Interview with Robert McDowell
I had the privilege of interviewing Robert McDowell this afternoon. I hope you’ll take 11 minutes to listen to some of the things that inspire him, including what poetry as spiritual practice means.
I look forward to bringing more interviews to the site in upcoming months. Here’s to the first of many.
Cheers.
Robert, thank you so much for this introduction to your work. I love your poetry beginnings in your mother’s womb. I’m also a singer and brought my daughter into this life with the vibration, breath and wonder of music in the womb. I’m a life coach and in the process of creating a workshop called “Singing As a Spiritual Practice”. I appreciate the insights you shared and the perfect synchronicity of hearing you at this time.
Thank you.
Cathy Zucker
Beautiful interview. Robert gave words to an experience I have been pondering about since yesterday. A man with developmental disabilities and an anxiety disorder spoke with me. His face is often dramatically tense, almost distorted. I sat listening to him and looking on him with love. And then his face changed and softened and he looked at me in the same way. We had stepped into a moment of love. It was absolutely awesome. I thought to myself: “So this is how God looks upon this man, and me.”
Thank you for offering this interview. Since finding Three Intentions, I’ve found much that mirrors how I’m trying to live now, and that is sustaining.
There is much in Robert’s statements about finding understanding through poetry. For me, writing poetry became a way into understanding my own, my family’s, and especially my late brother’s experiences of cancer. (I’ve posted some of those poems on my blog.) Words I could put down on paper spoke for me, helped bring me to acceptance I otherwise would have fought against. And they gave me back my voice.
You say “Poetry is in our DNA” which must be true since you remember listening to your mother’s singing and
piano playing while you were still in her womb. And your experience of near death a few times had to be “high
drama” and from all that, you must have LET GO OF the precipice that you thought you were on the edge of,
for we are all hesitant about edges. Poetry, that which you write, seems to me to be about allowing Planet Earth
to be more like Heaven. Gravity holds us here on Earth, otherwise we’d fly away in a minute. To work then with
poetry writing allows us to experience the joy of flying while we’re still here. That’s my take on it, anyway.
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