When was the last time you checked your phone? (That was easy.)
Now, when was the last time you read a poem?
Let’s explore some places online to find poems related to health, illness and recovery, and where to find them. We’ll also take a look at some outlets you might consider sending your poems out to, if you are a poet. National Poetry Month was launched by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 to celebrate the integral role of poets and poems in our lives.
With healthcare's proximity to pain, uncertainty, and death – all catalysts for art – it's no surprise that many patients and doctors alike have converted their experiences into poetry. If you're craving poetry about the healthcare experience, the modern options are abundant. The Poetry Foundation's Poems of Sickness, Illness, and Recovery (a contemporary and diverse list) illustrates this wonderfully.
Consider Elaine Equi's "Earth, You Have Returned to Me," where the author compares her pharmaceutical experience to being on different planets with different gravities, and presumably with different flows of time – an analogy that cannot be captured with dosage information or measurement of vitals.
Or Jane Kenyon’s “After an Illness, Walking the Dog,” which records the experience of recovery: both the awareness of life (“every pebble gleams, every leaf”) and our vast limitations.
Poetry websites aren’t the only place to find poems, however. Did you know that poetry can be searched in PubMed as a MeSH heading? Entering the search "Poetry as Topic"[Mesh] will yield results that include poems found in journals, including JAMA, which publish poetry on a regular or occasional basis. This MeSH search will also yield poetry-adjacent studies, including intriguing investigations which are situated at the intersection of poetry and medicine.
If you are engaged in the practice of writing poems, you’re in good company. Renowned poets like William Carlos Williams – a physician and writer – have demonstrated simultaneous excellence in medicine and art. But you certainly don’t need to be William Carlos Williams to write poems. Here are some potential outlets for your work, in addition to the journals mentioned above, and additional sources of healthcare-inspired creative output:
- Bellevue Literary Revue (BLR), established in 2000, is a “journal of humanity and human experience,” and is the first literary journal to have been established in a medical setting. It is published twice a year.
- Ars Medica is one of Canada’s first health humanities journals.
- Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine includes writing from both patients and practitioners, and publishes weekly. They publish both longer form poems and haiku.
- The Examined Life Journal is published by the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.
You can find a longer list of health humanities journals here.
The next time you take a study break, grab a snack and then feed yourself with poetry. Your brain will thank you!
This post was co-authored by Randy Plym and Deborah Wassertzug.
References
Equi, Elaine. (2016). Earth, You Have Returned to Me. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/91313/earth-you-have-returned-to-me.
Kenyon, Jane. (1987). After an Illness, Walking the Dog. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=36904.
