Poetry & The Unconscious
Wall Haiku
Magnolia wall,
Dawn citrine paints iron frets
In stippled tree mist
“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”
Robert Frost
Every artist knows that feeling of discovering. Of liberating the statue from the marble, as Michaelangelo would have.
Or unearthing the poem from the unconscious, as Seamus Heaney put it in his poem, Digging.
Psychoanalysis itself has had a long and somewhat conflicted relationship with poetry.
Freud, who for all his faults, drove the unconscious into the light, would lament that:
“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me”.
One of the pleasures of poetry is uncovering a hidden strata of jokes, allusions, puns and comic auguries embedded within. The unconscious is structured as a language, as Lacan said.
Here is Joan Didion:
“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write.”
Journalling, writing, creating, making art. All is discovering — the hidden reality, the secret meanings of our lives.
And the startling comedy of the unconscious — which understands language so well, yet disdains to use it simply, playing and punning instead.
Learn more about unconscious intelligence at ExecWellbeing.com
And visit my poetry page at:
