About Creative Voices

Healing Components of Poetry

Poetry is the response of our innermost being to the ecstasy, the agony and the all-embracing mystery of life. It is a song, or a sigh, or a cry, often all of them together.
--Charles Angoff (Lerner, 1994)

Poetry humanizes because it links the individual by its distilled experience, its rhythms, its words to another in a way which no other form of communication can. Poetry also helps to ease the aloneness which we all share in common.
--Myra Cohn Livingston (Lerner, 1994)

I believe that a poem is an emotional-intellectual-physical construct that is meant to touch the heart of the reader, that it is meant to be reexperienced by the reader. I believe that a poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms. I also believe that a poem is a noise and that noise is shaped.
--Stephen Dobyns (Dobyns, 1997)

I believe that poetry is life and life is poetry. Our lifes say so much about how we love, work and play. Our quest as mortals is to live life to the fullest and savor every moment. In our Art we express our inner soul, the abstract content of our being. We touch individuals that we would otherwise never meet. In our Art will leave our mark on the world that living has been an adventure we would not have chosen to miss.
--Sandra H. Miller-Salyer (2007)