Poetry for Sickness and Surgery?

In my writing on spinal deformity, spinal reconstruction, and life reconstruction, I'm not sure I've said much at all about poetry. I've met so many people who dislike it intensely (including some doctors). Sometimes I think it's a matter of fearing the unknown, or of having suffered miserably at the hands of inept or boring instructors.


As a longtime "closet poet" and reader of poetry myself, I'm encouraged to see so many more of us opening up to it these days. The poetry raps that began in Chicago, thrived in Brooklyn, and became a popular feature on HBO may have helped to show more of us -- visually, powerfully, through poets' spirited use of their whole bodies to deliver a reading -- just how affecting, how exciting it can feel  to experience or create a poem. I also seem to meet more and more people these days who have somehow stumbled on a particular poet and have found themselves unexpectedly transported, even transformed. The names that seem to pop up most often are those of Rumi, Rilke, and the contemporary U.S. poet Mary Oliver.


It may not be widely known as  yet, but poetry can actually be profoundly healing for those of us with painful and challenging medical conditions. In fact, there's actually a school of therapy focused on reading and writing poems. John Fox may be its best known practitioner. I can personally recommend one of his books, Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, which I have had in my own library for years. It's full of wonderful quotations, beautiful and moving poems by "patients" (as opposed to known poets), and exercises for eliciting the poetry in yourself.  It begins, "Poetry is a natural medicine."


I also love the book's preface, written by Rachel Naomi Remen, MD --  a specialist in internal medicine who now works as a kind of counselor/professional listener/mentor/modern-day shaman with seriously ill cancer patients, as well as with medical colleagues and students who seek her help during times of great pain or crisis. She has authored two poetic books of prose -- of stories, essentially -- Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings, which have often inspired and comforted me on my long journey through flatback syndrome and unexpected disability. (See http://being.publicradio.org/programs/listeninggenerously/)


Dr. Remen's preface to the Fox book on poetry therapy begins:  "As a girl, I hated poetry. So much more the irony that I have spent hours, even whole days, writing and reading poetry with people with cancer, with their doctors and their nurses, and with their family members. But this poetry is different from the poetry of my youth. Much of the old poetry was pretentious and erudite, full of references to mythology or the ancient Greeks, poetry whose words I could not easily understand. The poetry of my youth made me feel diminished.


"But this poetry," she continues, "this poetry makes me proud to be a human being." She explains that "[p]oetry is simply speaking truth. Each of us has a truth as unique as our own fingerprints. Without knowing that truth, without speaking it aloud, we cannot know who we are and that we are already whole." (By the way, this doctor has also been a patient herself, with a chronic debilitating illness first diagnosed when she was 15 years old. She has undergone as many major surgeries for her Crohn's disease as I have for my spinal deformities.)


Why do I bring all this up now? To cut to the chase, I have only recently come across the first poetry I've seen which deals specifically with scoliosis surgery. Its young author is featured at the beginning and then briefly again at the end of this article about a poetry therapy conference. If you decide to check it out, I hope will you find it as enjoyable as I did: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178585