April 2025 Letter | John Fox, PPM

April 8, 2025

Dear Poetic Medicine Friends,

Poetry is not a very popular art form these days,

but it is an essential part of human life. 

Octavio Paz

If You Put Your Foot Down in this Landscape

When I write a letter like this, I can sit looking at the screen for a long time.  I want what I write to matter.  Matter to you!  I may be a CEO and Founder of IPM with forty years of experience and practice but where do I begin now?  What is compelling to you?  What do I want you to know and take to your heart about poetry-as-healer?

I sit and think about marvelous happenings going on at IPM.  There is a superb, rich, detailed, mysterious, evocative, layered, creative, extraordinary landscape of flourishing.  There is an abundance of goodness of heart & bearing witness ; there is traumatic hurt joined with truth-telling and metaphor that breaks hearts open; a knowing breathes among us that whispers and shouts that poetry and poem-making are exactly what a person needs to have a life of meaning. 

You may hear sweet whispers and courageous shouts within yourself and around you.  Let’s pay attention.  Let us listen to one another. 

I am confident that if you put your foot down in this landscape you will discover something that meets your needs & longings, that inspires and affirms your voice, that there is something about you, possibly something you don’t quite see, and be surprised that is what others are looking for. 

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

Rita Dove

If you give it time, if we stop for a moment like Rita Dove invites, we will connect with many others who share this path of creativity & kindness, meaning & community. 

That is, for all these years, the spirit of The Institute for Poetic Medicine. 

Given Our Situation, I Want to Say This

As we turn towards and enter more deeply into 2025, it is important and necessary to make a living place for your words & breath, your life & heart.  Those substantial elements are what substantial poems – and lives – are composed of:

words        breath        life       &      heart

There is such a deep need for more goodwill to flourish in a country and world that is making more room for cruelty and hate.  Goodwill is the bridge, goodwill is the welcome place to rest, goodwill is the open palm and the flower. 

Let us remember to bring a flower to others, please look around for times to offer a bridge, a resting place, an open palm.

 These days, I am standing up and holding ground for the value, significance, equality of each and every voice. 

Your voice.  My voice.

We are not here in 2025 or any year to roll over and give up our democratic sovereignty and our cherished ideals.  I am calling on us to stay the course of courage & self-care, honesty & love, creativity & goodness. To use the words “cherished ideals” right now is no abstraction.

Our ideals are the compass of our well-being and the North Star of our truth and integrity.

This is a good place to include this – these qualities, ideals and states of heart – are all expressed by someone who greatly impacted my life.  My pausing right now is to consider this, as sadness and appreciation arise.  Michael Glaser who meant so much to people and to poetry has died.  I am grieving by appreciating.  Read my reflections on Michael. 

Fresh News of the Institute – Programs to Tap Into

I will write an adjacent article to this letter to share specific, fresh news of the Institute, including my “journey to the east” in the month of March, traveling to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.  That journey contained the blessing of collaborating with so many helpers and visionaries, especially Jim Elsaesser and Jean Richardson. 

Please read the message from Cathey Capers about the Poetry Summit sponsored by Eremos Contemplative Center in Austin, Texas, and co-sponsored by IPM.  You can see the gathering in this program image sent to the IPM office by our Board President, Trina Williams Johnson.  Trina and Cathey spoke at this summit!

 We try to show you through the newsletter the wide scope of what we are doing.  Do you know we have been offering The Poetry of Nature for six years, guided by the brilliant hearts & minds and & souls of NanLeah and Geoff Oelsner.  PON is an exploration and celebration of a person’s web-like connection to the living, sacred earth.  This is also an invitation and profound place to consider and express ourselves about the climate crisis and how we hold it, what we can do to change it. 

Geoff and NanLeah, each of them, with so many vivid dimensions, are uniquely gifted to help people bring their words to the page. NanLeah inspires us by writing monthly stellar letters.  NanLeah teaches us by writing monthly fertile letters. This year, Geoff is at times contributing to these letters. NanLeah’s letters are available to you even if you do not attend the PON circle.  I urge you to try them!

Learn more about PON.    

I want to offer a deep bow to these who over many years have helped the growth of Poetry as a Tool for Wellness (PTW).  Cathey Capers, so essential to PTW for all those years, has the creative and caring genius to bring a healing generative touch.  

You may not understand how I treasure the word affection and associate it with great flourishing – I know the great PTW Team does! Their affection, breathing across the PTW landscape helps them to become superb facilitators, good friends and a lovely community.  I am not giving you juicy and concrete specifics about PTW – there are so many!

Learn more about how you can participate in PTW.   

Another IPM regular offering is Opening To Our Mystic Heart Through Poetry. A mystic world-view has been important to me since my mid-teens – and it is poetry, or specifically the making of a poem that is a pathway to being touched by this mystic heart.

Once, a quarter century ago, I was sitting in a restaurant in Palo Alto and a felt-sense of mystic consciousness appeared.  The image and ineluctable tugs at my consciousness was so compelling.  I don’t necessarily recommend one does this, but this is true for me – for the next eight hours, it was a six-line poem, with all the words staying malleable, looking up at me from that page and table.  This captured me whole.  The poem was – and it is – a presence. This was a wonderous, timeless experience.  This is the poem that emerged: 

Susan O’Connell, is our guide to enter your mystic heart.  She is a Practitioner of Poetic Medicine, a graduate of the 3-year, 3-phase PM training program.  Susan, previous to that, was my teaching colleague at The Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.  Susan says “My interests lie at intersections of the mystic heart, expressive arts, and reciprocal relationship with the human and more-than-human world.”  What she isn’t saying here is that she would love to help you discover and/or give voice to your intersections. 

Learn more about Susan O'Connell.

I Could Not Have Known … I Imagined This!

The imagination is not a state:

it is the human existence itself.

William Blake

I couldn’t have known, 20 years ago (when I founded IPM) that it would become a vibrant, diverse, creative, magnetized reality for such fine (non-egoic!) people: teachers and poets, loving human beings, like Geoff and NanLeah, Cathey and her Team, Susan and such a community of poet participants like you.  There are numberless names! 

I believe this to be true – I could not have known – as in my mind – that founding IPM would lead to this.  YET rather than “knowing,” I imagined this. I meditated on what I imagined.  Like spending eight hours with the poem There Is an Origin, but this is a life-time of attention. 

This sounds a bit much – what I could imagine emerged from the heart of a child & from the fiery star in my heart.  That’s true.  Whatever immensity and particulars were imagined, they were and are, within me.  I knew I could find this outside of myself. 

Earlier in my life I imagined this.  I was 23 years old writing these lines:

Child or Flaming Sun, I am not sure who I am

flying myself into this Light.

I don’t want to sound cute…but as I come closer to turning 70 in August, I am still not sure who I am!  Child or Flaming Sun!  You see, I do love the mystery of it all. 

Yet, if I pause – and stop -- I do know – I am that.

Because I am positive and working so hard to shine (and rain!) poetry all over the US and the world, I could contend with the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz. It is different these days!  And yes poetry is better and more.  Yet I am bowing to Octavio Paz for helping me to understand why our situation is as perilous as it is – because of the severe lack of poetry. 

Still.  I bow to Paz because he is so beautifully speaking the truth that poetry is essential to life. 

Let’s work together to make what is essential possible, accessible and manifest. 

Please, can you help? 

Kindness, 

John