Evocative Space

Genesis

There are endless poems

in the world,

and each one seeks its listeners out.

A poet hears first some hint,

coaxes this

into the body

where listening begins

between them—the poem

making the poet,

the poet making the poem.

After, each listener becomes another

maker, each time the poem made

all over again, each time

becoming something new.

“Genesis” is a poem about endless numbers of poems in the world and the potential for any one poem to have no end as long as it remains potentially new according to who listens and how it is listened to. The poem foregrounds the generative “hint” that often emerges into consciousness as a word or phrase or prelinguistic rhythm that presses on the poet’s mind and body to be further formed; in this case, that hint was the opening declaration. I suggest through this poem that, in listening to such hints, a dynamic process is initiated and marked wherein the poem forms the poet and the poet forms the poem. Then, the poem itself (or some aspect of it) becomes a possible hint for the listener, precipitating a mutually creative relation between the poem and the listener, who at once makes the poem new. I choose this poem to highlight two important actions that I think are also inherent in analytic listening—the creation and expansion of evocative language; and the formation of a triangular relation between the sayer, the said, and the said-to.

By evocative language I mean to refer to all aspects of words—meanings, sound, rhythm, arrangement—that prompt associations, creative or aesthetic states of mind, and psychic play with other word elements and with images, all of which lead significantly to the emergence of other thoughts and feelings potentially re-presented in language. I also mean to suggest that such language encourages a heightened experience of those words and an altered relationship to them. As such, the listener’s attention is sharpened to the formal and informal aspects of what is said, and to other possible meanings of the words and other levels of meaning. Too, the listener is potentially more open to being surprised by words, to being acted upon by the language, and to have some heightened sense that what is said and what is sayable exist in dynamic tension with what cannot be said.

As rhetoricians note, language as communicated text forms a triangular relation among the spoken, the speaker, and the spoken-to. As text, any poem establishes at the least a triangular relation between the poet, the poem, and the listener or reader. I like to configure this relation as an evocative space, a site of potential experience not unrelated to the transitional space Winnicott specifies in the relation between caretaker and infant and between self and other, inside and outside. A poem formed within evocative space is itself a condensation of intentions and possibilities. Though primarily verbal, its surface hints often at other, multiple levels of meaning, music, and image, some of which we may never grasp, consciously or unconsciously. The depths the surface alludes to, and the relation between the surface and the depths, is the stuff of poetry; accordingly, à la Coleridge, the presence of those depths helps distinguish prose (“words in the best order”) and poetry (“the best words in the best order”).

Of course, I am also talking about what often happens in analytic work between analyst and patient when something uttered—by the analysand, by the analyst—lifts or is lifted from the discourse for closer attention and therapeutic focus. Such utterances emerge from and become explored within the evocative space also formed within the analytic context, with each party shaped into being close listeners and evocative speakers. As well, each party forms a relationship to the mutually created or mutually determined language that helps expand the triangular space and facilitate shifts in the subjectivity of each. I mean to point out that what gets said in the clinical situation is influenced not only by some sense of the other’s speaking voice and immediate capacity to hear, and by the implicit roles and specific relational history of the dyad, but by the deep evocation of language each effects in the other. We listen more closely not only to the other but to ourselves, learning from that dynamic listening what else we think and mean.

I present this poem also because it happened to arrive quickly and easily; it simply felt like a gift. Moreover, the poem was smarter than I consciously felt while writing it, and I enjoyed the subsequent process of discovering what else the poem was saying about poems being endless. I know from experience that while such poems may feel like gifts, the reality is that all kinds of unconscious work precedes what appears in consciousness. Throughout my writing life, I’ve been interested in the question of whether all poems need to be written, even if they are redundant, finally unsuccessful, derivative or trite, and so on. I’ve become convinced that, yes, all poems do need to be written, that each poem precedes countless others, this very necessary quality characterizing the work over time for poets and readers alike. The organizing force of this unconscious working is what we sometimes call “the process” (probably short for the “creative process”). Poets have many ideas about the poetic process, but many use the term to refer to a series of often nonconscious activities that unfold over time and eventuate in a so-called finished creative work. Such dynamics range from and include a heightened attentiveness to the subjective experience of oneself and the world; to playing with music, sound, image, and so forth; to the very directed associative thinking evoked by the poet’s paying attention; to the receptivity or even surrender of the self to chance or chaotic events (the undirected associations) during the delimited time of making the poem; and, of course, to the more conscious activity of revising or re-seeing the emerging poem.

It is a process I liken to some ideas about the analytic process, especially the idea that this process is actually several processes, including the formation of an analytic frame or situation, the attention to and elaboration of unconscious material, the handling of defenses against awareness, and so on. I am particularly influenced by the idea that the analytic process is best described as a series of two-person interactions within a clinical situation wherein the unconscious of each affects the other. Expanding somewhat on this view, Nancy McWilliams (2004) has suggested that a psychoanalytic sensibility includes a faith in the process of psychoanalytic treatment. She defines that faith as a “a gut-level confidence”; or as the conviction that “if two people conscientiously put a certain effort in motion, a natural process of growth [that has been arrested by the accidents of one’s life thus far] will be released to follow its own self-healing logic” (p. 43). She argues that this kind of faith assumes that the effort to pursue the truth of one’s experience—most frequently, the patient’s—has intrinsic healing value. Setting in motion some vitally inherent process seems central to how many of us think about what we try to do in treatment.

Like her, I feel some wariness about the use of the term faith and its suggestion of the religious and the theistic, but I also happen to agree that such a term accurately describes how I tend to feel poems make themselves and are made in the world. I return to the notion that a “hint” signals that “something is there.” The something that is not-yet-fully-something has a way sometimes of insisting itself quietly in me, and there are times when I feel that my attention is being directed by what waits to be. I tend as a writer to be guided by topics and themes, the content of which is often not clear until I am well into writing sequences of poems. One of my collections of poems was guided by a renewed attention to the gospel music I had grown up hearing as a child in the American south; and these poems also guided me to reread certain poets and works, and to be moved toward certain conversations and memories involving my grandparents and their peers. The collection that followed seemed characterized by what felt like directed attention to the blues, and especially the music of Robert Johnson; it was a collection about the complexity of listening and hearing and the relation of these to being changed. I seem preoccupied with the idea of a social unconscious as I work on new poems, most of which wait to be finished but all of which inspire some sense of faith in me about a process of making poems that is more intelligent and more persistent than I am often conscious of. The faith helps me go long periods sometimes without poems becoming finished or without the gist of a sequence of poems becoming apparent. It contributes no doubt to my sometimes simplistic optimism in the clinical situation that anyone can be helped to live a happier and more meaningful life if provided a good-enough fit between them and a thoughtful listener who behaves in good faith.

My appreciation for the process occurring within evocative space leads me often to wonder if, in analysis, the unfolding of evocative language—the development of freer association—is therapeutic in itself or only a necessary but not sufficient condition for analytic change. It brings to mind an essay on poetry and psychoanalysis by Adam Phillips (2000) in which he argues that the field of psychoanalysis tends to idealize poetry because it reassures analysts that language is a good thing, that it counters a skepticism we too often share about the fundamental value of words as therapy. Further, he questions what it means for psychoanalysis to think itself an art instead of a science, and to hold the art of poetry as its ego ideal. I won’t discuss here much of his thinking about what such aspiration means for psychoanalysis, but I’ll note one of his conclusions: that while psychoanalysis is indisputably a method for self-knowledge, poetry is not. He stresses that poetry has many uses and aspirations, but that psychoanalysis privileges the knowing of one’s particular self more deeply. This reminds me where my being a poet, as much as I love and appreciate it, can be a limitation when I’m in my office: the unfolding of evocative language in the clinical situation must ultimately occur in the service of teaching a patient more about his psychic life.

Before I turn to a clinical illustration of my thinking about analytic listening, let me share with you a poem, Ron Padgett’s “Grasshopper” (2011). ¹ Like my “Genesis” it takes poetry as its subject, but reminds us of our analytic interest in enjoying it.

It’s funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,

as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.

It’s a bad idea to fall asleep

while flying a helicopter:

when you wake up, the helicopter is gone

and you are too, left behind in a dream,

and there is no way to catch up,

for catching up doesn’t figure

in the scheme of things. You are

who you are, right now,

and the mind is so scared it closes its eyes

and then forgets it has eyes

and the grasshopper, the one that thinks

you’re a helicopter, leaps onto your back!

He is a brave little grasshopper

and he never sleeps

for the poem he writes is the act

of always being awake, better than anything

you could ever write or do.

Then he springs away.