Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

By

New poems & a book coming soon

Please find the poem, “On a Scale of 1 -10” online at SWWIM, published in August.  It is one of the poems in my soon to be published poetry and visual art book dealing with autoimmune diseases called, The Body Lives Its Undoing.

Other poems included in the book, are forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review and the Canadian Medical Association Journal.  “Sick Girl in the Wilderness” was published online by Isacoustic in July.

( above- beta cell circus, by Shelley Lowenstein)

 

                                                                                                                      (man, by Anna Hooser)                                                                                                                                                                                                         

The book, published in conjunction with The Benaroya Research Institute (BRI) has been almost 2 years in the making. The visual art is stunning, with contributions by Julie Trout, Anna Hooser, Shelley Lowenstein, and others, some of whom are scientists that work at BRI.

 

(art at right by Julie Trout)

By

“Tough”– a new poem in HEAL-from Florida State University College of Medicine

I am grateful to have the poem “Tough”,  from my poetry and art project on autoimmune diseases, out today from HEAL.

 

By

Writing as a Righting Journey-Moving Forward

paper cut show-MFA BostonWhy write.

I’ve written about writing and healing often. Writing workshops are what I now offer to other parents as a way of containing and expressing our experiences living with a child(ren) who has a life threatening or chronic illness. I recently came across an article on this subject on the Foundation for Art and Healing website from last year. I was reminded about Dr. James Pennebaker’s research on this subject and I want to go back and reread his work, Writing to Heal, now. You may find it of interest also.

There are many powerful reasons to write, but HOW we write is as important as the writing itself. Being able to construct a narrative from our emotions, or use metaphoric language as a container for the hard to express feelings, allows us to gain some perspective on what may feel overwhelming. I think it allows us to move from feeling to cognition.

I structure writing exercises so that participants have the time to let down into their feelings and experiences, but also have the opportunity to create a meaningful story or poem that provides a container for feelings. This sort of writing engages the prefrontal cortex, that part of our brains where decision making and discernment reside. This capacity to feel and contain is necessary for making judgements about treatment plans, advocating for our child’s needs and for adherence to the treatment plan. It helps move us from despair or depression about our circumstances to resilience and repair.

There is a caveat. Most of us don’t move through our feelings of grief or loss, anger or depression once and then never feel them again. We come back again and again to these experiences as our children get better and grow or don’t. Hopefully, writing allows us a mechanism for continuing to better understand what we feel and what we need for our own self-care and for our children.

 

 

By

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..