The Half-Finished Heaven

Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

From Tomas Tranströmer, New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton (Bloodaxe Books, 1997/2011)
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/

This is the poem that I read at my mother's funeral because I could not offer a conventional kind of eulogy. It will have different meanings for different readers. This is what it means to me and why I read it for my mother.

 

'We walk in the sun in hundreds' but millions remain in the shade of poverty.

'Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone' except that loneliness affects millions. Social isolation and social fragmentation are causing significant rises in anxiety and depression.

It is a 'half-finished heaven'. Capitalism has enabled many to 'walk in the sun' but its primary focus on profit, exploitation and competition has seeped, intentionally and manipulatively, into the human psyche.

When we can truly begin to care about one another then there will be 'a room for everyone'.

We have arrived at a time of immense possibility. But 'the vulture must break off its flight'. 

 

My mother despite her inability to let herself truly love and be loved, did have much to offer. One true thing that she did understand and she did try to express in the way she lived was that no person is above another. 

Free poetry

Modern poetry is the art of the fox. It creeps up. It strikes unexpectedly. 

Poetry uses words as weapons. But unlike the use of words as weapons by those who want dominance, those who make demands of others, those who want to silence differing points of view, poetry wants only to break out of prisons. Those prisons of worn-out ways of thinking and feeling that were only ever useful in serving the status quo. 

Poetry is the wind in your face, the blood in your heart, the wide open spaces of your mind, and the silence of your eternal being. 

If you can speak, or sign, or type or write, or laugh or cry, or scream or smile, or scratch or blink, you can create poetry. You are poetry.

  

Nayyirah Waheed, "Salt"

Nayyirah Waheed has created new ground in poetry which is an achievement and a movement of significance.
Salt. published in 2013 with Creativespace Independent Publishing Platform (acquired by Amazon about six years ago) has been an international success and is said to be studied in schools.
Waheed also posts her work on Instagram.
Currently in Australia paperback copies are largely unavailable, except through Amazon of course.
In book format it runs to more than 200 pages, with a lot of blank space within that bulk.
Self-publishing avoids the editorial process. Nevertheless Waheed has still had to suffer rejection and criticism; as anyone who makes their work public does.
She says that she wrote to and for people of colour. This is a rising refrain from those who feel marginalised. But I would say that poetry is larger than that, and art's endeavour is to reach out to a common humanity. To stay within the constraints of a single culture is not what it does. Art is able to simultaneously build newness within a culture as it questions and dismantles accepted cultural norms.
Salt stings, enhances flavour, and it heals. It is an appropriate title for this body of work. 
Not all the pages of this book contain poems. 
  
                    where
                    you are
                    is not
                    who
                    you are.
     
                       - circumstance

This appears on page 22. It is not a poem. It is an aphorism; a clever and relevant aphorism.

 even the small poems mean something. they are often
 whales in the bodies of tiny fish.

She is right about this which appears on page 25. While again not a poem, it is a playful something to ponder.

There is no reason why a book of poetry cannot contain material other than poems.

Poems like this one on page 19 testify to her recognition that life is poetry and her ability to transcribe the poetic into words.

when your mother unbirths you
because
she smells swans in your skin
it feels like
she is
singing in salt.
and
her eyes carve you out of her body.
you
are a dream
undreamt.
and
this is a holocaust
that
winter birds
will
never know.
–– swans

Within this body of work there is so much unexpected beauty. Like salt, poetry heals.

Waheed has created a community of poetry. May she continue to grow in her abilities with language and observation. She has broken the rules, and she needs to keep doing that.
          

Poetry as therapy

'The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious.  What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.' Freud (probably a remark made in 1928 to Professor Becker in Berlin)

Or, in the words of Jacques Lacan, who has been referred to as the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud: 'I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.'

And what is it about writing poetry that can blur the distinction between conscious and unconscious?  
'[Poetic] language stretches our conceptual frameworks and liberates our thinking. It is a language distinct from that ordinary language use for communication, the language of everyday speech, though it is recognizable within the terms of such ordinary communication. But it is also a language that draws attention to itself as language, a language of materiality, rather than the apparent transparency of ordinary speech in which the reader/hearer is encouraged to forget the words and to move straight to the world to which the words are supposed to refer. Poetic language advertises the writer/speaker’s efforts to encase concepts or objects in sounds and rhythms. The recipient of such a language is therefore encouraged to notice language in use, rather than moving directly to the ‘reality’ or the abstraction to which the words are supposed to refer.' Julia Kristeva

Soranus of Ephesus was the first noted practitioner of poetry therapy as such. He was born in Ephesus, practiced in Alexandria and then Rome. He was one of the chief representatives of the methodical school of medicine in which the rules of practice were simple and based on the theory that attributed all diseases to an adverse state of 'internal pores'. His suggestions for treatment of nervous disorders resemble modern psychotherapy.

Poetry has power therapeutically because it is a way for patients to 'find the truth of their own experience reflected back in a way they can recognise.' Dr Kenneth P. Gorelick, psychiatrist, advocate of poetry therapy.

'Poetry can capitalise on the ability to contain self-expression. Feeling and perception may deepen into greater understanding or may be transformed, resulting in emotional reparation, resolution of conflicts, and a sense of well-being.' Debbie McCullis, from 'Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health', edited by Luciano L'Abate, Laura G Sweeney.

There are three domains of poetry therapy. 
1. The receptive-prescriptive which uses existing poetry to elicit responses.
2. The expressive-creative, giving a client the chance to write.
3. The symbolic-ceremonial, which is connected to the power of ritual and symbols. from Poetry Therapy: Using Words to Heal
by Barbara Trainin Blank, The New Social Worker. 

https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/practice/Poetry_Therapy:_Using_Words_to_Heal/