@ The Association for Family Therapy 1996.

Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley

Road, Oxford, OX4 IJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Journal of Family Therapy (1 996) 18: 337-359
0164-4445 $3.00

Our ‘other history’: poetry as a meta-metaphor for

narrative therapy

Maryhelen Snyder“

This paper explores certain distinctions betwen narrative and poetry as

metaphors for the consciously authored life. I t is suggested that such
phenomena as ‘self, ‘authorship’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘time’ are experienced
differently within the narrative discourse and the discourse associated
with poetry. Five aspects of ‘poetic’ knowledge are explored: form (or
containment); aesthetic knowing; non-identity with self (participatory
creation), nothingness (and not knowing); and radiance. Two examples
from couple therapy are then given to illustrate these aspects and the
interface between this way of knowing and the lived life.

Introduction
The recent growth of narrative therapy, inspired largely by the
writing of White and Epston (e.g. Epston and White, 1992), has
brought an increased consciousness to many therapists and those who
consult them of the ways in which we are shaped by narratives
(meanings, identities, discourses, landscapes, plots and purposes) not
of our making, and of the possibilities of becoming more self-authored,
of creating our own stories of who we are and how we live. In some of
the psychoanalytic and neo-psychoanalytic approaches, the narrative
metaphor has also been explored (e.g. Schafer, 1992; Spence, 1982).
Consciousness of the storying, meaning-making, languaging nature of
human thought, emotion and behaviour, can release people from the
oppressive effect of assuming inherited meanings to be established
knowledges and foundational truths.
In my personal experience as a student and practitioner of the
narrative approach, I have repeatedly encountered in myself aq
emotional and cognitive disequilibrium when attempting to con-
ceptualize the movement of my life or my preferred ways of being as a
new or alternative ‘story’. It has been the absence of fit of my

a 422 Camino del Bosque NW, Albuquerque, New Mexico 871 14, USA
338 Maryhelen Snyder
experience to this metaphor which has motivated me to explore the
ideas described below. As I observe myself and others on those
occasions of release from the oppressive effect of inherited meanings, it
appears that these occasions are often experienced as ‘anti-narrative’
(Gilligan, 1994: 89); i.e. narrative descriptions are felt to be
subordinate or even irrelevant to that which cannot be reduced to any
story. An examination of the nature of poetry, as distinct from
narrative, can help to clarify this ‘anti-narrative’ experience. This
paper will explore the usefulness of poetry as a metaphor for both the
therapeutic process and the lived life. I am suggesting here that the
concepts which are central to the meaning of poetry are ‘meta’ to the
concepts which are central to the narrative metaphor. By that I mean
that they are more foundational, and of a higher order. Experience is
formulated in language and meanings, and life is lived sequentially in
time, but the experience that feels most ‘true’ to human beings is often
spoken of as ‘timeless’ and ‘inexpressible’.
In a discussion of the relevance of the metaphors of art and poetry
to narrative therapy, White (personal communication) made reference
to a quote from the Australian novelist, David Malouf:

How [poetry] spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since it wsn’t
always possible, but in precise ones just the same, for what is deeply felt and
might otherwise go unrecorded: all of those unique and repeatable events,
the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and
invitations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is
our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and
chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of
the planet, and has from the very beginning. To find words for that; to make
glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken to: that, when it
occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of
each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till
then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our
own.
(Malouf, 1993: 283-284)

This ‘other history’ is the subject matter of this paper. I will focus on
five aspects of it: form (or containment); aesthetic knowing; non-
identity with self (participatory creation); nothingness (and not
knowing); and radiance. All five aspects are interrelated parts of a
totality. Subsequent to an exploration of these five aspects, I will
discuss their application to family and individual therapy and give
two case examples from couple therapy.
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 Poetry and narrative therapy 339

1 Form is essential to poetry

The word ‘poem’ comes from the Greek poien, meaning ‘to make or
construct’. Although poems can be created within a wide range of
structures, the poet remains conscious of the structure of each part
within the whole as well as of the whole. In a successful poem, as in a
successful painting, sculpture, or musical composition, both composer
and recipient experience the form as essential to conveying the ‘truth’
of the subject. Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica describes this central
relevance of form in the imagery (and form) of the poem: ‘A poem
should be palpable and mute/ As a globed fruit/ Dumb/ As old
medallions to the thumb . . . A poem should be equal to:/ Not true . . .
For love/ The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea-/ A poem
should not mean/ But be’ (MacLeish, 1950: 893-894).
In an essay delineating the distinctions between poetry and
narrative, entitled ‘Admiration of form: reflections on poetry and the
novel’, C. K . Williams (1995) states that in poetry the ‘necessities of
form precede in importance the expressive or analytic demands of the
work’. In contrast, he notes, characters and events, plots and
landscapes tend to be of primary importance in the narrative.
Poets often describe the poem as a container (or form) for truth and
order. For example, Edna St Vincent Millay addresses this essential
aspect of poetry in the following sonnet:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon - his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the sweet confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingle and combine.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
O r answer. I will only make him good.
(Millay, 1950: 728)

Edna St Vincent Millay and Archibald MacLeish are describing the

essential nature not only of the poem but of the conscious life. With the
@ 1996 The Association for Family Therapy
340 Maryhelen Snyder
same foundational metaphor of the form or container, Emily
Dickinson describes the brain in this way:
The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside -

The Brain is deeper than the sea -

For - hold them - Blue to Blue -
The one the other will absorb -
As Sponges - Buckets - do -

The Brain is just the weight of God -

For - Heft them - Pound for Pound -
And they will differ - if they do -
As Syllable from Sound -
(Dickinson, 1960: 312-313)

This experience of poem as container (of the whole), poet as

container, brain as container, is relevant to the usefulness of poetry as
a metaphor for both therapy and the lived life. In a recently
discovered 1847 notebook, Walt Whitman (1995: 1) wrote, ‘Every
soul has its own individual language. Often unspoken or feebly,
lamely, haltingly spoken; but a true tit for that man, and perfectly
adapted for his use. The truths I tell to you or any other may not be
plain to you, because I do not translate them fully from my idiom to
yours. If I could do so, and do it well, they would be as apparent to
you as thcy are to me, for they are truths, No two have exactly the
same language and the great translator and joiner of the whole is the
poet’. ‘I am the poet of slaves’, Whitman writes in a poem that
appears in the same notebook, ‘and of the masters of slaves’.
The nature of poetic form is that it opens space for whatever ‘is’,
and therefore for experiencing that which is painful, chaotic,
contradictory and confusing. In Millay’s poem, ‘sweet Order’ does
not bar chaos from entry; rather it ‘holds its essence and amorphous
shape’. This is relevant for consciousness, dialogue, therapy and
living itself. As a therapist, for example, I hope to create both a
structure and a context in which each person’s idiomatic truths can be
heard by themselves and by the others present. What may appear at
first to be paradoxical in the dual reality of the container and open
space is addressed and clarified with the concept of ‘aesthetic
knowing’.
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 Poetry and narrative therapy 341

2 ‘Aesthetic knowing’ or ‘poetic intelligence’ informs poetry,

and is different in nature from reasoned knowing
Many writers have described a form of knowing that has been called
‘aesthetic knowing’ or ‘poetic intelligence’. I t is experienced as a
different form of knowing from that which we may more typically
experience. Peggy Papp (1993), who is both a poet and a therapist,
states that in this type of knowing there is a tolerance for ambiguity,
the absence of contradiction and a loss of ‘identity’. Aesthetic knowing
has a different relationship to time and space than the more linear
forms of knowing which we associate with narrative in literature and
in life. As Papp writes (1993) ‘Poetry stops time’. Language (or at
least, non-metaphorical language) does not lend itself easily to
describing the ways in which, in the context of ‘aesthetic knowing’,
movement and stillness, separateness and wholeness, the instant and
the infinite, the particular and the universal, can appear virtually
identical. Aesthetic knowing is non-analytically deconstructionist by
its very nature. In this way of knowing, there is non-identity with a
particular perception and the absence of discontinuity between
observer and observed.
Gluck ( 1994) distinguishes between the ‘self-flattering’ choice of
risk and darkness, ‘presumably the choice of the harrowingly real over
the decorous artful’, and the radically different willingness to be open
to ‘the ambivalent, complex, and truly dangerous’ (p. 56) that is
characteristic of what she calls ‘poetic intelligence’. She writes:
Poetic intelligence lacks . . . focused investment in conclusion, being
naturally wary of its own assumptions. It derives its energy from a
willingness to discard conclusion . . its willingness, in fact, to discard
anything . . . This flexibility, and this intensity of purpose, give the eerie
steadiness of mind Emily Dickinson has; even poets who stray wildly,
intentionally, display such steadiness, since its essence is attentiveness to the
path of thought. Nor is this egotism: thought, liberated of preconception,
has nothing to do with self.
(Gluck, 1994: 95)
Within the context of the dominant cultural discourses, opening space
for the experience of ‘what is’ can certainly be perceived as ‘truly
dangerous’. From both conservative and radical perspectives, it can
appear that such open space will threaten either the status quo or the
impetus towards change by allowing uncertainty and complexity. In
actual experience, however, aesthetic knowing reveals a ‘steadiness of
mind’ that can contain ‘wild’ uncertainty and complexity. The
@ 1996 The Association for Family Therapy
342 Maryhelen Snyder
creative actions that emerge from this kind of knowing tend towards a
more inclusive level of harmony. As a therapist, I am interested in
developing and encouraging this steadiness of mind by nurturing my
own and my clients’ capacity for attentiveness to the path of
consciousness wherever that path may lead.
3 Self-authoring takes a radically different form in the
context of poetic intelligence than it does in prevailing
cultural discourses about the nature of self and the nature of
authorship
The form of authoring that is experienced by the artist (whether poet,
musician, painter, sculptor, novelist, social activist, or scientist) is
typically described as instrumental and participatory. In other words,
the perceptions and actions that emerge in the context of undivided
attectiveness appear to move into, through and outward from
consciousness as though the organism were a musical instrument
being played by something outside itself to which it must be highly
sensitive. To situate this in personal experience, for example, I am
aware that when ‘I’ get out of my own way as a therapist, presenter,
writer, friend, or social activist, I experience the way in which
intelligence keeps operating if I do nothing more or less than give it
my undivided attention. When I become concerned with whether or
not it will keep operating, and with my own image in this process, it is
as though the ‘I’ is plugging up the instrument.
In Harland’s H a l f A c r e , David Malouf describes Harland’s experience
as an artist:
Each night he drew what was in front of him: a child’s head heavy with sleep,
a plate of scraps, a cheese dish and cover, a petrol lamp and the shadows it
threw up to bare rafters, the light as it fell on his father’s hair or on the man’s
knee where it was drawn up under him, and fell difkrently on the rucked
material of his trousers and on the bare foot - always the same objects,
familiar but different.
It wasn’t the objects themselves he was concerned with, though they too
had their burden of feeling for him and their own dense reality. . . .
He smoothed the sheet of paper in his hand (it was clean enough) and
considered.
Whiteness.
That alone was enough to take your breath away. It was the source of all
possibility, an infinity of objects and occasions.
. . The page was his mind and contained everything that was in his mind and which
waited there to be brought forth. Hidden beneath it was the world. He had only to let
things emerge, to let his hand free them: . . . ‘The page and his mind could become
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 Poetry and narrative therapy 343
one, and what they contained was the infinite plentitude of things that was
Creation, in which all things were equal; their equality, and the p o s s i b ~ l io~f their
springing into immediate existence, guaranteed by his recognition o f them and by the space
he had prepared and would let them 311.
He sat very still and contemplated what was before him. It seemed to him
that he had understood something important; that his hand, almost without
him, had made a great discovery.
(Malouf, 1983: 29-30; emphasis added)
The experience described here is passive in the sense that the artist
‘lets things emerge’, experiences the possibility of ‘their springing into
immediate existence’, allows his mind and hand to work ‘almost
without him’. The poetlartist experiences multiple dimensions of
experiencing, observing and constituting as an unfragmented flow in
which the choice to be attentive in the context of nothing already
existing (the white paper) and the choice to allow the movement of the
organism (Harland’s hand) in accurate response to this attention is
what is required for ‘authorship’. This instrumental, participatory
authoring however is both passive and active, receptive and inten-
tional. It requires the enormous energy of attentiveness and the
formulation in action of the fruits of that attentiveness.
In onc passage in his essay, C.K. Williams distinguishes the self-
authoring evidenced in the poem from the self-authoring evidenced in
the narrative. What the poet has undergone, he states, in contending
with form,
is not something that happens to the poem’s content; rather it is the poet’s
actual self, his or her ultimate reality, which is the material of the poem’s
artifice. There is a self-making involved in this struggle, but it is of a radically
different sort from that which amicts the characters, and, . . . possibly the
readers of novels. . . . Poetry induces the mind into involving itself entirely in
an awareness of its formal striving, and in doing so, demands that the mind
realize as much as it can its own entire nature. The poem offers the mind . . .
a way to experience itself objectively, by participating in something which
draws it beyond its own . . . capabilities, and still refers in the most concrete
way to these capabilities.
(Williams, 1995: 22-23).
It seems to me that what Williams is abstractly describing here is
precisely what Malouf is illustrating in his description of Frank
Harland’s experience as an artist. The sense of being drawn beyond
the mind’s capabilities, the sense of objectivity and entirety, are
central aspects of ‘poetic intelligence’.
In his classic essay on ‘The cybernetics of self, Bateson (1972)
@ 1996 The Associationfor Family Therajy
344 Maryhelen Snyder
describes the prevailing cultural and linguistic error in our conception
of self and mind:
Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified
or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the
previous stroke. This self-corrective (ix., mental) process is brought about
by a total system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this
total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind. More correctly,
we should spell the matter out as: (differences in tree) - (differences in retina)
- (differences in brain) - (differences in muscles) - (differences in movement
of axe) - (differences in tree), etc. What is transmitted around the circuit is
transforms of differences. And, as noted above, a difference which makes a
difference is an idea or unit of information. But this is not how the average
Occidental sees the event sequence of tree-felling. He says, ‘I cut down the
tree’ and he even believes that there is a delimited agent, the ‘self, which
performed a delimited ‘purposive’ action upon a delimited object (p. 318).
This concept of mind as immanent (vs. transcendent) in continually
creative and interacting feedback loops is immensely useful in
clarifying the distinction between self-authoring in the context of
poetic intelligence and self-authoring within the traditional formula-
tion of the self. In the latter case the human being perceives him/
herself as acting on the world. In the former the experience is rather
one of giving oneself over attentively and actively to a participatory
process which is trustworthily intelligent and creative. It appears that
only by removing one’s consciousness from self-consciousness, self-
referencing and self-evaluating one can function optimally. In the
example of the man cutting down the tree, attentiveness to the process
in its entirety is all that is relevant.
In this experience of attentiveness, people frequently observe that
translating what works in the moment into fixed knowledges can
interfere with the essential movement of intelligence. Intelligence
requires an ongoing stance of not knowing. In the therapeutic context,
this view of authoring as participatory means extending the narrative
metaphor of ‘reality’ as constitutive rather than representational to
the ‘poetic’ focus on the emergence of mind (‘reality’) in the simple,
albeit difficult, act of attentiveness to what is.

4 In its opening of space, the poem embraces nothingness,

emptiness and not knowing
The young Frank Harland experiences the ‘whiteness’ of the page/
mind as an infinitude of possibilities on which creating takes place
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 Poetry and narrative therapy 345
‘almost without him’. The ‘whiteness’ of no thing and not knowing is
experienced as foundational to creative expression. Harland describes
this experience as profoundly satisfying, but a radical disequi-
librium can be experienced by the mind when there is a chosen or
unchosen shattering of assumed knowledges and ways of knowing.
T. S. Eliot addresses this reality in the last segment of the Four Quartets
with these lines: ‘I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon
you/ . . . and wait without hope. . .I And what you do not know is the
only thing you know’ (1943: 201). Historically, paradigm shifts in the
way we personally or culturally organize experience and formulate
meanings have taken place slowly and often painfully against the
resistance of the external or internalized status quo. These shifts take
place more freely and flexibly when our foundational assumptions
allow for the emptiness, the darkness, the whiteness, the nothingness
which is often experienced when we ‘step off the edge’ of the familiar
and particularly off the edge of the prevailing cultural/linguistic
practice of assuming a representational ‘reality’.
A colleague of mine wrote poetry for the first time this year after a
series of events which she experienced as near catastrophic, including
the unexpected loss of her husband to another woman. She described
her experience with these words (followed by one of her poems):
This year was a year of suffering. I called it the four D’s: Divorce, Death,
Disease, and Destruction. I found that if I struggled against the pain, it just
got worse. If I tried to push it away, it came back in ever increasing waves.
So what I learned was to go inside it, to go into the ‘cauldron.’ It seemed to
burn its way through - sometimes in a few hours, sometimes only after
several days. And what kept coming out on the other side was poetry. I’d
never written poetry in my life, but there it was. Now I sometimes worry that
this creative edge won’t last.
L f e at Fiftr
The children are gone,
husband too, leaving me
in time unknown
before.
Beauty of my body changing,
deepening like the
smile lines of my eyes
Emotions full tilt,
I eat my pain
as it becomes the
burning, cleansing

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346 Maryhelen Snyder
fire within.
Deep sorrow the bedrock
of the promise of
sheerest joy -
Hand-in-hand.
Spirit encompassing,
gorging its self on the
wings, fangs, claws
and sinews of nature.
Rocks reveal my soul.
Moon illuminates the
dcpths of my craters
and still darkness
seizes the shadowed cavern walls.
My only job - to know all this
and speak in time
as never before.
It is interesting that she writes here of ‘know[ing] all this’ and
‘speakring] in time’. It is a fact that life must be lived in time and
actions are necessarily founded on knowledges, however fleeting. Her
fear of losing the ‘creative edge’, however, may be based on the
erroneoous assumption that creativity is lodged within the person and
can go away. The alternative perspective of ‘poetic intelligence’ is that
creativity and intelligence are inherent in the structural fit of
relational existence. When we experience this, joy is virtually an
inevitable response. The therapist plays a critical role in modelling
and encouraging the trust in ‘poetic intelligence’ that permits full
consciousness.

5 The inspiration, intent and effect of the poem is an inclusive

‘radiance’
‘Radiance’ is the word C. K. Williams uses in his essay: ‘A radiance
beyond all social and interpersonal insufficiencies . . . defined by
“amplitude that asks for nothing beyond itself’ ’ (1995: 14).Whitman
states in his 1847 notebook that ‘the test of a poem’ is ‘how far it can
elevate, enlarge, purify, deepen, and make happy the attributes of the
body and soul of a man’. In other words, how much radiance it can
convey and evoke.
The poet makes of experience a metaphor (from the Greek, ‘meta-
pherein’, ‘to carry beyond’). This experience of ‘carrying (or being
carried) beyond’ the event itself to that which is ‘hidden beneath’ (see

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 Poetry and narrative therapy 347
Malouf quote above) is both impetus and result (cause and effect) of
the poetic (i.e. creative) act. Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘Writing Poems’
(1988: 70) describes and demonstrates the way in which the creative
act results from the creator meeting the readiness of an endless flow of
already existing creative energy. The poem celebrates the ‘structural
coupling’ (to borrow Maturana and Varela’s phrase (1987) in which
the hunger of the maker is dependably fed because of the very nature of
existence itself.

This morning I watched

the pale green cones of the rhododendrons
opening their small pink and red blouses -

the bodies of the flowers

were instantly beautiful to the bees, they hurried
out of that dark place in the thick tree

one after another, an invisible line

upon which their iridescence caught fire
as the sun caught them, sliding down.

Is there anything more important

than hunger and happiness? Each bee entered
the frills of a flower to find

the sticky fountain, and if some dust

spilled on the walkways of the petals
and caught onto their bodies, I don’t know

if the bees know that otherwise death

is everywhere, even in the red swamp
of a flower. But they did this
with no small amount of desperation - you might say love
*
And the flowers, as daft as mud, poured out their honey.

The ‘self of the bee (of the poet, of the person) is that of an agentive
participant. The ‘structural coupling’ of this agentive participation
with a reality that is fitting to it allows for a way of being in the world
that is radically different from that which is described by a discourse
where self and mind are experienced as what Bateson describes as
‘transcendent’. Oliver describes a reality in which the drive of the
creative organism encounters the presence of an outside world in

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348 Maryhelen Snyder
which each is constituted by the other, both feeding and fed, and she
points to cssential ‘love’ in this reality.
Anderson has spoken of how ‘the center of the person is not in the
person, but outside - in the conversation and connection’ (1994: 15).
T h e poct reveals the immanent and dynamic nature of person in
relation to world. T h e ‘I’ of the poem, the ‘I’ that ‘puts Chaos into
fourtecn lines’ that ‘sings of itself (Whitman), that ‘leans against the
sun’ (Dickinson), that ‘holds so much goodness’ (Whitman) is not an
individual ‘I,’ but the articulation of the experience of self in world.
‘In all peoplc I see myself,’ Whitman wrote ‘none more and not one a
barleycorn less’. And in the same poem (Sung ufMyselj), he writes with
awesome grandiosity: ‘Divine a m I inside and out, and I make holy
whatever I touch or am touched from;/ T h e scent of these arm-pits is
aroma finer than prayer,/ The head is more than churches or bibles or
creeds’ (Whitman, 1993). The small child’s love affair with the world
is carricd into adulthood by poetic consciousness, and particularly in
the consciousness that self and world are not separate.
T h e experience of aware participation, as conscious self in world, is
inherently radiant. T h e poet allows her love affair with the world to
exist, not in spite of the mundanc or the tragic, not in spite of failure
and betrayal and loss, but with all of it in the embrace of
consciousness:
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing,
The vapor from the nostrils of death,
I know I was even there. . . . I waited
Unseen and always. . . .
Long I was hugged close . . . long and long. . . .
I hear and behold God in every object,
yet I understand God not in the least,
Nor d o I understand who there can be
more wonderful than myself.
(Whitman, 1993: 139)
Radiance, then, appears to be a natural aspect of fully relational living
(self in world; self with other). I n a recent article, Tomm (1994)
describes the ‘erotic energy’ integral to the dialogic nature of intimacy.
When there is a ‘permeable self in which openness to the experience
of the other and disclosure of one’s own experience operate
interactively, the emergent dialogue is an act of love. The dialogic self
lives in wonder. An attitude of wondering opens space for dialogue,
and the dialogue in turn expands the sense of wonder. The root ‘dia’
means ‘through’ and ‘logos’ is the ‘word’ or the ‘meaning’. In
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 Poetry and narrative therapy 349
‘dialogue’, there is an experience of shared and co-created meanings
flowing through the interactive process. We appear to be naturally
dialogic and dialectic selves, not only verbally and with another
human being, but in the moment by moment experiencing of a
relational, participatory existence. To the extent that therapy is
dialogic (see Snyder, 1994) in the sense that Tomm describes, it
nurtures an erotic and radiant energy which is transformative in
effect.

Applications to family and individual therapy

The five aspects of poetry addressed here are revealed in theories and
practices of therapy since its historical beginnings. This paper in no
way does justice to these many contributions to our collective
thinking. The primary question it addresses is: Does the metaphor of
poetry complement the narrative metaphor in a useful way? If what
distinguishes poetry from narrative is introduced and allowed more
consciously in the therapy session, what does that mean?
In my experience, the forms and practices that optimize space for
‘poetic intelligence’ to function in myself, in my clients and in the
interactive process include the nine characteristics listed below. There
is substantial theoretical agreement with regard to the first four of
these. I mention them because I experience them as difficult
achievements that require ongoing commitment and considerable skill.
The last five are emphasized less frequently in the training of psycho-
therapists. They are all variations on the theme of focusing attention
exclusively on the present experience precisely as Malouf describes in
the analogous experience of the artist with his white page, the subject
as it reveals itself in the moment, and the creative act as it reveals
itself unpredictably through the artist’s hand. This way of thinking is
in radical contradiction to the prevailing orientation toward assess-
ments, goals and results. Harland (the artist) doesn’t plan his
painting; he lets it unfold. In the practice of unfoldment the artist/
therapisdclient is attentive and active, but not managing the process.
The tools of the trade are relevant only as they serve this process of
unfoldment. It is this distinction which is a t the core of the poetic (vs.
narrative) metaphor. T h e meaning of this distinction in practice is
clarified in the two case examples that follow this list.
0 Highly attentive and reflective listening;
0 The suspension of judgement, certainty, agreement, disagreement,
all fixed notions of truth - as I (we) d o this listening;
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350 haaryhelen Snyder
0 A movement into the experience of the ‘other’(s) that requires what
Martin Buber described as ‘the most intensive stirring of one’s
being’ 1988: 71);
0 Assistance to everyone present in translating what Whitman called
the ‘idioms’ of each for the understanding of the other (see Snyder,
1995);
e A cherishing and celebration of the immediate and ordinary
moments of our simply being together in this time and space;
0 An ongoing removal of self-consciousness from this process;
0 Whenever possible, the subordination of concern with outcomes,
solutions and triumphing over circumstances or problems - to
attention, awareness and wonder;
0 A sense that attentive dialogue itself is often the ‘solution’;
0 A readiness for surprise, for what Malouf called the ‘hidden poetic’
for the ‘truth’ that comes upon us, that shatters assumptions, and
radically reorganizes reality.

Two examples from couple therapy

In the following case examples, the five aspects of the poetic metaphor
described above are revealed both by the clients and by myself. In
particular, 1 was conscious in these sessions of doing little more than
preserving the forms and practices that create space in my own
consciousness and the consciousness of my clients.

Case study I : Andrew and Anna

Andrew is an artist who has been coming with his wife, Anna, to see
me for marital therapy. In the sessions prior to the one described
below I had taught them a structure for attentive listening to one
another (Snyder, 1995). They had been struggling with a variety of
issues, of course, but the issues were not the cause of the impasse. A
theme that frequently emerged was Anna’s concern with Andrew’s
anger and depression, and the way in which he experienced her
concern as critical and controlling. In one particular session Anna
shared with Andrew her concerns about his marijuana use. This is
what Andrew wrote later about that session:

Dear Mel,
When you asked if I might share one of my recent experiences in
therapy I wasn’t sure if I could articulate any of it. And yet when I
@ 1996 The Association for Family Therapr
 Poetry and narrative therapy 35 1
began the process of trying to define the ‘experience’ I was surprisd
how easily thoughts came to me. It was not unlike the experience
itself, which seemed to come quietly and without effort. I define the
experience as a shift in the way I view my life, and yet it was more a
realization of something that always was.
I believe that being involved in psychotherapy with the loving
support of family and friends is an important part of reaching an inner
place where realizations about onc’s self can occur. I have also
benefited from daily aflirmations that stress the importance of living
in the present and developing a trust in one’s own personal power to
achieve fulfilment.
I remember the precise moment that my realizations occurred. I t
was during a therapy sesion that included my wife, and she was
expressing some of her perceptions of my behaviour. A light being
turned on or a curtain lifting might describe the experience, although
I also remember being totally certain that I had somehow changed,
and that I would never lose this feeling of being different. I knew at
once that this realization would not require conscious effort to
maintain.
As a direct result of this realization I was able actively to pursue a
change in my career path as well as overcome an addiction I had
suffered with for over twenty years. Such dramatic changes would
seem to require a catalyst equally dramatic in nature, and yet as I
mentioned before, this realization came from an inner place of quiet
and peace. It occurred to me that the time was right, but I also felt
that I had no control over what might occur or when. I wished for a
change in the seemingly endless cycles of my life, which is what
brought me into therapy in the first place. But what was responsible
for this particular change at this particular time is not clear to me.
I don’t doubt that every experience of my life up to that moment
and beyond was essential to reaching this point. As a result, I am not
burdened by regrets of any kind, such as ‘why did it take so long’, or
‘if I had only done this or that’. I believe this to be an important
aspect of my experience, and useful in creating a safe atmosphere in
which awareness can occur.
Sincerely,
Andrew
With perhaps a certain emotional investment in being useful, I was
interested in understanding what I had done as a therapist to
facilitate this transformation, or perhaps what Anna had done as a
@ 1996 The Association for Farnib Therapy
352 Maryhelen Snyder
wife. Andrew could not pinpoint anything in particular, although he
said that he felt my presence there, the respect and safety of the
therapeutic context, and even the way we were seated (Anna directly
opposite him and myself off to the right but also facing him) were all
important.
In the following sessions Andrew demonstrated a significantly
different way of relating to Anna and to himself. His manner seemed
to be more quietly attentive, more direct and less defensive, less ‘self
protective. A month later, I asked Anna to write down what changes
she had observed in Andrew in his relationships with himself, her,
their young son and his work since this transformation. This is what
she wrote:
(1) Less moody.
(2) More interested in communicating.
(3) More productive (i.e. getting lots more done in a day).
(4) More ob-jective (i.e. in realizing how his actions might be read).
(5) Less withdrawn.
(6) Less secretive.
(7) Less depressed.
(8) More pursuit of alternate work possibilities.
(9) More consistent; less volatile.
(10) I perceive less rage.
(1 1) More empathic.
This list highlights the characteristics which Anna has longed to see in
Andrew. She describes his changes here with the comparative words
of ‘more’ and ‘less’. But Andrew’s observations about his own change,
and my observation of that change, reveal a radical shift (not a
comparative one) out of which these behavioural changes have
emerged. A familiar internal arid external struggle seems to have
virtually vanished. He no longer feels the same need to oppose himself
to himself or to outside information. He is able to listen to himself and
to Anna differently - with interest and openness to what intra-
subjective and intersubjective process might reveal.
I t is interesting that Andrew uses the metaphor of ‘endless cycles’
to describe the way his life had been up to the point of this
transformation. In a subsequent session, he said that what he felt was
not so much the experience of a ‘dead end’ as of a ‘saturation point’. ‘I
couldn’t see going through the cycle one more time’, he told me.
It is now May 1996, nine months since that session, and the
changes have continued to hold. They have terminated therapy for
@ 1996 The Associationfor Family Therapy
 Poetry and narrative therapy 353
the time being, but I continue to be in touch with them. One
noteworthy aspect of the change itself is how totally Andrew continues
to trust it. He has no apparent fear of losing this new way of being in
the world. Another noteworthy aspect of the change is how simple it
has been for Anna to accept it and cherish it; she has no need to
maintain the old ‘system’. She had been wanting Andrew to change in
all the ways her list reflects since the onset of marriage therapy. But
her emotional reactions to his ways of being had been problematic for
him. They had felt to him as if they were ‘her problem’, and he had
experienced them as judgemental, non-empathic, closing space.
Before the change in Andrew, Anna had been practising a way of
speaking and listening that was more invitational. Since the change
occurred, she has continued on this path.
The narrative aspects of their lives continue. But the context of that
narrative and Andrew’s identity as a protagonist in that narrative
shifted radically in one clear moment of recognition. White speaks of
‘forgotten knowledges’ (personal communication, for use on a work-
shop flier). Although Andrew’s experience felt totally new to him, his
description and particularly the metaphor of a curtain lifting suggests
that something has been veiling a recognizable reality. The narrative
task, as White clarifies, is to nurture those knowledges when they
appear to us.

Case study 2: Judy and Ted

Judy and Ted had been married for less than a year when they
separated. At the time of the separation, they were both experiencing
considerable emotional pain and had been coming to me for couple
therapy for several months. Two weeks before the session described
below, Ted had decided that he needed to end the relationship
because it appeared to him that Judy was unwilling or unable to
respond adequately to his needs. Judy set up this session when she
was experiencing the grief of losing Ted. The night before the session
had been an eventful one. I have reconstructed Judy’s words from my
session notes, and asked her to edit them for accuracy.
‘I don’t know how to explain what’s happened, but something’s different. I
had been struggling and trying, and now I’m letting go. It feels like the
tension’s gone, and there’s just a blending of two differnt people. After Ted
decided it would be better to end our relationship, I wrote him several notes,
wishing him happiness even if it turned out to be with another person, but
also letting him know about my happy memories with him. He wrote me a
couple of notes and he was blaming me. But that was different too. It was like
@ 1996 The Associationfor Family Therapr
354 Maryhelen Snyder
I understood his pain. 1 didn’t accept the blame, but I didn’t exactly feel
upset by it either. In one of his notes, he listed a bunch of things that he said I
had and that he wanted back. One of them was a blue blanket. I didn’t
remember a blue blanket and I knew I didn’t have it, so I went out and
bought a really nice one. And I put it in a big box with the other things, and I
decided I wanted to take it to his house and give it to him. It felt good to get
him this blue blanket.
‘When I came to his door with the box, he invited me to come in and see
his Christmas tree. I was reluctant, but I did. It was a huge pinion tree, a live
one. I don’t even know how he got it in there. Our first Christmas together,
last year, right after we were married, we’d been too busy to do much, but we
bought a small live tree and decorated it with a few little things. Ted had five
or so little decorations on this great big gnarled, funny shaped tree. He said
he got the idea from what we’d done. There were his stocking and his son’s
stocking hanging on the fireplace. It just moved me a lot. It was so Ted. We
began feeling very passionate and Ted wanted me to go upstairs with him to
the bedroom. I told him that I didn’t know if I could; it might make it hurt
too much, saying goodbye. But we love each other, we just do. It’s not
exactly like there’s a choice. It’s more like birth and death; it just is that way.
He asked me to stand outside the bedroom door and he carried me over the
threshold. He said he’d never gotten to do that and he wanted to do it. Then
he wanted to do it again. He had me stand outside the door again and he
carried me over again. We cried and cried last night; we kept crying. One of
my favorite stories has always been The Christmas Carol, and the part where
Scrooge wakes up and it’s Christmas morning and he’s not dead. That’s the
way I feel. I’m wearing the ring again. And I’m never going to take it off until
he tells mc to. I don’t think I’m crazy. I say that because this is so different,
the way I feel. Something’s happened that’s different. Somewhere along the
line I felt his pain. I know he loves me and I know he wants it to be good. My
mother and father will probably say, “Poor girl, why is she doing this again?”
They will remember how much pain I was in from ‘Ted’s way of seeing me,
his accusations, his blaming. But I see Ted differently; I see our relationship
differently. ‘I’here’s a deep acceptance of the way it is. I don’t mean
acceptance like from now on no disagreements, no differences, no dificulties.
I mean acceptance like I just see him the way he is and I love him completely
and I know he loves me.’
My comments (scattered throughout a n d re-constructed here from
memory) were as follows:
‘That seems amazing, that difference, It’s as though you were going along
inside one way of organizing yourself and your life, moving from point A to
point B by trying and by struggling to maintain the balance between meeting
other people’s needs (like Ted’s) and meeting your own. I remember that we
talked about the progress you were making in noticing your own needs, and
speaking them without letting your guilt or Ted’s possible hurt or anger

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 Poetry and narratiue therapy 355
inhibit you. The people close to you were supporting you in your efforts to
assert your own needs, speak to your own perspective, claim ‘space’ for
yourself. When you felt the loss of Ted, it appears that you shifted (without
effort) into a wider way of feeling and thinking, a wider way of organizing
your life. This way of seeing Ted and yourself and your life feels so different,
that it feels like you have to say “I don’t think I’m crazy,” especially since
your mother and father and some of your friends might see you as acting
crazy.’
Over the course of the next three weeks, Ted and Judy first moved
back together and then decided to get a divorce. During this time they
continued in therapy. What was remarkable was that Judy never
veered from the foundational change that had occurred in her feelings.
In our last session, Judy and Ted said goodbye to each other. Both
cried as they spoke of the meaning this relationship had had in their
lives. The reasons for their choice to divorce are somewhat complex
and I will only discuss them minimally here. Ted was the one who felt
that his needs could not be met in this relationship. Ted’s marriage to
Judy was his third. He is beginning to look at how unmet needs for
intimacy in his childhood have created deep longings for someone
who can meet these needs more fully now, as well as difficulty trusting
love when these specific needs are not being met. At this time,
however, he sometimes holds the belief that somehow he has not yet
found the right woman. Judy and Ted hugged each other for a long
time at the end of our last session. He turned to me with tears in his
eyes and said, ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye to my first two wives’.
What pertains to this paper was the dramatic difference between
the feelings that had acccompanied the earlier separation and the
feelings that accompanied this final one. In addition to the totality of
her love for Ted, Judy also observed that she no longer experienced
the tendency to defend or justify the ways in which her own needs and
desires came into conflict with Ted’s at times, or to condemn the fact
that he found the extent of this reality unacceptable. The issue that
had caused their initial separation remained the same. What shifted
was the perceptual ‘ground’ from which Judy saw this issue, as well as
Ted’s experience of that shift. In my contact with Judy in the months
since couple therapy was terminated, she has stated that this
fundamental shift has remained.

Discussion of vignettes
It seems to me that both these vignettes reveal what I am describing
in the distinction between narrative and poetry as metaphors. In
@ I996 The Association for Family Therapy
356 MaThelen Snyder
particular a shift in consciousnesslaction as a single integrated
process, occurred for both Andrew and Judy that it would be difficult
to attribute to their authoring, a t least as we usually conceptualize
that word. I a m not suggesting in any way that the radical changes
they cach expcrienced were authored by some metaphysical entity. I
think its authoring is more in the nature of the way the mind works
whcn it is given enough internal and external support to work
optimally andlor when it becomes weary of the ‘endless cycles’ of the
narrative in which it is caught.
I n thesc cndless cycles, intelligence is not free to work, but clearly it
must also in a certain sense be available because a t an unpredicted,
unexpectcd moment intelligence is able to function outside of those
cycles. I t is as though both Andrew and Judy watched this happen
rather than made it happen.
Another aspect of both Andrew’s and Judy’s experience is the
difference between this typc of immediate awareness and plotted
resistance to a dominant story. I n the moment of recognition, nothing
is being overcome or triumphed over. A counter plot is not being
sequentially developed as an alternative to a dominant plot. There is
an cffortlcssncss to the cxperiencc that is notable, at the same time
that there is energy, attentiveness and activity. I n the absence of
resistance to what is externally and internally, there is an extraordinary
inclusiveness. Both Andrew and .Judy saw their own and their
partners’ ‘flaws’ with as much or greater clarity than before, but they
saw thcm differently; they experienced them as interesting challenges
to cxplorc and relate to constructively rather than as problems.
As the therapist with both these couples, I noticed the need to keep
freeing myself of my own habit of thinking of story as the primary
mctaphor for the lived life. By this I mean that I observed in myself
not only the habit of particular stories such as the psychoanalytic
stories and systemic stories in which I have been trained, but also the
habit of storying itself as it exists culturally. I t seemed to me that what
was most critical was my commitment to the ‘white page’, the empty
space in which creation keeps occurring. The stories are necessary
and inevitable in the same way that Harland’s perception of what he
was drawing was necessary and inevitable, but the experience of the
open space in which creative intelligence takes place is ‘meta’ to the
stories that unfold in that space.
As I read David Maloufs novel Harland’s HalfAcre during the last
month, I noticed repeatedly that what drew me was not the plot.
There was no eagerness to find out what happened next in the story-
@ 1996 The Association for Family Therapr
 Poetry and narrative therapy 357
line, the motive that often keeps people enthralled in novels. What
drew me was the quality of Maloufs attention, a quality which it
seems to me is the essence of love. There is the continual experience of
‘basking’ in this novel, basking in the presence of the present. I n a
certain sense, Andrew and Anna and Judy and Ted have embarked
on the valuable possibility of creating alternative plot lines. But in a
more foundational sense, they (and I ) have embarked on an anti-plot
journey in which the dominant cultural story about the necessity of
plot is missing. I n addition, as both Andrew and .Judy observe, the
usual way of thinking about choice and ‘authorship’ of one’s life is
experienced as different when the story of one’s life is built moment by
moment in the freshness of attention to what is. T h e journey is not
only anti-plot, but anti-protagonist as well. The experience is closer to
one of feeling moved, as Frank Harland describes in the passage
quoted above, than of moving oneself. And yet a high level of
intelligence, energy, and activity is being accessed. And commit-
ments, plans, directions are continually being created and co-created.
A story is unfolding.
Epston (1993; pp. 161-177) has described his work with a young
girl who was suffering from encropesis. He wrote a letter after their
first session in which he encouraged her to ‘out sneak Sneaky Poo’ and
continue to notice clues for how to do this. But when she came back to
see him, she was completely cured. She later described to him how
this happened by comparing it to the way in which Helen Keller
understood herself differently when she grasped what Annie Sullivan
was writing in her hand. She attributed the change in herself to the
way in which Epston helped her see herself differently. And the
change was virtually instantaneous (i.e. the curtain lifted). The
context of her life shifted so that change itself did not take time. Jiddu
Krishnamurti (see Krishnamurti and Bohm, 1985) refers frequently
to this phenomenon in which change as freedom from conditioned
thought does not take time.

Conclusion: externalizing both the problem and freedom

from the problem
As Epston and White (1992) have stated, the practice ofexternalization
is central to narrative therapy as they have conceptualized it.
Although this concept is present elsewhere in the history of philosphy,
psychology and psychiatry, the prevailing practices of psychotherapy
have been to identify the person with the problem.

@ 1996 The Associationfor Family Therapy

358 Maryhelen Snyder
One also finds in the history of human thought the externalization
of a source of freedom from a ‘problem-saturated’ identity and
existence. For example, I grew up as a Quaker with the concept of the
‘inner light’, a source of awareness and clarity that is not lodged
within a person, but which is accessible in consciousness. In poetry, as
described above, we discover frequent reference to, and participation
in, this source of aware intelligence. yet one could accurately say, I
think, that the prevailing practice of psychotherapy is to identify the
person with the solution.
The question which this paper addresses is whether there is an
alternative to the conditioned brain that is not simply an alternative
conditioning in which the ‘I’ removes itself from one story and
constructs another. This alternative is expressed by Krishnamurti
(1991) as the necessity of bringing the ‘I’ process to an end. When you
observe without the separation of observer and observed, he states,
‘you will find that perception has its own action’ (p. 30). In poetry, as
defined by Malouf and others, in the actual immediacy of conscious-
ness that poetry describes and reflects, we experience freedom from
fragmentation, from conditioning and from the internalization of
oppressive discourses (including the discourse of an imagined and
imaged self as an entity separate from the self‘s movement in the
world). In the fullness of attention, we experience a sense that ‘reality’
comes to us in clear acts of recognition which transform our ways of
feeling, thinking and acting. Although it requires the energy of
attentiveness to stay available to these acts of recognition, this
attentiveness is experienced as radically different from developing a
counter-conditioning or an alternative story. Instead, acts of living
appear to emerge from attentiveness itself.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the following colleagues for their support and
suggestions at various stages of writing this paper: Tom Anderson,
Morgan Farley, Enid Howarth, Molly Layton, Lee Maxwell, Peter
Pitzele, and my daughter, Susie Snyder.

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