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.