Don’t consider yourself a poetry person? You might be surprised! Comedy writer and poet Lyndsay Rush joins us to talk about her book “A BIT MUCH” and the power of poetry to think, process and heal. Dr. Shelley Noland, medical director for the Center for Humanities in Medicine at Mayo Clinic, helps us better understand how poetry and other art can improve our wellness.
Don’t consider yourself a poetry person? You might be surprised! Comedy writer and poet Lyndsay Rush joins us to talk about her book “A BIT MUCH” and the power of poetry to think, process and heal. Dr. Shelley Noland, medical director for the Center for Humanities in Medicine at Mayo Clinic, helps us better understand how poetry and other art can improve our wellness.
This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens.
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Dr. Denise Millstine: Welcome to the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where we explore health topics through books. We're going to focus today on one of our integrative medicine topics, specifically discussing poetry and its health effects. Our book is “A Bit Much”by Lyndsay Rush. I'm your host, Dr. Denise Millstine. I'm an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, where I practice women's health, internal medicine, and integrative medicine.
I'm so excited about my two guests. Lyndsay Rush is a comedy writer, the co-founder of the branding agency, Obedient, and the poet behind the popular Instagram account: @maryoliversdrunkcousin. Her writing has been featured in Reductress, McSweeney's, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. She spent most of her adult life freezing in Chicago but currently swelters in Nashville with her husband and young son. “A Bit Much”is her debut collection and first book. Lyndsay, welcome to the show.
Lyndsay Rush: Thank you for having me, Denise.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Dr. Shelley Noland is a hand and peripheral nerve surgeon at Mayo Clinic, where she is an associate professor of surgery, and she is the medical director for the Center for Humanities and Medicine at Mayo Clinic. Shelley, welcome to the show.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Thank you, very excited to be here.
Dr. Denise Millstine: “A Bit Much” is a collection of short poems that, as the book's cover promises, are for people who didn't even know they liked poetry. Lyndsay uses humor to address the female experience, from friendship to aging, to pregnancy, to kindness and love. On “Read. Talk. Grow.,” we discuss books to better understand health, and in this case, we're not discussing a specific health topic, but rather a healing approach. In fact, writing, reading, sharing, and discussing poetry, has been shown to have many health effects, so let's jump in. Lyndsay, you did not set out to be a poet, yet here you are with a book of poems. How did that happen?
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah. You know, I often call myself an accidental poet because, you know, I've been a writer for my whole career, but had never dabbled in a form until the tail end of Covid, actually. And I think I just, like a lot of people, had a lot of emotions, a lot of thoughts, and not a lot of places to put them.
So I just started putting them on paper and really fell in love with the way that poetry lets you sort of put things out there with a question mark. I like that it doesn't have to be definitive. I could explore heavier topics and just say, what if this were true? Or this has been my experience, dot dot dot. And then I, which is my sort of signature way of writing, wove jokes into it and which felt fresh and fun. And I found an audience for that very quickly. So, yeah, that's sort of the very short version of how I'm here today.
Dr. Denise Millstine: We love it. Shelley, I know you have some opinions about having all these thoughts and emotions and needing a place to put them and turning to poetry for that. Maybe you can comment on that and then also tell our listeners about your role in medical humanities and why that's so important.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Sure. Yes. Of course. First, I'll tackle the medical humanities. And I think, you know, the goal of the humanities in medicine at Mayo Clinic is really to integrate the arts into the healing environment. And that's for everyone, from patients to providers, to patient families. You know, we want the humanities to really touch everyone who walks through the door, and we want to stand out in that regard for the consideration of all of those multidisciplinary aspects that contribute to the humanities and the patients’ experience overall.
For me personally, I do have a love of poetry in medicine, and I have a similar Covid story. You know, I think Covid gave us a chance to stop and take a breath. And in the medical field, I think some of us felt like we hadn't stopped and taken a breath for 10, 15 years even. And so I found a smidge of time during Covid, and I found myself drawn to poetry and was able to take a few classes.
And I think what I love about poetry in medicine is, like you said, I think of poetry as a way of saying something that can't be said any other way. And telling, sharing something that you have a difficult time articulating or putting in words. So it gives you an outlet for those difficult things. And for me, I found myself doing a lot of writing about my training experience and some of the prior experiences I had, and I was writing about medicine and work primarily.
And so that's what I love about it. The other thing I love about poetry is that it's brief and it doesn't take a long time. And so if you're a busy professional, a patient provider, all you need is 20 minutes and you can write a poem, you can read a poem, you can do a quick session of blackout poetry. And so it's extremely accessible. And that can be in person. That can be virtual. So the sky's the limit for what poetry can do. And I think it's actually feasible in our busy lives.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Can you explain that last term you used; the blackout poetry?
Dr. Shelley Noland: Yes, absolutely. One of my favorite ways to introduce poetry to people who are new to it. And Lyndsay, I'm sure you know many people who are afraid of poetry. They hear poetry and they want to run in the opposite direction because they feel like if they're not Walt Whitman, then why bother?
And so blackout poetry is wonderful because what it is, is you give someone a large piece of text, and it can literally be anything from a medical textbook to a newspaper article, anything. And you have them scratch out words, and then the remaining words become their unique poem. And that is their unique poem. And they, they, they have ownership over that. So it's a very simple way to introduce poetry to groups, and it's wonderful to do virtually as well. And we've done it with a lot of our medical students here. Open people up to seeing that poetry doesn't have to be daunting. It doesn't have to be scary. You don't have to be a brilliant English professor to do it. Anyone can do it. And sometimes people are really surprised at what they're able to create.
Dr. Denise Millstine: And Lyndsay, you have some examples of this in the book. So can you comment about it as well?
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah I do I think that is…I have a lot of teachers actually, that follow my work and have used it to teach their students that poetry is for everybody, because I really do believe that. And I think something that excites me so much in the last -- as long as I've been a part of the poetry community, is how accessible it has become and continues to become.
Like you were saying, Shelley, that this is something, not only that people should not be scared to digest and read. There's so much poetry for so many different types of tastes and people, but it's also something that I think a lot of people would find a lot of joy and excitement to write.
So for a couple poems in my book, I wanted to write sort of companion pieces so I would blackout my own work, create blackout poems, or I've also heard them called erasure poems. And to sort of synthesize a longer poem into a bite sized moment. And I think I do that maybe five or six 6 times. And so that was a really fun thing for me to do. And then those are the only poems in the book that are on, what would you call them? Pages that face each other?
Dr. Denise Millstine: Both sides.
Lyndsay Rush: Yes. Everything else was just on one. So then we would have them be little pairings.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Erasure or blackout poetry. So this could be a gateway to looking at poetry and incorporating it in your life. Okay, Lyndsay, let's talk about the title. So I work in women's health, right? Many women have been told for a long time that they are, “a bit much.” They've been told to tone it down. They've been given messages that they should be smaller, not take up so much space. And so you flip that on its head in the poem, “She's A Bit Much,” in which you take this typically negative phrase and make it much more positive. Like sometimes “A Bit Much,” is the sprinkles, or it's the unexpected upgrade to business class. Can you talk to our listeners about this poem?
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah. So this poem, “She's A Bit Much” is obviously the hero title. The titular title of which the book is named after. So I was sharing these poems on Instagram. I had created this account with the handle you read earlier. It always makes me laugh in interviews; you guys are remarkably talented in this very prestigious field and you're saying, Mary Oliver's drunk cousin.
I made that user handle. Pardon me, I made that username as a nod to the famous poet Mary Oliver, as a way to let my new audience know that I hoped to encompass her curiosity and willingness to be astonished. I love that about her as a poet, but she talks a lot about nature and beautiful scenescapes and animals and things. And I was writing more about nail art or potato chips or pop culture. And so in a way, I was like, oh, I'm like her drunk cousin. I hope to have embody a lot of the things that people love about her, but a little more spicy, a little more blasphemous.
Anyway, so I started posting these poems on Instagram, and “She's A Bit Much” was the first one to sort of have a viral moment. And I realized how many women resonated with the idea of feeling like they were too much and that was so weaponized against women specifically as a way, like you said, to diminish them, to keep them small, to keep them quiet.
So, you know, there's a sort of popular meme that is going around that says, “If I'm too much, go find less.” But what I sort of did with this poem is that I think when people tell you you're a bit much, instead of saying, go find less, you say “thank you.” “A Bit Much” can be and is a beautiful thing if you're able to embrace that light. I just think it's a beautiful thing, and it has turned out to empower a lot of people and a lot of my audience to embrace that part of them and to celebrate it.
Dr. Denise Millstine: So, Shelley, many women will have experienced distress and trauma about trying to fit into a cultural norm or apologizing for their bodies and the space they take up. How can poetry possibly help with mood, stress, and even trauma?
Dr. Shelley Noland: I think poetry can be helpful in many endeavors. I think that it's been shown that the act of writing the poetry is therapeutic for writers. And as we said earlier, anyone can be that writer, and whether that's a patient, in our perspective, or a physician.
But then there's also the act of reading the poetry, which can also be therapeutic. And, you know, there are physicians who imagine having waiting rooms with poetry books in the waiting room that apply to that particular problem. You know, say it's a breast cancer clinic. There would be a book of poems there that is written by breast cancer survivors or potentially written by physicians who take care of breast cancer patients. And so bringing that into the specific realms of whatever the condition would be, if we're talking in the medical space.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I love that it's so important to think about the writing, the reading, and then also the sharing, the reading out loud and the sharing. Lyndsay, when I bought your book, when it first came out, I was at my cabin and I literally sat on my porch with a friend and her husband, and we each picked a poem to read out loud. Just jaw dropping and could discuss it, because it really does…they all apply to real life.
Okay, so Lyndsay, much of your writing starts with your short posts, especially on social media. Which is a great social experiment of sorts to know what's resonating with readers right away. Can you tell our listeners about the process and then how they eventually became the poems in your book?
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah, I really did use Instagram as a playground, a writing playground, and an experimental space to see if what I was feeling and the way I was writing it made sense to anybody else and to really start to find my people. And that was such a fun experience. And like I said before, once “She's A Bit Much,” the poem had some virality and was shared by celebrities, which just blew my mind at the time. I was like, oh my goodness, which is why I dedicate the book to Michelle Pfeiffer as a sort of joke. She was the first celebrity to share any of my work, and she put it on her actual feed. And so the dedication says for “Michelle Pfeiffer, you know why.” I just thought it would be a fun, funny nod.
And with that turning point, I realized I think the topic in general of really embracing who you are and pushing against social norms that want to minimize the female experience, and or the expression of that female experience, that became a centerpiece and sort of a through line. So that really helped not necessarily to form the exact pieces that went into the book, but the holistic aim of the book.
I was like this; It has to be “A Bit Much,” because that just is what keeps resonating over and over again in different ways. So as I continue to explore that, I could really tell which poems were, I guess, hitting. But then when I signed the book deal, I could no longer put new work on Instagram that was going in the book. So at that point, I just had to trust what I knew to be true about what I wanted to say, and maybe what I hoped would resonate with people. And yeah, that's sort of how it came to be.
Dr. Denise Millstine: I bet there were a lot of surprises about what did resonate. And since you talked about body image a little bit, there are a couple that I picked out for our listeners to go and listen to that really focus on body image. So maybe we'll start with “Love Yourself Gurl!,” and the first line of this is, “Body positivity is fantastic for everyone else.” And it goes on.
So, I think it's great to be in your head with all these real thoughts, being honest about how we'd like to feel good about our bodies, but we've culturally been really taught to criticize. Shelley, what do you think?
Dr. Shelley Noland: Absolutely. My training is in plastic surgery, is my background prior to hand surgery. And, you know, a big part of that is appearance, obviously, and big subsection of plastic surgery is esthetic surgery and something we deal with a lot is, where's the balance? You know, where is the balance, where it's okay to pursue things to improve your body image and your confidence versus where it becomes, you know, almost pathologic and negative.
And I think there's not a woman on this planet that doesn't suffer from some form of concerns about their body image. I mean, that is everybody. All of us can identify with that. And having face those norms and those cultural expectations certainly affects every woman, all of us.
Dr. Denise Millstine: In episode 42, we talked with Dr. Elizabeth Comen about her book “All in Her Head.” And part of that was about plastic surgery through history of women's health and who are these women making those changes for and to what standard? Right. Because there's nothing wrong with plastic surgery inherently, but ideally it's because it makes you feel better about your body or more comfortable in your body, not because of a cultural standard, or because traditionally many plastic surgeons are male. A man's concept of what's a beautiful female form. So thanks for tying that in, Shelley.
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah, I find the topic of beauty and aging. I explore that a bit in the book, and the aim would be if there's a book number two, which we're thinking about, that it would be sort of about big life transitions and growing older and all of the things that come along with that, because I feel the same way.
I'm 41, which is by no means old, but it's just wild. I put up a joke the other day that it was like, “Big aging wants you to think that 40 is old. Don't fall for it.” Even someone saying she looks great for her age or you don't look your age. I just really want to continue to write work that pushes against the idea that it is a bad thing to look or act like a product of our time.
Like I was born in 1983, there are going to be things that will seem, “cringy” to a younger generation, you know? And so I talk about accepting your cringe and accepting being weird. And I think the same goes for the external and the internal. To really just question for ourselves, why do I think that I should look or be something else? Unless it's for my own, like you said, my own desires and my own mental health.
Dr. Denise Millstine:Yeah, I completely agree.
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This is a nice segue to another poem called “A Race Against the Guac,” and the line I like from this is: “Society tells women that we are avocados: ripe for just the teensiest amount of time.”
This idea of aging and sort of that perfection at that moment, which I'm not sure how many women are like, this is it my body and life is perfect at this moment, right? Typically we look back and we're like, oh, back then, but we didn't necessarily feel it in the time and futures selves are not going to look at this time and think, wow, you were so healthy at 41. But, I think that's the point you're making, that we're all aging. And it's not that we're only ripe and delicious and beautiful for that blink. Why do avocados do that? I can never quite catch that moment as well.
Lyndsay Rush: I know. It is just a crazy thing to sort of realize, that like you said, if we're not careful, we can be chasing something elusive and ever changing that we will never catch. There's an author I love, her name is Anne Lamott, and she has essays about this. I'm going to paraphrase it; it says, what am I just not going to swim in the ocean because of my stomach? Or am I going to spend my whole life, as Mary Oliver would say, my one wild and precious life, being concerned about my soft upper arms?
Not to get too deep, but it is also can be. It's, what's the phrase I'm looking for? A tactic, I believe, to keep women focused on our appearance versus all of these other things that matter. We have so many hours in a day, and if that many of them are concerned about improving, I have poems about this as well. The whole idea of self-improvement can be so wonderful on one hand, and then on the other hand, sometimes I'm like, can I just rest? Like now I'm supposed to have, like hundreds of grams of protein. I don't have the time to do all of the things that we're being told all the time to get better on, an esthetic front. And it's just something I think about a lot.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Definitely. And then, Shelley, maybe you'll comment on this one. Another poem called “Goops I Did It Again,” talking about skincare, essentially, and all the steps. And one of the middle steps is a guttural, feral scream. And you end by saying, before you let the sunshine in, you have to let the rage out. So that idea of inside, outside beauty being connected.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely resonate and I think we all do with self-care now feels like another task on my to do list. And, you know, I was just discussing with my best friend this morning like, the to do list just gets longer and now it's another obligation is I have to rest and relax. But that feels like a work object that needs to happen.
It's overwhelming for women. I mean, the expectations are so high and they're just so unrealistic. But I do think we've made progress. I think, you know, audiences like yours that have come to the forefront may not have been celebrated as much, 10 or 15, 20 years ago. You know, I was born in 1980 and Gen X and, you know, you look back on some of the pop culture of the 90s and the early 2000, and there was extreme public body shaming of celebrities and women, and it was accepted, and we didn't even think anything of it back then. We didn't even realize how bad it was at that time.
So we are going in the right direction in terms of women and all of that. But yes, now the onus is; Now you have to be resilient. And you have to have empathy. And you have to have perfect skincare. And yes, it's a ten-step skincare routine. And don't you dare go out in the sun. You know, the list goes on and on and on and on. And for women, you know most of us have many things going on in our lives; work, family, you know, friends, everything. It feels daunting and impossible many days to juggle it all.
Lyndsay Rush: And the expectation that we have to make all of that look easy or effortless, because we have been told there is value in effortlessness. You know, she's just the no makeup-makeup look. How does she do it all? And I think a lot of us are screaming, we do not, we can't, we can't do it all. Because the all, like you said Shelley, the list does keep growing. But I also agree that we are going in the right direction.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Maybe having platforms, social media, and now hopefully our audience will think poetry as well. Another health experience that you spend some time with, in the book, is pregnancy, and that's really beautifully depicted. Of course, with your sense of humor. There's one lovely poem called “Mum's the Word,” where you reflect on the early pregnancy and then this constant stream of words, of advice, of delight, of warning, and go on to mention several people, like your dental hygienist telling you and asking you questions that have nothing to do with your teeth, or what they should know about the private parts of your life. Talk about writing about pregnancy.
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah, so I was writing the manuscript all the way up…I turned in the final manuscript the day before I went to the hospital and had my son. So I, you know, joke that I had a book and a baby in the same year. What, like it's hard. What can't she do?
And so I obviously found myself with a lot of emotions. This is my first child. I was, according to medicine, a…they don't use this term. My doctor said she's like, I do not use this term, but a geriatric pregnancy or AMA, advanced maternal age. And I just had, of course, again, a lot of thoughts and emotions. And I really enjoyed writing about that. And I ended up saving a lot of those poems, as well as this first year of motherhood for book number two.
And one of the things that struck me, I think, was other people's expectations and opinions and realizing very early on that just like a lot of aspects of women's lives, that I'm going to have to filter out what I take in, because I'll either, and really try to learn how to listen to my own intuition in my own voice.
And then secondly, how vastly different, certainly in pregnancy, but even beyond my experience was with my husband's experience within parenting and those same those expectations of body and capacity and talent and everything I should and shouldn't be doing. Poetry helped me so much, process through all of that, and continues to do so because what a - my life has never changed in that way, that vastly before.
Dr. Denise Millstine: The end of that poem is referring to your husband, the dad, to be the invisible dad, “…to be blissfully sipping on a half full beer, while not a single soul asks him what crib he's registered for.” It's brilliant because it's absolutely true; where the women is getting all, or the pregnant person, is getting all of the questions down to the nitty gritty.
Dr. Shelley Noland: I think that it's important to also reflect that. You know, I think your audience came about around this Covid era as well. And I think it's important to recognize that Covid affected men and women so differently, especially mothers, because along the lines of what you're saying, a lot of the extra duties of childcare that school's been closed, those all fell on mothers and it's not the same. And I think there are a lot of mothers in the Covid era and post-Covid who have never recovered or never gone back to work, if they were working. And so I think that that really ties into your audience. You know why there's such an appetite for this is because, partly Covid and what women experienced.
Lyndsay Rush: Yeah. As my son is one and a half now and I was thinking the other day, we're very fortunate to have childcare. But what that would have been like? I was like, oh my goodness, if I just had to somehow do my job with this child at home. I do not know how parents of children, especially young, young children, moms during Covid survive, how they did it. Had to have been so hard.
Dr. Denise Millstine: And that's one of the things I love about poetry, is that in these brief pieces, we often reflect on other things that resonate with us or are reminded of memories. There's a poem called “You've Got Mail,” where you're watching a man build a mailbox for a woman you know. Yes, she's introduced herself as an old woman who's dying. And we did a podcast on the book, “We All Want Impossible Things” by Catherine Newman.
Lyndsay Rush: I love that book.
Dr. Denise Millstine: This is such a beautiful, beautiful book. Right. But about the experience of being alongside somebody who's dying. And we talked with her about showing up and not just saying, let me know if there's anything I can do, which is useless. But like showing up and building the mailbox. You say, “I think of all the forms I've seen love take - open arms, open doors, gourmet sandwiches - and I add a new one to the list: mailboxes.” Inspired by this man.
So this is what I love. This is a question for you, Shelley, is that you can read a poem and it's about something. But don't you find that this medium, particularly then, often invites you to jump to a related experience or a shared experience of your own?
Dr. Shelley Noland: Absolutely. I think one of the greatest strengths of poetry is getting comfortable with the ambiguity and the different interpretations. And that's what I love about poetry in medicine. Is in medicine we have to live in unknowns. We have to live in a lot of ambiguity. A lot of times we don't know what the answer is or we never actually find the answer.
And so poetry teaches us to be more comfortable with that ambiguity, to have our own interpretations, and also teaches us that multiple interpretations can all be correct. And that's why, partly why it's so great for medical education is we're teaching medical students that this is the environment that you need to be comfortable with. And we also include something we've been looking into called visual thinking strategies, which is similar, you know, looking at a piece of art, for example. And how do we all interpret that? What do we each see in that piece of art? Poetry is very similar. We're all going to read it differently. We're going to find different things in it that are important to us or that stand out that we can relate to, and it can only help us be better people, but also better physicians and providers.
Lyndsay Rush: I love that. That is so fascinating. I've never thought about the medical field in that way. With that shared ambiguity. That's beautiful.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine: And how poetry can be that bridge.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Absolutely.
Dr. Denise Millstine: So, Lyndsay, you knew you were going to talk to us. You were going to talk about health and poetry. Is there a specific poem that you would want to highlight from the collection that applies to this conversation?
Lyndsay Rush: I think on the topic of grief especially; I have found that poetry really was a helpful medium for me. Reading it and writing it. We had to put our beloved dog to rest the week we got home from the hospital with our baby. That same week and it was just…I had such conflicting emotions of joy and sorrow.
There's a poem that actually, it's towards the back and it's called “I'll Hold It for You.” It's really about trying to hold each other's hands, so to speak, emotionally when you're going through something hard. And I wrote it when I was going through all of that. Because it just reminded me that people coming alongside you, sort of like, “We All Want Impossible Things.” It is so hard to come alongside someone and find the words. And that's another thing I love about poetry is sometimes if someone is going through something and I don't know what to say, to send them a beautiful poem and say, this helped me, or this helped me name the feeling or put those things I know that are in my head into words in a way that I couldn't have done myself. I love what poetry does for us in that sense. So it's called “I'll Hold It for You.”
And then when we were talking about companion pieces with my erased, erasure blackout poems; the one that is the companion piece to this is called “I Will Remind You of Your Joy.” And it was sort of when I turned the page on grief and started to remember good things or, you know, sort of get back to my life. And at first joy felt like a betrayal to the grief or to the thing or person, you had lost. And then I had a lot of people come into my life and remind me of the beautiful things.
Those two poems are almost the last two, I think. Well, the last like five and I love them as a set. I don't know if that exactly answers your question about health. I imagine there's a lot of research on grief and trauma and how that shows up physically, but that, processing in that way through poetry was very healing for me.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Thank you for that. It's true, the grief can be really difficult, and I love what you said about sharing poems when you don't want to say nothing and you don't want to say something that's trite or meaningless. I actually sent “Reassurances to save for a stormy day” to a friend this morning. After I reread the book last night because of what she's going through, it reminded me of her, and she said, I'm going to print it and hang it up on my wall. So you change lives. You affect lives.
Shelley, you want to just talk briefly about the types of poetry that are available. And so we've talked a little bit that Lyndsay's poems are very modern. They refer to modern references. They have a level of humorous, I don't know, Lyndsay. I hope it's not offensive to call them sort of casual. They're meant to be very accessible, very easy to digest, understand. They should feel like they apply to kind of this day. But there's a whole spectrum of poems out there. And I wonder if you would just comment about kind of that range and where you also seek different types of poetry.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Absolutely. I think getting back to what Lyndsay said also about grief, you know, I think the types of poems, I think in your book, you had them organized by subject almost, or need. What the need of the readers at that moment and that's one thing I love about poetry, is that some of the types are what need you have at that time, including grief or happiness or sadness. And I like poems that are organized that way because they are easy to share out. And there are facilities that use poems as actual prescriptions, where poems are prescribed to patients that are going through a specific topic. And I think that's something that we need to explore more and grow in that space. But the idea of using poetry to help treat, you know, alongside traditional medicine, how to help treat certain things. So I appreciate that, what you said about grief and the different types of poems.
In terms of different types of poems, you know, the sky's the limit. Poetry is anything and everywhere. And I had a poetry mentor who said, you can write anything down and you can call it a poem, and there really are no rules, which is great. And that's what makes it more accessible to more and more people.
But certainly, you know, poetry in medicine has a very long history. Many of the earliest physicians were actually poets, strangely enough. And there's historical ties that weave through over the years and years and years. And so I enjoy going back and reading a lot of the historical physician poets and finding that, you know, what they were writing and talking about back in the historic times actually still apply today.
Certainly, like probably the most famous physician poet of all time is William Carlos Williams. And he famously wrote his poems on prescription pads and was a very busy practicing physician. And at that time it was pretty rare to be a busy physician and be a successful poet. So I still enjoy reading a lot of his work. But, you know, Walt Whitman had a lot of medical ties. John Keats; they're everywhere. And then you have the poets who had their own mental illness or other things they were facing, like Sylvia Plath.
And so there's just so much to weave through it. And I was fortunate enough to take a class in Poetry in Medicine, which is offered here at Arizona State University. And learning about how they're connected is what really got me passionate about it. There's so many connections.
Dr. Denise Millstine: It's so fascinating.
Lyndsay Rush: There's a, I believe it's in London. Shelley, I don't know if you've seen; it was going around the internet for a while. A store that is set up like a drugstore that prescribes poetry. I don't remember the name offhand, but I, you know, sort of similar that you go in and you have a need or an emotion you're feeling and they prescribe you a poem.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Yes. Here at Mayo Clinic, we actually have a garden and we have a little box where you can, There would be poems in the box, and you can select a poem. And we also envision having like bubblegum dispenser machines, but they wouldn't dispense poems instead, that employees could walk up and request a poem and be dispensed to them. So that's sort of some of the things that we're working on to bring it into the space.
Lyndsay Rush: That's so cool.
Dr. Denise Millstine: Really, really cool projects. Okay, Lyndsay, I think it's probably true that you've inspired your readers to read more poetry, and we've talked about a few sources where they can find more. But we're hoping our listeners will get a copy of “A Bit Much” and look at the role that poetry just might play in their lives and in their health. Thank you both for being here with me today.
Lyndsay Rush: Thank you for having us.
Dr. Shelley Noland: Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine: “Read. Talk. Grow.” is a product of the Women's Health Center at Mayo Clinic. This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens. Our producer is Lisa Speckhard Pasque and our recording engineer is Rick Andresen.
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