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There is a poet in all of us. However unknown or neglected that part of us may be, it is there, often just waiting for the right conditions to present themselves.

Beyond writing poetry and being (and calling myself) a poet, I have known this since I realized that poetry is not just about literature and words on paper, it is alive in the living air all around us in any moment, and it is about our attitude to and relationship with life (all of life, and so death and dying also).

Poetry is also about that primary voice in us that we can also think of as the most radical part of who we are, belonging in our feelings and our individual authentic response to what happens to and around us. That primary voice is something we all get educated and socialized out of (to a greater or lesser degree) - indeed soceity would be impossible without these agreed terms of reference and description - however something is also lost in this process that Wordsworth referred to as 'shades of the prison house', which was why Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet, spoke of poetry as being among'the first things'. We may think of this in terms of dreams too, as well as play with its sense of expanse and experiment: in both the stirrings of our creative unconscious are free in a way they may later seem not to be.

Poetry is also about the imagination and gaining access to a different level of meaning. Nothing means anything merely at the concrete level beyond its function. That is materialism. For meaning, we have to get to another level which is also symbolic where things and events resonate with spirit. This is what the Romantics knew as Imagination (with a capital I).Through it we can open to our lives as intrinsically meaningful as journeys of experience and development in time - that is, when we can find that primary voice, that basic experience of identity in us again. This is where the work begins.

If I don't know how I feel, I don't know who I am. What I have experienced working with groups and individuals again and again is the power of the imagination and the heart to restore us to what we feel and therefore who we are. The expression that comes as a result - through drawing and group sharing as well as in writing - is fundamentally healing, and may also involve the naming of something long held and never spoken. Again and again I have seen faces lit up from within during and as a result of the writing that follows, and it is always a thread in the way I work in my private therapy practice as well. The Greeks knew this as catharsis, for me - weird and suspect as it is to the TLS mainstream - it is living poetry where poetry and healing are about the same thing: that spark that makes us know who we are, the relief and wonder of being back inside the skin of things.