Silverbells, MELT, not icky skincare
5 Baby-Friendly Poetry Practices with Anna Lena Phillips Bell
I tend to be an evangelist for morning walks. Getting outside without distraction feels incredibly supportive of the creative process for me. I now have really good data to support this because Anna Lena Phillips Bell, poet and editor of Ecotone, found her walks along the river inspired her dazzling new poetry collection, Might Could.
“I feel like this whole book is really just about taking a walk by the river,” Anna Lena says. “I wrote most of the poems from this place, and it really insisted on being front and center in my poetics, such that the book that I was working on (and I’m still working on), had to take a backseat to poems about this river and this landscape, as well as poems about trying to have a kid. Those walks were essential to making this book.”
In his introduction to the collection, Shane McCrae says Anna Lena is “one of the best lyric poets writing in America today.” With the utmost attention to meter and melody, these are poems you want to take on a walk with you. Anna Lena says that “poems live in our bodies,” and reading the collection, I experienced that so naturally.
“For me, poetry is such an embodied experience,” she says. “When I feel good in my body, it’s easier to make a good poem.”
Anna Lena sat down with Referential to recommend five practices that support creativity, are doable for parents, and get you in your body.
5 Baby-Friendly Poetry Practices
1. Taking care of your skin in a not icky way
I worked on farms as a younger person and did not take care of my skin at all. I did not wear enough sunscreen. I have tried to remedy that by actually taking care of my skin, but there are many icky versions of doing that involve a lot of products, petrochemical ingredients, money, and received ideas about beauty that I am trying to divest myself from with partial success. My friend Jessi Slavich is an esthetician and has a practice called Vena Cava. She’s a facialist, a body worker, and a really good thinker about what’s actually important for taking care of your skin. If I ever want to up my game, I go to her. Also, the things that Jessi recommends can be used just as easily for a baby.
For Ecotone’s 15th anniversary, we made a little almanac, which was all instructions of various kinds from different writers. She made a set of instructions called, “How to Wash Your Face.” I still reread that because I feel like it’s such a lovely, low-key way of taking care of your skin daily that doesn’t require a bunch of expensive stuff and doesn’t feel bad—it feels delightful.
2. Dancing in the living room at night
Before I got pregnant, I decided that I wanted to try to dance every day for a year. I used to live in Durham, North Carolina, which has a really wonderful dance studio called Ninth Street Dance, and I had a couple teachers there who I absolutely loved. There are good options here where I am, but since the pandemic, I haven’t done as much of that. I was reading Joanna Fusco’s Substack, and she mentioned having the idea to dance every day and then failing to meet that goal. I was like, “Oh, I want to do that. I’m going to dance every day.”
I made a little calendar for myself for the whole year, and I started doing it. I would always forget until the very end of the day, so then I would be in the living room at the end of the day, and I would put on Steve Reich, or Le Tigre and dance for the length of the song, and then go to bed. It was so fun while I was doing it, and then I failed to. I did not keep it up, but the idea of it is sustaining. Sometimes I think about it right before bed and just move for a second before I get in bed, and it improves my day. I have a poem about this in the book, a little reminder for myself to actually go and do it.
For me, poetry is such an embodied experience. When I feel good in my body, it’s easier to make a good poem.
Then dancing with a baby—oh my god, so fun. The first time my child was dancing and knew that they were dancing—standing there holding a sweet potato for some reason—and moving in response to music, the utter delight that my baby felt and I felt was hard to describe. Now sometimes we’ll have a dance party.
3. Fragrant walks
Something that I recommend to myself and other people is just taking a walk and smelling the air. I realize the air everywhere does not smell good. In fact, where I live sometimes it smells really bad because there are a couple different sources of pollution. There’s one factory that was doing something that made the air smell like cat piss. There’s a paper mill up river from us. I used to live near the port, and there would be all kinds of weird smells from the port.
But sometimes, you can walk outside and actually smell a plant that is releasing volatile organic compounds into the air that are for its own purposes, either to attract pollinators or to signal to other plants. Plants do this for lots of different communication reasons, but the effect for us is just delight. We get to smell something really nice. The happiness that I feel when the scent of a particular flower reaches my nose and then I see it is so great. When my baby was little, I would put him in the front carrier and walk to the river every morning. Now, he runs all around and makes it into more of an exploration than a walk, which I also enjoy.
There’s a tree that’s native to the Carolinas called silverbells (Styrax americanus). There’s a little park across the street where we go for walks. I would smell this amazing flower smell and wonder, “What is it?” Finally, I found it. It was a little tree growing in the bushes on the riverbank with these little white flowers. It smelled incredible, and then I had to find out what this plant was. It took me a while, but I figured it out. There are other more common plants in our landscape. Carolina Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens) almost smells like cotton candy, and it’s about to bloom.
4. MELT classes
This one does require some childcare, but I’ve liked taking movement classes since college. MELT is a modality that helps you to hydrate your fascia. It’s very gentle, and it’s really good for getting out of various kinds of pain, and also it’s very relaxing and pleasant. You feel like you can say that you have moved your body, but you don’t have to actually do anything terribly strenuous, in most cases, to do MELT.
There’s an amazing teacher, Angeline Shaka, who teaches online. I love her so much. She’s tough, but she’s also really kind. I find that when I am consistently doing it, it is easier to write, lift a baby and move around the world, and I am a happier person.
5. Memorizing poems
Memorizing poems is something that, like dancing every day, I always intend to do more than I actually do, but when I manage it, it makes me so happy to be able to call a poem up out of the air. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke says, “And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither.” I’ve always thought about that with poems and wanted to do more of it. In particular, I find it satisfying to memorize poems that are using meter. Poems live in our bodies, and the meter makes it easier to memorize and more satisfying to say aloud.
Also, it turns out that babies really like to memorize poems, or at least mine does, and it is such a delight. My child just recently figured out about rhyme, and it’s magic. It’s the most natural thing, making up nonsense words that rhyme, also memorizing nursery rhymes and song lyrics and saying them aloud. I’m with this kid all day, and sometimes it’s hard for me to recognize what’s happening, but suddenly there’ll be this very rhythmic speech, and I realize, “Oh, that’s that Pete Seeger song, or that’s that nursery rhyme that’s in the little book.” My kid’s capacity for having poetry in their brain is pretty amazing.
Follow Anna Lena on Instagram, read more of her work, and order Might Could here.
Reference Section
A poem Anna Lena has almost memorized is “Wedding” by Alice Oswald. Read it here.
When I was in my MFA, I worked with Anna Lena at Ecotone. This story by Amber Wheeler Bacon was one I found in the queue and absolutely loved.
And some music to dance to in your living room, from Anna Lena:
Note: I earn a small commission when you shop for books through my Bookshop links, which helps support Referential’s free subscriptions.
really enjoyed this one!