Tag: Poetry

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Health

Nationwide Poetry Month: Coping With the Covid-19 Pandemic

National Poetry Month: Coping With the Covid-19 Pandemic

Amanda Gorman’s inspired and inspirational poem, which the show stole from President Biden’s inauguration in January, has shown millions of Americans the emotional and social power of poetry and, hopefully, got them to use it themselves.

Diana Raab, psychologist, poet and writer in Santa Barbara wrote on her blog: “Poetry can help us feel part of a bigger picture and not just live in our isolated little world. Writing and reading poetry can be a stepping stone to growth, healing, and transformation. Poets help us see a piece of the world in a way that we may not have had in the past. “

Dr. Rafael Campo, poet and doctor at Harvard Medical School, believes that poetry can also help doctors become better carers, nurture empathy with their patients, and bear testimony of our shared humanity, which he believes are essential to healing. In a TEDxCambridge lecture in June 2019, he said: “When we hear rhythmic language and recite poetry, our body translates rough sensory data into nuanced knowledge – feeling becomes meaning.”

According to Dr. Robert S. Carroll, a psychiatrist from the University of California at Los Angeles, Medical Center, poetry can empower people to talk about taboo subjects like death and dying and enable healing, growth, and transformation.

Regarding the pandemic, Dr. Rosenthal: “This crisis affects more or less everyone, and poetry can help us deal with difficult feelings such as loss, sadness, anger and hopelessness. While not everyone has the gift of writing poetry, we can all benefit from the thoughts that so many poets have expressed beautifully. “

Indeed, the first section of the book contains Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” about losses that can comfort those who suffer. She wrote::

Even to lose you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I won’t have lied. It is obvious

The art of losing isn’t too difficult to master

though it can look like (write it!) like a disaster.

“When people are devastated by casualties, they should be allowed to feel and express their pain,” said Dr. Rosenthal in an interview. “They should be offered support and compassion, and not asked to move on. You cannot force it to close. If people want a shutdown, they will do it in their own time. “

The closure wasn’t a state that Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote this, cherished

“Time brings no relief; you all lied

Who told me that time would free me from my pain? “

Dr. However, Rosenthal pointed out that time brings relief to most people, despite what his friend Kay Redfield Jamison wrote in her memoir, An Unquiet Mind. For her, the relief “took up her own and not particularly sweet time”.

I now know that thanks to Dr. Rosenthal can be a literary panacea for the pandemic. They let us know that we are not alone, that others have survived devastating loss and desolation before us, and that we can be lifted up by the images and cadence of the written and spoken word.

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Entertainment

The Artists Dismantling the Limitations Between Rap and Poetry

The Artists Dismantling the Barriers Between Rap and Poetry

Rappers have an obvious advantage over side-born poets when it comes to rhythm. But also poets can shape the rhythm through stress patterns as well as through their lines on the page. Poets differ from prose writers in that they, not the typographer, choose where their lines should end, thus giving them the opportunity to play with a reader’s sense of time. Enjambment, when a syntactic unit overflows from one line to the next, is a fundamental poetic practice that empowers poets with the ability to create and re-shape meaning. In “Highest” from his upcoming “Somebody Else Sold the World” collection, 49-year-old Indianapolis poet Adrian Matejka rifles over Travis Scott’s 2019 hit “Highest in the Room,” but where Scott’s lines almost completely end – that is , dissolved in a complete phrase – Matejkas are mostly enjamged. Sometimes the effect is a syncopation: “This is / Machu Picchu high.” In other cases a picture is paused and then revived with a parable: “I raise / like the highest black hand in history class.” Still other times, Matejka enables a complex idea to unfold over several lines: “I rose like that Blood pressure of someone / black reproduced in the textbook / this monochromatic year. ”Matejka’s line breaks attest to a year of pandemic and racist violence and deny any effort to overcome the pain.

Moments like these show the reciprocity between rap and poetry, little formal things that have a big impact on meaning. “For me, it’s sound,” says 45-year-old Los Angeles-based poet Khadijah Queen of her work’s connection to hip-hop, although her poems also make use of silence. In her latest collection “Anodyne” (2020) she uses the entire page and writes not only with words but also with the space around it. Their lines dance, yes, but they also trip, cancel, pause, and begin in a way that’s reminiscent of an inventive MC playing a dozen different beats in a row.

Queen also understands her role, and that of her fellow poets and rappers, as necessarily engaged in civic work. She looks at Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, perhaps the most prominent black writer of the 19th century, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery and the rights of women and children on her platform. “Our job is to grasp what people feel in this time of contradiction: the difficulty and the beauty together. We are called to clearly recognize what is happening, ”says Queen. After the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and many others, rappers were also moved to express themselves through songs. Atlanta’s Lil Baby, 26 and one of the most successful emerging artists, released The Bigger Picture in June, in which he seriously deals with police brutality: “It doesn’t make sense; I’m only here to vent “In the past year, several other songs have expressed the anger and pain of Americans: Terrace Martin’s“ Pig Feet ”starring Denzel Curry, Daylyt, G Perico and Kamasi Washington; Noname’s “Song 33”; Meek Mills “Otherside of America”; YOUR “I can’t breathe”; Anderson .Paak’s “Lockdown”. For Queen and other black poets, hip-hop is not just beats and rhymes, but something more necessary as well. Hearing black voices speaking on their own terms creates refuge, especially at a time when blackness and blacks are besieged. “I love hip-hop because it emphasizes the use of black language as the standard,” she says. “It’s a space to be who you are without apologizing.”

Categories
Health

Erasure Poetry At Dwelling – The New York Instances

Erasure Poetry At Home - The New York Times

The past year has been difficult for many people. The pandemic, politics, job loss and isolation – most Americans had to find some new coping mechanisms to get through. Here’s one: erasure poetry.

Creativity can heal in difficult times, but harnessing these creative juices is not always easy. Sometimes you are just too overwhelmed and exhausted to write or create. During these times it can be helpful to turn to found poetry – a style of poetry where you write something new using only what you can find in an existing text.

Sometimes when it’s hard to write, this caveat gives you a starting point. It’s a bit like a painter working with a limited palette: you have both a solid foundation to begin your poem on and the challenge of creating something with just what you have in front of you. And even if you have difficulty writing traditionally constructed poetry, the medium of poetry found can give you access to vocabulary that you didn’t know you needed.

One of the forms of found poetry is erasure. The author finds something new to say in an existing text; in this case an article from the Times. Blackout poetry is a style of erasure that removes the words around a poem you found in the text to present both a piece of literature and a strong image of that literature on the same page.

You may be wondering, am I really writing a poem using someone else’s work to start? Yes! To write a well-found poem – and in this case a deletion – the poet has to intervene in the source text. This means that your poem is saying something different than the source code. It will be representative of your voice and your narrative.

The rules are pretty simple: in the event of a deletion, you can only use the words that appear in the article you selected, and you must use them in the order they appear. How you erase the words around your poem is up to you. Find out how to do it.

How are you going to delete? Would you like to use Wite-Out? A marker? Sparkle? Maybe you will try a collage. Erasing in the above poem was done with a Sakura Gelly Roll pen.

You can choose an article that makes you feel strong – joy, anger, or sadness. Or you choose an article that you cannot relate to at all. Both are great places to start. Once you’ve read the article, you’ll be able to identify words and phrases that you find interesting or that appeal to you, regardless of the context of the piece. Try to come up with at least one interesting or strong word to build the poem around.

The above poem was written using Marcus Westberg’s article “Crisp, Calm, and Quiet: A Winter Swedish Wonderland” from the January 10 print edition of The Times. It is important that your voice speaks in your poem, and not that of the original writer – a deletion poem should not summarize the material it was created from. It should say something new. While Mr Westberg’s article is about pandemic travel in Sweden, the poem is about the vanity of new beginnings.

Before you start this sharpie or wite-out, you may want to use a pencil to outline the words you want to keep. You can also make some copies of your article to practice or experiment marking up the page from the original newspaper page you are using.

When ready, erase any words other than those in your poem using the medium of your choice.

You wrote a poem. And maybe – just maybe – it helped you feel a little less stressed today. Cite your sources, then share your poem with friends. Perhaps you will find other erasers in your midst, a small clan of devious writers with whom you can exchange your creations.