Jumping to Poetry

As our American Rescue Plan Act Home and Community-Based Services Grant Initiative comes to an end of a year’s programing and teaching our partner Community Care, Inc. staff members the APP methods, we will share some of the highlights.

Here is a moment of joy from one of the Poetry for Life sessions.

Institute for Dementia Education and Arts (IDEA)

As Poet-in-Residence for Caledonia Senior Living & Memory Care (CSL), Chicago Scots, Glazner launches Institute for Dementia Education and Arts (IDEA)

IDEA is a new training concept to increase the knowledge and skills of professional and family caregivers interested in “best practices” dementia training for life enrichment through the arts. Using in-person and on-line models of training developed with a national team of dementia experts and staff from Caledonia Senior Living & Memory Care, IDEA will be Illinois-wide and national in its scope.

It is a powerful concept to use a care home as the anchor for the Institute for Dementia Education and Arts (IDEA). We build on more than a century of innovative care at Caledonia Senior Living & Memory Care (CSL). This project allows us to take that tradition beyond the walls of our campus to create the future of elder care. “Creativity in Elder Care” training will increase the knowledge and skills of professionals and family caregivers.

Glazner Performs Caregiving Poem at SPACE at the Poetry Slam 3/3/2024

The I.V. Waltz

(For my father Billy Glazner. After Theodore Roethke)

The morphine on your breath
Could make a grown man dizzy.
His hands on my shoulders,
he helps to lift himself up.
I.V. stand, maypole ribbons
of tube and power cord.
We step, step, stop,
step, step, steady,
our way to the toilet,
rolling the stand after us.
He can sit up on his own,
I give him a moment.
Snap on surgical gloves,
gently clean him.
Reverse our papa waltz,
lay him down to rest.
Trying to look busy,
listening for his death.

Dr. Fabu Carter named 2023 Jeffrey Clay Erlanger Civility in Public Discourse Award winner

Super proud of Dr. Fabu Carter being named 2023 Jeffrey Clay Erlanger Civility in Public Discourse Award winner. She and I began working together on the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, (APP) 14 years ago. During that time she has led hundreds of poetry workshops in the Madison, Wisconsin area.

 

She is currently working with me on the Poetry on Wheels project which is funded by President Biden’s American Rescue Act. We are partnering the Community Care Inc., to bring poetry to nuns living in four convents in Milwaukee.

 

Dr. Carter works on behalf of disadvantaged and marginalized communities through her work at the UW School of Medicine & Public Health Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s Inclusion of Underrepresented Groups Program, where she serves as a senior outreach program manager – increasing awareness of Alzheimer’s in the African American community.

 

In part she was hired by Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, due to the expertise she had built up from our work with the APP and now all she has learned there feeds our work together.

 

Southern Love by Fabu Carter

I want love
to be like a good pot of greens
pick the tenderest parts
separate from the hard stem
wash gently and thoroughly
removing every bit of dirt and grime
rinsing over and over and over
with the clear, clean water of forgiveness
season with savory meat, herbs and spices
and then simmer, simmer, simmer.

 

Watertown Memory Cafe Blooms!

Back on April 27th, 2023 I was the guest poet at the Watertown Memory Cafe. Host Robert Griesel and the group had a wonderful theme of planting marigold seeds. We performed poems about flowers and created our own original poem on nature, seeds and flowers. We stuffed the seeds into a soil pod. We each left a paper cup full of the pods. When I got home I put them on the window sill and a few weeks later planted them in a flower box out front. I was thrilled when they bloomed and even more thrilled to say that today on October 27th they are still blooming! 7 months of green thumbs! Cheers! Here is a series of photos from first sprout to today.

Poetry on Wheels

Super excited for the Poetry on Wheels launch with Community Care Inc.

The social worker, “Home Visit Team,” will engage people with the Poetry Booklets. Follow-up Arts Support calls to further use the Poetry Booklets with participants will be done by the APP staff.

Kelley Cooper, Clinical Nurse Educator with hundreds of Poetry on Wheels poems heading out with the “Home Visit Team.”