Lecture: When Winter Comes: Mutual Illuminations from Poetry and Group Analysis.
As a poet and group analyst my lecture to the GASi Summer School explored the resonances across the practices and processes of group analysis and poetry. I reflected on the interplay between memory and imagination, intimacy and distance, metaphor and meaning as well as the particular and the universal. The group analytic matrix can be understood as the forge within which creativity can be nurtured by providing containment, strengthening our internal holding and our capacity for reverie and play, and ultimately helping us find the words with which to tell ourselves and others about our lives. During my presentation I read a number of poems from my two collections published by Bloodaxe Books. I have quoted from the poems here but I cannot include them in full due to copyright restrictions.
The Forge
It is in the space between inner and outer worlds, which is also the space between people—the transitional space—that intimate relationships and creativity occur. – D. W. Winnicott from his 1951 essay ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.’
Poetry is the oldest form of literature. It was voiced by the individual on behalf of the group – to remember, preserve, and pass on the identity of a tribe, a culture, a nation. Likewise, the practice of sitting in a group, telling and reflecting on the stories of our lives must be one of the most ancient forms of communication. Three years after completing my group analytic training with the Institute of Group Analysis I wrote my first poem. Four books later I have no doubt that the unsettling, revealing, transforming experience in the training forge/matrix led to this unexpected bud burst of creativity.
Poetry is primarily an oral art – in other words it is the sound that matters most. You can be profoundly moved by a poem without fully understanding it. I remember how our training group analyst would listen and listen as we responded to each other across the group and then draw it all together and put it back to us in an interpretation. I often didn’t fully understand what she was saying but I came to realise that it was her tone of voice, the rhythm of her speech, the colour she put into her sentences, the images she used that told me I was understood, that we were understood, that it was safe to say whatever we had to say, that our attempts at communication were meaningful and brave.
‘When winter comes’, from my second collection When the Tree Falls (2019) reflects on darkness and shadow as the place from which creativity emanates. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/07/poem-of-the-week-when-winter-comes-jane-clarke-when-the-tree-falls-collection)
Traditionally there was a forge in every Irish village where people brought their horses to be shod but also to have implements made and mended. For me that training group was the forge for mending and making. There was the dim light, there were the colours of the other group members, there was the heat generated in the matrix that allowed for our sense of self to be bent and shaped, softened, strengthened and shone. A forge is a place for discovering, observing and acknowledging shadow. The forge in my poem could be seen, like a group matrix, as the transitional space between inner and outer worlds, a creative space for the interplay of memory, imagination, intention, and curiosity.
The American poet, Edward Hirsch writes about elegiac poetry: The elegy does the work of mourning. It allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance and it delivers an inheritance. It opens a space for retrospection and drives wordless anguish, wordless torment toward the consolations of verbal articulation and verbal ceremony. To my mind he could also have been speaking about group analysis.
Memory and Imagination
Another American poet, Jane Hirshfield speaks of a poem as a vessel for memory and the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote, On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.
Working with memory and imagination is the bread and butter of both psychotherapy and poetry. As a child I had the notion that memory was true and imagination was made up; now I see that the distinctions are not as clear cut. Memory is a storyteller, creating imaginative reconstructions of past events and shaped as much by the rememberer’s expectations and knowledge regarding what should have happened, and what could have happened, as what actually did happen. What’s more, memory is bodily as well as mental, unconscious as well as conscious, social as well as individual. The interplay between imagination and memory remains as powerful as it is mysterious.
Memory can be both a burden and a treasure trove. An analytic group could be described as a pressure chamber for the stimulation and retrieval of memories. I learned the power of memory in shaping our story of ourselves and our sense of identity. I learned that memory is both tenacious and fragile, that it is formed and reformed in the recalling. I saw how our emotional experience, assumptions, expectations and associations influence our memory of an event. I experienced the mystery of how we protect ourselves from some memories and yet can’t escape others. Why do we remember particular moments when so many moments of our lives are lost to us. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote: What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.
It seems to me that the years of working intensely in the realm of memory freed up creativity in me and continued to resource me when I began to write. I am beholden to the symbiotic relationship between memory and imagination. I see memory as the springboard but the poem is the dive. In group analysis memory is also often the springboard for a dive into the to and fro process of finding resonances and making meaning about the ‘there and then’ and the ‘here and now’. Even when a poem is sparked by memory, it must be free to go beyond memory to wherever the poem needs to go. This is where memory, imagination and craft meet.
An understanding of memory as mutable and individual is liberating. Memories are to be explored, to learn from, to play with and shape. The process of retrieving bits and pieces of memory and giving them form is a fundamental source of creativity. Sometimes it’s like as if, out of the blue, a new memory comes knocking on the door of consciousness wanting to be heard, to be seen and to be given expression. When I’ve written a poem inspired by a memory it is as if I have given that memory a home, by understanding it anew, by putting a more bearable distance between myself and a memory, by making meaning.
As group analysts we tell the story of our groups through vignettes. The characteristics of a vignette; brief and spontaneous, with a sense of immediacy, are similar to those of a poem. The vignette and the poem focus on a part to illustrate the whole. I have written about my parent’s relationship in my first two collections through vignettes. ‘The Yellow Jumper’ from When the Tree Falls (2019) centres on a gift my mother gave my father early in their marriage:
One day she folded and packed it in the chest
with the spare candles, letters, photographs
and the other questions she didn’t ask.
This and other poems began as explorations of the difficulties in the parental relationship that had a powerful impact on my childhood. However, because what I write is not totally in my control, what emerged was also a tribute to their survival as a couple for almost sixty years. It would be impossible for me to tell their long, complex story but in the words of Robert Frost, a poem is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.
Intimacy and Distance
The poet Mary Oliver’s consistent advice to other writers was to pay attention or as W.B. Yeats put it, the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
One of the most important gifts of group analysis is what it teaches about the dance of intimacy and distance that is at the heart of observation; thinking about feeling and feeling about thinking. In the process group members develop their capacity to speak of, bear and understand emotional turmoil. To write a poem the poet needs to combine intimacy with distance; to feel their feelings and to observe and think about their feelings. The writer uses metaphor and music to convey the emotion so that, though the poem is born out of the particular, it matures into something that transcends the individual. The paradox of metaphor is that it creates the distance we need to feel and express what is very close to us. The desire to express oneself may give the poem its initial energy but it is a poem’s universal resonance that makes it a work of art. Every poem has its requirements that shape what is said and how it is said. Readers read their own lives into the poem. They read their own losses and anxieties in the words and between the words, in the music and in the imagery.
We live with the inevitability of loss and therefore the inevitability of sorrow. We give sorrow words in group and in writing. Both help us endure, offering us companionship in the everyday experience of living with loss, helping us weave joy and loss and fear and hope into the tapestry of our lives. I believe that it is about making what seems unbearable bearable, it is about living with it and living through it. The truer your poems are for you the truer they can be for others – by being intensely personal you can write something that is intensely universal. Poetry is like music in how it expresses and holds back at the same time. The mysterious paradox is that while music and poetry make one experience pain and grief more intensely, they brings solace and consolation at the same time. Music and poetry reverberate within us – making space for the tumult of emotions we have in response to loving and losing.
As a poet I think of myself making an object with words, an object to be handed to someone else. The title poem of my first collection The River (2015) explores the nature of grief, inspired by the river flowing at the edge of the midlands farm where I grew up:
…………………………………… Only sometimes,
like yesterday or the day before, last night or this morning,
the river flows backwards, uphill to my door.
It was surprising to discover that the making is satisfying and pleasurable, even when what is being shaped is sorrowful. Writing poems of loss and mourning requires the poet to be in two places at once – in the despair of loss and the intense aliveness of creating, of shaping lines and stanzas, of looking for the right word, of searching for a metaphor adequate to what one is trying to express.
Surprise
The function of art is to open the prisons and give voice to the sorrows and joys of it all – Albert Camus.
At the beginning of each group session the analyst has no idea where it will go, what will be said or not said and what meaning will emerge through the back and forth within the group and over the life of the group. When I begin to write a poem I have no idea what it will become and in fact I have even less of an idea twenty years after my first poem. Now I trust more and can follow the poem though anxiety is always close at hand, anxiety that I’ll never write another poem and that my best poems are in the past. The poem is a surprise as is what you find yourself saying in the group. From its initial idea to completion, the poem can take many detours, each of them redefining the way the poet imagines and reimagines themselves in the world.
As group analysts and poets we work with the paradox of what we can and cannot control. I want to continue to develop my work by reading and studying other poets and by writing new work and at the same time I have to give myself over to what will emerge. So I live with a combination of purpose and commitment and an awareness of what is outside my control. I believe this is also important as a group analyst – a commitment to practice combined with an understanding that it is the group that does the work, the group that makes meaning, the group of which we are only a part. What we don’t know is always so much greater than what we know.
Group analysts can be surprised by the new understandings discovered by looking back, often in a moment of change and refection for the group as a whole, e.g. when a long-time member leaves. Similarly I have found new meaning in individual poems or in sequences when I have arranged them for a collection or when readers have told me what the poem has meant to them.
The words of Winnicott and Klein and Bowlby may have shaped my writing as much as those of Hopkins, Dickinson and Heaney – I experienced these writers as creators of understanding, givers of permission, purveyors of compassion. ‘The trouble’, a poem from my second collection, explores the relationship between daughter and mother. The poem arrived as a surprise, allowing me to express a complexity that I would find impossible to express in any other way. Many mothers and daughters have responded deeply to it; I think of it as my Melanie Klein poem.
Poetry as Communal Practice
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
– Czeslaw Milosz
The image of the isolated artist is a popular trope but for me poetry is as much a communal practice as it is individual. As group analysts we know that the individual is never isolated in a self-contained environment, but endlessly engaging in interaction with the surrounding world. I write the first few drafts of a poem on my own, (though often inspired by the communal, i.e. friends, family, ecologists, historians, other poets) then I take it to my workshop group for help, take it home again to revise and then take it out into the world again.
The process of writing moves back and forth – individual to group to individual to group, forming a matrix of mutual inspiration and interdependence. The act of making a poem is a movement from private feeling and perception into the shared realm of language.
We need others to create and recreate a facilitating environment, both internal and external to help sustain ourselves through the inevitable experiences of inadequacy, disappointment, rejection, envy, failure as well as success and the boundaries between the public and private self. In communal spaces with my partner and good friends I tease out the challenges of my role as an artist. We have a shared language, a shared understanding, a let’s look at this approach.
Central to my practice is also the wider community of fellow poets. Like all communities there are the rivalries, cliques, boundary breaches, power dynamics as well as mutual support, fun and friendship. Wendell Berry, the American poet and farmer, defines community as ‘the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared’. Group analysis helps us live, work and play in communities, navigating troubled waters to find the respite of a harbour before heading out again.
And of course the ultimate communal practice is the performance of poetry in public. The late, Carole Satyamurti, English poet and psychoanalyst, said a successful poem is one that will resonate in the minds of strangers. The poem becomes a space for audiences to create new meanings. As readers bring their own perspectives, they may read a poem in ways that the poet hasn’t imagined. This exchange is mutual as the audience add meaning to a poem, enriching the experience of poetry.
We talked about where we were going to be,
the wooden frame house with a picket fence,
but we didn’t talk about why we had to leave
as we touched the lockets around our necks.
These lines are from a villanelle ‘On the boat’ written in response to the experience of Irish women who emigrated to the US over many decades. A Nigerian woman who found asylum in Ireland heard me read this poem. Afterwards she wrote to me, saying she could fit herself and her experiences into each line. It spoke directly of her journey as a 20 year old woman leaving Nigeria, not knowing what the future held but sensing that she was travelling to a land of opportunities.This is the story for very many of us migrants. As we grow older we yearn to return home and wonder if we would have taken this journey as virgins if we knew what we would experience in the foreign land.
Group analysts have a particular interest in the collective or social unconscious as do poets. This woman’s response to my poem suggests that the poem taps into a collective unconscious that speaks to people across culture and time.
A Wounded Landscape
“I think of poetry as a social art… I want a poem to be useful.” Sharon Olds
In ten turbulent years from 1912 to 1923 Ireland experienced the 1913 Lockout, World War 1, the 1916 Easter Rising, the War of Independence, and a bitterly divisive civil war. When it was over, the island had been partitioned into two states, one of which was independent. Commemorating these events 100 years later is complex. In developing a Decade of Centenaries Programme the Irish government recognised the distinctive role of the arts in helping people explore how our country has been shaped and what we can learn from the past. I was commissioned to facilitate two groups from diverse communities along the Irish border with a view to writing a poem about the border which was then set to music by a Belfast composer, Elaine Agnew.
My opening question seemed simple – can you tell me about your experience of the border. I soon realised that I may as well have said – tell me about your life. Some of these women had never spoken openly about the border with members of the other community before. All of them had been profoundly affected by this line on a map. They spoke and they listened to each other and in the listening people found themselves expressing their experience differently or saying things they hadn’t actually articulated before. Even what may have been familiar was new in the respectful, open context of the conversation. I listened as a group analyst and as a poet. As a group analyst I was keenly aware of the risks involved in speaking openly about what had not been spoken, the fear of rejection, ridicule or even retribution but also the fear of the inner disturbance. I was aware of how difficult it is to articulate deep and often mixed or ambivalent feelings about identity and belonging. As a poet I was listening to the language used, the imagery, the repetition, the rhythms of what was said.
I am reminded of James Baldwin’s reflection on racism, History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. The conversations demonstrated how art gives a different kind of space that is beyond right or wrong, that’s in a different realm to right or wrong. It’s in the realm of trying to tell one truth among many truths. Art allows for multiple perspectives on the highly contested issues in which people are deeply invested and may have been very hurt. Art can bring attention to something that cannot otherwise be safely expressed and in so doing change how we see the world around us and how we see each other.
Towards the end of the meeting one woman said: There’s a wound in the landscape. Another woman responded, as if reaching out to her across the border: How can we heal this wound between us? There was a silence in the room; we had touched what lies beyond the differences, our shared experience of a wounded landscape. The conversations inspired me to write four poems – one long one detailing the physical reality of this 300 kilometre border, two about the impact on families of the border and subsequent violence and one arising from that fundamental question – how can we heal this wound between us. ‘When the sun’ and the other poems will be published next year in A Change in the Air, my third collection with Bloodaxe Books.
When the sun
rises beyond Cuilcagh’s
gritstone ridge
let’s tend
a sheltered acre
plant yarrow
to staunch the bleeding
vervain
to calm the fevers
comfrey
for broken bones
and for our sadness
borage and rose.
Reverie
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson (1779)
Written in 1779, Emily Dickinson’s poem to the imagination is all the more prescient today when both clover and bees are few. Reverie lives between conscious and unconscious experience. Daydreaming, musing, an aimless, non-sensical, illogical flow of thoughts and feelings and images, some of which we retain while others disappear like the most vivid dreams on waking. Is this where play and creativity are born? Is this where we find the words to say it?
There is often a mismatch between our experience and the words we have to describe it. We struggle to find the words to say it. Shame silences us, guilt censors us. We become isolated in our pain. The work of the poet is to try to communicate the particular in a way that is both fresh and somehow eternal. The Yugoslavian-American poet Charles Simic wrote in ‘The Life of Images’, My hunch has always been that our deepest experiences are wordless. There may be images, but there are no words to describe the gap between seeing and saying, for example. The labour of poetry is finding ways through language to point to what cannot be put into words.
Seamus Heaney held that the role of the writer is to find “images and symbols adequate to our predicament”. What is our current predicament? There is the everyday living and dying, there is inequality, oppression, violent conflict, torture and war. And now we have the existential threat to the very future of our planet due to the environmental crisis and the suffering it is causing and will increasingly cause all over the world.
What images and ideas will help us make emotional sense of this fundamental threat? How can our imaginations engage with the implications of a profoundly changed relationship between human and non-human nature? What has group analysis to offer? What has poetry to offer? We are not primarily philosophers, moralists or activists. We explore the relationship between internal and external worlds, providing:
a place to think together, to find words together, to mourn together.
a place to share the burdens that we fear are unbearable.
a place where we do not have to be alone.
a place to express vulnerability and hopelessness and to find strength.
a place to find and acknowledge our shadows
a place in which to try to tell the truth of what it is to be human.
Will what we have to offer contribute to the level of systemic change that is needed to meet our current predicament? There is no easy answer – we need political change and we need personal change, we need knowledge and we need dreams; they are interdependent towards creating solutions. Never has the need for serious play been more pressing.
And when the task is overwhelming I think of what Zadie Smith says about writing: ‘It’s your job just to channel whatever it is that you have, even if it’s very small, even if it seems insignificant, and feed it into this river, this huge, collective bit of water called literature. And that will do.’
Jane Clarke is an Irish poet and group analyst and the author of two collections, The River and When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books 2015 & 2019), as well as an illustrated chapbook, All the Way Home, (Smith|Doorstop 2019). Jane’s awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award 2022, the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry 2016 and the Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year 2016. Jane’s third collection A Change in the Air will be published by Bloodaxe in May 2023.
The River: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-river-283
When the Tree Falls: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/when-the-tree-falls-1216