Teenagers, Poetry, & The Search

I started seeing Abbott when she was 10 years old, fiercely angry and intensely introverted. She had trouble making friends, was persona non grata with school staff, and challenged her family daily. She had a hard time being here on Planet Earth. We worked diligently for almost four years, making extraordinary progress. 

When Abbott was fourteen, her family was moving out of state, and our work together came to a close. On one of our last days, we took a walk near the office through the old cemetery that sits on a bluff overlooking the shipping lanes between the mainland and the island. The day was brilliant. We watched boats and ships make their way to and fro, and we talked about what it means to belong—at home, at school, and in the world at large. Abbott’s questions, observations, and opinions reflected the shifts in her way of seeing the world—from childhood to adolescence—and she worried about what was to come. 

As we stood on the bluff, looking west and beyond, we both felt the impending closure of our work together. So I gave her, as I’ve given so many young people over the years, Mary Oliver’s wise compassionate words to take with her wherever she goes:

You do not have to be good. 
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.  

I repeated that first line, You do not have to be good, to remind her that she was more than her behavior, greater than the sum of her oppositional defiant parts. The breeze lifted her white-blond hair, a brief moment that seemed to foretell all the moments to come. My gaze remained steady on Abbott as I continued, letting my conviction that she belonged in this world come through the words and my voice:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination . . .  
. . . announcing your place 
in the family of things.

There’s nothing like a 14-year-old girl to bring the lofty back down to earth—Abbott simply smiled and said, “That was a long poem,” and we laughed.

Why poetry?

Why did I share this poem rather than just reassure Abbott that the world needed her? Why do teens in particular need to read, hear, write, and share poetry? How does poetry benefit their lives beyond an academic exercise in language arts class? 

There are a plethora of articles and blogs on why teens can benefit from poetry. You can find some wonderful contributions here, here, and here. Let this be one more offering and hopefully something new and unexpected for you and the teenagers you serve.

The “Unsayable Dimension”

Adolescence can be, even under the best of circumstances, difficult. Abbott joins the thousands of young people all over the world living with mental and emotional distress and trauma. Grief, heartbreak, longing, betrayal . . . the list is long of the things we will (must?) encounter in this lifetime. Many of these things reside in the “unsayable dimension” (Richard Jackson). Poetry languages what can’t be languaged. Poetry encircles, encompasses, and embodies experience. Poetry is a bridge between personal experience and the mythos of life. When teenagers read a poem that resonates, they join the world. When they write poetry, they begin to metabolize the intensities and mysteries of existence, of being human.

What am I
but a dark storm rising
above the wet black earth ~ D. S. Marriott

how important it is to run
to keep alive, and not to belong
but to be ~ N. Willard

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go. ~ T. Roethke

Move into emptiness
of question and answer and question. ~ Rumi

Rachel Kelly and Kim Rosen are two authors who share their stories about depression, heartache, grief, and how poetry got them through. Ocean Vuong’s Reasons for Staying is a 37-line antidote to suicide, abdicating, leaving, giving up, including this treasure, "Because this body is my last address.” One of the most powerful stories I know about poetry saving a young life is that of the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, who went from prison to world renowned poet. William Steighart’s Poetry Pharmacy uses poetry as balm and antidote for all manner of ills. The Pongo Poetry Project, started in 1992 in a Seattle youth center, has served over 6000 youth worldwide who have survived and are surviving extreme traumas, who have survived unsayable dimensions. Poetry saves lives. 

Poetry fosters Imagination

Poetic imagination is like water that rises up from an unfathomable well. Rich in image, it is nourishment, necessary for the soul’s life, the great moistener, something our youth need more than ever these days. It is from this place that poetic images come. In other words, the soul of the poet is not the place from which the poetry comes. Poetry comes to the soul of the poet through the poetic imagination. Poetry comes to feed the soul of the poet for the poet to be in service to the poem. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes: “One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears. . . The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.” 

Martin Shaw talks about “bone memory, [an] ancient, deep, primordial part of ourselves that seems to have a memory deeper than the heartbreaks that we’ve been through.” The power of bone memory comes from image and connects us to a vastness far wider, wilder, and wiser than ourselves. If we are going to address the global youth mental health crisis, nurturing this imagination is crucial. The psyche that is struck by the “sudden salience” of poetic image has now joined with and come into relationship with a larger life. 

Its name is the name you have buried in your blood . . . 
its eyes are the eyes of your most forbidden lover
and its claws, I can tell you its claws are gloved in fire. ~ G. MacEwen

a black that is blue
and you walk away from it ~
the heart peeling away in layers ~ R. Barre

This is the only stinging, magenta-cruel,
fire-green huffing, bellowing mayhemic
spirituality I will ever recognize . . . ~ P. Rogers

Jung writes, "[T]he psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a 'picturing' of vital activities.” Through engagement with image, imagination, and poetry, the adolescent pivots from the small and personal to the universal and de-personalized. They are provided a structure “full of meaning and purpose . . . and vital activities.” They become crucial participants in something larger than themselves. An invitation to step into a life that has meaning.

The Search

One of the central developmental tasks in adolescence is to find one’s place in the larger world, to seek answers:  “Who am I? Who am I here? And there? Now? And then? Who will I be and who do I want to be? Who do I need to be? Does my life have meaning and purpose?” Meandering through poems, reading them, writing them, discovering them, is one of the ways that teenagers engage in the search. Teenagers find themselves in poetry. 

The thread that connects

As I recited Mary Oliver’s words to Abbott, the rhythm and animation of words joined the two of us with “the wild geese high in the clean blue air” — she and I together belonged in and to the world. When it came time to say goodbye, I reminded Abbott that whenever she stands on a bluff, watches boats sailing by, or hears the wild geese heading home again maybe she would remember this moment. 

I don’t know what life holds for Abbott, but certainly it holds suffering and grief. None of us get through this life unscathed. My hope is that those words are now woven into Abbott’s sense of herself. Every time I say the poem now, Abbott has joined all of the others who have heard the words, and my mind and heart will reach out to her through the years and miles. Poetry is a thread that now connects all of us. My hope is that the poem becomes cellular memory for Abbott, fostering resilience for her journey, and that she knows all the way to her core that she matters. 

Poems referenced

Mary Oliver ~ Wild Geese

D. S. Marriott ~ Fallen, Rising, A Sack Full of Symbols

Nancy Willard ~ I Knew a Boy Who Ran with the Dogs

Theodore Roethke ~ The Waking

Rumi ~ Untitled

Gwendolyn MacEwen ~ The Red Bird You Wait For

Robin Barre ~ A Fairy Tale

Pattiann Rogers ~ Against the Ethereal

Photo by: Mumemories