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monthly reflection on current Lapidus-related issues

April 2010

what happened in Warwick

When you see a wheel for the first time it seems astonishing that is has not been thought of before. In this case the wheel was a forum for poetry and medicine to meet, debate, argue, fuse, turn round...see from a different perspective...and move.

James Naughtie, the broadcaster and journalist, had something to say about this is his introduction to the poets who had written for the Hippocrates Poetry Prize. This was the first International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine in Warwick.

Dannie Abse, the poet who was a doctor, read poems treating the treated, the mortal, the voice of the soul, the detail of a day's work.

Poets who won prizes read of corridors, echos, stitches on skin, eye-sight and in-sight, a man who lived and worked with dedication to healing and the limitations of human capacity. One spoke to a father-in-law whose life is close to the end. One wrote in the voice of Catullus - and his words were on film from Oxford. Lapidus recent Chair Wendy French was winner of the NHS category - for poets associated through work with the NHS - and New Zealand poet C. K. Stead winner of the Open category.

Warwick University is the crucible that contained the poetry and the medicine. Organisers of this symposium were Donald Singer, a professor of clinical pharmacology who is interested in vascular disease, better management of blood pressure and new systems to promote safety in prescribing (and presumably poetry) and Michael Hulse, who teaches poetry in the Writing Programme and edits The Warwick Review with a team of student editors (and is presumably interested in medicine). Warwick are fortunate in having the Institute of Advanced Study, which likes to bring together different disciplines - a rare approach in the oft-segregated world of academe.

People came from around the UK - and a few from rest of the world (Nigeria, South Africa, United Arab Emirates) - though not as many as could have come. Next time.

The heartbeat beneath the surface of patient care was heard in the winning poems and in poems by survivors of mental health care, by young people with HIV in South Africa and by people with cancer and those close to them in Gloucestershire.

Attendees were invited to consider William Carlos Williams' attempts to reach 'surgical' clarity in his poems, working as GP in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he delivered over 2000 babies but whose identity as a poet was lived out more in the literary circles of New York with friends such as Ezra Pound.

The question 'What's wrong with you?' replaced with 'What happened to you and how did you survive?' was a theme of Alan Beattie's rich presentation on metaphors of movement. People experiencing mental health treatment were heard through diverse poems and identified as both 'mad travellers' and 'cartographers' from alternative perspectives.

Brenda Read-Brown talked about working collaboratively with people in an oncology hospital to create poems. She engages people in conversation in waiting rooms and on the wards and together they find the poem that people want to write. Cheryl Moskowitz and Wendy French described a forthcoming project working with people with heart conditions in London hospitals. What does your heart mean to you?
© F Hamilton