Feeling for words: poetry and the logic of experiencing

Psychoanalytic investigation has revealed the difficulties inherent in our attempts to access and make sense of experience 'in-depth'. Aspects of experience may remain inaccessible, partly through mechanisms of active exclusion but also through factors inherent in the nature of mental activity at different levels of consciousness. The work of Ignacio Matte-Blanco suggests that the latter can be understood in terms of the operation of two distinct forms of logic that characterize and differentiate conscious and unconscious levels of experience. Drawing on Matte-Blanco this paper argues that poetry typically makes use of language in an intensely biological manner that can engage and embody less conscious levels of experience while simultaneously making this potentially more available to conscious awareness. This may be one way in which poetry can function to support in-depth human inquiry and give form to otherwise inaccessible experience, particularly those involving feeling and states of being. In doing so poetry has the capacity to not only represent experience but to deepen and extend experiencing.