Jenny Bornholdt
“Big Minty Nose” is one of six long poems that made up my book The Rocky Shore. They’re about all kinds of things, mostly illness, death (keeping it cheerful here!), the garden, kids and family. “Big Minty Nose” is the final poem in the book. I was recovering from a year of pain, then hip surgery; our friend Nigel had died of cancer and I was thinking about my father’s death from melanoma some years earlier. Writing about these things helped me find a place for them inside our daily life, which is where they will always be.
Working between science and the soul
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Dr Leah Kaminsky
A physician works at the border between science and the soul … the wise doctor probes not only the organs of his patient but also his feelings and emotions, his fears and hopes, his regrets and his goals. And to accomplish that most important task of applying wisdom, the physician also needs to take his own emotional temperature.” – Jerome Groopman, in the foreword to Writer, M. D., a collection of works by doctor-writers edited by Melbourne GP and writer Leah Kaminsky.
Kaminsky writes: Writing for me can be a kind of thermometer, where I check the rising mercury of my own beliefs, biases and uncertainties. It is not a place I hope to find answers—rather, I use the blank page to try and understand what kind of questions a doctor needs to ask. My medicine has always fed and informed my writing. But more importantly, literature has, I hope, made me a better physician.
“I give you my guessing tubes”: 4 poems by Rae Varcoe
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Dr Rae Varcoe was a Leukaemia and Lymphoma Physician at Auckland Hospital for 30 years. She has been a poetry reader for much longer and began writing verse at Victoria University’s inaugural MA class in 1997. Poetry has been one of the buttresses of her life in medicine.[Read more…] about “I give you my guessing tubes”: 4 poems by Rae Varcoe
“That’s my stroke”: Expressive Arts Therapy with a survivor of stroke
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Rose Stanton
Arts Therapy is a form of psychotherapy which connects with a variety of theoretical frameworks. It is more focused on the creative process and self-understanding than on art as an end product. I practise the multimodal approach. This is the use of two or more expressive therapies to foster awareness, encourage emotional growth, and enhance relationships with others. The expressive arts therapies can be defined as “the use of art, music, dance/movement, drama, poetry/creative writing, play, and sandtray within the context of psychotherapy, counselling, rehabilitation or health care” Malchiodi (2005, p. 2).
[Read more…] about “That’s my stroke”: Expressive Arts Therapy with a survivor of stroke
“I sing the body electric”: Walt Whitman
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Sue Wootton
Walt Whitman
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”—Walt Whitman (1819-92).
Walt Whitman was a journalist and poet who volunteered as a nurse in 1863-4, during the American Civil War. His major work, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was revised and expanded over the course of nine editions during his lifetime (with a tenth edition published posthumously in 1897).
Whitman’s poetry is intensely observant of the physical world, and deeply attuned to seasonal cycles and the passage of time. Birth and death, aging, disease, injury, love and passion all appear in his work, which is renowned for its oratory style, and its celebration of the embodied nature of human experience. “I sing the body electric”, he wrote. “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”
The poem continues:
Translating Frank Koenegracht
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Koenraad Kuiper
Doctor poet Frank Koenegracht is, as it says in his publicity, ‘one of the best, albeit not yet best-known, poets of the Dutch language area.’ For a day job he has been a psychiatrist specialising in sleep disorders.
He was born in Rotterdam in 1945 and has published ten volumes of poetry all with De Bezige Bei (The Busy Bee). He has received two prizes for his work: in 1990 the Anna Blaman Prize an in 2001 the Frans Erens Prize for his collective work.
His poetry often employs a vernacular style and picks up pop music allusions, has flashes of humour but is seriously involved with the human condition.