Recalling my teacher Richard Strozzi-Heckler’s sentiment from my somatic coach training, he said something like poetry is balm for the senses, although I haven’t got that quite right. He usually started and ended our sessions with a poem, and this is really when I began to appreciate there may be something beyond that pedestrian and predictable poetry spoon-fed to us in school. I didn’t much care for all that rhyming and rhetoric.
I was blessed to meet David Whyte at Strozzi Institute in the early 2000’s and, like many, was quite taken with his grounded charming self. I attended one of his poetry readings in Shropshire decades later, signed up for his Sunday Salons through the pandemic and regularly recommend his uplifting and amusing TED talk. Beyond him and Mary Oliver and Rumi though, I was naively ignorant about poetry.
There were poets in my first writing group and I was a bit sniffy (nice word for judgmental) about their offerings. I felt superior in my knowledge of what “good” poetry was – how ridiculous that seems now. For as I read more and more, I acknowledge this is very much a matter of taste, just as the creative arts all reflect the eye of the beholder. Something has shifted now. I even have a regular practice of finding random poems, reading them aloud, noting my internal response, and those that resonate I hand copy in to a beautiful journal gifted by a treasured friend. This is partly inspired by the late Dr. Michael Moseley‘s “Just One Thing” encouragement to read poetry every day, and partly by dear Marie McGuigan who offers a Focusing-with-Poetry evening through the Irish Focusing Network. By the way, Focusing and poetry are a marriage made in heaven.
When a friend told me about the Poetry Pharmacy, I was intrigued. There is a branch on Oxford Street in London, and one in the wilds of Shropshire which I haven’t visited yet. So after a rewarding day with clients I took myself to their space above Lush and spent a good long while browsing the shelves. They do actually have little bottles filled with poetry not pills. I’ve bought one for a friend but forgot to get one for myself to check out the contents. That’s for the next visit.
I now have way too many favourite poems to quote just one here, but I am enjoying sharing one with clients occasionally – just once in a while there’s something about the intensity and just-right-ness that hits the spot in a way nothing else can. OK, well, I guess I’ll just share one that I’ve drawn on lately. It’s Julia Fehrenbacher’s The Most Important Thing.