“Lyrical vandalism”

A template for the sublimation of rage in the age of ecological despair

Abstract

The article presents a poetry therapy template for the sublimation of feelings of despair and rage in relation to ecological destruction. Based on examples of my own exploration of eco-poetry in Landscape with Wind Turbines (2024), I will show a three-stage process of working through feelings of anger, moving from semiotic to expressive modalities: destructive writing (using techniques of inversion, erasure, mutilation and interpolation); parody; and defamiliarization. I discuss how this process, which I have called lyrical vandalism, relates to the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation, where feelings of anger are redirected into a socially valuable form of representation. I then suggest a framework where sublimation is achieved by means of a gradual transmuting internalization of intertexts consisting of famous nature poetry. The template is based on two central premises: the iso-principle (meet the participant where they are emotionally) and the affection-principle (the participants must select model texts that they have been moved by).