I hope I've given you a little bit of a sense
tonight of the connections perhaps
between poetry and healing.
And I wanted to read next a short excerpt
from another essay called "AIDS and the Poetry of Healing"
that perhaps brings some of these issues
out more explicitly or more clearly,
and it's just a couple of paragraphs.
"In poetry are present the fundamental beating
contents of the body at peace, the regularity
of resting brainwave activity in contrast
to the disorganized spiking of a seizure, the gentle ebb
and flow of breathing or sobbing in contrast
to the harsh spasmodic cough, the single voice ringing chant
of a slogan at an ACT UP rally in contrast
to the indecipherable rumblings of AIDS funding debate
on the Senate floor.
The poem is a physical process, is bodily exercise.
Rhymes become the mental resting places
in the ascending rhythmic stairway of memory.
The poem perhaps is an idealization
or a dream of the physical, the imagined healthy form,
yet it does not renounce illness.
Rather, it reinterprets it as the beginning point
for healing.
I wonder then whether poetry might also be therapeutic.
Many of my friends, especially some
of my colleagues in medicine, have teased me
for believing in the curative power of words,
joking that I should write some doggerel on my prescriptions
instead of the names of medications and directions
for their use.
If poetry is made of breath or the beating heart,
then surely, it's not unreasonable to think
it might reach those places in the bodies of its audience,
however rarefied.
Moreover, I joke back, I have never
seen a poem cause fulminant liver failure or bone marrow
toxicity, even a really bad one.
Putting the mouth to words and by incantation
returning regular rhythms to the working lungs--
these were the principles by which
ancient healers in Native American cultures
practiced their art.
The Egyptians gave their dead a book full of charms and spells
to be used in the afterlife.
Might not poetry then facilitate the passing to another realm?
Poetry is a pulsing, organized imagining
of what once was or is to be, what life once was,
what life is to be.
It is ampoules of the purest, clearest drug
of all, the essence and distillation of the process
of living itself."