How Poetry Can Help Us Embody

form follows function

Introductory Note: Initially, I said I’d only be in your inbox, dear reader, once a quarter, but I may have to be adjusting that timeframe and sprinkle in more posts. I’m continually working on the “what and why” of this particular Substack in both my mind and in transparency with my audience. To re-use an overused metaphor, I’m flying the plane as I’m building it, and this particular plane has to do with embodiment and writing practices for the sake of our collective liberation. Though my last post was about how I’m no expert on embodiment, I’m feeling a need to add a follow up about how writing, and poetry specifically (on which I am more of an “expert”), can help us ground and embody. Yes, I’ve written on this topic before, but this time, I also have a little **shameless self promotion** at the end of this post, due to a timely upcoming related event.

Our nature is to be whole, even as we are fractals

These days, I am often pulled in many directions. My daughter needs a ride to dance class or to a meeting thirty minutes away. She has a driver’s permit now, so she’s actually the one who drives the freeway and city streets while I sit in the passenger seat, all good, but unnerving. At the same time, my mom needs dinner served, her checkbook balanced, lab work appointments and a meeting with a lawyer. And she also sometimes needs company while simply watching TV. There’s always laundry and dishes to do; a to-do list for housework longer than my body. I often ignore those chores to be an active participant in my community; I go knock doors for a local candidate, create a budget or plan a fundraiser for local Black-led nonprofit partner, or meet with the county equity coalition steering committee. Plus, this time of the year—my husband who was gone working for most of the last two months—is in and out and we all need to re-adapt to each other. His mom, my mother-in-law, needs care and company too, so I drive sometimes to Portland and take her to medical appointments and then a brunch.

Sometimes people ask me how I am handling all this care work, activism, and being a writer trying to make a living in these transitional times where the fate of our democracy teeters. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m handling a thing. I cope with this state of being pulled in many directions in unhelpful ways. Many evenings or early mornings, I ill-advisedly doom-scroll on social media, or eat too much ice cream, or watch all the late night monologues just to laugh. I often feel as fragmented and disorganized. Therefore, putting the phone down and living into my commitment to practice creativity and embodiment is the thing saving my body, mind, and spirit from completely falling apart. Like a great writer once said,

“I write because writing helps bring life into clearer focus and give shape to what I might otherwise experience as disconnected shards.”  – Joyce Thomas

Creative practice most often for me is writing poetry and prose, but also occasionally I draw, paint, sew, and bullet journal. I did a public writing practice after the difficult birth of my child—the one about to turn 16 on Halloween, how spooky is that? My body was then (still is a little) pulled apart at its core. I felt incredibly split and unrecognizable to myself, so I started a mom-blog to process the birth and its aftermath. Looking back now, I realize how writing that blog, called 54-Hour Mama, pulled me up from the watery underworld of early motherhood back to myself. And, in my very first post on that blog, I told the story of writing a poem after my child was born:

“One morning, in a state of sadness at the reality of my daughter’s birth, I wrote a poem, one of those poems that appears like a blessing out of nowhere. The poem was about the myth of Scylla and Charybdis, those Roman nymphs turned monsters that give us our proverbial “rock and hard place” analogy. In the poem, the mother/speaker acknowledges the difficulty of the infant stuck between these terrible monster-rocks, and she wants only to soothe her child. Writing the poem helped begin my healing and I was grateful to the gods and muses that allowed me the gift of creativity. Afterwards, I felt more relaxed and more connected to my daughter.”

Seeing that post now, I realize how powerful the process of writing that particular poem was, how needed it was. The metaphor of the ancient monsters appeared as I became a mother, which tied together an even more subtle but nefarious theme of mothers as monsters, and, subsequently, women as reproductive beings so “hysterical” our bodies need to be regulated. That poem is also written in the classic form of heroic couplets (a form you could learn more about soon in my Poetry for the People series, still being built!). I see now how that form was such a blessing because I needed to feel in my wrecked body the kick-ass, hardscrabble hero’s journey motherhood is. I feel so grateful for poetry-writing as spiritual practice, as grief practice, as wholeness practice for I need to pull myself together, over and over and over again.

As I have said in many posts here, here, and elsewhere, the institutional and cultural systems that keep us separated from each other are purposeful and antiquated, but nonetheless very powerful. But in a poem or creative practice, solace and new shape can be found.

What’s your creative practice today? How will you embody the values of liberation and self-determination into your being, if just for ten minutes?

P.S. If you’d like to hear that Scylla and Charybdis poem, as well as other poems based in allegories, allusions, and more!, I’ll be the featured poet at the McMinnville Public Library (the town where that Halloween baby was finally birthed!) on November 14. Open mic to follow—come share your own poetry and embodied practices.

I love that this photo of me is at least a decade old.