(*Names have been changed)
Mike hid his face with his hand. His shoulders shook and a strangled cry escaped from behind his fingers.
We’d been listening to Matthew Dickman’s poem Stroke from rattle.com. The workshop participants, all inpatients at a rehab facility for people who’d experienced brain injury, stroke, and other trauma, were silently absorbing it. “What feelings or thoughts did you have while listening to this poem?” I asked. Some shifting in seats, breathing. Wilma, an older woman who understood everything I said, but whose speech was unintelligible, got up suddenly and left.
Was she frustrated with not being able to communicate? I wondered. Staff people present, the rec therapists and one of their interns, spoke— but none of the patients did, not even Leon, a senior citizen amputee who was also hearing and visually impaired, but whose personality bubbled up as though from an underground spring. Earlier, Leon had reacted strongly to the poem Human I’d brought about my experience of the “therapeutic quiet room” (TQ) in the psych hospital. “There was so much e-mo-tion in it, the way you read it,” he drawled in his French-tilted English, hitting his slight chest with his hand, eyes half closed.
Grasping a bit, I asked, “What’s one word that came up for you when you heard this poem? For me, it’s intense, even though the poet is so matter of fact.” Someone nodded, and Mike started to sob. The rec therapist bent her head close to him to ask if she could push him away in his wheelchair, so they could chat.
I watched their backs disappear out the door of the large rec therapy room and felt stricken. Had I, wanting to be of service as poet laureate, brought something to this group that hurt more than it helped? Though I was used to people being moved by poetry and how it connected to their own lives, I didn’t know any of these people well enough to offer comfort to anyone, to commiserate, or to ask them about what they brought to the poem (and I’d been warned, understandably, not to question them about their issues and stories). In any case, the people I felt the need to talk to most had just left the room. What was next? All I could think to do in the moment, was to push the stricken feeling aside and keep talking about poetry.
Usually I facilitate a workshop where the writers are, like me, people who live with mental health labels and histories, psychiatrization and medication. I have a comfort level with them when diverting off the path of writing and talking about writing, to hear things about their lives that are riveting, radical, or raw. But last year, I felt I’d burnt out of doing that work, and needing some time to rest and take stock of my life, I gave up that gig. Still, when I became Poet Laureate of Halifax, I dove into the idea of collecting poems from people and places around the city that aren’t normally associated with poetry.
I’d been stuck on the idea of talking to city trash collectors and plumbers about poetry. But I wanted to start close to home with inpatients at the rehab, just down the street from me. People for whom the disability they were being treated for is new, and the losses grievously fresh. Because even though I’d been reassured time and time again, by my contact at the city, a past poet laureate and my own self— that the laureateship was meant to allow me to keep doing what I was doing and amplify my voice, I wanted to feel useful. Partly because of the honorarium the municipality was paying me; and partly because I thought the rehab patients and I had something to offer each other. I was familiar with pain, and I thought I could take theirs too, and maybe we’d make something out of it.
But after Wilma, Mike, and the rec therapist left, I looked around over the tops of the heads of people in the room, searching for my reason for being there. I couldn’t find one. So I settled back into talking and listening, though my eyes kept scanning the back of the room for something that wasn’t there.
Leon, cocking his good ear toward me and closing his eyes, didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. He spoke of the poetry he’d read in school as a child. “The endingzzz,” he tried to explain, “of the lines...had to be same. I just...” He gestured with his hand the long sweep of a line, that ended with him pretending to nod off. In his melodious accent he spoke of how the words we’d shared than evening had awakened him to another kind of poetry. “There is passion!” he said emphatically. It did my hurt heart good to hear that poetry had won another convert, and one who had a hard time hearing or seeing and whose first language was not the one in which he was experiencing poetry, to boot.
I asked if anyone had brought poetry of their own to share. The rec therapy intern brightened. “I have one!” she said and began reciting a poem she’d written long ago about her one-eyed cat, that made us all laugh. It tumbled from her, fresh and effortless, as she remembered her eight year-old self, standing on a counter top, proclaiming. Then the rec therapist returned and so did Mike, so the intern recited her cat poem a second time for their benefit, and we laughed again. I felt relieved, and buoyed that Mike wanted to come back.
The rec therapist had brought copies of the poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou and read it out to us, a tonic for the scattering of panic and ambivalence that I’d been feeling about being there. Leon strained toward her, listening intently. “There’s rrrrepetition of the line “I rise”, he said. “it’s powerful!”. It certainly was. So powerful. The ship of my heart had somehow righted itself.
....
In the succeeding two workshops we wrote our own poems and collaborated on a poem that was meant to be posted for patients who would pass through the rehab in the future. It was hard and exhausting work, choosing and collecting and bending and blending our words with one another. We finished late and suddenly there were goodbyes called from people in wheelchairs rolling away from me toward the door, and we were done.
My hope is that by the end of my tenure as poet laureate, I will have met a lot of people like Mike and Leon and the rec therapy intern, brought poetry to them and taken away poems that they create, poems that I am thinking about whether and how to share with the wider community.
As a legacy project, I think I’d like to make a poem film, maybe with excerpts from poems created during workshops such the ones at the rehab, or of a poem I write about my experience of meeting people across the community over poetry. It’s still hazy for me and I’m not sure yet what I’m doing, but I have faith that it will become clear, as the noise and sediment around the laureateship settle to the bottom. There’s many ways to be a poet laureate apparently! And I’m so glad to have the privilege of asking myself “what’s next”? for another two and a half years.
