For psychologist George Northrup, poetry comes just as naturally as helping people navigate life.
The New Hyde Park-based writer has penned approximately 1,500 poems, he said, writing his first when he was just 8 years old.
His inspiration? People.
“Because my work is always putting me in touch with emotionally meaningful, sometimes very poignant experiences, it trains me to be emotionally available to have those experiences,” said Northrup, who has been practicing psychology since 1987. “Poetry is not that different. It is often just being aware that something wonderful just happened or something terrible just happened, noticing that and how there might be a way to capture that in words.”
His upcoming poetry collection, “Everyone’s Going,” centers on grief, morality and how to think about death and losing loved ones. He said he started writing poems in the collection roughly 30 years ago, with no thoughts of the work building into a book.
“I had a relative who had died, and it touched me in a certain way while I was busy shoveling snow in the middle of winter,” Northrup said about the inspiration for the first poem he wrote in this collection. “I composed a poem about it in my head and wrote it down when I finished showing.”
“As you get older, of course, you’ll lose people. My parents got older and died, aunts and uncles and friends as well,” he continued. “There were opportunities to hold in words the experience of those losses and save them. I reread them as a way of honoring people who are no longer here.”
Northrup said he hopes his translation of his experiences with grief into words will help others with their own.
“I hope readers take away the ability to bear grief when it happens,” Northrup said. “To be able to withstand it and not run away from it, not turn away from it, not stuff it down, not try to distract themselves, but to let themselves grieve and go on living, which is often what a lot of life is.”
“Everyone’s Going” is Northrup’s fifth collection of narrative poems. Working his poems into collections is something he has begun doing somewhat recently, in an attempt to reach more people and form a narrative arc through his work.
“I publish individual poems fairly often, but I started collecting them into chapbooks or full collections about 11 years ago, because I didn’t want them to be stuck on my hard drive when I dropped dead,” he said. “I thought, let me get them out into the world a little bit more, if I can.”
Northrup was elected president of the Fresh Meadows Poets in 2006 and remained a member until the group dissolved last year. Though he said he’s looking to wind down his psychology practice, where he primarily provides counseling to individual adults and couples, to focus on writing and other hobbies like gardening, he said he still loves his job.
“I went into psychology because I thought I would never be bored. I was right,” Northrup said. “People are complicated, surprising, conflicted, often full of mixed emotions to be sorted out and understood. They’re often living under the influence of events in their life that happened many, many years earlier, sometimes without quite fully realizing that they have more options than that.”
“Everyone’s Going” will be released on July 8. It can be preordered and purchased through Amazon.
