Poetry therapy: A tool to foster creativity

As we cram academic and technical knowledge into our heads, other facets of ourselves begin to diminish. As we conform to pressures to learn, to perform, to produce. we lose touch with our own self-awareness and our own creativity. This being the case, how then can we recreate our own creativity? One method of fostering that creativity there are many other methods as well could be through the medium of poetry within a poetry therapy group. Poetry therapy is essentially this: within a group of approximately six to ten people. poems are read aloud. discussed. experienced and often written in relation to the participant’s own individual feelings. The poems act as catalysts to self-awareness and often as change agents. To date. this therapy has been used in the treatment of such problems as alcoholism. drug addiction. and other mental and emotional difficulties. For the future. poetry therapy holds the promise of helping many people to get back in touch with their own forgotten creativity. This paper will examine and compare the relationships between poetry therapy and two methodologies of creativity training i.e. creative problem solving and the synectics method of creativity training. It will attempt to illustrate that the poem and the poetry therapy group inadvertently touch upon the methods and elements of creativity training. Thus, if these elements are known, poetry therapy could be further developed as a stronger tool for fostering creativity within the emotionally healthy or “normal” individual. There are many definitions of creativity. Sidney Parnes (director of the Creative Problem Solving Institute) sa\‘s creativity is “perceiving new and relevant meanings and relationships in what we know and what we attend to. It is making new connections, new metaphors. It is spinning our mental kaleidoscopes so that we formulate many new and varied patterns (Creativity: Unlocking Human Potential, p. 1). Arthur Koestler. novelist and essayist. says that creativity is “an actualization of surplus potentials.” W.J.J. Gordon, founder of Synectics, defines creativity as “the mental activity in problem stating and problem solving situations where artistic or technical inventions are the result” (Svnectics, 1961). Morris Stein, author of two volumes entitled Stimulating Creativit?, (1973 and 1975) says. “Creativity is a process that results in a novel work that is accepted as useful, tenable, or satisfying by a significant group of people at some point in time” (p. vii; vol. 2). In essence then, creativity is a process. And this process has elements that directly apply to the process of poetry therapy. Sidney Parnes stresses that the primary way to foster creative behavior is “to facilitate the effective use of a person’s associative abilities.” Parnes suggests two general ways for increasing these abilities: (I ) the individual can feed his brain the necessary fuel for it to function at a stronger capacity: (2) the individual should attempt to remove the brakes the emotional brakes that prevent the associative mechanisms from working (Parnes, Creative Behavior Guidebook, 1967. p. 63). The “fuel to feed the individual’s brain” is provided within the poetry therapy workshop by the poetry, the participants’ active discussions, and by the forced relationship concept which is stressed in creaEivity training programs.