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Nothing substance utters: Difficult poetry and the craft of psychotherapy

This paper is not a detailed critical examination of a poem, though it is framed by one. Nor is it a case study, though it keeps the psychotherapy clinic in mind. It is a plea for the activity of reading poems – particularly difficult ones – as a practice that can be as valuable to the craft of psychotherapy as studying theory. Some research shows that continuing professional development for psychotherapists and counsellors is most productive when it is emergent not planned (Fender, 2015). Maybe reading poetry for some therapists could be thought of as CPD. But, I am suggesting, not just any poetry, but difficult poems. By ‘difficult’ in literary criticism, we mean the extraordinary fact that poetry, the ‘language-act most charged with the intent of communication, of reaching out to touch the listener or reader in his inmost [can] be opaque, resistant to immediacy and comprehension’ (Steiner, 1978, p. 18). And furthermore, that much of the most authentic poetry of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries falls into this category. Steiner refers to Heidegger in defining such poetry: