July 2025 Letter | John Fox, PPM
- IPM Team
- Jul 15
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 28
July 15, 2025
Dear Poetic Medicine Friend,
I sincerely hope this letter finds you well or as I say, nearing my 70th year, well enough.
If you are less than well…may you recover soon. May what we offer at The Institute for Poetic Medicine provide you with comfort, uplift and creativity. Our invitation is for your unique and sacred voice to be heard. That is our mission. Poetic Medicine, in all its dimensions, is our loving service to nurture a better world.
Including the poem Every Day as Wide as a Field by Naomi Shihab Nye, with its focus on hope is intentional and is meant to bolster and soothe you and me and all of us as we are caught up in a nation-wide and world-wide travail of authoritarians forcing their will.
Because of those who do care not a whit for truth, kindness, or protecting the vulnerable, we need the vulnerable strength and truth-telling of poetry and poem-making. We are hearing and seeing now those who are keen to speak up for those who are being hurt.
This is hope. This joining of people is hope.
In addition to the way that hope joins us, I wish that you will find:
Kneeling outside
to find
sturdy green
glistening blossoms
under the breeze
that carries us silently
I am for us being soothed by the “sturdy green” and “glistening blossoms“ and I am for each of us acting in ways that show our own sturdy green and glistening blossoms. This might include staying true to our nature, advocating for compassionate policies, and/or supporting people who show truth, kindness, and especially protection of the vulnerable.
***
A Summer Lull for You Perhaps but Not So Much for IPM
Is it summer where you are? Where I am summer is here for sure. We are wishing you a summertime that allows you to put your feet up and take a good nap, to unfurl your sails to catch a breeze that will carry you along the edge of your sense of adventure, or simply to stroll without any other purpose than to deeply breathe.
Our Poetry Partner funded work continues this summer – bringing poetry and poem-making to Veterans, to people living with Parkinson’s, to people overcoming substance use, to people given a mental health diagnosis who are now becoming facilitators for Poetry as a Tool for Wellness (PTW).
Each month IPM offers an online poetry circle that uses one of the sessions from the PTW program. I have been attending this program as a participant and absolutely loving it. You could join me for one of these sessions in coming months, we keep the website homepage updated with the calendar of events. Check this out here.
Also on-going is the monthly remarkable Poetry of Nature (PON) guided by Geoff Oelsner and NanLeah. Every session they lift-up love and great care for the living earth. They inspire this love and great care in others. PON is well-into its 6.5 year! It is still possible for you to sign up for their monthly letters and receive their poetry prompts and so much more.
***
I recently had the great pleasure of collaborating with Fiona Chang-Foo, PhD, in Hong Kong. Fiona founded the Three-Year Expressive Arts Therapy Program in Person-Centered Approach at the Centre on Behavioral Health of The University of Hong Kong. I have been honored to share numerous online programs with her students.
How exciting it is to show and learn together that poetry-as-healer is able to travel freely across borders, languages, culture and time!
Fiona demonstrates again and again that this international collaboration is true for all the arts. Together, she and I long for a creatively inclined and better world, with people who recognize, nourish and embrace the expressive healing arts.
***
A Glad Return to My Home Ground & Celebrating a Poetic Medicine Story
My hometown of Cleveland, Ohio is calling me as it does every year. I will, god-willing, be there August 21st – September 4th.
There will be opportunities for us to write together! I am going to be the guest of The Community of St. Peter on Friday evening August 22 and during the day on Saturday, August 23. Our “theme” will be:
A Single Line Opens the Way:
Joining Poetry with Trust
to Nourish Contemplative Practice
There are spiritual elements in this “retreat,” but those elements are not Catholic or religious. Please read the description here.
While in town for my 70th birthday on August 31st, I will also bring the creative and healing work of Poetic Medicine to young people at Hawken School, to elders at Laurel Lake Retirement Community, and to men who are residents at the 2100 Lakeside Homeless Shelter.
Here is a celebratory note:
In 2009 I brought Poetic Medicine to 2100 Lakeside.
Coming along to help as a scribe was Annie Holden. By “scribe” I mean Annie sat beside and wrote for men not inclined to write on paper, but who were willing to speak their poem.
Something during those three days profoundly inspired Annie. Within months she left her bookstore retail job – of 30 years! She wrote grant applications to VISTA etc. and with this she continued to bring poetry and poem-making to 2100 Lakeside.
Annie was an early IPM Poetry Partner. After that funded partnership, not only did she continue with the poetry, she eventually took a job at 2100 Lakeside (via the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry) helping with the culinary program.
TO THIS VERY DAY poem-making at the shelter continues. Even during Covid when the men at 2100 were living separately in hotel accommodations, Annie kept poetry going. I don’t know how. Amazing!
In that first year of 2009, Annie wrote the following:
It is a small band of us presently involved in a poetry workshop at a local men’s shelter in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. A fledgling enterprise, we are learning how to choose poems and how to help varying groups of men engage with the material and each other. It is an activity loaded with surprise, possibility and wonder. As John Fox’s poetry workshops have taught me before—never underestimate the power of words and those who give them voice.
There was (and is) a dedicated cadre of volunteers who came – and they were always stunned, moved, inspired by the poems of these so-called homeless men wrote with immense depth, these marginalized people whom the culture labels as homeless. I can’t wait to be there again.
The lasting nature, the generativity of what we do is nothing less than astonishing. This generativity is true for our programs across the board. It is without doubt true that by igniting a creative spark in a person and the way a poem, when both written and spoken, naturally casts fertile seeds, we are helping to create a garden.
If there is ever a question about the meaningful viability of “poetic medicine,” I hope this story responds to that. I could go on with other like stories. There are so many lives touched!
***
Remembering a Dear Friend of Poetry
The poetry community lost one of our most steadfast, true and helpful friends. I mean the extraordinary journalist Bill Moyers. Moyers, known by the general public as an advisor to President Johnson and importantly, with the Kennedy administration, being central to the founding of the Peace Corps.
He died at the ripe age of ninety-one. There is much to be grateful for. As a journalist Bill Moyers was known for pursuing truth and meaning. What he did uncover and reveal came by dint of facts and especially by letting people share their stories. Bill Moyers endeavored to show the best of humanity, and with great good fortune, that included poets and poetry. Please read here how we honor him.
If you are drawn to the A Single Line Opens the Way program at The Community of St. Peter in Cleveland, OH, on August 22nd and 23rd please register and come join us in person – I would love to write with you.
Kindness,
John Fox
p.s. Please consider helping us continue this generative and healing work with a donation.
***
Poetic Medicine Summit 2026: The Expressive Art of Poetry
If you have wondered about the "why" and "how" of what we are doing at IPM, and/or how it might relate to you, this Poetic Medicine Summit on April 25 & 26 in Austin, Texas is a must-attend event.
Keynote speakers will include
myself, John Fox,
and Amanda Johnston.
Click the links here and learn more about each of us!
We hope to see you there too!
Sponsorship and registration information can be found here.
We are very excited about what we will be offering through workshops, presentations, collaborations, and conversations. Community and caring is an important part of what poetic medicine offers and this larger gathering in person will offer so much of that!
We hope you will find that Poetic Medicine Summit 2026 exciting, informative, inspired, and helpful.
Your response to this is welcome. I hope that you will take the time to read the full July Newsletter here.
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