Nicole Homer performing one of her amazing poems

We re-posted this on 6 February 2014, in order to correct the pathname – this was the only way we could find to do it. So this is effectively a duplicate post – and we are leaving it in place because it has comments.

Mesmerizing and powerful performance by Nicole Homer of her astonishing and wonderful poem. If you have experienced a relationship with food that is also about feelings and worth; if you live in troubled relationship with your sense of your own body; if you work with someone who has: listen to this!

BACK STORY: Once upon a time (well, yesterday actually), a therapist at a counselling service was introduced to a poet she had not previously come across – Lauren Zuniga. This happened in a private context, and she was not sure whether it would be okay with Lauren to post the poem – ‘Everything is going to be Amazing’ – on her counselling service blog. The therapist experienced the poem as expressing some of the essence of person-centredness (the way we work at this service). The therapist was so excited about Lauren that she searched on You Tube and found the poem we are linking to here. The You Tube clip says the poem is performed ‘at the request of Lauren Zuniga’, and does not specify that it is actually a poem by Nicole. The therapist had never encountered Nicole either, but was equally blown away by this poem as she had been by Lauren’s – and again thought it stood right at the heart of person-centredness. She misinterpreted her path to the poem and the ambiguous You Tube description to mean that this was Lauren’s poem performed by Nicole. The apparently domestic setting increased this illusion (because You Tube is full of people performing other people’s work in domestic settings – obviously it’s also full of people performing their own work in domestic settings, but often says so). The therapist has the flu, and is cognitively woolly at the moment, so the retrospectively obvious – that this might be Nicole’s own poem – did not occur to her. This morning she found a comment (below) from the poetry police pointing this out – for which she thanks them (she likes knowing when she has made a mistake, although she does not herself like or believe useful a ‘crime and punishment’ paradigm). So she has corrected the post, and her comment on You Tube. And now she is going to tweet it again. The End. (Lindsey Talbott, Therapist, Palace Gate Counselling Service – the therapist concerned!)

Here’s a link to Nicole’s site: http://nicolehomer.com/bio

And here’s an article about Lauren, who doesn’t as it turns out belong in this post – but will feature in future posts for sure:-

http://fourstory.org/features/story/lauren-zuniga/

(We are using some medical model terms as tags for this post, because we want people to see it….)