Writing Therapy

Lesson 1: What is a poem?

What do you think a poem is? This lesson will help you discover the answer then allow you to share a poem -- or respond to an "I wish" exercise!

Introduction

Regardless of what you learned in school or may have heard in the past, I would like you to start for the purposes of this course thinking of a poem as a ‘gesture that expresses.’ This is consistent with contemporary thinking and it’s the way I work, as do many of my contemporaries.

Try to like something
___
|ry|
tO
|
Li
ke
Some thing and the anger will go.

may not be your idea of a ‘poem’ and you may not especially like it but it’s one I recently did. As Deena Metzger has said in a book that’s not the one in your reading list, “I suggested, ‘Write as if you are a blind man. Write….as if your intelligence is in your ability to taste the world. (Writing for Your Life)”

While not everyone would agree, and there are alternate models in The Making of a Poem, for example, this is a model I would like you to consider trying out for this course. There certainly is room for other models and if you would like to suggest some this would make a good topic for our first discussion: what do you think a poem is? How do you define a poem?

I am going to ask you to write a poem that ‘expresses emotion’ for this course and then revise it based on what you learn from the readings here and feedback from others. It is possible to use something you already have written if you like. Any judgment on the poem will be from the perspectives we develop here as we go about expressing emotion and not from the perspective of whether it is a good or publishable poem.

In the second lesson we will be examining some ideas on what expressing emotion means poetically and psychologically and models of how the emotion can be exaggerated, but for now just use your concept of an emotion and be open to changing your idea about this as we go along. The third lesson will be an examination of ways that this emotional expression might relate to improved health and the fourth lesson will be on how your expression might be shaped or modified for a better health outcome for you.

Right now I am sure that you are hesitating about taking the course . You also doubtless are hesitating about writing the poem either because you are hesitating about ‘poem’ or about expressing emotion. This is very understandable and we’ll be moving into this in the next session. I don’t have any magic answers here that apply to everyone but I’d like you to take a deep breath, close your eyes and count to at least ten. While you are counting see if you can think of any reasons why you are hesitating.

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