Joe's Black Dog

Joe's Black Dog
Joe's Black Dog by Marjorie Weiss

24 July 2013

Craig Powell, 'Poetry on the Brain', Meanjin, December 2004

'Early in that period of analysis it came to me that the worlds of psychoanalysis and poetry are one and the same. 

I was having a session with my analyst, free associating, so the conversation took all kinds of knight's-move and dog-leg turns. 

And my analyst made a few quiet responses that helped me see there was an unexpected unity to all of this, a thread of meaning connecting all the images and going to the depths of the relationship between us.

I realised with quiet delight that a good session is a poem. It felt the same as when disparate images finally cohere with unexpected depth and a poem is made. Not all my poems achieve that, of course, just as not all therapy sessions achieve a state of profound connection. But some do, and that's always an occasion for gratitude.'

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