Self-Care A-Z: Breathe Into Poetry—A Self-Care Strategy

by Kimberly Garts Crum, MSW, MFA

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body.

     ~Thich Nhat Hanh~

     There’s almost too much to celebrate these days. March was Social Work Month and National Women’s History Month. And I write this essay during National Clutter Awareness Week.

     Next up is April’s National Poetry Month. Established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets to celebrate “poets’ integral role in culture,” National Poetry Month is now the largest literary celebration in the world.

     Poetry “evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience.” Poems convey story, image, reflection, praise, and complaint. Modern verse does not restrict itself to a specific form. Rhyming at the end of lines is rare. Internal rhyme is common. You’ve heard it in rap music, which features words with similar sounds in the middle of consecutive lines. Rap is urban poetry. Sound and image. Idea. Human longing. It’s all there!

And poetry can help us breathe!

     “Your carbon dioxide level is high,” a nurse announced. “You must have been holding your breath when they drew your blood.” This was a revelation. I’m not squeamish about having my blood drawn. Nevertheless, the expectation of a needle must have caused me to stiffen and hold my breath. We humans are the opposite of trees. Trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. Humans normally do the opposite, except when we’re stressed—feeling tense, endangered, inadequate, anxious, confused, sad.  

     Current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, who began the poetry podcast The Slowdown, describes the relationship between breath and poetry in her essay, “Why Poetry Helps”—

Unlike any other form of writing, poetry has breath built right into it, thanks to the line break, and the stanza. ‘And here we breathe a little,’ the poem says, ‘and here we breathe a lot.’ Right now, as a society, I think we need that breath. That necessary pause that allows for our own wrecked little selves to enter the poem, or even just return to the room we are presently in.

Listening to and reading poetry aloud will create breath awareness.

     During Poetry Month, and beyond, incorporate poetry into your self-care. Here are sample poem excerpts, with a link to the full poem, to get you started. Read aloud, pausing for punctuation and line breaks.

“Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

“Canary,” by Rita Dove

Fact is, the invention of women under siege

has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” by Ocean Vuong

Tell me it was for the hunger

& nothing less. For hunger is to give

the body what it knows

     Poems are like postcards. Message and image are provided in very little space, digestible in a short time, and easy to return to. Memorable. In fact, you’ll find lines of poems on billboards and murals, such as this one from Amanda Gorman’s 2021 Inauguration poem “The Hill We Climb”—

For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Now comes spring.

     The time when trees inhale and exhale deeply, growing into the world, fearless and unknowing. Now is the time to rest in the beauty of the moment. Notice kindness and small wonders.

     Fold poems into your life. Take time to listen, to read, or to write without self-judgment. Tune in to an episode of the podcast Poetry Unbound by the OnBeing project, or listen to Krista Tippet’s interview “To Be Made Whole,” with U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón,

     Be like the trees. Breathe!

     Breathe the season, with a little help from e.e. cummings whose famous poem, ‘i thank you God for most this amazing,” praises the harbingers of spring—

               for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

               and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

Kimberly Garts Crum, MSW, MFA, is a former medical social worker, now a writing instructor. Poetry shaped her life at an early age. Kim continues to live by the credo of Dr. Seuss’s Horton— “I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent!” Her tattered 60-year-old Horton Hatches the Egg book sits proudly on her bookshelf still.