Trauma and Poetry: Memory, Image, and the Descriptive-Meditative Poem

Abstract

This essay explores how our memories become recurring images, and how, in a controlled setting, illustrating these difficult memories through both narrative and image can change the experience of our memories over time, and ultimately be one step along the road to healing. This essay also explores how the act of writing a poem does not always lead to healing, but can simply be a first-hand account of what it’s like to live with traumatic memories. I will offer close readings of Anthony Hecht’s “A Hill” and Emily Jungmin Yoon’s “An Ordinary Misfortune” in order to demonstrate how poetry and its movements are well-suited to expressing the trauma survivor’s experience.