Writing Therapy - Poetry

Poetry

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry finalist Bruce Weigl, a veteran of the Vietnam War, has discussed the therapeutic benefits of writing, especially when combined with other forms of therapy, for people coming to terms with traumatic experiences such as war. According to Weigl, "What it helps you do is externalize things, give a shape to it. And that’s what Denise Levertov kept telling me is that, Look, you control it now. It doesn’t control you anymore. You own it now."

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Famous quotes containing the word poetry:

    the raw material of poetry in
    all its rawness and
    that which is on the other hand
    genuine, you are interested in poetry.
    Marianne Moore (1887–1972)

    Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.
    William Harmon (b. 1938)

    The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)