Writing Therapy

Lesson 1: What is a poem?

Throwing a feeling

Lesson One, Section Three: Throwing a Poem.

The gestural quality of a poem is somewhat like the gestural quality of an emotion. As Metzger wrote and I’ve learned from my experience as a psychologist, emotions typically have a bodily or physiological quality to them. There is a lot of information on what an emotion is http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp?CRID=em... and it’s definition is currently in a state of flux but I don’t want us to get sidetracked into this here. Let me just invite you to take a look at http://litsite.alaska.edu/uaa/healing/em... which is a summary of the connections here by Esther Sternberg who is a prominent scientist who likes to write. If you are intrigued by this subject, I’ve listed her recent book, but it’s not mandatory reading.

Emotions have a physiological or bodily quality to them. For me this becomes obvious when I talk or think about ‘gut feelings’ and if you care to think about it, most of our words for emotions are metaphors with a bodily dimension like this. It might not be too distracting to discuss this briefly and it might put you in the mood for the next step which is to poetically ‘throw’ an emotion. What I (and others like Deena) have in mind here is the concept of becoming aware of how you feel physically (for example, in your gut) and ‘throwing’ that feeling out onto the page or through your computer keys without letting yourself become too consciously aware of the ‘right’ word to describe it.

I’d invite you to be fairly physical here, in the sense of actually feeling yourself making a physical motion while doing it, as if you were throwing a ball, for example. Perhaps it would help you get in the mood if you were to take a walk or go for a run or do some sit-ups and then return to writing. You might also want to read what Pennebaker has to say about expressing emotions or read what Danish says about anger, if you can get her book.

The difference between talking about emotions and expressing them is something I could help you understand if we were interacting person-to-person, but I’ll try and explain. Lucia Capacchione’s Living with Feeling might also be helpful here. You might also want to think back to what Deena Metzger said about poetry above and think of yourself as blind and without too much conscious awareness just let yourself become aware of a feeling and get it out.

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