Poetry is a language of comfort for people in difficult circumstances. This was the subject that Laki Vazakas and Ginny Lewis spoke about as guest speakers before the students in Professor Elizabeth Fay’s class, ENGL 121 Poetry Matters: Connecting Poetry and Patients. As employed artists-in-residence at Boston Children’s Hospital, Vazakas and Lewis provide narrative-based artistic opportunities for all inpatient units at the hospital. Vazakas facilitates the making of video poems for the young patients and Lewis handles their written narrative projects. Their work lines up perfectly with the focus of the class, which puts emphasis on poetry as care for the very young and very old. Funded by the Mellon grant, this double-session (six credit) course exposes students to philosophies of care and their applications in poetry, allowing students to see firsthand how poetry helps individuals cope through unique and painful situations.

Under normal circumstances, Professor Fay’s class would have taken multiple excursions to Boston Children’s Hospital in order to meet patients and learn how the arts have helped them. Because of Covid-19 and the virtual nature of the course, the artists-in-residence brought poems written by patients to the class. In their presentation and Q&A, they consistently referred to the patients at Boston Children’s as artists or poets, and the class expressed how powerful this was for them. “Patients are artists,” Professor Fay said. “They are productive, creative, active people who are undergoing something.” Student Dan added to this with thoughts on how impactful it was to consider that these young people have control and agency in their art in circumstances when they have little control. He said it showed the impact of “poetry, art, and our need for art.”

The impact of art was on display in the presentation of poems. Vazakas shared two video projects by past patients at the hospital. Each video showed patients writing and reciting their poems from their rooms in the hospital. Both young poets were able to help direct and edit the video, with assistance from Vazakas. Lewis also shared two written poems by patients and their families, one documenting the experience of a patient with sickle cell disease and another who had lost a child. The four poems described pain through the metaphors of dusk, dawn, temperature, and environment. They vividly described the hospital as a setting of painted colors and the absence of color, a place where they wrestle with questions of healing and loss.

After hearing these poems, students were able to respond with comments and questions. It was clear they felt deeply inspired. “Pain is medicine,” was a line in one of the poems written by a patient, and it was echoed by Ty, a student in the class, who shared that just last week he had written about a similar idea of “pain is art.” Other students shared that they love the work that these artists do and hope to follow a similar career path, including students Dan and Zenarda who plan to follow up with the artists. Student Ronni was curious about how they found themselves in the position of an artist-in-residence. Vazakas explained that colleagues told him about the opportunity since he was working on collaborative video projects. “It’s an incredible odyssey and gift to be able to do this work,” he said. Lewis explained that she was drawn to it because it blended her interests in education, art, and child development. The hospital setting is particularly important to her: “I dislike hospitals so much and that’s part of why I do this. How can I make someone else’s experience less horrible?” Student Haley explained that she wants to work with child trauma patients and asked about how the two of them cope with the difficult things they see and experience in their workplace. They both shared that the support systems they have in place are key, both on and off-site, with weekly check-ins with a counselor and a network of fellow artists and chaplains on-site who share their experiences.

Learning about the important work being done by these guest speakers is just one facet of the many opportunities available to students in ENGL 121. It fits into several of the course objectives, like focusing on creative writing skills for particular audiences and understanding society’s need for literary art to be a part of the work done in both public and private sectors. For the literature part of the course, students work toward these objectives by reading a variety of poems and memoirs, as well as philosophical and medical texts. They develop their critical analysis skills through class discussion and written responses to texts like Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters on Life,” and selected poems from a diverse list of sources. In the workshop part of the course, students read their poems together in order to refine a final portfolio of six poems of care to submit with their final care essay, an analytical research essay that will explore a topic from the literature section of the course. They must write at least one poem based on what they have come to know about patient needs from the guest speakers.

As Ginny Lewis said of their jobs as artists-in-residence, there is “a mix of medicine and the humanities” in what they do, and this applies not only to the important artistic and healing work happening at the Boston Children’s Hospital, but to the work happening in Professor Fay’s course. With attention to critical thinking and creative work side by side, this course not only asks questions of how poetry matters to patients young and old suffering from disease, but more broadly it focuses on the need for art and the humanities in every field and area of life. Whether they go on to work in healthcare or not, students learn in this course about many real-world applications of the philosophy of care and the importance of poetic and artistic expression for the promotion of healing.