Oftentimes, our own words fail us. It is then we can turn to poetry, a succinct form of language the poet had crafted, honed and finely tuned into a sharp tool to pry open our minds.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins writes in his poem forgetfulness, “No wonder you rise in the middle of the night / to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. / No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted / out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”
No wonder indeed. Our minds as we age contain so much information, poetry is like a code that can retrieve emotions and information or memories at our fingertips.
Simplicity of Language
In a way, the simple language helps inform complex emotions we want to convey. For instance, In Halleluiah, poet Mary Oliver looks back on her 60 years and prepares to move forward, “And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes / almost forgetting how wondrous the world is / and how miraculously kind some people can be? / And have you too decided that probably nothing important / is ever easy? / Not, say, for the first sixty years. / Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more, / and some days I feel I have wings.”
The rhythm of poetry is like a song. We know those inflections and rhymes from our earliest of days. My favorite video is one where my mother reads William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud with its lines, “When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.”
Though she’s gone, during spring and summer months, I’ll play the video to reflect on her vibrancy in that moment. She came alive in the recognition of patterns of words and patterns in her life.
Likewise, studies have been undertaken to prove how poetry plays a role in our lives.
Poetry Intervenes
The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project was one of the earliest and longest lasting programs in the United States to encourage the use of poetry to connect humans as they age to their lives and one another. I based my own work with dementia individuals on this concept as well. Language is a way in and out of difficult situations. Responding to short passages, individuals are often surprised to learn what is buried beneath their exterior lives. The use of poetry to stimulate memory appears to be something all the participants can relate to. The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, “also promotes participants’ self-esteem and social skills,” Lesley Halliday, of Isabella Geriatric in New York, once wrote.
The National Institutes of Health studied this further, looking at oral poetry, “in which people with dementia are positioned as cocreators of embodied texts and directly benefit from the power of the spoken word.”
AlzAuthors.com was founded in 2015 by three women, Marianne Sciucco, Jean Lee and Vicki Tapia, who, after personal challenges with care partners, saw the need to promote literature written by caregivers, industry professionals and individuals who experienced some form of Alzheimer’s or dementia. They freely share resources, podcasts and recently published a new volume of work with several authors, including me, as way to share and express the experience of loving and caring for someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s or experiencing it for oneself.
A sampling of such literature might include writers such as Elizabeth Cohen. “Poetry is writing with gaps in it,” says Elizabeth Cohen, poet and author ofThe Family on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Love and Courage,which describes the years she spent “living between learning and forgetting,” simultaneously caring for her infant daughter and aging father. “I never really feel like I have to tell why those images are there or even what they mean, it’s just what the other person is bringing to it.”
If poetry really is writing with gaps in it, that suits our minds just fine. Our memory too, is filled with lapses large and small. We can all use a little poetry to fill in the spaces between real time reflections.