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.”

Awardees for Round 2 of the Wisconsin Medicaid HCBS Grant have been selected $12 Million Awarded to 90 Applicants Across Wisconsin.

I believe APP is the only arts project! Here is what they wrote: “Congratulations on your recent grant award as part of the American Rescue Plan Act Home and Community-Based Services Grant Initiative.

We will be featuring success stories about our grants on our Department of Health Services website. Your application had innovative ideas that we want to highlight for our audiences.

In partnership with the managed care organization Community Care, Inc., this project will offer the Poetry for Life program. This participatory arts program helps older adults and people living with dementia create and perform poems, stories, and songs. Poetry parties at select locations, home visits, and arts support calls will bring creative programming right to participants and families.”

APP Coronavirus Response

APP Coronavirus Response

Poetry Party!
We are custom designing Poetry Parties held online through Zoom for your community. We are happy to talk with you about helping to create an event for your adult day care, memory cafe, assisted living center or skilled nursing home.

Poetry Party is a 30-minute to hour long show that sounds like an old-fashioned radio show. Suitable for all ages! Funny Poems! Happy Poems! Poems that make you want to Dance. Love Poems! Silly Poems! Won’t you listen in and take a chance?
Contact poet Gary Glazner for more info at: garyglaznerpoet@gmail.com

MIT Visual Stimulation Reduces Beta Amyloid Plaques

Brain cells called microglia (green) stained for lba1, a microglia marker (Photo Credit: Hannah Iaccarino, Anthony Martorell)

Brain cells called microglia (green) stained for lba1, a microglia marker (Photo Credit: Hannah Iaccarino, Anthony Martorell)

This is remarkable and hopeful news from Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and senior author of the study, which appears in the Dec. 7 online edition of Nature.

RadioLab writes about the study, "Today, a startling new discovery: prodding the brain with light, a group of scientists got an unexpected surprise -- they were able to turn back on a part of the brain that had been shut down by Alzheimer’s disease. This new science is not a cure, and is far from a treatment, but it’s a finding so … simple, you won’t be able to shake it."

Here is a link to RadioLab's piece on the study:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/

From MIT: “It’s a big ‘if,’ because so many things have been shown to work in mice, only to fail in humans,” Tsai says. “But if humans behave similarly to mice in response to this treatment, I would say the potential is just enormous, because it’s so noninvasive, and it’s so accessible.”

http://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment-alzheimer-1207

 

 

 

RIP Pat Summitt

She was the winningest coach in basketball history. A few years ago she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Here is a story by her good friend and writer Sally Jenkins on using poetry with Pat.

Jenkins gets the idea from an unnamed Alzheimer’s guide that suggests using poetry with people living with memory loss and the Longfellow poem that opens, “I shot an arrow into the air.”

 

That is my story and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project is the unnamed guide. Jenkins writes, “After she was forced to retire, reading to her became harder as the disease progressed. One afternoon I followed the advice in the Alzheimer’s guide and tried a short poem. I read about Longfellow’s arrow, streaking through the air and coming down he knew not where, ‘For who has sight so keen and strong that it can follow the flight of song.’” Jenkins goes on to use Mary Karr’s amazing poem, “Loony Bin Basketball.”

That I had any small part in these two friends connecting through poetry is an honor. Much love to the family, friends and fans of Coach Summitt.

Good Afternoon

Natalie Rose

One of the pleasures of doing this work is the people you get to meet. Natalie Rose is part of the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) team, I had the honor of training in creative aging. Located in New Smyrna Beach, in Florida, ACA is a well known nonprofit interdisciplinary artists' community featuring community programming and residencies led by distinguished contemporary artists.

ACA was founded in in 1977 by Doris Leeper, an internationally known sculptor and painter and visionary environmentalist. Among the Master Artists who have led residencies are visual artist Robert Rauschenberg; jazz composer Cecil Taylor; choreographer Merce Cunningham, and poet Robert Creeley. 

Under the leadership of Nancy Lowden Norman, and Jim Frost, Co-Executive Directors, ACA is where much of the planning and development of the NCCA Creative Caregiving Guide© took place.

It is wonderful ACA is extending their work and vision to the creative aging field. Rose writes about the training experience, "I felt uplifted and transcended in our time together at Ocean View nursing home last week. Afterwards I went to the ocean to write and capture the experience into a poem." You can find out more about Roes's work on her meetup page: Yoga in Nature