The Power of Writing Poetry in Old Age

‘There is not a particle of life that does not bear poetry within it’—Gustave Flaubert

I read this quote to the small group of assisted living residents who had signed up for my weekly poetry writing workshop. We were gathered in the charming, cozy library of their facility, just the six of us, including my 96 year old father.

All of them had been exposed in high school to the declaiming of classic poetry; my father can still recite in sonorous tones, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

But, most of them had never written poems, and none were familiar with modern free verse; poetry had always felt a bit intimidating to them: forbidding, indecipherable, elite. Yet, they wanted to know more about it.

“Really, though, who is going to be interested in my little, ordinary life, my very ordinary thoughts?”, said Marie. “How can that be poetry?”

Marie is 94 years old, a warm, bright-eyed woman, vivacious and suffering from dementia.

“Tell me about your ‘ordinary life’, Marie”.

She spoke to the group of her simple childhood in the Bronx, the beloved cobblestoned street and magnolia tree.

She told us that when her husband came home from WWll he was depressed, had trouble finding work. Eventually, he got a job in the ‘Hard Section’ of the post office, the area where all the insufficiently addressed letters landed.

“He hated his job”, Marie said.

Her husband worked from midnight to five a.m., five days a week, attempting to unravel the mystery of the intended recipient of each missive: he opened the letters and read them for clues; he used phone books and foreign language dictionaries.

“So, Marie, your husband was really a kind of detective”.

“Well, yes, I guess he was. I hadn’t really thought about it that way. He was determined to get every letter to its final destination”.

It broke his heart, Marie said, when the task was often impossible and a letter had to be destroyed; many of them were love letters or letters of apology.

“So he was helping people, I suppose. I wish he had seen it that way. And, the funny thing is, he really missed it once he retired!”

“These recollections are not only interesting, they are very moving, Marie, and you are going to make poems about them!”

I had adopted as my mission helping Marie and the other participants recognize that their stories were worth recounting, and that telling them in the form of poems could unlock the special meaning, the value of their tales. I hoped to guide them in expressing their strong feelings and deep thoughts about their past and current lives—and while doing so, to somehow transcend their chronic infirmities.

I used Kenneth Koch’s wonderful book, ‘I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing to Old People’ as my template.

In the late 1970’s, Koch spent about six months working with greatly incapacitated elders at The American Nursing Home in New York City, aiding them in the writing of poems. His unique approach embraced the idea that poetry writing not be treated as therapy, but rather as the learning of an art—a road to an accomplishment and a way for an old person to be fully present and alive. He writes lovingly of his classes and students and includes in the book all of the poems written in his workshops.

I began my first session with the theme of colors; I asked everyone to think of a favorite color—or colors—and encouraged them to think about how that particular color made them feel, what memories that color evoked.

I read aloud poems about colors, including Marge Piercy’s poem, ‘Colors passing through us’, which ends with this stanza:

‘Cobalt as the midnight sky/ when day has gone without a trace/ and we lie in each other’s arms/ eyes shut and fingers open/ and all the colors of the world/ pass through our bodies like strings of fire’.

“These poems don’t rhyme, but I like them”, Marie said. “It’s okay if we don’t rhyme?”

“Of course!”

I wanted the students to feel free in their work, to have few restrictions in terms of poetic form; attempting to teach them how to write sonnets or sestinas in the face of their varying memory challenges would have defeated the entire purpose of the workshop. We were going to concentrate on free verse.

I told them to write down some thoughts about their chosen color, just a few lines, and to try and repeat the name of the color in each line. That way they could begin to sense a rhythm to their words, gain a sensitivity to the sounds of poetry, the musicality of it.

Marie wrote:

‘Mom’s hair was gray and silvery/ Her face as bright as the silver stars/ Her smile made me so happy/ Now my hair too is gray/ Just like my beautiful silver-haired mother’.

We had started to write poetry!

Every week I introduce a new subject; we go around the table and listen to one another’s ideas and impressions.

“What is your favorite season, Marie?”

“Oh, it is winter! I feel safe in winter time, cozy and wrapped up and protected from the world”.

Then we take turns reading aloud poems I have selected to inspire them: ‘November for Beginners’ by Rita Dove; or “Fireflies”, by Frank Ormsby. Soon, the students are itching to write. Those who struggle using a pen or transposing thought to paper dictate their compositions to me.

“Poetry is strange, isn’t it?” said Marie. “There is something magical about it”.

“There is indeed, Marie. As Dylan Thomas said: poetry is what ‘makes my toenails twinkle’. Pretty marvelous, right?”

“Yes!”

It has been seven months since we began our weekly poetry writing. Every Tuesday, Marie and Peg are already in the library when I arrive, notebooks splayed open on the table, pens and pencils nearby. My father and Barbara and Janice straggle in eventually, but they always show up.

Some sessions are less successful than others: there are times when Barb falls asleep and my father is restless with an aching shoulder; Peg might leave early for an appointment, Janice is withdrawn.

But my elderly poets are blooming.

After some initial resistance and discomfort, they now write relatively freely and openly; they are glad to tell their stories through poems. When I ask them to speak directly to the stars—or the moon or the sky— as Keats does in his poem, ‘Bright Star’, they are excited and adventurous. They have now written poems about music, childhood, roses, seasons, war. They have constructed persona poems and comparison poems and learned to use metaphors and similes. They take pride in both their own creations and those of their fellow poets. They love listening to what well-known poets have written.

And they have connected to the naturally poetic in their deepest selves, writing with increasing confidence about their wide range of personal experiences and emotions, from the very happy to the very sad.

In a recent poem that the workshop composed together, a collaborative poem about the end of WWll, Marie wrote:

‘There was a beautiful magnolia tree on our cobblestone street in the Bronx/ Before the war, my husband and I would spend hours and hours sitting under its magnificent blossoms/ Hours, hours/ So many of the boys from our neighborhood never made it home again/ Under the tree is a plaque for them/ Situated on a mound of grass/ Stars carved next to each of the dead soldiers’ names/ So many stars, too many stars’.

“This workshop is the best thing that has ever happened to me!” Marie announced at our last meeting.

Marie and my special, old age poets are viewing their days with fresh eyes. They seem to be finding beauty and meaning everywhere—in their memories of the past and in today’s world around them— through the writing of poetry.