Poems

Poetry helps me find “the place beyond words.” We poets use words to point ourself and others toward those ineffable places. When this water of 'being' is running through me, I write for the joy of participating and the hope of learning something new. If my words then touch others I am rewarded a second time.

March 10, 2014 By Suzanne

What to do When the Closets Open

You know those 2 am post traumatic stress moments? You know, when the “worst case scenarios” come out of their closet, throw open all the tidy drawers you kept closed in the light of day, strewing the folded ‘what ifs’ and sullying the newly laundered, ‘maybe we’re past the worst’?

Last week I was this basket case, wondering if the physical therapy my daughter was now engaged in to help strengthen her muscles, was doing damage rather than good. She had come back from an appointment earlier in the day complaining about how sore she felt. Usually, sore muscles are a sign of pushing beyond one’s comfort level or norm. But in the recent past, too much stress on her physically (trying out a new sport) had most likely led to a relapse in her illness. Now awake and thoroughly surrounded by those guilt tripping needlers in my mind, I was giving in to my fear.

How did I not make myself more anxious than I already felt?

I had to get out of bed so as not to wake my husband, find my notebook and write down those fears. Also, I wrote down the facts of what had happened that day and in so doing remembered what her physical therapist had told me about how long she might be sore. 3 days he said, (and he was right), but I had to live through those days and see for myself, all the while listening to her “ow’s” and needs for neck or back massages, (which I was glad to accommodate). Each day the pain subsided a bit and I kept this, and my 7 years of experience, as my mantra.

Writing has been one of the most important things I’ve been able to do when I can’t do much else. I was able to go back to bed and sleep. And in the morning I went to look for a poem I remembered by a woman named Anne Harrington. The opening stanza is piled like a stack of laundry and reads:

Jammed/Crammed/Damned

Emotions piled in a corner

One on top of another

Stuffed in

Crammed

Jammed

Heaped high

Overlooked

Too busy to get to…

I could get to them, I just couldn’t make them behave until I could put them on paper.

Someday I hope to be stacked more like this:

January 10, 2014 By Suzanne

The Moth Eaten World

Here is the cover of my new chapbook put out by Finishing Line Press. You can order a copy here

To entice you, here are some “glowing” words from two poets who have read the book.

Suzanne Edison’s The Moth Eaten World held me breathless. Poem by poem we explore not just a failing body, but a daughter’s disease and a mother’s journey through this world. The poems fill us with questioning concern—I left God in her Temple when you got sick—but she compassionately walks the reader through. Not many poets can write about illness well, especially the illness of their own child, with such precision and grace that Edison has. These poems offer so much to the reader—strength and struggle, beauty and fear, faith and doubt—Edison is not only the detailed observer, but the moth, the mother, and the world held together, she writes a powerful and necessary book for all.

— Kelli Russell Agodon, Author of Hourglass Museum & The Daily Poet

In The Moth Eaten World, Suzanne Edison talks about a subject no one wants to talk about: the sick child, and accomplishes this onerous but fundamental task by invoking mythologies, African tradition, story telling and the use of fresh metaphors to guide us through a deep and challenging world. She describes the accouterment of illness with a cleverness that invokes sticks in the sand instead of IV poles, angels instead of nurses, always in the presence of a mother’s partially cloaked desperation, and her fervent desire to “stitch you back whole” once again. All in all the book is a clear view of a catastrophic situation made palatable by the skill of the writer and a vision that uses language as warrior against the sorrow of loss.

–David Watts, author of Bedside Manners, and The Orange Wire Problem.

November 21, 2013 By Suzanne

Teens READING from the Heart of Illness & Healing

For 9 weeks now a group of 7 teens, aged 13-18, have been coming to an after school, independent, poetry writing workshop. These teens live with a variety of chronic illnesses themselves or live with a family member who is chronically ill.

I began this workshop for teens after several years of teaching writing to, and working with, parents of kids living with chronic illness. I had written a grant to interview these, and other parents, and write a series of poems based on those conversations. When I presented my work, one of the places I read was an inner city clinic in Seattle where many of the sickle cell families I had conversed with, are seen. Subsequently, I was asked by the staff if I could teach a workshop for teens. I was excited by the idea and with the help of two more grants, was given this opportunity.

Tonight is the inaugural, culminating reading. They will read to their families, friends, clinic doctors, nurses, social workers and other community members.

They have shown determination and resilience in writing about their illnesses, about their feelings of loneliness, fear and anger. They have written about what makes them feel better, their hopes, joys and what can also be seen as normal teenage concerns of belonging, identity and passion. I put the word normal in italics because this is the thing they all struggle with, and against. What does it mean to be normal, what does it mean to have an added issue of chronic illness to layer upon the everyday stresses of school, family, social life? How do I define myself, how do others define me? (My belief is all of them are bigger than their illness and expressing all parts of themselves allows them and others to see their fullness. It enlarges all of our lives.)

They are courageous, not only in their writing, but in their willingness to get up in front of people and read their work aloud. When we first started practicing for this reading 3 weeks ago, many of them swore they couldn’t do it. They wanted one girl to read all their work, as they thought she was the “true poet” and not afraid of speaking aloud. But gradually, after much laughing, and consternation about whether they’d be laughed at, they were able to make it through a full run practice. Then one girl commented brightly, “this is going to be fun”.

Their work will also be available in book form. They chose the title: Based on a True Story: Just Beyond the Gate.

For a copy of this booklet, please see the online store soon..

August 17, 2013 By Suzanne

The Art of Losing

I highly recommend a book of poetry edited by Kevin Young called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing.
The title is from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. I got a hardback version at a book closeouts website through Amazon (forgive me independent bookstore lovers) for about $8 + shipping.

I want to quote Kevin’s opening lines in his introduction as a way to bring you into wanting to also get the book.
“I have begun to believe in, and even preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.” And, “a poem must be willing to be unwilled, beckoned by need.”

And this book is filled with poems driven by need: elegies, remembrances, dedications, words that attempt to point towards the things that are often unspeakable, or seemingly feel that way. I love the way I am drawn to think about other forms of art, painting and music, as I read different poems. I thought about Ad Reinhart and his seemingly monochromatic paintings in all black and all red. They beg us to be absorbed into them, by them. They seem to hover around those “almost unspeakable realities” and yet, we keep trying to find the words and images, sounds and visuals to express our ineffable lives.

The Art of Losing is a remarkable compilation of poets living and dead, from W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton to Dean Young, Robert Hass, Lucille Clifton, Adam Zagajewski, just to name a few. And there are so many, many more. For what greater mysteries are there than death, love and living.

As William Faulkner is quoted in the opening section called Reckoning:

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

Theodore Roethke says in the section, Recovery:

I learn by going where I have to go.

And finally, Philip Larkin opens the last section, Redemption with:

What will survive of us is love..