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For my last SharePost, submitted on 28 December, 2008, (www.healthcentral.com/schizophrenia/c/100/53657/ii-13-consumer ), I submitted a poem entitled "WARD 7N," which I believe touches on self-stigmatization and forgiveness in consumers and asked that visitors read and tell us what this poem ...
It is very difficult for me to read the poetry of others or to understand it when it is spoken/read. It is like my brain cannot keep up with the imagery and analogies and pace and use of poetic tools. So when I wrote w/o really commenting on the poem you had written, that was why. I could not read it closely. But now I printed it off today and am trying to read it closely and get a good idea of what you are saying. It is difficult, as I said. Isn't it odd that I think I am a very good poet yet I have trouble reading poetry? People who know I write poetry often try to force books of both poets of the past and contemporary poets on me and I rarely ever read it.
I do understand, I believe, what you are saying with your poem because I wrote a poem very much like it some time ago. To me, it speaks of the essential aloneness of mental illness and the way it is demoralizing (which could be self-stigmatization, I guess.) It is as if you keep guessing which way to turn to get relief, even though you acknowledge the relief the medication provides. In the end, I cannot tell if you are turning to self love or the love ot others for forgiveness of the pain. Either way, it is a hopeful conclusion.
Carolyn
Carolyn:
Thank you for the comments. I too often have trouble reading poems written by others and have turned to writing my own poetry to fill the gap. In reading the poetry of others, I am often afraid that there is some essential message I am missing, something that I do not see for lack of experience or even empathy. I've also discovered that there are many, many people who say they simply don't read poetry becuase they "just don't get it."
In talking with others that do read poetry, I have found that each and everyone comes away from the same poem with a different idea of what the poet is trying to say. Perhaps this is one of the enduring values of poetry. The reader somehow becomes personally invested in the poem.
I believe that writing poetry, as you have suggested, can be very therapeutic, sometimes even cathartic. Along this line, I often find that each time I go back to read a familiar poem once again, I take some new thought or idea away. I think it's similar to journaling, but much more impactful.
You're probably too young to remember the movie "Back to School" staring Roger Dangerfield. In the movie, he goes back to college after a long and very succesful
career in the retail clothing business. He doesn't study and when asked by his English teacher to write a paper analysing a poem, he hires the very poet that wrote the poem to write the paper for him. The teacher flunks Roger because the analysis he submits "bears no relation whatever to what the poet is trying to say."
At one point in my illness (my senior year in college) I had developed my own language by using English words but changing their meanings. In this private language I filled journal after journal. I found these journals about eight years ago when we moved. The journals had been written over thirty-five years before. I could not read any of the entries.
Carolyn, you are extraordinary person with a large measure of wisdom. Write poetry always for yourself and you will leave a legacy from which future readers will learn more about life than they expect.
Robin