ABSTRACT
Early in my career I had a supervisor who would say (tapping the ash off his cigar): “The art of the clinical is the art of the ordinary.” Our patients don’t want theories, they want their experience addressed (including of course the pre-conscious edge of their experience). And they want it addressed in ordinary language. Well, that’s what we want from poetry too. The great American poet William Carlos Williams famously recommended against abstraction: “No ideas but in things”, he insisted.
