Out of the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram, Mary R. Bast, Ph.D. 
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised: January 31, 2010
 

Poetry & Personality
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Jewel Tree Lawrie Dignan Tibetans call their Buddhist tradition a "wish-fulfilling jewel tree." Those who absorb its teachings will experience bliss and enlightenment.

Poems That Illustrate Each Enneagram Style (poem of the month below):  

Ones: Those who are known as perfectionists, who preach at others for falling short of perfection. The driving force is anger, which usually erupts when someone has failed to live up to their expectations. They can also have a "running amok" side that allows temporary escape from their own high standards.

Twos: Those who have to maintain the self-image that they're helpful, giving help and advice whether others want it or not. They use manipulation to influence people. If they feel betrayed they may even become vindictive ("after all I've done for you!"). Their driving force is pride (it's very difficult to admit they have needs, too).

Threes: Those who are self-promoting and can showcase themselves at the expense of others. They look outward for their reflection in the eyes of others, and their inner life is lacking. Their driving force is vanity, which requires always trying to look good; consequently they tend to be self-deceiving, reframing failure as success.

Fours: Those who can easily focus on their own flaws and sink into moodiness; their conversation is ripe with sad stories. The driving force is envy, which shows up in dissatisfaction with the ordinary, the mundane: the grass always seems greener somewhere else.

Fives: Those who like to think long and hard, and sometimes sound as if they're giving a dissertation. They may have deep and passionate feelings, but they tend to disdain the role of emotions in human interaction. Their driving force is hoarding, which shows up particularly as a detachment from feelings, a stinginess of affection.

Sixes: Those who are characterized by self-doubt, indecision, and procrastination. In interaction with others they look for hidden agendas and can be accusing, especially of those they worry have power over them. To counter the driving force of fear, they exhibit reckless courage, then worry they've shot themselves in the foot.

Sevens: Those who love to tell anecdotes and may forget to invite others to talk, sometimes perceived as oversimplifying or skating over the surface because they're so interested in a variety of attractions. Driven by a search for pleasure, they're over-focused on enthusiasm and uneasy activity: life MUST be fun!

Eights: Those with a "bull-in-the-china-shop" quality and the reputation of being controlling, because it's difficult to acknowledge vulnerability. Driven by the need for excess, they feel responsible to direct situations and they pursue power aggressively. They greatly value justice -- as self-defined!

Nines: Those "nice" people tend to merge with others' preferences. Taking a strong position is difficult because they see all sides of an issue and are essentially non-aggressive. Their driving force is indolence -- they're out of touch with their own wishes, a kind of self-forgetting. They tend toward epic tales (it's hard for them to focus).

Poem of The Month - February 2010

Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris by Barbara Hamby For an hour on the train from Beauvais to Paris           Nord I'm entertained by the conversation of three American girls about their appointment the next           day with a hairdresser, and if there is a subtext  to this talk, I'm missing it, though little else. Will bangs           make them look too dykey? And layers, sometimes they hang like the fur of a shaggy dog. Streaks, what about long           streaks? "Whore," they scream, laughing like a coven of wild monkeys, and after they have exhausted the present           tense, they go on to the remembrance of hairdos past-- high school proms, botched perms, late-night drunken cuts. The Loch Ness           Monster would be lost in their brains as in a vast, starless sea, but they're happy, will marry, overpopulate           the Earth, which you can't say about many poets, I think a few weeks later taking the eighty-four           bus to the hairdresser, where I'll spend three long hours and leave with one of the best cuts of my life from Guy,           who has a scar on his right cheek and is Israeli, but before that I pass a hotel with a plaque--           Attila József, great Hungarian poet, black moods and penniless, lived there ten years before he threw           himself under a train in Budapest. If we knew what the years held, would we alter our choices, take the train           at three-twenty instead of noon, walk in the rain instead of taking the metro? The time travel films           I adore speak to this very question: overwhelmed by disease and war, the future sends Bruce Willis back           to stop a madman. I could be waiting by the track as József arrives in Paris, not with love but money,           which seemed to be the missing ingredient, the honey he needed to sweeten his tea. Most days I take the B           line of the RER, and one of the stops is Draney, the way station for Jews rounded up by the Nazis           before being sent in trains to the camps, but we can't see those black-and-white figures in the Technicolor           present like ghosts reminding us with their pallor how dearly our circus of reds and golds has been purchased           and how in an instant all those colors could be erased. from Indiana Review and The Best American Poetry 2009

Alphabetical List of Published Poets

Anthony Abbott: The Philosophers (Fives)
Sherman Alexie: The Exaggeration of Despair (Fours)
John Ashbery: The Problem of Anxiety (Sixes)
Margaret Atwood: Bored (Nines)
W.H. Auden: I Have No Gun, But I Can Spit (Fives)
Gregory Bateson: The Manuscript (Fives)
Jeanne Marie Beaumont: Afraid So (Sixes)
Sheila Bender: For My Daughter Who Has Gone to Study in Japan (Twos)
Sheila Bender: My Mother was Here Today (Twos)
Wendell Berry: Warning to My Readers (Nines)
John Berryman: The Animal Trainer (1) (Threes)
Elizabeth Bishop: Manners (Nines)
Nina Bogin: Initiation II (Sixes)
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno: Death Barged In (Nines)
Emily Brontë: Stanzas (Threes)
Cathleen Calbert: The Woman Who Loved Things (Twos)
Billy Collins: Osso Buco (Sevens)
Billy Collins: Forgetfulness (Nines)
Carolyn Creedon: first communion (Fours)
Carolyn Creedon: Pub Poem (Fours)
Carolyn Creedon: litany (Fives)
e.e. cummings: Sonnets-Unrealities. III. (Fours)
Philip Dacey: Prisms (Sevens)
Kate Daniels: Homage to Calvin Spotswood (Eights)
Emily Dickinson: I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed (Sevens)
Rita Dove: Three Days of Forest, a River, Free (Sixes)
Stephen Dunn: His Music (Sixes)
Louise Erdrich: The Glass and the Bowl (Twos)
David Allan Evans: Bullfrogs (Ones)
Alice Friman: Getting Serious (Nines)
Carol Frost: To Kill a Deer (Eights)
Robert Frost: Mending Wall (Fours)
Gary Gildner: First Practice (Eights)
Allen Ginsberg: After Yeats (Nines)
Louise Glück: Unwritten Law (Eights)
Seamus Heaney: Doubletake (Eights)
Anthony Hecht: Lizards and Snakes (Sixes)
Jane Hirshfield: A Room (transformation poem)
Michael Hofmann: Fine Adjustments (Nines)
Michael Hofmann:  Last Walk (Nines)
Jonathan Holden: At a Low Mass For Two Hot-Rodders (Threes)
John Hollander: Powers of Thirteen-6-Fancy-Pants (Threes)
Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Windhover (Sevens)
A.E. Housman: To an Athlete Dying Young (Threes)
Mary Karr: The Worm-Farmer's Lament (Fours)
Mary Karr: Winter in the City of Friendship (Fives)
Jane Kenyon: Depression in Winter (Fours)
Galway Kinnell: Showing My Father through Freedom (Fours)
Paul Klee: Individuality (Fives)
Maxine Kumin: After Love (Twos)
Maxine Kumin: Nurture (Fours)
Stanley Kunitz: The Portrait (Ones)
Adrie Kusserow: Skull Trees, South Sudan (Sixes)
D.H. Lawrence: The Wild Common (Fours)
Denise Levertov: Variation on a Theme by Rilke (Nines)
Philip Levine: Of Love and Other Disasters (Four)
Don Marquis: the lesson of the moth (Nines)
Irene McKinney: Fame (Threes)
W.S. Merwin: The Stranger (Eights)
W.S. Merwin: Far Country (Nines)
Jim Wayne Miller: Rechargeable Dry Cell Poem (Fives)
Susan Mitchell: Ritual (Nines)
Pablo Neruda: Summario (Twos)
Mary Oliver: The House (Nines)
Mary Oliver: The Journey (Twos)
Mary Oliver: Wild Geese (Ones)
Dorothy Parker: Résumé (Fours)
Dorothy Parker: Comment (Sevens)
Dorothy Parker: A Portrait (Nines)
Linda Pastan: The Book (Fours)
Marge Piercy: For Strong Women (Eights)
Sylvia Plath : Child (Sevens)
Marie Ponsot: One Is One  (Eights)
Marie Ponsot: Old Mama Saturday (Nines)
Naomi Replansky: Housing Shortage (Fives)
Adrienne Rich: Stepping Backward (Fours)
Rainer Maria Rilke: Presentiment (Fours)
Teresa Noelle Roberts: Apotheosis of the Kitchen Goddess II (Eights)
Luis J. Rodríguez: Cloth of Muscle and Hair (Eights)
Theodore Roethke: In A Dark Time (Sixes)
Theodore Roethke: The Meadow Mouse (Eights)
May Sarton: Now I Become Myself (Sevens)
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer: Confession in April (Ones)
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer: Afterwards (Fours)
Anne Sexton: The Bells (Twos)
Karl Shapiro: How Do You Walk? (Fours)
Karl Shapiro: The Sickness of Adam (Fives)
Charles Simic: The Return of the Invisible Man (Nines)
Macklin Smith: Walking Around With Tubes and Bottles (Fours)
Stevie Smith: Not Waving but Drowning (Sevens)
Stephen Spender: Dolphins (Sixes)
William Stafford: Bi-Focal (Threes)
William Stafford: With Kit, Age Seven, At the Beach (Sixes)
William Stafford: A Story That Could Be True (Sevens)
May Swenson: Beast (Ones)
May Swenson: The Lightning (Ones)
Dylan Thomas: Fern Hill (Fours)
Sharon Thomson: On The Flatlands (Sixes)
Sharon Thomson: Pigeons (Eights)
John Updike: Dog's Death (Nines)
Mona Van Duyn: The Delivery (Twos)
Alice Walker: S M (Twos)
Ronald Wallace: The Belly Dancer in the Nursing Home   (Sevens)
Lew Welch: He Thanks His Woodpile (Fives)
Walt Whitman: A noiseless patient spider (Twos)
David Whyte: Waking (Nines)
Anna Wickham: The Marriage (Eights)
Roger Woddis: Down With Fanatics! (Nines)
William Wordsworth: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge (Nines)
William Wordsworth: A slumber did my spirit seal (Nines)
Charles Wright: The Minor Art of Self-Defense (Fives)
Paul Zimmer: Zimmer Resisting Temperance (Sevens)
Paul Zimmer: The Great Bird of Love (Eights)
Al Zolynas: A Nine Considers His Curses and Blessings (Nines)
Al Zolynas: Postcard From Home (Nines)  

Poems of Transformation:

A Room (Jane Hirshfield) Blackwater Woods (Mary Oliver) Cottonmouth Country (Louise Glück) Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep (Mary Frye) Kudzu (James Dickey) Lost (David Wagoner)

Poem of Sustenance (Sheila Bender) I Saw Myself (Lew Welch) The Faces at Braga (David Whyte) The World below the Brine (Walt Whitman) Root Cellar (Theodore Roethke) More Transformation Poems

About Poetry:

• I Meet My Shadow in the Deepening Shade: "There is so much buried in each of us that shows up symbolically..."

• "Poetry is the natural ally of the Enneagram in the cultivation of compassion..." (Clarence Thomson, Comments on Poetry and Personality) 

• "This moment of surprising yourself ... is at the heart of poetry as healer."  (John Fox, Poetic Medicine) 

• A Feast for the Soul: A Writer's Digest article offers resources for poetry lovers (and cites this page).