Cracking Poetry Wide Open: A Community Project
There’s a poetry project that I’ve had on my heart for over two years now. Thinking back, I’m not even sure why I was thinking about this project, because at the time, I had read my work in front of an audience, maybe once before. But this idea was to read my poetry at retirement homes.
The first time I suggested the idea to my husband, he said, “No!” I looked at him in surprise.
He said, “Well, I mean, you could, but you might want to check the death rate after your visit to see if it increases.” It was a little joke about how all my poetry at that time was dark and sad and might plunge the listeners into a deep depression and untimely death.
Over the years, the vision has evolved and grown, and for the past couple of months, I have worked with my writing group, Page Turners, to develop this plan further. The vision for this project is to break expectations about poetry and make reading and writing poetry accessible. Through running a Poetry Night at Barnes & Noble for the past year, I’ve watched how healing poetry is, and I already knew it was healing through my own personal experience. This has led me to want to bring it to more people.
The first stage is to start poetry readings at retirement homes, where it’s not just reading to the residents, but a discussion about poems and memories. Ideally, I’d like this to lead to a small poetry workshop where seniors start writing poems. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about it, but I started volunteering in retirement homes during the summer when I was 13 years old, and I volunteered, even more, the following summer. I was so captivated by the stories and wisdom of the people living in these homes. I worked in a retirement home for a bit in high school, and again when I was in college. I enjoyed taking a moment away from my duties to visit with the residents, being charmed by their humor and vibrant personalities.
There’s a wealth of memories and stories within retirement communities. I think these sessions of discussing and writing poetry can help capture some of those memories while also becoming a tool that these seniors can use to work through things when they feel no one is hearing them. There are so many reasons I think a poetry project like this could benefit the community, and I couldn’t possibly get all of the reasons down here.
This is really just the first phase of this project. In the next phase, I’d like to do some poetry workshops in schools and change the way kids think about poetry. I want to unlock the power of a poem and demonstrate how much emotion and story can be packed into a poem. Kids are another group whose voices sometimes gets lost in a crowd, and I’d like to give them a tool that will help them figure how they feel about things they are going through.
This is a huge project I’ve had rolling around in my head for a while. And I have no idea if it will take off or fizzle out. And if it is successful, I have no idea what it will look like six months or a year from now, because I really want the participants to be able to help shape and mold the program, so they get the most out of it.
The exciting thing is that we already had our first poetry reading at a retirement home on Monday. One of the concerns I had was keeping people’s interest, especially this first one which was scheduled right after dinner. While it took longer for people to join us than anticipated, we were there talking about poetry for nearly an hour and a half. I wasn’t sure we’d be able to keep everyone interested for more than half an hour for the first one, but it turned out not to be an issue.
One man recited poems, which was amazing. And the residents were excited about having us there to visit with them about poetry. They wanted to know when we’d be back, and they were excited to invite their friends to the next one. That means we already have another event for next month.
We also have three more poetry readings set up at three different retirement communities this month, and I hope they all go as well as the first. I really look forward to watching poetry bloom in our community, and I hope it gets people excited about poetry and other poetry projects start sprouting up in our community.
I mentioned in the last post that I wouldn’t be able to do half of what I do without my writing group. This is a perfect example. This project is so much bigger than one person could hope to do on their own. And it’s really a bigger project than my small group can do, but it’s a start.
