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It may appear that the act of writing is fruitless in the face of the size and open-ended complexity of gathering environmental calamities including global heating, species extinction, and the appearance of plastic in everything. And yet – and yet – poets and others continue to write in ways that allow us to think about the earth's futures and, more specifically, the future of place in catastrophic times. Geo, Eco and Topo – poetics are acts of making – making earth, home, and place. Making earth as homeplace. This paper considers Juliana Spahr's book Well Then There Now as an entry point into thinking and writing about place in a relational way appropriate for a time of emergency. It focuses on the ways writing-as-making (poiesis) can help us to diagnose troubled worlds and prefigure new ones. The paper surveys the connections between geography and poetry, outlines the contributions of eco, geo and topo poetics and explores the hybrid poetics of Well Then There Now before advocating for the affordances of creative writerly approaches for geography more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While clients embark of journeys of discovery when participating in counselling, a counsellor is also discovering which processes in counselling potentially facilitate change. In this paper, I present one research finding: that offering a client a found poem which featured resonant images from their own talk could enhance meaning-making by them. Drawing on Bachelard (1969b), this approach can be considered thera-poiesis. In my counsellor practitioner research, I engaged eight bereaved people in individual therapeutic conversations about how their lost loved spouse or partner still contributes to their life. In my listening, I paid attention to resonant images in their talk, wrote these as found poetry, and offered this poetry to each participant. In this paper, focusing on one participant's image of the 'bubbling life force', I show the meaning making potential for the client of a counsellor's highlighting of a resonant image. I argue that one engine of change in counselling may be the generative potential of language itself, and the artful replication of resonant images in particular. [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]

The Siculo-Norman king, Roger II (1095–1154), created a courtly culture that used art, architecture, and literature to reflect the symbolic and cultural values of the states that ringed the Mediterranean. An essential vehicle for Roger's cosmopolitan dialogue was the performance of court poetry that was broadly inclusive of the poetic conventions of the Latin, Greek, and Arabic-speaking worlds. Poetic performance at Palermo created an integrative dialogue of cultural valuation that crossed political as well as linguistic boundaries. While such acts of statesmanship might seem quaint to modern eyes, the potential of Siculo-Norman cosmopolitanism becomes more intriguing when we reflect on the current reality of failed states (Northern Africa), continuous conflicts (Israel), and fissured unions (EU) that ring the Mediterranean today. Roger's diplomatic use of poetry offers a refreshing alternative to the broken dialogue that exists in contemporary interstate relations in the Mediterranean. This paper illustrates that diplomatic poetic exchange has the ability to create cross-cultural commensurability in ways that modern cosmopolitan practices rooted in international law cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, Nigerian poetry in English has always been characterized by protest in nature. Beyond its aesthetic scope, it has been critical of socio-political and environmental problems that have bedevilled the nation. This paper is concerned with such literary instrumentalism; the use of poetry by Nigerian writers, living in Nigeria, as an instrument against abuses of human and environmental rights. The theoretical framework that is employed is drawn from the notions of protest writing in Africa and ideas of postcolonial ecocriticism. This will provide a context that brings the fate of humans and nonhumans together under the weight of a failed home government and multinational capitalism in contemporary Nigeria. This study will trace the development of literary and political events in Nigeria, followed by a textual analysis of selected poems. Attention will also be paid to the growth of environmental legislation in Nigeria since the colonial period. This article concludes by arguing that in the absence of an effective or practical legal framework, poetry remains one of the most significant instruments for highlighting the violation of human and environmental rights. As such, the study benefits contemporary scholarship by drawing attention to the social dimension of poetry – and the arts generally – as well as the role literature plays in foregrounding environmental crises in postcolonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from a seven-year, ongoing relational poetics between two poets and their former secondary English teacher. Organized by the world's urgencies, the three authors have studied the force of poetry throughout incidences of violence against Black lives close to home and across the United States. This practice began in the classroom and continues beyond graduation through remote correspondence across three cities. Through it we develop the concept of study as love, engaging with Moten & Harney's concept of study as irreducibly social and in excess of institutional parameters. We also develop the concept of poetics as more than methodology, engaging with Glissant's poetics of relation. Through love and poetics, we call for literacy studies engaged with the ontogenesis of Black life, moving beyond institutionally white disciplinary methods and standard research outputs. We ask how the poetics of relation and the love of study produce new worlds. [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]

Theorization of cultural and political issues of Northeast of India often creates a disengagement from the actual cultural performances produced in the region. This unique geo-cultural place is sometimes homogenized. In actuality, it is the home of diverse socio-cultural practices and performances. In the context of globalization, deforestation, Christianization, other internal clashes and external influences, material bodies, here, are continuously being rewritten in socio-cultural sphere. Non-representational theory considers poetry as an effective mode of exhibiting the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational world. This paper will focus on exploring the corpus of Northeast Indian English poetry that focuses on social practices and bodily experiences to interpret the entire cultural flow of everyday life. As Non-representational Theory positions 'affect' as a central issue to individual and collective disposition in constituting the affective political discourse, this paper will also indicate some political imperatives by advancing a politics of hope in the realm of socio-political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’sArt as Experience(1934). The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing (as art) does within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a 'mother tongue' (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading poetry aloud is an extremely useful teaching method for therapists and analysts, one that attunes mind and ear to both self and other. To listen to a poem, one must be open to the experience of physical sensations, affects, silent registers and unknowingness that may take some time to begin to put into words. Becoming conscious of internal resonances coinciding with those of another is the basis for the clinical skills we are hoping to help trainees develop. Being present in an embodied way to the music of what is spoken also develops a heightened sense of effective uses of language in psychoanalytic writing. This paper offers several poems in very different styles in order to think about this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dissonance created when Emily Brontë's striving to find language that equals her 'world within' is constrained by the 'world without'. The title quotation, the opening line of one of Brontë's early fragments, highlights the intensity of her desire to wake the song that so moved her in the past. It is Emily Brontë's struggle to wake the 'entrancing song' coupled with the pull of the 'heavenly key' that impels her poetry. In her treatment of desire to re-enter states of past bliss, Emily Brontë is an heir of Wordsworth. Reading her poems alongside Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', I explore how Wordsworth's cry of 'Whither is fled the visionary gleam' is also Brontë's. Yet, this dissonance is for both poets, to use Emily's own words, a 'darling pain'. The longing, even with the pain, is a form of fulfilment. So, I conclude by arguing that this seeming dissonance is what gives Brontë's poetry its 'peculiar music'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this research was to analyse poetry written by Israeli high-school students during or after visiting Poland within the framework of Holocaust education. I describe first the stages of shaping the discourse of Holocaust memory in Israel, and of Holocaust education; the Holocaust's place in the world of young Israelis; and the journeys to Poland as reflected in research. Following that, I present the results of the research and an analysis of the findings. The paper will discuss how Israeli adolescents cope with a cultural trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion of David Shaddock's beautiful paper, I strongly agree that our patients need us to serve as witnesses for their traumatic experiences. However, my understanding of what makes the role of witness so profoundly challenging differs from Shaddock's. In contrast to Shaddock who believes that traumatized people live in a separate world, I believe that we all live in the same world, one that is wracked by trauma. I also challenge Shaddock's reference to "the third." I find it difficult to think of the act of witnessing in terms of "the third", "the cultural third," even "a living third." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defines the notion of dialogic local space and highlights its importance to teaching and learning. A dialogic local space values multiple local realities as it invites us to listen to, take up, and have confidence in our own local everyday and personal realities, and to listen to, consider, and respond to other local realities. This openness can deepen and widen how we know and see our own realities. We show what a dialogic local space can look like in a second grade classroom community. We employ sociocultural discourse analysis to illuminate one teacher's pedagogical choices in a month-long poetry Writing Workshop unit for seven-and-eight year olds. We present a big picture look at the unit and then take a close look at five minilessons. Findings detail ways this teacher's minilesson design, flow, and content cultivate dialogic local spaces, and how a dialogic stance, manifest in classroom talk practices, encourages students to participate in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of a Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP hereafter) on young people’s engagement with poetry in a group of schools in London, UK. It does so with reference to the secondary Discourses of school-based learning and the Spoken Word community, an artistic ‘community of practice’ into which they were being inducted. It focuses on what happened when secondary students, already enculturated into school Discourses about learning (in their English lessons especially), learned about new ways of being readers, writers, listeners, and performers through the SWEP Discourse. The paper draws on qualitative data collected during the first three years of programme development to consider how an introduction to the social practices of this artistic community appeared to influence 11–18 year old students’ attitudes to poetry study, discussion, writing, and performance both in school and beyond the parameters of traditional secondary school learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces a new teaching method, poetry, into the geography classroom, accompanied by an out-of-class discussion on a blog, and finds that its effects are rather different from those of traditional teaching methods, as it allows new perspectives on instructional content related to migrant workers’ lives and identities in China. The method enables students to analyse content from the perspective of cultural geography, in which poetry acts as an art form that connects people’s identities and social spaces. On the basis of this, we also provide some suggestions to engage students in critical analysis of poetry, from the perspective of cultural geography, through interactive online platforms such as blogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contradiction in how Stevie Smith saw the relationship between her poems and drawings. On the one hand, she looked at her doodles as vital to her poetry and backed with a great deal of intentionality. She painstakingly cut and pasted them into her drafts and left detailed notes to her publishers when those placements were not to her exact specifications. On the other hand, though, she talked about her doodles as if they were ephemeral and backed only by caprice. This essay argues that Smith's doodles play at the intersection of intentionality and caprice; in doing so, they become deliberately detachable objects that signify both placed with and when displaced from her poetry. Decisions, whether by Smith or by her editors, to move or remove an image have both subtle and dramatic changes for readers' experiencing of her poems. This paper relies on archival and published sources to provide readings of several of Smith's poems including 'Do Take Muriel Out,' 'The Rehearsal,' 'The After-Thought,' and 'Not Waving but Drowning.' In their continual ability to be removed and reattached to her poetry, Smith's doodles destabilize the texts that they supposedly compliment, while at the same time also revitalizing them by allowing them to remain open to new interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author, who is a single mother of a young man with mental illness, describes her son’s first psychotic break. By melding poetry, prose, dream journal entries, and medical case notes, she explores the embodied experience of witnessing her son’s decompensation. In sharing her story, she reminds other caregivers of people with mental illness that they are not alone. She makes sense of her experience with findings from the literature about posttraumatic stress among family caregivers of people with chronic illness and explores the implications for caregivers, practitioners, and scholars of mental illness, trauma, and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the use of poetry as a social research method and describes the underlying philosophy as well as the practical processes involved in carrying out such an approach. It draws on an ESRC-funded research project which took place at a Sure Start programme in an impoverished town in North West England. Sure Start was a New Labour initiative working with families with young children in disadvantaged areas. The research used poetry as one of several means of working with the community in order to look at the effectiveness of the local programme and to explore people's experiences of parenting in poverty. The paper discusses some of the poems produced during this project and questions the extent to which an arts-based approach to social inquiry can challenge dominant ideologies of oppressed people and provide an alternative discourse. This is particularly important in social work education in terms of addressing pre-conceptions that students may have about those marginalised groups that they are likely to be working with in their future practice as social workers. It concludes that poetic texts can provide insight into the lives of others, and can generate important discussion in the process of their interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jerome Bruner’s experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the ‘subjunctification’ of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By ‘subjunctification’, Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for example) to transform one’s experience of the world, to render understanding in more complex ways and to do more than get things done as they have always been done. This paper reports on a small-scale replication of the experiment that sought to measure differences in the affordances of poetry being read aloud compared to hearing a short story or a news article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trauma needs containment and recognition in order to be handled, and this project enabled the soldier to do both through the use of writing and poetry. This paper is based on the qualitative findings of an 18-month long poetry therapy group conducted in a veteran's center, and follows the progress of the veterans as they learned to use writing and poetry to focus on the present and reconnect to a broad spectrum of emotions they had been trained to suppress. The paper describes the theory behind the exercises and their impact on the veterans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research with young people who 'do not fit the mould' requires innovative and unconventional methods, but what are the implications of such methods for scholarly representation? This paper reports on the development of such a method with students diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and offers one view of the borderland spaces and tensions between critical theory and narrative inquiry. In particular, the paper defines the methodology that underpins the 'critical cover narratives' method, describes the application of this approach within a doctoral study, and identifies resultant issues of representation when combining narrative and critical approaches. The paper then details the use of a tapestry metaphor to reconcile these issues. The central premise of the paper is that differing methods produce different knowledge, which demands different forms of representation. In making this case, the paper discusses the importance of a balance between the epistemological and aesthetic within scholarly representations of narrative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is written in a personal capacity and mainly takes the form of a poem - in five sections - composed as a response to some of the ideas in the article by Hannu Heikkinen and colleagues in this same issue of "Educational Action Research": 'Action research as narrative: five principles for validation'. The poem takes its title and structure from that article: its coming-into-being as a piece of work is described in the short introduction. As the introduction mentions, the author-poet has discussed, in previous papers, some of the connections and disconnections between the practices of educational research and poetry. The present paper offers actual work-in-practice that illustrates how these have been played out in one context - which was as poet-in-residence at a conference on inter-professional learning and practice in healthcare. The author is very keen to tempt others into dialogue on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 BC). It centres on Plato’s discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato’s Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigated the use of poems for reflection. Participants (n = 16) were enrolled upon a Foundation Degree in Sports Coaching. Part modular assessment saw the students create an action plan that provided key indicators as to their ability within a range of study skills. The entire cohort failed to implement the plan. Whilst there exists a prevailing wind of poetic embrace within the social sciences, limitations are evident within the domain of sport and physical activity. The research questions whether poems may be implemented as a means to initial reflection and reorientation and as a consolidation of prior learning. Findings suggest poetry may aid initial reflection and reorientation and a consolidation of prior learning, that the writings were enjoyable, at times frustrating, developmental and that such creativity might be advocated elsewhere across the HE curriculum. Implications for the learner are discussed and I suggest a framework for practitioners (‘Reflective Facilitation’), which considers how we may assist our learners in a process of guided discovery in which their reflections may become critical and self-governed. The paper then considers the limitations of the research process and offers considerations for future practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking as a case study the marble group of Apollo and Daphne, sculpted by Giovan Lorenzo Bernini for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the 1620s, this paper discusses the exchange between sculpture and poetry in determining how the beholder engages the sculpted object. More in particular, the question is addressed how the image's infringement on the beholder's world and body can both be activated and channelled by text and discourse, and how, at the same time, the artist seeks to relate to such a discourse with his work. To map this complicated exchange, first several contemporary poems are discussed, focusing in particular on the manner in which they thematize the beholder's encounter with sculpture. Subsequently, the Apollo and Daphne is scrutinized to gain understanding in the ways it engages with and presupposes literary discourse and the embodied beholder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between continuity and change in Central Asian domestic felt textile production. In order to set this in the context of a pastoralist perspective, the paper draws on regional practices such as oral poetry and movement through landscape, as well as human–environment relations in order to reveal the dynamic and creative improvisatory process through which local textile production can be understood. In so doing, it examines whether Euro-American anthropology's rejection of a ‘static’ notion of ‘tradition’ for one of hybridity (reflecting a critique of its own nostalgia), has inadvertently moved us away from a focus on the historical narratives of those we study, which is often at odds with their own concerns. The author argues that for ‘moving people’, it is the dynamics of orality, human–environment relations and the practice (rather than the evidence) of material culture that elucidates our understanding of the relationship between continuity and change. The power of felt is thus reflected in the apparently ephemeral, non-enduring, aspects of these practices, which are what makes them endure, continuously bringing the past into being for new cultural futures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses how major breakthroughs in generating, analysing and disseminating action research about problem-based learning were made through the medium of poetry. I used poetry in three ways: as data, as an interpretive device and as a reflective medium. Poetry helped me to disseminate my research in provocative, memorable and challenging ways. Action research is conceptualised as a triple process of doing, thinking and being that incorporates the powerful use of poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on research on masculinities to examine poetry as a socially and culturally gendered genre. Situated in the context of the current 'crisis' around boys' underachievement in school, attention is drawn to the problematic understanding of poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. Attention is further drawn to the way in which poetry, when offered up to boys, is often imbued with traditional and outdated definitions of masculinity. We illustrate the extent to which hegemonic versions of masculinity are implicated in discourses about poetry as an unsuitable genre for boys. This is accomplished by undertaking a critical analysis of various sources such as Odean's (1998) Great Book for Boys, and Scieszka's (2005) Guys Write for Guys Read, as well as Iggulden and Iggulden's (2006) The Dangerous Book for Boys. Historical perspectives which highlight the role of sexologists in forging an association between poetry and effeminacy are also used to illuminate the legacy associated with the treatment of poetry somehow discordant with dominant understandings about boys' developing masculinity. In this way, we provide a richer understanding of poetry and its discursive relationship to masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaginings and uses of place in Northern Ireland are characterised frequently by sectarianism, leading to the strict territorialisation of space along cultural, political and religious dividing lines. It is argued that such geographies underpin the six counties' ongoing intercommunal conflict. Extrapolating from the work of feminist economic geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham, this paper suggests that in order to fracture the monolith of spatial sectarianism, attention must be paid to imaginings and uses of place which sidestep or move beyond the tendency to exclude. Here I examine poetry by Michael Longley and Sinead Morrissey for its alternative envisaging of place, and argue that these particular instances of opening out a spatial imaginary are of import both in a Northern Irish context, and further afield. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to demonstrate the power and meaning of human lyricism by the only means that can really do so - lyricism itself. Using a fresh reading of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (Eliot, 1944), the author demonstrates the lyrical attitude Eliot himself offers us as a way to observe the world. This lyrical attitude, which the author believes is a vital component of the analytic presence, will be presented here as a unique kind of integration between the predictable and explicable - and that which is inexplicable and sometimes even unknowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of poetry in healthcare education have investigated self-selected groups. Many have been descriptive, whilst others speculated on utility and justification. This study explores perceptions of learners, a cohort of 13 registrars in one general practice training scheme, who experienced poetry-based sessions within their curriculum. The study's design was naturalistic, consisting of two poetry-based small group sessions, facilitated by a course organiser. The first session used poems selected by the facilitator, the second, poems selected by the registrars. Poems were read and then discussed, with an emphasis on individuals sharing their personal responses to the poems. This paper reports the first stage of the study, which utilised questionnaires and a focus group to investigate the perceptions of the entire cohort. The second stage, involving individual in-depth interviews with six registrars, will be reported in another publication. Poetry sessions were considered enjoyable and effective, even by those previously sceptical. These sessions required no expert literary resource, just a facilitator with a willingness to explore the learners' responses to the poems. The registrars identified benefits that may help doctors, both personally and professionally. Potential impacts on patient care were also identified. Differences between the two types of poetry session are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how drama therapy assists incarcerated women in freeing themselves from internalized oppressive beliefs. In the context of a drug and alcohol treatment program for incarcerated women, the authors assist the women in building three distinct bridges to healing: a new relationship to one's self, to other women, and to the community. Writing exercises, performance techniques, and group drama therapy empower women to express their diverse voices. As the women risk sharing their personal stories and journeys of recovery, they begin to actively envision a different future for themselves. The participants discover talents that offer them an opportunity to experience themselves in a different light, no longer bound by the stigma of being in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the use of poetry in therapy, particularly with trauma survivors, and clients in recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs. Practice examples from sessions with individuals and groups illustrate some of the methods and benefits of writing poetry. Mazza's (2003) model is introduced, together with a discussion of the theoretical base and research supporting poetry writing as a therapeutic collaboration. In addition, the author demonstrates how therapists can use poetry writing themselves as a way to make sense of their work, and relieve the stress of absorbing the hurt and pain of their clients. Samples of poetry from her work and that of other therapists are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What lessons for psychotherapy can be drawn from the enjoyment and sustenance we find in the use of literature? This paper looks back on a recent creative writing project undertaken with patients in a hospice day centre, and suggested reasons why the patients found this activity not only enjoyable but also therapeutic. Both the hospice as an institution and the poetic form are defined in terms of a transitional space. The article shows how the act of reading and writing poetry places a value for patients on not knowing at a time when the plain hard facts of terminal illness loom large. The author describes a practical way of engaging with poetry in this context, and uses clinical material to describe how the literary arts can provide a transformational object, and a point of inspiration, that may help patients to negotiate the changes brought about by their illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]