Living Well: The Ordinary Power of Poetry
Living Well , a column
By Donna Henderson
“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams
We humans have turned to the language of poetry for millennia to celebrate and to grieve, to clarify thoughts and express emotions, and to refresh our spoken language itself with poetry’s love of sound and attention to sense. Even so, for many of us it seems to exist at the margins of our lives only (if it even has a place!), to be brought out for sentimental occasions, then put away like holiday decorations until the next event.
But poetry, by its nature, helps us both to navigate the stresses and to fully receive the blessings of our daily lives. By creating a container for what we fear and what we mourn, what is uncertain and what is unknowable and unsolvable, it offers an antidote to our unconscious “escape hatches” of rage, blame, numbness, despair, judgement, and substance use: common “go-to” behaviors when we find sorrow, fear and confusion too hard to bear.
April being National Poetry Month, I wanted to take a moment to bring attention to importance of poetry to our very being: to our connections with ourselves, to other humans, and to the world of being as a whole.
“I really believe that poetry is something we humans need almost as much as we need water and air,” declares Krista Tippett, in her On Being podcast interview with U.S. Poet Laureate poet Ada Limón. “We can forget this. And then there are times in a life, and in the life of the world, where only a poem — perhaps in the form of the lyrics of a song, or a half sentence we ourselves write down — can touch the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of others.”
For Limón herself, the practice of poetry is essentially the practice of paying attention directly, through the body. After all, the body is where we actually feel things, not just think about them. It is where we experience the world directly, through the portals of our senses, and not just our thoughts. Poetry, Limón says, “anchors you to the world again and again and again,” such that the ordinary might be more deeply felt and seen…and ourselves deeply heard and seen in return.
As, for example, in Oregon poet Connie Soper’s poem “Foot Massage,” a poem which tenderly notices and honors the quiet ways of love and of beauty present in the ordinary moments of a life.
Foot Massage
My parents never danced in the kitchen—
no flamboyant dip in a red silk
dress, no rakish tilt of the fedora. They swayed
to a predictable rhythm of domesticity:
proper, Presbyterian.
Evenings, with dishes cleared
and children pajamaed, they sat
at opposite ends of the couch.
My mother slipped shoes off,
stretched her legs to nestle
bare feet in my father’s lap.
He massaged her left arch and then
the right with strong thumbs,
slowly circling the ankles
to caress her heels. He kneaded crevices
between each toe to touch that tender hollow
on the underside. She settled into cushions,
arranging her feet as a cat would curl,
and like a cat she purred.
Who knew the foot, with all its
tiny bones, could soften and surrender
to pleasure like that. The whole house
mellowed under its lid. Then they rose to
the last choreographed tasks
of the day: latch the doors, dim
the lights—two beats slow, quick
quick slow.
“Foot Massage” is from Connie Soper’s collection, A Story Interrupted, published by Airlie Press in 2022, and reprinted with permission of the author.
Interested in doing some more exploring to find where poetry might meet you?
Poets.org is an excellent resource, where you can search by poet, and by theme You can also sign up there for their free “poem-a-day” program (Rattle Magazine [embed link: rattle.com] has a poem-a-day program, too) to receive a poem every day in your inbox.
Support Local News
Support local writers, journalists and artists by donating today.
