Rebuilding your personal identity after a
serious relationship breakup can be like assembling a piece of IKEA furniture,
argues Ethan Kuperberg in a humorous one-page article in the September 12 issue
of The New Yorker titled 'How to put your Sëlf together.'
Leaving your Sëlf
unattended during re-assembly "can result in injury, error, or [worst of
all] poetry." So should doctors
have anything to do with this traumatic consequence called poetry?
To our ears poetry is foreign although in other
times and places it was familiar. It is not the language of business, politics
or science. Instead it links to art,
drama, sculpture, and music, especially to song. It enables feelings of love and loss, of
ecstasy and sadness not easily otherwise expressed to find a voice. The
contrast of prose and poetry is incomplete and prose can of course be brilliant
as a vehicle to carry these feelings.
Also, overlap occurs between prose and poetry, and 'prose poetry'
follows. But poetry has unusual strength for this communication.
Because there are many forms of poetry - long
and short, rhyming (simple or complicated), tightly disciplined or free,
inscrutable or accessible, concrete or abstract - there are many definitions, none
entirely satisfactory. Despite the variety in poetry and its definitions,
several common features can make it attractive to doctors.
First, poetry can express our deep feelings when
patients or family or friends suffer and die. It enables these feelings to be
explored, articulated and shared without the heavy transactional processes of
prose. Doctors whose encounters with death and suffering are common and
profound use poetry to express their feelings. Patients and carers do likewise.
Second, poetry can enable the expression of
achievement - liberation, cure, safe birth, the lifting of depression - that
are not enumerated in key performance indicators that tend to reflect processes
and financial efficiency expectations of the clinician. It can share an
elemental connection to love and happiness that bypasses the bureaucracy of
measurement and computation.
Third, poetry reveals deep things about the shy
poet and his or her subject that he or she would find difficult otherwise to
share, uncovering the soul in its naked austerity. Not all doctors are extroverts, not all
express their feelings openly. They may be more comfortable speaking from
behind the veil of poetry.
It is a mistake to think that poetry is simply
random jottings that require little effort. In fact, it is an art form that
carries its own discipline like learning a musical instrument. I have
benefitted from membership in a poetry writing group that meets each week with
an expert tutor to share poetry and critique one another's efforts. I have come to enjoy the way poetry makes me
consider and savour each word, and the fellowship of poets from different
backgrounds. It is rich in metaphor, analogy and simile and light on
description, depending more on evocation, suggestion and impression.
The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney had a
brilliant talent for turning words, like diamonds, through ten or more degrees
allowing the light to diffract into new colours, astonishing the reader with
their novelty. Take for example the first stanza, especially its brilliant last
line of his poem 'The Sharping Stone':
In an apothecary's
chest of drawers,
Sweet cedar that we'd
purchased second hand,
In one of its weighty
deep-sliding recesses
I found the sharping
stone that was to be
Our gift to him.
Still in its wrapping paper
Like a baton of black
light I'd failed to pass.
Poetry allows me to search my mind for
interpretations of events and people that are not immediately obvious. Others might access these insights through
meditation, but for me, sitting at the laptop with no more than the germ of an
idea of the poem and then watching it emerge, expands my understanding of those
events and people.
The Scandinavian Nobel laureate poet Tomas
Tranströmer suffered a devastating stroke in 1990, leaving him hemiplegic
and without speech. His recovery was
gradual and never complete, but he returned to playing the piano with his left
hand. He returned to writing short poems.
I wondered about his experience - lived as it were from the inside. So I wrote a poem, beginning with the
confusion and disorientation of the acute phase of his CVA, as he might have
experienced it. I tried to use his voice, his style, for this purpose. One
snippet of this quite long poem, The Stroke of One, reads:
In a flash my spirit
was caught like a
fish in a net,
my flesh pulled and
spun
through an unfamiliar
deep.
I do not claim that this poetic exploration was
helpful to anyone, least of all Tranströmer, but I feel
differently about the stroke experience as a result. Maybe that makes me a better person to
understand strokes in others or in myself if I were to suffer this fate. You can find the complete poem on my poetry
blog Stephenleeder.blogspot.com.au along with others from recent years.
Although I do not have the epidemiological
evidence, it is said that poets are miserable people who often end their lives
by suicide. The search for meaning and interpretation that underlies much
poetry can be a manifestation of human alienation or depression. But as a counterweight, read Shakespeare's
sonnets or the Psalms of Degrees.
As with art, drama and music, there is room for
the expression of great happiness in poetry. The process of poetic reflection
mines happiness from our unconscious like precious ore - it is free and for our
pleasure!
Published in Australian Doctor 28 September 2016 http://bit.ly/2cBvJqm
