Intimate Listening

Suppose we think of the poem as its own intimate listener, listening closely to itself as it is being composed and later interpreted, acting upon the receptive poet (the original maker of the poem or the reader who makes the poem up each time he or she engages with it) so as to become real. As such the poem exists as a dynamic and ever-potential phenomenon seeking out its listener.

Listening implies relation, at the least between the speaker and the spoken-to. But deep listening (or, intimate listening, the kind of listening so characteristic of analytic listening) implies certain qualities about the relation—close attention, mutuality, evocation of “potentiality”, idealization?.... It is an aspect of what is therapeutic—the assumption that what we have failed to know, speak and hear lies behind what distresses us; once we speak the formerly unknown to a listening other and to an accepting and reflective other-in-self, we become better able to live our lives well.