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https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jun/18/poetry-can-heal-it-helped-me-through-depression

Extract:

For me, poetry is medicine. The poet Les Murray writes: “I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you’ll use any remedy you’ve got.” In the 19th century, people in asylums were encouraged to write poetry, while William Cowper (1731-1800) wrote that, in his depressions, “I find writing, especially poetry, my best remedy.” Orpheus was both healer and poet and his lyre could vanquish melancholy.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n23/adam-phillips/the-soul-of-man-under-psychoanalysis

Extract

When Harold Bloom writes with his useful (and usual) fervour about Eliot that ‘to have been born in 1888, and to have died in 1965, is to have flourished in the Age of Freud, hardly a time when Anglo-Catholic theology, social thought and morality were central to the main movement of mind,’ he is writing with unnecessary triumphalism. The idea of ‘the main movement of mind’ was, after all, as precious to Eliot as it is to Bloom. If in some spurious, putative cultural competition the language of Freud has won out over Eliot’s language of Anglo-Catholic theology; if some of us, or most of us, are now more likely to talk about sexuality and violence and childhood when we talk about people rather than to talk about the soul and original sin and redemption, it is worth remembering just what this transition from the language of sin to the language of unconscious desire entails. It is naive to believe – as both Eliot and Freud showed us in their different ways – that languages could ever be anything other than the traces of their own histories. We would be right to assume that there were also continuities and evolutions where there seemed to be ruptures and revolutions. Both Freud and Eliot write out of a history of descriptions of self-division, of the individual in conflict, riven in one way or another. It is no accident, so to speak, that R.D. Laing took his title The Divided Self from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

If we take self-division and conflict for granted, as Freud and Eliot clearly do; and if we take seriously the problem, and not merely the progress, of secularising a language; then the question becomes this: does this division, this conflict we experience in ourselves, reveal our sinfulness, and if not what does it reveal? It may just reveal the fact of division; and yet so much depends on the way in which we assign moral status to the combatants. In this agonistic picture of ourselves – by which we are clearly compelled if not actually bewitched – there is an anxiety about the division of the moral spoils. Once we relinquish the reassuring but sparse intelligibility of a world of good and bad we begin to experience the vertigo, the disarray of what is politely called moral complexity. When we don’t understand something – and especially when we have taken understanding to be our currency – we are prone to coerce and oversimplify. ‘It is human,’ Eliot writes, using the difficult word,

when we do not understand another human being, and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement, of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/what-is-a-poem/281835/

Extract:

There is at least one kind of utility that a poem can embody: ambiguity. Ambiguity is not what school or society wants to instill. You don’t want an ambiguous answer as to which side of the road you should drive on, or whether or not pilots should put down the flaps before take-off. That said, day-to-day living—unlike sentence-to-sentence reading—is filled with ambiguity: Does she love me enough to marry? Should I fuck him one more time before I dump him?

But such observations still don’t tell us much about what a poem really is. Try crowd-sourcing for an answer. If you search Wikipedia for “poem,” it redirects to “poetry”: “a form of literary art which uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonoaesthetics, sound symbolism, etc.” Fine English-professor speak, but it belies the origins of the word. “Poem” comes from the Greek poíēma, meaning a “thing made,” and a poet is defined in ancient terms as “a maker of things.” So if a poem is a thing made, what kind of thing is it?

Photo by Katherine

Writing is the axe that breaks the frozen sea within

Franz Kafka

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/30/julie-myerson-my-writing-day

“The author and columnist on her powers of concentration, the importance of Pilates and the trials of co-existing with an inquisitive tabby cat

Julie Myerson

Sat 30 Dec 2017 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conative

Extract:

https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/springsummer2019/tulip-fever

https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/springsummer2019/tulip-fever

https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/articles/autumnwinter2017/way-still-small-voice

A sentence from the above:

“But Elijah only hears God once he listens to a sound that is so fragile, it could easily go unheard. “

To the mother holding her own son
His body dehydrated ,drained and dead
Who can imagine her emotion?

I feel  in my own depths , vibration  stuns
Though I lost the one I had once wed
Grieving with  the mother and her son

On this night ,the ambulance had gone
Woe had pierced me , drawn my blood
I  could never have imagined  what  began

Forgive my  hubris, my comparison
Mary’s pain eluded me till led
To mourn like she’d already done

The Passions wild and painful   were all done
Whether in the Garden or the Bed
I had not dreamed of such emotion

I heard the still small voice  and what it said
Despite  the hollows of my heart were filled with dread
With the mother weeping  on her son
Help us hold  our loss  until we’re done