Poetry as a Catalyst for Care

Poetry has been a source of my own healing. With the Forms & Features workshop “All about Self Love” I led, I was reminded that poetry has the opportunity to be a source of healing for all. I was reminded that poetry is and can be a mode of care. When we take time to care about ourselves and love ourselves, we open up the possibility of healing and resisting capitalistic and societal norms that keep us from engaging in self love and care. We also open up the possibility of being able to make space for communal care. Self care is communal care. Self love is vital to our existence. 

I am a human that believes in creating ofrendas, or altars. I believe in taking up physical and liminal spaces for my loved ones and for myself. As individuals, we deserve to be adorned, to create space for ourselves. Creating space is an act of love. 

Prompt

If you created an altar to yourself, what are three things you would include?

In exploration of self love, we read quotes from bell hooks, sat with them, and shared our reflections. I invite you to do the same. 

Prompt

Read the following quotes, sit with the quotes, write, draw, share your reflections in whatever ways serve you.

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself.”

― bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions

“Love is an act of will, both an intention and an action.” “Love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.” — bell hooks

In a world where we are asked to move quickly, I invite you to slow down. In the workshop “All about Self Love” we had the opportunity to slow down while engaging with Audre Lorde’s Questionnaire to Oneself, adapted by Divya Victor from “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” collected in Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. Divya Victor is a poet, editor, and educator. Victor is the author of various poetry collections and essays. She is an assistant professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University. She is an editor of Jacket2. 

Prompt

Check in with yourself with Audre Lorde’s Questionnaire to Oneself. Take your time with your response to each question. 

Poems to Read:

Remember by Joy Harjo

Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong by Ocean Vuong

Spend time with these poems. Name your favorite lines, your interpretation and meaning. How can you connect to these poems?

Prompt

Respond to the following questions: What do you need to remember? What do you know about yourself by heart? What makes you feel whole? What parts of yourself are you still looking for?

Writing Prompt 

Using the reflections you have from bell hooks’ quotes, your response to Audre Lorde’s questionnaire, and the close reading of Vuong’s and Harjo’s poems, create a poem focused on self love, intimate self check-in, or celebration of self. 

We closed the workshop the same way I will close this essay, with an affirmation from the Nap Ministry, “Rest is a meticulous love practice. Practice daily.”