by Kim Rosen
This book was a gift from my dear friend and writing teacher Sage Cohen; it was her offering to help me heal after the Eaton Fire (along with When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön). My interest in both reading and writing poetry is relatively recent, and Rosen’s work is a powerful touchstone in my learning curve for both. I read it over quite a long period of time, just a few pages a day as part of my morning spiritual reading. Her main focus is on the practice of memorizing poetry and speaking it aloud, which of course many of our grandparents (and certainly my parents) would have done routinely in the course of the education of their youth. I have not yet added this into my own practice, but she certainly persuaded me of its value.
I had a deep synchronous literary experience reading this book, which I have had versions of enough times that I chalk it up to being watched over by some kind of a Divine Librarian. I had just finished writing in my morning journal about the bodily experience of singing: “the sense of the way that vibration and sound actually fuels my body. It’s not just something I produce, it’s something I also consume (kind of like writing!), or any kind of art, or movement. You do it with your body, but then your body also receives it and is nourished by it. In the case of singing, you breathe in air, and then make your body actually vibrate, and those vibrations are happening inside your body at the same time as the sound waves you produce through your mouth exit your body and then come back through your ears in a big circle.”
After finishing the rest of that entry, I put down my journal, picked up Rosen’s book, and opened it to the bookmarked page where I had stopped the day before. This is what I found: “Try reading a poem aloud, as if you were sending your voice directly into your own ears. Imagine that the sound of your voice is like a viscous liquid, a vibrational medicine puring back into you. Perhaps it is exactly the sound that can best heal and nourish you out of all the sounds of creation. . . Feel how the sound coming out of and back into you is quenching some thirst you may not have noticed before. . .”
As I wrote in my journal the next day, “Felt pretty damned mystical!”