The psyche is fundamentally mimetic, metaphoric, and meaning-directed. From Aristotle's Poetics, in which mimesis is defined, to the discoveries of neuroscience today, with its exploration of “mirror neurons,” the imagination's impulse is to create analogies of experience. Poetry especially reveals that events in our lives are given an order and coherence in language to create a representation of that event in an aesthetic form. “Psychopoetics” may be a useful term to designate how the psyche makes meaning of an event by offering a narrative, an extended metaphor, to reveal the inner sleeve of the event through an energy transfer from the event to a form of “affective presence.” Using several of my own poems as illustrations, this exploration attempts to give language to the translation from a lived event to an aesthetically formed experience in poetic form. Such a creative process of aesthetic expression can evoke feelings of compassion and social justice.
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