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Mayday University Hospital, Croydon. 2002 - Hyphen-21 Flipbook PDF
Mayday University Hospital, Croydon. Reading on Friday February 1st 2002 Poets : Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, Debjani C
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Mayday University Hospital, Croydon. Reading on Friday February 1st 2002 Poets :
Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, Debjani Chatterjee, Rashida Islam, Rogan Wolf
Singer :
Nilufar Hossain
Photographer : Report :
Pierre Bascle.
Rogan Wolf
Before the reading, the hospital Trust Chair, Sue Eardley, showed the poets round. The poems were displayed all over the hospital, framed and sited thoughtfully and attractively.
The reading took place in the main foyer. There was a strong wind that day, which roared in every time the automatic doors opened. Each of the poets read a few of their own poems and a few others they loved. Andrew Motion read his poem about Anne Frank’s life of hiding and waiting and then a passage from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” ; Rashida Islam and Nilufar Hossain sang songs by Tagore and Nazrul, whose verbal grandeur was evident, whatever language you spoke. Debjani Chatterjee and Rogan Wolf read together a Navajo chant – “In Beauty May I Walk”
This was the second of eight readings that took place in South London healthcare sites during the first months of 2002. Andrew Motion’s presence allowed us to make it the flagship event of the series, hoping that whatever publicity it attracted would help to promote the “Poems for the Waiting Room” project as a whole.
A press release had been sent out and had attracted interest from national dailies and healthcare journals, as well the local press.
The Guardian Saturday February 2 2002
Health services offer verses while we wait by John Ezard
We spend eons of our lives in medical waiting rooms and what - asks Rogan Wolf – do we get? "An overworked receptionist and a few nasty notices on the walls." Or, as the poet Kathleen Jamie puts it, we have to hang around in "these fallow rooms of spider plants/ and magazines, where the telephone shrills/for someone else, and the outside world/ is a distant drone, and time itself is out on call". So now 400,000 poetry posters are to be sent to hospitals, GP surgeries, dentists, health centres and mental health offices all over the country in a campaign to make their public areas more human. The project - the biggest of its kind - sets out to extend the worldwide success of Poems on the Underground and Poems on the Buses in London to a different, clinical domain. lt was launched yesterday by the poet laureate, Andrew
Motion, with readings in Mayday University Hospital, Croydon. His new poem While I Wait for You features on one poster, as do works by Carol Anne Duffy, Dannie Abse, Roger McGough, Maya Angelou, Derek.Walcott and 45 other contemporaries commissioned by the poet David Hart. Also included in the packs planned for 4,000 waiting rooms are favourite verses by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake. Some poems are in Gaelic, Urdu, Hindi and other tongues, with English translations. Motion called it "an inspired scheme which combines two of poetry's sacred powers: to be entertaining and salubrious". After a long search, the organisers found a poem which stands a chance of sending patients in to greet their dentist with a smile. It is an anonymous limerick which contrives to find a suitable rhyme for a dentist called Archibald Moss.
The £30,000 project is to be funded by the NHS and the Arts Council. A trial, with money from the King's Fund, the Poetry Society and the Association of London Government has already been greeted with enthusiasm. A Gateshead GP wrote of wanting to “unmedicalise the waiting room. The idea is to show we are human beings". Yesterday Rogan Wolf, an independent social worker who pioneered the use of the poems through the charity Hyphen-21, said medical waiting rooms were places of boredom as well as anxiety, crisis and pain. "We live our lives today in a relentless rush. Waiting rooms make us pause and as a result things can open up and questions surface. What we’re given at present too often dehumanises us as individuals. It does not support us inwardly. So here - in a poem - is straight talk, a window for the imagination and even a touch of love."
These won't hurt a bit... Please Take a Seat …List all the words you can for "wonderful" and remember you are all of these. Now imagine you're invisible until you've counted up to five in Urdu : eik, doh, tin, char, panj. You will be seen shortly. Judy Tweddle Waiting I imagine a whole year like this a whole year of waiting... actually you spend most of your time sitting & one third of your life in bed you only get one call better be ready Wendy Mulford A Dentist A dentist named Archibald Moss Fell in love with the dainty Miss Ross. Since he held in abhorrence Her Christian name, Florence, He renamed her his dear dental Floss Anonymous.
The Sheffield Star
“In beauty may I walk” In beauty All day long Through the returning seasons Beautifully will l possess again Beautifully birds Beautifully joyful birds On the trail marked with pollen With grasshoppers about my feet With dew about my feet With beauty With beauty before me With beauty behind me With beauty above me With beauty all around me In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, It is finished in beauty It is finished in beauty
may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk may I walk
ANON. from the Navajo (trans.Jerome K. Rothenberg)