OVERexpressed & OUT features Jacinta White
Founder of The Word Project shares how poetry helps her to transform grief into healing.
In 2001, Jacinta White founded The Word Project where she works with individuals and groups using art as a catalyst for healing. In 2015, she founded Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing to provide a platform for those to tell their story through poetry, creative nonfiction, and photography.
Jacinta White uses "poetry as healer" and has studied Poetry Therapy with Dr. Sherry Reiter of the Creative Righting Center and facilitated alongside John Fox of the Institute for Poetic Medicine. Her chapbook, broken ritual was published by Finishing Line Press (2012), and she's a contributor to My Soul to His Spirit: Soulful Writings of African American Daughters to Their Fathers (SoulDictates, 2005), and editor of Walking With God (Duncan & Duncan, 1996).
Jacinta's latest collection of poems is Resurrecting the Bones: Born from a Journey through African American Churches & Cemeteries of the Rural South (Press 53, 2019).
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, the author of Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories describes White’s lush poetry as, “Part meditation, part prayer, and part act of resurrection that evokes the complex interweaving of ancestry, praise, and everyday interaction that comprise black church life in the South.”
Jacinta’s Prompts for Writing:
I like to find a word or phrase in a magazine or a meme that stands out for me and then use that as inspiration for a poem or a journaling prompt. What's the word or phase you've chosen? Where did it lead your writing?
So much about the creative and healing journey is to "trust the journey." Journal on what stands in your way of trust. Then, take time to write who you would be/how you would feel if you did trust yourself, the Universe, perhaps others more. What's something beautiful that has come out of trusting the journey?
Author Julia Cameron talks about "morning pages." It's an exercise where you write three pages first thing in the morning to get your freshest thinking. It's a practice I'm pretty consistent with and it has helped me find clarity as I listen to my desires. It's worth trying!
Poems by Jacinta V. White
GUMBO SOIL by Jacinta V. White Gumbo soil is great for growing cotton & blueberries & heirloom roses but it is better for burying the dead & stories & roots & family ties & nonsense & quarrels & letters & coins & cigarette butts & moonshine & past lives & past wives with boyfriends & all things unspeakable & guilt & sin & worn shoes & costume jewelry & faux fur & fake identities & hatchets & all the harsh language ever spoken to you or against you words that stink & slay & slash & fly out all which cannot be unburied, deep memories & gapped smiles & Southern charm & lopsided history books & roots of willow trees still trying to speak, if anyone will listen & letters in boxes under floorboards & bruised photos & the feet of your too-late lover standing graveside tearful & empty-handed Resurrecting the Bones: Born from a Journey through African American Churches & Cemeteries in the Rural South, by Jacinta V. White. © 2019, published by Press 53.
CHURCH MOTHERS by Jacinta V. White women in white dresses surround me after service like absent mothers longing for baby’s return to their breasts rejoicing—prayers for a daughter’s return are answered— while they wait in line to tell me they knew my folks, and how they knew me young, in pigtails and knee-highs, they remind me when I was not yet full of the life I now hold behind my eyes pain taking up space I thought no one could see women, gray curls spiraling from beneath their cloth hats, twist both my arms in theirs take her to the altar one says to the other I am caught up in their strength speechless and well-taught to not resist this kind of salvation we fall to our knees caught by a purple, velvet cloud and wooden rails blood and water sprinkled on my forehead forgive they firmly whisper their breath on each of my cheeks say you forgive Resurrecting the Bones: Born from a Journey through African American Churches & Cemeteries in the Rural South, by Jacinta V. White. © 2019, published by Press 53.