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When writing a poem which attempts to enter another person's experience, to imagine what it would be like to be them, the process has many similarities to self-supervision. Transference, countertransference and projective identification are all examined through the medium of free association. In therapy, the aim is to enhance my interpretations. In poetry, the aim is to create a poem inspired by another person.
I sometimes write a poem arising out of an experience in therapy. Then the two processes and aims are one.
Of the poems offered here, the first, ‘Failing Light’, is an attempt to feel my way into the experience of a person with Alzheimer's disease, and the second, ‘Closing Scene’, into a suicide. ‘Still Birth’ and ‘Putting It Right’ arose out of my work as a therapist, and the last poem, ‘For Your Infant Son’, arose from work with a supervisee.
The sky is burdened with the gathering snow,an avalanche of years bears down on him.Memories lie like stones that once were flowers,deep in the troubled rivers of his brain.He hears so many voices from the past,like tapping miners trapped inside his head.There is terror in the blank of his daughter's name,