Is poetry a form of therapy?
"We have to be careful not to confuse poetry with healing." — ANDREA JURJEVIĆ, Poet of the Week
The $3600 ONLY POEMS PRIZE closes in ~2 weeks! Submit here.
Andrea Jurjević is the author of In Another Country (2022 Saturnalia Prize), Small Crimes (2015 Philip Levine Prize) and Nightcall. Her translations from Croatian include Olja Savičević’s Mamasafari and Marko Pogačar’s Dead Letter Office, which was shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. She’s a native of Croatia.
Food
A man asks a woman out for lunch to a café with a pepto-pink patio. She orders pomegranate parfait and he fried chicken biscuit. Afterwards she gives him a blow job in his car. Next time they meet, he takes her out to a Japanese joint. He wants to do something nice for her because she drove six hours to see him. He suggests a sushi and sashimi mariawase, hot sake. She asks for a tuna roll and tea. That night they have sex on the sofa and fall asleep in their clothes. After abortion she gives him her oxies. When he is in town next, she leaves her husband and goes to a store to get wine. She isn’t sure what kind he likes, so she buys three types, plus a purple port, and meets him in a vacant studio. They open a red blend and pour it into solo cups. The cups get slippery while they fuck on the futon. Her anus bleeds for days. He stops by in winter. In one hand she holds a bowl of beetroot and nasturtium, with the other she lifts her skirt up. He eats with unwashed hands. In spring they drive through the Lowcountry. He insists to take her to a nice restaurant. But a nice place is impossible to find. He’s upset. She says it’s okay, she doesn’t care about food that much. This upsets him even more. A strange undercurrent is at works. The sky starless. Dark as a grave. As a walnut. As an empty gut. They go to sleep hungry that night and they never have another meal again.
Healing is not an absence of pain. In other words, it is human to hurt. To sit with discomfort. To acknowledge it.
Poetry allows us to articulate and make sense of whatever is churning within us. It can help us construct something out of an impossible, unresolvable situation. We can turn that situation into a piece of art, and then we can look at it as an object. That might be a cathartic experience, but I don’t want to call it healing. Healing is continuous . . . We have to be careful not to confuse poetry with healing. Poetry is and should be an independent force.
Is poetry a form of therapy?
You can catch up on some of the answers to last week’s question here:
This week, inspired by Andrea Jurjević’s interview, we dive headlong into a difficult question. Poetry is certainly a way to express ourselves and deal with our problems and pains and also the injustices of the world at large (and how they affect us in a very real way). But is that enough to be a form of “therapy”. Can we define therapy within poetics?
Poetry and therapy have a center we can usually recognize but not recognizable borders. The easiest identification we’re in that circle is the satisfaction of a useful change in perception or other kind of relationship with the lives we live. But it’s as much belief as definition. An open heart and open heart surgery can each be necessary but for fully different reasons, from fully different perspectives. The point for me is how they nurture or challenge my life to grow, deepen, expand or focus in a satisfying way. Which is why my favorite poets surprise me, sometimes with my own established feelings. And why “comfy chair” poetry doesn’t. And why I’m grateful Only Poems is provoking thought and feelings, not just depicting them. This is where poetry thrives.
Wow, what amazing prose poems! I’m usually not a fan of prose poetry (probably because I’ve never written a good one), but these are everything a prose poem should be; thanks so much for sharing. This is why poetry is therapy. Relating to others through reading poetry and sharing my own poems.