Clippings

Posts for Tag: poetry

Poetry helps patient care

For the past year, the National Aspergillosis Centre (NAC) based at the University hospital of South Manchester has employed writer in residence, Caroline Hawkridge, to work with patients and staff, because of a conviction that word exploration is already boosting the effectiveness of the care given by its health staff...

For the past year, the National Aspergillosis Centre (NAC) based at the University hospital of South Manchester has employed writer in residence, Caroline Hawkridge, to work with patients and staff, because of a conviction that word exploration is already boosting the effectiveness of the care given by its health staff.

There's not as much here as I'd like to see about the approach that's been taken, but there's enough to let me know that I'd like to see the approach use more widely.

Memorizing Poetry

Via @PoetryFound, Roger Ebert set me scurrying through the things I've read about memorizing poetry.

Ebert made me remember the words of Brad Leithauser, pointed out to me by Lynda Barry,

"The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”

Edward Hirsch stops short of memorization, but he takes up the same thought in How to Read a Poem

I believe such stored magic can author in the reader an equivalent capacity for creative wonder, creative response to a living entity. (Graves means his statement literally.) The reader completes the poem, in the process bringing to it his or her own past experiences. You are reading poetry — I mean really reading it—when you feel encountered and changed by a poem, when you feel its seismic vibrations, the sounding of your depths. ‘There is no place that does not see you,’ Rainer Maria Rilke writes at the earth-shattering conclusion of his poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’: ‘You must change your life.’

I've only made a first step here—the passages were merely remembered, not memorized, but they left a deep impression and I wasn't happy until I found them in my notes. The pleasure I took in looking for them and finding them goes a long way toward demonstrating the truth that all reveal.