creative forces

Blog 34…June 2014

I was lucky to be born early enough to be forced to learn 200 lines of poetry every year at school. It’s one of the things I value most about my education, although it didn't mean much to me at the time and was confined to the 18^th and 19^th century English poets, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Mathew Arnold - Rupert Brooke was the most modern and Bliss Carmen the only Canadian. Many of those lines still circle around in my head, called up by something I read or hear.

Now I enjoy seeing contemporary situations and events being interpreted with poetry... expressing, exploring and expanding our feelings about what’s around us as we struggle to make sense of things. When Mustafa Ahmed’s close buddy was shot and killed in Toronto, his response was a tough and moving poem that finished “Those friends may be close but they don’t know the chambers of your heart”. Cuban born, Boston based physician Rafael Campo uses poetry to help his patients (and himself) contain emotions and find metaphors for pain. Renee Sarojini Saklikar, who lost several relatives in the horror of the Air India crash, composed a series of poems as an elegy to the 82 children who died. There’s even a group of Toronto poets who love mixed martial arts and find poetry in its conflict and movements.

In 2011, in an effort to diminish the “intellectually brutalizing” affects of medical school and stimulate creativity, Yale University and University College London joined together to establish an annual poetry competition for their students with a generous prize. The poems help students develop abstract thinking and realize the commonality and universality of their experience.

In downtown Toronto, The Secret Handshake is a peer support cultural centre presenting a gathering spot and daily programmes of dance and movement and visual arts. Once a month, on a Sunday evening, established poets read alongside individuals struggling with mental illness. Traditional medical treatment only takes people part way to recovery, words and other means of communication free and extend emotions and diminish isolation by linking the artists and the audience with emotions we all feel. 

I’ve consoled many young girls turning thirty with Ogden Nash’s lines “How old is Spring Miranda?” and made toasts borrowing from Shakespeare with  “But if the while I think on thee dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.” from Sonnet XXX.  The holiday season isn’t complete without listening to Dylan Thomas’s resounding voice deliver A Child’s Christmas in Wales. 

As well as many other wise things she said, the angelic Maya Angelou told us that poetry is music for the human voice. Whether it’s a limerick, a sonnet, haiku, a villanelle or a piece of doggerel on a Hallmark card, poetry gives us a way to express what we’re feeling and thinking when other words fail us.