ABSTRACT: 
        This article explores certain distinctions between narrative and poetry as metaphors for the consciously authored life. It 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; 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 thought and work of Michael White and David Epston (see Epston & 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 (for example, Schafer, 1992 and Spence, 1982). Consciousness of the storying, meaning-making, languaging nature of human thought, emotion, and behavior, 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 an emotional and cognitive disequilibrium when I attempted to conceptualize 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 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" (see Gilligan, 1994; p.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 article 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 his examination of the relevance of the metaphors of art and poetry to narrative therapy, Michael White (personal communication) has made reference to a quote from the Australian novelist, David Malouf (1993): 
 
 

This "other history" is the subject matter of this article.  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 two cases of couple therapy. 

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" (in MacLeish, 1950; pp. 893, 894). 

        In a recent essay delineating the distinctions between poetry and narrative, called "Admiration of Form: Reflections on Poetry and the Novel" (American Poetry Review, February, 1995), C.K. Williams 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 this sonnet: 
 
 

        Edna St. Vincent Millay and Archibald MacLeish are describing the essential nature not only of the poem, but of the conscious life. With the same foundational metaphor of the form or container, Emily Dickinson describes the brain in this way: 
 
 

        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 wrote, "Every soul has its own individual language.  Often unspoken or feebly,  lamely, haltingly spoken; but a true fit 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 they 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" (Washington Post, February 18, 1995; p.1). "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.  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." 

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." It is experienced as a different form of knowing than that which we may more typically experience. Peggy  Penn (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 we associate with narrative in literature and in life. As Penn writes, "Poetry stops time" (1993; p.6). Language (or at least, non-metaphorical language) doesn't 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 de-constructionist 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

        Louise 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: 
 
 

        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 toward 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 creative actions that emerge from this kind of knowing tend toward a more inclusive level of harmony. For example, leaders such as Martin Luther King have reported the occurrence of moments of feeling totally overwhelmed by the complexity of what they are facing. King turned in such moments to a "spiritual" source of knowing which not infrequently led to an immediate clarity of perception and action. 

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 attentiveness appear to move into and 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 Half Acre, David Malouf describes Harland's experience as an artist: 
 
 

       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 formulation 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 can one function optimally.  In the example of the man cutting down the tree, attentiveness to the process in its entirety is all that's 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 appears to require not knowing.

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

        The young Frank Harland experiences the "whiteness" of the page/mind as an infinitude of possibilities on which creation takes place "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 disequilibrium that 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  Four Quartets with these lines,  
 

        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 poet/artist 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 intentional.  It requires the enormous energy of attentiveness and the formulation in action of the fruits of that attentiveness. 

        In one 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 afflicts 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" (1995; pp. 22, 23). It seems to me that what Williams is describing here abstractly 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," Gregory Bateson (1972; ) describes  the prevailing cultural and linguistic error in our conception of self and mind: 
 
 

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 became a poet 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. 
 
 

        It is interesting that she writes here of "knowing all this" and "speaking 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 erroneous 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

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 "an amplitude that asks for nothing beyond itself" (1995; p. 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 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; p.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 & Varela's phrase; see 1987) in which the hunger of the maker is dependably fed because of the very nature of existence itself. 
 
 

        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 it is radically different from  that which is described by a discourse in which 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 which each is constituted by the other, both feeding and fed.

        Tom Anderson spoke recently of how, "the center of the person is not in the person, but outside - in the conversation and connection" (1994; p.15). The poet reveals the immanent and dynamic nature of person-in-relationship to world. The "I" of the poem, the "I" that "puts Chaos into fourteen lines," that "sings of itself," (Whitman) that "leans against the sun" (Emily Dickinson), that "holds so much goodness" (Whitman) is not an individual "I," but the articulation of the experience of self-in-world.  "In all people I see myself," Whitman wrote, "none more and not one a barleycorn less." And in the same poem ("Song of Myself"), he writes with awesome grandiosity: "Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;/ The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,/ The head is more than churches or bibles or creeds" (Whitman; 1993).

The experience of agentive participation, as conscious self-in-world, is inherently radiant. The poet allows her love affair with the world to exist, not in spite of the mundane or the tragic, not in spite of failure and betrayal and loss, but with all of it in the embrace of consciousness: 
 
 

Radiance, then, appears to be a natural aspect of fully relational living (self-in-world; self-with-other).  In a recent article, Winnie 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 "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 not only with another human being, but in the moment by moment experiencing of a relational, participatory existence.

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 article 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 in 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 less emphasized in the training of psychotherapists. 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 assessments, goals, and results. Harland (the artist) doesn't plan his painting; he lets it unfold. In the practice of unfoldment the artist/therapist/client is attentive and active, but is not managing the process. It is this distinction which is at the core of the poetic (vs. narrative) metaphor. The meaning of this distinction in practice is clarified in two case examples. 
 
 

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, I am 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 One: 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 (see Snyder, 1995). They had been struggling with a variety of issues, but the issues of course 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: 
 
 

        With perhaps a certain emotional investment in being useful, I was em." 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 like "her problem," and he had experienced them as judgmental, non-empathic, closing space. Before the change in Andrew, Anna had been practicing 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. Michael White speaks of "forgotten knowledges." 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. 

Two: 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 began coming to me for couple therapy for several months before the sessions described below.  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 the session described below 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.        
 
 

My comments (scattered throughout and re-constructed here from memory): 
 
 

        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 good-bye 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 getting 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 good-bye to my first two wives." I plan to stay in contact with both Ted and Judy in the months to come. 

        What pertains to this article was the dramatic difference between the feelings that had accompanied 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 and Ted's experience of that shift. 
 

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 particular a shift in consciousness/action, as a single integrated process, occurred for both Andrew and Judy that it would be difficult to attribute to their authoring, at least as we usually conceptualize that word.  I am not suggesting in any way that the radical changes they each experienced were authored by some metaphysical entity.  I think its authoring is more in the nature of the way mind works when it is given enough internal and external support to work optimally and/or when it becomes weary of the "endless cycles" of the narrative in which it is caught. 

        In these endless cycles, intelligence is not free to work, but clearly it also must in a certain sense be available because at an unpredicted, unexpected moment intelligence is able to function outside of those cycles.  It is as though both Andrew and Judy watched this happen rather than that they made it happen. 

       Another aspect of  both Andrew's and Judy's experience is the difference between this type of immediate awareness and plotted resistance to a dominant story. In 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 effortlessness to the experience that is notable, at the same time that there is energy, attentiveness, and activity. In the absence of resistance to what is externally and internally, there is an extraordinary inclusiveness.  Both Andrew and Judy saw their own and their partner's "flaws" with as much or greater clarity than before, but they saw them differently; they experienced them as interesting challenges to explore 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 metaphor 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.  It seemed to me that what was most critical was my commitment to the "white page," the empty space on 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 Malouf's novel Harland's Half Acre 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 line, the motive which often keeps people enthralled in novels.  What drew me was the quality of Malouf's 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.  In 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. Additionally, 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.  The 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 commitments, plans, directions are continually being created and co-created.  A story is unfolding.        

        In an article that appeared in Therapeutic Conversations, David Epston (1993; pp.161-177) describes his work with a young girl who has suffered from encropesis. He writes a letter after their first session in which he encourages her to "out sneak Sneaky Poo" and continue to notice clues for how to do this. But when she comes back to see him, she is completely cured. She later describes 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 attributes the change in herself to the way in which David 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 & Bohm, 1985) refers frequently to this phenomenon in which change as freedom from conditioned thought does not take time. 

Final words; Externalizing both the problem and freedom from the problem: 

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

        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 article addresses is whether there is a 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 consciousness 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 world).  In the fullness of attention, we experience a sense that "reality" comes to us in clear acts of recognition that 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. 

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