title: Using Poetry to Promote Talking and Healing
author:  Pooky Knightsmith 
description: Poetry's many attributes include the capacity to absorb secrets and express pain too deep to talk about. Its ability to be a creative and healing tool for poets of all life stages and ages is as limitless as your imagination. Pooky's timely, easy-to-read and user-friendly book explores how the writing and reading of poetry can be a valuable resource for communicating with the self and others. Author: June Alexander, mental health advocate and author of Using Writing as a Therapy for Eating Disorders<br /><br />At last! A book that values and uses poetry as a therapeutic tool, as a way of helping us make sense of ourselves. Unlike so many stereotypes about poetry, this book is practical, unpretentious and heartfelt, with applications for helping people - young and old - way beyond mental health settings. Pooky Knightsmith has opened a very creative box for us to use. Author: Nick Luxmoore, school counsellor and author of Horny and Hormonal, Feeling Like Crap and Working with Anger and Young People<br /><br />If you are "poetry-impaired" like me, Dr. Knightsmith's book is a revelation. Poetry is a language many of my depressed and suicidal adolescent clients speak fluently, but one I have never had much confidence using in my therapy. This beautiful, honest, and instructive book has given me another tool to use in my work. Author: Jonathan B. Singer, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Loyola University, Chicago School of Social Work and coauthor of Suicide in Schools: A Practitioner's Guide to Multi-level Prevention, Assessment, Intervention, and Postvention<br /><br />Whoever you are, whatever you do, here is a profoundly personal and moving insight into the world of emotional and mental ill-health. But this book is much more than that. Whilst many will identify with the dark depths of emotion within her poems, Dr Knightsmith's greatest achievement is in offering teachers, carers and friends not only a valuable resource to enable empathy, but also a starting point to aid and encourage recovery. <i> </i> Author: Dick Moore, Retired Head Teacher and Trainer for the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust<br /><br />This is a remarkable and original book. Pooky's poems, born out of her own experience and that of those she has worked with, offer us real insight into the complexities of living with and recovering from mental ill-health. The careful structure of the book encourages exploration of relevant themes and is a welcome addition to supporting recovery, when used within a therapeutic setting. Author: Jessica Streeting MA, School Nurse and Advisor to Public Health England (www.schoolhealthstreet.co.uk)<br /><br />In this informative and powerful text, Pooky shows us how we can find our voice within the poetic words of others and in the creation of our own poetry. Poetry offers a medium of self-expression that captures so much more than words and rationale. As such, poetry offers an ideal place to find empathy, meaning and solace. To believe that "someone else understands, and someone else is listening." Author: Dr Helen Street, applied social psychologist and educator, The Positive Schools Initiative<br /><br />This is a remarkable resource not only for therapists but also for teachers of English, creative writing and drama. The prompts for discussion are very varied and raise issues of technique and the impact of a writer's choices as well as subject matter. The sections defining poetic forms and providing ways in to writing are brilliant for the classroom, and then there is the astonishing anthology ... Author: Jane Bunclark, Head of Academic Drama, West Buckland School, Devon<br /><br />This is an incredibly impressive and valuable book. Given its powerful and personal insight, it will in my view be perfect for use with professional therapists working one-to-one with clients. While the book is rightly intended for use in a one-to-one setting and not in the classroom, I have learnt much from reading it which will influence my work with the PSHE Association. Author: Jenny Barksfield, Deputy CEO and Senior Subject Specialist, PSHE Association<br /><br /><i>Using Poetry to Promote Talking and Healing</i> is a humble guide for both professionals of mental health and the public in general. By providing a heart-warming insight of a very personal experience, Pooky Knightsmith allows the reader to identify himself with the ordinary struggles of human existence in an effortless manner. An undeniable prolific written testimony of ascendancy and bravery, this book is a major trigger to personal change. The reader - and <i>artist-to-be</i> of its own piece of life story - is invited to set himself free of inner criticism and follow its instincts. The book offers an unexpected myriad of creative tools able to facilitate the expression of feelings. A specially worthwhile reading for any mental health professional eager to introduce creative possibilities in the therapeutic context. These tools might well work as the preface of a joint story written between therapist and client. Author: Sofia Correia Alegria Source: SENcology blog
zlib_text: POETRY	THERAPY
  Owen	E.	Heninger
  
  e-Book	2016	International	Psychotherapy	Institute
  From	American	Handbook	of	Psychiatry:	Volume	7	edited	by	Silvano	Arieti
  Copyright	©	1981	by	Basic	Books
  All	Rights	Reserved
  Created	in	the	United	States	of	America
  
  Table	of	Contents
  POETRY	THERAPY
  Introduction
  Place	in	Therapies
  Theory
  Techniques
  Bibliography
  www.freepsychotherapybooks.org
  4
  
  POETRY	THERAPY
  Owen	E.	Heninger
  Poetry	may	be	used	as	a	device	to	involve	patients	in	the	therapeutic
  process.	It	is	the	speech	of	interiority,	the	“language	of	being,”	both	intense
  and	compact,	and	gets	at	the	true	utterance	in	the	therapeutic	endeavor.	Some
  therapists	maintain	that	all	poetry	is	therapy,	that	it	is	one	of	the	techniques
  man	has	developed	to	cope	with	inner	turmoil.	Poetry	may	serve	as	therapy
  either	by	the	resolution	of	mental	anguish	or	by	providing	a	way	for	man	to
  face	 his	 conflicts	 more	 honestly.	 It	 is	 a	 means	 to	 engage	 in	 meaningful
  personal	 communication,	 it	 is	 a	 link	 to	 