Poetic Healing: As the hospital and its clients have chang

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Poetic Healing: As the hospital and its clients have changed, counselor Douglas Holder adds another dimension.

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This article came out in Feb. of 2000 in The Boston Globe. It was the lead
article in the Living/Arts. I found it in my archives and typed it up
because it is no longer online. It can be purchased from The Boston
Globe archives.






THE BOSTON GLOBE: (Living Arts: Feb. 8, 2000.)

Poetic Healing: As the hospital and its clients have changed, counselor Douglas Holder adds another dimension.

By Michael Kenney (Globe Staff)


SOMERVILLE\u2014In the fourth collection of poetry of poetry Douglas Holder
has published at his Ibbetson Street Press here, he includes a poem of
his own, titled: \u201c A Simple Nod.\u201d

I saw him in Harvard Square,
happily walking with a friend.
As we passed each other
we exchanged a simple, understated
nod.
Our silence was a friendly conspiracy
a reminder of where he once was
and where he was
now.


The where is never stated\u2014although two words, \u201cthe ward,\u201d a few lines
further on provide a hint. Holder, 44, is a mental health counselor, and
for the past six years he has been conducting poetry workshops at
McLean Hospital for its patients.

\u201c I\u2019d been working there 17
years, and I\u2019d had my poetry published in small journals,\u201d he says. I
wanted to add another dimension to my job and help a few folks out.\u201d


While Holder would not think of ranking himself with Anne Sexton, who
won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, he does invoke the legendary
poetry workshops she conducted at McLean in the late 1960s. Sexton, a
patient at the Belmont hospital in 1973, committed suicide in October
1974.

Nor does Holder claim that the hospital today resemble
the institution of those years. \u201cIt\u2019s not like the old McLean,\u201d he says,
\u201cwith patrician types sitting around drinking tea from bone china.\u201d
That was the McLean of Harvard fullbacks, Porcellian Club members, and \u201c
Mayflower screwballs.\u201d That was the McLean that Robert Lowell, a
frequent patient there in the 1960\u2019s, memorialized in his poem \u201cWaking
in the Blue,\u201d and that writer Susanna Kaysen, a patient in 1967, recalls
in her best-selling memoir \u201cGirl Interrupted,\u201d now a major motion
picture.

Today, Holder says, the members of his poetry groups are more likely to be the homeless \u201c coming in with a bit of doggerel.\u201d


He runs two workshops, one on Thursday afternoons for patients in the
hospital\u2019s open-ward program, which meets in a converted Victorian
mansion, and other Friday evenings for patients on two locked wards
where Holder works. Neither is open to an outside visitor.




But whether in the mansion or in the more institutional setting of the
locked ward, Holder says, \u201c I try to sort of have a coffeehouse
atmosphere. We\u2019ll have a round of applause when some reads a poem.\u201d

Of course it doesn\u2019t always work out as planned.

Holder remembers reading Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl\u201d at his very first workshop.


\u201cI was pretty enthusiastic then, and a bit naïve,\u201d he says. I thought
they\u2019d like it. I saw the poem\u2014with its lament about the \u201cbest minds of
his generation lost to madness\u201d\u2014as a haunting cry that would be a
catalyst for discussion.\u201d

And he says with some self-deprecation, \u201c I thought they\u2019d think of me as, \u201c Hey, this guy knows where I am coming from.\u201d


Instead , \u201cthey were angry and one of them walked out,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd
one of them told me: \u201cWhy do I have to hear this? I live with it.\u201d


Another time, Holder says, a young woman became hysterical and ran out
when he read a poem of his own about a kosher butcher in Brookline.


\u201cIt turned out the young woman had a painful experience in her life,
which she associated with chickens, and she couldn\u2019t take it,\u201d Holder
says. \u201c I had a lot of explaining to do with the clinical staff.\u201d

\u201cYou never know,\u201d he adds, \u201cwhen you might hit a vein.\u201d


The problem is compounded, Holder says, by the fact that today\u2019s
hospital stays tend to be shorter\u2014a week or two instead of several
months. \u201cYou don\u2019t always know what to expect,\u201d he says.

It also means that the workshops aren\u2019t quite they were in Sexton\u2019s day.


\u201cI get in their face about it,\u201d Holder says. \u201c I\u2019ll go around to the
rooms in my wards and ask: \u201cAre you coming to the poetry group tonight?\u2019


\u201cAnd sometimes, I\u2019ll have a doctor or another staff person tell me
that so-and-so is a well-known writer, so I\u2019ll make a special effort to
get them to come.\u201d

A number of poems written by patients in
these workshops have been published\u2014usually anonymously in the now
defunct Boston Poet and other small poetry magazines. But not in his own
magazine, which shares the name of his small press, Holder says,
because that would violate hospital policy.

Because he believes
that poetry can play a healing role, Holder started Ibbetson Street
Press, out of house in Somerville\u2014naming it after the street where he
lives with his wife, Dianne Robitaille, a poet and geriatric nurse.


Holder, who got a master\u2019s degree in literature from Harvard\u2019s
extension school while working at McLean, has been publishing his poetry
in small magazines and especially Spare Change, the monthly journal for
the homeless. \u201cI write a lot about homelessness and mental health
problems.\u201d

Starting a small press to publish local poets, Holder says, was \u201c a way to get connected.\u201d


The most recent issue\u201438 pages on 81/2 by 11 paper with a paper cover,
bound with black slip plastic binder\u2014sells for $4 and contains 40
poems; an interview with Ed Galing, an elderly small press poet; and
several reviews.

Among the poets are a number of first-time
writers and others described as \u201cmainstays\u201d of Holder\u2019s press. There are
also two professors of literature\u2014John Hildebidle, who teaches at MIT,
and Robert K. Johnson, who teaches at Suffolk University\u2014as well as Don
DiVecchio, the poetry editor of Spare Change.

Ibbetson Street
Press has also published a number of chapbooks, and old English term for
a small collection of poems or ballads, most recently: Poems From 42nd
Street\u201d by Rufus Goodwin, a poet and journalist who lives in Boston; and
a collection called \u201c Poems for the Poet, the Working Man and the
Downtrodden,\u201d by A.D. Winans, who published a small poetry magazine in
San Francisco.

\u201cWhat distinguishes our journal,\u201d says Holder,
\u201cis that it contains poems that anyone can read.\u201d They deal \u201cwith
everyday life. There\u2019s not a lot of arcane words or funny verse
patterns.\u201d Anyone, he adds,\u201d can get something out of them.\u201d



The following is a poem written by an anonymous participant in one of Douglas Holder\u2019s poetry workshops at McLean Hospital:


When The Hunter Arrived.

When the hunter arrived
at the place
where it was unfamiliar
he became the prey
stalked by everything
ever unleashed
by the conspiracy of creation.
to the edge he cantered
idols toppling by his sides
until at last
those that were against him
trusted his insight into their
essential nature
Finally pushing a hole through
God\u2019s left eye
past what had separately
designed the limitless war
streaming beyond infinity.

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