In the town of Bishop’s Castle, England, a peculiar shop called the Poetry Pharmacy is taking walk-ins and giving consultations — but in lieu of prescribing medication, the “pharmacists” offer hand-rolled lines of poetry.
“In each of the pill capsules that you can see, there are extracts from poems,” shop owner Deborah Alma told NBC News anchor Kelly Cobiella.
“By turns, a stone is grown in you, and then a star,” Cobiella read aloud.
“Oh,” she paused, turning to Alma. “That just gave me chills.”
Alma has spent the majority of her life finding ways to use poetry as a tool for good — traveling around Shropshire as an “Emergency Poet” and reading poetry to neighbors, strangers, and everyone in between.
“I was working with people with dementia, actually, using poetry to assist communication, and saw how poetry could change someone’s mood,” Alma said.
“People just need some help to find the poem that they will respond to.”
The Poetry Pharmacy, which recently opened a second location on Oxford Street in London, offers personalized consultations to walk-in clients.
But they also have walls of pre-made pill capsules — that are also available online — that offer balms for “broken hearts,” “existential angst,” “empty nest syndrome,” and are “not to be swallowed (except metaphorically).”
A poetry prescription for “comfort” pills, for instance, is intended for “Times of Great Need; to Counteract Sorrow.”
The bottle includes a line of poetry from Galway Kinnell who wrote: “The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing.”
For Alma, the dream of The Poetry Pharmacy sprang from a desire to prove how poetry could be a cathartic way to ease stress, anxiety, and grief.
“We offer a therapy in slowness and a nostalgia for something lost: old fashioned service, friendliness, even listening,” Alma told If Lost Start Here, a mental health blog.
“People can come in feeling miserable and we give them a free ‘pill’ as well as the chance to talk about what they need. Then we prescribe a poem.”
Alma also wants poetry to be accessible — and she says that many customers are surprised by how affected they are by the tiny snippets of prose.
“I wanted to stop poetry from being intimidating and I wanted to show that it can literally be a vehicle for talking to people,” Alma emphasized.
When she first started opened her business in 2019, Alma was met with a wall of skepticism.
“People said, ‘you know why there is no other Poetry Pharmacy in the world? Because no one wants it,’” Alma recalled. “But we’re finding differently; the idea of it even existing in the world seems to be a nice thing in the middle of all this darkness.”
“It’s a piece of optimism and faith in something,” she continued. “It’s a positive thing, and light-hearted in lots of ways.”
Header images via The Poetry Pharmacy
