Weaving the Errant corners of the self: poetic apprenticeship and relational transformation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This poetic autoethnography introduces poetic apprenticeship, a recursive practice of deep dwelling with mentor-poems, carrying them into ordinary life, writing back to them, and weaving the resulting voices together. I argue that poetic apprenticeship creates a relational process through which estranged or disowned aspects of the self can be encountered, answered, and partially integrated. Across several months, I engaged poems by Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke, and David Whyte through reading, recitation, memorization, response writing, and reflective return. Three original response poems and a final braided poem form the creative-analytic corpus. I call the increased capacity of these previously partitioned positions to belong within the same life poetic individuation. Alchemical images are applied retrospectively as a secondary interpretive heuristic rather than a developmental mechanism. Poetic apprenticeship may therefore be therapeutically meaningful.