Parkinson’s Disease & Found Poems / Visual Poems

Kimberly Burnham
3 min readNov 7, 2020

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Found poetry is like recycling or upcycling. It is finding words already on the page and highlighting them and creating a poem. Visual poetry is poetry that has a visual aspect like art over found poetry or words that become art.

Visual Poetry 100 Found Poems on the Brain: Week One Parkinson’s Disease

Found Poems are poems made, created, tugged into being from the words of others. In this case the words have come from documents about Parkinson’s disease. One way to create a visual poem is to take a found poem and color around the words creating art that reflects the ideas, the poem, or covers over the words and letters not needed for the poem. The mind reads and pulls the words from the page. The heart creates a new pattern as the hand circles, retypes, and colors, engaging the senses in this intuitive delightful process. Where have you found poetry?

Wake Up

Any eyes able to be opened

affect breath remembered

control

dealing with one sign of feeling

want

the brain responsible and significant

all humans must go through

the regular rhythm of the day

wake up

-Found poem / Visual Poetry by Kimberly Burnham. Inspired by Parkinson’s Disease HANDBOOK pg 13 American Parkinson Disease Association, Inc.

Promising Exergame

Another promising rehabilitation

improvement

balance

gait

daily activities

quality of life

Same new

validating worth

potential

exergames

motion capture

motivating potential

do away with seed of boredom

An eye on possible benefits

regaining visual and auditory reaction

rerouting brain activity

for motivation and positive feedback

challenging

adaptable

touch ’n’ explode

-Found poem / Visual Poetry by Kimberly Burnham. Inspired by Parkinson’s disease patient rehabilitation using gaming platforms lessons learnt in International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Science (IJBES), Vol. 2, №4, October 2015 pg 4 by Ioannis Pachoulakis, Nikolaos Papadopoulos and Cleanthe Spanaki, Department of Informatics Engineering, Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece and Department of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

Parkinson’s Expressive Communication in Found Poetry and Visual Poems by krakenimages on Unsplash

Self-Image

Expressive communication

awareness pattern

effectiveness of music

can be used to improve memory

stimulate conversation

by providing a steady rhythmic structure

can be motivating

way to purposefully improve

social interaction cooperation and feelings

self-esteem self-express and creativity

reminiscence of singing

melodic intonations

-Found poem / Visual Poetry by Kimberly Burnham. Inspired by Julie Guy, MT-BC & Angela Neve, MT-BC in Music Therapy & Parkinson’s Disease Fact Sheet pg 2 from the Music Therapy Center, San Diego, California.

Alpha-Synuclein

Researchers at National institutes of Health

studied

a large Italian family

three Greek families

a German family

A triplication of a threadlike structure

a protein

an excess of normal

Parkin a protein that normally helps

break down and recycle

PINK1 codes active

mitochondria

several English and Basque families

people in North Africa and the Middle East

GBA gene makes

the enzyme glucocerebrosidase

Seek to understand

tell use about

potential

-Found poem / Visual Poetry by Kimberly Burnham. Inspired by What genes are linked to Parkinson’s disease? Hope Through Research Parkinson’s. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke National Institutes of Health. pg 4–6.

Decision Making Time

Speed of reaction time

control visual picture

memory visuospatial language

sorting odd man out patterns

design shape detection

Speed of recognition

clock drawing

copying task memory

Verbal fluency

pattern of letter fluency

category fluency

action word fluency

A trend toward performance and solving

decision making time

-Found poem / Visual Poetry by Kimberly Burnham. Inspired by Parkinson’s disease with dementia and dementia with Lewybodies by Richard Camicioli and Nancy Fisher 2005 Neurology Asia 2005; 10 : 79–98. pg 83

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

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Kimberly Burnham
Kimberly Burnham

Written by Kimberly Burnham

(She/Her) Writer, Poet, currently working on a memoir, Mistaken for a Man, a Story for Anyone Struggling to Feel Comfortable in Their Own Skin, Clothes, & ...

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