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So much pain in the world – the formless
grief of the body, whose language/is hunger –
I speak/
because I am shattered.
The dream of art is not to assert what is already known
but to illuminate what has been hidden….
At the age of 16, Louise Glück , winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Poetry, weighed 75 pounds. Consumed by a deadly anorexia, she began a psychoanalysis that lasted seven years. In interviews and essays, she has acknowledged her analysis saved her, helping her to recover so she could exist in the world and continue to write poetry, which she had abandoned as her illness progressed (2020).
If anorexia is Thanatos – the ascendency of the death drive – poetry can be construed as Eros – creative rebirth through the embodiment and containment of language. Embodiment is defined by Merriam-Webster as that which is concrete and perceptible, or “… cause[s] to become a body or part of a body.” The poem – concrete, perceptible, and an extension of the self – exists in the object realm of readers and can be experienced and shared through the commonality of language. Too, the poem is contained by its form – whether sonnet or free verse — as well as the concreteness of words on the page.
Glück (2020) was interested in examining the experience of intimacy arising between speaker and listener, adding that the poems to which she has been most attracted are those “in which the listener or reader make an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry… .” In Glück's view, the poem is a communal sharing, a communication that demands to be heard. This intimate dialog exists as well in the sharing of emotional communication in the therapeutic setting between patient and analyst, which Glück probably experienced as an analysand.
While healing is not always the main priority for a poet, writing can be regarded as a