In describing what happens when we read literature, health humanities scholar Rita Charon uses the metaphor of a clearing. A story or poem, she proffers, provides a space we and others can enter, in which “any one in any place has the chance to make contact.”
A poem can be shared between all of us in a way an individual conversation cannot. And so, when we read together and share our attention to the form and meaning of the poetry or sacred text before us, we gather in the space our attention creates. In this clearing we have the chance to make contact with one another. We have the opportunity, Marie Howe suggests in her poem “The Map,” to understand:
The Map
The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world.
The girl was going over her global studies homework
in the air where she drew the map with her finger
touching the Gobi desert,
the Plateau of Tiber in front of her,
and looking through her transparent map backwards
I did suddenly see,
how her left is my right, and for a moment I understood.
Marie Howe
Rosemary Weatherston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director, Women’s & Gender Studies Program
Director, Dudley Randall Center for Print Culture
313.993.1083