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A Poetry Therapy Experience
May 13, 2023 @ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
The Center for Existential Studies and Psychotherapy (CESP) invites you to join us on the afternoon of Saturday, May 13, 2023, for a poetry therapy experience led by Lauren Mazow Boyle, Ph.D.
“From our arguments with others, we make rhetoric; from our arguments with ourselves, we make poetry.”
—W. B. Yeats
The use of poetry in health and well-being dates back to ancient civilizations, including ancient Greece, where Apollo held powers of both poetry and healing. Through its evocative language, rhythms, images, and metaphors, poetry reaches toward the unconscious and the ineffable, giving shape to what lives shapeless within us. Poetry therapy draws on this capacity of literature to explore and work through our inner lives and discover our creative capacities to hold complexity, find meaning, and make beauty, even from pain.
Lauren Mazow Boyle, Ph.D. will lead us in a workshop to experience poetry’s potential for connecting us with ourselves and each other and exploring its place in clinical work. Participants will read and discuss a poem together, with an eye toward whatever it may evoke in each person. Participants will write their responses to the poetry, sharing as much of these spontaneous writings as they wish to discover what meanings may arise in our open and creative minds meeting.
We’ll gather from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. on May 13 at a picnic shelter in Rock Creek Park.
- The shelter has a roof in case of rain but is otherwise open-air—our best shot at combining safety and comfort.
- Space will be limited.
- Send us an RSVP at cesp.wdc@gmail.com so we can reserve your spot and email you directions to the event.
For more information about CESP, please visit https://centerforexistentialstudies.com.
Lauren Mazow Boyle, Ph.D. in a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Potomac, MD. She is also a Poetry Teaching Artist with Arts for the Aging and a workshop leader with The Things They Carry Project through the New Directions in Writing Program of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis.