What makes a poem a soul poem?
Dan: I think of soul as that place where the sacred meets the secular. I first heard the word soul in the sixties in relation to music. Remember soul music? I just loved performers like Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, James Brown and so many others in that style. What they had in common was that they had sung in the black churches and had moved on to singing about worldly matters like love, sex, money and the like. The music expressed an intensity of feeling that was more than worldly, yet stayed grounded in worldly affairs. It had a depth and richness that I found addictive. I still love that music and I look for that soulful quality in any art; that is what I look for in the poems we choose for The Great Night of Soul Poetry. I was lucky enough to study with Jungian psychologist James Hillman who has spent a lifetime working with the idea of soul. One thing that I took from him was his distinction between spirit which longs to transcend this veil of tears, this mundane wo
