Tag Archives: Grief

Peter Markus on Using Stories to Make Sense of Grief

Teachers & Writers Magazine Spring Issue 
Writing Through Trauma, excerpt three

 

The spring issue of the magazine, out now, features a special section on Writing Through Trauma, in which writers in the schools from programs nationwide to describe their work with children and adults whose lives have been changed by violence, illness, the death of a loved one, or other tragedies. In the wake of the violence that occurred this past December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, we asked these writers to offer their insights into how words can help comfort and heal in the face of grief.  Last week we posted a piece by teaching artist Autumn Hayes, from WITS Houston. In this third excerpt,  Peter Markus, from InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit, describes how he helps his students translate grief into words.

 

Holding On, Letting Go , Making Use: Writing as Remembering

by Peter Markus

The act of remembering, I often tell my students, is most often an act of love. When someone we love leaves us, is taken from us—by the hand of God, or by a hand holding a gun—we can keep their spirit and story alive through the power of words. We can write them back into a world—the poem that the page can sometimes become—that we can hold forever in the palms of our own hands. Be empowered by that, I say. Reach back, with the pen in your hand, and hold on, as did Miguel Rodriguez, the young Detroit poet behind these words, when he wrote down what he could not otherwise get himself to say:

Crushed

Your hands
make a stone man
turn soft.

I am heavy
with the memory
of your touch.

When I invite students to write about loss, I let them know that no one in the room is exempt from the experience and the absence that remains in its wake. The older we get, the more we live and love, the more these losses accumulate. But as the poet Jack Gilbert wrote, he himself no stranger to love and the losses that come with it: “There will be music despite everything.”

Our purpose, as teaching artists in the schools, is to show students that there is a song to be sung. It may be out of sorrow, yes, but poetry allows us to celebrate what is lost even as we mourn.

As someone who believes that language has the power to restore and even redeem us, I encourage my students to reclaim that which has been taken away, to make use of experiences that can sometimes beat us and hold us down.

No one is fenced off from the violence that is our world. A mother is taken by a drunk driver. A brother meets with a bullet over a leather jacket. A classmate walks out of school on a Friday afternoon and doesn’t come back.  We use poems to tell these stories. We use stories to help us make sense. (more...)