A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (5)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

The contradiction in writing is that you write in private, and then you allow others to read what you have written. I am a private person and yet I have also always been a “public” person. The circumstances of my life pulled me out of the crowd when I was a child; these circumstances included the death of my father and failing two grades at school. I write from the private depths of my being, and then I let go of what I have written, get it published, get up in front of a room full of people and read it to them.
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If (as I believe) poetry is the voice of the human soul, then healing and poetry are connected in a fundamental way. Confessional poetry, poetry of witness and Spirit, is a form of healing, by revelation, by catharsis, by discovery of inner truth. Poetry can be healing for the poet and it can also contribute to healing the person who reads poetry. We denigrate this aspect of poetry when we call it “therapy.”
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The poet—who is also the wounded healer—brings psychological and spiritual depth to his work. It is the work of the poet to bring the unconscious to consciousness, to be a midwife to consciousness. Poetry is not therapy, it is poetry, but I believe that some emotional and spiritual healing can be a by-product of poetry. I refer here to both reading someone else’s poems and writing one’s own.
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Good poetry does not moralize, but there is a moral dimension at the very foundation of all poetry and literature. All great poetry, all great art, has a moral dimension grounded in the eternal and universal. It is the nature of the unconscious mind to seek wholeness out of psychic fragmentation, and to assert a moral response to life situations. Morality, what is good and what is bad, is inherent in the human psyche. Poetry, like all great art, has an underlying affirmation of morality.