The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

In the throes of illness, language can be elusive. As Virginia Woolf put it, “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” And yet, as Emily Dickinson noted, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –.” In this group reading, four writers living with migraine, mental illness, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and long Covid will share poetry engaging with the challenges—and opportunities—inherent in producing art both because of, and in spite of, chronic illness. Reflecting the myriad ways illness impacts body and mind, presenters will share lyric and narrative poetry as well as formally experimental and hybrid forms such as visual, concrete, found, erasure and prose poems culled from the archive as well as contemporary medical discourse. The work of several presenters also aims to expose, and interrogate, persistent and stereotypical attitudes toward those living with chronic, often invisible illnesses—especially women/women-identifying and BIPOC patients—that result in their pain and disability being minimized or discounted by the medical industrial complex. In addition to reading their work, presenters will discuss their writing processes and how they sustain a creative practice while living with chronic pain and/or disability. Presenters will explore not only the dis-ease of their wayward bodies and brains, but also the ways that the altered sensations, perception, cognition, and emotions of sickness can open new pathways for creative expression.