Poetry, surprise and older adults

“One of the great lessons of Cohn’s teaching experience is that everyone does have a poetic voice. “Right now I have a class with several students who, due to blindness, stroke or other health issues, can’t read or write,” she said. “They are still brilliant and they have a long history of loving learning, writing and language. So they come and find ways to participate. One woman, when I asked if she would like help scribing her words, said ‘I enjoy writing the poems in my head.’”

With Writing Home, Cohn aims to connect with students in a more personal and personalized way. “Rather than coming in with a cookie-cutter set of workshops, the Writing Home sessions are growing out of conversations I’ve been having as an artist-organizer, talking to experts in aging in and around the Creative Enterprise Zone, visiting existing programming for older adults – exercise classes, craft and arts groups, riding shotgun with someone delivering meals to homebound elderly.”

In a field where just getting to class counts as a victory for many students, it would be tempting to set the bar low, but Cohn measures her success by an array of metrics both challenging and inspiring. “I know sessions are succeeding when people come back for more,” she said. “We’ve succeeded if people have written something in class or between sessions. We’ve succeeded when people are bursting with eagerness to read what they wrote. We’ve succeeded when people share writing about a difficult experience and I get to witness that writer being supported by the community of writers gathered around the table. We’ve really succeeded when a student is willing to take the risk of revising work. We’ve succeeded if I share a poem an elder wrote and younger people are surprised by the quality or voice of a poem.”

And sometimes students even surprise themselves. “As a poet, one of my favorite moments is when a timid student, usually one who was given a whole lot of DOs and DON’Ts by a school teacher 70 or 80 years ago, takes a risk and tries something new in a poem. I remember a rush of pleasure when we were writing about art and I’d brought in a variety of images for writers to look at, and a student who usually wrote in very competent but tight rhyming couplets wrote an amazing, wild, gorgeous prose poem, and then looked up and asked innocently ‘Is this a poem?’””

Known by Heart’s Writing Home project launched in September in St. Paul’s Creative Enterprise Zone. Visit knownbyheartpoetry.com for more information.