Poetry as a Spiritual Practice: Five Movements, Five Forms
This column is meant to be a companion piece to my column, Using Poetry as Medicine: The Truth is You’re Already Doing It. While not necessary, it may be beneficial to read that one before reading this one.
Poetry is innately spiritual. It’s something we feel in our bodies long before we ever read it on the page or out loud. We know that poetry can be, and has been, passed down through the tradition of oral storytelling. Poetry is also found in sermons and prayers, hymns, and guided meditations.
We even turn to poetry as means of memorializing milestone events. We read it at weddings, at funerals, and at graduations. We include it in birth announcements and birthday cards.
We use poetry to reflect a deep knowing about ourselves and our world.
Reading and sharing poetry is one of the simplest ways to be present with, and remember the cycles of our life. Poetry allows us to access the emotions associated with each cycle and compassionately anchors and guides us as we define, clarify, and process those emotions, thus bringing us closer to our inner selves and helping us better attune to our communities.
Poetry and Spiritual Practices
Additionally, because poetry spans a diversity of subjects and forms, it has the power to reflect and mirror the components of spiritual development and practice. Spiritual practice often refers to a set of activities one can do to deepen their relationship with the sacred. These activities are usually concrete and practical, with a focus on inner attention and holistic wellness.
In his book, Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, poetic medicine expert John Fox notes that spiritual practices are intended to help people feel more connected to the unfolding of their life journey. Different traditions can emphasize different aspects of life, with some traditions emphasizing service and prayer, while others emphasize compassion and forgiveness.
In my own spiritual practice, I have come to contemplate five movements: devotion, discipline, community care, self-care, and joy.
I use the term “movements” because I view spiritual practice as a type of music wherein each aspect exists simultaneously as independent and interdependent. The movements can be experienced separately, together, in no order, and/or repeatedly as often or as little as necessary.
To engage with these movements, I also focus on practical activities, (such as pulling tarot cards, journaling, chair yoga, singing and reading, to name a few) that correspond to each one. Each activity asks me to engage in reflection with the goal of enhancing personal and collective care.
Poetry can personify spiritual movements. Poetry can reflect the range of our human experience and offer us a space to hold our confusion, our resistance, our clarity, even our wonder and awe. Poetry can be our companion in moments of stillness and action and can help us focus on minute details or notice the bigger picture. (Consider the work of a single poem versus how several poems work together across a collection.) Poetry can ground us as we do the difficult work of looking deep inside to create our own meaning.
Five Movements, Five Forms
While the variety of poetic forms that reflect spiritual practice is expansive, for this article I am only focusing on five. Some forms may be new to you while others may be familiar, and while each form is different, they often share characteristics. Much like the movements of spiritual practice, these forms can be independent and interdependent.
I’ll be utilizing A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry by Annie Finch to help me discuss these forms. Let’s start with one I’m sure many of us are familiar with.
1. The Haiku (Devotion and Discipline)
The haiku is, quite possibly, the most well-known poetic short form. Comprising three lines, and a strict syllable count of five-seven-five, the haiku forces us to include a lot of wisdom into a small space.
The haiku asks us to get quiet and still long enough to notice the world around us and capture it in quick, potent images. To write a successful haiku, we must be devoted to the image and we must be able to speak directly to what we see.
Annie Finch says that the purpose of the haiku is to capture a moment of pure awareness, with each line being self-contained. She notes that the haiku is designed to bypass our logical minds and bring us into a timeless state. A haiku calls for focus, not distraction, and reminds us that it is the repetition and collection of moments that creates a body and a life.
Haiku asks us to be present with only what we experience in the moment, nothing more and nothing less.
The most well-known haiku writer is Basho. You can find his complete collection of haiku archived at the Haiku Foundation Digital Library.
2. The Sonnet (Devotion and Discipline)
The sonnet is, perhaps, the poetic form that calls for the most discipline. With a strict line and syllable count, as well as several variations, the sonnet doesn’t simply ask for our attention and devotion, but demands it. (Read more about the anatomy of sonnets.)
When writing a sonnet, we cannot simply give up when the construction becomes difficult. We must stick with writing until we get the words right, the stresses strategically placed, and the rhyme scheme to flow. Furthermore, because sonnets often employ a problem/solution structure, wrestling with how to compose each line can aid us in developing our own problem-solving skills.
Annie Finch says: “The sonnet can keep a moment, hold a feeling or experience, and turn it around in the light of our awareness until many facets are evident. The sonnet can work for you if you understand its strengths, but work against you if you treat it too lightly or ignore its power.”
The sonnet reflects our own ability to question, wonder, search, demand, and arrive.
It is a timeless form that requires experimentation, patience, and consistency. To get the most out of our spiritual path, we must embody these ideals too. The process is almost never easy, but the result can be rewarding.
Often it is the pressure and constraints placed on our lived experiences that catalyze the greatest growth and transformation. We must not rush the process, but rather allow it to be organically revealed.
My favorite spiritual sonnets are the Holy Sonnets written by John Donne.
3. The Ghazal (Self-care, Community Care)
Made popular in places like India and Persia, the ghazal comprises at least five stanzas of self-contained couplets. Each couplet ends with the same word, and the last couplet most times, but not always, includes the name of the poet as a direct address. Additionally, the first line of the couplet includes a word that rhymes—or creates a rhythm with—another word in the second line of the couplet.
Annie Finch notes that ghazals were traditionally meant to be sung and that their rhyming and repetition can create a meditative, trance-like quality that is soothing to both body and ear. Furthermore, the ghazal has also been utilized as a call-and-response where the audience chants the refrain.
During my MFA program, the poet Dean Rader taught me a simple entry point into the ghazal that has two steps. First, choose your ending word first and write around it, and then make each couplet into a type of prompt. Let one be information about a place, one include a question, another include a list, another a political statement, and so on. We were encouraged to write each couplet separately, then arrange them later.
I view the ghazal as both a prayer and a call to accountability. This form holds the author up to their own mirror, and asks them to acknowledge their place in, and responsibility to, the larger community.
To be effective artists, leaders, and influencers we must be able to recognize our own strengths and weaknesses, what we can offer, and what we need to receive.
The ghazal is the form for that conversation, the container where we, the authors, can reflect on, and evaluate, the effectiveness of our impact.
The most well-known, modern ghazal writer is Agha Shahid Ali. One of his most famous poems is “Ghazal.” I also recommend a deep dive into his collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals.
4. The Epic (Self-care, Community Care)
The epic is such a well-known form that I’m sure examples came immediately to mind: Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Homer’s The Odyssey, Paradise Lost. We all had to read one, or more, of these narratives at some point in our schooling and, if by chance you haven’t, well, you have a journey ahead (pun absolutely intended).
Epics are poems that reflect the values of a culture. They usually include a central hero/heroine who goes off on an adventure to try and destroy a monster or other beast. The monster is usually an allegory for national conflict.
“These are the stories and traditions that are passed down through generations,” writes Finch. “They solidify identity and inspire political pride.”
Identity is the most important aspect of spiritual practice. It’s the reason why we start and the reason why we continue.
Our identity shifts, changes, and solidifies within, and with, each movement.
It is only when we know who we are that we can find our place in community, our sense of belonging. It is in community that we learn our role and how we contribute. At the same time, the epic can remind us of our strength. While our journeys may be similar, each of us has our own path to follow.
If you desire a conversation with a higher power, I recommend The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (if you buy the book, I highly recommend a version with the full color plates; you can also listen to the audiobook) and the “brothers” section in Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light.
5. The Paradelle (Joy and Playfulness)
There’s not much known about the paradelle form except that it is beloved by poet Billy Collins. Started as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke, the paradelle is a four-stanza poem where the first and second lines of each stanza are repeated and then the fifth and six lines include only the words from the first two lines, but in a different order. The final stanza of the poem includes all the words, and only those words, from all the other stanzas in the poem.
The lines in the poem can both make sense and not make sense. It is a form that, according to Annie Finch, asks us to challenge ourselves and our history.
This form is humorous, experimental, cyclical, and recursive, and teaches us that the spiritual path is non-linear.
Instead of moving in a straight, predetermined line, spirituality often involves moving back and forth between cycles, revisiting lessons we thought we had already learned.
The form offers us, at once, a sense of familiarity and surprise and encourages us to let go of self-consciousness in favor of playfulness. This form reminds us that the spiritual path, while important, doesn’t have to be serious to be meaningful.
We can have fun in our practice, get creative with it, laugh. We can dance with life. When we follow our joy, we are living as our highest self.
You can read my paradelle, “Nature’s Paradise,” published in Dominican University of California’s Tuxedo Arts Journal.
Final Thoughts
The best way to enter a spiritual journey—and a poetic one—is with curiosity. Allow yourself to gather and taste poems. Read first lines, read last lines, pick a random page in a random book and see what message is available to you. Have fun, be spontaneous.
Seek the words, but also let the words seek you.
Don’t try too hard to make the words make sense. If they don’t make sense today, you can try again tomorrow and the day after that.
Spiritual practice is a practice in renewal. Move with your rhythms and let the poetry follow you.
In the words of John Fox: “notice the exquisite details of your life. Let it be a magical stage on which anything can happen.”
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This article was published on November 21, 2024. Written by:
