Poetry and Story Therapy

The Healing Power of Creative Expression

Geri Giebel Chavis

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781849058322
• eBook ISBN: 9780857003119
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Poetry and short stories can act as powerful springboards to growth, self-enhancement and healing. With the guidance of a skilled facilitator, participants can engage with their own creative expression, and with that of others, and in doing so find opportunities to voice their truth, affirm their strengths, and find new ways of coping with challenges.

This book explores the therapeutic possibilities of poetry and stories in turn, describing how to select appropriate works for discussion, and providing techniques for facilitating personally-relevent and growth-enhancing sessions. The author provides ideas and suggestions for personal writing activities that emerge from or intertwine with this discussion, and explains how participants can create their own poetic and narrative pieces using non-literary stimuli, such as music, photographs, paintings, objects, and physical movement. A useful appendix contains titles of individual poems, stories, and literary anthologies that the author has found particularly beneficial in her work, as well as useful further resources and contact details for readers who would like to train to be registered or certified poetry therapists or facilitators.

Combining theory with innovative ideas for practical, experiential exercises, this book is a valuable tool for creative arts therapy students and practitioners, mental health and medical professionals, and anyone else interested in the healing possibilities of creative expression.

Part One

Poems

Springboards to Growth and Healing

Chapter 1

Poetry’s Special Healing and Inspirational Role

Healing Poetry and its Historic Roots

The special place of poetry in the history of healing is well established. The shamans and medicine men and women of ancient civilizations chanted poems as a part of their healing art. In ancient Greece, Apollo, the patron god of poetry and music, is also recognized as the divinity of medicine and healing not only in his own right but also through his son, Aesclepius. Through the multifaceted Apollo, poetry is associated with light, sun and prophecy. The Biblical David soothed the cares of Saul with his psalms. Early dramas that provided inspiration and catharsis for entire communities also were performed in poetic form. At the beginning of the early nineteenth century, British Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats and Percy Shelley re-energized the deeply inspirational role of poets and poetry.

Poetry’s Power in the Present Day

In our own time, there seems to be a resurgence of poetry’s presence in the popular imagination and in popular culture. Poetry is alive and well in emotionally charged spoken word competitions, in coffee house gatherings where poems are recited against musical or visual backdrops, in the increasing popularity of poem memorization, and in the growing presence of poems on city streets, nature trails, buses and trains. Almost every time we attend a wedding, funeral or prayer service, we hear aptly chosen, evocative poems, and we repeatedly read newspaper accounts of how catastrophic events elicit poetic outpourings to memorialize and help us cope with trauma.

Rose Solari (1996) conveys a strong sense of the ever widening net poetry is casting for growth and healing in our own time. Solari (1996) points out that:

poetry is making its way into a number of new fields: Poems and poets can now be found in corporate training sessions, in educational programs for at-risk groups, and in therapy sessions, where social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists have discovered the healing power of a well-made poem.

According to Solari, ‘many seem to agree’ that:

Good poetry, in whatever form, can provide the means for exploring the psychological complexities of our lives, as well as our spiritual yearnings. Today those in psychology and spirituality circles often turn to poetry for enlightenment and guidance. (Solari 1996, pp.25–26)

Poetry as a Vehicle to Insight

Throughout the years, many writers have claimed that poetry provides significant insight into the human psyche and human behavior. For example, in concluding his essay on ‘The Psychology of Women,’ Sigmund Freud (1933, p.185) asserts that ‘If you want to know more about femininity, you must interrogate your own experience, or turn to the poets.’ Both Freud’s and his disciple Carl Jung’s respect for poetry as a cornucopia of significant personal knowledge is eloquently embellished in our own time by two authors whose goal is to bring poetry to the people. In Poetry for Dummies, John Timpane and Maureen Watts (2001) describe the wonder of poetry in a way perfectly fitting the world of poetry therapy:

Suppose you invented a way to concentrate all the best things people ever thought and felt into a very few words. And suppose you did something to those words to make them pleasant, beautiful, unforgettable, and moving. Suppose this invention could get people to notice more of their own lives, sharpen their awareness, pay attention to things they’d never really considered before. Suppose it could make their lives—and them—better. You’d really have something there…What is this fantastic creation? Poetry. (Timpane and Watts 2001, p.1)

Romantic Poets on the Mission of Poetry

The ambitious mission of poetry implied in the above words mirrors the strong messages of English Romantic poets like Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth. In their own ways, chiefly through their poems but also in their prose writings, these authors affirmed poetry’s power to guide, illuminate and heal.

In his ‘Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,’ William Wordsworth (1965d) sets forth the poet’s mission as he sees it: to convey the truth of human experience empathically and in accessible language and to ‘describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified’ (Wordsworth 1965d, p.448).

In Canto One of John Keats’ narrative poem, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1990a), the poet-persona asserts to the goddess Moneta, mother of the Muses and divinity of memory, ‘sure a poet is a sage / A humanist, a Physician to all Men,’ and Moneta supports the truth of his statement by fervently replying that the poet is the one who ‘pours out a balm upon the world’ (Keats 1990a, pp.295–296). When Keats decided to devote himself to poetry instead of medicine, he ended up becoming a poet-healer. He realized that he needed to incorporate pain into his work and transform it through the alchemy of his artistry, into beauty that is truth. His commitment to this task is suggested in these words he wrote to his brothers, George and Tom Keats, in an 1817 letter: ‘the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth’ (Keats 1990b, p.370).

After the persona in The Fall of Hyperion convinces Moneta that he is indeed a poet, he not only is allowed to ascend the colossal stairway, but also reaches a height from where he views a vast arena of grief. As he watches the fallen Titans, he is seared by his empathetic response. The poet’s reaction is viscerally captured in the following lines describing Saturn:

Degraded, cold, upon the sodden ground

His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,

Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were clos’d,

While his bow’d head seem’d listening to the Earth,

His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

(Keats 1990a, p.299)

Nearly two centuries after these lines were written, they eloquently embody the pain of individuals who have lost their ‘kingdoms’ in one way or another. When I was counseling a young man who was experiencing his mother’s lengthy battle with cancer, he resonated deeply with the above depiction of Saturn’s state. Like Saturn, he too was losing his realm of the familiar.

Keats’ contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, defined his role as poet-healer or guide in a more overt way than did Keats. In his essay, A Defence of Poetry, Shelley (1967) focuses on the regenerative force of poetry for individuals and entire societies. He claims that ‘Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight.’ He adds that poetry ‘awakens and enlarges the mind’ and ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world’ (Shelley 1967, pp.11–12). At the conclusion of his ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ Shelley’s (1993) poet-persona suggests his role as master-therapist when he prays for the power to disseminate seeds to regenerate new possibilities in humankind. Shelley’s metaphor is particularly apt when we consider the fact that the original Greek root of the word, therapist, is linked to the midwife role in the birthing process.

Poets and Their Poems as Counselors

These words of Elizabeth Drew (1959) help to explain why poems can be so empowering: ‘The poets find the right words in the right order for what we already dimly and dumbly feel, and they also fertilize in our consciousness responses which were lying inert and cloddish’ (p.32). Like Drew, poetry therapists recognize that untold numbers of poets are unwittingly acting as counselors for people they will never meet or see.

Wordsworth, in fact, functioned as an unwitting therapist for the famous essayist statesman, John Stuart Mill. In his Autobiography, Mill (1993) recounts details of the severe depression he experienced when he was a young man in the years 1826 to 1827. Alarmed at his extreme dejection and total lack of emotion, he turned to the poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular, to help himself. Mill was relieved to discover fitting descriptions of his own suffering in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection Ode,’ a somber yet moving poem that captures its creator’s own despair and loss of creativity. More importantly, Mill’s reading also included the emotional utterances of Wordsworth, through which Mill tells us, he discovered a cure. Although he ‘took up his collection of poems from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief from it’ (Mill 1993, p.1027), he found to his surprise that Wordsworth’s poems, especially those conveying the beauty and grandeur of Nature, helped him regain hope (p.1028). He pays homage to the effect of these poems in the following terms:

What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; …And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence…I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this. (Mill 1993, p.1028)

In asserting the healer’s territory for the poet, American literary icon, Robert Frost, is akin to his Romantic predecessors and Mill, even if his claims are more moderately expressed. Frost (1972) tells us that a poem ‘ends in a clarification of life’ and can be ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’ But Frost goes further in asserting a powerful connection between poet and reader, when he notes that a poem ‘must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader’ (Frost 1972, pp.393–4).

The Intimate Link Between Poet and Reader

In How to Read a Poem, Molly Peacock (1999) also captures the link between poet and reader when she notes that we are sometimes ‘attracted to a poem because it makes us feel as if someone is listening to us.’ She describes the effect of reading poems special to us in these words: ‘As you meet your own experience through someone else’s articulation of it, you are refreshed by having a companion in your solitude’ (Peacock 1999, p.14). Peacock articulates what I and so many individuals doing similar work encounter repeatedly. Clients and group members will often say with wonder and relief, ‘Wow, this poem is about me,’ or ‘This is my life described here!’

Throughout the centuries, poetry has occupied a special place in the human psyche. Individuals living in different times and places have highlighted the unique ways in which poems forge deep connections with their readers, arousing them on many different levels. Repeatedly and in passionate terms, poets and other writers have attested to the power of poetry to awaken our minds and spirits, soothe our hearts and even transform the course of our lives.

Chapter 2

Therapeutic Features of Poetry

An Authentic Voice Inviting Reader Engagement

The intimate connection between the poet’s voice and the reader or listener is at the core of what makes poetry such a valuable resource for helpers in the service of their clients. The persona of so many poems seems to communicate directly with us in passionate conversation. Poems embody the presence of an authentic voice speaking to us across time and space, often in throes of emotion and at an important juncture.

Concise lyrical expressions, confessional and personal in tone, tend to grab and hold a reader’s attention as they speak to the senses, mind and heart. There is an immediacy to so many poems that causes many to refer to them as experiences rather than works of art. The active experience of poetry reading is well captured by Nikki Giovanni (2003b, p.221) when she defines a poem as ‘pure energy’ that is ‘horizontally contained / between the mind / of the poet and the ear of the reader.’

The instant establishment of a connection between the persona’s voice and the reader is well illustrated in ‘Marks,’ which Linda Pastan, in her 2009 keynote address to the National Association for Poetry Therapy, described as her ‘most popular poem.’ In it, the speaker confides in us as readers, immediately allowing us into her world. With a healthy blend of humor and serious content, she employs an everyday metaphor that anyone who has received grades or been judged can appreciate.

My husband gives me an A

for last night’s supper,

an incomplete for my ironing,

a B plus in bed.

My son says I am average,

an average mother, but if

I put my mind to it

I could improve.

My daughter believes

in Pass/Fail and tells me

I pass. Wait ’til they learn

I’m dropping out.

(Pastan 1982, p.69)

From the very first line, readers usually sign on to the persona’s situation, living through their own experiences of being evaluated by others. Reacting to the last line, readers almost always exclaim with laughter, relief or surprise. The journey to which this poem summons the reader proves irresistible time and again.

The reader’s immediate personal engagement with Pastan’s speaker can be illuminated in terms of a phenomenon that Norman Stageberg and Wallace Anderson (1952) call ‘The Poem Within,’ described as follows:

Wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Poems
• Part Two Stories
• Part Three Creative Writing for Life Enhancement