Crafting order and beauty from loss: using found poems as a form of grief therapy

ABSTRACT

The death of a loved one can create a tear in the fabric of meaning. Grieving involves remaking meaning. In therapy, events can be emplotted into stories, which can return some sense of coherence to the bereaved. In this paper, I present a way of narrating loss through a narrative therapy approach of retelling. This involved writing found poems, known as rescued speech poems, from the conversations of people who had lost a loved partner. The found poetry sought to bring an order to grieving and to polish the beauty of key moments following loss. For one participant, the found poetry amplified a narrative of the biography of the loved one. For another, the poems added beauty to a memory of her deceased partner. Thus, rescued speech poems—judiciously selected from speech, and sensitively arranged on the page—can provide another way to facilitate vibrant meaning-making of life after loss.

KEYWORDS:

• Grief
• loss
• poetry
• therapy
• story
• meaning
• narrative therapy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the term “stories” and “narratives” synonymously.

2 Gillies and Neimeyer (2006) also suggest that while for some people, the loss creates holes in the fabric of their woven universe, for others, it creates disruption which involves a reconstruction of the whole fabric of life meaning itself. This is partly influenced by whether the loss of a loved one is “consistent or inconsistent with one’s preloss meaning structures” (p. 54).

3 Narrative therapy was created by Australian Michael White and New Zealander David Epston in the late 1980s (White & Epston, 1989). Their work emerged from two distinct philosophical streams: a focus on storied lives from ethnography and anthropology (Bateson, 1979; E. Bruner, 1986; Geertz, 1983; Myerhoff, 1992) and a focus on noticing discourses and naming power from Foucauldian poststructuralism (Foucault, 1980).

4 For the finer details of writing rescued speech poetry as a form of grief therapy, see my doctoral thesis (Penwarden, 2018). Alternatively, a short article explains key aspects of this thera-poetic practice (Penwarden, 2020).

5 Each participant chose a pseudonym for themselves and their deceased partner.

6 All the found poems and representations of interview transcripts shown in this article are part of a data set for my doctoral study, completed 2018, which was formally approved by the Faculty of Education Research Ethics Committee, The University of Waikato (approval number: EDU102/11).

7 Māori, extended family.

8 Māori, sacred communal meeting house.