Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part LIII)

Some of the rehabs used poetry as part of their cognitive therapy. At Odyssey House, the poet, editor, and publisher of The Croton Review, Ruth Lisa Schecter, was employed as full time poetry therapist in the early ‘70s. A certified poetry therapist, she wrote about her work in an essay, “Poetry: A Therapeutic Tool in the Treatment of Drug Abuse” published in Jack Leedy’s 1985 book, Poetry As Healer (Vanguard Press).

“By trial and error, I stumbled into an emergency curriculum relative to “live or die.” Since survival was the theme, emergency treatment of priorities might work, offering poetry, not as a lulling tranquilizer, but rather as an urgent “telegram” applied much as a respirator or cardiac message--intense, dramatic and immediate. Of necessity then, literary techniques, forms, grammar, spelling, rhyming, philosophy or history of literature, were neglected. Although as the program continued, all techniques emerged naturally and spontaneously via exposure. Attention span was extremely brief due to physical weakness and emotional exhaustion. Depression, loneliness, withdrawal, morbid suspicion and disorientation from drug abuse were the pervading symptoms.”

Although she was no longer working at the site during the years Waterways visited the program, the staff remembered the positive effect of her work on the residents. In the Spring of 1987 she read at the “Last New York Book Fair.”

My master’s thesis at NYU had looked at the work and history of blind poets. I was fascinated by the question “Does a poet’s inner vision compensate for physical blindness?” The notion of healing through the arts, though, has philosophical footing in Aristotle’s writing about catharsis in The Poetics. There have been varied interpretations, but an aesthetic study of "Inspiration and Katharsis" by the Swedish professor of Aesthetics Teddy Brunius helped inform my work. In that study, Brunius traced the idea of poetry purging fear and pity from Aristotle through Milton to Freud.

Through the Waterways publications students were able to share their work with counselors at alternative program sites. In that way the Waterways Project benefited the students, the agencies, and the schools. The psychologists on Riker’s Island were astonished by their successes in using poetry therapy in their work with troubled inmates. The two prison psychologists I met were frustrated because of their inability to fully realize the potential of the therapy. They were responsible for serving thousands of prisoners. The paperwork of the bureaucracy took precedent, and despite the lack of official support they were able to schedule groups of inmates to discuss and read aloud their poetry.