Читать книгу The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities - Johanna Emeney - Страница 7
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.
ОглавлениеWritten during his medical training at Auckland University (now the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences), Colquhoun’s Playing God is New Zealand’s best-selling and most nationally-renowned book of medical poetry (Yeats 2009, 6). It was the first poetry collection to win a Readers’ Choice Montana Award (as well as winning the 2003 Montana Award for Poetry). In October 2006, it climbed the Booksellers New Zealand list and became the only poetry collection in New Zealand to have gained Platinum status.7 By September 2009, it had sold over 10,000 copies world-wide, gaining Double-Platinum status (Yeats 2009, 6).
In addition to Colquhoun’s Playing God, several New Zealand poetry collections on a medical theme, both from doctors’ and patients’ perspectives, have won awards and plaudits in the 2000s, proving demonstrably popular with readers and ranking highly on best-seller lists. Haematologist Rae Varcoe’s medically-based Tributary was published in 2007, the same year as C.K. Stead’s The Black River (Auckland University Press). Stead won first place (and ₤5,000) in the inaugural Hippocrates competition with his poem, “Ischaemia”, and Varcoe won first and second place in the Annals of Internal Medicine’s Poetry Prize in 2004.
Assisted by a grant from the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand, the collection Walking to Africa by Jessica Le Bas was the best-selling New Zealand “book of fiction”8 a week after its launch on October 9, 2009. The series of poems, told from the point of view of a mother whose daughter is being treated for depression, looks at the provision for mental healthcare for adolescents in our country.
Other medically-themed poetry collections published in New Zealand thus far in the 2000s include Anne Kennedy’s Sing-song (2003), hospital doctor Angela Andrews’s Echolocation (2007), past poet laureate Jenny Bornholdt’s Mrs Winter’s Jump (2007) and The Rocky Shore (2009), the late Sarah Broom’s Tigers at Awhitu (2010), and Ingrid Horrocks’s Mapping the Distance (2010). Many of these collections have an autobiographical basis—indeed, a number of the works under discussion evolved from authors’ journal entries that were later developed into poetic sequences or whole collections. For example, the subject matter of C.K. Stead’s poem “Ischaemia”, written especially for the Hippocrates Prize, is directly related to the stroke he suffered in 2005. The poem is narrated, in dictated-letter form, by Catullus, Stead’s poetic alter-ego, but the experience is Stead’s own, down to the details documented in the poet’s other writings and interviews—the transient dyslexia, the distortions of vision that persisted even months after the ischaemic attack (Stead 2006, 76–77). Stead’s first post-stroke collection The Black River (2007) features a number of poems that grew from a notebook kept at his bedside while he recovered (Stead 2006, 80).
In addition to these books, other notable collections have been published between 2003 and the present date. Paula Green’s (2010) Slipstream is a series of poems about the poet’s diagnosis of and treatment for breast cancer. Throughout the book, cross-word clues and song titles are woven into the story, reminding the reader of the patient’s everyday life and interests while she goes through surgery and radiotherapy, humanising and giving character to the nameless “she” persona, caught in the slipstream of illness and recovery.
Leigh Davis’s posthumously published Stunning Debut of the Repairing of a Life (2010) follows the author’s struggle to write again after brain surgery. This book won the Kathleen Grattan Award. The first half of the collection is the facsimile of a handwritten notebook. The second is a month’s worth of printed poems informed by The Odyssey. Davis’s poetry is transcendent, personal; it looks at illness, faith and death from the position of an unflinching “I”. Another posthumous collection is Gleam by Sarah Broom, which was published in 2013. This second volume of the poet’s work focused on terminal illness and the family and was linked to her premature death from secondary lung cancer.
2013 also saw Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Dark Sparring published. The second section of the collection deals with the poet’s mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer, and then her treatment for the disease. Using Wallace Stevens’s poetry as a springboard, Marsh explores a family’s way of coping with the matriarch’s illness and death.
In 2014, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle’s Autobiography of a Marguerite was published. Told by an “I”, suffering from an undisclosed autoimmune disease and enmeshed with her mother/carer, the book explores the themes of identity and language from the inside of illness. The first section of the collection is a series of connected prose poems, linking daughter, mother and grandmother. The second section features poems punctuated by footnotes taken from books by Marguerite Duras and Marguerite Yourcenar. The last section uses photographs as well as prose poems to return to the story of the mother, daughter and grandmother, and the effects of illness on family and identity.
Cloudboy by Siobhan Harvey was also published in 2014. Told in the third person, but very much from the viewpoint of “Cloudmother” (35–36) to the eponymous autistic and gifted child, it is searing in its criticism of the educational, psychological and paediatric healthcare provisions for children on the autism spectrum.
These collections provide a rich range of narrative positions taken by the poets, and the ideas they express about identity and family life in the face of illness and medical treatment vary in terms of how the speakers view the familial relations they present, as well as life in the context of a clinic or hospital. Yet, they have in common a sustained narrative engagement with their topic, a real-life tie to the occasion of the series or collection and a polemical intent behind the poetry—one which very often reveals itself via the interplay of medical and personal language, and which is in keeping with contemporary sociological findings regarding doctor-patient relationships.
