A kind of healing

We all have scars. Some are deeper than others. Some are more obvious.

My cousin Jennifer was a ballet dancer who started dancing as therapy at age five, after a near-fatal burn injury left her entire back and parts of both legs covered with scar tissue.

I remember the first time I saw her dance professionally. From the audience, the scars on her bare back were indistinguishable from the taut muscled backs of her fellow dancers. She danced flawlessly, because as an artist, she had woven her external “flaws” into her mode of self-expression.

Last week, the First Fridays poetry series at Tusten library featured a group of teen writers from the area. There were eighth graders from Tri-Valley in Grahamsville, NY and from the Delaware Valley Middle School in Pennsylvania and a group of Job Corps teens from Callicoon. Most had been published in The River Reporter supplement Teen Amphibian.

Some were too shy to read their own work. Another student read for them as they stood silently beside her, mouthing the familiar words as they heard them slip from the page, bringing their deepest thoughts out of the darkness, into the safe house of the library.

Their writing explored themes ranging from enjoyment of nature to the death of a sibling to a parents’ emotional abandonment.

One young man, having “outed” himself as bisexual to his mother, only to have her reject him, now used the forum of neighbors and strangers to take another chance at acceptance. He was not disappointed this time.

As Mary Greene, who edits the supplement, noted in her closing remarks, “It is one thing to write about it (the pain in your life)... and quite another to stand up and read it aloud...”

The First Fridays series never fails to stimulate and vivify me. Laura Moran, who is the series’ curator and its mastermind, spotlights local authors along with poets of national distinction, bringing them together for an evening that also includes an open mic. The open mic is a chance for local writers (or people who don’t yet know they are writers) to get feedback on their work or just hear it aloud in public. Sometimes that simple act is the catalyst that brings an author to life.

This month, the author of note was Jeffrey McDaniel, a native Brooklynite now living in Cold Spring, NY and teaching creative writing at Sarah Lawrence.

Whether it was serendipitous or planned, McDaniel was the perfect complement to the teen writers. An accomplished, skillful writer, McDaniel touches on the same themes of love, loss and self-doubt that are the young writers’ life blood. His style is accessible and unconstrained by rigid form, and he seemed at times to be speaking in conversation with his young audience.

He won appreciative laughter with his poem, “The Archipelago of Kisses” where he describes “love at sixteen” like “being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses.”

As the father of a baby girl, McDaniels has a consciousness of parenting and an awareness of the deep scars that can be left by unconscious parenting. His words were the nourishment this audience needed and they responded to it gratefully.

Earlier that evening, someone asked me if there was anything interesting going on in town. I said I was going to a poetry reading at the library, and they demurred. I can understand why. Of course, “a poetry reading” did not accurately describe this event. And, although as a poet, I would have gone to just any poetry reading, I can understand someone else finding an overdue load of laundry more compelling.

What words could I have used to entice this person, I wonder? “Come hear a bunch of teenagers spilling their guts in uneven language?” No, that wouldn’t do.

But you couldn’t get me interested in watching a badly scarred ballerina dance, either, if you put it that way. Sometimes we just have to trust that art will connect with us, and acknowledge that we all have scars that need to heal and be healed.

— Cass Collins