Editor’s Note: The patients interviewed in this article remain anonymous at both their request and the request of the Franklin Recovery Center so as to not interfere with the patients’ ability to secure jobs once released.
Jim Bell sat in his classroom on the second floor of the Franklin Recovery Center’s Northern Hope Center as he does each Thursday, waiting as patients filed in and grabbed a print-out of poems he brought for them.
Some followed along as the poems were read aloud, breaking the silence in the quiet room; others read a book or decided to draw, often coming and going throughout the hour.
For those who do stay, it’s poetry hour with Bell, the Pioneer Valley Regional School pole vault coach and himself a recovering alcoholic. The class could be described in free verse as follows:
“Hey,” Bell rang,
“What happened to John?”
Murmurs first
Matriculated, then
Shouts of answers:
‘Respite,’ ‘He’s out,’
‘He left last week.’
“That’s good,” he replied.
The room grew
Quiet, as it can at times.
“You miss Brian?
I mean, Kevin.” Again,
Silence.
A disjointed reply from
One in recovery: “I got
A thought, but I can’t
Keep it together.”
In early recovery,
The brain is all over the
Place, Bell suggested.
Then the clinical quiet
Filled back in —
“Oh, I’ll send an
Attendance sheet
Around,” he said,
Filling the space.
“Almost forgot.”
A women slept in a chair.
Another left to be treated
By a nurse.
Some, though, are still
Lost in their work:
Poetry.
“Anybody want to share?”
One patient raised his hand, and recited his poem:
There stands the glass on
The table top…
The glass is half full…
A bottle just to
Tempt me…
There stands the glass
That reminds
Me of my past.
Another hand, another poem:
I wish I can tell
My entire story of my
Childhood, but I can’t.
I just want to live
Without any
Interruptions.
I’m just another face
In the crowd
Bell likes to say, “Poetry is the language of crisis,” adding that “It can be the language of recovery, too.”
The Bernardston resident who coaches track both at Pioneer and Northfield Mount Hermon School is well-known in the community for not only his track and field accomplishments, but also for his work in the realm of poetry and recovery.
Bell, who has been sober for 36-plus years, speaks freely with his students about his own addiction, but also about how he found a path to move forward. That path was lined with poetry — not often the kind that rhymes, like one patient noticed with befuddlement. It’s the kind of the Beats, like the work of Allen Ginsberg. It’s about free verse, which makes a lot of sense for someone who finds freedom by the weight of the lines strung together.
First, there was a poem by David Lerner, titled “Mein Kampf.” Bell asked if anyone wanted to read. After a moment, a patient volunteered.
“I want people to hear my poetry and/ weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,/ eat their television sets, beat each other to death with swords and,” one stanza reads. Another Lerner poem reads, “Immobilized by grief,/ He sits,/ A syringe in one arm.”
One poem by San Francisco poet Joie Cook begins, “Is it nice to know that literature/ unmasks insanity.” Yet another, by Bay Area poet Jack Micheline, starts, “you who are judges are unable to judge/ you who limit the mind are therefore limited,” and ends with “you who liberate the mind/ you are the rose of this world/ this is my university of learning.”
The last poem in the packet was one of Bell’s, “The Difference Between Pole Vaulting & Poetry.”
“there is/ nothing/ subjective/ about pole/ vaulting/ you either/ make/ it/ or you/ don’t,” the first stanza reads. “there’s/ no pipe/ smoking/ cheese/ chomping/ cracker’d/ academic/ tweed/ jacket/ hush/ room/ wine/ smirking/ critic/ fool,” the second stanza reads. “say/ what’s/ what.”
Bell asked his students what they thought about these poems and what tones they reflect. He received answers like “recovery,” but also “anger.”
“These are the people shaking their fists,” he said about the poets in the packet. “I appreciate them because they speak to us as addicts — outlaws, people outside the lines.”
Bell originally began to relate to poetry by happenstance, in a bookstore in San Francisco. He found the “Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,” where rhyme wasn’t necessarily the reason for the poetry making sense. It’s this book and some of the authors in it that led Bell to see himself in poetry, and as an addiction counselor since the mid-1980s, he’s been trying to help others see the same.
“Sometimes it’s hard for it not to be roses are red, violets are blue,” Bell said. “I think they’re able to see and hear their voice sometimes. At least I try.”
That trying has been on display in the past nearly two years at the Federal Street detox center — a process that he explained has been “really good for my recovery.” Since the center — which is overseen by the regional agency based in Springfield, Behavioral Health Network — opened its doors in late 2016, Bell has taught poetry to the intake patients, something he was used to doing with inmates at the Franklin County House of Corrections.
Bell has learned about himself, seeing those in the detox every week. It’s been a reminder how it can be when you’re in early recovery, teaching him “patience and tolerance.”
“He’s not trying to make us cry or anything like that, bringing out some bad emotion,” one patient said. “He brings in appropriate material for people in early recovery. ‘Oh, anxiety, this is what I’m feeling, too’ — those early recovery feelings that suck.”
The last person to read her poem on a recent Thursday was a new face at the detox. She shared a poem that opened the eyes of many sitting around her, including Bell’s. Afterward, she shared her thoughts on poetry’s meaning to her.
“In the past, drinking has been my only outlet for anger and sadness and my other emotions that I can’t express,” she said. “It’s just remarkable the healing aspects (poetry) has.”
Another patient, when asked his thoughts, shied away from how he felt about poetry, but said of Bell, “He brings out what little creativity I have in me.”
Some people don’t end up writing anything. They like to sit and listen. Others are allowed to write in another language.
“He gives us respect, we give him respect,” one patient said of Bell. “The Spanish people, we love him.”
His love for the class went further.
“I used to write poetry for my wife.” He paused, then added that he lost her five months ago. “It makes me think of her.”
Before he walked away to eat lunch, he explained was in the detox because he recently relapsed off of heroin, likely carfentanil, which is often deadly. It was his first relapse in decades.
The detox is, of course, a place for those who have relapsed, but Bell has made it, at least on Thursdays, a place to use poetry as a form of healing and an act of creating something tangible.
Bell has been collecting poems from the patients, and produced the “Northern Hope and Everything Else Poetry Book” late last year. Now, Bell is working to compile a second poetry book, to be called “Northern Hope: The Path to Recovery.” He recently provided his students with a draft of a cover, which depicts a heaven-like door.
Before class ended, Bell left copies of the proposed book cover on the table where the colored pencils are, allowing them to create their own elaborate colorations of a potential cover.
When writing and drawing ceased for the day, the patients filtered out of the room again, some for the last time, moving on from the structure of detox and into the free-form of life, hopefully ready for the next stanza in their journey of recovery.
Staff reporter Joshua Solomon has worked at the Greenfield Recorder since 2017. His beat includes health, welfare and education. He can be reached at jsolomon@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 264.