Dementia Positive

  • Home
  • About us
    • John
    • Kate
    • our philosophy
    • our publications >
      • Dementia Positive - about the book
      • Dementia Positive book events
    • contact
    • our activities >
      • our stuff online
      • current projects >
        • Kate's PhD >
          • What's it all about?
          • Why am I doing this?
          • How this relates to other things
          • Flow
          • PhD blog: felt experience
        • poetry in Herefordshire
      • recent events
      • reading >
        • The Little Girl in the Radiator
        • Love, Loss and Laughter: Seeing Alzheimer's Differently
        • Making is Connecting
        • Valuing Older People
      • film & theatre
      • our website
      • writing
      • thinking up new ideas
      • previous projects
  • What we want you to know about
    • hidden doors
    • forthcoming events
    • meet new people
    • arts ideas & resources >
      • reading to people with dementia
      • Chocolate Rain
    • interesting organisations
    • our favourite books
    • stuff online
    • downloads
  • Can we help you?
  • Blog
  • PhD sources
  • our stuff online
  • CC front page
  • New Page
 

Picture
READING POETRY & PROSE

For some years now
The Reader Organization in Liverpool under its ‘Get Into Reading’ scheme, led by Katie Clark, has been running very successful poetry-reading sessions with people with dementia. These are a mixture of reading to and with people, and poetry has been found to be more suitable than prose because of the emphasis on rhythm and rhyme and the speaking voice, and the encapsulation of an experience in one short span of language.

There are articles by John and Katie on the scheme in the Journal of Dementia Care issues for November/December 2008 and September/October 2010.

There are also training courses offered, and two anthologies available: ‘A Little Aloud’ (poetry and prose) and ‘Poems to Take Home’. You can find out more on their website
.

We have recently come across an international organization with similar aims. It is called the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.
 This is a highly developed organization too, but they deal almost entirely with classic poems to stir the memory of participants, whereas Katie uses poems from all periods. They publish their own anthology.

John and his poets in Herefordshire have been combining poetry reading with writing down people’s words and making poems from them. They find that sharing verse can often stimulate people to be creative in their speech.