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‘POETRY GIVES US PERMISSION TO FEEL’ Arielle Tchiprout finds solace in the power of the pen

When I signed up for a poetry therapy session, I didn’t think I needed to be healed. I was just going along for the fun of it; at best, I hoped I’d rekindle my love of poetry-writing that I’d lost as a teenager, when I became too self-conscious to believe my poems mattered. Nevertheless, I was looking forward to my group-workshop Zoom call with writer, university tutor and poetry therapist Victoria Field. I’d never heard of the profession and it turns out it’s unique: Field qualified as a Certified Poetry Therapist with a Us-based organisation and she’s active in developing the field of therapeutic writing in the UK. For 15 years, she has led workshops with diverse groups, including students, adults with learning disabilities and the elderly, encouraging connection and introspection via reading and writing poems.

‘When we talk about “poems”, we’re referring to short, intense pieces of writing,’ she tells us, a group of three, at the start of the session. ‘It doesn’t have to rhyme. It’s really just whatever comes out, so we work in a very non-judgemental way. It’s not about literary criticism or school, but seeing what appears on the page, and what we might find out about ourselves from doing that.’

We start with a warm-up, an acrostic poem for the word ‘October’. Though the session isn’t supposed to be like school, my mind drifts to a classroom as I write the word in capital letters down the side of the page. She tells us we have five minutes to fill in the poem, writing constantly without changing anything. Afterwards, we read our poems, and we giggle about the similarities between them: they all centre on coronavirus, and the strange autumn that looms ahead. ‘Poetry can give us the sensation that we’re not alone in the world,’ says Field. ‘It gives us permission to feel.’

For the next part of the session, we read and analyse a poem. Optimism by Jane Hirshfield appears on screen, and we read it aloud one by one. This, Field says, elicits feelings of nostalgia and comfort, before she leads a therapy-like discussion digging into our thoughts. She asks for memories and images that the poem conjures up; who and what certain words bring to mind.

‘When we’re out in the world, we have all this stuff going on in our heads, but when you’re reading a poem, you can focus on a smaller world, which can help you connect in all sorts of ways,’ says Field. She explains that it’s different to psychotherapy because you’re able to start with the poem; it’s outside yourself, which ‘perhaps makes it feel a bit safer’. For the final part of the session, we take the first words of the poem (‘More and more I have come to admire…’) as a springboard for writing our own poem, with six minutes to open our minds and pour it on to the page. Before I realised what I was writing, I scribbled down a poem about the herbs planted by my boyfriend days before – a man who’d been newly suffering from anxiety and panic attacks, triggered by family issues and the trappings of lockdown. It was a poem about watching his eyes light up when seeing seedlings poking through the soil. Subconsciously inspired by the poem we’d read, it was a verse about hope.

When I read my poem aloud, I cried. I came into the session feeling cheery, but there I was, releasing a sadness I’d stuffed inside my heart in order to make space for his. Field and my co-poets nodded in recognition and congratulated me – not for the quality of my poem, but for releasing my emotions. As a working writer, it felt soothing to be affirmed for my efforts, not for the result.

After hearing the other poems, I felt tired – the good kind of tired you feel after completing your to-do list and diving into a freshly made bed. I logged off feeling calm, quiet and content.

That night, I showed my poem to my boyfriend. He held me close and we planned new plants to grow and shared our hopes for when this pandemic is over. We agreed I should start writing poetry again. I think that imperfect poem, with its clumsy rhymes and long lines, ended up healing us both. Find Victoria Field at thepoetrypractice.co.uk

‘I felt calm, quiet and content’