Poetry pharmacies showcase the healing power of poetry

Photos of Sigma Tau Delta's Alpha Pi Epsilon chapter poetry pharmacy.

Poetry is all about putting the best words in the best order to rhythmically convey imagery in a way that elicits an emotional response. Likewise, those emotional responses can have a therapeutic effect. So why not prescribe poems to people who need to hear them?

That's where William Sieghart's idea to host poetry pharmacies comes into play.

A few years ago, William Sieghart hosted a TED Talk explaining how he became a poetry pharmacist. He said he realized that poetry had healing power after he recommended relevant poems to people based on how they were feeling.

Sieghart's work has also inspired others. For instance, the Alpha Pi Epsilon chapter of international English honor society Sigma Tau Delta hosts a traveling poetry pharmacy on Utah Tech University's campus, and they've been working to expand into the local community as well.

Likewise, the chapter had a roundtable presentation at the honor society's annual convention this year, and they gave a demonstration at a chapter display table identical to the one seen below.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Autumn Nuzman (@autumn_nuzman)

I've run Alpha Pi Epsilon's poetry pharmacy several times myself, and the results are always positive.

In one instance, an entire class came to experience the pharmacy after their professor saw my social media post with that day's location.

Likewise, on days when I've hosted the pharmacy outside the exercise-focused Human Performance Center, athletic-looking people have asked for poems about body image.

And on other days, students who are on their way to take tests have asked for poems addressing anxiety, and those who have experienced a breakup asked for poems addressing heartbreak, among other experiences.

One of my peers also said that a student asked for a poem from the "Hope" category, and after my peer offered Tupac Shakur's poem "The Rose That Grew from Concrete," the student confided that they'd been considering suicide and the poem made them reconsider.

Poetry's healing power has so much potential, and poetry pharmacies are a wonderful way to make that power accessible to communities at large.