Versed in care

We need more poetry in care and nursing homes. The final years of any life should be as enriched with art as possible. When access to art venues and libraries become impossible for the elderly, poetry has an advantage: it is fluid and nimble enough to come to life where it matters—that is, where the people are.

A decade ago, the poet Sarah Hesketh spent 20 weeks visiting a dementia care home as part of a project called Where The Heart Is. Her brief: to create a no holds barred artistic response to what she found. "For the residents I was working with," Hesketh writes: "Language was something difficult. Something they now had to fight with, something even to be afraid of." Her discovery was that poetry could play a part in the lives of people in care homes, sparking new conversations and make the invisible visible. The poems Hesketh wrote are published in The Hard Word Box (Penned in the Margins) and are full of things that seem to define the resident’s lives—spoons, plates, baths—and are written with such warmth and humour that we feel connected to these people we’ve never met.

Poetry won’t work for everyone, in every setting, but it does have a superpower in the care and nursing home context: rhythm. Certain poems can activate muscle memory and create instant enjoyment. This can often work best in the context of shared readings, which the Liverpool-based organisation The Reader excel in. There is also a project called Poetry Together which invites a person in a care home to write or memorise a poem, and a young person to do the same. It then brings them together to share the experience. This project is the brainchild of Gyles Brandreth who says: "It’s amazing stuff really. Learning poetry together changes lives!"

With over 400,000 people currently in nursing homes, 5,500 different providers and 11,300 care home facilities for the elderly, there is real scope for the literary world to make a difference.

The act of writing a poem distils all we are—mind through body through to the page—so that in that moment, anxiety disappears. We become, momentarily, the poem itself. Writing a poem can be a deeply enriching process, allowing for everyday stresses to disappear and mood-improving endorphins to be released. And out of it comes the creation itself, which can do many things: from confirming an identity to making a private experience sharable. There are ways of taking the daunting-factor away too, for example by trying collage poetry (where words are snipped out from newspapers and assembled on the page) or erasure (often called ‘blackout’) poetry, through which a printed article is redacted, using a marker to cross out the words you don’t want and leaving the page to reveal a secret poem that was there all along. Writing poetry in care homes is part of the process of conversation-starting—of listening to people in care—which is what is really meant by bringing poetry into these spaces.

This was something articulated by the legendary American poet Kenneth Koch when he led workshops in a nursing home in New York City. "Writing, they found memories that made them happy and unhappy," Koch says, "and they found a way to write poems about the present as well as the past". In the book that came out of his experience, I Never Told Anybody, Koch gives us some sure-fire creative writing prompts to try out in care homes, from writing with colour to writing a poem in which you are the ocean.

Hesketh’s work with writer Dinah Roe also extends to providing a space for carers to give voice and creative expression to their vital roles in supporting people in care. Poetry by Carers is a platform dedicated to poems written by carers and inspired by the often-overlooked fact that the poet Christina Rossetti was herself a carer.  Roe says: "Recovering Rossetti’s poetics of care is part of a broader process of honouring, rethinking and revaluing caring in our society." This project gives vital time for carers to read, write and reflect on their experiences and connects them together with other people with similar experiences. As the project point out, one of the barriers to care-givers accessing support is that they don’t often see themselves as carers, and poetry can play a vital role in finding that voice. "Poetry can actually do things," Hesketh and Roe say: "Poetry can really help people". 

With so many dynamic projects in this area, there is no better time for publishers and libraries to lean in. With more than 400,000 people currently in nursing homes, 5,500 different providers and 11,300 care home facilities for the elderly, there is real scope for the literary world to make a difference.

Libraries can become mobile by delivering their collections to the people who need them. As libraries are often measured by their memberships, and with most people in care homes being members of libraries once, this is an win for everyone. Publishers can commission anthologies of poems made for this setting, from Burns to Rossetti. There is also potential for libraries and publishers to work together, with libraries working closely with care homes to help people discover their favourite poems and publishers making them available. Libraries could commit to promoting new books aimed at care and nursing homes, as well as providing social activities around books and group reading moments. 

There is scope for audio labels to get involved, too; poetry read out loud can use its rhythm to spark conversations. "It is a pleasure to say things," Koch says, "and such a special kind of pleasure to say them as poetry".