In Praise of the Rubber Duck (It’s Not Just for Bathing Anymore)

Painted and decorated rubber ducks from the annual rubber duck race in Leichlingen, Germany, 2007 (Wikipedia)

Disclaimer: Serious-minded folk will want to pass over this week’s post, as it violates one of blogging’s most sacred rules: Thou Shalt Not Post on Dumb Things Nobody Cares About.  The rest of you, keep reading.

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 I don’t normally spend much time thinking about rubber ducks.

In fact, I don’t usually spend ANY amount of time pondering the little creatures, no matter how cute they are or how creatively costumed.  If I had one in my bathtub as a child, I imagine I enjoyed it, but I take showers nowadays, so a rubber duck would serve no purpose in my bathroom beyond decoration.  And since its colors wouldn’t really match the rest of the décor, the point is moot.

For me, at least.  Not so much for other people.

What got me to considering the possibilities posed by a child’s squeaky toy (which is, incidentally, made of plastic vinyl and not rubber.  You know what they say about truth in advertising!) was an article in my local newspaper on the ”Great Duck Derby,” an annual event to benefit the Mead Botanical Garden in Winter Park, FL. This innovative form of fundraising set me to thinking: If you can race rubber ducks for a worthy cause, what else can you do with them?

Turns out, quite a bit.  For starters, you can:

• Write a song about them, thereby helping to launch them on the path to cultural icon status.  If you also launch your recording career in the process (hey, it worked for Ernie), remember where you got the idea, okay?
• Exercise a technique known as “rubber duck listening” (a staple of some mental health professionals I’ve known) when someone brings a problem to you.  Just smile and nod as they talk, in the hope they’ll eventually arrive at a solution on their own.  Chances are good you’ve already done this without knowing there was a name for it.   Bonus points if you shout, “Hey! Stop rubber ducking me!” the next time that happens.  Then enjoy the bewildered look on their face.  You’re welcome.
• Use them to advance your knowledge of oceanography.  I feel certain that Bryn Shaffer, credited by some for being the inventor of the rubber duck in the late nineteenth century, could not have foreseen that her brainchild would someday travel from the confines of the bathtub to the endless span of the deep blue sea, furthering the cause of science in the process.  But it did.
• Get one in a tattoo.  Because sometimes true love can only be expressed in body art.  Brave that electric needle and show the world you care!  Who cares if your friends call you cheesy?
• Start a collection.  Better yet, start the world’s BIGGEST collection.  After all, Charlotte Lee only had 5,631 of them as of 2011. I know somebody out there’s itching to steal that spot in the Guinness Book of World Records – could it be you?  And if you’re not keen on record setting but would like to take away some valuable academic lessons from your efforts, Ms. Lee entertainingly explains how in this video.
• Then again, sometimes just one duck is enough…especially if it’s Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s non-partisan goodwill ambassador, designed to travel the world’s waters in an effort to “reconnect people with their childhood and put a smile on their faces.”  Mr. Hofman, deep down you must be one wacky dude…and I adore your brand of wackiness.
• Discover your inner rubber duck by taking a quick quiz.  I’m a Superhero Duck.  Who woulda thunk it?  But I took the test twice!

These are just a few of the possibilities. Now how about you?  Did you have a rubber duck in your tub when you were a child?  Do you still?  (It’s okay, you can comment anonymously.)  Have you embraced your Inner Rubber Duck?  Write me and let me know.  (Bonus points if you share a picture.)  And until we meet again – Keep on Quackin’!

(Stock Free Images)

Refrigerator Matchmaking

“You got a chicken leg?  I’ve got some mashed potatoes.  See ya at seven!”

Photo by semarr

I’ve been out of the dating scene for a while now, but I have my share of memories.  My first date was with a dear friend…who just happened to be gay.  Since then I’ve been set up by other friends (whatever happened to that guy who seemingly couldn’t wait to get away as we said goodnight?  Oh yeah, he’s remarried), been offered moonshine at another date’s dwelling (I rather regret declining now; I’ll probably never get another chance), tried a few online services (why do they insist on matching you so contrarily to your stated preferences?), and been temporarily intrigued by the concept of kissing dating goodbye.  I’ve heard tales of woe from friends and coworkers about being stood up and the shortage of good partners, been asked out to lunch by a caller on the helpline where I volunteered (both policy and common sense prompted a kind refusal), and been approached by a widower at least 20 years my senior while walking in my neighborhood, with health problems that included a palsy so severe, I had to write my phone number for him (I was too soft-hearted to turn him down flat just then).  I can’t say I miss the dating scene all that much.

But I’m still occasionally surprised by the methods people employ to meet that special someone…and that includes something I call refrigerator matchmaking.

I was in my car waiting for a red light to change when I heard about “restdejting” (roughly, “leftover dating” in Swedish) on the radio.  My first thought was that this was one for the “Now I really have heard it all and can die” category.  But as more curious trends wander across my path, I’ve had to put off my funeral arrangements in favor of frantically groping for a pen and paper with one hand while the other’s on the steering wheel…and eventually blogging about them.

Pairing people by their leftovers is the brainchild of Swedish farming cooperative Lantmännen, which claims that one-fifth of the country’s food goes to waste.  That’s a whole lotta leftovers - why not share them instead of dumping them?   Let’s face it, cooking for one can be a challenge, not to mention lonely, so environmentally conscious and interested singles can now simply enter up to five ingredients/leftovers found in their kitchens on the Restdejting dating service page, which lists are then posted on Facebook.  Or they can note what they’re looking for and the size of the meal they’re planning to enjoy, and wait for a match.  It’s not unreasonable to think that if you find someone with similar tastes in food, you’ll have other attributes in common.  At the very least it can spark a dose of culinary-themed eloquence: how many people do you know who advertise themselves as a “Large walnut looking for strong cheese”?

Given that the Environmental Protection Agency quotes an annual food wastage of no less than 33 million tons of food in this country, I’d love to see Americans embrace the concept of ”restdejting.”  But of course I also wanted to know if it worked.  Apparently it has, for about 600 people as of 2011.  And a quick poll revealed at least one person who would be game.   Said my friend Joyce, “If I weren’t a married woman, I think it would definitely affect my dating choices if I could check their fridge for healthy food leftovers.  Leftovers are more significant to me than what a man buys at the grocery store, because they’re proof of what he actually cooked and ate, not just what he bought.” 

A final “Pro” for successful refrigerator matchmaking, even if it doesn’t lead to a love connection?  Lantmännen spokeswoman Jenny Svederman noted that her cooperative has reaped a bonus of publicity for their cause:  “As a food company, this is where we can be relevant and contribute.”

I’ll eat to that.

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How about you?  What do you think of “restdejting”?  Would you be willing to give it a try, looking for a possible partner or in support of World Environment Day on June 5?  Write me and let me know.

Next week I’ll be lightening things up a little with “In Praise of the Rubber Duck.”  (Hint – it’s not just for the tub anymore.)  Hope to see you there!

Lacy Memories

Last year I took my car in for a routine oil change when my mechanic, Scott, discovered a surprise under the hood.  Not five minutes into the operation, he opened the waiting room door and announced, “Lucie, you’ve got something living in your car!”  My first thought was, Oh, no, a cat crawled in there.  I was hoping it was still alive and okay – after all, Scott had used the present tense.

With some trepidation I approached the vehicle and peeked in.  There, smack in the middle of my engine, was a nest like I have never seen before or since…an astonishing creation of old newspaper, pine needles, a handmade Christmas ornament (barely recognizable as such even to me), two nylon Knee-Hi’s, and, perhaps most bewilderingly, a string of hand-tatted lace.

Fortunately, there was no sign of the nest’s owner, dead or alive, on the premises.  After the initial shock – even Scott remarked that he had never seen anything quite like it in his career – I took a picture for posterity and posted it to Facebook, because that is what one does nowadays.  I was curious to see if anyone had an idea of what kind of animal created such a thing.  The answers leaned towards a heat-seeking rodent, but the important thing was that all that debris had not started a fire under the hood – something I still marvel at.  The nest was cleared out and a bemused chuckle had by all.

But a short while later I realized I had a bone to pick with that unseen rodent.

I didn’t begrudge him the pine needles.  Lord knows we have plenty of those to go around.  I’d long since read that slice of newspaper.  The nylon stockings remain a mystery, but I figured if they were anywhere near the garage they must not have been wearable.  I wasn’t happy about the loss of the Christmas ornament, knowing the thoughtful work and time that had gone into it, and can only pray that the friend who made it will never read this blog and suspect it was hers.

I think what bothered me the most was that string of tatted lace.

How it ended up in the garage is yet another mystery, though I suppose it wasn’t serving any useful decorative purpose.  By the time Scott pulled it out of my engine, its original function was lost to history.  But I thought I knew who’d made it.

My maternal grandmother.

Whenever I see my grandmother in my memory, it is nearly always with a pair of clacking knitting needles or a crochet hook in her hands, because she rarely sat down without them until her very last years. Garments, afghans, and lace flowed nearly nonstop from her fingers, uninhibited by conversation or her daily TV programs.  But then, many of the women in my family did some kind of needlework.  A  needlepoint piano bench cover and bell pull from my dad’s mother, a clock and dove of peace from my maternal great-aunt, a small crocheted pillow cover pieced from an unfinished project left by my great-grandmother…I used to like to think I was carrying on their feminine tradition with my own embroidery.

Grandma told me years ago that she had hoped to teach both her granddaughters to tat.  Since I was geographically the closest, I decided one day to take her up on it, though to be honest, I had no interest in the craft.  But I had observed her with her small tatting shuttle, the subtle flick of her wrist – it was all in the wrist, she said – and I thought, how hard can it be?  And it will make her happy.  So I sat down and prepared to tat.

And found I could not make a single picot.  In an entire hour.

Which was exactly how long I put towards that effort.

I don’t know if Grandma was secretly disappointed – I do know she thought I gave up too easily – but I concluded that tatting and I were not meant to be and stuck with my counted cross-stitch while Grandma continued to flick her wrist into streams of delicate lacy loops.

I don’t recall now what she did with them, and I’d forgotten all about them until I saw that piece beneath my car hood. I found myself feeling a bit sad that such delicate work had ended up in such an ignominious position, remembering her tireless hands and the Florida Gator afghans she proudly presented to her children; the azure dress I wore to church and lacy collar I sported to work (no one else had a handmade collar like that!); the anticipation of giving pleasure that went into all those afghans and dresses and collars, shawls and bootees and baby blankets.

And I found myself wishing that I’d given tatting just one more try.  I have no idea what I would have done with my efforts, but I do know it would have given her pleasure to teach, even if I was hardly an adept pupil.

Funny what kinds of memories a rat’s nest under the hood of an old Honda Civic can stir up, isn’t it?  Even though I later discovered that the unfortunate tatting Scott pulled out was actually my mother’s!

But how about you?  Have pieces of needlework been handed down in your family that you treasure?  Do you tat?  If so, is it really all in the wrist?  Have you ever discovered a nest beneath your car hood that was big enough to baffle your mechanic?  Write me and let me know.

In the meantime, make sure your own lacy memories are stored far away from your garage. Especially in winter.

                  

                     Mother of all car engine nests!                 Crochet, not tatting, but still Grandma’s!         

                                                                                                                                               

Savoring Spanish Moss

I don’t know about you, but I love Spanish moss.

Spanish moss (Photo credit: imabug)

Perhaps it’s because I’m a Southerner, but those gently swaying gray beards always touch a chord in my spirit, and I’m briefly reminded of languorous belles in hoop skirts, sweet tea served on summer porches, charming drawls like molasses.  One night while walking in my neighborhood, my eye caught yet again by moss illuminated in a streetlight, I was inspired with an idea for a poem about it.  And I’m not the only one – Canadian troubadour Gordon Lightfoot even wrote a song about it.

To be sure, Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor moss, but an air plant in the bromeliad family, and there are differing versions of how it came by its present name. One has it that French visitors to Louisiana found it reminiscent of the long beards of Spanish explorers who’d preceded them, christening it “Barbe Espagnol.” The Spanish, less than flattered by the comparison, fired back with “Cabello Frances,” or French Hair.  But the French descriptive stuck for years, eventually morphing into Spanish moss.  Other sources say the name comes from an old folktale about a Native American woman who died, leaving a grief-stricken husband who cut off her braids and hung them in a tree, where they turned into Spanish moss and served as a reminder of her death, and his sorrow.

Whatever the case, not everyone has an affinity for that gentle sway.  In Hope Dahle Jordan’s 1973 novel “Three Desperate Days,” seventeen-year-old Julie Jameson hates the limpness of moss, which seems to symbolize her weakness and insecurities. And some homeowners call in professionals to remove it.  But I side with the Internet commenter who noted that “Oak trees without Spanish moss look lonely and cold to me, like they need someone to bring them a shawl.” The poet in me smiles at that description.

For a while I thought this homely grey bromeliad had a medicinal purpose.  In Conrad Richter’s novel  “The Trees,” Sayward Luckett’s younger sister, Achsa, comes down with a fever that is plaguing nearly all the nearby settlers, and as her temperature steadily climbs, Sayward wishes she had some of her mother’s “moss lemonade.”  She knows nothing of it except that it has to be washed “in three waters” and “nothing could cool a fever quicker.”  But her mother, Jary, has recently died, and the secret of moss lemonade with her.

Now isn’t that interesting, I thought, though for the life of me I couldn’t fathom how the curlicue plant, pulled from a tree limb, could ever produce anything like a lemony taste no matter how it was prepared.  You can imagine my surprise when I discovered years later that the moss in question was “Irish” and not a bromeliad at all, but a seaweed.  (For the record, the bottom of the growing tips of Spanish moss is edible, but nearly tasteless.  And no, I haven’t tried it.  I was afraid a neighbor might notice.)

But that doesn’t mean the tree-growing stuff has no other function than to sway gracefully in the wind. Fishermen used it to mend nets and early colonists mixed it with mud to caulk their cabins.  Carmaker Henry Ford upholstered his Tin Lizzies with it. Then there was my friend Carol, who cross-stitched a standing Santa figurine and stuffed it with moss.  “But you have to bake it at 350° first,” she informed our weekly embroidery group, “to kill all the bugs.” Oh, yes…tiny insects chewing their way through your carefully selected fabric and threads would indeed be an unpleasant experience.  And let’s not overlook Dawn Klug of Floral City, Florida, who literally made Spanish moss into a one-woman industry after her son showed her an article about saddle blankets woven from the plant.  Ms. Klug bought a loom and taught herself a nearly dead art, selling her work to collectors and Civil War reenactors.  She may well be the last practitioner.

Finally, while boiling the gray stuff won’t yield lemonade of any sort, you will brew what Klug calls “an amazing fertilizer” for your homegrown vegetables.  Think how much money you could save by pulling it right off your trees – or your neighbor’s.  I doubt they’d mind.  Especially if you saved them the cost of a professional call.

How about you?  Do you find “Barbe Espagnol” to be romantic?  Useful?  Edible?  A source for crafts?  Or a “sticky, spidery, ugly-looking parasite” that strangles trees?  (Breathe deep, blogger Trudy! It’s not a parasite, nor will it kill your trees.)  Write me and let me know.

And if you ever get a yen for whipping up some moss lemonade when you have a fever or respiratory ailment, here’s a recipe from the 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book.  Let me know if it works!

Moss Lemonade

• 1/4 cup Irish moss
• 2 cups cold water
• Juice of one lemon
• Sugar

Pick over and soak Irish moss in cold water to cover. Remove moss, add two cups cold water, and cook 20 minutes in double boiler; then strain. To one-half cup of liquid add lemon juice, and sugar to sweeten.

I Used to Be a Poet

As National Poetry Month draws to a close, I’ve talked about persistence in writing poetry (losing your job for it), punishment for poetry (being beaten for writing it), and poetry as a tool of healing…but now it’s time to lighten things up a bit.  Because while poetry can be mysterious and serious, it should also be accessible and fun…and sometimes when the people who write it get together in a group, interesting things happen…

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It is not to my credit that in junior college I chose to write poetry over my usual fiction simply because it was shorter and, therefore, presumably easier.  Of course, I now know better.  But there you have it.  And, perhaps not surprisingly, that early poetry was pretty bad stuff.

Although I achieved the goal of completing my first chapbook last year, these days I’ve eschewed poetry for prose, in the form of this blog, the occasional freelance article, and an in-progress novel.  But a recent spell of poring over months-old emails from the Academy of American Poets, which provides subscribers with a “Poem a Day” five days a week, had me thinking about poetry once more…and how I still intend to write two more chapbooks…and from there it was merely a hop, skip and a jump to recalling the first Palm Beach Poetry Festival in Boca Raton, which I attended with my friend Terry Godbey in 2005.

I didn’t really know what to expect of the festival, but it was quite the experience, from the dead hotel guest on our first night, to…well, read on.

Poet Billy Collins at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. (Wikipedia)

* * *

The festival began on a Friday evening with a panel of guest poets – former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Thomas Lux, Sharon Olds, and Patricia Smith – speaking on the application of poetry to our lives.  The next day we had two “craft classes,” one on poetry and riddles, the second on rhythm and sound in poetry (something sadly missing in a great deal of modern work). Terry and I were both blessed with epiphanies that day, mine occurring at the first of the two major readings when I saw nationally acclaimed slam poet Patricia Smith for the first time.  In theatrical, straight-from-memory delivery she celebrated everything from making cornbread with her father to a group of women who stripped in public in honor of Pablo Neruda; her ”persona poems” appropriated the voices of Olive Oyl and an undertaker with equally electrifying realism.  It was unlike anything this gal, accustomed to relatively sedate college open mics, had ever heard, and Patricia was so popular that all her books sold out by the end of the evening.  I hardly envied Tom Lux following such a performance, but his distinctive voice took me from laughing about a 1957 refrigerated jar of cherries to, in a breath, watering eyes as he eulogized a quadriplegic friend.

The next night’s reading with Sharon Olds (does anyone write about sex like Sharon Olds?  Seriously, does anyone?) and Billy Collins (who else would channel the spirit of a deceased dog…who didn’t like his owner?) left both Terry and I with further inspiration, to the point that Terry was drafting a new piece by dinner time. But you could say the highlights had actually begun on Friday…when she entered our room around midnight to announce that a state trooper was at the front desk, other officers were milling about, and she’d ridden in the elevator with two men carrying stretchers.  I was left in a state of mystery until she appeared a second time after running into a fellow wearing gloves and a badge that said “Removal Services.” (Hint: he wasn’t removing garbage.) Had someone died? Terry inquired.  “Yes,” but he didn’t know the details.  A few minutes later he was bringing a body out of a room on the fifth floor, and the next morning we learned that an elderly gentleman had passed away in his sleep.

I couldn’t help wondering if that was a sanitized version, but told myself I’d probably seen too many movies.

Thomas Lux (Wikipedia)

On the second evening of the festival, prior to the guest poet readings, a group of attendees met for dinner at a local restaurant. While waiting for the food to arrive, festival marketing coordinator Maria (name changed to protect the blogger) announced that she’d dreamed, two nights before, that she had, um, male parts.  Someone asked her for details.  Said Maria: “Are you sure you really want to hear this?”  They were.  Next thing we knew, she was recounting with gusto how she’d dreamed that she, as a woman, was performing a certain act in a bathroom, and while she was marveling at how different it felt from anything she’d experienced as a woman, a second, um, part began growing out of the first. Then she suddenly remembered that her boyfriend was coming over, and thought, aghast, “I need a lady part!”  (Okay, that’s not exactly how she worded it, but I’m trying to keep this post relatively family-friendly.) Whether she magically acquired said part or not is unknown, as the dream apparently ended there.

And I couldn’t help wondering what Freud would have made of that one.

Highlight #3 occurred at the same dinner, also courtesy of Maria.  As moderator of a weekly poetry slam, she described a memorable occasion on which a girl who was next in line to perform suddenly announced she had to go to the bathroom.  Maria informed her that she’d forfeit her place in the lineup if she did, since the rule was to go before you were due on stage, or hold it until you’d finished.  Unable or unwilling to choose between her limited options, the girl announced to the audience, “Excuse me, I’ve gotta pee,” and proceeded to do so in a bucket on the stage. This matter of business over, she carried on with her performance.

As Maria said, you just wonder who raised some people.  And I couldn’t help wondering the same thing.

Our final highlight of said dinner came to us via a quirky gentleman known herein as Bert, who at one point remarked to Terry, “I’ve been thinking of writing a book for men on how to make love to a woman, because in my experience, most men don’t know how.”  (I observed to Terry later that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how he acquired said experience; she had her own pithy observations on the subject.)  Bert’s advice on writing wasn’t much better.  Noticing Terry working on her new poem, and her mentioning that she had reached a block, he suggested something to the effect of “Put your beginning at the end of your middle” and “Think of your poem as a spider’s web.” But that was nothing to his next conversational salvo, fired at Terry’s friend, who lived in New York City: “Have you ever smelled a New York subway bathroom?” The poor girl replied that she wasn’t sure there were any. All I recall after that, since I wisely tuned out the rest of the topic, is something to the effect of how “an opened bottle of Mr. Clean couldn’t compare.”

And I still can’t help wondering why anyone would consider the foregoing topics appropriate for mealtime conversation.

Our next two highlights transpired at the open mic reading on Sunday afternoon.  Perhaps I should point out here that the festival audience was predominantly late middle-aged to elderly, and one could be forgiven the apprehension, as Patricia Smith mentioned to me while signing a copy of her book, that some poems might be “a little over the top” for said audience. I remembered this when Maria introduced her work by saying it was “for any woman who’s ever been called a whore, and for every woman who hasn’t followed her bliss for fear of being called a whore.”  In spite of mentally rolling my eyes at “follow your bliss,” I prepared to listen with interest…and it was indeed interesting, sprinkled liberally with profanities and opening with a shouted “WHORE!”

Due to the large number of readers, Maria, as moderator, had limited each to a single poem. While the majority of them were quite good, several obviously disobeyed the 30-line maximum rule. We all, however, obeyed the one poem only rule…except for the lady who regaled us with a piece opened by a shouted, rapid-fire line in a language which might have been Eastern European.  (Bert told us later it was intended to imitate the sound of approaching tanks).  She then spoke in a subdued, gloomy fashion about war, etc., followed by another shouted line of incomprehensible language…followed by more gloomy war stuff…ending with a third line of incomprehensible shouted stuff. Dramatic pause.  Then, in a girlishly sweet, light, smiling voice, she announced “This is my light one.”  Maria quickly reminded her of the “one poem only” limit.  “But it’s a short one”… One poem only!  “But it’s really quick”… One poem only!  She finally gave in, but not without protest, putting me forcibly in mind of those old vaudeville routines involving a giant hook wielded from offstage.

Then there was the lady whose cell phone rang during one poor guy’s reading.  There’s nothing like being treated to a canned performance of “Hello, Dolly!” while you’re trying to read your work to a large group of strangers – especially when it’s your first time reading in public.  The audience instructed him to start over.  He did.

The final highlight I’ll mention belonged to Sharon Olds. Introducing one of her newer poems, she began by, “in deference to the title,” removing her hair scarf and letting her long ponytail fly free.

Poem title: “First Condom.”

* * * * *

“Good Lord, that sounds like something out of the sixties,” commented one friend upon hearing the unexpurgated version of this story.  I was born a bit too late to speak to that, but I suppose it’s just what happens when you put a crowd of creative souls under one roof.  And while I only started one or two new poems that weekend, neither of which came to fruition, the wildly distinctive voices and talent, the laughter, tears, and even awe are as fond a staple of my memory as the wackiness, even if the latter is more immediately memorable.  Technical issues prevented DVDs of the featured poets from being developed, but the CDs received in their place have brought me enjoyment on many a long car trip or work commute. I’m glad to report that the festival thrived and has been held annually for nearly a decade, lengthening and adding more workshops and guest speakers, and I’ll never forget being a part of its inception.

I used to be a poet.  Someday I’ll be a poet again.  Someday I’ll get around to that second chapbook…and, I hope, a third.  Someday I’ll find myself feeling wistful for another dose of hijinks-laced inspiration…and maybe I’ll find myself receiving another epiphany at another meeting of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

Maybe I’ll even find you there.  Just do me a favor – don’t invite Bert to dinner, okay?

* * *

How about you?  Have you ever been to a poetry festival?  If so, what were your most memorable experiences?  Did you get an epiphany out of it – or a new poem?  Would you even go to a poetry festival?  Write me and let me know.

“Take Two Sonnets and Call Me in the Morning”

From this some people would infer
That this good man’s a conjuror:
But I believe it is a lie;
I never thought him so, not I,
Though Win’fred Hobble who, you know,
Is plagued with corns on every toe,
Sticks on his verse with fastening spittle,
And says it helps her feet a little.
Old Frances too his paper tears
And tucks it close behind her ears;
And (as she told me t’other day)
It charmed her toothache quite away.

- Mary Leapor, from “The Epistle of Deborah Dough”

* * * * *

In the last couple of weeks we’ve taken a look at Mary Leapor, the 18th-century kitchen maid/poet who died of measles in relative obscurity at the age of 24, yet has found a modern appreciation, and the brave female poets of Afghanistan’s outer provinces who must keep their verse a well-guarded secret.  Mary is said to have been dismissed by one employer for letting the meat burn on the hearth in her zeal to capture her thoughts on paper, while some Afghani women have been beaten or even died for what they wrote.  Their stories are important and necessary to tell, but I was a little disturbed by the punitive shadow they cast, and found myself wondering if poetry was ever used as a tool of healing.

It certainly is.  But guess who’s written it for just over four decades and didn’t know that?  Or that the word “therapy,” according to registered poetry therapist Perie Longo, comes from the Greek therapeia, which means to nurse or cure through dance, song, poem and drama?

Yup, that’d be me.

Now I’ll admit that on first learning there even was such a thing as a certified poetry therapist, my eyebrows went up a bit and I thought, There’s a certificate for that?   But when I discovered that poetry therapy was not a tie-dyed love child of the sixties but a medical treatment since the fourth millenium, it was clear I was about to be enlightened.

Perhaps the most unconventional method people have used to heal with words belongs to the ancient Egyptians, who wrote poems on papyrus, placed them in liquid, and had patients swallow them in order for the verse’s medicinal powers to work more rapidly.  The Greek god Apollo was associated with both healing and poetry.  American Indians have long used songs and recited words to cure, while Benjamin Franklin established the first American hospital to care for the mentally ill with poetic therapy in 1751.  Then  there’s the striking use of what one might call “poetry plasters” in Leapor’s “The Epistle of Deborah Dough,” quoted above.   Nowadays The National Association for Poetry Therapy trains and certifies therapists, who must have knowledge of psychology as well as literature.

I imagine nearly everyone knows at least one person who’s put pen to paper when they were nursing a broken heart.  Years ago a coworker, on learning I wrote poetry, remarked that she used to as well, but didn’t anymore, because “I’m too happy.”  And while I was glad for her, I had to smile.  But other poets say in all seriousness they’d go mad if they didn’t write regularly, while still others, like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, shared their demons on the printed page yet ultimately sought release in suicide.

I’ve never consulted a poetry therapist, but I have tried to exorcise emotion in verse.  On a few occasions the result has brought a sense of peace like a gentle sigh: “Oh, yes, that’s it at last.  I’m done with that now.”  Other attempts ended in frustration – how does one eulogize a late friend without sounding maudlin when said friend didn’t have a maudlin bone in her body?

Perie Longo tells of a man who, holding a published copy of his poem, said, ”I feel like I am somebody, finally.”  There’s a certain joy that comes simply from the act of creation.   Once I told a friend that when I’d finally completed a poem to my satisfaction, I thought I tasted a hint of what God felt when He looked at His work and pronounced it good.  Years later, alone in an unused bedroom with a notebook, struggling for just the right words to complete the final poem for my first chapbook, I stopped suddenly and said out loud with a brief sense of wonder, ”As long as I can write poetry, I’ll be okay.”

Because it was true.

One of my favorite poets is a clinical psychologist…and I’m a little embarrassed now to recall my surprise at this on our first meeting.  Oh, I knew William Carlos Williams was a physician as well as a poet, but I vaguely regarded that as an anomaly when I thought of it at all.  I never dreamed that aspects of reading and writing verse corresponded to some of the medical skills required by doctors of his time.

I’m happy to know better now, thanks to people like Dr. Danielle Ofri, who always tries to “sneak in a poem at the end” of her rounds with students and interns, and John Fox, founder of the Institute for Poetic Medicine in California, not to mention doctors like Thomas Duffy of Yale Medical School, who noted that poetry “opens our minds to asking patients the right questions, while helping us address the emotional demands of doctoring.”  As Dr. Ofri found after sharing Jack Coulehan’s blistering “I’m Gonna Slap Those Doctors” with an alcoholic in withdrawl, her patient may not have been suddenly cured, but in his brief stay, both he and the staff observing him developed “a sense of human connection.”

Isn’t that a necessity of the healing profession?  And isn’t it, ultimately, why we write?

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For another look at poetry’s connection with medicine, check out these insightful entries submitted to a poetry contest sponsored by two major medical schools in 2011.  Then I hope you’ll join me next week as I end my observation of National Poetry Month on a lighter note with a look at some of the unexpected things that can happen when a crowd of poets get together.  See you there!

Pondering Persistence, Part II: When Poetry Equals Punishment

Can poetry hurt us? they ask me before
crawling into my words to sleep.

- Patricia Smith, “Building Nicole’s Mama”

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Words are scary things.  Oh, on the surface they may seem ephemeral…once they’re spoken, they vanish like smoke.  They can be forgotten if useless, ignored if hurtful.  They have no physical body until they are written – and that body can be destroyed without a trace.

And when they’re arranged in the form of a poem – well, who ever thinks of poetry as hurtful?  Unless it’s a satire to expose a wrong, or a cathartic exorcism of a painful event.  Poetry, most would probably say, should be a gift, a song, a thought, a whisper, sometimes even a shout…

But a short, poisonous snake?

That’s one definition of the word landai, which also means folk poem, in the Pashto language  - a curious word to apply to something like a poem.  Years ago my grandmother remarked to her daughter that, “When I was coming up, poetry was ‘Roses are red, violets are blue…I love  you.’”  Poems weren’t considered snakes in any English class she ever attended.  Nor had I ever heard of a landai until I came across an article in the New York Times, “Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry.”

This is the Pashto verse of a Poem by Amir Hamza Shinwari, with the Title Pashto Zheba or Pashto Language. پښتو: دا د امير حمزه شينواري د شعر «پښتو ژبه» يو فرد دی. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At first I was baffled by this story on the role of poetry in Afghan women’s lives and a literary society called Mirman Baheer, a society with hundreds of members, some who can meet openly in public…and some who cannot.  It was those latter women whose world I was drawn into, a world where the writing of verse, even a two-line landai, can induce a beating or at worst death, if the fingers wielding the pen are those of a female.  I, with my laptop and notepads and multicolored inks, can jot down an idea or a couplet whenever I wish, share my work with the world under my own name, recite it in any public forum, without fear that my male relatives will accuse me of besmirching the family honor.  I have unhindered access to local bookstores and writing groups, friends to critique my work, printers to bind my finished words into a book.  Consequently, I take poetry for granted.  Enough to usually put off writing it unless I have a rare deadline to meet or assignment to fulfill.

Funny how ease of access so frequently equals a shortage of persistence.

Last week I told you about Mary Leapor, an 18th-century kitchen maid/poet who memorably let the meat burn in her employer’s kitchen while scrawling her not-to-be-deferred thoughts on paper.  I thought of Mary, and persistence, again as I read about Afghani female poets and their not-to-be-deferred words, feeling certain Mary would take up their banner.  She didn’t take poetry for granted, and neither can the members of Mirman Baheer, whose founder, Saherra Sharif, describes a poem as a sword.

And while  I’m thankful for the article, for journalists like Eliza Griswold who jeopardized her own safety to write it and for poets like Ogai Amail, who transcribes verses from a teenager’s voice on a cell phone, for the most part I’m still just baffled.

Baffled by the case of Nadia Anjuman, who died in 2005 following a severe beating by her husband.  Nadia was considered a disgrace to her family for writing poetry describing the oppression of Afghan women.  Baffled by the memory of a girl named Zarmina, who after being caught reading her poetry over the phone, was beaten by brothers who assumed a boy was on the other end and tore up her notebooks for good measure.  Not long thereafter, Zarmina fatally set herself on fire - ”because her family wouldn’t let her marry the man she loved,” according to one source.  Baffled by men who view poems as snakes, by wondering what I could do for women whose tongues are muffled but unsilenced, whom I’d be proud to regard as my literary sisters.

But I have no real answer to that bewilderment right now, except to share their story – not because it’s National Poetry Month, or because I’m a woman and a poet, but because I believe that’s what they’d have me do.  And to ask you to share it as well, helping more people remember their names, their words, lest they too vanish like smoke…in the hope you’ll agree that something as mysterious and beautiful - yes, as necessary - as the human voice raised in poetry should never equal punishment.

(Photo credit: Lynne Hand)