “Formal Wear,” he addresses various features of importance to poetic form. I appreciated his admirably approach to unclothing the sentence—how the sentence carries the most responsibility within the machinery of the whole piece—both sound, meter, rhyme, word choice, flow, and various other intricate gears and screws of writing are the bulk of what gives a sentence its meaning, its voice—but that, according to Szirtes, “the line will make its own music too, with or without instruments” (3).

I am a big believer in having poems accessible enough to the readers in such a way that it is the form itself which invites the reader into the poem, to encounter a realization entirely personal to that individual being. In the same way, the sentences or lines crafted by poets are what allow this process to happen, by first enticing their own ghosts to enter into the house created.

Language, to Szirtes, is “a product of the imagination,” and there is something to be said for the specific or vague images created by the poem holding more meaning because structure triumphs over chaos and meaninglessness (2).  It is in this statement that I align myself most, because this is the mindset I tend to have when rereading my work or thinking about my writing/editing process. I like to think that the white space on a page can sometimes speak the most to the reader. There is something to be said, or echoed in the empty spaces that fill a page of poetry, specifically the places in between lines or between stanzas. These are the places that have come to be the most important to me, chosen with careful fingers and conscious thought.