Footnote! My work is performing and creating poetry with people living with dementia. In college I studied psychobiology and began writing poetry. Here is a link to a PBS News Hour special on the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.
My paper “Dementia Arts Mapping: observational methods for documenting impacts of poetry and recreation in care settings,” co-written with Dan Kaplan and published in “Arts & Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice,” was directly inspired by Ramon Santiago Cajal and his deep looking. Here is the paper.
Creativity in Elder Care
Training Medical Students
in the Use of Creative Expression to Improve Elder Care
“The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients as the physician sees from day to day… This, in the end, comes perhaps to be the occupation of the physician after a lifetime of careful listening.”
-William Carlos Williams Here is a link to Arts-in-Medicine
The lacework of charcoal line branches Resembled axons, and dendrites
Floating inside my head.
As if the outer workings of the world
Melded with the inner workings of my brain I’ve never been able to write this.
This moment of blending
Of all being one
Neurons, stars, twilight, universe
The way water collects
in the crannies of a black oak tree
and waits there for a
child’s imagination,
to still it into a cistern,
to be drunk on a journey,
to the place where
a mind can take root.
Footnote: I taught an art-in-medicine class at University of Arizona Medical School and that led me to being able to hold a brain. That led me to being published in Journal of American Medicine. Here is a link to the article.
Quote from the article “…By asking participants to join voices in repeating a line of poetry participants are encouraged to shed some measure of isolation, tap established long-term memories, and possibly nurture short-term memory through auditory sense memory pathways of the primary auditory cortex and echoic memory storage pathways involving prefrontal cortex regions.”