Land of Stone: Breaking Silence Through Poetry

By Karen Chase

For more than a decade, Karen Chase taught poetry writing to severely incapacitated patients at a large psychiatric hospital outside of New York City. During that time, she began working with Ben, a handsome, formerly popular and athletic young man who had given up speaking and had withdrawn from social interaction. Meeting on the locked ward every week for two years, Chase and Ben passed a pad of paper back and forth, taking turns writing one line of poetry each, ultimately producing 180 poems that responded to, diverged from, and built on each other’s words. Land of Stone is Chase’s account of writing with Ben, an experience that was deeply transformative for both poet and patient.

In Chase’s engrossing narrative, readers will find inspiration in the power of writing to change and heal, as well as a compelling firsthand look at the relationship between poet and patient. As she tells of Ben’s struggle to come out of silence, Chase also recounts the issues in her own life that she confronts by writing with Ben, including her mother’s recent death and a childhood struggle with polio. Also, since poetry writing seems to reach Ben in a way that his clinical therapy cannot, Chase describes and analyzes Ben’s writing in detail to investigate the changes that appeared to be taking place in him as their work progressed. A separate section presents twenty-two poems that Chase wrote with Ben, selected to show his linguistic development over time, and a final section offers Chase’s thoughtful reflections on the creative process.

Land of Stone will provide honest and valuable insight to psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, alternative therapists, and other mental health practitioners, and will also surely be of interest to creative writers, teachers, linguists, and anyone looking to explore the connections between language and healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9780814335604

Karen Chase

Karen Chase is an accomplished poet. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker and The New Republic, and have been anthologized in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and Billy Collins’s Poetry 180. She is also the author of Kazimierz Square: Poems.

Book preview

everything.

I Am a Stone

Ben Begins to Write

Summer is about to end. A light-colored car is caught in a traffic jam on the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. The car has no air conditioner, the air is sticky and thick, and no one cracks a window. This is how I picture the scene. Mr. and Mrs. X are in the front seat, Ben and his older brother, Martin, in back. Except for an occasional futile horn and the whirr of traffic speeding the opposite way, there’s no sound. No one complains, no one suggests rolling down a window, no one says a thing.

With no hint of trouble brewing, Ben grabs Martin by the shoulders and begins to shake him robotically and mercilessly. Mr. X swerves off the highway onto the wide right shoulder and pulls Ben off Martin. By then Martin is screaming bloody murder, Ben is saying nothing, Mrs. X is quiet, and Mr. X has halted the outburst. It is indescribably hot.

They pull back onto the road. Traffic inches along, then eventually picks up speed, and within half an hour the family arrives home. A few days later, Ben is sitting upright, his posture-perfect back straight, on the drab green living-room sofa, watching the weather report on TV. There’s flooding in the Midwest; the Missouri has overflowed its banks. Towns are going underwater. Ben is watching aerial views of devastation. No amount of sandbagging, no amount of citizen effort, eases the disaster. The National Guard is rescuing people by helicopter. Ben, unmoving, is glued to the screen.

Arriving home from work, Mrs. X opens the front door, walks into the kitchen, and puts water up for tea to have with the chocolate babka she baked the day before. She has been on her feet since morning, selling clothes at a Manhattan boutique.

Would you like a cup of tea, Ben? she asks in her still-thick Eastern European accent.

Ben abruptly rises from the sofa, walks over to his mother, and throws her onto the floor, saying, Why do you keep baking my cake with poison?

The next week, Mr. and Mrs. X bring Ben to Rosedale Hospital. When asked why they have brought him in for admission, they say, He has not talked in six years. That’s all. No mention of either the car or cake incident. When Ben is asked why he’s there, all he says is, Everything is fine.

It’s the end of a hard summer, and I’ve just driven almost three hours south to get to work at Rosedale. My mother died a few months ago, and the ride down gives me a stretch of time to maybe think about it. This summer I’ve been writing a lot of poems and have been generally withdrawn.

I unlock the door to the ward and walk down the hall toward the nurses station. A new patient is standing motionless next to the water fountain. He gazes at the wall and doesn’t seem to notice me as I pass. No matter how distracted I am, there’s no way I could miss him. His looks arrest me. More than six feet tall, with a lean build, he has close-cropped black hair and piercing dark eyes, a long, aquiline nose, and full lips. He’s wearing an immaculately tailored shirt tucked in to bleached blue jeans and plain white sneakers. As I walk by, I’m uncomfortably aware of how small I am compared with his large frame. A nurse on duty tells me Ben has just come on the ward and barely talks.

The next day, he’s standing in the exact same place, staring at the same spot on the wall. I stop.

Hi. My name is Karen Chase, and I write poems with people here. I’m wondering if you’d like to try it.

Yes, he says, without moving his eyes from the wall. Surprised that he answered me, and surprised that he agreed, I set up a time to meet with him the following week.

Before this, I’d worked with a few people at Rosedale who were silent or almost silent. It took enormous will and wish on both my part and the patient’s part to make a go of it. Ben’s first definitive yes and my susceptibility at that moment made for an auspicious start.

Since my mother’s death in the spring, I had pulled back from the hospital work. Each week when I arrived there, the staff, out of concern and compassion, asked how I felt, how I was doing. Really, I had nothing to say, but I responded, Things are going okay. What had been okay, in fact, was writing. It was my sanctuary.

Talking about her death was not what I wanted to do. In fact, talking about anything had little appeal. So when the staff told me that Ben said the words yes, no, everything is fine, and rarely anything else, that sounded mighty good to me.

The next week, I’m due to meet with Ben for the first time. I wake up early in my cottage on a lake in rural Massachusetts. In the coming light of morning, I make my way out to the cold, dark car, turn the heat way up, leave the radio off, and begin the long drive south. No thoughts of Ben—in fact, no thoughts at all. The ride passes in a flash. There I am, pulling into the huge hospital parking lot. Where have I been all these hours? I have no idea. Fumbling through my oversize canvas bag for my keys as I meander through the lavish corridors, then up the stairs to the ward, I find my furry rabbit’s foot on the key chain. I unlock the heavy ward door. Ben is watching the weather report on TV at the end of the hall. His eyes land right on me, and he gets up and walks in my direction. I motion toward the porch and say hi. He says nothing, and we both walk to the porch.

The porch is a long, narrow room with a bank of windows facing the enormous old maples outside. On the opposing wall, a large plate-glass window looks in to the nurses station. More accurately, the window looks out; whatever happens on the porch is visible to the staff, and they keep watch. Today I’m particularly aware and glad about this. It’s windy, I notice as I walk in and sit down. The leaves look very huge and very green. I’m aware of the discrepancy between the outside lushness and the inside drabness.

Ben sits down, then I sit on a chair on the opposite side of a long, low oak table. Neither of us has uttered a sound so far, but it is strangely comfortable.

As if it were one vague, long word, I mumble, Whatdoyouthinkofpoetry?

As I ask the question, Ben averts his eyes, then focuses right on me. His look turns into the definition of eye contact. He says nothing.

You like it? I ask.

Long pause, tense again. Still, oddly comfortable.

No.

Now Ben glares at me, as if the sound of my voice has insulted him. He did agree to meet with me, I remind myself, a bit confused.

Want to write? I say.

Yes.

Here is a man who says little, but he seems to say what he means. I lean over and pull a small stone from my briefcase. Because he looked like a stone to me the week before, it occurred to me that we might use a stone as a takeoff for writing.

I call the stone the third thing. When I first began to teach at Rosedale, there were numerous objects—you could call them ritual objects—that I brought in to stimulate writing. Put an apple, a shoe, a shell on a table, and each writer can focus on it in his or her written line.

When I put the stone on the table between us, Ben did not touch the stone but looked at it for a long while. I wrote, I am a stone on top of the page and handed him the pad and pencil. Neither of us said a word. Without a moment’s hesitation, he wrote, a stone is good and passed the pad back to me. I added another line. And so began the rhythmic back and forth of our work together, a reliable pattern that lasted for two years.

I am a stone (K)

a stone is good (B)

it sits on a field (K)

it never worries (B)

it never dreams (K)

it always comes through (B)

in any weather (K)

everything is always fine with it (B)

even in blizzards (K)

everything is always okay with a stone (B)

By relating to the third thing, the stone, rather than to each other or ourselves, I wanted to stress that our writing was going to be about the outside world, that we were not going to use words to directly express anything personal. As a psychiatric patient, he was continually urged to talk about his personal life. As a woman who had just lost her mother, I was often urged to talk about her death, with the assumption being that talking about my loss would help.

Writing poems with Ben was going to be different. I wanted to show this stonelike character that external images can correspond to internal states. Writing about a stone was a way to be personally accurate, a way to tell a subjective truth. In other words, I’m not really a stone, but I’m like a stone. When I wrote I am a stone, I was telling Ben, You can make up things in a poem, and I was saying, You’re not alone, fellow. I, too, could be stony.

Much like Ben’s posture, the structure of his lines was rigid. Although my lines respond to his, the reverse is not true. You can read his lines and skip over mine. Had he ignored what I wrote? I had no idea.

Even if he was ignoring my lines, my experience of writing our poem was vastly different from my work with Ashley, another patient on the ward. After I wrote my line, she traced over it as if it were hers. When I wrote another, she erased it and replaced it with a different one. It took a long while before we alternated with our own lines. The notion of dialogue had been absent. For her, talking meant monologue, and she talked incessantly. Talking seemed to be her way to fill space, to erase other people.

But with Ben, I sensed connection from the start.