“Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them,” Dennis Gabor once said. It’s a brilliant mental health tool because reading and writing poetry can enhance people’s lives in many unexpectedly beautiful ways.
The poet Deborah Alma probably knows this better than anyone else. After many years of prescribing poems as cures from the 1970s ambulance at festivals, conferences, hospitals and care settings, libraries and schools, the woman has opened the world’s first Poetry Pharmacy in the UK.
More info: Poetry Pharmacy
Deborah Alma opened the world’s first ever Poetry Pharmacy in which, instead of sleeping pills and multivitamins, customers will be offered poetry prescriptions
Deborah, together with Dr James Sheard, has been dispensing poetry since 2011. They did so in a very creative and quite unusual way: dressed in white coats with stethoscopes from the back of a vintage ambulance called the Emergency Poet.
“The whole impetus for that project was to be a vehicle (pun intended) for poetry to be delivered to people who don’t usually encounter it,” Deborah explained. “To be inviting and not intimidating, to counter the widely held perception that poetry is ‘difficult, obscure and not for the likes of me,'” she added.
Yet with time, as a middle-aged woman, she was getting a bit old for driving around, therefore, she came up with the idea of opening a more permanent base—the world’s first ever Poetry Pharmacy.
“The Poetry Pharmacy was a way for us to park up the ambulance and bring the therapeutic effects of poetry under one roof, with an emphasis on well-being and inclusivity,” the woman said.
Hidden in the heart of busy London, prescriptions have a little poetic twist. In this one-of-a-kind pharmacy, people can find very different medicine: a balm for broken hearts, some Christmas spirit, pills of joy, or a social media detox. Each tiny glass bottle contains colorful capsules with poetic extract on paper. They are not to be swallowed (except metaphorically) and promise to lift the spirits for everyone.
No bitter pills, no adverse reactions, these unique poetic extracts are not to be swallowed, except metaphorically
Deborah believes that poetry can do so much to match or alter a mood and to assist in so many ways with people’s good mental health.
“My long term mission has been to bypass the gatekeepers and bring poetry to more people in playful and engaging ways; and I couldn’t have wished for a better place to do it. With the generous support of Lush, now poetry will be on the most famous shopping street in the world!,” she said immediately after her first Poetry Pharmacy opening.
This unique pharmacy store’s shelves are filled with thousands of books in order of emotions—words for love, comfort, calm—and tiny bottles of ‘Poemcetamol,’ capsules containing carefully written scrolls for everything from exhaustion to existential angst.
The customers can also find something for their ‘darker’ side, such as Darknesse: extract of night; for howling to the moon and the love of the unlit. Or, they could just simply be prescribed good coffee and cake in the Dispensary Coffee Shop.
“Whether you are suffering from the stresses of the modern world or the pain of a broken heart or simply need a tonic for the spirits, the Poetry Pharmacy has a poetic remedy for you,” read the Lush press release.
Deborah noted that there’s something that poetry does that no other art can quite do.
“It goes very quickly to the heart of something… as though speaking intimately from one person to another, very, very directly,” she explained.
Deborah Alma and Dr James Sheard began dispensing poetry in 2011 from the back of their vintage ambulance at festivals, conferences, hospitals and care settings, libraries and schools
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved books and reading—especially poetry. It always somehow felt to me that, heart to heart, we all speak the same language.
When I saw Deborah’s Poetry Pharmacy for the first time, I couldn’t help myself but smile—what a wonderful idea!
There are several researchers who point to poetry’s remarkable ability to not only decrease feelings of fear, sadness, anger, or worry, and increase empathy, but also to improve the quality of life and reduce symptoms of trauma. Therefore, Deborah’s prescriptions will definitely help thousands of people.
People on the internet where overwhelmed by the creative idea of prescriptions for the soul
