Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This research explores how the affordances and constraints of the poetic form partner with the nonverbal memories of child abuse survivors to articulate previously unarticulated suffering. The objective of this research was to discover how poetry facilitates the telling of this unspoken trauma. This research contributes to literary trauma theory and to understanding confessional poetry as a particular form of trauma expression. The practice-led research methodology involved the researcher writing poetry about her experiences of child abuse, refining, and editing the writing for poetic excellence, and then analysing and identifying the poetic techniques that allowed her to access previously inarticulate trauma. With the support of a psychologist, the researcher followed poetry’s lead, writing about the past according to the affordances and constraints of the poetic form. What she discovered is that engaging in a dialogue with poetry equips the child abuse survivor to access hidden and unspoken trauma stored in nonverbal parts of the body. The poetic forms of repetition, metaphor, defamiliarisation, the uncanny, and the double empower a survivor to engage in a journey of understanding and representation. Poetry, as a form that mirrors trauma memory, facilitates the transformation of an unspoken past, restoring agency to the survivor.