Last March, I attended the annual National Association of Poetry Therapists conference in Boston. Browsing the vendor tables, I discovered Jennifer Bosveld’s offering, The Pocket Poetry Parenting Guide. It presents a short but impressive collection of poetry for use in helping parents with the most important and perhaps hardest job of their lives. The collection’s 26 poems bring to light the highly emotional quality of parenting and provide workshop leaders and parents a way to identify and look into the emotional issues and responses involved in raising children.

I especially resonated with the following two poems, reprinted here with the permission of Jennifer Bosvold and Pudding House Publications.

Returning Home Late
By Rasma Haidri

There are girl things on the floor:
black hairbrush, ribbons, plastic glitter
and socks.

Don’t touch a thing.
There is nothing you need to put away.
There is no such place as “away” to put things.

How perfectly your living daughters
have left evidence of their abundance.
Turn and go to them.

Do not disturb this scene they have created.
It is the beginning of the painting
in which they will show you who you are.

****

What We Teach Them
By CB Follett

 My daughter sits on the edge of her seat
so her legs can dangle and says,
her voice stretching the length of the bus,
That man looks like a monkey.

I flush, because he will never know
how much she likes monkeys,
how, at the zoo, we watch them endlessly
swinging through truncated trees. She says

they twinkle because they are having fun.
Perhaps the man would like to look
as if he’s having fun, but she and I discuss instead
hurt feelings and rudeness, until she stammers,

But I like the way he looks
and the man smiles, a real smile,
a smile that says connection, but she
now has a pinch of doubt.

As a former director of a daycare center and vocational school instructor for parents and early childhood educators and also as mother and now grandmother, I was hooked. I bought a copy of the book and learned that every purchase is a two for one, if the buyer promises to donate the second book to a parent or parenting group. Upon my return home, I sent my second copy to my daughter so she could donate it to the library at her children’s childcare center.

Impressed with the effort to use poetry to make a difference in helping parents, I wanted to learn more about Jennifer’s project and how it was going. I emailed Jennifer questions; her answers inspire ideas on how as poets and writers we can present our craft to others to help them seek truths and understand vulnerability.

Sheila
On the back cover of the book, you note that each purchase of the book is matched with a free copy to the Parenting in Public Places Project for parents of children-at-risk and for caregivers of children in underserved populations. I’d like to know more about the Parenting in Public Places project and how it uses the book.

Jennifer
Under the name Parenting in Public Places Project, I facilitate groups of parents using The Pocket Poetry Guide. I offer half-and full-day intensive reading/writing/discussion workshops with five to fifteen participants. I always have the institutions I work with provide one or two mental health professionals to sit in with the group. Poetry is powerful stuff and even under the best circumstances, what comes up can send a client crying out of the room. Even that represents a breakthrough, it can be challenging for a presenter who needs to be concerned about group dynamics and keeping to a minimum anything confusing that keeps clients from closure in a group setting.

I use The Pocket Poetry Parenting Guide as a basis for discussion of what I call Yes-based parenting, that is making YES the default response unless there are common-sense reasons for educated and thoughtful NOs. I distribute the books to parents in groups, and they consider the messages in the poems while discussing their own parenting situations. Poetry is useful in exploring this point of view because it bravely takes us close to the nerve center of experience, moving us toward recognition of our personal experiences and encouraging new points of view.

When I child asks, “Mom, can I go to the movies with friends tonight?” Mom is often so busy with a job, the house, and family stress, that she’s too tired to consider even the simplest of requests, so NO is the default answer–just in case there’s danger there, just in case her child shouldn’t be with “those kids,” just in case there’s something Mom isn’t thinking of.

Too worn out to think or out of fear, parents sometimes automatically say NO. The poetry in this anthology highlights the value of mundane interactions; it models wise parental decisions. Taking a child for a walk is evidence in a couple of poems that small decisions change lives. Poets can use this book to focus on scenarios and instill possible choices in the minds of “parents at risk,” who may not be doing this most important job well.

Parents Without Partners and especially groups at Mental Health Centers/Programs use the collection to talk about specific moments in parenting, from preparing and sharing meals to what parents might do when they can’t think of any activities to do with their children. I offer all group facilitators discounts on bulk numbers.

Sheila
What made you start the project?

Jennifer
I’ve been on boards of mental health associations and centers for decades, worked for state and county programs serving individuals who are products of bad parenting, and have dealt with the results of stressed, ill, and incapable parents all my life. I had great parents and a happy childhood. With a start like that, I had to do something. There is an obligation that comes with that kind of good fortune, I believe. Additionally, as a poet and poetry publisher, I’ve had the privilege of reading and considering for publication, an endless number of poems reflecting these challenges and about some of the saddest moments in the lives of parents, children, and observers. Dealing with our difficult childhoods is one of the most common threads among poets. There was/is need for the anthology, need for material that helps group members focus on these issues, and this is a wonderful place where poetry can serve. I coined the term “applied poetry” about 27 years ago and I can think of no more important place to apply poetry than for our parent-child relationships.

Sheila
How many of The Pocket Poetry Parenting Guides have you distributed?

Jennifer
Perhaps 2,000. We don’t have funds or time to heavily market this project, but we can be there for another 50 presentations or so. Again, any group facilitator can contact me for deep discounts.

Sheila
What are you most pleased with about the project to date?

Jennifer
I’m most pleased that taking this little book to small circles of struggling parents has introduced many of them to poetry for the first time. All of the poems speak to the parents. They are excited that they get to keep it and use it. We conduct writing exercises based on one of the poems and participants are invited (not forced) to share what they’ve written. It is amazing to see the results of their writing and how pleased they are with them. Using the tools of the poet’s trade–metaphor, hyperbole, for example–participants came close to “truth.” There are always many who say, “I’ve never thought of . . .” and whatever it is, they owe this new understanding to poetry. They leave knowing what active listening is, fairness for siblings, the value of slowing down and looking at their child’s eyes when saying YES and applying common sense to the qualifications surrounding that answer. I’m most pleased with the personal, individual participant’s ability to make a major change in her/his life–a change that positively affects the children.

Sheila
I’d certainly love to experience one of the exercises you present. Can you share one?
Writing It Real readers are parents, teachers, therapists and writers, all of whom will appreciate seeing the exercise and learning again how writing and teaching others the process facilitates personal growth.

Jennifer
Here’s a successful exercise I used for The Mental Health Association of Licking County in Newark, Ohio.

This exercise is called, “When I Said Yes.” The facilitator asks the parents in the group to put the name of their child at the top of the page and then presents a list of questions:

When was the last time you said yes to your child for something that took a lot of thought on your part? Give that decision a three- to six-word title, like “Going to the Fair with Jimmy.” Make complete sentences that state how your child’s question and your answer proceeded.

Where was your child standing/sitting when asking and what did he say? For example, “Tyrone stood in his Old Navy sweatshirt by Glen’s blasting stereo and nearly shouted, Mom, can I go to the Fair with Jimmy and his Dad tomorrow?”

Where we you in the room? Describe your place in it, your clothes, and what else was going on the in room. Use concrete images, specific detail as much as memory allows about the moment of the request.

How did you say YES?

What was your child’s reaction?

What was the outcome? Did he go? If it was a good experience, did you take time to acknowledge his part in the success for that day? (The facilitator might have to explain how to do this.)

During this exercise, Gloria (name changed) realized that she had a double standard for her son and daughter and that she never would have let her daughter go with another parent. She realized there were all kinds of things she allowed her son to do at an age she never allows for her daughter, who is growing up timid and frightened and with low self-esteem. Gloria started to explore whether she might let go of her daughter a little and allow her to expand her experiences. And she committed to try to write out some things she felt she hadn’t taught her daughter yet about protecting herself in public and away from home with others and about preparing her daughter more for the world and less for living in fear. A year later, I received a thank-you letter from the client and a follow up on how well things were working.

Sheila
Thank you for the exercise! I see how it touches people and helps them see what you talk about in the prolog and epilogue of the collection:

Each birth is a holy event and the beginning of a sacred trust. Every day is a birth day of ten thousand saviors. Expect miracles, from each one…

Practice that magic word and everything that can be, will be. Practice the word and a virtuoso is empowered–a designer, conductor, inventor, visionary in short pants. Read these poems and parenting becomes a stage of small magic tricks with that magic word in common. But the children are not our subjects, our objects of manipulation; in fact, they are apprentices, magicians too, and ultimately deserve the applause. When you applaud a child you applaud all who made the way for him. If you know the magic word, you are probably part of the solution and will recognize some moments in this book.

…We can Yes if we have to the best of our ability taught our child lessons of self-protection and we are reasonable sure that the activity is appropriate for the age and circumstances of the child. We might guess Yes if other reasonable persons would say Yes under similar circumstances. We can Yes even if a part of the Yes assumes that the majority of people in our communities are that caring population that comprises the village it takes. We can Yes even though there is evil in this and every land and the possibility of any of us running right into it.

We cannot live our lives projecting the worst that could happen. We cannot victimize ourselves further with a fear of the streets, the neighborhood around the corner, the other side of town. That fear has made prisoners of many; there are prisons we have chosen to live inside. We can never contribute o the healing of a space by staying out of that space.

I want to thank you for the words that speak not only of children and how we must raise them, but also of our own poems and inner voices and how we must facilitate them, too. No one knows better than children, I don’t think, how magical the world is, and no one is more willing to pause and to see this magic. In doing so, they inspire poets and, let us hope, also the adults who are their parents and their village. Poems restore adult eyes to seeing magic–the way babies look in their infant seats and on their changing tables, the way the door knobs to our children’s rooms feel, to the way we hold our babies when they are teething, take them for walks in wagons.

Thank you for the permission to share the poems and your words from the book. They highlight the way poetry is itself a saying a yes and thus facilitates us in our saying yes and in our ability to stretch and see beyond ourselves. All of us can benefit from doing your exercise if we think of our children, our partners our bosses or those we supervise, any who ask our permission. We will learn something new about our interactions.

****

Pudding House Publications offers The Pocket Poetry Parenting Guide, a slim, tall, perfect bound book for $12; groups receive large discounts and since individual buyers are invited to think of a parent at risk to give the book to, they receive two books for the $12. Negotiate bulk orders with Jennifer Bosveld at Pudding House, 614-986-881 or email jen@puddinghouse.com.