A small group gathered in the Georgia T. Lord Library in Goodyear to explore an unconventional approach to wellness: poetic medicine. The workshop, titled “Writing for Wellness: A Poetic Medicine Approach,” introduced participants to a practice that blends creative expression with concepts of care and resilience.
Dr. Rosemarie Dombrowski, the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix and founding director of the nonprofit Revisionary Arts, led the session. Dombrowski teaches bioethics and medical humanism at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix and has worked extensively in community health education.
“I work at the intersection of poetry and medicine, which is kind of a rare intersection of the Venn diagram,” Dombrowski said. “I do palliative care work, so I’m trying to keep people alive through poetry.”
Her interest in the field stems in part from personal experience. “I have a 26-year-old son who has a profound disability. I don’t know that I would have survived without writing poetry,” Dombrowski said. “At first I didn’t know what it was called. I just knew it was helping me. Once I knew what it’s called and I started to understand what it had actually done for me, and what it was continuing to do, I had to start bringing in other people.”
Poetic medicine, as described by Dombrowski, is a therapy that incorporates elements of expressive writing, poetry reading, and therapeutic dialogue to benifit patients both mentally and physically. Poetic medicine encourages active emotional processing through the medium of poetry.
“The very first hospital founded by Benjamin Franklin instituted poetry therapy as a complementary modality,” Dombrowski said. The practice continued in various forms through the 20th century. It used to be practiced in clinical settings, especially by psychologists, through the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.
Today it is called poetic medicine, as activists like Dombrowski try to embed it more permanently in medical spaces.
“This work is important and and poets always have done it historically. They have always been reframing our relationship the big kind of philosophical subjects, and we all have trouble wrapping our minds around: pain, loss, dying,” Dombrowski said. "Poets have spent hundreds of years of laboring. So why not turn to that? They’ve probably written as much on the subject as any scholar has.”
During the workshop, Dombrowski outlined the evidence supporting poetic medicine’s use across several areas of health care, including chronic illness, stress, aging, and grief.
“In 1999, a study published in (the Journal of the American Medical Association) found that expressive writing reduced symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis,” she said. “This was measurable, it wasn’t just about how the participants felt.”
Other studies show that rhythmic poetry, when read aloud, can increase heart rate variability, otherwise restored by diet, exercise and lifestyle changes
“We’ve known since at least 1997 that expressive writing can combat stress,” Dombrowski added.
Dombrowski said creating poetry as a group reduces isolation and reciting it increases the flow of oxygen to the brain, assisting with memory retention in aging individuals.
In the context of grief, Dombrowski shared her experience after the loss of her mother. “For the first eight or nine months, I was paralyzed. I tried everything from mindfulness to neuroscience, but it was poetry that helped me start to integrate that loss,” she said. “The research says the same thing. Writing about memories and loss can help people find meaning, and that’s the only treatment for grief that has shown long-term benefit.”
Following the discussion, participants engaged in writing and reflection activities. First, they read and discussed selected poems, including“I Worried” by Mary Oliver and Denise Levertov’s “Talking to Grief.” Participants were then invited to create metaphors for their own experiences of grief or stress or to list out and reframe personal anxieties using the structure of a poem they had just read.
Dombrowski also introduced attendees to the “Poetry Pharmacy,” a project she curated at Banner-University Medical Center in Phoenix. The installation allows people to choose from labeled bottles containing printed poems on themes such as resilience, grief, mindfulness, or healing.
“It’s poetic medicine practiced in a passive way,” she said. “You grab the bottle, open it, and find a poem related to the theme on the label. It’s something people can do on their own time.”
She encouraged participants to think about how poetry could be integrated into everyday medical care. “Why not include a poem in the discharge papers, something about healing, or hope, or strength?” she said. “It wouldn’t be difficult and it might make a difference.”
Dombrowski’s nonprofit offers a free virtual community workshop every third Saturday of the month open to everyone. No writing experience is necessary. Revisionary Arts also offers specialized groups catered to veterans, people with dementia and adults with disabilities.
More information about Revisionary Arts programs and resources is available at revisionaryarts.org.
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