Hear, Hear

Sight inward seeing itself

2011-12-26T16:34:00.000-08:00

How Indeterminacy Determines Us
William Bronk

We are so little discernible as such
in so much nothing, it is our privacy
sometimes that startles us: the world is ours;
it is only ours; others that move there,
or seem to, are elsewhere, are in another world,
their world; only, we see from time to time
—shattered, as though we were nothing, or not
stable—sometimes we see what they see,
no world we know. Theirs. Strange. As though
by a momentary shift of little bits
of charges, copper were carbon and felt the weight
and valences of carbon in a changed field
of inertias and reactions, and then were copper again
in a cupreous world. We are left to wonder at
and ponder our privacy and ponder this:
we are two unknowns in a single equation, we
and our world, functions one of the other. Sight
is inward and sees itself, hearing, touch,
are inward. What do we know of an outer world?

As the office poetry reading group goes on hiatus, I offer this poem by William Bronk as one of our last subjects of study. It’s from his 1964 book The World, the Worldless, one of my favorites. I was especially intrigued by the idea of sight inward seeing itself, and the implications similarly for the sensory experiences of hearing and touching. But what proved most fascinating to us was the consideration of privacy as a way to refer to the psychic reality—conscious and unconscious—characterizing each person’s subjectivity. One view of psychic reality proposes that deep subjectivity is limited by and contained within one body; another that privacy is in fact constituted between two or more persons in interaction; and a third which suggests that subjectivity between people is created in reference to—and perhaps because of—a social third manifesting as language, or social structure, or social order. We take our privacy for granted, assuming it belongs to us. But, who and what exactly are we?

Here’s looking to 2012.

Work of the World

2011-08-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

To Be of Use
Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Goodbye to Kate Leslie, MSW, a colleague in the work, who is moving from the Bay Area to live and work in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She introduced me to this poem, one of her favorites, and it seems apt in thinking not only about the clinical work we do but the work of poetry.

Understory

2011-03-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

To walk out of the field guide
and listen. To wait
for the world to approach with its dapple and hands.
Who are you?
Dreamer On A Short String.
Big Boots Chomping Through The Underbrush.
There’s an understory here, shades
of meaning, tale told by a rock
signifying everything.

To open the grammar of being seen
and let the creatures name you.
Lover Who Begins To Notice.
Figure Of Speech.

I used this poem by Sue Wheeler in a class I'm teaching to illustrate a psychodynamic approach to psychotherapy. The poem alludes to a journey, during which the speaker has the opportunity to encounter what I think is the other within oneself. Concurrent is the opportunity to nurture some sense of a complex understory that can eventually become spoken.

2011 Poetry and Psychoanalysis at SFCP

2011-01-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

Poetry & Psychoanalysis will resume on Sunday, February 13, from 3:30-5:30 p.m. at San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP), 2340 Jackson Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco (entrance on Webster St). We are pleased to announce that our Guest Poet will be Brian Teare (see below) in conversation with Forrest Hamer.

Poetry & Psychoanalysis features a highly accomplished guest poet in informal conversation with one of SFCP’s poet/psychoanalysts about poetry and psychoanalysis and their shared interests in language, the unconscious, the creative process and potential difficulties in that process, as well as how we work as poets (and as analysts) to gain access to and express deep and at times seemingly ineffable human experience. Following the discussion, our guest will read some of his poems and there will be an opportunity for the audience to comment and ask questions. Books will be available for purchase after and the poet to sign them.

Our events have drawn lively audiences of poets, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, painters, poetry editors and teachers, readers of poetry and people wanting to become readers of poetry.

We welcome you to join that audience and our discussion.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis is offered through the Outreach Program of SFCP. Our events are free and open to the public. If you do plan to attend, please notify SFCP by phone at (415) 563-5818 by the Friday before so we will know how many copies of the poems to be discussed should be printed and how many chairs made available.

**********
BRIAN TEARE

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. He has published poetry and criticism in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, Seneca Review, Verse and VOLT, as well as in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and At the Barriers: The Poetry of Thom Gunn. He’s published three full-length books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and Pleasure—as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown. On the graduate faculty of the University of San Francisco and Mills College, he lives in San Francisco, where he makes books by hand for his micropress Albion Books.

FUTURE EVENTS:

Sunday, May 1, 2011 Denise Newman in conversation with Susan Kolodny.

O Poem, Hopeful Body

2010-10-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

After Visiting Hours
Leon Weinmann

All unnecessary weight is eliminated….Even the brain cells needed for song are lost and seasonally replaced in some birds.
--All the Birds of North America, p. 63

At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this heartless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.

After a long break, it seemed appropriate to return with a poem that speaks and embodies hope, hope also being the implicit character of the efforts we make to make sense of suffering.

On Delicate Unraveling

2010-04-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

In the Tannour Oven
Brian Turner

Stitched into the gutted belly of the calf:
a fat young lamb, dressed and cleaned,
its organs removed from the cave of bone.
And within the lamb: a stuffed goose.
And in the goose’s belly: a mortar round.
And within the mortar round: a stuffed hen.
And in the hen’s belly: a grenade.
And within the grenade: a stuffed thrush.
In the thrush: a .50 caliber bullet.
In the .50 caliber bullet: seasoned
with murri, oil, and thyme—a wedding ring.

Ah, love—when you undo the stitches,
take your time. I have love letters
stuffed inside of me, these tiny bodies
made heavy by their own labored breathing.

from Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010)

I'm interested here in the complex intimacy portrayed between this speaker and his beloved, an intimacy that grapples with the violences occasioned by experiences in war. Another intimacy is the one implied between the poet and the reader or listener, the poet warning and assuring the reader about what struggles to be contained between them also. And in the context of this blog, the relationship between a helper and someone coming to be helped is finally brought to mind, especially when the latter lives with what has almost been unbearable. What a triumph loving can sometimes be!

blessing the boats

2010-02-13T22:10:00.000-08:00

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Lucille Clifton 1936-2010

Poetry Reading with Cello and Conversation

2010-01-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

Bridge Crossings---Conversations in Poetry
A series of four Sunday afternoons, Feb. 7, May 16, Sept 26 and Nov. 7, 2010, 3:30pm to 5:30 pm. C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco.

We hope to offer you an enjoyable afternoon through the poems and conversations of two poets who will address a common theme. Accompanying music and visual images will also be featured. The impetus for these conversations arises from the notion that poetry is a “crossing” over varying psychic territories that touch our lives, our practices, and our humanity with both a feeling of recognition and surprise.

PROGRAM
February 7, 2010, “Soul’s Tongue: A Poetry Reading with Cello and Conversation.” Poets Naomi Ruth Lowinsky and Forrest Hamer will read and converse; Cellist Chris Evan will provide musical accompaniment.

The poet and the analyst share the medium of language; both engage in the work of translation—from image, affect and memory into words.
• Does soul speak to each in the same tongue?
• If the poet is also an analyst, does one discipline support the other? Or are they conflicting practices?
A Freudian and a Jungian, both analysts, both poets, will read from their work and reflect on these questions.

FORREST HAMER is a widely published poet. He is the winner of the Beatrice Hawley award for his collection “Call and Response” and the Northern California Book Award for his collection “Middle Ear.” His most recent book of poems is called “Rift.” Poems of his have been published in “The Best American Poetry.” Forrest Hamer also works as an analyst and comes from the Psychoanalytic tradition.

NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY has published her work in many literary magazines. Her poetry collections are “red clay is talking” and “crimes of the dreamer.” Her memoir on creativity, “The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way,” was recently published. Naomi also works as an analyst and comes from the Jungian tradition.

CHRIS EVANS has performed classical music in the Bay Area and France. She has played in the orchestras at San Francisco State, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley. Lately she has become interested in improvisation and composition.

Refreshments will be served. $20.00 Donations requested.
Directions and parking information is attached.

Within the Realm of Possibility

2009-07-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

Nightfall
Cassiano Ricardo (trans. Barbara Howes)

Friends, I sang as a bird sings
at daybreak. In full agreement
with one single world.
But how could one live in a world
where things had a single name?

Then, I made up words.
And words perched, warbling, on the head
of objects.

Reality, thus, came to have
as many heads as words.

And when I tried to express sadness and joy
words settled upon me, obedient
to my slightest lyrical gesture.

Now I must be mute.
I am sincere only when I am silent.

So, only when I am silent
do they settle upon me—words—
a flock of birds in a tree
at nightfall.

Though language always exists in tension with what is unspeakable, poetry and psychoanalysis concern themselves essentially with what thrives within this tension, centrally the possibly-spoken. Within this realm, meanings press toward and against language, the essential (soul, unconscious, spirit-nature, etc.) a trickster which regards speaking with appropriate wariness.

Lost

2009-06-09T17:56:00.000-07:00

Goodbye, then, to the third-year candidates who took my seminar on psychoanalytic writing at SFCP this spring. It was a pleasure working with you.

Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet
Eavan Boland

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city—

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Found

2009-05-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

Both poetry and psychoanalysis exist as locations for discovery. We may wonder: is there ever discovery without uncovering; uncovering without discovering something new? Consider the elements of both in the following poems:

Facing It
Yusef Komunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Unbidden
Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
has left something
undone.

.

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today’s edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

.

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You’re not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it’s been.

Rhythm and Blues

2009-04-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

I’ve always been awed (no, at first, I was a little afraid) by the capacity of blues music to contain a complex of intense affects in such a way that the listener is worried and then rendered better able to bear the difficulties of being alive and aware. The music reminds me that any effective insight into (or, sight in) human experience registers finally at the level of emotion. You’ve got to feel it way down to the depths of your soul.

Here’s a wonderful poem by the poet Jericho Brown (whom I had the honor of teaching in a summer poetry workshop some years ago), from his first book, Please:

Track 1: Lush Life

The woman with the microphone sings to hurt you,
To see you shake your head. The mic may as well
Be a leather belt. You drive to the center of town
To be whipped by a woman’s voice. You can’t tell
The difference between a leather belt and a lover’s
Tongue. A lover’s tongue might call you bitch,
A term of endearment where you come from, a kind
Of compliment preceded by the word sing
in certain nightclubs. A lush little tongue
You have: you can yell, Sing bitch, and, I love you,
With a shot of Patron at the end of each phrase
From the same barstool every Saturday night, but you can’t
Remember your father’s leather belt without shaking
Your head. That’s what satisfies her, the woman
With the microphone. She does not mean to entertain
You, and neither do I. Speak to me in a lover’s tongue—
Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night long.

Poetry & Psychoanalysis Events

2009-02-25T17:48:00.000-08:00

Two new events in the Poetry & Psychoanalysis interview series have been scheduled.

Cole Swensen will be interviewed by Alice Jones on Saturday, March 21 from 2.30-4; and C. Dale Young will be interviewed by Susan Kolodny on Sunday, April 26 from 3.30-5. Both events will be held in the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis auditorium, 2340 Jackson Street, 4th floor, San Francisco, CA. 415.563.5815.

Learning to Listen

2009-02-08T20:39:00.000-08:00

I had the wonderful experience earlier this week of being a visiting poet at Santa Clara University. It was an enlivening experience, partly because it gave me a chance to reflect on my dual roles as poet and psychotherapist; but it was also enlivening because the students I encountered were such enthusiastic listeners. Twice during interviews, I was asked about the process of listening, especially how I think it is people become better listeners. I’ve tended to answer this question by referring to passive listening—noting the relation of sounds to silence, and the importance of becoming still enough (sometimes, also, brave enough) to recognize what sounds from the silence one has come to appreciate. But I’ve been remiss in not emphasizing also that we listen to what sounds in contrast to what else sounds—that listening is in many ways an active process wherein we turn attention away from the myriad of other sounds we can perceive (we listen to only a fraction of what we could hear), and we construe in some fashion particular sounds we have turned attention toward. And, as I have appreciated by way of years of education and experience—clinical and literary—we hear, but we learn to listen.

This was also brought to mind by an experience in a poetry reading group recently when we were discussed a poem by Brenda Hillman titled, “Phone Booth” (appearing originally in The New Yorker and reprinted in the 2008 Best American Poetry.) The poem is presented on the page in two columns of equal length side by side. One can read it best by reading down the left side first, and then the right; but two of us also tried reading the columns simultaneously. The effect was fascinating--both of us were attentive to the heightened effort involved in reading and comprehending our respective columns; and we each noticed how much more attentive we were to the sounds of a passing car or a door closing outside the office. The poem enacts something of the experience of carrying on a conversation while in a telephone booth—the focused attention to the other’s voice, and to our own—as well as the psychological phone booth we now create in using cellphones (such that we become hyper-attentive largely to the voice on the other end of the “line”.) By emphasizing passive listening (and the potential interferences with being able to hear what sounds from silence), I’d put in the background the remarkable screening we do during listening to keep ourselves from being distracted. And these days, to my mind, that is the more significant challenge.

Conch Chowder

2008-12-21T22:06:00.000-08:00

by Elizabeth Alexander

“I’m making conch chowder,” says my next-door neighbor, Joe. There are no walls between our apartments. “We’ll all watch basketball,” he says, “and we’ll eat it with French bread.” I tell him that I have to run an errand.

Next thing I know, I’m outside New York, looking for a roadside Holocaust museum I’d read about, I had to see. I find it, hand-lettered signs, an old woman on a bench with a heavy Polish accent. A young man and his son go inside; you go down into the Invisible Man’s basement, which is wildly lit up and makeshift, and you look out at the world from that small space. I begin to cry. I cry and cry and cry. Then it’s time to go home, so I look for a cab. How much would it cost to go from Jersey to Chicago?

Everyone is upset when I get there. Danielle, Joe’s wife, says we have to have a family meeting, no more lateness, no more unexplained absences. My eyes fill up again when she says the word, “family.” I sit down in front of the TV and eat my conch chowder, which is cold. (2001)

I’m delighted Elizabeth Alexander is Obama’s inauguration poet, for I have always been impressed with her efforts to address herself to matters of American history especially through poems. I was particularly taken by her third book, Antebellum Dream Book, and by the apparent centrality of dreaming to her fashioning many of those poems. As such, she offered the dream space as a site of public and poetic conversation, for the poems are “interpretable” largely through communications between one unconscious and that of another.

I look forward to the new conversations.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

2008-12-06T19:52:00.000-08:00

by Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Group Process

2008-07-02T17:27:00.000-07:00

This marks another year’s end for a psychoanalytic poetry reading group to which I belong. We began as a clinical case group some years ago, but began reading poetry together while discussing the dynamics of mourning (we’d read Catherine Barnett’s Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes are Pierced and Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III which includes that wonderful poem, “One Art”—I’m reminded, incidentally, that two of the most interesting books of poems I’ve read this year are Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy and Kristen Prevallet’s I, Afterlife.) Our focus this year was on Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dien Cai Dau and a small collection of Emily Dickinson poems edited by Joyce Carol Oates. One matter linking both poets was the engagement each poet offers with sometimes intolerable states of mind—Komunyakaa’s poems were written almost in a flood of memories and affects years after he left Vietnam, while Dickinson obsessively fashioned her deceptively simple poems as she moved through complicated shifts in mood and ideation throughout her life.

I’ve been impressed once more with how valuable it is to read poems closely in a group context. We typically read a poem twice, if not three times, and move rather slowly through a book of poems so as to deepen our attention to what we experience and construe over time. The process points out how deep attention cannot be taken for granted and must, as Buddhists suggest, be cultivated. We jokingly say to each other that we fear not being able to read poems again alone! The truth is we just add each other to the inner chorus of voices always present when we encounter a new poem.

I Believe Insight Doesn't Happen at Once

2008-05-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

This poem by Mary Ruefle intrigues me partly as an allusion to the process over time of coming to speak what one knows.

The Hand

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.

Muses and the Sense of Intolerable Loneliness

2008-04-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

In a journal entry for the Poetry Foundation blog (www.poetryfoundation.org) a year ago or so, Patricia Smith asked readers to characterize their muses, describing her own as “the love child of Mona Lisa and James Brown” and whom she has variously named “La Music, Jimmie Savannah, Her Bitchness, Ruby Begonia, Sista Sometimes, Mavis, Butterfly McQueen, M’Dear, Hot Damn, The Esteemed Imperial Inimitable Goddess Ms. Gwen, My Boo, Cleopatra Jones, Tamika, Miz Thang, and Mamie Eisenhower.” One poet described her muse as an exquisitely sensitive young girl adults don’t tend to hear; another as “Bo Willie or Gut-Bucket” because his poetry emerged from gut-wrenching experiences; still another as a “bad boyfriend.” Evie Shockley described her own as a Debbie Allen figure peering over while Evie reads the morning paper and pointing out what’s missing from its pages. In an essay published in ZYZZYVA titled “The Visitor” (and later in the anthology Lucky Break, edited by Howard Junker), I described my own muse as an old slave woman whose picture I’d seen as a child. She was posed with her bare, whip-marked back facing the viewer, and I went on to imagine her visiting me some nights, looking in me for her stolen children. I suggested that the conversations between us eventuated in my poems.

I’ve been preparing a paper on writing and the problem of intolerable loneliness, how such experiences can lead writers to turn away from their unfinished works, even from working. It occurs to me that, while many writers characterize this state as a sense of their muses abandoning them, we might also think about those writers abandoning to some extent their own muses. And I wonder if the further unconscious aspect of this mutual rejection doesn’t involve struggle with some measure of destructiveness ever present when writers are emerged in the process of creating. Melanie Klein’s 1963 paper on loneliness (from Envy and Gratitude) has been especially helpful in this regard. Klein delineates several internal and external sources of the sense of loneliness—which she distinguishes from a sense of solitude or feeling lonesome—but she suggests that the infant’s earliest psychic challenges include the developmental quest to achieve some essential integration of creative and destructive representations of oneself and of others. In relation to one’s internal objects, Klein writes, “ (t)here is always a close connection between being able to accept and to give, and both are part of the relation to the good object and therefore counteract loneliness. Furthermore, the feeling of generosity underlies creativeness, and this applies to the infant's most primitive constructive activities as well as to the creativeness of the adult.” I think the concept of a muse is one way writers can represent their relation to that “good object”.

Other Conversations

2008-04-06T20:34:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of conducting two public conversations about psychoanalysis this week. On Friday, Ricardo Ainslie (www.ricardoainslie.com), an Austin psychoanalyst, filmmaker and professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas, visited with SFCP candidates as part of an intersession series on the politics of the other. Ainslie’s focus was immigration, and we talked about anti-immigrant sentiment and the complex psychological dynamics underlying it, as well as the social imaginary (a la Castoriadis) of Mexican immigrants moving across political and psychological borders into the United States. I was intrigued by Ainslie’s unique career, his moving work on racial and ethnic conflict in selected Texan communities, and especially his discussion of culture as “a series of sociopsychological enclosures.” He used this Winnicottian idea to elaborate the ways in which immigrants from Mexico recreate such enclosures in public and private spaces so as to negotiate the necessity of cultural mourning as well as engage with the challenges of migrating. For immigrants and non-immigrants alike—the distinction probably more fluid than either is inclined to think—the creation of enclosures also involves the creation of what is excluded, a matter we humans find sometimes impossibly challenging when we perceive ourselves as threatened and feel uneasy.

On Sunday, I interviewed devorah major as part of our Poetry and Psychoanalysis series. Her poetry stresses the performance as much as the written aspects of the art, and she discussed how her development as a dancer shapes still the poems she makes. I was enthralled with her voice—both in the enunciation of her poems and in the musics of her distinctive style. She also spoke of her conviction that poets must engage themselves and their art with the world, offering to be shaped sometimes in ways they would not imagine beforehand. I often think this is true also of psychoanalysts!

Poets Making Poems: A Program on Poetry and Psychoanalysis

2008-04-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

Recent outreach efforts by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP) to expand relationships with a variety of community interests have spurred involvement with local nursery schools, mental health centers, post-performance discussion programs conducted in conjunction with the American Conservatory Theater and the San Francisco Opera, and a public lecture series.

This past year, SFCP initiated a very successful program on poetry and psychoanalysis, which has drawn in members of the public interested in poetry and has featured stimulating discussions of the creative process articulated by a variety of poets. Susan Kolodny, an SFCP faculty member, founded the program, a series of 90-minute interviews with local poets conducted by Kolodny, Alice Jones, an SFCP Training and Supervising Analyst, and me. We are analysts who also happen to be poets, and the interviews are organized particularly to explore the process of making poems.

The guest poet is usually interviewed for a third of the program; another third is spent reading and discussing the poet’s work, especially his or her thoughts about the poems; and the rest of the time is devoted to questions from the audience. During the first year, a distinguished group of six poets, who have each published poetry collections, participated in the program, which was attended by 35-75 people each time.

The poets and their most recently published collections were Brenda Hillman of St. Mary’s College, Pieces of Air in the Epic; Paul Hoover of San Francisco State University, Edge and Fold; Dan Bellm, One Hand on the Wheel; Lyn Hejinian of the University of California, Berkeley, The Fatalist; Alan Williamson of the University of California, Davis, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems; and Elizabeth Robinson, Apostrophe.

During the interview, poets were typically asked about their own paths to writing poetry, how they each think about the nature of their poems, supports for and interferences with creating their poems, the place of unconscious or nonconscious elements in the process, and their experience of real and imagined audiences in writing and revision. After reading their poems, the poets described what they remembered about writing them, and they responded to questions and comments further illuminating that process for the audience and poets alike.

Several of the poets were asked what they thought about the relationship between poetry and psychoanalysis. Most pointed to a heightened appreciation in both of the emergence and experience of language. Further, both disciplines were characterized by an awe
or appreciation for the nonconscious. “Most everything we are is the unconscious,” Hillman suggested, and she noted that both writers and psychoanalysts strive to be better listeners to what emerges from the unconscious, especially significant metaphors.

Hoover suggested that poetry goes straight to and acts on the unconscious, and he conceived of the relationship between poetry and psychoanalysis as formed especially around an interest in the vicissitudes of mental states. Like Hoover, Hejinian was impressed with the shared interests in language and mental states but emphasized the process of making poems as more consciously countering the determinism inherent to the unconscious.

Bellm described the two traditions as working in the realm of mystery, interested thus in metaphor, image, and the tolerance of ambiguity. Bellm and Robinson see poetry and psychoanalysis engaged in what each terms “spiritual practice.”

Williamson talked explicitly about Winnicott’s ideas about transitional space. He was persuaded that the process of making poems entails language being experienced by the poet as being both outside and inside, with the creating poet engaged in transitional play. For Robinson, language is emphasized as an attention to mental states which reflect the intersection between “the immanent and the transcendent.”

Some of these poets said poems emerged from their heightened receptivity and attention to compelling images, sounds, even phrases or lines made salient within aesthetic states of mind. Williamson described the poem as already formed at this point but, like an embryo, waiting to be developed. For others, some conscious preoccupation initiated poem making; the poem was an opportunity to “think things through.” Hejinian, who likes to dwell in a “state of quandary,” feels poems are the result of conscious engagements with philosophical, sociopolitical, or cultural questions or problems. Most poets seemed to suggest that both of these originations characterize to some extent the process of creating poems, the preferred character a function of personality and aesthetic style, formal and informal education, and subject matter.

The poets differed in the degree to which they intended their poems to be expressive or abstract, and several spirited discussions ensued concerning the matter of “accessibility” or “difficulty” in poetry. The variety of their answers highlighted the numerous paths they took to becoming poets (despite many shared conditions which favored poetry over other forms of creative expression or silence), the influences of creative and intellectual mentors and traditions, even the many differences for poets in their respective audiences.

The diversity of poets for the series has helped us attract diverse audiences, with community poets and artists equaling the number of psychotherapists of various kinds. Comments from discussion participants have been enthusiastic, conveying excited anticipation of future programs of how poets make poems, and how that process is similar to the heightened attention to meaningful language psychoanalysis fosters.

reprinted from The American Psychoanalyst (2008)

Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World

2008-03-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that “here” is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.

--William Bronk (1964)

Intimate Listening

2008-03-05T09:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Fateful Encounters

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An old blues legend has it that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. One night at a crossroads, people say, Johnson met another black man near a river, and gave the stranger his guitar. The stranger tuned it, played one song, then gave it back. From that point on, Johnson becomes unusually creative—he can play the guitar well, he can make up new songs, and he can sing. He also matures into a man of unusual power. And those who had known him before, who had considered him a bit of a pest on the guitar and who found his voice scratchy, were surprised and delighted by this change. They were also suspicious, for they were sure Johnson had made an evil bargain.

This Faustian legend intrigues me as a poet and as a psychoanalytic therapist, especially the element within it of the fateful encounter--the interpersonal and intrapsychic engagement with whatever it is the devil represents here which allows in turn for something new and creative. As a poet, I recognize in the process of writing poems a fateful engagement with aspects of my imagination, my ear, and my skills as a writer. As well, there is an engagement with internal objects and with an internal audience that helps me realize poems singly and in sequence. And as a therapist, particularly as a psychoanalyst, I engage not only with my analysands in potentially transformative ways, but with aspects of myself in the countertransference. However, contrary to the blues legend, I have learned from both kinds of encounters that meaningful change happens not suddenly, not dramatically or supernaturally, but gradually and subtly. And, it happens through language.

Poets and psychoanalysts are, of course, taken with meaningful language and appreciate its power to contain, represent and to affect. The language is verbal, primarily, and we attend to its contents and to its form. But we are also intrigued by the relationship between what is stated and what is not, and between what is symbolized and what remains unsayable. We also attend to what feels most meaningful, and to when and where the breaks in meaning occur. Both psychoanalysts and poets concern themselves, moreover, with the relationship between meaningful and nonmeaningful language.

I also find that we value subjective experience, particularly the unconscious, as well as the processes of relaxed attention and “free” association. And, as one who is both, I have developed a basic trust in “the process”: in treatment, that the analysis of resistances to emerging transferences moves most analyses along; in poetry, that overcoming impediments to fateful engagements can similarly yield meaningful writing.

I do not listen in the same way, though, when I am in my office and when I am at my writing desk at home. As an analyst, my listening is close and largely focused on moments of immediate discomfort conveyed either in the content or form of what is said to me. I listen also to the content of the analysand’s language for connections to what else I have heard about the history, the transference, and the current life. In short, I listen as an analyst primarily to language. As a poet, I seem primarily to be listening for language. I am listening largely for what presses to be represented, and then for how to present “the right words in the right order”. Though analytic listening involves a similar dynamic, analysts associate more to what is already communicated. When I write poems, I am most like my analytic self only when I am revising or “re-seeing” the not-yet-finished poem, for then my attention is directed more keenly and my thinking more prominently synthetic.

I’ve not been conducting psychoanalyses for very long, but so far it seems that another, related difference between the two kinds of listening involves how much time I can spend freely in reverie. In the office I experience an interpersonal (and professional) pressure to speak what I observe and what I think. When I’m writing, the danger of foreclosing a poem inclines me to wait, occasionally for a year or two, before I begin to think of myself as working on a specific poem.

My dual identity as a poet and a psychoanalyst is new, and only slowly does it become more comfortable. Sometimes, I feel as if the two represent distinctly different states of mind. Increasingly, though, I recognize that each influences the other in terms of the content of my preoccupations, and in terms of the stimulation within me of productive states of contemplation. Most valuable, though, is the way each deepens my capacity to listen. It makes me think once more about that Robert Johnson legend: perhaps in fact his fateful encounter was with what he had yet to hear, his transformation thus a changed capacity to listen to what had seemed unpleasant, uninteresting or merely absent. Perhaps the change occurred not only in Johnson, but in all of us, poets and analysts included, who were listening to him.

printed originally in The American Psychoanalyst (2000)

Announcement

2008-02-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

The Poetry and Psychoanalysis series at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis resumes this spring with three interviews scheduled with distinguished poets.

April 6, 2008 devorah major
Interviewed by Forrest Hamer

May 4, 2008 Carol Snow
Interviewed by Susan Kolodny

July 20, 2008 Al Young
Interviewed by Forrest Hamer

All sessions take place on Sundays from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at SFCP (temporarily located at 2340 Jackson Street, 4th floor.) There is no admission, but participants are encouraged to register beforehand by calling SFCP at 415.563.5815 or by email at office@sf-cp.org.