"After Reading Music from Apartment 8"

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares his poem "After Reading Music from Apartment 8," which was recently featured in the November 2025 print issue of Psychiatric Times.

Dr John Stone (1936-2008) was a prominent physician and poet who dedicated his academic career to Emory University School of Medicine, serving as a professor of medicine and associate dean of Admissions. He was renowned for his unique ability to bridge medicine and literature, integrating the study of poetry and prose into medical education. Berlin discovered Stone’s poetry when he was a psychiatric resident in the 1970s, and along with the passionate essays of the surgeon/author Dr. Richard Selzer, Stone’s work planted the seed that a doctor could be a poet. Berlin's favorite John Stone book is Music from Apartment 8.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.