We welcomed participants from Chile, Morocco, India, the UK, the Netherlands, and all over the U.S. for this session, during which we shared the poem “Possibilities,” by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish writer Waclava Szymborska as  translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh, posted below. As an exercise in approaching the poem with an open mind, we began with just the poem itself, without a title or author name, and we invited two volunteers to read the poem aloud.

Discussants recognized the poem’s form (a list, like a multiple-choice test, a comforting coping mechanism or uncannily settling, open to vagaries, as a reader I sought order, seems based on contingency, a mix of thoughts without coherence, reflects what we choose to carry and bear) and debated whether the poem belied a lack or excess of agency. One participant said she loved the way the narrator’s specificity suggested self-knowledge; another abhorred the poem’s insistent centering of the self. The proliferation of I’s was noted in contrast to the single line describing the narrator’s eyes.

After disclosing the poem’s title and thinking about whether it changed our reading, we offered as a prompt an invitation to “write about a possibility.” Five participants read their writing. The range of responses was — as always — inspiring. One writer shared a fully formed piece that wrote of not one possibility but many, including the possibility of loving. Another writer balanced the possibility of bad outcomes against good, and wondered if the pain of our world in this moment can end. 

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session Saturday, June 6th at 2pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Possibilities
By Wisława Szymborska

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

From Nothing Twice, 1997. Wydawnctwo Literackie.
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh. 
Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session! We were so glad to resume our Monday workshops and welcome participants from across the globe: Canada, India, Lebanon, Mexico and across the USA: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and West Virginia.

Angelica Recierdo’s poem “The Salon” evoked a powerfully rich discussion on this evening when so many of us are devastated by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Several weeks ago when Natalia and Lynne chose this text (written before the COVID-19 pandemic) they crafted the prompt: “Write about the frontline” conceiving widely of “the frontline” as encompassing service workers in nursing homes and hospitals as well as food and sanitation workers, EMT, fire, and law enforcement. They had not anticipated, until the past week, that “the frontline” could conjure images of peaceful protestors and rioters coming face to face with the police and National Guard.

In somber tones 34 participants delved thoughtfully into the text. The group imagined the occupants of the nail salon and extended the theme of the poem to include women around the world and the creative energy they exude — providing beauty and comfort for other women, who may or may not engage in eye contact and conversation; who are seated above the women who shape and sculpt and soften their hands and feet; or women who may be as exhausted as the beauticians from taking care of others. Someone called these interactions “comraderies come full circle.”

The words “limbs and digits and pain” brought forth mention of prosthetics and “the aesthetics of prosthetics” that change not only function but also identity and how one is viewed by others. “It changes the entire person,” commented one participant about the use of limb prosthetics.

The group considered professional and racial diversity of the text’s human subjects, economic injustice, therapeutic touch, risk of chemical exposure to poison, returning too soon to spaces of exposure to airborne viruses, asking, in effect: what price beauty?

In the poem is the background noise of the 5 o’clock news, which for readers now is 24-hour news foregrounding confrontations of peace and protest, violence and nonviolence. Images of frontlines now come not only at the bedside but also from the streets One person pointed to the blurring of frontlines and another wondered, “What is happening behind battle lines?” We traced disparities in the United States of morbidity and mortality, of incarceration and injustice between those with light skin and those with dark skin. As one of the participants said, “These brown and black children we can’t seem to love.”

Newcomers and loyal participants in Narrative Medicine’s methods of reading closely and deeply listening took turns providing care. In Zoom-drawn rows, we faced each other and created a space in which to hold individual and collective griefs. One woman spoke of this as “having a container for all the grief in the world.”

We are so grateful for our session tonight and want to leave you with the thoughts of a participant who wrote, “I’m walking away reminded to remember others’ fatigue and needs, as well as their abilities and beauty.”

During debriefing, our wonderful Joe Eveld reflected on the participant’s characterization of the session as a container for grief, and realized how much it resonated with a quote by Joy Harjo on the power of poetry that he had recently referenced in an essay: “A poem is an energetic construct…You can talk about anything in a poem. … It will hold what you cannot hold.” – (You can read more of what Joe has for us in the Editor’s Letter for the latest issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine here.)

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session Wednesday, June 3rd at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

“The Salon” by Angelica Recierdo

Women in rows. One row at the feet of the other,
Like shoe-shiners at airports that no one makes eye contact with.

To be in the business of limbs, digits, and pain,
Is to make yourself tired making tired women beautiful.

The Vietnamese woman in front of me is a sculptor.
Polishing dead skin to present me
A smooth new part of my body. I thank her.
Pay her for tenderly touching me in ways
Some lovers can’t even do, won’t even do.

The Salvadorean woman in front of me is a surgeon.
Wielding a tweezer, she softens and plucks the cuticle.
She plucks my story out and we laugh together in Spanglish.
We celebrate colors with the 5 o’clock news in the background.
Acetone in our noses, my hand rests on hers as she works.

47 participants joined us from NY, PA, IA, IN, NJ, IL, CA, MN, Italy, Canada, and India. After three readings (two aloud, one silent), the group discussed the many ways into and through the unpunctuated poem “Thanks,” by W.S. Merwin, posted below. The poem begins with a one-word first line: “Listen” that evoked an immediate narrator-to-reader call to action–a command emphasizing what may be said, healed, whatever makes you you.

Participants brought layered interpretations to the text, referencing a Jewish prayer, Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” and an expression of love, utility and futility (with no one listening at the end of the poem, does it negate all the “Thank you’s?”). With its tone and tensions, the poem served as a reminder that we as individual readers often see a text through a subjective lens and interpret it via our lived experiences. Questions we were left with included “Are we hopelessly praying? Are we blind and rotely saying thank you?”

The prompt ““Write about what you go on saying” generated creative responses ranging from the declarative (“I am just, … I am chaos, … still I am”) to the interrogative (“What am I? Can I be still?” and “What you go on saying? How? Tell me how? How do I better this place?”).

Beyond identifying questions, participants asked, “Must I listen to them?” and used imagery of four ionic societal pillars while exploring themes of race, gender, lack of listening, and blind spots.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session Monday, June 1st at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Thanks
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

From Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).
Copyright © 1988 by W. S. Merwin.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

With participants from, Canada. England, India, and in the U.S., New Hampshire, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, California and elsewhere, we discussed Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night,” posted below.  Beginning with the image of father and child holding hands under the night sky, the poem seemed to participants to expand into a recognition of great loss, and then a sorrowful affirmation of “something there is,” a mystery that will sustain us, bring hope after the “ravening clouds” have “devour[ed] the stars,” or at least, provide comfort to a crying child.  The rich discussion pointed to the intimate relation of father and daughter –and to the face of human mortality confronting the infinite. 

The prompt, “Write about what will shine out again,” elicited a wide range of responses, some identifying small signs of comfort and hope, some bringing humor to the subject of inequity and acknowledging that in our world things have never shone for all of us.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session Sunday, May 31st at 1pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

On the Beach at Night
by Walt Whitman

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

We welcomed a wonderful group of 38 participants from places including the American college towns of Palo Alto, Austin, Iowa City, Villanova and Hanover and world capitals like London, Montreal and Paris, not to mention Atlanta, Bahrain and Elsah, Missouri.

Our text today was the poem “Prayer,” by Marie Howe, posted below. We entered by asking “Whom is the ‘I’ addressing?” Participants suggested the “you” might be a parent, a higher being, or even the narrator addressing herself.  As we shared our diverse ideas, one participant remarked that the poem kept changing colors. The title of the poem and the psalm-like use of couplets suggested that the “you” might be a spiritual god. Two readers compared the line “you are as close as my own breath,” to a Koran passage that addresses God as “closer than the jugular vein.”  Another participant imagined the “you” to be a writer’s muse and noted that the narrator’s struggle resembles a writer’s struggle with the creative process. We also thought about the often-expressed regret for things left unsaid and heard the “you” as someone who had died. Reflecting on the possibility that the narrator was actually addressing herself, we remarked that she seems to have mulled over these feelings many times before. We explored how the physical items like luggage linked to the trucks carrying garbage, which had a sonic resonance as well. Some people detected humor in the ending and sarcasm in the characterization of beauty products as “something more important”  than “you.” Several readers enjoyed the juxtaposition of the sacred with profane, the transcendent with the everyday.

Our prompt was: Write a story you forgot to tell. One response described moving a parent to a healthcare facility and led us through a series of factual statements. This created a sense of suspense that contrasted with the vulnerability we felt when the piece ended with a question, “Is this how it is written?” We also noticed how, although the piece was written in the present tense, it very much had a sense of past and future, echoing the Howe poem. Another piece described a young person’s interest in Jungian philosophy, and we felt the universality of dreaming of the future, as well as the humor the narrator showed while looking back at a past self. The final writing used the metaphors of music to describe the sensation of living with a “free-styling” illness. Weaving together ideas like rap and a symphony, the writer composed a sensory-filled piece that seemed to echo the aesthetic of the experience.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session Friday, May 29th at 7pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Prayer
by Marie Howe

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.

Originally published in “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”, Norton 2008