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In one of the poems in his book Without, the New Hampshire-based poet and essayist Donald Hall describes how, early in the treatment of his wife's cancer, he made his way each morning
among gangways, elevators,
and nurses' pods to Jane's room
to interrogate the grave helpers
who tended her through the night
while the ship's massive engines
kept its propellers turning.
Hall came to Lewiston and Portland in November, as the guest of the Maine Humanities Council, to read from that book, to talk with his many fans (including some just learning to read with the help of his stories), and to meet some of the people on the decks and in the engine rooms of that vast ship, the modern hospital. The notion of poets and physical therapists, essayists and anesthesiologists finding common ground to talk about their respective pursuits is an unusual one in our culture. Many of us inhabit specialized worlds. As the celebrated scholar who is the central character in Margaret Edson's play W;t discovers, the fact that she has devoted a lifetime to editing John Donne means little to the highly trained specialists who care for her through her chemotherapy and she knows nothing of their world, either. Both the play and Hall's poetry are among the rich array of readings that have been part of the Council's statewide program Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care. Funded by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as by other generous donors, the seminars will be offered in 20 Maine hospitals, from
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| Writer Donald Hall with participants at the recent Literature & Medicine conference |
Caribou to York, beginning in January 2001. The idea is deceptively simple: bring together in one room a group of health care professionals – including nurses, physicians, therapists, administrators, hospital trustees – and ask them to read and discuss a list of imaginative works that deal with the issues of health and healing. The results have been extraordinary. Participants quickly draw from their own experience and reflect on the ways in which, for all its marvels, highly technological modern medicine has separated patient and caregiver. Some of them say afterwards they have learned how to listen better. They also find themselves talking in new ways to their own colleagues – people they may see every day but have no personal contact with in our highly specialized and bureaucratic health care system. (For more about these seminars, see The Humanities Interview). As part of the Literature & Medicine project, Hall spoke at Bates College to a conference for 75 health care providers and administrators, representing more than half of Maine's hospitals. He read from the poetry of his late wife, Jane Kenyon and from his own poetry – a calm, detailed, frank, and utterly devastating account of facing the death of a beloved partner. He also read before an overflow audience of the general public at Portland's State Street Church. And he found time to visit with participants of the Maine Humanities Council's New Books/New Readers program from Skowhegan. They are using two of his prose works, The Man Who Lived Alone and The Ox-Cart Man, in this reading discussion group for adult new readers.
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