Of course. As Mark has pointed out, it doesn't mean not trying to fix the system.

Quincy hasn't (in this thread) advocated for discarding capitalism, and it's dangerous to believe (as I see, maybe inaccurately, implied in your wording, RogerBob) that improving the system requires impossible-to-achieve reforms.

Well put.

Funny how poetry and poets seem to have opposite effects on my stress levels. I wonder if anyone's done a scientific study.

Ha!

You lower my stress level, Julie. I think it's your mindfulness.

And the small rippling sound is the sound of me cheering.

Because, just yes. There are various layers of arguments as to why, including ones about all arts, not just poetry, but I think (subjective) there's a particular place for poetry in letting us engage in multi-sensory experiences that aren't ours, but enable us to enter different worlds, empathise, document the world in a way that doesn't rely on big narratives, or data driven narratives. Particularly when read aloud. Poetry can be not only a small act of personal resistance but a way of sharing alt-narratives that works on a human scale.

There have been so many diversions and false binaries produced in the arts in the past, though - one of the metaphors for the landscape of poetry on here I really liked (and I can't remember who it was or where it was posted) was poetry as a 'big tent', with lots of different people writing in it. The writer shared the landscape of writing as an inclusive big tent, which was lovely. But, in reality, structures of power in writing and all arts are forming/reforming all the time. And there are lots of gatekeepers in the big tent.

So, for me, the fact that people choose to share poetry as a practice/as a thing to do/ activity outside the tent is unequivocally positive. Particularly when they might not.
Too many words.

Aaron - the choice of keeping your poetry open, not just readable, but open/open - for me, is important - because you might choose to be a gatekeeper.

Quincy Lehr, I agree that it's scary how wellbeing/mental health has been appropriated by a neo-liberal agenda.

Sarah-Jane

Unfortunately escaping into this cherrypicked "mindfulness" is usually a way of avoiding engaging in a real, serious, meaningful revolution to change the world. It's not very different from merely taking a pill and then going back to serve the same destructive forces that resulted in you needing to take the pill. We just keep having faith in the same system over and over again, while it crushes us over and over again. Then we try to use these kinds of things as damage control, over and over, further and further, due to the frequency and extent of damage caused by destructive forces we continue to serve.

The original article shows its ignorance of mindfulness when it says, "But, what happens if you don’t enjoy sitting in lotus pose for hours? Can you still practice mindfulness? Good news! The answer is yes. In fact, there are several unsuspecting ways to participate in an activity with intention and reap similar benefits" and then goes on to suggest reciting poetry, gardening and walking.

You don't have to sit in a "lotus pose" to practise mindful breathing and if you're a beginner, and doing it properly, you shouldn't be doing it for hours. You would start with about 10 or 15 minutes.

Words are good for charming us on courses that are beneficial to us. They can breathe life into tired and discredited ideas. That's how it works. I have had a long life during which this idea has surfaced many times in popular culture, thrown up by a tide that ebbs and flows and needs to make it new.

Traditional Hindu practices gave rise to Transcendental Meditation in the fifties, rediscovered by the Beatles in the late sixties, to be ridiculed in The Young Ones in the eighties.

Zen, centuries old, brought to the foreground by Herrigel in the forties, made central to poetry by the Beats in the fifties, and brought forward again in the seventies by Pirsig et al.

Nearer home, so to speak, is the central place of The Silence in the Quaker faith, drawing gently on them all.

There has to be a reason for the persistence of this practice. I suppose it must be a response to the persistent quest for it. Mindfulness, eh? So be it. It is with us because we need it and because it works.

Political revolutions, to the right, to the left, have the same persistent periodicity. We live in the realm of cycles. When we get there, there's no there there.

Nemo

When I was at University back when we were hippies, there was a memorable graffito in the men’s toilets.

“Do not adjust your mind. There is a fault in reality”

Which I guess is Quincy’s point. On the other hand, if we don’t want reality to drive us mad then we need to find ways of coping and mindfulness may be better than drugs or denial.

Hey Nemo!!