Biopoems and Memoirs

Participants also wrote biopoems, a relatively new poetic form taught in high schools and colleges. The poem uses a format that helps create a chiseled, vivid portrait of the writer or someone the writer cherishes.

I penned this biopoem to give my mom on Mother’s Day:

Frances
Mother, grandmother, widow for eight years now,
Relative of conversation and culture,
Lover of books and family,
Who feels compassion and kinship with her children, their
    spouses children, and every new person at the YMCA
    arthritis swim class
Who needs solitude, solace, sincerity
Who fears unannounced company and not much else
Who gives insight, news clippings, Cracker Jacks, and love
Who would like to see her children and grandchildren often
Matriarch of a great family
Bozeman

Even after the fall course ended, the elders have continued to write their stories. Said one, “I want to write a memoir for my children and grandchildren before I die.”

Another participant, Sister Georgeann Quinlan, BVM, is writing a book to accompany a program she offers called “Angels Everywhere.” Several of the elders are writing for a more exclusive audience: the self. One explained, “I write to get to know myself better and to develop an ability to let go of past experiences.”

Perhaps the drive to turn our lives into stories springs from the same impulse that led cave dwellers to carve on walls, and poets ancient and modern to chisel words into poetry. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Stories let us explore life’s crevices, peaks, and canyons, arriving where we started but knowing ourselves for the first time.

Silver Ambassador Carol Sullivan, PhD, is a Denver writer, author, former state legislator, and English teacher who created and co-teaches the course “Turning Your Life into Story,” designed for anyone age 55 and over who enrolls in courses at Denver’s Most Precious Blood Wisdom Center. This course has been networked with “Transitions Without Walls,” a Silver Planet project, funded in part by the Rose Community Foundation’s Boomers Leading Change initiative. 

You may contact Dr. Sullivan at caros8@comcast.net.