Some people write poetry all the time, even for a living. For a gifted few, it's really their first language, as music is to my little friend Margaret, who was born warbling. Surely she will be an opera singer, and for her, use of the spoken word will always be to walk on two feet, like mortals, when she was born to fly. For some it is this way with poetry.

Most of do not read or write poetry. We re

Everyone, however, writes poetry upon 2 occasions: falling in love and the death of a child. Love lost or unrequited is also in the running.

What's the connection? Well, the best and worst of times, and the element of agony. There's a sense of awe, which is where the word aw-ful comes from, because of the impact of the feelings. Because poetry (second only to music) deals with the uber-emotional experiences, we include it in our Emotional Intelligence program. "Poetry," someone wrote, "is emotions through a crack pipe."

That's a metaphor, the stuff of which good poetry is made, along with rhythm, though it need not rhyme. Bad poetry, doggerel, is made of bad metaphors, forced rhyme, and static rhythm "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.." da da da da.

The best metaphors and analogies (metaphor is the comparison without the words "like" or "as" actual included, i.e., "Gianni is a veritable Pandora's box of woes.") combine two completely different things, or attributes, forcing us to feel what they have in common.

A few who read this may have direct experience of both crack and poetry, but most will fall in Group I, which has not experienced crack, or Group II, which has not experienced poetry, and will extrapolate the "big bang" experience that's being described.

When I worked for the homeless shelter, one of the addicts told me, "You simply can't imagine how good cocaine makes you feel". Her voice trailed off. Her eyes glazed over. She didn't have words. Neither does the man falling in love, or the mother who has lost her child. The one cannot describe how good it feels; the other, how bad. In common, they share intensity.

And yet, because we're human, we feel the need to try and express the agony and the ecstasy because we've been taught to put things into words, for release, sometimes to gain something (comfort in our grief), and sometimes just for the joy of expression. It is our way of howling at the moon, and when we howl our pack can find us. It is one of our positive, intelligent choices for dealing with disequilibrium.

Let's say the man's wife has just left him. He's 60 years old, married late in life, has no children. He is now devastated, perhaps feeling deeply for only the second time in his life, the first being when he found her.

How will he cope? What is he coping with? He is not coping with the intellectual fact "she left," but with his extreme physiological, psychological, and spiritual reaction to her leaving. Separation from a loved one is a physiological event wreaking havoc. The blood pressure rises, the heart pounds, the solar plexus collapses, we forget to breathe, our gut protests, in diarrhea or constipation, we can't sleep or sleep all day, our immune system goes out of whack and we get sick, and then sicker, and then sick again.

What does he do "with" these nigh-intolerable feelings? How does he make them go away? On the negative said, he could crawl into a bottle, deadening these feelings, or go pick a fight in a bar, or kill himself. In the neutral territory he could temporarily anesthetize himself with prescription medication, therapy, or a transitional affair. In the positive area, there is exercise, meditation, music, and poetry.

Music and poetry are favorites because they are expressing emotion in symbolic language.

When we read, "Being with you or without you is how I measure time," we have an ah-ha experience, emotional, not mental. "Wow, that's exactly how it is with me," we think.

And then we show it to our friend, or send it to our coach, as if to say, "THIS is how I feel. THIS is what I was trying to say," and we are relieved, if not comforted, because the feelings we couldn't quite name have been identified, and have been identified as universal (though ours are always "more" because they are ours), so we feel connected. Like children, we think that to identify it means to have control over it. "If he knew how he was hurting me, he'd ..." We assume 'the other' cares, and that's a good thing to assume. To assume otherwise, leads to bitterness and cynicism.

Language gives us a sense of order over the chaos and connects us with others. We share "vocalization" with other mammals, pack animals that we all are. It may be that at the extremes we are "as bears dancing," resorting to sighs, squeals, or groans; or more deeply, silent grimaces, pupils dilated, bodies arched with tension; or we wax eloquent and become poets because "a use in measured language lies..." having felt that way ourselves.

Music may be the best, because it goes directly to the pleasure center, circumventing the tyranny of the left brain. And because it is universal. You cannot listen to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and not know yearning and longing, no matter where you live on this planet, and even if you've never experienced it before. It IS longing.

Poetry and music are intelligent ways to deal with emotions. We include them in our study of Emotional Intelligence for this reason, along with other arts like painting and sculpture. So many people dislike poetry (what they mean is that it makes then uncomfortable, it "disturbs" them), I always feel like I should give a warning, as if I were about to expose them to leprosy.

However, I don't. I let it sneak up on them, after, of course, we've discussed that advancing one's emotional intelligence will inherently "disturb" (just as poetry does), but benefit in the long run, and they have agreed to this. No pain, no gain, doncha know.

"But," they silently tell me, when they read the first selection, "But THIS isn't what I bargained for." Like the people who promise "for better or for worse," they have within, without realizing it, a limit beyond which they are not willing to go. "For better, okay; for worse, okay, sure, BUT NOT THIS."

I give them the painting, "The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons," by Jacques-Louis David (http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/david/brutus.jpg ) along with the terrible story behind it - Brutus has ordered their death as a result of a civil uprising...the sins of the father being visited on the sons, and there he sits, with his wife, the mother of the boys, and with the wives of the boys.

Then comes "My Last Duchess" (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/duchess.html ) by Browning. This poem is difficult even if your first language is English, and requires a lot of mental energy.

Hard work that it is to develop your EQ, there are two comments I most frequently hear: One is, "this is the missing piece." The other, "I had no idea. This has opened up..." Opened up what? Opened up what? "Opened me up." "Opened up whole new worlds for me."

Amateur poetry of course should not be judge any more than you would judge the song of an innocent child. Randall Jarrell said it best. He is the author of one of the shortest most impacting poems existing, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" - http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/gunner/gunner.html . It was presented to me one quiet day in a boring sophomore high school English class, and changed my life. Jarrell became an editor and critic, and had this to say about the submissions he received: "In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever been expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick."

If you have an arm or leg to rip out, music and poetry are two of the few possibilities available for relief. Check out Club Vivo Per Lei/I Live for Music (www.susandunn.cc/vivoperlei.htm) for music leads. Classic Poems (http://www.netpoets.com/classic/ ) is a good place to start for poetry.

About the Author

Susan Dunn, http://www.susandunn.cc, mailto:sdunn@susandunn.cc . Individual coaching, coach certification, Internet courses and ebooks. Take the Difficult People course and make your life a lot easier. Email for free ezine. Specializing in emotional intelligence (EQ).