Grief brought to numbers

John Fox — certified poetry therapist, author, and associate professor at the California Institute for Integral Studies — shares his thoughts on the healing power of poetry during a free presentation Thursday at the Ashland Community Hospital. Photo and video by Debi Smith | For the Tidings

The emotional power of poetry at the core of John Donne's poem, "The Triple Fool," is also at the heart of the "poetry therapy" that John Fox is sharing with patients, professionals and poetry aficionados in Ashland this week.

"Donne says it beautifully," said Fox. "(Poetry) brings (pain and loss) into a distilled form where you can let it speak back to you in a form that begins to make sense."

Fox, a "certified poetry therapist" (certified by the National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy), hosted a screening of the movie "Healing Words: Poetry in the Art of Medicine" and led participants in a shared writing exercise and panel discussion on Thursday evening at Ashland Community Hospital. On Friday, he is conducting an in-house event for the Ashland Hospice.

Considering the common wisdom about poetry is that it belongs to an hermetic coterie of professionals, producing "art for art's sake," it seems at first blush to be a hard sell.

"Well, it's not American idol," said Fox. "But I've been doing this for 25 years and there has been a lot happening around creativity in the last 15 or so. People see the 'food fights' on TV and think, 'There must be a more thoughtful and meaningful way to approach life.'"

The goal of poetry therapy, said Fox, is to give people practical support "as they reconnect to the inner impulses that drew them to their professional calling while discovering inner resources that will sustain them in their daily lives."

"When people see poems written by people just like themselves and they begin to feel more confidence in it," he said.

Fox has found poetry very valuable in situations where the participant has a life-altering illness, such as cancer, or has experienced a titanic loss.

In situations like those, people realize, "I can't afford not to say what I really feel. Poetry," said Fox, "lets them say what is otherwise unspeakable."

Cynthia Meilicke, MS, coordinator of the Bereavement and Volunteer Program at the ACH Ashland Hospice and Palliative Care Services, remembers one instance in which poetry, and the use of poetry therapy by in the hospice's operations, was particularly powerful for one client.

"On the anniversary of her husband's death — and this was an over-50 year marriage — one client gathered her family together," said Meilicke, including her grown children, all of whom lived out of the area. "She read all the poetry from all the sessions she had attended at the hospice" as a ritual of remembrance for her husband.

This client was not a poetry fan prior to her experiences at the hospice, Meilicke said. But it hardly mattered.

"Poetry speaks across all socio-economic barriers," she said.

Some people feel very strongly that the "traditional" elements of poetry, things like meter, rhyme and form, help its practitioners to create stronger poems. The difficulty of threading a formal needle makes the utterance stronger, like water forced through a narrow opening. But many people in Fox's workshops have not written poetry since grade school, others not at all.

For Fox, it is all about the poem out loud. Poetic tools are there to help people more accurately express what they are feeling. The difference is that they are not taught in an "up front" fashion as they might be in an academic course.

"The key is providing people with some tools they can use to put feeling into one's words," he said. "Read them out loud and they begin to get a sense of rhythm and cadence, poems take a shape." The therapeutic and healing element of poetry is the focus, however.

In addition to speaking engagements, Fox is the author of numerous books on the topic of poetry, including "Finding What You Didn't Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity through Poem-Making" and "Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making."

With a B.A. from Bard College, Fox explored the realm of the spirit with guru Ram Dass and learned poetry therapy under that practice's pioneer, Joy Shieman at El Camino Hospital in the Bay Area. In addition to lecturing and conducting workshops at high profile locations such as Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School and the Esalen Institute, Fox speaks at numerous hospitals, churches and other places of worship and community centers across the U.S. and the world. He is also founding director of the Institute for Poetic Medicine.

Fox will be conducting workshops for the public through Sunday at the Hidden Springs Wellness Center in Ashland.

John Fox's website: http:///.