Journaling to Improve Your Poetic Writing

Poetry is a personal, creative art form. It relies on imagery and metaphor to convey its message. The Progoff Intensive Journal Method stimulates creativity and intuition, allowing the images and symbols in your life to flow freely out of your spirit and onto the page. This freedom of flow allows you to overcome mental obstacles that may be keeping you from being productive and creative. The Intensive Journal Method can help you get over writer’s block, gaining insight into the symbols that may be obscured in your life. Because the images are based on your own life experience, your work builds on honest, open, and personal feelings. This self-discovery opens the door for creative productivity, and paves the way for the transformation of personal imagery into meaningful poetry.

"I first went to an Intensive Journal workshop in 1978, when I was just out of graduate school, and had been writing almost nothing but papers, tests and lectures for ten years. I was aware that there was something wrong with this, for me anyway, but I had no idea how to find my way back to identifying myself as a poet– as I had when I was younger. I certainly did not expect that one workshop would teach me that lesson, but it did. Because of the way the Intensive Journal workshop showed me how to access imagery and symbol, and then to connect them to larger systems of personal meaning, I began to write poetry seriously again the morning of the second day of the workshop, in the workshop."

–Sally McNall,
Chico, CA