POETRY STUDIO — free as the sky

After earnest inner debate, I signed up for an online poetry class, offered by CenterQuest School of Spiritual Direction’s Lifelong Learning Community. I debated because it is one thing to like, bordering love, poetry, it would be a completely different matter to write poetry. The discovery of poetry as something I love came from a startling exploration during COVID-19.

Unlike other more direct, logical, and binary writing genres, poetry holds generous and free space for contradictions, mystery, and wonder without needing conclusions. (If conclusion, one would have to wonder “whose” and “why” conclusion.) The vast space allows for questions and self-discovery and a sacred meeting ground between what is universal and personal. Poetry does not plunder mystery with concepts. Poetry questions and invites us to ponder and search deep within and look for connections both intra-personally and universally. Poetry is a way of seeing and knowing beyond my immediate self which paradoxically includes me. Poetry because of its bountiful silence could pass as a language of God.

My biggest cheerleader has been my wife, nudging me ever so gently to take a stab at writing poetry. Perhaps she saw something in me that I had not seen. All in all, I semi-hypnotize myself as if this is just one class. So, I am not making a big deal out of this. Which by the way comes in handy so I can conveniently save myself from making a fool of myself if needed. At the same time, it is a step, a deliberate one. One thing is for sure: I know I am curious more than anything. Years ago, for fun, we along with another couple decided to enter a pitch-dark cavernous passage in Cappadocia Turkey with no lights on, Moving what was less than 20 yards seemed like an eternity. We were on our fours, crawling and groping in darkness. This poetry studio feels like that.

I have tried to write and poke at poetry before, but looking back, I tried too hard to be perfect and precise. It did not feel natural. I was too serious, and not having fun. During our first online session, the instructor gave the participants prompts to write on two separate occasions. The first was to write an acrostic poem, using my first name, C-H-O-N-G. She gave us 10 minutes. Later, she read a poem and told us to use the poem as a launching pad to go in whichever direction we wanted to go. This time within 12 minutes. Since there were time limits, I had to let it fly without much filtering and “perfecting” (as if I could do so). I let my hands do the work and lines flowed out based on my recent life experiences. Surprisingly, the time restriction was more helpful than I initially feared.

This class was attractive because it was combined with spiritual direction principles. We are not critiquing each other’s works (I am not sure if I can survive such a class), but essentially holding space for all to access inner reality and be faithful in the moment. No room and effort is made to judge and comment on each other’s works. We are to merely notice and share responses based on our own life experiences. As the course is aptly named, “Ordinary Words, Extraordinary Grace: Writing from the Heart,” I experienced the sacred in our ordinary and the moment.

During the week, I was given another assignment to write a poem, describing a scene I was in, again with a time limit of 12 minutes. No filtering and editing. The poem was not merely to narrate but to project an image that was being evoked in me and to express energy and meaning. I had known that poetry is sacred and intimate before and I am scratching the surface of vulnerability. More than anything, this opportunity permits me to plumb the depths of my interiority and perhaps even alternate consciousness I do not yet know I possess and have words.

For a day, my wife and I decided to act like tourists in Kuala Lumpur. To start our venture for the day, I found a café converted from a 100-year-old heritage home where the old and new collide. After a few sips of cappuccino, I put the timer on. And this. I later titled it, “Bliss and Birds.”

Date with my sweetness,
surrounded in the vertical world of grey and red blocks, trees and
sky. With my head tilted, my eyes climb up and down.

Inside an old building turned into a modern chic café,
cages hang vertically from the tall ceiling,
without birds,
the main attraction.

Wondered why at first, then relieved of their emptiness.

I welcome the emptiness of planning, blank stares
toward efficiency. I welcome freedom of imagination of the vertical world of
how high I can go. What can I see from above?
Those who have learned to
let go and emptied. At last, it is a
free world of bliss and birds.