ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the poetics of illness experience and its transformation through poiesis. Work in medical anthropology reveals that illness experience is articulated through metaphors that both are bodily grounded and draw from a fund of cultural meanings and affordances. This everyday poetics mediates seemingly immediate experiences of pain and suffering and gives meaning to affliction. The chapter considers the cognitive science of how metaphor elaborates experience and explores the poetics of constructing individual and collective identity along with the deliberate use of poetry in coping, healing, and psychotherapy. Sections address the origins and immanence of poetic language; embodiment, enactment, and the process of poiesis; cultural idioms and the poetics of symptom experience; poetry as a vehicle of self-fashioning and path to self-knowledge; the politics and poetics of alterity; poetry and healing transformation; and mythopoetics and self-transcendence. Examples are drawn from clinical ethnographic research, psychiatric education, psychotherapeutic practice, and personal engagements with creative writing.
