Listening with Both Ears

I developed each of my careers separately as if they were not compatible — at times, in fact, each has seemed to thrive at the expense of the other. However, the two careers have actually been developing in tandem; I strive now to be more fully conscious of the facts that the poems I author are written by a psychoanalyst, and the psychoanalysis I practice is conducted by a poet.

I am always trying to hear better. I work in two domains where deep listening is central to their efforts and success. I've come to appreciate that, in both poetry and psychoanalysis, the speaker, the spoken and the spoken-to act upon each other so as to create an evocative space wherein thoughts and feelings evoke other thoughts and feelings, many of them formerly unconscious; as well, multiple meanings and multiple levels of meaning are potentiated, as are states of mind more commonly described as creative, reflective, perhaps even aesthetic.

But another way I can elucidate the burgeoning convergence for me of these two careers is to describe the collection of poems I have written over the last two decades. Each book has been written while I was actively engaged in psychoanalysis in some form, and each is inflected with preoccupations elaborated through writing the poems and thinking psychoanalytically.

The first book, Call & Response (1995), was a book about finding identity through finding voice, and hearing within my voice those of many others. I wrote it during the course of my own analysis, and just after I resumed writing creatively, mourning therein the losses of intimates and friends from AIDS as well as the childhood losses of my grandparents and my brother. I started writing a sequence of poems called the “Goldsboro Narratives”, and I continue to write these to this day. In the first cohort of these, I sought to give witness to a place and time wherein my grandparents and their contemporaries were alive again; I also sought to think more directly about the legacy of slavery implicit