THE IMPERTINENT DUET::
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#1: SPANISH DANCING ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH
(in collaboration with Silvia Kofler)

I. A Small Question of He or It

At this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference, Silvia Kofler, an old friend and colleague, showed me a translation of Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer” that she’d come across in an anthology. “Look how they translated this line! Why?” And so began a conversation. While I take full blame for the vagaries of the translation at the end
of this piece, this essay is really a joint endeavor, a record of the dialogue between Silvia and myself.

Silvia is a native Austrian who emigrated to the United States in her twenties. She’s a published poet in both English and German. Rilke is, of course, a poet she’s known since her school days, but it’s worth noting that Rilke is not, for contemporary German readers, the ubiquitously read icon he is in America. A German speaking poetry reader might delve into Rilke as often as contemporary Americans read, say, Wallace Stevens.

And as for us with Stevens, the German reader often has to slow down and mull over just what it is that Rilke is saying. But in this case, Silvia seemed emphatic.

Silvia’s issue was a line in Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer.” Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar. The line comes immediately after the first stanza and is, in fact, a stanza unto itself. “Spanish Dancer,” an extended metaphor set in a Paris nightclub, is one of Rilke’s least opaque poems. Most, if not all, Englishspeaking translators have roughly followed Herter Norton’s 1938 translation. Norton’s reading of the first stanza and the stand-alone line that follows is:

Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss,
eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten
zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis
naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss
ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten.
Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar.

…

As in one’s hand a sulfur match, whitely,
before it comes aflame, to every side
darts twitching tongues – : within the circle
of close watchers hasty, bright and hot
her round dance begins twitching to spread itself.
And suddenly it is altogether flame.

Why, Silvia asked, did they translate er as it when it should be he?

The answer that Rilke’s myriad translators would uniformly give her is that in German, unlike English, inanimate nouns are gender specific. Either masculine or feminine. Der Tanz is masculine. And so in German, the pronoun for dance is “he.” And er, in this case, refers to the dance.

It’s logical. There’s no “he” mentioned anywhere else in the poem. And, as I said above, I’m not aware of any English or American translator who’s treated the line otherwise.

But, no, no—Silvia said. Sure that’s “logical,” but it’s not the way a native speaker would read this poem—at least at first. This, after all, is a very erotic piece and it’s as much about a man watching as a woman dancing.

Which got me thinking. Grammar has rules that seem logical, but poetry has it’s own linguistic logic. And Rilke, especially, has his own poetics. His imagery can be as musical as his metrics—often fugue-like and ambiguous with interchangeable melody and harmonic lines as it were. In this context, it may well be that another native speaker might read this line differently than Silvia has always read it. But why does she read (and want to read) er as a he rather than a gendered dance? What happens when you interject a specific man into the poem?

First, to me, the effect is reminiscent of a film director zooming in on a face in the crowd. It crystallizes and personalizes the eroticism of the dance. And second, it stops you (at least in German) because you have to ask yourself—did Rilke really mean “he”? And so that image might (for another German reader) flash and disappear if you finally settle on “it.” But the image is there, at least subliminally.

And one shouldn’t overlook the poem’s line structure. Rilke has set one stand-alone line between two five line stanzas. He’s making us stop; the standalone line doesn’t flow smoothly from the Tanz in the previous stanza. Read by itself, without referring to the previous stanza, er is just as readily he as it.

It’s hard for an English speaker to connect with this, because we have so few gender specific inanimate nouns. What’s happening in the German, seems to me, to be similar to what happens if you come across something like:

The queen boarded the Queen Elizabeth
then she promptly set out to sea.

Is the “she” that sets out to sea the queen or the ship? You stop to think, and may say, what’s the difference because both, in fact, set out to sea. But you stop to think. And the image of the queen and the Queen both come to mind.

__________

II. But How in the World Can You Translate Something Like That?

I’m not sure, but I think it’s a good example of why poems as resonant as Rilke’s benefit from regular re-translation. It’s a commonplace observation that Rilke has become overdone in English. There are commercial reasons for this—he’s in the public domain, and most of the selections sell. Sadly, most of the selections read like workshopped versions of each other. So the only reason to do another version is to try to bring something across that hasn’t been attempted. And I think that’s a good enough reason here.

__________

III. So Here’s the Attempt

Some tricks just can’t be duplicated. I can’t think of a masculine English noun remotely equivalent to “dance.” My first thought was to just choose “he”—as Silvia seems to have done. Say something like and suddenly he’s utterly on fire.

That’s consistent, it adds a close-up of a face in the crowd that instantly focuses the poem, makes the dance as much a dialogue as a performance. I can understand why Silvia was so incensed at losing this aspect in the translation she read.

But then, is that too onedimensional? Does it lose the resonance implicit in choosing
between images? You could also dodge the issue entirely and say: and suddenly, completely, helplessly: -fire. Leaving out both “he” or “it.”

If you took that approach, you could stretch Beschauer—spectators, watchers—into something more gender specific and overtly erotic, like voyeurs.

But then you lose that wonderful effect of a close-up, zoom in.

And—as Silvia pointed out to me as our dialogue progressed—there’s another subtlety in the way Beschauer is used. This is another masculine noun, but also one that in German normally takes its singular or plural form from whether it’s prefaced by the masculine der (singular) or the feminine article die. In this case, it’s not prefaced by a definite article, because the plural is inferred from Kreis—the circle of spectators.

Even so, Silvia observed—the lack of the usual definite article might subtly nudge the German reader into the ambiguity of er in the standalone line.

Most of this isn’t possible in English. So finally, the best approach may be to try to find the tangled resonance of “he/it” elsewhere in the poem. And just overtly go with what seems Rilke’s intent.

__________

Rainer Maria Rilke

SPANISCHE TÄNZERIN

Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss,
eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten
zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis
naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss
ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten.

Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar.

Mit Ihren Blick entzündet sie ihr Haar
und dreht auf einmal mit gewagter Kunst,
ihr ganzes Kleid in diese Feursbrunst,
aus welcher sich, wie Schlangen, die erschrecken,
die nackte Arme wach und klappernd strecken.

Und dann: als wurde ihr das Feuer knapp,
nimmt sie es ganz zusamm und wirft es ab
sehr herrisch, mit hochmütiger Gebärde
und schaut: da liegt es resend auf der Erde
und flammt noch immer ergibt sich nicht -,
Doch sieghaft, sicher und mit einem süssen
grüssenden Lächeln hebt sie ihr Gesicht
und stampft es aus mit kleinen festen Füssen.

…

Rainer Maria Rilke
—tr. Art Beck

SPANISH DANCER

The way a sulfur match, cupped in the hand, whitens
before it flames, licks out in every direction: -
within the intent ring of watching eyes,
the quick, bright heat of her circling
feet shivers until it flares.

And suddenly he and the dance are altogether fire.

With a blink, she ignites her hair,
then instantly with seductive mastery,
whirls her entire dress into the bonfire
from which her naked arms rear
up like startled rattlesnakes.

As the fire finally clings to her like a slip,
she strips it off completely, aristocratically tosses
it aside with a haughty shrug. And watches:
There it lies, smoldering on the ground, still
burning and unwilling to surrender. And with
a smile on her face and a sweet “hello,” she
stamps it out with small, sure steps.

–from Rattle e.6, Spring 2009 (PDF)

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). He’s currently trying to atone for some of his earlier Rilke versions by retranslating the Sonnets to Orpheus.

Silvia Kofler teaches at Rockhurst University and is editor/publisher of the poetry magazine, Thorny Locust. Her latest poetry collection, Radioactive Musings, was included in the Kansas City Star’s Top 100 books of 2007 by local authors.

Maryhelen Snyder

THE ART OFWAITING:
THE PARALLELS OF POETRY AND THERAPY

O you and me at last, and us two only!
—Walt Whitman

There are only the two of us. The poet and the page. The therapist and the client. These are the central creative activities of my life. And each is an intimate experience that I and others have compared to that of being a midwife. Because the fact is that the primary satisfaction lies in waiting. And then, as a poem or a person emerges, in being receptive, and sometimes astounded.

Neuroscience is daily revealing more about the not-yet-formulated, not-yet-materialized energy of the brain in repose, an energy virtually infinite and vastly more intense than the motor activity of putting language on paper or applying language to therapy. Formulated energy springs from the chaos of possibility. I wait and I trust: trust the muse to tell me what she is wanting to sing, and the client to tell me what is alive in her in this moment.

* * *

Sometimes a client has failed to notice that I am present—or I have failed to notice it myself! We slip into something that is simply a repetition of already thought thoughts, already assumed problems, already stale ways of seeing each other (or, rather, of not seeing). If I notice that I am bored or restless, anxious or discouraged, my task is to be attentive to my mind, to stop with my pen in mid-air so to speak, or stop a therapy session in midsentence. If my client is boring me, then I am boring myself. I might say: Wait, let’s take a moment to notice I’m here, you are there. Two human beings. We matter to each other.

Something shifts. Perhaps we are quiet together, perhaps we take time to breathe, perhaps my client takes time, with my guidance, to experience this moment in his body, in the sights and sounds around us, in his current feelings and thoughts, in our relationship, to discover what wants to be said now. This is a parallel process to the one Lucille Clifton often described as discovering “what the poem wants to say.” What is emergent from the latent energy of the embodied and relational mind, from what neurobiologist and Mindsight author Daniel Siegel describes as the “open ended plane of possibility.”

What is the mysterious “energy” that allows every aspect of the mind to come into play? As though the two hemispheres and the frontal cortex stretching back in evolution to its origins, and all the stuff of existence that makes each self a self-in-world, and the deep “light” within that no-one can name, suddenly got switched to on? Whatever it is, apparently the capacity to surrender to the creative intelligence available to consciousness exists in all of us. Sometimes “we” intend it, sometimes it takes us by surprise without conscious intention.

I watched a documentary on the life of Whitman in which the narrator points to a manuscript revealing the very beginnings of the writing of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s handwriting suddenly changes. He is become new. Magical and musical language and the truth of experience is available to him as though from a bottomless well.

As therapist and poet, I have done my homework. For some 60 years of my thus-far life, I have been studying my two primary crafts. I have the degrees, the certificates, the licenses, the publications—and I do believe that much of this training and this almost daily practice, have made some difference. But the biggest difference resides in my openness to the shift to a new beginning.

* * *

The word poem comes from the Greek poien, to make or construct. Although my poem can be created within a wide range of structures, I remain conscious, as poet, of each part within the whole, as well as of the whole.

Sometimes I choose my container before embarking. Certainly, in the case of therapy, I have chosen that the session will last a certain amount of time and take place in a certain location. Beyond this, I let the form emerge almost entirely from the co-created meanings that emerge in the therapeutic dialogue. Sometimes I choose to work within a particular structure, as a poet might choose the sonnet form before beginning, or part way through the poem. In my own case, I attempt to never be more committed to the container than to the ever-emergent meaning and “music.” The moment is always guiding me; at least, this is what I strive for.

One structure that has come to define my work as a therapist is that of “becoming the other.” This is a form of empathic listening in which I quite literally enter the “lifeworld” of a client by speaking as if I am that client. We don’t understand the neurology of what makes this possible, but Martin Buber found the best language I have discovered to date. He writes of the “bold step” involved in taking the consciousness within another human being into our own. He says that this step requires “the deepest stirring of our own being.” He expressed to Carl Rogers, in a recorded dialogue, his belief that empathy is not an accurate enough word to describe this possibility, that a preferred word is inclusion.

I have a rather strict structure for using this method, a structure I can teach to couples and other therapists in the same way I can teach the form of the villanelle to students of poetry, step by step with examples and practice. But with therapy, as with the poem, following the form will not be
enough.

In one of my favorite sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of “Chaos” trapped in a poem:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

These lines have precise parallels to the therapeutic relationship and to the client’s struggle with internal chaos. Carl Rogers’ person-centered approach had a rigorous, consistent, and open-ended form to which I can re-call myself when I wander away (and permit the client to wander away) from the flow of creative intelligence that is available when we are listening for it.

What has been called “aesthetic knowing” or “poetic intelligence” is different in nature from reasoned knowing. It informs both poetry and therapy, this in the activity of “becoming the other.” Sometimes I do this silently—in my own mind—as I listen. I attune to the body language and to the implicit meanings. I exercise the miracle of intuition. Einstein tells us that he did not arrive at the theory of relativity with his rational mind. Something else, something inexpressible and inexplicable, happened.

In a play, entitled Explain This Moment, that is likely no longer in print, Harry Willson created this opening scene: A grandfather is dying in the next room (off-stage). His daughter and young grandson are front stage. The boy asks his mother to explain death. She tells him that some things can’t be explained. He looks at her disbelieving, and insists that she can make sense out of death, that everything can be explained. She kneels down in front of him, takes his shoulders between her hands, and looks intently into his face. “All right, then,” she says, “Explain this moment.” I remember a stillness in the audience as we all felt the impossibility of that.

When I consciously choose to enter the space of my poetic intelligence about the other, I say what I did not know I knew about their lived experience. The client often responds with words like these: “How did you know that! I feel exactly what you expressed—but I didn’t know I felt it until you said it. It’s as though two of us existed in my one mind.”

And the truth is that I don’t know how I knew it (as we often don’t know where the clear insight and language of a poem comes from). Nor did I consciously know I knew it until I said it. And I’m not always right, so I quickly self-correct if what I say doesn’t resonate as true for the client. I have no concept of “resistance” in the vocabulary of my work as a therapist. My attunement either fits or it doesn’t.

* * *

There comes a moment (often many moments) in virtually every therapy session and certainly in the creation of any poem when I realize that I don’t know what I am doing or where I am going.

Perhaps relevantly, my mind’s heart just went to the battlefields on which American soldiers currently risk and lose their lives and the lives of our so-called enemy. So I will give space to this flight of my mind away from the apparent subject of this essay. It is perhaps most on the battlefield that we don’t know what we’re doing, where we need to be forgiven because we know not what we do. But it is also on the battlefield that we are taught to act quickly and forge ahead. It is not a moment when we can stand in the stillness of not knowing, not knowing why I am dropping this bomb, killing this man who is likely as young and brave and terrified as myself, destroying this home and family and child, murdering people I would likely love if I knew them. We must act, and act irreversibly. In this respect, the therapist’s role seems more dangerous than the poet’s. In the irreversible present moment, she has the power to allow herself to be seen as an expert, to pathologize, diagnose, medicate or at least recommend medication, hospitalize, intensify self-doubt, hatred and despair. And likewise, she has the expert’s power to encourage, to keep families at least temporarily intact, to heal internalized trauma. She is asked, even begged, to know.

In the therapy session, however, as in the poem, we can and must stand at least for awhile in not knowing. We cannot allow urgency, necessity, or habit to guide us. We must be capable, as Keats’ often quoted letter to his brother reminds us, of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

This concept of opening space wide for not knowing allows something to happen that is contrary to all our pedagogy and up-bringing and to cultural discourses worldwide. It is no wonder that the oracle at Delphi was amazed by Socrates. How did he achieve this wisdom of knowing that he did not know? My favorite therapists and philosophers and poets have stood in this space. Quakers have no creeds or beliefs. They perceive the “inward light” as either an actual lived experience, or not. They perceive Jesus as one who experienced the “Father” (not a gendered word in Aramaic) in himself and in us. Faith, then, becomes a commitment to such experience, a willingness to trust it. This awareness is at the heart of all so-called religious experience, but often gets lost in the rigidities of institutions and rituals and cultural discourse.

Again, we can’t explain this with our rational minds. What does it mean for a poem or a human being to embrace nothingness, emptiness, and notknowing? The poet Rumi wrote, “Way out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” These words are widely quoted because we know what they mean experientially without being able to explain them any more clearly than in poetic language. The didactic poem and the didactic therapist may be momentarily reassuring—but we require the mystery. We do not want these lines from famous poems to be explained or turned into the prose of interpretation; they can’t be.

* * *

The poet makes of experience a metaphor, from the Greek metapherein, “to carry beyond.” This metaphorical experience of carrying, or being carried, beyond the event itself, to its hidden and potential meaning is the impetus and the result of the creative acts of poetry and therapy.

A powerful “mystical” experience in my own life occurred several weeks after my older son almost died of a grand mal seizure that left him not breathing, and then unconscious for close to an hour. I was terrified. One day, with a friend, I was exploring my fear, entering it as fully as I knew how, when these words “came” to me fully formulated and not rationally believable: We live in an absolutely perfect universe, and the whole thrust of existence is to participate in that already existing perfection. I could not accept this with my rational mind—but the words seemed to literally push against my locked voice and cry themselves out. And when I said them, over and over and over, they felt right to me—and I cried with the release of fear
and grief.

The etymology of the word perfect reveals that it means made thorough, through and through. It is not a static end point; it is a context, an ever-repeated origin for the infinite nature of creation. The poet and the therapist, alive in the movement-in-relation that is our actual experience, allow our love affair with the world to step forward, not in spite of the mundane or the tragic, not in spite of failure and betrayal and loss, but with all of it in the embrace of radiant consciousness.

* * *

A final word about the nature of this creative energy. I drove down a street in my neighborhood many years ago listening to an audio tape of a talk given by Krishnamurti. He was describing the difference between effort and energy, how energy comes to us most often when we give up all effort. A man had come to Krishnamurti because he was suffering with the knowledge that he had not really loved his now deceased wife. Krishnamurti simply invited him (them) to sit quietly with the fact of that. At a certain moment in this practice of stillness and waiting, the man felt an “enormous energy” arising out of the darkness of his experience, and “that,” said Krishnamurti, “was love.”

__________

Maryhelen Snyder is a psychotherapist and writer living in northern Virginia. Her poems and essays have appeared or will appear in numerous literary journals, including, most recently, The Gettysburg Review, Sojourners, and Passager. She has published two books of poetry and a memoir, No Hole in the Flame (Wildflower Press, 2008). Her essay on the work of Emily Dickinson, “Guarding Master’s Head,” appeared in last winter’s issue of Poet Lore.

–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

Richard Brostoff

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN POETRY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, embraces an inversion of our conventional beliefs: “It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.” What poetry may refer to as the abyss, our wilderness or wild, psychology more likely refers to as the unconscious. Poetry offers psychology its own perspective on the reaches of this realm, a unique repository not only of energy, but also of imagery, metaphor, paradox, inversion, contradiction, and often enough, beauty. Rather than a territory to be conquered, poetry valorizes and embraces the resources of the unconscious; it celebrates rather than subdues its creative genius. The poem invites our fascinated commerce with our deep world beneath the world; it invites us to linger in the sensory experience of its inhabiting. Stay awhile, it says.

Often enough, having entered an underworld, the poem suggests: you were here once, lived here, knew this, and the sense of discovery is a bit like walking into that odd, half-ruined city below the city in Rome—sitting there all the time waiting to be recovered, entered and explored in all its strangeness. At other times our underground world opens like a brief visitation. As Jane Hirshfield has written: “There are openings in our lives/ of which we know nothing./ Through them/ the belled herds travel at will,/ long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.” (Hirshfield, 3)

The psychological view comes to us from Freud, who believed the unconscious was a realm to be journeyed to, conquered and tamed. If Freud’s early ambition was to be a military general, he found, ironically, not an external front but an internal frontier to be subdued. For Freud, the domain of aggressive and libidinal impulses was largely instinctual, and unconscious energies were, at best, to be sublimated. If psychoanalysis’ methods allowed entrance to this unseen world, it was not to linger and bring back its wisdom, but, through insight, to make conscious and therefore colonize its foreignness and potentially dangerous energy: “the therapeutic effort of psycho-analysis…is to strengthen the ego, to widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organization so that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall be ego.” (Freud, 80) Freud’s extraordinary discovery of an alternate, secret world inside each of us is often underappreciated, the idea having become integrated into our cultural ideology. Yet, while disturbances of the psyche, a kind of overflow of the “id,” can lead to dis-ease, excess or psychosis, Freud may have nonetheless undervalued the unique resources of the void or abyss, of chaos, of strangeness itself.

Of course the terrain of poetry is not one of unstructured wilderness; it insists, much like psychology, on the ordering, structuring principle of craft (in some ways analogous to the ego or analyst), which holds, with form, in dynamic tension the disorder and storm force of the abyss. In the vessel of language, irreducible metaphor and structure, poetry holds in suspension contradiction and paradox, our conflicts and wild energies; it achieves a dynamic balance between the visible and invisible worlds, surface and depth, valorizing neither at the expense of the other.

On the surface of things, of course, the mediating presence of language is the essential medium of psychotherapy as well as poetry. If one wants to understand the life of another realm, another country, and communicate with those who live there, one must become conversant in their language. Poetry offers a less abstract, more sensory, Anglo-Saxon directness—a language of the body, as opposed to a more conceptual, Latinate language. At worst, the intellectual language of psychoanalysis serves as an obstacle course to feeling. When I return to my psychotherapy office in the afternoon, after writing a poem in the morning, my mind is more fluent and at ease with trope. As is true for our dream life, image and metaphor suggest an older, primal means of understanding and representing the world, a language in themselves. The practice of writing facilitates the metaphormaking facility of imagination (that sixth sense, as Emerson suggested), which has its roots planted in the unconscious. Like a traveler in a foreign country, one becomes immersed in its odd expressions and syntax, conversant with the illogical logic of its ways, entranced with its strange linguistic fauna and flora. Falling into the rabbit hole of imagination, into my shadow world certain mornings, warms up my ability to speak the dialect of the place, and therefore aids me as a therapist in speaking more directly to another’s wilderness, to the precincts of the heart. It aids in piercing the elaborate web of resistances and defenses on the borders of the deep life, in piercing the veil of our everyday lives.

Still, poetry is entranced not only with the strangeness and signification of our deep life’s language, but with the materiality of verbal surfaces, texture and tone, sonic life—the music of its making. I believe the psychologist is enlivened, steadied in his or her joint journey with a client by this simultaneous appreciation for the surface—the “manifest content” of the patient’s associations as well as its “latent content,” to use the language Freud used to discuss the interpretation of dreams. Close attention to verbal construction, to rhythm and the orchestrations of sound—to the aesthetic surfaces of a patient’s “productions”—energizes the journey, and, often enough, offers a portal to the interiors. Curiosity, deep attention, appreciation for the forms of our expressions—these are crucial values of the poet no less than the therapist. Fascination with the surface draws us in, invites us to “know the world more magnificently,” as Jane Hirshfield has said of poetry, and is the hook that draws us into depth.

Yet if a fascination with “surfaces” remains an energizing value of poetry, and a potential source of illumination for psychology, no less important is poetry’s comfort with uncertainty. Poetry, like the unconscious, is a domain of “ands” rather than “ors,” tolerates and even valorizes contradiction, drift and counter drift; it multiplies its meanings, embraces difference, remains comfortable with its elusiveness, its mystery. “Do I contradict myself, very well, then I contradict myself,” as Whitman wrote. How much room there is for multiple truths, for the slipperiness of truth, its fragmentary nature, its penchant toward inversion. Poetry is as likely to gesture toward or deconstruct its own assertions as to finally insist on them. Psychology interprets; poetry leans into its truths. It “tells it slant,” as Emily Dickinson said. Poetry is less likely to offer an overarching interpretation of its images and associations. The poet surrenders to his or her journey of discovery, without restless hankering after final truths; he practices, as Keats called it, “negative capability.” Poetry therefore keeps one humble as a therapist, suspicious of too much didacticism, definitive or final truth—suspicious of the one who, finally, knows. It’s not that the therapist or analyst wants to deconstruct him or herself, or fail to offer guidance and interpretation, or surrender the authority at best earned through study and experience, but rather to be wary, and to allow some of the values of poetry to penetrate the inevitable fault lines of his or her psychological and conceptual terrain.

One central aspect of that psychotherapeutic terrain and its framework remains Freud’s suggestion that the therapist be a kind of blank slate onto which the patient might project pieces of him or herself or his or her past. Analysts have therefore traditionally attempted to remain reasonably silent. Elsewhere Freud advises the analyst to have the objectivity and distance of a surgeon. The risk is in becoming absent, a kind of absentee landlord of the patient’s psychic real estate. When I attended my first analytic conference in medical school in the late seventies, I was surprised to find the central discovery of several papers presented that afternoon was that the analyst’s real presence mattered, that there were in fact two people in the room.

Poetry has served as a kind of model for me in this regard, because one of its central impulses is toward presence: it seeks to embody itself in the moment of its activation as it is read, to embody and unfold itself in voice, breath, and rhythm, and in the particularity of the world. Rather than beginning with an overarching interpretive frame as psychology does, poetry begins in specificity. It feeds the phenomenal world through the eye of its needle, takes up residence, and seeks to waken itself. While it searches out “insight” as well, it does so as a flowering on the taproot and stalk of its inhabiting presence. Poetry reminds me to lean into my inhabiting presence as a therapist, as well as to keep building toward understanding from the ground up, from specificity, from “the thing itself ” as Williams said; it reminds me not to be overly attached to what Nietzsche calls a “reification” of our ideas and interpretive frame. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” the therapeutic hour, like the poem, “must ride on its own melting,” as Frost would have it, finding its own pathway and “law” as it goes.

Of course one might equally well outline the multiple ways psychology illuminates, even nurtures the poet and the poem. Certainly, psychology’s conceptual framework and methods, its lens, can be extraordinarily helpful in interpreting image and metaphor, the “associations” of an early draft, and therefore help the author find a poem’s “focus.” It can be terrifically helpful for writer’s block, or helping the poem “come out,” to say all it needs to say, or to understand and overcome, or perhaps embrace its resistances, or to understand the poem’s “transference” to an audience. But I mean only to be suggestive here. These ideas are for another essay.

A larger question remains: To what extent can poetry and psychotherapy mutually illuminate the shadows of the other? In a dialogue between poet and psychologist, how often might one attempt to dominate or colonize the conceptual or artistic domain of the other, or is it possible for each to engage in mutual, concentrated listening, allowing the brightness of the other to expand the realm of his or her awareness? What remains critical is to find a mutually empowering manner of relating in which neither dominates, but nudges one another toward their distinct, sometimes mysterious selves. At best they might throw one another into relief, clarify their respective resources, their particular “genius.” Science has taught us when two ecosystems meet and overlap, land and ocean for instance, sudden fresh pockets of life appear, new niches where life might be nurtured. Similarly, when two disciplines meet, such as poetry and psychology, one might hope they settle into a long-lasting relationship in which the vital contribution of each creates new forms of understanding, as well as the rich unfolding of the other.

__________

WORKS CITED

Hirshfield, Jane. “The Envoy,” Given Sugar, Given Salt (Perennial, 2002).

Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture 31,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of SigmundFreud (Hogarth Press, 1932).

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Richard Brostoff is a psychiatrist and has worked in the mental health field for over 25 years. He studied literature at Bennington College and Brandeis, and medicine at Duke and Harvard. His literary work has appeared in Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, Confrontation, Permafrost, Wisconsin Review, Magma (London), Verse Daily, and many other journals. His chapbook, Momentum, was published by La Vita Poetica. In 2000, Brostoff was awarded the grand prize at the AEI International Poetry Festival, and in 2003 was editor’s choice for the Robert Penn Warren Award. He also received an international publication award from the Atlanta Review and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Prize in 2010.

–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010