April is poetry month! Are you reading or writing poetry? I hope so. If you've followed my blogs you may know that I'm a poetry fan. I turn to poetry to help me laugh, imagine, and heal. As a professional and family caregiver, poetry is an essential resource that supports my spirit. Expressions in poetry can speak where words fail me and console when I need comfort. They ease feelings of isolation and remind me that I'm not alone. I read poetry yet many people in medicine and caregiving write poetry to articulate or express their powerful experiences with patients and human illness. Poetry is uniquely helpful for anyone engaged in healing whether as healer or someone being healed. Have you found its therapeutic properties?
Poetry helps both healer and patient according to Rafael Campo, physician, teacher and award winning poet. Campo says poetry can improve patient interactions and humanize medicine to effect better healing. "Sometimes, in my experience on the wards, in the very busy medical world, we believe we don’t have time to fulfill one of the primary functions of the healer: to bear witness...," he tells a University review, "It’s to me one of the great gifts of being a poet in the medical world: to always be reminded of how important that acuity of observation and listening truly is in our work. I certainly feel it [poetry] helps me be a more effective healer." Dr Richard Berlin, a psychotherapist, echoes that message. He writes in his blog: "Poetry can help doctors become better healers because poems teach us to see the world from the emotional viewpoint of another person. As Steven Dobyns writes, 'A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.'" Slowly poetry and the discipline of "medical humanities" are finding inclusion in medical school curriculum. Dr Thomas Duffy, director of the Program for Humanities in Medicine at Yale, explains why poetry is essential to medical professionals: “Poetry opens our minds to asking patients the right questions, while helping us address the emotional demands of doctoring, especially in the formative years."
Listen to these Harvard medical students discuss the relationship between medicine and poetry. One student tells the interviewer that poetry empowers her to be a healer. "I gather all these stories [from patients] and I report them in a way that's good for the institution and good for the attending [staff] but then when it comes to processing my feelings poetry is the way I need to do it and it's the way I kind of spit out all the emotional content that's been put into me all day. It's very cathartic," she says. According to Finding the Words to Say it: The Healing Power of Poetry poetic language is uniquely suited to expressing issues that are culturally taboo or too overwhelming for regular words like the interactions caregivers and health professionals experience with some patients or while supporting people with terminal illness. RN and poet Madeleine Mysko notes in her blog that the majority of poems written by nurses, for instance, "are uniquely set in the working life of the nurse, a working life that requires an intimacy with human suffering the likes of which no other profession requires...Each one [poet ]," she concludes, "has mustered up the discipline it takes to make something beautiful out of what a nurse knows." Poetry in medicine is still gaining acceptance but there's no doubt that it improves the stability of the healer, promotes more compassionate healing and inspires some outstanding works. The annual Hippocrates Prize celebrates writers at that intersection of poetry and medicine. An article in the Lancet about the prize observes, "We are creatures of language and finding words for critical experiences helps us cope and find the way forward."
While poetry gains traction as a teaching and coping aid in professional medicine, poetry is well-documented and widely accepted as a healing resource. The National Association of Poetry Therapy draws its membership from health care professionals in all areas of service who utilize the healing powers of reading and writing poetry in their practice. Dr. Perie Longo, a registered Poetry Therapist writes, "Poetry therapy is gaining ground as a way to treat a range of mental illness, from schizophrenia to depression to substance abuse. In therapy, reading poems by other authors provides a structure for patients to evoke associations, connect with their emotions and realize they are not alone in experiencing such feelings." Poetry aids in mental health treatments and also gives friends and family a format to explore their own feelings. Richard Widerkehr's chapbook, "Her Story of Fire," for instance, chronicles the poet's lifelong relationship with his sister's mental illness. Reviewer and psychotherapist Rena Ziegler explains that Widerkehr's "poems offer an unflinching view of the pain and longing one feels when loving someone who has retreated to an inaccessible world....Widerkehr helps us enter that world and perhaps even understand some of it." Mental illness is only one area where poetry serves as a healing tool. It's used in all forms of recovery as well as with terminal illness and dementia.
Poetry is powerful and versatile. Poems can both comfort and inform. Poetic language and imagery are ideally suited to the complex and profound experiences we encounter as healers or caregivers and uniquely suited for exploring revelation and insights. Channel your inner muse and call out the bard! Before this month is over consider reading or writing poetry. If you have a minute, share one with all of us in the comments below.
Update 11/14 Scientists have published an FMRI study showing that poetry impacts our brains much like music with benefits to our mind and memory.
