VAN NUYS : Abused Women Find Purpose Through Poetry

For years, as she was pushed, shoved and beaten by her husband until bruises covered her entire body, Kim Norgaard didn’t say a word.

Even when she was hospitalized with a broken tailbone after being slammed into the wooden armrest of a couch, she told doctors she had fallen down. But in the year since fleeing to Haven Hills, the San Fernando Valley’s only battered women’s shelter, with her two young children, the 25-year-old has found her voice.

And this week, Norgaard and five survivors of domestic abuse gathered at a poetry reading in Van Nuys to encourage other women to find theirs.

“It gives a purpose to what I went through,” said Norgaard of Canoga Park after reading several poems to about two dozen people at the Valley Hospital Medical Center. “It gives me a sense of power and control.”

In recognition of the nationwide focus on domestic abuse and the surge in calls to its hot line in the weeks since Nicole Simpson’s death, Haven Hills held the community forum this week and scheduled another one for early August.

“In the past few weeks, an unbelievable sequence of events has brought domestic violence attention and focus,” said Betty Fisher, executive director of Haven Hills. “It came at a very high price for Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. But it has made many women face the reality of what their lives are.”

Calls to the shelter’s hot line have nearly doubled in the last month, according to Fisher. Many of the calls came on the heels of the television airing of 911 tapes of Nicole Simpson reporting domestic abuse.

“Women identified with those calls and the voice on the tapes,” Fisher said. “They recognized the feeling, the words, the situation.”

On Tuesday, dedicating the evening to the memory of Nicole Simpson, five women read from the book, “Finding Our Voices: Speaking Out Against the Violence,” a compilation of poetry on domestic violence put together by Jae Levine Weiss, one of the counselors at Haven Hills.

“This is a way to be vocal, a way to find power,” said Weiss, 42, of Van Nuys.

Weiss, who was beaten repeatedly during eight years of marriage until she finally fled with her 14-year-old son to Haven Hills, has used writing in the eight years since her escape as a tool for her own healing as well as to encourage other women to articulate their emotions.

At the end of the session, Weiss dedicated one of her poems to Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. “Let’s say a prayer for those of us whose lost lives’ flames were extinguished by brutality,” she read, “. . . and celebrate the essence of what they might have been had they survived.”

The shelter will present another community forum at the Valley Hospital Medical Center, 14500 Sherman Circle, at 7 p.m. Aug. 4.