Alan Buckley on poetry, creativity and the unconscious

Art is a revelation, not a criticism – WB Yeats, The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux

Enquiry into the unconscious has been my business for the best part of two decades: the job title psychotherapist has been applicable to a lot of my work during this time, though I’d no more use it as a response to the “What do you do?” question at parties than I’d use the term “poet” (Auden’s answer of “archaeologist” always strikes me as pretty much the safest bet). Therapy is full of factions and labels, so while I might call myself a Gestalt Therapist, what seems most important to say is that I believe that addressing deep psychological process needs commitment, courage, and above all time. The quick fix just doesn’t exist, either for the individual, or for the social, cultural and political systems whose craziness is manifested through the individual. I also believe that good therapy is transformative, not simply adaptive, whether that is Freud’s conversion of “neurotic misery into common unhappiness” or the anarchic self-individuation advocated by the ‘third-force’ therapies of the 1950s and 60s.

And this is where the good ships of poetry and therapy begin to sail in similar waters, for isn’t some kind of transformation a key part of what we’re about? Even if a poem isn’t blowing our head off, it surely should be delivering at least a sufficiently strong tap on the skull to wake us from our necessary, ongoing trance. Whatever the poem’s register or genre there has to be some quality of disturbance, of the reader being engaged by something at least partly familiar before being startled into a different or heightened awareness. Frost’s dictum of “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” suggests that a similar process has to have happened during composition; the analyst Wilfred Bion said that if there aren’t at times two frightened people in the consulting room, we will only find out what everyone already knows, and the same applies to the little room of the poem.

We’ve all had the experience of poems that are highly crafted and unobjectionable, but which demand no re-reading; that, to follow Yeats’ comment, critique or reflect the world perfectly well, but offer no revelation, as if the writer was unwilling to risk truly diving into the poem to fish something up from the depths. Similarly, the therapy session where the client unfolds their familiar script of isolation / fear of rejection, while the therapist keeps one eye on the clock, is an equally dead space, unless the therapist throws the script aside and enquires (for example) whether acceptance might not actually be what the client fears most; or, more boldly, whether the client is as bored with all this as the therapist. This is risky, but it opens up the possibility of reconfiguration, of something new and alive being created rather than another well-adjusted corpse. Both poem and consulting room are, of course, physically and chronologically clearly boundaried spaces: whatever disruption occurs is contained in some way, providing the “momentary stay against confusion” that Frost describes.

I’d argue, by the way, that it’s not the primary purpose of therapy (any more than poetry, or art in general) to help people feel better; rather, it’s to help them to feel, to think, to be more engaged with the actuality of themselves in their environment. In The Use of the Self in Therapy Carl Rogers says:

I think that therapy is most effective when the therapist’s goals are limited to the process of therapy and not the outcome… If the therapist is feeling ‘I want this person to… change in such and such a way’ I think this stands in the way of good therapy.

Awareness is the only true goal; or, as Fritz Perls (one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy) put it, the purpose of therapy is “to wake people from the nightmare”, to break the trance of semi-conscious existence that passes for much of our daily lives. Of course, being woken is not necessarily pleasant; as Eliot’s bird in the rose garden (in Burnt Norton) points out, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”.

To look at how the unconscious comes into poetry in practice, it’s useful to concretise it, and move it away from being a mental construct accessed through metaphor (the dark pool or the forbidding cave). Long before ‘holistic’ became little more than a catch-all word for marketing activities like having your feet rubbed while listening to recordings of whales, the ‘third force’ therapists of the 50s – rejecting both the mind-bound symbolic interpretations of the analysts and the mechanism of the behaviourists – were positing an absolute unity of thought, feeling and action. Within this framework, what mattered most was embodied experience; the body never lies, or at any rate never completely lies. When a need is frustrated, there’s a unified response: motor functions are inhibited; breath and muscle groups are constricted to minimise feelings; and thought processes rapidly create a story to explain that the need was unimportant / inappropriate / unacceptable etc. The need doesn’t go away – it stays repressed in the body until it can safely be expressed, although this repression often becomes so habitual that the unmet need is pushed out of current awareness, and is only discernible through hints in somatic process. The task of therapy is then not one of interpretation, but of steadily increasing awareness; the client is considered literally to hold the answers within them.

In Grace Unfolding: Psychotherapy in the Spirit of the Tao-te ching by Greg Johanson and Ron Kurtz, we’re presented (in the chapter entitled Relinquishing Control) with Karen, who notices a slight upward movement of her shoulders whenever a new person comes into the group and sits next to her. The therapist doesn’t get her to talk about what’s happening; nor does she make an interpretation. She simply helps the client to move more deeply into her experience, by open questions and suggested experiments within the group. The therapist has no agenda for any particular outcome – what Gestaltists call “creative indifference”, a stance not dissimilar to Keats’ “negative capability”. Karen becomes aware of other sensations, including a bitter taste in her mouth, and gradually an episode of sexual abuse is brought back into full, embodied awareness; it is “re-membered”.

To show the poetic parallels, I’d like to consider Mark Doty’s reflection (available on the Modern American Poetry website) on the process of writing his poem A Display of Mackerel. He begins with straightforward observation:

In the Stop ‘n Shop in Orleans, Massachusetts, I was struck by the elegance of the mackerel in the fresh-fish display. They were rowed and stacked, brilliant against the white of the crushed ice…

Doty doesn’t push for meaning, or wonder how this might become a poem – he simply trusts that there’s something here worth staying with. He attends to the process of poetry just as the therapist attends to the process of therapy, sharpening and refining. He notices as he writes how the movement from “sheer description” in the first three tercets to more metaphorical language (“think abalone, / the wildly rainbowed / mirror of a soapbubble sphere, // think sun on gasoline”) begins to hint at some deeper meaning around interchangeability – as he says, “If you’ve seen one abalone shell or prismy soapbubble or psychedelic puddle, you’ve seen them all”.

Eventually Doty realises that the wider context of the poem is the death of his long-term partner Wally Roberts, and the AIDS epidemic. Where so many are dying in or before their prime, there is a constant challenge to the focus on individual achievement, “the Romantic self and its private golden heights” as Doty calls it. The response he finds is that the mackerel in his poem seem “happy… / to be together, selfless, / which is the price of gleaming.”

To praise the collectivity of the fish, their common identity as “flashing participants,” is to make a sort of anti-elegy, to suggest that what matters is perhaps not our individual selves but our brief soldiering in the broad streaming school of humanity.

Doty recognises that he could not have considered the ideas around human identity “nakedly”: he needed the mackerel to act as a vehicle.

The therapist’s belief that the body never lies comes, I’d argue, from the same place as William Carlos Williams’ dictum “No ideas but in things”. In the Gestalt approach to dreamwork, the key technique is to focus on the objects, not the people. If, for example, a client’s mother appears in a dream, it’s all too easy to get into a familiar client-therapist dialogue. But if we get the tin of beans that was on the kitchen table in the dream talking to the light fitting, or the chipped green teapot talking to the thick carpet, then the energy almost invariably shifts into a heightened, creatively anxious state of possible emergence. We might still be talking about the client’s relationship with their mother, but we’ve succeeded in sneaking past the gaze of the conscious mind (the “inner police system” that Ted Hughes refers to). Similarly in poetry, to approach the big themes head on is usually a recipe for getting nowhere, or creating clunky, inauthentic results. Much better to allow those themes to trip us up when we least expect it, which is partly why I don’t carry a notebook around with me – it sets up too great a context of looking for something that might become a poem.

There’s one further push I want to make, which is to look more closely at Frost’s claim that no surprise for the writer means none for the reader. In her poem Wildly Constant Anne Carson quotes directly from a letter Proust wrote in 1913:

We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.

Nothing exceptional here: items of clothing, so closely associated with the bodies who wear them, are potent objects for “re-membering”. We might think how the gloves need to be described – their colour, their smell, the choice of material – in order to invoke the absent person successfully (I follow the point Don Paterson makes in his 2004 TS Eliot lecture: “Prose evokes; the well-chosen word describes the thing. But poetry invokes; the memorable word conjures its subject from the air”). However, what’s important to realise is that just about any object could achieve an invocatory affect.

In her study of trauma theory Creating Sanctuary, the American psychiatrist Sandra Bloom gives the example of Paul, who suffers a near-fatal heart attack while dining out with his wife. A man who prizes self-control, Paul directs his energies into ‘forgetting’ the episode and regaining his health, but increasingly finds himself experiencing anxiety, for what appears to be no particular reason:

In fact the anxiety occurs when he sits across a table from his wife, when he goes to a restaurant, whenever an emergency vehicle drives by or he hears sirens, whenever he sees someone with the vivid blue eyes of the EMT who gave him a CPR, whenever he smells the aroma of fried onions which permeated the restaurant.

What happens during trauma is that the mind-body whole of the individual, and all its sensing, perceiving and processing functions, are suddenly overwhelmed with stimulus. It’s not so much that possible death makes our life flash before the eyes; rather, in that moment we become totally aware of our environment and our place within it. We are given an almost unbearable dose of reality where everything is connected, which means that despite the mind’s best defences the trauma is constantly reactivated; the individual is continually guided back towards the traumatic event.

Extreme interconnectedness is, of course, also part of the poet’s stock-in-trade, the willingness to put any two things together in the belief that something new and enlivening might be sparked through the process of connecting them. To explore this, I tried to conjure up two words that were at least superficially unconnected, which of course is like trying to look relaxed when you’re waiting for someone to turn up for a first date. I came up with “marmalade passion”, and was just starting to think about the context I’d need to create in a poem for the metaphor to work when I noticed that I was already feverishly drawing links – marmalade is made of fruit, and there are passion fruits, passion is often said to be devouring, and one might devour toast that’s smothered in marmalade, then it’s but a skip from smother to mother, and a whole host of further associations. Of course, this word pairing in itself can’t be guaranteed to lead to, or even be part of, a good poem. But what I can see already is that there is something in there that can trigger the brain into a rapid and slightly obsessive exploration of connections and connotations.

Trauma is something that exists on a spectrum; anything that suddenly threatens our perceived sense of self-in-the-world can lead to an overwhelming flood of perception and stimulus. Not everyone will have been in a train crash or fought in a war, but most people will have an experience of, say, being small and momentarily losing sight of one’s parents in a crowd – which for a child is as much a ‘whole-world’, life-threatening experience as Paul’s heart attack. This means that it’s possible to talk about trauma and traumatic process on a very small scale, and my argument is that somewhere within every successful poem there’s at least one moment that mildly traumatises us, that triggers our deepest knowing of how the world may be unmade in an instant. Even if it appears to be re-made in the following moment, we can’t claim that nothing has changed; the poem, which draws us in with the illusion of being a fixed event, has given us a glimpse of how the world is both utterly interconnected, and constantly in flux.

This is also why I don’t carry a notebook. Phrase or images often come to me at inconvenient times, such as when I’m hurrying for an appointment I’m already late for. This is no surprise: being in a hurry is one of those states where the grip of conscious control is temporarily slackened. However, it’s usually a mistake to commit the words to paper before seeing whether they have that mildly traumatic quality that ensures they will survive without the page; that quality that means they are still agitating in my mind after the meeting has finished, or on the following day. Sandra Bloom talks about traumatised people becoming “possessed, haunted by the theatres in their own minds. They cannot control the intrusive images, feelings, sensations that come into consciousness unbidden, terrifyingly vivid…”

The poet, on a smaller scale, is attempting to trigger that same experience in the reader, to leave them somehow possessed. In doing this, they achieve their primary aim: having read the poem once, and put it down, the reader is compelled to pick it up again, to re-enter the familiar yet curiously troubling room. The poem does not simply invite re-reading; it demands it.