Health: Poetry offers outlet to cancer patients


How I feared chemo, afraid/

It would change me./

It did./

Something dissolved inside me./

Tears began a slow drip;/

I cried at the news story/

Of a lost boy found in the woods ... /

At the surprising beauty/

Of a bright leaf falling/

Like the last strand of hair from my head./

Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published "Sound Travels on Water" (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

"The creative process can be really healing," Lotvin said in an interview. "Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking."

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, will hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish "The Cancer Poetry Project 2," an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.


"It's always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them," he said. "It's such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies."

On return visits, Campo's patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, "At the Cancer Clinic," by Ted Kooser, from his collection "Delights & Shadows" (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails/

of her clothes. The sick/ woman/

peers from under her funny/ knit cap/

to watch each foot swing/ scuffing forward/

and take its turn under her weight./

There is no restlessness or/ impatience/

or anger anywhere in sight./ Grace/

fills the clean mold of this/ moment/

and all the shuffling magazines grow still./

In Potvin's case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is "Tumor":

My neighbor walks/

For miles each night./

A mantra drives her, I imagine/

As my boys' chant did/

The summer of my own illness:/

"Push, Mommy, push."/

Urging me to wind my sore/ feet/

Winch-like on a rented bike/

To inch us home./

I couldn't stop;/

Couldn't leave us/

Miles from the end./


Her husband has since recovered, and Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the "Cancer Poetry Project" anthologies. One poem is "Hymn to a Lost Breast," by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly/

let it fling/

let it flip like a pancake in the air/

let it sing: what is the song

of one breast flapping?/

Another is "Barn Wish" by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can't see me/

Listening to the rustle of/ papers and pills in the other room,/

Wondering if you can hear them./

Let's go back to the barn, I whisper.

Let's turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose./

Let's eat Bill's Doughnuts and drink Pepsi./

Anything but this./


"They say it's the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling," she said. "It's the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears."

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