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I hope I've given you
a little bit of a sense

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tonight of the
connections perhaps

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between poetry and healing.

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And I wanted to read
next a short excerpt

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from another essay called "AIDS
and the Poetry of Healing"

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that perhaps brings
some of these issues

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out more explicitly
or more clearly,

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and it's just a
couple of paragraphs.

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"In poetry are present
the fundamental beating

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contents of the body at
peace, the regularity

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of resting brainwave
activity in contrast

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to the disorganized spiking
of a seizure, the gentle ebb

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and flow of breathing
or sobbing in contrast

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to the harsh spasmodic cough,
the single voice ringing chant

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of a slogan at an ACT
UP rally in contrast

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to the indecipherable rumblings
of AIDS funding debate

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on the Senate floor.

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The poem is a physical
process, is bodily exercise.

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Rhymes become the
mental resting places

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in the ascending rhythmic
stairway of memory.

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The poem perhaps
is an idealization

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or a dream of the physical,
the imagined healthy form,

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yet it does not
renounce illness.

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Rather, it reinterprets
it as the beginning point

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for healing.

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I wonder then whether poetry
might also be therapeutic.

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Many of my friends,
especially some

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of my colleagues in
medicine, have teased me

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for believing in the
curative power of words,

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joking that I should write some
doggerel on my prescriptions

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instead of the names of
medications and directions

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for their use.

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If poetry is made of breath
or the beating heart,

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then surely, it's not
unreasonable to think

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it might reach those places
in the bodies of its audience,

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however rarefied.

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Moreover, I joke
back, I have never

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seen a poem cause fulminant
liver failure or bone marrow

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toxicity, even a really bad one.

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Putting the mouth to
words and by incantation

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returning regular rhythms
to the working lungs--

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these were the
principles by which

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ancient healers in
Native American cultures

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practiced their art.

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The Egyptians gave their dead a
book full of charms and spells

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to be used in the afterlife.

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Might not poetry then facilitate
the passing to another realm?

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Poetry is a pulsing,
organized imagining

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of what once was or is to
be, what life once was,

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what life is to be.

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It is ampoules of the
purest, clearest drug

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of all, the essence and
distillation of the process

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of living itself."

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