From the Unconscious

In Night Errands, How Poets Use Dreams, Roderick Townley writes:

One hears complaints about ambiguity from those who value the straightforward. What does all of it mean? Why can't poets say what they mean? Often, there is something legitimate about the public's irritation with contemporary poetry. A lot of facile surrealism poses as profundity, and it is not always easy to distinguish willful obscurity from the inevitable ambiguity of deep imagery. Actually, the best poets are always hunting down the exact word, the precise phrase, firing off panicky letters to editors to be sure that a semi-colon has been changed to a comma Confusion is the last thing they want; it would defeat the whole enterprise, which is communication, from deep to deep.

In the following two poems written by Salman Akhtar, he has achieved the goals of both good analysis and good poetry: internal communication between deep places within and the ability to span the gap between deep places within the speaker and the listener. Akhtar is a professor of psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He is the author of Broken Structures (1992), Quest for Answers (1995), Inner Torment (1999), Immigration and Identity (1999), and New Clinical Realms (2003), as well as editor or co-editor of nineteen other books. He is a scholar in residence at the Inter-Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia and has published six volumes of poetry.

Sheri A. Hunt, M.D., is a candidate at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in both the adult and child training programs. A published poet and member of TAP's editorial board, she welcomes reader comments and suggestions at sherihunt@hotmail.com.