Waiting room reading material (that isn't People)

Danielle Ofri, editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review and a practicing internist at Bellevue Hospital describes a recent reading at the hospital and the transformative effects that providing a home for a literary magazine has had on it. Besides her current staff position, Ofri did her medical training at Bellevue and has witnessed the change firsthand.

This very room where audience members now sipped cabernet and leafed through back issues of the BLR, once served as the social work office. As a third-year medical student many moons ago, I rifled through bins of used clothing, hunting for a pair of pants for one of my patients. He was homeless, and his discharge was delayed because he lacked pants.

I could never have envisioned that someday poetry and prose would be regular denizens of Bellevue, alongside staphylococci, appendectomies and myocardial infarctions.

In 2001, the review put out a call for "poetry, fiction, and nonfiction submissions on the themes of health and healing, illness and disease," subjects which, at an earlier time, would not have been considered topics for polite company. Instead, Bellevue Literary Review and its readings have attracted a broad following. Ofri theorizes that this is because "everyone is at some point touched by illness, whether personally or through the experiences of a family member. None of us are immune to the frailties and limitations of the human body."

Hal Sirowitz, the former Poet Laureate of Queens, NY, recited his poems with an absolute deadpan delivery. This was not a self-styled conceit, however. Sirowitz discussed, forthrightly, the Parkinson’s Disease that has been gradually limiting his motions and speech. He’d undergone deep-brain-stimulation surgery a few years ago that released him from the tyranny of rigidity, and allowed him to participate in events such as this. In the poem “Father’s First Heart Attack” he read:

“…He had seen actors pretending
to have heart attacks on TV,
so he knew what was happening.
But he couldn’t get the dramatics
right…
…If he ever gets a second one, he
hopes it’ll be more TV-line.
He wants to die like a professional.”