Nevertheless, Love Cannot Be Taken from Us:

Insofar is poetry in Expressive Arts supporting resilient living?

Date & Time: March 9 (Sunday), 2025  

**This event will be recorded. Registrants will receive the recording link via email after the live session.**

Introduction:

Nevertheless, Love Cannot Be Taken from Us. Insofar is poetry in Expressive Arts supporting resilient living?

We are worldwide caught in overwhelmingly existential challenges like never before. Values are crumbling, biodiversity is endangered, we face geopolitical uncertainties, wars, millions of human beings are worldwide on exodus.

Who are we within this entanglement, and who do we become? This know: we need each other more than ever. Unlearning, relearning the language of solidarization rather than the slogans of polarization.

Insofar can poetry in expressive arts be supportive, build resilience, recreate hope and confidence as a platform for healing, reconciliation, problem solving, personal and professional development? We will focus on encouragement for using poetry in expressive arts work and daily life practice.

Poetry in expressive arts iS introduced as a means of personal and professional growth and to tap into the power of another voice in the service of life, learning, healing, and transformation.

This participatory presentation will focus on poetry in expressive arts. I will offer poietic inputs adequate to the field of expressive arts and let poetry speak itself. Participants are invited to explore in writing and reading aloud the presented themes, and to enter a conversation.

I propose poetic work as a new method of learning that honors mystery, amazement and beauty. Finally, I return to the essence of poetry: cultivating love as a resilient way of living in the world.

Our latest textbook Poetry in Expressive Arts. Supporting Resilience through Poetic Writing’ will serve as a point of departure and inspiration to discover new perspectives:

‘Poetry’ is a meditative practice, a refuge, and a mystery. I continue to learn about the power of poetic expression to further my becoming as a human being, to share experience and emotions, and to hold space for my inner life.

I write:

To inhabit my life more deeply.

To stand to the truth of my own experience.

To find surprises, To celebrate life.

To scare myself, To find the shadow.

To confront the lies I tell myself.

To open to what want to come through me.

To deepen my experience of the world.

And to approach the mystery.’

Sally Atkins

Speaker: Margo Fuchs Knill

Margo Fuchs Knill is a professor, psychotherapist, expressive arts professional and poet. She is the Founding Dean of the MA Program, Division of Arts, Health and Society at EGS, and a member of the original Core Faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS).

She was an Assistant Professor at Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. Margo works in private practice and teaches expressive arts internationally at training institutes in Europe, Russia, Asia, Latin America and the US. She iS the author of numerous poetry books, such as Leben will leben. Love Survives, and has contributed numerous book chapters on poetry, poetics and expressive arts. She is co-author of Minstrels of Soul: Intermodal Expressive Therapy, as well as a contributor to Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy: Theoretical and Clinical Perspectives. Her latest book, together with Sally Atkins, is titled Poetry in Expressive Arts: Supporting Resilience through Poetic Writing and is translated to Chinese.

Expected Outcomes:

• Attendees will understand the resource-oriented value of using poetry in a session.
• Attendees will gain competencies in writing poetry with a given prompt and time frame.
• Attendees will gain new perspectives about their own thinking.
• Attendees will be inspired to deepen the inputs they received.

This event is free for IACAET Registered members