Course Details

This honors seminar seeks to explore the interface between poetry and the healing arts and science. In an age when technology dominates our daily experience, the emotional parameters of illness are often overshadowed. The human brain has not changed in the last ten thousand years in its need for expression surrounding fear and grief. We will review brain anatomy and physiology, and correlate brain domains thought to be essential to the creative process and the use of functional MRI scans to investigate these brain structures.

Students will start by acquiring basic poetic craft and techniques to bring music and emotion into language. The history of poetry in medicine will be examined: its value in retrospective reflection, as a tool for teaching compassion to medical students, and as a vehicle for expression in mentally and physically afflicted patients. Renowned physician-poets will be discussed and each student will participate in vocalization of a selection of their poems. Cross cultural traditions will be honored.

The format of the class will be in a round table, workshop tradition with constructive, collegial critique. Each student will be required to generate “in-class” writing as well as weekly writing assignments, and to create 3-4 poems relevant to illness, death and healing. A broad spectrum of environmental, socio-political and personal grief can be the subjects for powerful poems that move us.

An editor, co-editor and graphic design artist and publicity agent will be chosen by the class to produce a 30-40 page book of poetry for publication by the University by the end of the seminar. A group reading at the University Bookstore or Seattle venue, in which all students must participate, will be graded as the final examination. My role will be as a facilitator and guide to provoke thought, to generate innovative poems, and to open minds and hearts to the possibilities of poetry for self exploration in the realm of illness, death and healing.