ABSTRACT
This chapter explores with stories and poems as attempt to share the personal and professional understanding of the notion of strong poets, a notion that for us includes both narrative and poetic voices. It focuses on the stories and poems that speak to large and small events and situations that connect us to the ongoing influence strong poets have in our lives. The chapter acknowledges those who have provided us with the medicine to understand the power of our own stories and poems in our present work and life. It also believe that forming and sustaining relationship with one's self is critical for maintaining an attitude of openness for the hard work of sifting and sorting past experience to make new meaning of it in the present. The chapter provides a link between this poem and the first story in that what both have witnessed at home in childhoods has remained, continuing to inform thinking today.
