This groundbreaking project 2008-2010 took poetry into the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) in a series of imaginative ways. Staff, patients and visitors enjoyed poems on loo doors, in corridors, on restaurant tables and on hospital radio. And hospital staff took part in free poetry reading and writing workshops led by The Poetry Trust’s Jane Anderson and Michael Laskey.
Michael Laskey’s specially commissioned poem ‘Treatment’, inspired by the life, knowledge and experience of patients and staff, was unveiled at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in September 2009.
Treatment
Back in hospital again today,
no fun, but let’s hear it for the porter
who stopped and asked was I lost.
And for the old boy I was sat next to
whose affability lightened
the wait in that windowless room.
He told me he’d worked from fourteen
on a fruit farm; how to save blackcurrants
from frost, they’d burn fuel oil in drums
all across the field, smoke it off.
With greengages though, how each tree
comes up with a bumper crop
every seventh year, never fails;
how unpropped branches breaking
will make it make new growth.
Michael Laskey
August 2009
The Poetry Treatment began in August 2008 and the initially year-long project was organised in partnership with the NNUH’s Hospital Arts Project and funded by Arts Council England, East, The Limbourne Trust and Norfolk County Council. With thanks to designers Silk Pearce for generous in-kind support. With an estimated 1 million readers reached in the first year and 70% strongly in favour of the poems on loo doors, The Poetry Trust and NNUH Hospital Arts Project continued the poster series for a further year.
Here’s one of the posters displayed on the loo doors, featuring a poem by Thomas Lux, one of The Poetry Trust’s many American friends.
