Taking a Moment for Poetry
Each week, a “poem for reflection” is included in “This Week,” the ACPE newsletter. I am often asked where we find the poems that are included. I thought it might be helpful to share several of the resources I use to identify those poems, hoping they might prove helpful to you in your work.
My latest favorite is Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems by Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby Wilson (eds.). From Yehuda Amichai to Alice Walker, these editors have compiled an exquisite collection that can be a quick “go to” resource when you really need a poem or a lovely devotional resource for meditation and contemplation.
Several years ago, I came across Kevin Young’s edited collection The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. While many of the poems can also serve as lovely sources of meditation and contemplation, they also may be resources in your work with clients, students, and patients. Young has grouped the poems around six themes: reckoning, regret, remembrance, ritual, recovery, and redemption. A rich mix of sacred and secular, these poems cut across traditions to many of the deepest human expressions of grief and loss as well as hope and healing.
John Brehm writes, “When we sit in meditation, we shift from thinking about our life to experiencing whatever arises in the present moment: bodily sensations, sounds, feelings, the breath. Thoughts will happen, too, but we learn not to indulge or chase after them. We simply notice them as one more strand in the intricate texture of the present moment” (187). It is with this in mind that his edited collection is intended. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy offers over 125 different poems, all of which invite us to sit with the words, not moving too quickly to make sense of them but rather to let them dwell with us, if even for a moment.
James Crews has assembled another collection that is titled How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. In a world and a season such as this, these poems are essential reading. Unlike the other collections where the poets tend to be quite well known, this collection features many new voices, with a wonderful attention to the multicultural and multiethnic diversity that enriches these phrases and verses.
Many of you may be familiar with the poetry of Christian Wiman. He has also edited a collection titled Joy: 100 Poems. Like much of Wiman’s work, he engages a variety of poets to probe the depths of meaning found in their work as they relate to joy. He writes, “Joy, though inevitably tragic because death is absolute, is the very lifeblood of being and ought to be sought and seized at every moment of experience” (xx). In the midst of this cloudy month, these poems of joy might be a welcome addition to your shelf!
There are, of course, several of my favorites as well. Mary Oliver, Howard Thurman, David Whyte, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Natah Treathaway, Mark Nepo, Jane Hirschfield, Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, and lots of classic writers. There’s also the On Being “Poetry Unbound” and “Experience Poetry” projects, great listens if you would rather hear these beautiful offerings. And finally, there’s Poets.org and the Poetry Foundation (PoetryFoundation.org) which are huge treasure troves of poets, poems and all sorts of resources, often grouped by themes for quick searches.
So now you know many of our sources! May you be enriched by this cornucopia of beauty!
Trace Haythorn is the Executive Director of ACPE and can be reached at Trace.Haythorn@acpe.edu