ABSTRACT
How can we live well in the world? How can we learn to live with wellness? Writing poetry is creatively connected to health and healing. In The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber (2016) present a trenchant critique of contemporary academic culture and call for a deliberate commitment to slowing down. They claim that “research does not run like a mechanism; there are rhythms” (p. 57). We attend to poetry as a way of learning how to live with wellness because, as Berg and Seeber understand, “slowing down is about asserting the importance of contemplation, connectedness, fruition, and complexity” (p. 57). In our poetry we linger with the possibilities of language, especially the central energies of poetry that Jane Hirshfield (1997) identifies as “the concentrations of music, rhetoric, image, emotion, story, and voice” (p. 7), in order to linger with the possibilities of wellness.
