Koenraad Kuiper
Poems are sneaky but each poem is sneaky in its own way. We could say the same about melanomas. And so, sneakily, just like that, a little volcano on the left arm turns wrist watch into risk watch…
‘Taking my mother to the opera’ by Diane Brown
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Diane Brown
Diane Brown explains how writing a poetic family history brought her parents springing back to life.
A friend who rang on my birthday asked what I was doing. Writing a blog about Taking My Mother To The Opera, about dementia and brain damage, I said, so a nice cheery day.
In truth, I found writing about my parents difficult and sad at times but also funny and strangely joyful. Dementia had taken some of my mother away and my father had died by the time I began to assemble the book with old and new poems. It became a way of re-engaging with them as they miraculously sprang back to life.”
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Ageing poetically
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Janet Wainscott
Some years ago, when my mother was still alive and living in a dementia-level rest home, I sat in a meeting for residents’ family members. The discussion turned to activities. One woman said her mother loved poetry, and asked whether poetry could be included in the activities offered. Someone else endorsed the comment and I thought that it would be something that my poetry-loving mother would enjoy. Nothing happened, but later, after my mother’s death, I decided it was an idea worth pursuing.
I was aware that reading, including poetry, is used in some rest homes and day programmes for older people, but I wanted to go beyond reading, discussion and reminiscence. I looked to Gary Glazner’s Alzheimer’s Poetry Project in the USA, and John Killick’s UK dementia poetry programme, In the Pink, for inspiration and guidance. Both projects combined the sharing of poems (especially well-known poems) with the creation of new poems.
Speak up! Poems about deafness
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Ruth Arnison
Melbourne on the quiet
a 10-day holiday
with broken hearing aids
Emergency poet!
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Deborah Alma
Emergency Poet is a piece of theatre, a quack doctor show and also at its heart, a vehicle (pun-intended) for sharing and disseminating poetry. I travel to city centres, festivals, libraries, hospitals, conferences, schools – I have even been to a couple of weddings! My last ‘emergency’ call-out was to a conference of psychotherapists and psychiatrists for the UK National Health Service.
Dressed in a doctor’s white coat and stethoscope and accompanied either by Nurse Verse or a Poemedic, I travel in my vintage 1970s ambulance, which is still fitted with its original stretchers and medical equipment. It’s a mix of the serious and the theatrical. There are skulls, jars of eyeballs and other body parts inside the ambulance, and under an attached awning there is a ‘Cold Comfort Pharmacy’ with Nurse Verse dispensing poems-in-pills for various ailments, including internet addiction and anxiety. There’s even some poetry Viagra.
A correct compassion
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Alan Roddick
The only poem I have ever written directly about dentistry is called “A Patient”. When I wrote it, some fifty years ago, James Kirkup’s “A Correct Compassion” was the only example I knew of a poem ‘about’ medicine. It is both a vivid description of a cardiac surgeon, observed by medical students, performing a mitral stenosis valvotomy, and an extended metaphor for the writing of a poem.
At the end of the operation (and the end of the poem), the surgeon’s ‘“I do not stitch up the pericardium. // It is not necessary.’” is matched by the poet’s conclusion:
For this is imagination’s other place, / Where only necessary things are done.”
The occasion of my own poem was less dramatic, but I like to think it demonstrates that a dental extraction, another occasion where ‘only necessary things are done’, can make a fitting subject for a poem.