By Katie Hynes, St. Barnabas Medical Center Lit & Med Volunteer
“Poets don’t get calls in the middle of the night,” joked Cat Doty, poet, teacher, and author of Momentum (CavanKerry 2004), before a crowd of medical students attending an afternoon poetry workshop at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, NJ on April 12. “Unless perhaps it’s a fellow poet who’s just finished something.”
After program coordinator Phyllis DeJesse, D.M.H., R.N., Assistant Director of the Medical Humanities Program at Drew University, introduced St. Barnabas’ inaugural “Poetry Heals” session, co-sponsored by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and CavanKerry Press as part of a statewide April/May series, Doty used humor to make reading and writing poetry accessible, relevant, and fun.
In just an hour, attendees listened and responded to poems by Sharon Olds, Jane Kenyon, Conrad Hilberry, Billy Collins, and Doty herself, then created two group poems inspired by the readings.
Ranging in tone from humorous (Olds’ “Diagnosis”; Collins’ “Litany”) to conflicted and frightened (Hilberry’s “The Woman who was Ready to Die”) to brave (Doty’s “Grandma”) to accepting (Kenyon’s “Let Evening Come”), the selections dealt with realities medical professionals confront daily, like diagnosing critically ill patients. In Hilberry’s poem, for example, “The doctor circled around / the news, but [the patient] had guessed it.” In Olds’ piece, “the doctor said, / What your daughter has / is called a sense of humor.”
Doty acknowledged that while poets have time to pick and choose the perfect words and employ stylistic devices like simile and metaphor, doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff are often put on the spot. Questions that lingered after the discussion: Did the poems accurately reflect doctor-patient interactions? What is it like to face someone who’s suffering, and how can you offer compassion and kindness?
When the session ended, Doty expressed “great surprise and joy” at what the students had written.
“At first everyone was standoffish,” admitted medical student Diya Goorah. “But by the end most embraced the experience.” Explaining that her busy schedule doesn’t often afford her time to write, Goorah added that the workshop “gave me a second to stop and think about the big picture. We talk to patients all day but it’s so routine that you don’t often step back from it and think about how you feel.”
Robert Clarkgerman, a medical humanities graduate student at Drew, described the workshop’s ideal outcome: “Participants take the humanistic, qualitative approach to what we talked about today and put that into practice with their own patients. They come to an understanding of where poetry fits into the medical field. It’s not all about lab results.”
Indeed—as Doty described the work of a poet, it’s often about “reaching for the unsayable and getting as close to saying it as possible.”
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