Ackerman on psychotherapy and and poetry.Poems Foster Self-Discovery. I sent him [Ed: her psychiatrist] all the poems that emerged, hot off the heart, and they became an important part of the therapy, another place where we could meet. There’s a tradition of using artworks in this way, children’s drawings especially, and it opened up some unexpected avenues. So much of life falls between the seams of the sayable. It’s ironic that poets use words to convey what lies beyond words, that poetry becomes most powerful where simple language fails, allowing one to bridge the conscious and unconscious, and even festoon that bridge with sensations and subterranean desires. In a poem by Emily Dickinson, all that may occur in a single word, phrase or even line break. Metaphor thrives in the spaces between words. Of course, psychotherapy and lyrical poetry address many of the same issues, and they both create a space where one can explore one's relationship with oneself and others. Both require rules, tremendous focus, entrancement and exaltation, the tension of spontaneity caged by restraint, the risk of failure and shame, the drumbeat of ritual, the willingness to be shaken to the core. So, though refreshingly different from each other, the two overlap in companionable places. [by way of New York Times: Books]
Both of these disciplines, in their current forms in this particular eddy of human experience called the US at the beginning of the 21st century, tend to cater to self-indulgence and plumbing the depths of the mind for...
Sorry; sorry—being snarky. Bad Allan.
“So much of life falls between the seams of the sayable.” Nice fourteener though I prefer alexandrines.
“...the willingness to be shaken to the core.”
9:01:27 PM 
|
|
