There is a line by Amelia Rosselli that Antonetta Carrabs has used as a starting point in some of her workshops: “There is something like a pain in the room.” She does not explain it, does not analyse it. She lets it sit there and waits. Often, someone answers.
The power of words is at the heart of Poetry Therapy. One clarification before going further: this method does not replace any clinical treatment. It is, as Carrabs herself defines it, «a practice that uses words as the universal language of inner life.» Its value lies in the possibility of naming what is difficult to say — not in treating illness. Carrabs has been bringing this approach to psychiatric wards, prisons, care homes, schools, and university lecture halls for over twenty years. This spring she is a guest at UniSR as part of Health Mode On, the PRO-BEN student wellbeing project, to explore free verse as a tool for emotional literacy.
«I usually start with simple questions — ‘How are you? What have you been up to?’ In the participants’ responses I identify a word, an emotion, a worry, and from that I build the opening line» Carrabs explains. Sometimes the workshop begins from a line by a well-known poet, like the Rosselli verse above. From there, participants start to tell their own stories, in their own words, with no formal rules.
«At the end of the session I compose a choral text from everyone’s contributions and read it aloud. People recognise themselves in this collective work and are often surprised: ‘I said that.’ The text is printed and given to them to keep. It is their poem, even though we wrote it together.» In her workshops, Carrabs draws on the teachings of Nicaraguan theologian Ernesto Cardenal, who in the 1980s placed poetry — in the form of free verse — among the basic necessities of life, alongside bread and water. Free verse has no formal constraints — it does not depend on metre or require any prior literary knowledge. That is precisely what makes it a vehicle for free self-expression. «Anyone can be a potential poet, if they are willing to give voice to their inner world.»
It was paediatric haematologist Giuseppe Masera, former director of the paediatric clinic at the University of Milan-Bicocca, who brought Cardenal’s workshops to Italy in 2006 — first with children in oncology wards, then, together with Carrabs, in an increasingly wide range of settings.
Antonetta Carrabs spent years working in hospital wards, in particular the psychiatry unit at Clinica Zucchi, where she led Poetry Therapy sessions for nearly four years. From that experience she chooses to share only a few fragments, those that have stayed with her most, like the words the patients wrote starting from the Rosselli line.
Someone described their pain as “a light bulb flickering on and off.” Another wrote that their pain “has no colour, but has different phosphorescences: blue, violet, green.” A third person spoke of “a thought that touches and prods my existence.” Another simply said: “in my small world everything is burning.” Reading these words, even just transcribed on a page, is disarming. Professor Anna Ogliari, associate professor of clinical psychology and UniSR coordinator for the Health Mode On project, made the same observation during the session. «Encountering psychic suffering through poetry, a completely different emotional channel from the clinical one, restores a softness to listening that is sometimes deliberately set aside in clinical care, so that practitioners can attend to patients with an objective eye.»
«It is about recognising a power of words that, used outside the clinic and outside established protocols, can lead to a deeper understanding of the person in front of you», Carrabs adds. Notably, the psychiatric staff at Clinica Zucchi monitored the impact of these sessions using standardised anxiety and depression scales, finding a consistent trend towards improvement.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in Psychiatry Research in 2026, covering fifteen studies on poetry-based interventions, reports significant reductions in symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress. The authors note, however, that the evidence remains limited by small sample sizes and variable study quality, and that poetry may play a useful role as an adjunct (not a replacement) within psychiatric care pathways. This is also Carrabs’ position: «My work is not about curing illness. It is about using words as the universal language of inner life» she clarifies.
Carrabs’ workshops were not designed exclusively for contexts of vulnerability, even if that is where their impact is most visible. The same method works, with different registers and language, with nursing students, with inmates at Monza prison, with elderly residents at a care home in Brianza. «These last participants, in particular, used choral poetry to share memories of childhood courtyards, first loves, shared experiences. From those stories a close-knit group emerged where none had existed before.»
The thread running through all these contexts leads back to the power of words - a power that is often underestimated. Words can build or wound, open doors or close them. Learning to use them to name emotions, fears, and anxieties is a way of inhabiting the world more fully, of being with oneself and with others. It is more than a literary exercise.
«At a time when universities, hospitals and institutions are asking how to integrate the emotional dimension into education and training, I am working on this in dialogue with psychiatrists and philosophers. Together we are building a new current of thought, which we want to call “Neocurantismo”. The real challenge we are setting ourselves with this movement is to understand how many of us are truly willing to make space for our own emotional lives, and to share them through poetry» she concludes.