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This article is an a/r/tographic (artist/researcher/teacher) study through autobiographical close readings of several poems as a means to understand death within what the author calls eternal poetic time. Moving beyond the author's childhood's static image of death, the paper suggests that the ephemeral nature of life is not something to fear, but makes living more beautiful and eternal through the making and sharing of poetry and art. This paper is the first part of a three-paper study, which includes original poetry by the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of a loved one can create a tear in the fabric of meaning. Grieving involves remaking meaning. In therapy, events can be emplotted into stories, which can return some sense of coherence to the bereaved. In this paper, I present a way of narrating loss through a narrative therapy approach of retelling. This involved writing found poems, known as rescued speech poems, from the conversations of people who had lost a loved partner. The found poetry sought to bring an order to grieving and to polish the beauty of key moments following loss. For one participant, the found poetry amplified a narrative of the biography of the loved one. For another, the poems added beauty to a memory of her deceased partner. Thus, rescued speech poems—judiciously selected from speech, and sensitively arranged on the page—can provide another way to facilitate vibrant meaning-making of life after loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the subject of failure from various angles. The first angle relates to the lyrical failure, which takes place at any moment in which the mind chooses to envelop something with a familiar context instead of revealing what is new in it, or chooses to know “about” something rather than knowing the thing itself. The second angle considers the link between experiences of failure and the human ability to imagine and to live “parallel universes.” The third angle considers the experience of failure as being connected with the work of mourning. The fourth angle relates to the experience of failure as creating a dialogue with our interior sense of measure. The fifth angle considers the internal dialogue of failure as comprising within itself the unconscious fantasy of a “higher authority,” which sees beyond us and guards our steps. The sixth angle considers the experience of failure as a lyrical gesture, one which exists not in the territory of authentic truth, but in the breathing space which can be created only as the result of moving between choices. Finally, through the integration of the various angles a therapeutic case will be presented to demonstrate a situation of obsessive libidinal investment in the experience of failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]