Diane Morrow

Sweetness

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 8, 2007 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry

One of three places that I’ve come across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Wild Geese, in the last month or so was as a kind of epigraph—before the table of contents—to the poetry anthology, Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley. The anthology, first published in Britain, is one I would recommend, and I’ll probably get around to writing about it more here on this site one of these days. Meanwhile, today, I wanted to draw your attention to one particular poem that I found in the anthology—a poem called “Sweetness,” by Stephen Dunn. The poem is freely available on the web, this because of a project–Poetry Out Loud–which encourages high school students to memorize and recite poetry. But back to the poem, Sweetness—the first seven lines— Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it. . . Nice, huh? The poem makes me think, among other things, of that bag of tomatoes and that rotisserie chicken in Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer. But any way you look at it, I think maybe he’s onto...

Four Ways of Looking at Healing, in No Particular Order

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 7, 2007 in Uncategorized

Purple tulips in the window A photograph of purple tulips in the window A woman whose daughter has died, sixteen years ago, and, still, the grief, it catches her unaware—that raw fresh ache. This is more frequent in January. How do you do it? I ask her. I really want to know, how does she do it. I picture her getting up every morning, making breakfast, walking the dog—it’s wet some days and cold—and then there’s all that has to be done next. How do you do it? She says she knows that she will see her again. When she dies she will see her daughter again. She tells me this as if it is the most obvious thing. Remembering to refill the bird feeders on a winter afternoon and then looking out the kitchen window—finches—swooping in to the feeder as if to some busy midtown diner, where inside it’s warm, there’s a waitress inside refilling coffee, and voices, that sound of forks against...

Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 4, 2007 in Featured Pieces, Healing Poetry

EIGHTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT CANCER by Eleanor, Louise, Lydia, Nell, Rosetta and Sandra I I love my mother, my brother and my grandmother But I’m not ready to go and be with them yet What about my three children? II Questions: How are we going to proceed? What is my chance of recurrence? How did this happen to me? Why am I even in this picture? III A lot of people think, “Why me?” I never did go through, “Why me?” IV Pure and simple fear Fear of what? Pure and simple fear of pain Fear of the next thing, and the next V Depression. Sometimes you don’t recognize when you’re depressed. There are some days when you just don’t want to talk on the phone. VI I felt like a marionette My strings being pulled in every direction They want me to have this scan, and this test, And this bloodwork. Where do you want me now? VII I left my body and the treatment And the doctors– I left them to the guidance of God VIII The whirlwind, the disruption The chaos it created in everyone else’s life— My husband’s, my three sons, their families, my friends, and mine. Like a tornado had come through It kept getting bigger IX When is this going to end? Where is the end? X Lost in this never-ending struggle or tunnel The struggle is the tunnel On and on Never-ending Dark XI I want to say something about sickness Not being able to keep anything down Sickness on top of sickness Complications of a weakened immune system XII So much information Overwhelmed with information Three bulging grocery bags (And you’re sick. When can you read?) XIII Sleep What’s a good night’s sleep? Waking up exhausted The lack of energy is indescribable XIV Burning, Burning And more burning During radiation XV So tired doing basic things Will I ever be normal again? XVI With all of that you have to deal with generalizations And stereotypes: “Oh, you still have your hair?” XVII Other people’s insensitivities: “We’re not talking about cancer.” XVIII Other people’s kindnesses: A bag of tomatoes A rotisserie chicken. This piece was written at Cancer Services in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at a writing and healing workshop in 2004 after we had read together “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace...

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 1, 2007 in Healing Images, Perspective

In a letter about his poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens writes that the poem “is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations.” The poem is made of up thirteen stanzas—thirteen sensations—each marked by a Roman numeral. Each stanza has the word blackbird in it. I like the second stanza. Number II: I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. I also like the ninth. Number IX: When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. I like the way that each way of looking at a blackbird is distinct and complete unto itself. I like the sense in the poem of worlds beyond the landscape of the poem itself—a blackbird marking the edge of one of many circles. In his book, Writing With Power, Peter Elbow suggests a writing exercise in which one follows Wallace Stevens’ example and writes a poem “that looks at or talks about the same thing over and over again.” Elbow writes of how he did this himself with a cherry tree—looked at it in different ways and made this discovery: I see now that it is about missing the house on Percival Street where we used to live. . . If I had tried to write a poem about missing that house, it probably would have been terrible. Being stuck with having to write tiny stanzas about that cherry tree did it for me. The cherry tree gave him a way in to writing what he wanted to write—perhaps to what he was longing to write. The thirteen ways gave him a way in. Gave him more than one way in. I tried this exercise once with a writing workshop I was teaching to women with cancer. I told the women they could choose to write thirteen ways about anything at all and they chose to write about cancer. They wrote as a group, taking turns, the stanzas coming fast, one after the other. They actually ended up writing sixteen ways of looking at cancer. Then one of the women who had been absent came the next week and she added two more ways and they ended up with a poem, “Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer.” What I noticed in that workshop when the women were writing those different ways was that knowing they were writing a lot of different ways had a freeing effect. They weren’t writing the only word on cancer—the last word on cancer. They were just writing one way of looking at cancer, and then another, and then another. You could try it if you wanted. You could become one of the ones looking. You could write seven ways or sixteen ways or eighteen ways of looking at . . . what? The full poem can be found here. Elbow’s Writing with Power here. And here is the poem the women wrote at Cancer Services: Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer...

Is Shifting One’s Point of View a Healing Habit?

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 30, 2007 in A Different Perspective

In 2003, James Pennebaker and R.S. Campbell published an article that carried the intriguing title, “The Secret Life of Pronouns”. The authors proposed, based on the analysis of thousands of texts, that flexibility in a person’s use of pronouns when writing about painful memories is associated with improved health. This was not a predicted finding. It emerged when Pennebaker and associates persisted in asking the question: Why it is that writing about emotional topics results in better physical health? What actually happens? The most consistent finding prior to this 2003 study had been that people who participated in expressive writing reported that, afterwards, they actually thought differently about the experiences after they wrote about them. Pennebaker’s question then became: “Is this change in thinking reflected in the ways people write?” In other words, do people become healthier as their writing changes in some way? To try and answer this question Pennebaker used a computer program developed by researchers on artificial intelligence, a program which performs linguistic analysis on written texts. 7501 writing samples were examined. A total of 3,445,940 words. A virtual sea of words. In this sea, he looked at how a person’s writing changed over successive days—and whether or not these changes were correlated with better health. The first thing Pennebaker looked at was content. Did changing the content of one’s writing over a period of days affect health? For instance, did the health of those persons who wrote about a different topic on successive days fare better than the health of those who wrote about the same topics? The answer? It appeared to make no difference. Next, Pennebaker looked at writing style. And he discovered that when people changed their writing styles over several days they were more likely to show improvements in health. When he narrowed down these changes in style, he discovered that participants were most likely to show improvement in health if, over the course of different writing samples, they changed what pronouns they used. It’s an intriguing finding. For instance, writing from the I point of view some of the time, and then you, then we, then he or she or they correlated with better health. The finding was not a directional finding. It was not better, for instance, to move from first person to third person, or visa versa. What mattered was the simple fact of variability—flexibility. In his remarks about the study, Pennebaker makes this comment: “Pronoun choice is based on perspective.” He also admits that the finding is enigmatic. It raises more questions than it answers. For instance, does pronoun flexibility actually cause improved health, or is it a feature that merely emerges coincident with improved health? Is pronoun flexibility a skill that can be learned? Could it be like yoga? Flexibility increasing with practice? Or, to put this yet another way: is there any benefit to be gained from intentionally writing from a different point of view? Is shifting one’s point of view a potentially healing...

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