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Dalit literature is the articulation of protest and anger against the injustice and social exclusion the Dalits are subjected to in the caste-ridden, hierarchical society of India. The Dalit authors and critics argue that it is this protest and anger, a new literary strategy which can build the aesthetics of Dalit literature. Dalit literature, however, is yet to form a conceptual standard on which the Dalits can represent and universalise their experience of pain. Many Dalit poets have attempted to build a distinctive aesthetics through poetry. But poetry essentially related to emotion seems inadequate to build a conceptual framework which is essentially an intellectual phenomenon. Though Dalit writers resist the Sanskritised aesthetics of mainstream literature by using their own language, registers and idioms, they nonetheless partake of the mainstream aesthetics when they articulate themselves in poetry. Gopal Guru (2012) claims, "Poetry helps the Dalit in making connections through metaphors but not through concepts" (p. 23). My paper, however, will argue that as Dalit experience is at the centre of a distinct Dalit aesthetics, Dalit poetry based on rich experience can contribute to build a new aesthetics for Dalit literature. My paper will refer to a number of Bengali Dalit poets whose poetry can serve to build a separate aesthetics through poetic rendering of their distinct Dalit experience, conforming at the same time to many principles of mainstream aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the role of fathers in the family. Structured around three poems, it emphasises the need for a triangular structure in the mind, enabling the child (and any individual) to look at 'reality', internal and thus external too, from a third position. The Oedipal situation, what Hanna Segal called 'the core complex', lies deep within the mind of any individual, and continues to have vital relevance in the lives of modern families. Clinical material is included in the paper to illustrate the points made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In difficult times, people turn to poetry, reading, and writing for solace and peace. In emotionally intense and traumatic times, people use poetry to process and understand the lived eyepieces. The havoc wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the emotional and psychological well-being of individuals all across the world. Poetry has emerged as a savior in these difficult times. A phenomenon, "lockdown poems", came into existence as individuals all across the globe processed and shared their lived experiences of isolation, pain, and suffering through poems. In the present paper, students of a management program process and share their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent lockdowns, and their community work experience. Poetry as a therapeutic and hope-building tool is discussed in the paper along with the original poems written by the students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Transitions are critical periods that can lead to growth and, or, distress. Transitions are a sociocultural process, yet most approaches to transitions in practice and research do not explore the social or developmental aspects of entering a new training phase. Wenger reminds us that identity development is crucial when newcomers navigate change. In this paper, we use Wenger's modes of identification: engagement, imagination and alignment to explore students' identity development (as a student and professional) during the transition from pre‐clinical to clinical training. Methods: We enrolled nine 2nd‐year medical students who generated 61 entries comprising audio diary (or typed) reflections over 9 months (starting 3 months before clinical clerkships began) and interviewed them twice. We used research poems (transcripts reframed as poetry) to help construct a meaningful, emotive elicitation of our longitudinal data and analysed data using sensitising concepts from Wenger's modes of identification. Results: Students described their transition as a journey filled with positive and negative emotions and uncertainty about their current and future careers. Students navigated the transition using three mechanisms: (1) becoming more engaged through taking charge, (2) shaping their image of self through engagement and finding role models and (3) learning to flexibly adapt to clerkship norms by managing expectations and adopting a journey mindset. Conclusions: We successfully narrated students' identity formation during their transition to clinical training. We learned that students became more engaged over time by learning to take charge. They shaped their image of self by engaging in team activities and reflecting on role models. They learnt to adapt flexibly to clerkship norms by managing expectations and adopting a journey mindset. We suggest that institutions provide a safe opportunity for medical students to reflect, allowing students' transition periods to be lived, reflected on and supported. The authors showcase Wenger's three modes of identification (engagement, imagination, and alignment) as medical students transition to clinical training using longitudinal qualitative methods and research poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Virtual Poetry and nursing have much to say about humanity during and after the global lockdown. Whereas nurses have worked on the front lines to treat infected patients both physically and mentally, poets have played a tremendous role in relieving students of negative energy, motivating them to pursue their dreams and hopes. Building on Thematic Analysis and the Reflective Learning Approach, this paper examines the relationship between virtual poetry and nursing education. One focus group from Agadir city had to study English at ISPITS institute for 14 h, using Google Meet and, at a later stage, they were entailed to evaluate their learning experiences with the Online English Class. The results unveiled that the Moroccan student nurses share a great concern for humanity and that virtual poetry could be used as an instructional medium in shaping their personality traits and reinvigorating their academic goals about the nursing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes group and community intervention work with individuals currently or formerly experiencing homelessness to create mutual connection and support using art, poetry, stories, pop-up porches, and photobooks. The group and community intervention work was enhanced by International Association of Social Work with Groups (IASWG) SPARC endorsement and funding to create photobooks which served to visualize the life stories and accomplishments of persons identifying as currently or formerly homeless. The two-decade journey of the author's work with individuals experiencing homelessness will be described to illustrate and celebrate how creative group and community interventions addressing homelessness (including photobooks) can connect individuals experiencing homelessness with people who have never experienced homelessness to facilitate group dialogue and mutual understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friendship is a central focus in children's lives and is important for healthy development. During the Covid‐19 pandemic, children experienced restrictions on their interactions with friends. This research heard the voices of 10 children (7–11 years) in England regarding their friendships, drawing on data collected through creative participatory methods including drawings, photography and collages, and accompanying unstructured interviews. Findings provide new insights into how children endeavoured to maintain their friendships through virtual interactions, street/doorstep visits, and artwork, and how friendship disruption affected their well‐being. This paper argues for educators to heed the implications for the period of 'Covid recovery'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A co-design project, consisting of individual and collective design activities, was organized with clients of a mental health service, in order to explore its potential to support people with psychosis. The group met for approximately two hours, weekly, for six months, participating in design activities and collectively deciding on the project purpose and outcome – a boardgame. The experience of one group participant (Anthony) is explored, selected as the first case study within an Interpretative Phenomenological Analytical (IPA) framework. Following IPA's ideographic focus, Anthony's case was purposefully selected, as it portrayed a detailed picture, informing theoretical reflection on designing as therapeutic. The paper includes Anthony's first-hand account, combined with an analysis of data from three semi-structured interviews, photographic evidence and a reflective diary kept by the lead researcher. Results suggest that, for Anthony, design activity: a) helps developing a sense of agency b) is experienced as grounding in reality c) contributes to the development of inter-personal relationships, and d) has a different sense of rhythm than artistic practice. These results are contextualized within literature on the lived experience of psychosis and suggest that designing can be beneficial for people with psychosis, providing the backdrop for further research and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purposes of this paper are to briefly describe the meaning of metaphor from a variety of sources, to show its ubiquitous and creative nature, to share some examples used in common parlance and scholarly works, and to elaborate the meaning of metaphor from a humanbecoming perspective with three metaphorical truths—semantic resonance, coherent integrity, and magical transfiguring. Metaphor is a linguistic way of conveying an idea in poetic language with words and phrases articulated as complete ideas with the use of unusual words that normally have different meanings. Metaphor has been used often in literary narratives and poetry to clarify meaning. Many authors offer ideas about what a metaphor is and how it should be used. Some of those are presented in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the potential influence of Wilhelm Dilthey on the works and thought of the Peruvian writer and ethnologist José María Arguedas. In 1953 Arguedas opened his ethnological article "Mountains in the Process of Peruvian Culture" with a quote from Dilthey's book of essays Experience and Poetry (1910). Despite the fact that the two authors are distant in space and time, their hermeneutic approach and, above all, their faith in art as the highest possible form of knowledge, brings their reflections together. Dilthey's triad experience -- expression -- understanding, which forms the core of the chosen quote, expresses the essence of art and its value: beauty, honest judgment, an authentic descent into the depth of linguistic expression and cultural identity. The three concepts also summarize Arguedas's lifelong efforts to use art to make the underestimated Quechua and mestizo cultures a legitimate part of modern Peru and art in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns young adults who came to Sweden from Afghanistan as unaccompanied refugee minors (UMs) and their engagement with poetry and other creative activities. The aim was to explore how UMs use poetic writing and other creative activities to handle resettlement challenges. Seven young men and six young women, aged 18–24, participated in semi-structured interviews. The material was analyzed using the three components of poetry therapy, developed by Mazza. Three themes were identified: (1) Encouragement; (2) Creative expressions as a "safe place"; and (3) A sense of recognition. Through creative expressions, our participants could understand and handle the emotional difficulties and the insecurity associated with resettlement. Poetic writing was a way to convey personal experiences of injustices, a source of self-understanding, and a way to establish new social networks. We discuss and present suggestions on how poetry and other creative activities can be integrated in interventions toward UMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated co-constructed research poetry as a way to understand the lived experiences of people affected by rarer dementia and as a means to use poetry to convey those experiences to healthcare professionals. Using mixed methods, 71 people living with rarer dementia and care-partners (stakeholders) contributed to co-constructing 27 poems with professional poets; stakeholders' verbatim words were analysed with descriptive qualitative analysis. Stakeholders were also surveyed and interviewed about their participation. Healthcare professionals (n = 93) were surveyed to elicit their responses to learning through poetry and its acceptability as a learning tool. Poems conveyed a shared narrative of different aspects of lived experience, often owing to atypical symptoms, misunderstandings by professionals, lack of support pathways, and a continuous struggle to adapt. Stakeholder surveys indicated it was a valuable experience to both co-create and respond to the poems, whilst group interviews revealed people's experiences of the research poetry were characterised by reflection on lived experience, curiosity and exploration. Healthcare professionals' responses reinforced poetry's capacity to stimulate cognitive and affective learning specific to rare dementia support and prompt both empathy and critical thinking in practice. As the largest poetry-based study that we are aware of, this novel accessible approach of creating group poems yielded substantial information about the experiences and needs of those affected by rarer dementia and how poetry can contribute to healthcare education and training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnography seeks to open up for re-interpretation and debate three topics that feature within social work practice, research, and education: firstly the value and use of metaphor in understanding practice, secondly approaches to social work reflective writing, and thirdly the issue of poverty and its significance and impact in child and family social work. Metaphors can be valuable in framing understanding of issues within social work practice and advocating for change. Three metaphors have been particularly used in understanding the relationship between social work practice and poverty: The Invisibility of Poverty, The Elephant in the Room, and The Wallpaper of Practice. The three Parts of this autoethnography each adopt a different approach to autoethnographic writing and addresses and unsettles one of these metaphors. The first part adopts a narrative-reflective-analytical approach conventional to reflective writing in social work. The second and third parts adopt poetic and post-humanist approaches, respectively. It is proposed that adopting autoethnography as a methodology challenges the uncritical application of metaphor to situated practice and thereby prevents interpretive foreclosure. 'Writing against' objectified social work knowledge may assist in opening up practice to more challenging critical reflection and re-interpretation. Juxtaposing these three parts demonstrates the potential of non-conventional autoethnographic approaches to provide opportunities for deeper reflection on the experiences of doing social work within the context of poverty than conventional approaches to reflective writing. Furthermore, they indicate a need to reconsider how well these metaphors reflect social work practice experience with poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the samples of poetry of Hazrat Alisher Navoi, which are one of the important sources for studying his personal life. Therefore, the poetry of a great poet is an image of his joy, dreams, happy moments, sorrows. Through the experiences of the poet, the spiritual world of a person is known, his feelings, experiences, the world of sadness, joy and desire, philosophical and moral issues worthy of study are imprinted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between metaphors and emotion in the context of adolescent distress and psychotherapeutic treatment. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of Mexican American adolescents receiving outpatient treatment for a variety of emotional and behavioral problems, the article examines what I call "prescribed" metaphors deployed in mainstream, manualized child and adolescent Cognitive Behavioral Therapies commonly used in mainstream clinical contexts. I explore the models of emotion communicated to youth by one such metaphor, youth responses to this metaphor, and the potential implications for young people as they take up the underlying models and affective practices embedded in the metaphor. Specifically, I examine how youth respond to messages about emotion metacognition and emotion regulation embedded in a metaphor that equates feelings with temperatures that can be monitored and objectively measured. I find that youth are at once convinced that abstract knowledge about internal states is inherently valuable because it is linked to desired forms of personhood, but also concerned about the limits of technical metaphors to capture aspects of lived experience and the flattening and homogenization of affect that might accompany the practices such metaphors help to enact. I analyze alternative interpretations of prescribed metaphors as well as the spontaneous metaphors used by youth to talk about their emotions and experiences of distress, in an effort to think through the politics and poetics of emotion metaphors in the context of an evidence-based psychotherapy for young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My recent research on an early female bhakti saint brought to the fore differences between her perspective as represented in poetry attributed to her and her medieval biographer's representation of her concerns. Through that study, the widespread academic use in recent scholarship of traditional biographies to interpret female bhakti saints became especially visible and problematic to me. In this experimental essay, I consider what patterns we might find if we prioritize the poetry attributed to influential female bhakti saints, navigating the significant issues of subjectivity, voice, and utterance to discern the contours of their devotional subjectivity as an authoritative nexus for conceptualizing and expressing individual and group devotion. In contrast to scholarly assurances that female bhakti saints are internally steadfast or that they are mainly troubled by external situations, I argue that their devotional subjectivity voices their realization that diverse embodied experiences of contestation are generative for a shared sense of devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 19th century, much academic effort has been expended researching leadership. Bodies of theory have risen to dominance, proved unsatisfactory and been replaced by another generation of ultimately disappointing leadership thought. This repetitive pattern continues, so we ask what motivates this continuing, seemingly fruitless search? Focusing on researchers and not leadership per se, our analysis is inspired by two surprisingly complementary sources: psychoanalytical theory and Lewis Carroll's epic nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits. Together they lead to a theory that re/search is motivated by unconscious desires to experience the transformational object—an ultimately unachievable search but one that unconsciously sustains the ever-growing field of leadership research. In contributing a new psychoanalytical theory of unconscious motivations that inspire our research, we also demonstrate the inspiration poetry may offer organizational researchers. We conclude by offering a ninth fit, which leaps into the void of future thought and finds that the leadership Snark was, in fact, a Boojum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poem "Swallowing Water" by Se Henthorn is presented. First Line: I never met the man who started his art; Last Line: But never silenced now - or ignored.

An interview with Dr. Tiffanie Tate Moore, author of "FloweTry: A collection of 108 poetic flows on Life, Love, and Liturgical issues" is presented. Topics discussed include influence of Dr. Moore's life journey on the poems and influence of poems on her life, numbers of poem in her book, and poem that inspired the most joyful memories in her life.

Chronic illness diagnoses frequently cause the shattering of personal assumptions about the self and the world, resulting in an experience of alienation and fragmentation of identity. Multiple studies on the effects of expressive writing have demonstrated physical, emotional, and psychological health benefits, yet little is known about how it might offer benefit in response to a chronic illness diagnosis. Combining the transformation-through-writing model with the dual process model for non-death loss and grief, I take an autoethnographic approach to explore how creative writing about Fibromyalgia (FM) allowed me to progress from a first story/loss orientation to a second story/restoration orientation as part of a dialogical process of self-reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers exploring sensitive topics need to identify appropriate methodologies to encourage open expression. We used poetic inquiry to explore the lived realities of transwomen in Namibia, a socially marginalised group globally. We conducted two focus group discussions with 15 transwomen and developed found poems. The poems captured issues of identity and belonging and illustrated the transwomen's journeys of self-acceptance, experiences of violence, rejection, agency and relationships. In order to enhance participant voice and enrich the poems, they were shared with some transwomen in a feedback and reflection session. This article unpacks this collaborative poetics approach. We share selected poems, explore their impact on participants, and discuss how this engagement with the poetry allowed for deeper discussion of participants' experiences. The collaboration around the poems allowed researchers and participants to find new ways to explore and address issues of discrimination and marginalization, and to actively engage larger and more diverse audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present three poems written from personal experience of living with primary progressive non-fluent aphasia (primary progressive apraxia of speech). The poems provide a window on this illness 'from the inside', and vividly illustrate how intellect and inner life may survive strikingly intact, even after speech is lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]