Article
by Listener Poet Frankie Abralind
A prospective client recently expressed their strong interest in working with us. “This all seems great,” they said.
“Our leaders are going to love the skills portion of this; they definitely understand listening as a tool for resilience and wellbeing and effective team function. You’re clearly pros. One thing, though: the poetry part is going to be kind of hard to sell to them. Can you help me out with that? Why poetry?”
Since the early days of The Good Listening Project, we’ve had a vision for humanizing healthcare. Still, at the beginning, we were shy about our poetry connection. “Poetry is the how, not the why,” we’d tell people.
After several years of learning, growing, and assessing our impact, that’s changed. We've realized that our prowess with poetry is, in fact, our core strength.
Listening to someone, being present with them, acknowledging that they matter? Yes. That’s fundamental to the work we do to transform healthcare systems and support the humans inside them.
But writing a poem for them afterward that reflects what they said? That’s how we’re changing lives and humanizing systems.
Poetry is human.
A poem does a few things that a write-up, report, or memo typically doesn’t.
First, it gets read.
It gets read again, and again. It gets posted, shared, put in a frame on someone’s desk or next to their bed. Not always, of course, but we get loads of emails from our “poemees” (the term we coined for the folks that our Listener Poets write poems for) who tell us they’ve done just that.
A recent study published in Hospital Pediatrics found that a poetry intervention positively impacted emotional wellbeing of hospitalized pediatric patients and led to statistically significant reductions in fear, sadness, anger, worry, and fatigue. A poem touches a person’s humanity. It speaks to the person’s mind and spirit, not just the ailments of their body.
Each custom poem we write is reflective of what the poemee shares during their session. We don’t try to fix anything. In many cases, the Listener Poet is simply paraphrasing or quoting exactly what they heard the person say.
We’re giving them an artifact of their existence that says, “I see you.” The poems can help people process grief, access joy, and make them sigh deeply and weep with relief.
We couple listening with custom poems. This provides a powerful tool for reflection and meaning-making. It’s what Emily & Amelia Nagoski were describing in their book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, when they wrote:
““We can’t ‘believe’ our way out of oppression, exile, or despair. But when we make meaning, we can sustain ourselves through worse things than we can imagine.”
There’s a strong demand for effective programming to support the wellbeing and resilience of healthcare workers. Our clients know it. That’s why they come to us.
It’s because Listener Poet sessions, the reflective poems that result from them, and the deeper connections that result from our small-group “Brave Conversations” are not your typical tools for fighting burnout in healthcare.
According to the nurses, doctors, social workers, and others who we serve, they’re far more effective.
So, why poetry?
Because poetry works.