Each day, I write the poem of my body. The more I’m able to befriend movement as a means to learn what knowledge lives within, the more interesting my experience becomes. What poem might my body write today?
Poems are distillations into presence wherein now exists in blood flowing through veins, in muscles contracting and releasing, in joints flexing and extending, in this inhale, in this foot strike against the pavement, in this sigh. “To be alive with this tremendous energy,” Joel Kramer states in The Passionate Mind, “is to be alive now…It’s all happening now, which is a moment to moment thing.” All the ways we might choose to move: practicing yoga asana, lifting heavy weights, strength training, endurance running—these are all places of breath and attention, where the mind is compelled to show up and feel, to build intimacy with what’s here, down on a tissue level, down deep in the wellspring of intuition, a place from which poetic acuity materializes.
Every Sunday, at my sweet sangha, Yogasource, in Santa Fe, I teach a class called, My Body is a Poem. I teach movement through the lens of poems and poems through the lens of movement. Poetic expression is deeply yoked for me with the continued practice of moving. Being in movement-based meditation-in-action allows us to learn to feel our bodies. This process of interoception is an ongoing discernment—a distillation of our awareness—towards the signals coming from within our bodies.
Each day, I write the poem of my body. The more I’m able to befriend movement as a means to learn what knowledge lives within, the more interesting my experience becomes.
The poem is alive in the body, and we get to tune toward how that poem wants to come forth onto the page. There’s so much to consider. What thoughts connect to what movements? And why? What types of movement patterns help me wake up awareness? What’s tangled in this connective tissue tug? What actions help me shift energy to places that need it more? How might actions that stimulate blood flow and reinforce postural length create the conditions for creative awareness, too, to flow more easily through these elongated, clearer channels? What movements help me settle my nervous system so that I might arrive at my writing desk more ready to meet craft?
I’ve had this embodied experience many times wherein movement created the conditions for poetic awareness. In a recent practice of self-guided exploratory movement, my big toe kept wanting to lead a kick. I was lying on the floor poking the air with the toe; my muscles of extension continued to flex and extend from the hip and knee towards where it insisted I point. I kept repeating the pattern, my toe curious, my toe in the lead, and after some time, it brought me to feel as if I was in utero, poking for my mother’s attention, for more food.
I’ve been writing poems about my history of disordered eating and hadn’t yet traced awareness back to pre-birth. Once I took the energy into my notebook, the writing activated memories of being told family narratives of how I stripped Mom’s teeth of their calcium and that being pregnant with me caused her a mouthful of cavities. My physical study, on the floor, poking at what was there in the open field of the air, led to newfound levels of learning to process, in poems on the page, where my initial feelings of hunger came from.
Wild, the embodied realm is eager for inquiry, if one is willing and interested to walk the paths of fascial fibers into latent awes waiting to be discovered.
Once a year, I lead a poetry & movement retreat with my beloved teacher, Mark Doty. Folks move their bodies in the yoga studio and on the trails with me, and they move their minds on the page in craft talks with Mark. A few years ago, Mark and I took a group of poets deep into the quietude of the northern New Mexican microcosm of Ghost Ranch’s land rich with aging Piñons and otherworldly hot-toned sandstone cliffs of Middle Jurassic rock. I nudged one of the participants, new to me that week, Kristin Lueke, to scale a safe but scary vertical portal from the trail up to the mesa’s top by way of some unexpecting, light bouldering. We were a bit ahead of the other hikers, so it was just us and our spirits in our bodies and the spirits of the rocks. She was pretty scared. Didn’t want to do it, froze a few times. But she climbed. And Kristin and I found our way thereafter to the edge of the long, flat summit to sit together and look out over the scene.
A day later, when she read her poem, Ghost Ranch—a deep reflection on grief through the lens of losing her dog, Mimsy—I remember tears, mine, at the lines:
something small i love is leaving me.
now it’s late morning in abiquiu & i’m alone
in the courtyard, rolling around on the flagstone
breathing.
The gestures of moving, being, and breathing coalesced for Kristin as this poem, which emerged from the state of presence that is meditation-in-action. “Meditation is not a removal from the world,” Kramer writes, “it’s an extraordinary activity, an activity without effort, that involves a direct confrontation with that which is, always containing within it the eternal.”
Skill-building within movement modalities helps us practice noticing…so we are more able to welcome these moments into our art, our words, and share the practice of presence.
Look at how, in Dance Party, Clint Smith recounts his speaker’s dance movement experience with his kiddos. After the of flow music and moment, his speaker reflects:
Now, halfway through the song, everyone is jumping,
and I, caught up in the ecstasy of this moment, fall
to the ground and convince this no‐longer‐young
body that it is a good idea to start doing the worm.And when my children see me, their eyes become pools
of possibility, and it is clear they see this as a clarion call
to climb onto my back. And now, here we are…
The speaker relates being in “the ecstasy of this moment.” It’s from the joy of doing the worm on the floor with his kids that the poem comes to be.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Wordsworth’s definition of poetry being “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility.” Those “feelings” are equally as physical as they are emotional. That’s the interoception. Skill-building within movement modalities helps us practice noticing—the sweetness of a post-dinner family dance, the stirrings of an eating behavior through the movement of a leg, climbing rocks and breathing into the heavy grief of a dead dog—so we are more able to welcome these moments into our art, our words, and share the practice of presence, the practice of being bodies in motion, the practice of writing poems, with others.
Plant your feet on the ground. Take a few deep breaths. Wiggle your jaw. Roll of wrists. Rebound your heels against the earth. Shrug your shoulders. Lift your arms, hook your thumbs, and lengthen your spine. Feel what’s here. For as Mary Oliver writes in The Deer, “We only have so many mornings to do it, to look around and love the oily fur of our lives.” So, wake up that body, & wake up the poems!
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My Wise Little Ghost by Emily Hyland is available from Trio House Press.