Last week, a friend of mine arranged a screening of an in-the-works movie he was a part of. The film was a documentary project on poetry as a therapeutic tool, and I sat down to watch it with a skeptical eye.

I’m a writer, and I have a great deal of respect for poetry and poets, mostly because I’ve tried my own hand at the discipline and usually end up less-than-satisfied with the results. What can I say? I have high standards. I know there are poets out there who are masters of the craft, poets whose words always make me pause, or breathe a little more deeply, or look at something small through new, more respectful eyes. I know this sort of poetry exists.

For every brilliant poet, and every awe-inspiring stanza, though, there are pages of pages of trite disasters from armies of tragic hopefuls (if you don’t believe me, just head down to your local coffee shop during one of the open mic nights) and I was positive that this project of poetry-as-therapy was bound to contribute to the latter. I was willing to grant that the process of writing might help the patients, but wasn’t so sure I wanted to have to LISTEN to what they came up with.

The film was around hour long, and by the time we reached the end, my mind had been changed completely.

". . . as I listened in case Jane called for help, or spoke in delirium, ready to make the agitated drive to Emergency again for readmission to the huge vessel that heaves water month after month, without leaving port, without moving a knot, without arrival or destination, its great engines pounding." -- Donald Hall, from The Ship Pounding

The majority of the movie revolved around a program that had been implemented at a hospital in Florida. A group of physicians ‒ neurologists, pediatricians, oncologists ‒ had put together something they called “The Arts in Medicine,” in which visiting artists and poets and dancers would come to lead workshops and interact with the hospital patients. The doctors supporting the project were as adamant about its measurable value as they were their mystification as to WHY it was so effective: they knew that patients benefited, and saw remarkable improvements in health, but couldn’t explain the mechanisms through which this healing occurred.

As the documentary continued, though, it slowly became clear. The patients interviewed expressed, over and over again, how much meaning they derived from the poetry they wrote and the art projects they engaged in. The emotion apparent in their faces and reports threw into sharp relief how strangely meaningless their environment was.

This isn’t intended to be a criticism of the hospital, or of our health care system. It’s a mere fact of the institution of western medicine: the implicit promise of the field is that pain is something that can be taken care of and that suffering, by extension, is unnecessary. There’s nothing wrong with this promise ‒ after all, there’s plenty of good that’s been done by our doctors ‒ but it comes at a cost. If suffering is unnecessary, then there’s no reason for it, and if there’s no reason for it, there must be no lesson to be gained.

The thing is, though, that suffering and pain can be one of the most phenomenal teachers around. We’ve all spoken to people who are grateful for what might seem otherwise unbearable obstacles. The number of HIV sufferers who express gratitude for their illness ‒ “I was lost,” they’ll say, “and utterly directionless until my diagnosis. Realizing how precious and short life is was an amazing gift,” ‒ is tremendous. And while, in the same way I wouldn’t want to infect people with HIV because of this gift, I wouldn’t want to begrudge anyone the benefits of the medical system, I do think there’s something to be said for gleaning meaning from pain. As one of the doctors in the film said, “We’ve found that the program helps patients to heal , regardless of whether or not they ‘get better.’”

I don’t think this is accidental. I think that without meaning, managing pain starts to feel hopeless. And it’s this for this reason that The Art in Medicine program worked so well. The writer-patients were able to turn their suffering into something, to use their time their creatively, and, thus, to imbue what they were undergoing with meaning.

Obviously, this worked.

But the fact that it worked was not enough to interest me in the pieces the patients produced. This I learned from another portion of the film.

One of the patients, Dakota, was a tiny eight year old girl. I don’t remember what her diagnosis was ‒ leukemia, perhaps, or some other form of cancer ‒ but this doesn’t matter. What matters is that she was sick; she was living in the hospital. She perched on her bed, preoccupied with a painting, while one of the hospital poets attempted to elicit a poem from her. “Dakota,” he asked, “What do you love most?”


She responded with a few words about kitties, and about her own cat, “Socrates,” and the man sitting by her bed carefully, attentively, and dutifully wrote down each sentence.

I found my eyes rolling. This was supposed to be poetry? I thought. This was just some pre-teen chatting about her pet. She’s not even saying anything that profound; it’s just a story about the cat hiding, the girl finding the kitten’s tale, and, lo and behold, locating the rest of the animal in front of it. She’s not consciously writing poetry. She’s just talking.

Then, though, the poet read back, slowly, Dakota’s words. He didn’t embellish them in any way, and didn’t mock. He merely restated what she’d said with an attitude of reverence, prefacing his delivery with “Dakota, here’s your poem.”

And it was beautiful. It was simple, and sweet, and while the words were the same, while Dakota’s intent hadn’t changed, I suddenly realized how much of poetry involved attitude. There was something poignant in how the girl herself listened to her own words with such curious appreciation, and so sweet to see the realization spread over her face that everyone else was giving them the same devout attention. In a world in which we so rarely listen to others ‒ especially when it comes to children ‒ the scenes of someone being so attended to closely was beyond moving.

I thought about what a gift that was, and how the mere act of such careful attention was enough to make something meaningful. I thought about those instances in which I’d heard about the gift of time being one of the most generous things one could get a convalescent, but it hadn’t sunk in before that THIS was the sort of time that mattered ‒ this total and complete attention. It was this that turned words into poetry.

And it was this sort of poetry that healed.

So why is this relevant, you might ask? Why does it matter? It matters because it changed the way I listened to people. For the next day, I started pretending I heard poetry coming from the lips of everyone I talked to, and what I learned was remarkable. I couldn’t believe how much beauty I heard, and I couldn’t believe how much care this effort involved, and I couldn’t believe what a lesson it was in hearing what was being said. And while I still wouldn’t advocate writing each of these impromptu poems down, or compiling them for a collection to be foisted on others, I would highly, highly recommend the exercise. I felt as though, in trying it, I was really sharing in, and understand, someone else’s world, and this, to me, seems essential to both poetry and healing. I think we could all use a little more of both.