ELOISE KLEIN HEALY
In 2013, a few months after being named the first poet laureate of Los Angeles County, celebrated lesbian poet and literary legend Eloise Klein Healy suffered a case of viral encephalitis. The damage to her brain’s left temporal lobe resulted in Wernicke’s aphasia, a breakdown in the symbol system of language. “It was a painful thing,” says Healy, author of nine books of poetry. “I was poet laureate, and then I lost my mind.”
Years of speech therapy helped the 77-year-old Sherman Oaks resident speak and write again and led to 2018’s “Another Phase,” a book of five-line poems that began as a focusing exercise from her therapist, Betty McMicken, who wrote the book’s forward.
In the title poem, Healy writes: “It’s hard for me to read the L.A. Times. / I want to relearn, to reline part of me. / How did my brain twist? / How did the whack of it phase me? / Every page. Every word blank.”
During the pandemic, Healy has kept busy with therapy sessions, which have moved to Zoom. And the Antioch University professor emerita is at work on a second book of poems about living with aphasia, due out next year from Red Hen Press.