Highlights from John Fox – 2025 Symington Public Forum on Healing with Integrative Cancer Care
This post continues our series from the 2025 Symington Public Forum on Healing with Integrative Cancer Care. Each entry offers a glimpse into one powerful talk—and an invitation to watch the full presentation.
In a luminous, deeply human talk, John Fox, founder of the Institute for Poetic Medicine, invites us to explore poetry as healing practice. Fox shows how poems become doorways to tenderness, comfort, truth-telling, and transformation.
A pathway to tenderness and comfort
Fox opens with a childhood memory: nine years old, fresh from leg surgery, he trips on his crutch at school and falls. His teacher, Mrs. Baird, kneels and kisses his forehead. No speech, just presence. That single act—“a pause in time”—becomes a lifelong imprint of what comfort feels like.
Nine years later, on the eve of his below-knee amputation, another act of care arrives: a night-shift nurse in a white uniform quietly lowers the bed rail, climbs in, and simply holds him. Wordlessly, her body says: You are not alone. Fox names this as the work of healing: not fixing, but accompanying.
“I want to work in a hospital where it’s okay…”
Fox reads lines by Cortney Davis, nurse practitioner and poet, whose poem begins: “I want to work in a hospital where it’s okay to climb into bed with patients and hold them…” The poem names what happened to him and what many of us ache to offer: human contact that dignifies suffering. Fox honors that such language can be complicated—some will bristle at the word God in Davis’s work—and he reminds us: poetry therapy isn’t English class. We’re not grading belief. We’re inviting presence.
Truth-telling and transformation
Fox turns to poet Richard Osler, diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. In Living with Stage Four, Osler writes of less walking and more looking out the window, his reality held without flinching. Fox links this to Keats’s negative capability: the strength to live with “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” without grasping for easy answers.
Then Osler’s Never Forget: “words become fireflies in the dark… they burn bright.” Here is transformation, not cure, but a widening. Words, well-trusted, guide us to the rooms beneath the ego, open doors to the inner life, the places where grief and wonder touch.
It’s not a magic wand
Poetry won’t replace surgery, chemo, or protocols. But Fox’s stories argue that medicine without tenderness is incomplete. A kiss on the forehead. A body beside a body. A poem that connects one to the mystery. These are not extras; they are part of care. And they can be learned.
Fox gestures toward time differently. The way memory makes certain moments feel like now. He gestures toward the natural world and the divine as sources and companions.
Watch the talk
Watch John Fox’s presentation from the Symington Public Forum on Healing with Integrative Cancer Care. Let it be a doorway—then share it with someone who needs the reminder that presence heals.
Resources
- Institute for Poetic Medicine: Programs bringing poetry to people on the margins, in hospitals, and in community.
- Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making: John Fox’s classic introduction to poetic medicine, with a preface by Rachel Naomi Remen. A guide to explore poetry as a healing art and a form of inner exploration.