Bucks County Courier Times

9/25/2001

Poetry a Therapeutic Outlet in These Times of Grief
By Betty Cichy

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two weeks ago, readers have been sending us poems.

As a newspaper, we don't usually print poetry, but the growing pile of handwritten heartfelt stanzas has made us rethink that policy - just this once.

Clearly, there's something about writing a poem that helps some people deal with their feelings about the attacks. According to Dr. Christopher Bursk, a professor in the Department of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College and the author of several books of poetry, poems are a way to express feelings that are hard to talk about.

Just the act of putting words on paper can give you some sense of control over unspeakable tragedy "We feel so powerless faced with personal grief and, in this case, national grief," Bursk says. "Poems are an engine of hope because every word you write is your exercise of your freedom to choose."

Bursk hasn't written yet about the recent events-it's still too soon, he says-but he has been working on his next book of poems. Reflects Bursk, "It's what kept me sane."

So great is poetry's power to help people deal with their emotions that there is even a specialty in the counseling field called poetry therapy One of its best known practitioners is Dr. Sherry Reiter, a clinical social worker who operates a practice called the Creative "Righting" Center and trains mental health professionals who want to use poetry therapy in their work. Reiter, who has offices in Brooklyn and Manhattan says some of her patients have been writing poems about the terrorist attacks. "We're at ground zero now, and we're digging bones," she says. "We are looking for the meaning and structure of our lives. Poetry is the language of the soul."

The sounds and form of poetry can reflect and influence our emotions, Reiter says. Poems that have rhythm like the human heartbeat are very calming. But those filled with hard consonants and jagged lines can convey feelings of anxiety and trauma.

People who are deeply disturbed about recent events may write exploding poems, Reiter says. But just writing these poems is a constructive, not destructive, act.

"If they're able to write, they're able to get a sense of mastery, a sense of control," says Reiter. "The feelings are ordered into words and can be looked at."

People who don't want to write poems may find comfort or wisdom in reading poems by other people. The choice of poems is a personal one, but Bursk recommends the poetry of Walt Whitman, who cared for soldiers injured on Civil War battlefields. Whitman didn't turn away from the pain, but affirmed what the soldiers were experiencing, Bursk says.

The National Association of Poetry Therapy offers some poems on its Website, www.poetrytherapy.org, as well as links to other poetry sites on the Web.

And if you do write poems about the attacks, don't send them to us Newspapers are not really the right place for poetry. Share them with your friends, e-mail them to family members, hang them on the refrigerator, publish them in your church bulletin.

Or write them in a journal that you can keep and add to as a record of your own suffering and healing during a time of profound national grief.