Salon Health & Body | Word doctor

Description

Word doctor

A Harvard physician believes poetry can soothe and even heal his patients.

| M y patient seemed skeptical at first. "What am I going to do with that?" she asked as she stared at the cover of Marilyn Hacker's book of poems "Winter Numbers," with its image of ripe pears, full as a woman's breasts, tangled in blood-red yarn. I have shared this book -- and others, like Audre Lorde's "The Cancer Journals" and Alicia Ostriker's "The Crack in Everything" -- with other patients of mine who are newly diagnosed with breast cancer.

"To survive/my body stops dreaming it's twenty-five," ends one of Hacker's most devastating poems. For a long moment, I too questioned whether words could heal.

But in responding to that poem's killer couplet, in grappling with its blend of resignation and persistence, I felt the unique power of poetry. Aside from finding an alternative to the sea of medicalese in which she was about to be immersed, aside from finding answers to questions she might not dare ask her overworked and/or imperious physicians, aside from the breaking of her own heart in each carefully rendered line break, I knew that in poetry my patient would discover courage, comfort and, ultimately, precious wisdom.

Elizabeth, as I'll call her, proved more resistant to the healing power of language than most of the patients with whom I have tried to share poetry.

"Look," she said, "I appreciate you trying to show you care. But I want you and all my doctors to know what to do about my medical condition, and not my feelings." I noticed how the rim of tears forming in her blue eyes seemed to magnify their beauty. "So you can keep this." Abruptly, she ended our encounter by leaving my office, slamming the door ...

Original URL

http://www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/12/08/poetry/index.html

http://www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/12/08/poetry/index.html