Poetry & Palliative Care: Podcast with Mike Rabow and Redwing Keyssar
In celebration of National Poetry Month, we are delighted to share with you the second podcast in our series on poetry and medicine.\xa0 In the first podcast, we talked with Guy Micco and Marilyn MacEntyre about poetry and aging.
In this second part in our series, we welcome Mike Rabow and Redwing Keyssar to talk about palliative care and poetry.\xa0\xa0
As with aging, poetry operates on multiple levels within the palliative care space.\xa0\xa0
Poetry puts us in our patient\u2019s shoes. As Redwing\u2019s poem says, \u201cwhy not live as long as possible?\u201d\xa0\xa0
Poetry holds us in that liminal space so many of our patients are in. Paradox.\xa0 The impossiblity which is life, which is everything, and death, which is the end of life. As Mary Oliver tells us In Blackwater Woods, and I\u2019m paraphrasing here, we must to hold it to our bones, knowing our lives depend on it, and when the time comes, to let it go. To let it go.\xa0\xa0
Or as in Mark Nepo\u2019s poem Adrift, I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
Poetry helps us grapple with our own experiences of illness.\xa0 Redwing, who is a cancer survivor, shares poems about her experiences with cancer.\xa0 Mike Rabow shares his award winning poem about coming out to the world about his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis.\xa0\xa0
We talk not only about reading poetry, but also writing poetry, and using poetry in medical education as a healing modality.
And along the way, we really felt like we got to the heart of things.\xa0 To the deeper emotions - of loss and grief, of wonder and transcendence - that are at the heart of the complex care we provide.
-@AlexSmithMD\xa0
Links to Redwing\u2019s poetry workshops:
Food for Thought Poetry for Resiliency\xa0
Loss, Losing\xa0 and Loosening, poetry for grief and loss\xa0\xa0
Wounded Healer poetry sessions\xa0
Links to Redwing Keyssar\u2019s poetry collections\xa0
Redwing\u2019s website: www.redwingkeyssar.com
Mike Rabow\u2019s Comprehensive Care Team randomized trial of outpatient palliative care
Look also for a forthcoming article by Mike and Redwing in Journal of Pain and Symptom Management on poetry as a healing modality, to be published mid May (will add link when out).
In addition to Redwing\u2019s own songs and poems, other poems read by Mike and Redwing during the podcast:
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
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