Thursday, April 30, 2009

The Poetics of Healing, bios of doctors, artists and other presenters

The Poetry Center presents

The Poetics of Healing

2 events on May 8 and May 9 , 2009 (scroll down for programs)

http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/


Friday MAY 8
Listening to listening

an
afternoon colloquium
in collaboration with the University of San Francisco School of Medicine
Medical Humanities Initiative

project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND


Friday MAY 8
12:00–1:30 pm @ UC San Francisco School of Medicine,
Toland Hall, Room U-142 in UC Hall, 533 Parnassus Avenue, free


LISTENING TO LISTENING
On the words of medicine and the medicine of words

Featured participants
Joan Baranow
Mellody Hayes
Guy Micco
David Watts

speaking and in conversation with Eleni Stecopoulos

Joan Baranow, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at Dominican University of California. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and the anthology Women Write Their Bodies: Stories of Illness and Recovery ( Kent State University Press). Her book of poetry, Living Apart, was published by Plain View Press. With her husband, physician and poet David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine, airing nationally in 2008-2009.


Mellody Hayes Founder of the UCSF Student Writers Group, Mellody Hayes is a fourth year medical student interested in ethnographic research and narrative medicine.

Guy Micco Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Berkeley, and at UCSF, Guy Micco directs UC Berkeley's Academic Geriatric Resource Center, is Co-Director of the Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law, and a member of the Joint UCB-UCSF Medical Anthropology Program. He works as a Hospice physician at Bruns House (Hospice of the East Bay) and is a member of the Ethics and Social Justice Committee for Elder Care Alliance. His published writings include "Listening to the Story of Medicine," "When Disability is in Question," and numerous articles and reviews on death and dying. He has taught and lectured on subjects including "Death and Art," "Death, Suffering, Spirituality, and Medicine," "Imaging and Imagining Pain and Suffering," and "Narrative and Medicine."

David Watts’ second book of stories from the practice of medicine, The Orange Wire Problem, is just released from the University of Iowa Press. This book, following his Bedside Manners (Random House, 2005), is a collection of short stories which focuses upon the intricacies and surprising complexities to be found within the doctor-patient relationship. He has published four books of poetry and a CD of “word-jazz.” Watts is founder and director of Writing The Medical Experience Conference and Workshops held alternately at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York and in the San Francisco Bay Area, an NPR commentator on All Things Considered, a producer of the PBS program Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine, a gastroenterologist at UCSF, a classically trained musician, an on-camera television host, and a medical columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Mill Valley, California with his wife and sons.

Eleni Stecopoulos is a San Francisco poet and independent scholar. Co-recipient, with The Poetry Center, of a Creative Work Fund grant for 2008-2010, she is curator of "The Poetics of Healing" and is writing a creative-critical book on the topic that draws on program events and the conversations they generate. Stecopoulos is the author of a poetry chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006) and the forthcoming collection Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2009). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and has taught writing and literature at these schools as well as Bard College, St. John's University, and San Francisco State University.

*****

Saturday MAY 9
a symposium on the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice
project curated by ELENI STECOPOULOS
supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND


Two interrelated programs, with a break for dinner

Saturday MAY 9
4:00–6:00 pm AND 7:30–9:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street, $5 admittance per program
(park at Sutter– Stockton Garage; walk 4 blocks north from Powell St BART)

in collaboration with Meridian Gallery


THE POETICS OF HEALING a symposium

"Our desire is to create a dialogue between artists whose work has somatic and therapeutic dimensions; healers and healthcare practitioners attuned to words, sound, imagery, and creativity in their practice; and others (scholars, ethnographers, activists, community workers, patients) who study or work toward healing. Some topics of interest include: the medicine of words and sound; healing the social body; listening and empathy; indigenous traditions; medical humanities. . . ." –Eleni Stecopoulos

Afternoon program, 4:00–6:00 pm
John Tercier
Elise Ficarra
Amber DiPietra
Mutombo M'Panya


Dinner break, 6:00–7:30 pm

Evening Program, 7:30–9:30 pm
Robert Gottesman
Robert Kocik
Silvia Nakkach


Symposium bios:

Amber DiPietra
is a poet who lives and works as a member of the Bay Area disability community. In perpetual cartilage deficit, her interests include tracking the orthopedic body in real time, personal fossil records, translating the phantom kinetic self, ¡accion mutante! politics, and warm waters. By day, she proffers information about talking books, tactile maps, and more at the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. You can read more from her in a recent issue of Tarpaulin Sky or at adipietra.blogspot.com

Elise Ficarra
is a poet, writer, editor, arts administrator, Buddhist practitioner, yogi, and Zen Hospice volunteer. Swelter, her first book of poems, won the Michael Rubin Chapbook Award in 2005. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and she is co-editor of the journal minor/american and Associate Director of The Poetry Center at SFSU, where she has also taught Creative Writing and English Composition. She is interested in the recuperative and restructuring capacities of language and listening and how writing and mindfulness practices inform one another.

Robert Gottesman
"I am a 61 year old 4th generation physician who was trained at the University of Chicago. I spent five years doing full time emergency room work and twenty five years as a generalist in a small community North of Santa Barbara, California. Working, at times, with 3 and 4 generations of a single family I would provide comprehensive cradle to grave care to my patients. I have a master degree in depth psychology and I took a two year sabbatical to study Eastern philosophies. I am
interested in the relationship of healing and language and have used poetry and my own essays as adjunctive therapeutic modalities."

Robert Kocik
is a poet and architect living in Brooklyn, NY. He has developed an experiential science called The Prosodic Body. "For the Prosodic Body, medicine is as intrinsic to poetry as music; speech signals hormonal secretion; inequity is treatable by tone; and our susceptibility to words is infinite." His publications include Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2001), Rhrurbarb (Field Books/Periplum Editions, 2007) and the 2009 All Peoples Calendar.

Mutombo M'Panya
, PhD, is originally from Congo/Zaire; he received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Planning and Management of Natural Resources, and was an instructor in their School of Public Health. As a Fellow of the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, he also was coordinator of NGO projects. He has had more than 20 years of experience working with NGOs and has served on various boards, including the International Development Exchange, World Neighbors, and the Center for Global Health. M'Panya worked on USAID projects in Africa involving health planning, nutrition, and manpower training. He also worked as a consultant with UNDP and the World Bank, and with health and nutrition projects for the Community Systems Foundation, and has consulted on maternal health projects in Ecuador and Nicaragua. Currently, he is the director of the Science and Humanities Integration Project at Sonoma State University, where he teaches in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies. He teaches and lectures in epidemiology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. One of his courses there deals with issues of music and healing, including pain management.

Silvia Nakkach M.A., MMT, was named by Utne Reader "one of forty cutting-edge artists that will shake the art world in the new millennium." A pioneer in the field of sound and transformation of consciousness, she is an award-winning composer, a psychologist, a music therapist, and a voice-culturist. She has created The Yoga of the Voice, a ground-breaking curriculum of vocal therapeutic techniques that have become landmarks in the field of sound and music therapy. Her interest in indigenous cosmology and spirituality has led her to collaborate with legendary teachers from Indian and South American shamanic traditions, and for 27 years she has studied Indian classical music with maestro Ali Akbar Khan. She is on the faculty and is the academic advisor for the Sound, Voice, Music Healing Certificate at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Nakkach is the founding director of the Vox Mundi Project & School of the Voice, an international organization devoted to the preservation of sacred musical traditions combining music, service and spiritual practice, with school sites in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Barcelona, Spain, New York, and the Bay Area. She has released seven CD albums; her CD Ah, The Healing Voice is widely played in health care centers to create a healing atmosphere during radiation and surgical interventions. She is a contributing author to various books, including Music and the Human Process, Music in Human Adaptation, Transpersonal Consciousness, and Music Therapy at the End of Life, and is presently working on her latest book: Yoga of the Voice. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.


John Tercier received his MD from the University of Alberta and PhD in Humanities from the University of London. He practices as an emergency medicine specialist in Canada and has taught history of medicine and cultural studies at universities in the United Kingdom and United States. This symposium, The Poetics of Healing, provides an opportunity to explore from yet another point of view his interest in the intersection of the arts and medicine. His work on the cultural significance of resuscitative protocols/rituals, The Contemporary Deathbed: The Ultimate Rush, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. His current research focuses on the trauma of representation.


Eleni Stecopoulos is a San Francisco poet and independent scholar. Co-recipient, with The Poetry Center, of a Creative Work Fund grant for 2008-2010, she is curator of "The Poetics of Healing" and is writing a creative-critical book on the topic that draws on program events and the conversations they generate. Stecopoulos is the author of a poetry chapbook, Autoimmunity (Taxt, 2006) and the forthcoming collection Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2009). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and has taught writing and literature at these schools as well as Bard College, St. John's University, and San Francisco State University.




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