My ongoing research in poetry therapy has been highly insightful and meaningful for myself these last few weeks. Having an interest in poetry was a good start; but the therapist side of me started asking more questions once I delved into my topic.

The one question I kept asking myself, the one thing that I thought was the largest variable in any form of poetry therapy in my opinion, was the decision on which poem to use. Which poem was the best? Which author? Is there some sort of official list? Of course if I was a poetry therapist myself I would probably know the answer to these questions and could facilitate my patient with the correct poem to help them better understand their illness(s) but alas I am not. In the previous books that I have read during my research, Poetry as Therapy by Morris. R. Morrison and Poetry Therapy: The use of Poetry Therapy in the Treatment of Emotional Disorders they each had a section listing which poems were used in the texts themselves but not really a concrete end-all be-all list.

Interestingly enough I ran across an article published quite recently in the scheme of poetry therapy (2012) which was a content analysis on the most frequently utilized poems by therapists. Leah Olson McBride used Sherry Reiter’s (Vice President of the National Association of Poetry Therapy in 1980) list of the most commonly utilized poems by therapists with authors such as Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and William Wordsworth. Seventeen of twenty-two were used from the list (5 because they simply could not obtain the actual poems for some reason) and were pitted against criteria from a 1990 Hynes and Hynes-Berry study.

The criteria for rating the poems is based off two modes: Thematic and Stylistic. Each mode has four separate dimensions. The thematic dimensions are: Universality (is the poem something anyone can understand or did you need a personal experience to understand?), Powerfulness (was the theme powerful enough to sway the reader or did they just go “meh”?), Comprehensibility (can the average joe get it or do you have to be a rocket scientist?), and Positive-Nature (is the poem bringing you down or does it fill you with joy and passion?). The stylistic dimensions are: Rhythm (do you want to get up and dance or stay in your seat?), Image (does your mind create a crystal clear image from the text or are you Picasso painting the Ladies of Avignon in your head?), Language (does the poem use simple words or is it toilsome to read?), and Complexity (short and to the point or does it have 1,000,000 stanzas? [ain’t nobody got time for that!]). Poems that were not used had themes that were either too personalized, dull, negative, or obscure.

The poems were graded using this Hynes and Hynes-Berry rubric earning a score of 1-8 if they matched each dimension of said criteria. (2 modes * 4 dimensions=8). The results show that the average score of the poems was a 6.24 with the scores ranging from 3 to 8.

Only 2 of the 8 poems were given an 8 out of 8, “The Road Not Taken” and “An Autobiography in Five Short Chapters”. In a “close second” were six out of the seventeen poems graded that met every gambit of the criteria except one. The stylistic dimension 4 was passed by 100% of the poems and proved that all seventeen were of sufficient length. The dimensions that were lacking however were “Positive-nature” and “Rhythm” with only nine poems receiving those marks. The poems that did receive low marks though were not deemed “bad” to use but maybe were not very good for this rubric and also may contain some heavy-hitting wordage that could affect the patient during an introductory phase of poetry therapy and should only be used when the therapist has built up a strong, trustful bond with their patient . Hynes and Hynes-Berry chimed in stating “there is no sure-fire formula for distinguishing a mediocre work that is potentially effective from one that is entirely unviable.” Overall fourteen poems met six or more of the criteria with Powerfulness, Complexity, and Universality being the most frequently met dimensions.

I enjoyed this study because it gave me an improved insight on not only which poems were used, but also how and why they should be used. There is not really an official guide set by the National Association of Poetry Therapy, or anyone else for that matter, on which poems should be used and when, so it was satisfying to see someone else out there had the same question as me and answered it giving me some sort of framework as where to begin if I were ever in a clinical setting where I found myself utilizing the methods of poetry thearpy.