Gone indie in NoLA

The poem is a physical process, is bodily exercise: rhymes become the mental resting places: rhymes become the mental resting places in the ascending rhythmic stairway of memory. The poem perhaps is an idealization, or a dream of the physical–the imagined healthy form. Yet it does not renounce illness; rather, it reinterprets it as the beginning point for healing. I wonder, then, whether poetry might also be therapeutic. Many of my friends, especially my colleagues in medicine, have teased me for believing in the curative power of words, joking that I should write some doggerel on my prescriptions instead of the names of medications and directions for their use. If poetry is made of breath, or the beating heart, then surely it is not unreasonable to think it might reach those places in the bodies of its audience, however rarefied. Moreover, I joke back, I have never seen a poem cause fulminant liver failure or bone marrow toxicity, even a really bad one.