New Poetics

I've been contemplating my personal poetics recently, especially after hearing Rick Benjamin's amazing interview with Chris Lydon on Open Source. Rick's a dear dharma friend and in his interview, he speaks of poetry as a wisdom tradition. And to a degree too, I think of his poetry as being a vessel for the communication of love. His new book which is out any day is called Passing Love after a Langston Hughes' poem, and speaks to the ephemerality but also the exchange between individuals, whether loved ones, reader and poet, etc.

As much as I am able to identify with the notion of poetry as a wisdom tradition, I am not able to articulate my own poetics in this way. Well, not exactly. Lately, I've been reading several books on erotic transference and countertransference in therapeutic relationships. This self-study and exploration were a way to revisit past loves, past therapists, past relationships, etc. Transference and countertransference are present in all relationships - whether with one's lover, child, parents, boss, or former acupuncturist, a friend who works as a stripper in a gentleman's club, that corny movie on the television screen - it presents a tremendous opportunity to work through past wounds and arrive at integrating archetypal symbols into one's own consciousness to become whole. The therapeutic practice is a practice of love and holding space for another, while maintaining neutrality and holding up the mirror. As the person that I am, born into the family that I was, I have had a very thin skin between myself and everything else that's out there. I am a blank canvas for the transference of others - and it is on this level too that poetry and the arts - music, painting, dance, and opera - have deeply moved and affect me. So it is in my poetry that I seek to create the experience of transference and countertransference. Poets talk about creating an immediate experience, moving a reader to identify or empathize, as a vessel to create radical change, whether social or political or personal, as a medium for healing, as a medium for wisdom. For me, I think I have grown perhaps less ambitious or idealistic, or rather that my attention is attuned now to something much finer in its sublety, more intimate, and more infinite. The poem becomes a transformational object.

From David Mann's Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy

"The erotic is ubiquitous and at the heart of unconscious experience. As such it is a structuring dynamic in all two-person interactions....Because the erotic is frequently the basis for the most transformational experiences in ordinary life...the therapist, because of his or her own erotic subjectivity, is outside the patient's script, and thereby, the erotic countertransference can enable the patient to experience a different reaction, a new transformational object, that facilitates change and development."

"The patient and the therapist are continuously communicating at an unconscious level. The unconscious is best seen as porous and permeable, allowing experiences and affecting their passage between individuals. In the transference and countertransference the unconscious, with its creative and pathological constituents, will be passing between both participants in the analytic encounter. The therapeutic action can be described by seeing the transference and countertransference as a mutative process whereby both participants modify their unconscious fantasies...the erotic is particularly significant in this respect: it is psychically binding, bringing each individual into a strong conscious and unconscious relationship with others. An erotic bond is forged at a deep emotional level that binds individuals into a relationship with each other at the deepest levels of fantasy. It seems that the transformational potential of the erotic goes right to the heart of the therapeutic transaction and the universality of unconscious erotic fantasy life is what connects and gives this process a good deal of its momentum."

And from Nathan Field's essay "O tell me the truth about love" -
"A four-dimensional relationship is not especially rare, but something that happens to many people at particular moments of their lives...is reached in many ways - in art, in nature, in prayer, in childbirth...just as the shift from the two dimensional to the three dimensional requires the transcending of primary fusion in order to achieve separateness, so the shift from the three dimensional to the four dimensional requires the transcending of the ego in order to achieve this paradoxical state of communion/separation. When the moment of communion happens, there is a sense that healing takes place... for long-term change to establish itself, these intense experiences need to be repeated, perhaps many times, in order to undo the massive mistrust so many patients acquire in childhood."