National Poetry Month!

Hello, welcome back to Practically Happy, episode number 280. Today, I’m going to have a lighthearted episode for you as a celebration of National Poetry Month. April is National Poetry Month, and if you haven’t been listening for very long to this show, then you might not know that I’m a huge poetry fan.

It’s something that I’ve always loved since I was a young girl. And it’s only been in the last few years that I remembered that and have come back into poetry with intention, as a ritual, as a spiritual practice, to connect to myself and connect to the world and connect to others, to explore ideas and explore this beautiful art form in an interesting way.

Poetry builds connection!

I thought I could share some research that I did during grad school about the benefits of poetry, its connectivity and some of the reasons that it’s so connective. And just share a few of my favorite poems. I do this often. I have a segment on the show called pause for a poem in a recent podcast episode about spiritual expansiveness.

I shared several poems throughout the episode, and I’m going to share some more. In fact, one of the research studies that I’m going to share with you today, it talks about how passive listening to poetry can deepen feelings of connection and lessen feelings of sadness and loneliness. So, this is a show that you can return to at a time You know, in the future, if you’re feeling a little bit lonely or a little disconnected or you feel like you could just use a little bit of uplift, maybe turning on episode 280 and listening to some poetry can lighten your heart.

How do you feel about poetry?

I’m curious how you feel about poetry right now. If you are a long-time listener, maybe you have grown accustomed to the idea of pausing for a poem every few episodes of Practically Happy.

If you aren’t sure how you feel about poetry, I’m so excited to introduce you, hopefully, to a couple new poets today and to share some of the ways that I like to enjoy poetry and how I incorporate it into my regular life.

I also wanted to just start out by sharing that there’s no right or wrong way to interact with the medium of poetry. I know sometimes If you walk into an art museum and you’re unfamiliar with the art or the artists or the type of art, it can feel a little bit embarrassing, like you’re not viewing the art correctly or that you don’t know enough about it to make it meaningful in your life.

And I want to just relieve you of those burdens when it comes to art and poetry, specifically poetry today, that it’s okay to not get a poem, to not understand it on some deeper level. It’s okay to not relate to all the poetry that you read. It’s okay to not like poetry that rhymes or poetry that doesn’t rhyme.

It’s okay to like short poems rather than long poems. It’s okay to love poetry in verse and want to read an entire book written in verse. There’s no right or wrong way to enjoy poetry, or to not like it. It’s okay to not like it as well.

What is interesting is that we’ve sometimes come up with these ideas about it that close off our minds and our possibilities to maybe discovering something new about ourselves or about a new author or about an experience or circumstance that we may have had in our lives that a piece of poetry could shed a new light on.

Poetry as a Spiritual Practice

With some of my coaching clients recently, I’ve been talking about the idea of creating new spiritual traditions. If you have, grown out of some of the spiritual rituals of your past, or maybe you’ve made a religious or spiritual transition, and you feel a little bit. Like you’re standing in a wide-open field and you’re not sure how to express or engage in an act of meaning outside of the context that you’re familiar with.

This can go for a lot of things. It can go for families or relationships or, just moving through transition. Sometimes you feel a little bit lost. For me. Stepping outside of the boundary box in this specific sort of nuts and bolts of the way that you do things in this church, in this religion, in this spiritual context has felt expansive for me in a positive way.

And, when I go to reach for things that feel connective to me. Poetry is one of those things that has really filled me up in a way that feels spiritual. It feels like it brings life and understanding to my life, and it helps me think of things in new ways. It gives me those moments of pause and pondering.

Particularly, I find myself drawn to female poets who write about our interaction with the natural world or our relationships with ourselves as women and as bodies and as mothers. And being intimately engaged in reading someone’s writing that is meant to evoke emotion That’s meant to peel away the layers and not necessarily tell a pretty story but just to bear open some of the humanity that we experience.

This has felt incredibly healing and incredibly spiritually connected for me So if you find yourself experiencing any sort of a transition that you feel could use some boosting up or some padding around the edges or some deepening in your veins, into that connection of how it feels to be this new you, this new person that you are, maybe there’s something for you in some of the books of poetry that I’ll share today.

This morning, the sunshine is thick enough to swim in, as if you could fling yourself into it and float. I want to wear it like a robe, squeeze it into my suitcase, swallow it whole like a hot lemon. I’m finally a woman willing to feed herself, light, bread, joy. Sometimes, you don’t know that you’re starving until you’ve had a proper meal.

That’s when your heart really begins to howl. When it learns what it’s been missing. Howl by Joy Sullivan.

Joy Sullivan is a poet that I began following a couple years ago on Instagram. I’ve shared some of her poetry in the comments. segments here and there on the show. Her first full collection just was released. It’s called Instructions for Traveling West, and I will link it in the show notes along with the other books of poetry that I read from today.

Connection through Poetry

I mentioned that one of the things that feels so comforting to me about poetry is the feeling of connection. You may have heard that this is something that America has been lacking in recent years. Back in 2017, this is even before the pandemic, the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health epidemic.

It was a big enough problem that it’s not only affecting our emotional health, but that is trickling down and affecting our physical health and mortality as well. Post pandemic, the rise in self-reported loneliness has only gotten worse. It’s continued to increase. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this in your own life, if things have just felt a less connected or that the fallout from the last, real, really a decade has been a struggle.

According to a recent national survey in 2021, approximately 36 percent of respondents to the survey reported feeling lonely frequently or almost all the time. In the prior month and about 61 percent of respondents ages 18 to 25 and 51 percent of mothers with young children reported feeling disconnected.

According to researchers Lipick and Warner in 2023 in a research paper that they did among the strategies identified to rebuild connection and deepen relationships in this disconnected and lonely world, the power of language should not be forgotten.

Poetry speaks of a common connection with humanity and puts into words experiences that we’ve felt and haven’t figured out how to describe. I know oftentimes I read a poem and think about how it’s touching parts of my experience that I haven’t been able to put into words or that I haven’t thought to put into words.

Poetry can affirm emotions across the spectrum from joy and elation to despair and grief, reminding us that we are Human, and that this condition can be universal. A poet whose poetry feels real and connected to me is Kate Baer. This is from her collection, What Kind of Woman. It’s called, What Mothers Say.

I am tired. I am sleeping. I am heading up to bed. Is it Tuesday? What’s tomorrow? When’s the last I slept alone? I am thinking. I am talking. Do you see I’m on the phone? Bring the dishes. Find your blanket. Put that book back on the shelf. It is bedtime. It is rest time. You need to go and brush again. I’m working.

I’m eating. Therefore, we bought you your toys. Go and play now. Find your brother. Find elsewhere to make your ship. I am angry. You’re not listening. Please stop crying on the floor. It’s a school night. Do your homework. Let me come and scratch your back. I am listening. I can hear you. Thanks for telling me the truth.

Let me closer. Let me help you. I am here now, let me stay.

The Language in Poetry

In a great article written by a poetry professor in 1999, she acknowledges that even as the complexities of our world grow ever more confusing and disorienting, poetry can give us the language to make sense of reality. She shares how the playfulness or poignancy of words, the ability of language to hold us almost captive in its intensity, beauty, or genius, is particularly apparent in poetry.

Its spare and carefully chosen language compels us to pause and to wonder. This pause and reflection, an invitation to wonder, can help us build connections to ourselves and to the poet, or to ourselves and others who may be experiencing similar things. This type of poetry connection can validate our feelings and help us make sense of the events in our lives.

Even the cadence of poetry, with line breaks and pauses in unexpected places, can lend itself to a slower consideration of what’s being shared. It causes us to pause and think, be curious about why they said it that way.

Even the line breaks I notice when I’m reading and seeing the poem. Sometimes I am curious about why they chose to move the second half of the sentence down onto the next line or create a little bit of a suspense there.

This slow enjoyment can be considered an act of savoring, which is something I’ve discussed on the show before. It’s this amplification of a positive emotion or of a positive experience that can build our fulfillment, connection, and happiness.

Rupi Kaur wrote her first poetry collection and published it as a university student at age 21.This poem called Productivity Anxiety is from her most recent collection called Home Body.

 I have this productivity anxiety that everyone else is working harder than me and I’m going to be left behind because I’m not working fast enough, long enough, and I’m wasting my time. I don’t sit down to have breakfast.

I take it to go. I’ll call my mother when I’m free. Otherwise, it takes too long to have a conversation. I put off everything that won’t bring me closer to my dreams, as if the things I’m putting off are not the dreams themselves. Isn’t the dream that I have a mother to call? And a table to eat breakfast at?

Instead, I’m lost in the sick need to optimize every hour of my day. So, I’m improving in some way, making money in some way, advancing my career in some way, because that’s what it takes to be successful, right? I excavate my life, package it up, sell it to the world, and when they ask for more, I dig through bones trying to write poems.

Capitalism got inside my head and made me think my only value is how much I produce for people to consume. Capitalism got inside my head and made me think I am of worth if I am working. I learned impatience from it. I learned self-doubt from it. I learned to plant seeds in the ground and expect flowers the next day.

But magic doesn’t work like that. Magic doesn’t happen. Cause I’ve figured out how to pack more work in a day. Magic moves by the laws of nature. And nature has its own clock. Magic happens when we play. When we escape, daydream, and imagine. That’s where everything begins. Poetry, with the power to fulfill us, is waiting on its knees for us.

Poetry can Ease Pain and Decrease Depression

Inviting us, as readers or listeners, to be present and feel our own feelings may be a key component of poetry’s positive correlation with well-being. During times of physical pain or emotional pain, when loneliness or isolation can feel especially difficult, poetry can have powerful, relieving effects.

In a fascinating 2016 study comparing the effects of physical pain reduction in cancer patients who were exposed to passive listening of either music or poetry, those in the poetry group not only reported similar pain reduction as those who listened to music, but also decreased depression symptoms and increased hope.

The authors talked about the poems that patients had listened to were easy to understand and addressed the universal topics of life. Death, health, illness, love, happiness, pain, and hope, like the types of poems that I’m reading. They also shared that one of the mechanisms for the benefit may have been opening patients to feelings of connection because poetry breaks the law of silence, bringing out forbidden topics wrapped in beauty that allow for self-resolution of eternal conflicts.

I know sometimes I read a poem that expresses something that I felt, but maybe felt embarrassed to feel or didn’t realize other people felt that way. And that feels like a sense of self awareness and a self-resolution and some self-compassion. I found this study interesting.

Particularly interesting because the groups that were given poetry and music, this was passive listening. They weren’t reading. They weren’t writing poetry. They weren’t trying to create poetry. They weren’t trying to have a conversation or a discussion about the poems. They were simply listening.

Passively listening to poetry. And that helped decrease some of their pain, decrease some of their symptoms of depression, and increased their pain. They’re hope.

These next few are from a collection called Mother’s Milk, Poems in Search of Heavenly Mother, by Rachel Hunt Steenblick. They’re short, and so I’m going to read a few that are on pages next to each other, so you get the feel.

Milk and honey. My hunger makes her breasts let down. Soaking her shirt. With milk and honey.

My mama answers me. I root, open mouthed and howling. She answers, nursing me on demand. Perfect blessing. The mother held me in her arms and blessed me, giving me my name.

Mirror image. It is difficult to say now if she was created in my image or I in hers. What is easy to say now is When I look inside a mirror, I see God.

How I Enjoy Poetry

I thought I would share some of the ways that I like to enjoy poetry. I have a section on my bookshelf that contains all my books of poetry. I probably have about 15 or 20 at this point. I’ve been actively collecting them probably for the last four or five years. And I both follow new poets on Instagram when I find them.

I love the account @poetryisnotaluxury. And so that sometimes introduces me to poets that I am not familiar with. If you can tell the style of poetry that I’m drawn to is more conversational not a lot of rhyming. Although I’m not opposed to rhyming. I just like the cadence and the rhythm of the words rather than strict verse and I really like contemporary poets.

I mostly read women poets for a couple reasons. One, because I think that writing in general is something that’s so recently, just in the last, few centuries, been available to women widely and particularly in terms of the arts, men controlled the arts historically and were commissioned in the arts and were compensated in the arts.

And so much of our historical vision is penned by men. And I love being able to read about the experiences of women that mirror more of my own experience. Not that there aren’t fantastic and wonderful male poets out there as well. I happen to just really connect with and love. Female authors and female poets.

In fact, at a garage sale, maybe a yard sale would be more appropriate because there aren’t really garages in my neighborhood. A couple years ago I was wandering through I was just on a walk with my dogs and there was a yard sale out in the neighborhood, and I was, going through some of the things, and I found this cute little Japanese ceramic tray that’s in my bathroom now.

All my, lotions and potions are sitting on it. And when I bought the tray, the person who owned the house and was, hosting the sale said, we are including a free book of poetry with every purchase today. The homeowner’s mother was Sarah Lockwood, who was a local poet. She published several books of poetry in the 70s and 80s.

The one that I was given is called Projections, and it was published in 1985. And it’s a great little interesting book of poetry. She had a historical bend. There’s a lot of talk of Greek mythology and sort of metaphors worked in there. This poem is called Eve, and I think it’s, Kind of cheeky and fun and relates to what I was just discussing regarding publishing.

I do not think she said the cowardly thing the Bible claims. The serpent tempted me. She would have held it high. That little core and cried. Let’s make an end of endless spring. Who could endure it through eternity? This garden has been something of a bore. Nor did an angel drive her through the door.

Perhaps it drove the man. Quite likely, she, bursting to look outside, would stop to look first at the angel. Women want to see whatever is there. Afterward, nurturing her children, learning how to sew and cook, she didn’t find the time to write a book. Man did, and man excels at editing.

I mentioned that I keep these books of poetry in one place on my shelf, and I like to keep one on my desk. I’ll rotate through them, but I keep a book of poetry out because I’m much more likely to flip through it and read it if it’s available to me. And I will read one for a time, and then I’ll just I often don’t read cover to cover because poems can function so independently.

I’ll flip through and skim a couple and then when one catches my eye, I like to read it carefully a couple times and even read it out loud and let it sink in. I also mentioned to one of my coaching clients who I’m introducing to the idea of poetry as a spiritual practice, that I like to think of these books of poetry as notebooks and journals.

I will have a pen or a pencil alongside while I’m reading and underline phrases that jump out at me, write notes in the margins, put a date on it. If there’s something in my life that feels particularly related that I want to remember. In this way, interacting with the poetry reading it, pausing, pondering, thinking about how it relates to me, feels like it gives this added meaning and added connection to the whole process and really takes it over from just reading to experiencing and internalizing and pondering.

I love to read. I read Lots of books. I usually read a couple books a week, read, or listen to, and very few are books that I go back to. Some nonfiction books I kind of use as reference books, but the books of poetry feel like collections that I want to nurture and return to and think about in new ways.

There’s probably a couple of the books that I’ve read every single poem within the book, but there’s probably a few, most of the books of poetry that I haven’t read every single poem I’ve maybe skimmed them, but I haven’t taken the time to go deep with every single one. Every time I pull one out, there’s something more to read and something more to learn and I That feels fun.

How Could You Enjoy Poetry?

It feels like a really engaging practice. Even just starting with one book of poetry could be a fun way to celebrate National Poetry Month and see if there’s something there that feels connective to you. Like I said at the beginning, I want to reiterate that there’s no wrong way to read and experience and enjoy a poem, and it’s okay to not enjoy all of them.

One of my favorite pieces of sitting and reading and contemplating is just the thoughtfulness and stillness that it brings. And that is something that I know I can use more of that returning to myself and giving myself time to simply be and to think and to connect. If you could use some stillness and some contemplation and a little bit of connection and enrichment in your life, this may be something that you want to try.

And again, I will link all the books of poetry that I’ve shared from in today’s episode in the show notes. And maybe I’ll add a couple more favorites that I didn’t share from today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode just listening to some poems and some ideas around how poetry can be beneficial for you, how you may start to include a poetry practice into your life.

And I’ll send you off with a favorite from Mary Oliver. This is from her collection, A Thousand Mornings, and this poem is called Today.

Today I’m flying low, and I’m not saying a word. I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats being eaten, and so forth. But I’m taking the day off, quiet as a feather. I hardly move, though really, I’m traveling a terrific distance.

Stillness, one of the doors into the temple.