Poetry and Poem Making at the End-of-Life with John Fox

This webinar has been available for all to view.

Recorded: May 2021

View / Listen to Recording HERE

Webinar Guest Speakers:

• John Fox – Poet Therapist and Author, Founder of the Institute for Poetic Medicine

Webinar Moderator:

• Kris Kington-Barker – INELDA Doula

This talk and mini-workshop by John Fox, PPM will explore, consider, and demonstrate the meaningful, inspiring, and effective use of poetry & poem-making at the end of life. Drawing from a deep range of poetic sources and life-experience, John will welcome you into the wide realms of creativity, especially where the shaping of words can connect to the feeling heart.  

A key to this hour and a half offering will be to show how time-tested strategies & wise choices, your faith & trust, your intuition & love can respond significantly to human need and help evoke a person’s capacity for self-expression.  

John Fox brings a lifetime of experience to this work. His teaching for INELDA is rooted in personal, profound loss.  After 14 years of 7 surgeries between the ages of 4.5 and 18 (which had a deep impact on his daily life) his right leg was amputated below the knee.  His loss threw John into a maelstrom mentally, physically and spiritually.  

Following the amputation, he reached out and experienced profound contact with Ram Dass, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Stephen Levine.  These contacts included three-fold realities:

• A very gradual healing process for himself.

• Seeing how another person is helped, is served, especially at the end of life. 

• Steps in perceiving and then developing ways that poetry and poem-making could make a difference for not only the dying person, but those in relationship with that person. 

While John decidedly does not offer explicit spiritual prescriptions with this work of poetry-as-healer, it becomes clear that the poetry itself can provide a container for elements of spirituality, including the experience of surprise, paradox, insight and at times, joy.   

That said, the deepest gift is that the writing and/or hearing of poems can evoke truthfulness, truths which often include heartbreak, pain, and the deepest crying out.  

More than anything that can be described in poem-making is the direct, personal experience of hearing one’s own voice, which can, as Stephen Levine often advised, “be a chance to treasure yourself.”  Here is where a practice of presence, of witnessing, of allowing the quiet will all make a difference.           

John Fox is a poet and author of Finding What You Didn’t Lose: Expressing Your Truth and Creativity through Poem-Making and Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making.  John is the founder of The Institute for Poetic Medicine which funds healing poetry programs for the marginalized across the United States.  He taught regularly at the collegiate and post graduate level as an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies, Sofia University (formerly The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and Holy Names University, Oakland). John taught for 20 years as adjunct at John F. Kennedy University – first through the Graduate School of Professional Psychology and since 1997 in the Arts & Consciousness Department.

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