Poetry Therapy Helps Patients Make Rhyme and Reason Out of Life

To me alone there came a thought of grief; A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong.

--William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”

A solemn woman with an Eastern European accent was reading Elton Evans’ “The Man in the Glass,” the flat tone of her voice a reflection of the depression that was the reason for her confinement. The poem concluded: For it isn’t your mother, father or wife

Whose judgment you must pass;

The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life

Is the one staring back from the glass ... . “

Dr. Arthur Lerner, director of poetry therapy at Woodview-Calabasas Hospital in Calabasas, gently ask her what the poem meant to her.

“It means that you have to believe in yourself and that what you think is important, not what somebody else will tell you is important,” she said.

The woman was one of a handful of patients at the poetry therapy group led by Lerner, a pioneer in the field of using poetry to bring about a breakthrough in the treatment of mentally ill people.

‘Unseen’ Member of Group

Poetry in the therapy setting, Lerner has written, “acts like an unseen but felt member of the group. In the process of hearing or reading a poem an individual may uncover large chunks of despair, fright and rigidity that keep him or her from acting in an effectively healthy manner.”

Though centuries old, the use of poetry as therapy has increasingly established itself as a form of treatment practiced by more than 2,000 psychotherapists, psychiatrists and other professionals who work with the mentally ill, according to the National Assn. for Poetry Therapy, of which Lerner is president.

In June, the seventh annual poetry therapy conference will be held at Columbia University in New York. Among the topics expected to come up is how to generate money for research to establish the effectiveness of poetry therapy, which dates back to Aristotle. The sage was the first to speak of catharsis, the purifying of the emotions or relieving of emotional tensions, especially through art.

Lerner, an energetic sexagenarian who holds doctorate degrees in psychology and literature from USC, conducts several weekly poetry-therapy groups at Woodview-Calabasas and Van Nuys psychiatric hospitals.

17-Day Stay Is Average

Perched on a bluff above the Ventura Freeway, Woodview-Calabasas Hospital is home to about 100 patients at any given time, whose average stay at the sprawling, contemporary retreat is 17 days. While they are residents of the hospital, patients are placed under the care of psychologists and psychiatrists who may prescribe poetry therapy sessions for them. Poetry therapy is similar to its sibling therapies of art, music and psychodrama, all of which are typically practiced in conjunction with traditional psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.

The format in poetry therapy sessions is flexible. While many poems are chosen by the therapist, patients are encouraged to share their favorites, whether written by others or themselves.

“Whatever the emotional traffic will bear,” Lerner said. Among the poets he finds the most effective are Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, John Ciardi and Shakespeare.

Emotional Response

Reading poetry for many patients at first can be as intimidating an experience as it often is for students anywhere. Unlike conventional poetry classes, however, where the emphasis is on literary analysis, here the focus is aimed at the individual’s free-association response to the emotional content of the poem.

“Our aim is to help the individual learn the art of helping himself or herself,” Lerner said. “We believe strongly with Walt Whitman,” who wrote, “I am larger, better than I thought/I did not know I held so much goodness.”

“Did I promise you a poem?” Lerner paternally asked of the small group gathered one evening for the unusual poetry reading. He handed a copy of a poem titled “What Somebody Said When He Was Spanked on the Day Before His Birthday” to a friendly teen member of the group.

The boy, dramatically dressed in clothes geometrically splashed with black and white, read the poem haltingly. Finally he stopped and said, “It scares me.”

The youth, whose periods of awareness are fleeting, Lerner said, is given permission to instead read the poem that he has written during the week. So pleased is he with his own creation that he cannot resist singing it and in the process breaking into laughter several times, even though his poem graphically and painfully describes the degradation of three people in the throes of a drug orgy.

Lerner then read a poem titled “Trippin,” written, he said, by a drug addict and chosen for its relevance to the boy’s problems:

“I love you drugs I love the high that you give when deep down I know that you are a sin I love you drugs but I know that you are only teasing my brain . . . . “

Finishing the poem, Lerner asked the group if, like the teen-ager, they sometimes felt obsessed by something or someone. “How many times have we said, ‘God, I cannot live without him or her?’ ” he asked.

Must ‘Grab the Moment’

With teen-age patients, Lerner said later, it is important to “grab the moment,” because their attention span is limited, particularly when the problem has been substance abuse. For that reason, he often evokes rock music lyrics sung by Cyndi Lauper, Pink Floyd and The Grateful Dead--what he calls “the language of guts.”

Lerner, talking with the patients, paraphrased an anonymous poet: “In the journey out of the soul there are many detours, but we must find the right way for ourselves.”

“All of life is a poetic unraveling,” he said at another point.

Lerner read a poem in which the poet lamented how many times she must start over in the course of writing a poem.

An engagingly warm, alert woman in her 40s, who said her week at Woodview had consisted of “ups and downs,” told what the poem meant to her. “You start something and something else comes up and you don’t finish what you started--like life.”

Laughter of Recognition

“How many times has this happened to each of you?” the therapist asked, eliciting laughter of recognition from the participants.

“I see what you are trying to get across here,” said a youth who repeatedly paced the room.

“I am saying give yourself a chance--you understand more than you think,” Lerner said, adding, “Each time we read we see things in a different light. So we have got to learn to keep loose . . . .”

Dick Anderson, a psychotherapist at Woodview-Calabasas Hospital and a specialist in the treatment of juveniles, said that poetry therapy can help young people begin to understand the concept of emotions.

“Adolescents don’t walk around with much of a vocabulary of emotions. Yet feelings are attached to words,” he said. Anderson said he once treated a tough kid at Woodview-Calabasas who thought that poetry therapy was ridiculous.

Deeply Affected

“He was an abused child who was not very verbal,” Anderson said. Yet after he began poetry therapy, he began acting out his emotions, which Anderson said was a positive indication that he was being reached at a deep level of emotion.

“That was the beginning,” Anderson said. “After about a week this kid broke down. He saw something in those words that he had never seen before.” The poem that began the teen-ager’s recovery was Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Anderson said.

Dr. Lee Roloff, writing in the spring, 1987, issue of the Journal of Social Psychiatry on the subject of “Social Despair in Adolescent Boys,” described how boys in a detention ward were were helped by poetry therapy to “conceptualize in language rather than acting out.”

Roloff, 59, a senior analyst at the C.J. Jung Institute in Chicago, professor at Northwestern University and a poetry therapist, said that writing poetry restores the capacity of the psyche to speak in its own language.

“Their poems became absolutely accurate diagnostic tools for the inner despair” felt by the youths, Roloff said.

A young girl undergoing treatment at Woodview-Calabasas Hospital, asked what she thought about poetry therapy, put it more simply.

“This is the first time in my life that I have ever been able to talk about myself,” she said.