May 16, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
If you know me at all, then you know I love poetry. I read a lot of it. You might say I consume metaphors, images, and ideas. I also carve space into each week to write poems, enjoying the struggle and care of language. I find restrictions and limitations frustrating, but usually worthwhile. So, it will come as no surprise that I immensely enjoy the entire month of April (National Poetry Month) and attend as many events as possible. This year was no different. And while I could highlight any number of great things that I found, I want to focus solely on a class with poet Latif Askia Ba. I attended his course “Waking Up in the Body” which was hosted by the Poetry Foundation on April 29th.
Incorporating lessons from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Ba instructed us on how he uses mindfulness in his writing. Repeating a phrase from the Sutta, he said, a “mendicant acts with situational awareness.” In other words, it is important to realize where we are, what things are in our space or touching our body, and how we feel in the moment. He had us focus on the body itself because the body carries memory.
This subject is deeply personal to Ba who has Choreic Cerebral Palsy. Ba turned our attention to another poet with cerebral palsy, Larry Eigner. In our workshop, Ba had us listen to Eigner’s poems and then dictate the sounds we heard. The poems proved difficult to access in audio-only form. Ba challenged us, however, by explaining that poetry is already a form of fragments. Poems are as often misunderstood as understood. He invited us to take pleasure in the sound, the misunderstandings, the journey itself. Eigner questions language, space, understanding, and more in his terse, open-ended poems. Eigner stretched limits of understanding by using the full page and leaving a lot of white space.
Ba’s open-minded approach to language allows anyone to access poetry. Even if all you hear are sounds, then you have succeeded. I often first access only an image on my first reading of a new poem. I might hear important sounds, repeated sounds. I miss so many things on that first read. As with everything, a newcomer misses more than they grasp. Giving myself grace to miss things enhanced my ability to concentrate on what I did notice. In this way, I accessed important concepts. Eigner explained that he (like all of us) has so many simultaneous thoughts that it is impossible to list them on the page. He might write five different random thoughts on five consecutive lines. What seems disconnected to the reader is actually a demonstration of the mind’s movement. Instead of trying to impose order on these stanzas, maybe it is enough to realize that the human mind is a messy, chaotic stream of noise. Sometimes when we write down the noise, we find novel ideas, unexpected emotional turns, and a therapeutic experience. This type of poetry feels destabilizing, but is in actuality, a way of representing experience.
Ba’s poetry reminds me the many ways in which language is embodied. In his poem “Cratylus,” Ba combines philosophy with the body’s experience. He writes:
“…. First. My body was a crisis. Then
an enigma. Then a liability. Now it is a brief encyclopedia. If you’re confused
Cratylus try saying it back to yourself in a palsied accent. So that each spasm
is a word turned inside out. So that knowledge is a dyskinetic hand….”
Ba has an exceptional ability to capture both body and mind in language, which is an incredibly difficult feat. Therefore, if I could highlight any single experience from National Poetry Month, it would be a workshop with Latif Askia Ba. Access a few of his poems at The Poetry Foundation. I highly encourage you to listen.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ MaxBert
