Gregory Orr

On Poetry and Healing

I don’t approach poems as therapy. I just come to them as myself.

Poems allow us to reclaim our stories, understand trauma and survival, realize that growth and healing are possible, lessen shame and embarrassment, and give us a sense of belonging.

The hippocampus, which situates our memories in time, doesn’t function properly under stress or during trauma. My poems are an external mechanism for placing traumatic events in time, which keeps them from feeling never-ending and ever-present. I think of it as a kind of assistive technology, like a keyboard for my dyslexia or glasses for my farsightedness.

Poets use the beauty intrinsic to poetry to shape their experiences and change the way they live in the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allows us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

I see great value in dreams and writing about them, not only because dreams are where we do unfiltered processing of our experiences without the imposition of an artificial sense of time or an enforced rigid inner governance but also because we can more freely make leaps when talking about dreams, since that’s exactly what dreams do. Injecting a bit of the surreal into the poem can help us bring our dream wisdom into our waking lives—and therein lies not just surviving, but the ongoing work of healing.

Poetry’s concision and beauty allow me, as a writer and reader, to enter into myriad experiences—some like mine and some unlike mine—and to see common human impulses at work. A collective psyche emerges—a collective conscience and collective unconscious—as a backdrop to the individual experience. Poetry has taught me a great deal about my own psyche, my own mind, my own impulses, and my own needs. But it’s also contextualized all of that within a larger environment and larger swaths of time than a single human timespan. Poetry approaches the archetypal, the mythical, the things that lie deep in our ancestry: things we can’t, and shouldn’t, ignore if we’re going to survive on this planet and help this planet survive.

Stephan Torre says that, for him “… writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out.” I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

More Than Noise

Stephan Torre says that, for him … writing comes when it must, when it’s too hard to hold in the joy or grief without blurting it out. I love that way of approaching poetry, but I personally don’t wait until the point of bursting. I try to do the work every day of cultivating making music out of noise, as Kim Addonizio writes in her poem “Therapy.”

Gregory Orr talks about something similar, which is that the act of writing a poem gives the poet more control than they had at the time of the traumatic event they’re writing about, which in itself is empowering and healing.

And then there’s all this beauty intrinsic to poetry, which the poet uses to shape the experience and move it into a different part of the mind and body. What’s made is more than noise. It’s a way of singing through pain or, as Orr says, allowing us to order the disorder that’s in and around us, that’s intrinsic to the world we live in.

Poems as Time-Stamps

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an “I am here” as opposed to “I am still there” message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.

O’Grady-Orff

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

To name ourselves rather than be named / we must first see ourselves … / So long unmirrored in our true selves / we may have forgotten how we look. — Lorraine O’Grady, epigraph for Bluest Nude: Poems, by Ama Codjoe

My poem / is finished and I haven’t mentioned / orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call / it ORANGES. — Frank O’Hara

He folded himself from the corners inward / and then again in triangles. When the nurse came in / to check on him, he was gone, the sheets smooth / as a pond at first light. — Charlie O’Hay

They are saying          these boys

          are fictions stoning other fictions          These are the punishments

that attend          These are ghosts throwing at nothing

— Miller Oberman

You forget / the contours slowly, in / the long second leaving, / neutrality a structure / you learned to glamorize, / the way you have come to / imagine doors as rectangular. — Cindy Juyoung Ok

As anticipated as a commercial holiday. / It was always before / whatever was coming next. — Robert Okaji

He is not / a fragment, but a symptom / of light creeping across / the desert. — Robert Okaji

How difficult to be lost. / So easy to remain unseen. — Robert Okaji

Listen. / The earth, too, considers you limitless. — Robert Okaji

oh, to be / that tongue / and palate, / those lips / surrounding you, / to be your / consonant / in a field of vowels. — Robert Okaji

What you call / home I call / diminishment. What you / surrender, I bundle / and mail to strangers. — Robert Okaji

Like flowers, / We did not know we were petals / Until only the last one remained. — Star Okpeh

My work is loving the world. / Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — / equal seekers of sweetness. — Mary Oliver

Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world’s willingness to receive it–indeed the world’s need of it–these never pass. — Mary Oliver

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. — Mary Oliver

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things. — Mary Oliver

Poetry shouldn’t explain anything, particularly to those who demand explanations. — Yoshev Omed

In the wavering balance of my feelings
set against each other
lascivious love and modesty
but I choose what I see
and submit my neck to the yoke;
I yield to the sweet yoke.

—

In trutina mentis dubia
fluctuant contrarian
lascivus amor et pudicitia.
Sed eligo quod video,
collum iugo prebeo:
ad iugum tamen suave transeo.

— Carl Orff, “In Trutina,” from Camina Burana

Olim lacus colueram / olim pulcher exiteram, / dum cignus ego fueram. / Miser, miser! / Modo niger / et ustus fortiter.

Once I dwelt in the lakes, / once I was beautiful, / while I was a swan. / Miserable, miserable! / Now black / and burnt fiercely.

— Carl Orff, “Olim Lacus Colueram,” from Carmina Burana

Somehow something has gone wrong with poetry in our culture. We have lost touch with its value and purpose, and in doing so, we have lost contact with essential aspects of our own emotional and spiritual lives. — Gregory Orr

When poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they’re both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them. ― Gregory Orr

I open my eyes & my father is driving me / to our new home at the edge of the world. / the wind tells me this is the genesis of / my despair. — Praise Osawaru