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New Zealand as the Literary Locus of this Study Introduction
The Modern Marriage of Medicine and Poetry The Medical Humanities Medical Poetry It is not difficult to summon to mind the names of several famous physician-poets throughout western history: Oliver Goldsmith, John Keats, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Carlos Williams, Dannie Abse. It is not quite so simple, but eminently possible, to come up with a long list of poems about illness and medical experience, both from a patient’s perspective, and from the perspective of an observer of suffering or a carer. Again, to give a selective list:6 “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman, (1881–82), “Mental Cases” by Wilfred Owen (1917), “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath (1961), “Anorexic” by Eavan Boland (1980), “What the Doctor Said” by Raymond Carver (1989), “Mastectomy” by Alicia Ostriker (1998), “The Halving” by Robin Robertson (2013). The poems in this short selection are about a variety of medical subjects, and might be found in single collections or anthologised in a work such as A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine, edited by Brown and Wagner (2016). The first two poems in the list are set against the backdrop of war (Whitman’s wound-dresser tends injured soldiers, and Owen’s “mental cases” are those whom we would now term sufferers of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder). Plath’s “Tulips” is a first-person account of a hospital stay, during which the numbness and anonymity associated with the clinical environment highlights the speaker’s growing distance from her family, as well as her fragile mental state. Another poet taking on the patient’s role, Boland articulates the inner prompts of an anorexic, forced to destroy herself by starvation, while both Carver and Ostriker describe momentous encounters with doctors: Carver’s a diagnosis with lung cancer and Ostriker’s the removal of a breast. Robin Robertson’s (2016) “The Halving” takes the reader viscerally through the median sternotomy performed upon the speaker, followed by the operation’s aftermath. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were several poets writing series of poems with links to medicine and health—notably, a number of the Confessional poets—Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath—all of whom considered the previously taboo subjects of mental illness in their poetry, and at length. A fine example from the 1970s is Robert Pinsky, and his “Essay on Psychiatrists” (in his 1975 collection Sadness and Happiness), which consists of 21 titled sections, 464 lines of poetry, contemplating the nature of the psychiatrist-patient relationship. Yet, some of the poetry to come in the following decades was to prove equally autobiographical and even more intensely interrogative in its approach to the doctor-patient relationship and the relation of the biomedical to the personal. This book will consider the following “stage” in medical poetry: the seeming shift to the whole collection or extended series on an autobiographical medical theme with a socially-focused polemic at its core. Once more, to selectively exemplify such works—and, once more, to limit the discussion to works within the western, anglophone tradition—it is notable that in the time period during which ideas about medical humanities and narrative medicine were beginning to positively saturate the United States and the United Kingdom, writers like Rafael Campo, Sharon Olds, Mark Doty, Dannie Abse, Carole Satyamurti and Philip Gross (to name but a few) were producing collections that contained a large number of poems with personal, medical bases. Furthermore, much as the Confessionals challenged the thematic taboos of mental health, alcoholism etc. in their time, the works that I will examine from the United States and the United Kingdom often are about diseases and physical states or practices that doctors, patients and parts of society in later eras found, and perhaps still find, confronting—from homosexual sex and the early management of HIV/AIDS patients to the ways in which the aged and dying are treated by healthcare professionals. I shall provide a brief discussion of medical poetry in the United Kingdom and in the United States, with analysis of the work of four poets whose oeuvre lies within the span of this study and substantively reflects a consciousness of the issues central to the medical humanities and narrative medicine. The autobiographical medical poetry of Dannie Abse (1923–2014) and Rafael Campo (1964–), the two doctor-poets, and Sharon Olds (1942–) and Philip Gross (1952–), will be discussed in two separate chapters in order that the writing of the doctor-poets’ poetry and the “lay” poets’ poetry can be discussed independently, in terms of their connection with medicine, their narrative position, presentation of biomedical and personal languages, and critical reception. These chapters are intended to form a backdrop for the close discussion of medical poetry in New Zealand, whose adoption of the medical humanities, and whose flourishing of medical poetry appears to have occurred within the context of a global trend. The remainder of the book, then, will concentrate on examination of the proliferation of medical poetry in New Zealand that appeared to begin with medical doctor Glenn Colquhon’s 2002 collection Playing God. Critical Perspectives The writing of doctor-poets in the UK and the USA has, generally, been received very well by critics, the democratic and revelatory aspects of the doctors’ writing pin-pointed for especial praise. For example, Joseph Cohen (1983) observes of Dannie Abse’s poetry that “The poems deriving from Abse’s experience as a practising physician are increasingly powerful […] and Abse’s medical practice is to his poetry […] what trench warfare was to Wilfred Owen’s poetry” (33). Peripherally, it is also noteworthy that Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability (2010) received much praise from reviewer Kate Kellaway (2010) of The Observer for its very obliqueness—its avoidance of the medical realities. For Shapcott had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, and she underwent surgery followed by both chemotherapy and radiotherapy. All of these facts appear as elements of Of Mutability. However: Sarah Crown (2010), the Guardian reviewer, agrees. She interprets the title of the collection as extremely telling with regard to the poet’s general perspective throughout the book: Kellaway’s and Crown’s are interesting readings of lines of the eponymous poem and the title of the book, respectively, but they are easily countered by focussing on the way in which, in the lines quoted from the poem, the “cells” are made more familiar and less threatening by the language used both to personify them and to bring them into a known, lifeworld context. They are a “rabble”, causing trouble, up to no good. The “I” (the patient) cannot possibly understand the process at work inside her body, the relentless cell division of the tumour, nor its would-be metastases, and so she turns the mutant cells into things that one associates with minor injuries; things that itch or feel rough to the touch, as if chapped. Through this familiar language, she subdues the terror of the unchecked cell growth, the cancer whose name she avoids and from which she disassociates herself. Similarly, the title “Of Mutability” (poem and book title) is in homage to the artist Helen Chadwick, whose solo exhibition held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1986 aimed to evoke images of transience, death and rebirth. Clearly, also, “Of Mutability” alludes to the last line of Shelley’s “Mutability”: “Nought may endure but Mutability” ([1885] 2017, line 16). Everything about the collection speaks of ephemerality and change, something that the author had been contemplating because of her illness experience, perhaps 9, but also because she is a person who has written for years about transformations, particularly those which occur in the classical world—Ovid’s Metamorphoses,10 for example. Moving on to personal medical poetry’s reception in New Zealand, author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, described the country as having “no reviewing culture at all” in a Guardian article of September 7, 2013. While this is an exaggeration to make a point, it is perhaps true to say that conducting a balanced and far-reaching survey of academic reviews is challenging in New Zealand. It is not a large or populous country; its reviews are often few, short, and written by other poets within a small literary scene. However, there is enough material in the form of reviews from The New Zealand Poetry Society, The Lumiere Reader, and magazines such as the New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Books, regional newspapers and longstanding literary publications such as Landfall and the Journal of New Zealand Literature, to make and illustrate some substantive remarks regarding differing critical receptions of doctor-poets’ and patient-poets’ works. The critical reception of the work by doctor-poets and patient-poets was in some ways schismatic. The former was most often viewed as brave and heroic in its revelations, the latter as solipsistic. Furthermore, it was evident that when parents made their sick children the subjects of their poems, some reviewers would interpret their narrative position as exploitative or sermonising.

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