More than words: The healing power of poetry
A recent bout in hospital underlined the restorative powers of poetry for one of Australia’s leading exponents of the craft.
During a recent health crisis, I found a way through by bringing myself back into focus reciting poems to myself.
I also had my partner, a poet, close by as much of the time as she could physically be there, and that sense of language being core to our lives felt even more concentrated in her presence under those conditions.
But as I made my way through Emergency through various scans and tests, into theatre and finally ICU, poetry manifested in other direct and tangential ways. The experience (and there are ongoing health issues) was a confirmation that poetry is not only a means of survival and healing for me, but also deeply imbued in the medical process.
The poetics of medical language is rich across all cultures — medicine and health are a constant in any poetry, and this is on so many levels from the linguistic resonance of medical terminology and nomenclature through to the similarity between articulating symptoms, interpreting them, contextualising, making a prognosis and finally treatment.
For me, that’s how I structure poems — language undergoes a process. Not that I want to specifically “heal” language (heal thyself, language!), but rather that I want to understand how in a poem it reaches a point of being potentially able to go back into the world in a slightly different form.
Certainly, in this medical experience I have been going through, I have been remade in some ways. If I hadn’t been, I’d have severely stroked, lost my eyesight or ended up dead. Other things are part of me that weren’t before. I have been partly “re-drafted”.
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The most straightforward use of poetry over those initial days was in mentally reciting poems I keep in my storehouse. Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, Blake’s Ah! Sun-flower, Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, various Emily Brontë poems …
In the case of Ah! Sun-flower, I recited it to medical staff somewhere to “prove” that I was cogent. It seemed to give them a lift as well. But as a poet who believes that all experience and all that is observed has to be at least weighed up and considered in the context of poetic language as a more “in between” than “regular speech” (and thus often more able to “express the inexpressible” means of coping), I also converted what I was going through into lines of poems. I composed in my mind as it was being “put to the test”.
Those lines I memorised stuck and are now becoming poems or, rather, I am now writing them out and re-drafting them. From lines and word fragments, larger units are built. One of the complex things about hospital in general is that you necessarily overhear and see things that belong to others’ lives. Private things which should remain private. And other patients are receiving this of you as well. I try not to hear and see what is not mine to hear and see, and one way of “forgetting” is to change the personal into the generic in lines of poetry. Privacy is respected, but a broader experience can be particularised and possibly connected to your own.
Inevitably, when asked what one does or has done for “work”, if you are a poet you will mention poetry. Word of this spreads around the hospital fast, and those with an interest in poetry will seek you out, or at least bring up the subject. I found this incredibly affirming.
Committed and skilled people were looking after me, and at least four of them spoke of poetry as something that mattered to them in various ways. My anaesthetist was a poetry-book reader, given a poetry book every Christmas. He asked me if I knew of a book of poetry by a woman whose father had suffered a health crisis and before he said much more I immediately identified the book (for which I had in fact provided an encomium). This pleased him, and it pleased me, because it was connection.
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Then the lead consultant of the operating theatre team told me of his daughter doing poetry at school and his wish that he could help her more, as his understanding of poetry was “limited” to rhyming verse. He recited a poem he had cooked up for me on diagnosis and procedure that, given the pressure of the situation, was certainly relieving to me, and I think meaningful to him. It was a generous act, and it was a deft piece of rhyming occasional verse.
There was a kindness across the entire field that saw language as being a means to mental as well as physical improvement
My consultant neurologist (who immediately identified the condition I was suffering) had a group of students with him during one visit to my bedside, one of whom lingered for a while to discuss the overlap between literature/poetry and environmentalism. And I had an ICU nurse with whom I spent hours between things discussing the intersections of philosophy, being a writer, addiction and tolerance. As he took blood, changed a drip, checked my plumbing and wiring and dealt with my bodily needs, he talked about the life of a writer, his own life, the community he worked in. There was a kindness across the entire field that saw language as being a means to mental as well as physical improvement.
Politics and ethics are part of how and why I write. Even being in a public institution dedicated to helping people, I am constantly processing the fact of it being on stolen Indigenous country, the costs to the environment of human needs, the social inequities that are all too obvious in the Emergency waiting room, the mental distress of so many who need hospitals as a port of call to manage life emotionally, mentally, socially as well as physically. Or rather, that these elements are all bound inextricably together.
Even poems in fragments are still poems and whole in themselves. I felt in fragments, but I was part of something much larger than myself. This was generative, never alienating. Again, I have to make analogies with poetry, because that’s the way I process things. I feel poems can hold all of these things and still remain porous enough for a reader or listener to pass through and impart themselves into the whole as well. A poem has to be interactive.
Something that really jolted me into a physical awareness of poetry’s ability to act positively on the body was when my partner Tracy reminded me, when I was rock-bottom, of one of my favourite poems, Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.
I had gone through a real blood pressure low during the night during which language started to destabilise, and I found it difficult to articulate. I was trying to explain this to her in the morning and finding the effort required frustrating. She quoted: Rage, rage against the dying of the light. She meant it resistantly, and supportively. A line I had quoted many times myself came back to me, was suddenly with me. Thomas was right because she was right in using the poem in this context.
And poetry was woven into “aftercare”. During a follow-up consultation with an ophthalmologist from Ireland who detected a “spark” in my retina (which could lead to permanent loss of half vision in one eye, but may resolve itself), poetic language usage led to a broader conversation about language and place.
We discussed spending so much time in Ireland on the Mizen, poetry and eyesight (I had been treated by an ophthalmologist in Cork City years before) and she delighted in the grim poetic language I used to describe the embolus. What’s more, she somewhat levelled me out in the best possible way by responding, “I think it’s quite pretty”. It was. Even something disturbing can be beautiful.
And as I was leaving the clinic, I noticed a poem on the wall in Vietnamese and in English-language translation which expressed thanks to the ophthalmologists there. My eyes were dilated so I could not read it, but when I am back for a check-up in a few months, I certainly will. I look forward to it. And when I attend other clinics in the hospital over coming months, I will have my senses opened to poetry. It’s everywhere.
John Kinsella’s verse novel Cellnight was published by Transit Lounge in 2023. His book of poems Ghost of Myself was published by UQP in 2025.
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