Poetry Improves Patients' Emotional health

When people listen to words, there is a chemical change in their bodies. ... Poetry does not have any side-effects, and you can always get a refill.

Diane Kaufman, assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at University Hospital in Newark is one of growing number of physicians and therapists who use "poetry therapy" to help their patients cope emotionally with their illness reports Rohan Mascarenhas in New Jerseys The Star-Leger.

In the picture (left) poet John Fox discusses the amputation of one of his legs with audience members at a Poetry in Medicine Day at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School.

The Road Retaken

How's this for poetic justice?

When a group of more than two dozen young people broke into a former residence of poet Robert Frost (an old farmhouse in New England which belonged to Middlebury College) for a drinking party and trashed the place, the problem was to find an appropriate "punishment", The Burlington Free Press reports (found via The New York Times).

The Addison County state's attorney decided that instead of a jail term or community service, the offenders should go back to the classroom to study - the poetry of Robert Frost. And what poems more appropriate than The Road Not Taken and Out, Out? And who best to teach them than Jay Parini, a Middlebury College professor and Frost's biographer?

Parini of course underlined the relevance of the words to the offenders' own lives :

Believe me, if you're a teenager, you're always in the damned woods. Literally, you're in the woods -- probably too much you're in the woods. And metaphorically you're in the woods, in your life. Look at you here, in court diversion! If that isn't 'in the woods,' what the hell is 'in the woods'? You're in the woods!

Prose, Not Prozac

Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there's a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something - can be enormously helpful.

Blake Morrison in today's Guardian writes about the therapeutic power of literature and investigates a new kind of book club, designed to heal illness both physical and mental. (The quote above is from a patient, as you probably guessed.)

Jane Davis's Get into Reading initiative runs more than 50 projects across Merseyside, Liverpool and has taken reading to:

... groups in care homes, day centres, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric wards, cottage hospitals, sheltered accommodation and libraries; groups for people with learning disabilities, Alzheimer's, motor-neurone disease, mental health problems; groups for prisoners, excluded teenagers, looked-after children, recovering drug-addicts, nurses and carers ...

with some truly remarkable results.

You can read more about the project on the organization's website and in their report here.

The Poets of Guantánamo

The great thing about poetry is the way it gives a voice to the voiceless and disenfranchised, expresses the deepest of hurts, and helps to heal them.

A collection of poems written by the prisoners of Guantánamo prisoners' poems was launched in the UK a few days ago, the Guardian reports. (The US launch was in August.)

Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak brings together poems written by 17 of the detainees, collected American law professor Professor Marc Falkoff,who has represented them.

The poems were written with no expectation of an audience beyond the other inmates - some of them carved with pebbles on styrofoam cups, to be passed around and read, and then confiscated when the plates were collected.

Many of the featured poets were writing for the first time, although according to an article on SFGate.com Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost was already a respected religious scholar, poet, journalist and author of 19 published books before his arrest about a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. He recreated his "cup poems" from memory after his release in 2005.

His brother and former fellow Guantanamo inmate Badruzamman Badr said in an interview :

Poetry was our support and psychological uplift. Many people have lost their minds there. I know 40 or 50 prisoners who are mad. But we took refuge in our minds.

Dost is himself amazingly positive about his time in Guantánamo:

The positives have outweighed the negatives ... I was not unhappy for being detained because I learned a lot. I wrote from the core of my heart in Guantanamo Bay. In the outside world I could not have written such things.

So how good is the book? Megan O' Rourke writing for Slate.com says the book is distinctive for a number of reasons:

First, because it is a collection of writers, it drives home the plurality of experience and attitudes of those incarcerated, pushing back against the tendency to view them as interchangeable "enemy combatants." Second, because many of the authors are still being held in Guantanamo, it serves as testimony in an ongoing debate over the rights of foreign citizens who have been labeled dangers to the United States. Third, poetry proves to be an ideal way for these authors to convey the frustrations of imprisonment. The supple restrictions of the form lend intensity to their despair (or fury) at being imprisoned without habeas corpus on a remote island. ... What makes it interesting is not so much the literary virtues of the poems—some are quite artful, while others are less accomplished—as the way the poems restore individuality to those who have been dehumanized and vilified in the eyes of the public.

And US former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky assesses the collection at The World.org pointing out that it's greatest quality is its urgency.

You can listen to some of the poems on the University of Iowa website and find links to more reviews and discussion about the treatment of detainees.

Of course, if you care about the issue of detainment without trial in general terms, the Amnesty International website provides useful information. Because who knows, it could be coming to a country near you!

(Picture at right from the New York Times.)

Poetry Behind Bars

Being much interested in the therapeutic uses of writing, I felt inspired by this piece by Louise Tickell in today's Guardian about a project to bring performance poetry to prisoners.

HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire for men with convictions for serious crimes has been designated the UK's first "fully therapeutic prison", and the Grendon Live Literature programme is run by Alan Buckley (pictured above with one of the prisoners) and Steve Larkin, two Oxford-based performance poets. Ten weeks of writing workshops culminate in a final performance.

The programme has been found to develop the inmates literacy and presentation skills, but what about the quality of the material produced? In Poet's Letter magazine Buckley writes:

An obvious question is: are the poems people write any good? Or is writing them just good therapy for the inmates? The answer is that the standard of writing and performing is incredibly high for a group of people (both inmates and students) who – on the whole – have never done anything like this before. Although the inmates in particular often write about traumatic past experiences, the reality for them is that they are in therapy groups every day, so they tend to be very clear about seeing the poetic task as different. Also, the series of seven workshops ends with a slam (“The Slam in the Slammer” – could it be called anything else?), open to visitors from outside as well as inmates, so there is a healthy pressure to write and work up pieces that are able to engage an audience, whether this is through humour, exploring the common ground of human existence, or challenging people’s assumptions.

As a trained psychotherapist myself, with fifteen years’ experience of working in mental health and drug and alcohol settings, a prison TC is a familiar environment. What is incredibly refreshing for me is to have the chance to engage with people in a a way that is so clearly focussed on creative expression and moving forward, rather than exploring historical hurt.

Poems for Loss

An article about how poetry has the power to heal the soul from the New York Times.

Madge McKeithen turned to poetry when her son, Issac, began to suffer from an incurable and debilitating illness, finding in it :

Companionship. A connection that felt true ...

that helped her to cope with the pain of watching her son's condition degenerate, while doctors were unable even to make a diagnosis.

She tells the story of her son's illness and how it inspired her own book at Poets.org :

Ike left home for college in September 2001, four years into his illness. No longer living with the day to day of Ike’s illness, I began to write, and it was then, as Pablo Neruda puts it, that…Poetry arrived / in search of me. I became a poetry addict - collecting, consuming, ripping poems out of magazines, buying slender volumes that would fit in my pocket or pocketbook, stashing them in loose-leaf notebooks, on shelves, stacking them on the floor. In the midst of all this grief, I had fallen in love. With words. Poems, especially. And just in time. ... Poems became almost all I could read. I tucked them inside the thick file of Ike’s medical records when we headed for more doctors. I read and reread them in waiting rooms and exam rooms and sometimes hid in them when the world I could touch was too much. Poems spoke to me and sometimes for me.

McKeithan joined a writer's group and began to pen the meditations on her experience of reading poems which grew into a book called My Blue Peninsula, which takes its title from an Emily Dickinson poem .

Poet Billy Collins writes of the book:

Blue Peninsula is a sequence of meditations on poems not by a literary critic but by a mother who is fighting despair over her young son’s bewildering and protracted sickness. Madge McKeithen tries on these poems—ranging from John Clare to Diane Ackerman—like garments to fit the changing shape of her sorrows, and she holds onto each one to keep herself from falling into the well of grief. Here—let there be no doubt-- poetry makes something happen.

Related Post:

Poetry and Healing (3/2/06)