Writing the Body

“It was a mess in there.” This was how the doctor greeted me when I emerged from the drugged stupor of a traumatic surgery where I had been cut open and stapled back together. Or did she say that I was a mess in there? The mind cannot always remember; this is the nature of trauma.

However, whatever words the doctor spoke were received by my body as invocation, and what she was calling forth felt more like blasphemy than diagnosis. Language holds the power to create, and it was this disembodied process of having my body assigned a narrative that had me become curious about what my body would say without the imposition of someone outside of myself. If I were to give the body ultimate agency, which is different from writing about the body, then what stories would she tell?

Writing the body became ceremony to (re)awaken my connection, and through our embodied writing workshop participants came to discover the rich creative source that we all have available to us. As with any ceremony, we began our workshop with grounding and participants were invited to free write with the following prompts:

• Write on the relationship with your own body.
• Write on the relationship to bodies outside of yourself.

The prompts are not poetic in nature and there is no expectation of writing in form because our relationship to our bodies have enough constraint. The prompts are intended to be low stakes so that we can access whatever it is our bodies have to say. In keeping with exercises that are low stakes, once a gentle opening to the language of our bodies was created, we then turned away from the human body in order to examine a poem about an insect.

In “Sheathed Wing,” by Hila Ratzabi, we grappled with the poet not knowing what to do with an insect that left its copper-brown gift of a body on a window. Beginning our exploration with a sentient being that is rarely, if ever, revered has the ability to sharpen our attention not just to poetic techniques but also to the subtle qualities of the physical form. Starting with this little soul allows us to distance ourselves from our bodies while developing a conversation that will support us when it’s time to hold up a mirror to our divided selves.

As we deepened our practice of becoming familiar with the body, we then turned to markedly different poems like “Here, Bullet,” written by poet and veteran Brian Turner, because if a body is what you want then let us poetically engage with the bullet whose existence is given by an appetite for bodies. Our study of bodies later turned to sermon with “a note on the body,” by poet Danez Smith, because in this disembodied world we could always use the reminder that your body still your body.

What does your body remember?
What is your body forgetting?
What is your body channeling?
What is the language of your body?

These questions arose out of a guided meditation to support us in returning to our bodies where the only prompt is to listen deeply for what arises. This allowing, this witness, will source not only your writing, but also your (re)connection with the lands of your body.