ARTS
Clinical Poetics
Tiffany Carmouche
A D.C. nonprofit makes poetry out of the stories of nurses, doctors, and patients.
Frankie Abralind By John Anderson Contributing Writer “The word tender comes to mind,” says Tamara Wellons, who manages the artist in residence program at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute in Fairfax. In a space on the second floor, near the elevators and escalator, a person sits at a table with a typewriter and an open chair across from her. Two signs read “Listener Poet” and “Tell Us Your Story.” Anyone is welcome to sit and tell their story, Wellons continues. “A caregiver, staff member, or patient: on site, it can be a security guard. It can be anyone in the space who wants to sit down and be with the listener poets.” Schar’s AIR program is a partnership with Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, a D.C. nonprofit that creates most of its programming to support patients and caregivers dealing with cancer. A variety of artists participate: painters, knitters, musicians. It also includes The Good Listening Project, a D.C.-based nonprofit that sends listener poets to hospitals and medical
conferences—in person or, now, remotely. They listen to doctors and nurses, and write poems for them based on their conversations. The Good Listening Project is the brainchild of Frankie Abralind, an experiential designer and experienced listener, who wants to be part of the solution to reduce staff burnout in medicine. What was once a weekend art project got reinvented through his job as a designer in the Sibley Memorial Hospital’s Innovation Hub— plus business trips and chance encounters at Burning Man. While anyone who sits with The Good Listening Project receives a poem, in the end, what they get from the experience is something far greater: the opportunity to be heard. The project has roots in a business trip to New Orleans in 2013. Abralind saw numerous poets busking in the French Quarter the way musicians might—typewriters their only instruments. “I was immediately captured by that idea,” Abralind says, “because I love talking to strangers, and I had this confidence that I could write a poem.”
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He’d never seen a poet busker in D.C., so when he returned home he became that guy, minus the tip jar. He called it Free Custom Poetry. Accompanied by a friend, a folding table, two typewriters, and a bag of paper, they’d set up near the National Air and Space Museum and write poems for interested tourists. Abralind would then photograph the people—his poemees, as he called them—and write brief notes about each poem. But the fun wasn’t just giving writing away: It was in the connection, the empathy. For a long time, Free Custom Poetry was just a hobby, though. In 2016, Abralind began working in the Innovation Hub at Sibley Memorial Hospital. The Hub worked to solve staff-led problems via design thinking: a way to solve problems through ideation, prototyping, and user testing. They might create devices, like 3D-printed hooks to carry walkers on the back of wheelchairs when transporting patients, or they might work on more abstract issues, like creating an illustrated guide to better communicate the importance of case coordinators.
That summer, Abralind asked his co-worker, Andrew Yin, if he would be interested in joining him on the Mall to write poems for tourists, as he’d been doing for years. “He said, ‘I know you really like listening and hearing people’s stories,’” Yin recalled. Abralind described it as a creative way to listen to people’s stories and translate them. Poem-writing frustrated Yin at times, but he remembers most encounters fondly, like the poems he composed for a pair of women who just graduated college. “I got to write this poem about getting older, growing up, and becoming adults,” Yin ref lected. “As they walked away, I saw them turn to each other and give each other a hug, and just be so happy to be with each other. It was totally amazing to see that reaction.” Back at work, their boss, Nick Dawson, saw photos of Yin and Abralind’s outing. He asked why Abralind hadn’t done it at Sibley. Abralind hadn’t considered it. On a day off, Abralind went to work and set up his typewriter, expecting to write poems for patients. Instead, staff sat down. They discussed giving diagnoses, or concerns about burnout, among other things. It dawned on Abralind how well Free Custom Poetry fit in a hospital setting: He wanted to make it a program. Burnout, which came up often in the sessions, is a major concern in medicine. “Nurses want to leave after the first year of being a floor nurse,” says Suzanne Dutton, a geriatric nurse practitioner at Sibley who earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice studying burnout. Dutton first met Abralind in the Innovation Hub, creating a whiteboard questionnaire to assist nurses dealing with patients who had delirium and short-term memory issues. According to one recent longitudinal study, pre-COVID, 31 percent of registered nurses will leave after the second year and up to 55 percent will leave within six years. Dutton mentions other factors, such as patient to nurse ratio, staffing shortages, patient suffering, and challenges with institutional and ethical issues. But for her, burnout was also a lived experience. After 15 years as a nurse practitioner, it got to be too much. She had been on-call 24/7 for 1,000 geriatric patients. “I considered leaving and becoming a pastry chef,” she says. Instead, Dutton took a different job at Sibley. Chance encounters at Burning Man made it possible for Abralind’s project to get off the ground. In 2017, the festival provided him with a summer intern; in 2018, it gave him a pro bono grant writer, a benefactor, and a co-founder. By the end of 2018, he’d officially left Sibley and started an independent nonprofit called The Good Listening Project with Kay McKean, a leadership coach who balanced her organizational strategy and long-term planning against Abralind’s mission development and sales. “Poetry is the how of what we do,” says McKean. “Listening is the why of what we do. From the beginning, we always had the presence of listening: That is where the healing comes from.”
