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Empathy is an important aspect of therapeutic relationships in health and social care settings. Health educators can foster empathy development in learners through creative writing activities. Drawing on the humanities, specifically poetry, this paper offers strategies for educators to support empathy development in learners, with a focus on service user poetry and associated creative writing activities. We discuss how poetry can enable alternative perspectives about care to emerge thereby challenging previously held assumptions about mental and physical states. Using poetry can enable a rehearsal of empathy by bringing experiences to the learner in a safe and facilitated environment. Through creative writing activities, we believe that students can learn to better understand and empathise with others, as well as explore their own feelings and experiences related to caregiving, to support self-care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the concept of emotion and its relevance to education via character education through the medium of poetry. The objective is to demonstrate the potential implementation of character education through poetry, and to show the intrinsic link between poetry and virtue, knowledge and reasoning. It is argued that poetry serves as a bridge between emotion and character education. The philosophy of emotions is explored through the works of Aristotle, Karin Bohlin and David Carr. Character education is understood in terms of a Neo-Aristotelian approach, drawing on Kristján Kristjánsson, Bohlin and Carr. My position is that, through exercising the craft of poetry, children and young students are provided with tools for exploring emotions, and for discerning and deliberating about virtues and moral contextual nuances in the broader context of human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As digital photography proliferates in the contemporary world, theorists and creative writers continue to debate what photographs signify and how the poetic ekphrasis of photographs should be understood. This has become a pressing issue in an age when new technologies allow the easy manipulation of digital images – which, depending on the context in which they are viewed, are increasingly being characterised as creative, imaginative, unreliable or deceptive. Yet nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century theorists tended to assume that photographs had a direct, if complex, relationship to observable, external reality, something reiterated by Susan Sontag as late as 1977. This paper discusses how ekphrastic poems by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin enshrine assumptions about photography that are now shifting, and how contemporary ekphrastic poems about photographs increasingly challenge, sometimes subversively, photography's link to the 'real'. Such poetry continues to emphasise the way photographs connote a 'chasm' or 'thickening' of time but are more troubled than earlier authors by the idea that photographs may not represent anything clear or knowable. Eve Joseph's and Leslie Scalapino's poetry demonstrates ways in which photographs tend to juxtapose a sense of transience with a new sense of photography's sometimes obdurate problematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a personal paper about the author's animus, Watsky explores his fascination with Louise Glück, after attempting to solicit first her poetry for Jung Journal and then an interview about her voice in her poetry shortly after her death. He realized he had projected his anima onto a complete stranger known only through her writing. Suspicious of his motives, he proceeds to read her entire oeuvre during a two-week period, exploring their intersections and their divergences. Watsky then narrates a previous projection onto the writer Joanna Field who turned out to be the Freudian analyst Marion Milner. After reading all of her work and convinced that she had been influenced by Jung, he sought her out in Hamstead, England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay zooms in on the story of the Palestinian body condemned to suffer unspeakable injustices so that a system based on inequity keeps working for the few. It relies on poetic texts written or performed by those whose bodies are controlled by the interrelated forces of settler colonialism, authoritarianism, and imperialism. The storms these forces unleash and the prices they exact in terms of human life cement the condition of the body whose life bears witness to the fall of justice. The essay argues that these poets practice what we would like to call "seizing life from the teeth of death" wherein their determination to fight oppression exceeds national and regional boundaries to embrace and learn from the indigenous nations in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research uses poetry as a form of data to explore a sense of ‘belonging’ for staff working in higher education. Poetic content analysis was explored as a research method and using poetry in this way has allowed for a nuanced exploration of questions of belonging in the context of individual intersectional identities. Following an analysis of eighteen poems submitted by staff working in higher education four major categories emerged: ‘Community’, ‘Exclusion’, ‘Transformation’, and ‘Self’. These emergent narratives led to several recommendations that institutions and individuals might consider implementing to create a more positive sense of belonging for all staff working in higher education. These recommendations and emergent narratives are centred around a willingness for higher education as a sector to better recognise and nurture the deep-rooted commitment that is shared by many staff to the potential of higher education both now and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been little research into poetry classification and the potential to access poems by form and genre. The categories listed in the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms (LCGFT), Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and the poetry-sharing platform, PoetrySoup, were compared through a systematic mapping process. It was found that LCGFT coverage is more extensive for poetry than fiction, but all four sources' coverage is limited. Beyond a small core of well-established forms and genres, poetry is classified in many less well-known ways, with many categories based on form, as well as a wide range of other characteristics, including some very specific ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]