Archives for posts with tag: Poetry
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Brendan Kennelly: ‘We Are Living’…

May 27, 2014 //
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It never ceases to reassure and to uplift me that, no matter what I am feeling or thinking, there is a poem and a poet out there who can put words and closure to my circular thoughts.

I hope to move home shortly. My daughter and I have not been here long, around six years, although they have been very important ones in terms of her growningupness and my role as a mostly peripheral witness and occasional invited guest to this most transformative and wondrous of ‘sociological processes’…

Now, it is time to move on, and we are both keen to find a different space. Yet leaving and moving are complex events and emotions are inevitably mixed, with hope sitting alongside sadness, and optimism tinged with fear and with a sense of loss.

The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly movingly considers the tensions that exist between memories and the places they inhabit, as well as the essence of memories, personal relationships, and the transient and finite nature of it all, or not…

 

We Are Living

 

What is this room

But the moments we have lived in it?

When all due has been paid

To gods of wood and stone

And recognition has been made

Of those who’ll breathe here when we are gone

Does it not take its worth from us

Who made it because we were here?

 

Your words are the only furniture I can remember

Your body the book that told me most.

If this room has a ghost

It will be your laughter in the frank dark

Revealing the world as a room

Loved only for those moments when

We touched the purely human.

 

I could give water now to thirsty plants,

Dig up the floorboards, the foundation,

Study the worm’s confidence,

Challenge his omnipotence

Because my blind eyes have seen through walls

That make safe prisons of the days.

 

We are living

In ceiling, floor and windows,

We are given to where we have been.

This white door will always open

On what our hands have touched,

Our eyes have seen.

 

Brendan Kennelly

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Categories Poetry

Rosemary Tonks

May 4, 2014 //
2

The poet and writer Rosemary Tonks died this week aged 85. She famously disappeared from the literary scene in the 1970s and spend the following decades as a recluse.

The elusive biographical details of her life and of her disappearance have long intrigued me. But perhaps it is best to focus more on what she chose to share with us – her writing – rather on that which she deliberately kept to herself.

from Addiction to an Old Mattress

 

‘No, this is not my life, thank God…

…worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;

Obsessed first by one person, and then

(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;

These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,

They belong to the people in the streets, the others

Out there — haberdashers, writers of menus…’

 

‘…Meanwhile…I live on…powerful, disobedient,

Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,

With these people…who are going to obsess me,

Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly knew, it’s unforgivable

For this is not my life

But theirs, that I am living.

And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.’

 

CQ

 

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Categories Poetry

‘My Life Was The Size Of My Life’

March 18, 2014 //
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I just came across this poem by Jane Hirshfield in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

I love it.

from My Life Was The Size Of My Life:

‘My life was the size of my life.

Its rooms were room-sized,

its soul was the size of my soul…

…Others, I know, had lives larger.

Others, I know, had lives shorter…

…Once, I grew moody and distant.

I told my life I would like some time,

I would like to try seeing others.

In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned…’

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2014/03/10/140310po_poem_hirshfield

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Categories Poetry

Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Prayer’…

February 3, 2014 //
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I just came across this sonnet by Britain’s current poet laureate, and instantly fell in love with it.

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itself. So, a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth

enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;

then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth

in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales

console the lodger looking out across

a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls

a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer  —

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

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Categories Loss, Melancholy, Poetry

Sinead Morrissey…

January 14, 2014 //
2

I was so delighted to hear that Sinead Morrissey won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize last night. I have admired her work for some years, and every new poem she creates continues to impress and to move me.

Tonight, I read one of my favourites for my teenage daughter. My daughter’s parents are, like Morrissey’s, divorced, and the poem in question considers the legacy of this, as well as the visceral reality of what we are all products of.

Genetics

My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.

I life them up and look at them in pleasure —

I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,

to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,

but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends

who quarry for their image by a river,

at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.

And when I turn it over,

my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.

My body is their marriage register.

I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands

for mirroring in bodies of the future.

I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.

We know our parents make us by our hands.

Sinead Morrissey

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Categories Families, Literature, Poetry

Dennis O’Driscoll…

December 31, 2013 //
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The Irish poet died on Christmas Eve 2012. He would have been 60 on New Years Day 2014.

It thus feels appropriate today, on the last day of 2013 and the eve of the day of the poet’s birth, to share one of his poems, and one of my absolute favourites.

Life

Life gives

us something

to live for:

we will do

whatever it takes

to make it last.

Kill in just wars

for its survival.

Wolf fast-food

during half-term breaks.

Wash down

chemical cocktails,

as prescribed.

Soak up

hospital radiation.

Prey on kidneys

at roadside pile-ups.

Take heart

from anything

that might

conceivably grant it

a new lease.

We would give

a right hand

to prolong it.

Cannot imagine

living without it.

Dennis O’Driscoll

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Categories Literature, Loss, Poetry

Poetry and the ‘Patient-Doctor Relationship’…

November 26, 2013 //
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I have been thinking about this most unique of relationships, partly in the wake of Medicine Unboxed 2013, and also as I am currently writing chapters for a book on Illness and the Arts.

Jonathon Tomlinson has written a very comprehensive and insightful essay on the notion of the ‘patient’ (http://abetternhs.wordpress/2012/04/09/whats-in-a-name/).

Here, I just want to draw attention to words from those who have expressed their experience of the patient-doctor through their poetry.

Firstly, Raymond Carver, who died as a result of lung cancer, and his poem What the Doctor Said:

‘He said it doesn’t look good

he said it looks bad in fact real bad

he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before

I quit counting them…’

Later in the poem:

‘he said I am real sorry he said

I wish I had some other kind of news to give you’

Carver concludes:

‘I just looked at him

for a minute and he looked back and it was then

I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me

something no one else on earth had ever given me

I may even have thanked him habit being so strong’

This is one of my all time favourite poems. It manages to say so much with so few words – the essence of poetry itself – and within 23 short lines the poem delivers such a strong sense of what the sufferer was experiencing at the ‘other side’ of the desk.

Secondly, to another poet who died as a result of cancer, Julia Darling. The anthology The Poetry Cure, which she edited with Cynthia Fuller, contains much to enlighten those who wish to gain insight into the suffering of illness.

In her poem Too Heavy, Darling directly addresses the medical profession:

‘Dear Doctor,

I am writing to complain about these words

you have given me, that I carry in my bag

lymphatic, nodal, progressive, metastatic…’

‘…And then you say

Where are your words Mrs Patient?

What have you done with your words?

Or worse, you give me that dewy look

Poor Mrs Patient has lost all her words, but shush,

don’t upset her, I’ve got spares in the files.

Thank god for files.’

Finally, also from The Poetry Cure, from Carole Satyamurti’s Out-Patients:

‘My turn. He reads my breasts

like braille, finding the lump

I knew was there. This is

the episode I could see coming —

although he’s reassuring,

doesn’t think it’s sinister

but to be quite clear…

He’s taking over,

he’ll be the writer now,

the plot-master,

and I must wait

to read my next instalment.’

The poets say it all.

I have nothing to add.

CQ

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Categories Cancer, Death and Dying, Doctors, Literature, Poetry, Suffering

Poetry, Science and Medicine…

October 17, 2013 //
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I have come across two events over the past week where links between poetry and science or medicine have been initiated.
Firstly, appropriately at Keats House, I attended the launch of a collaborative project between poets and scientists (http://www.poetry.gb.com/BiomedicalScience). Eleven poets teamed with 11 scientists to create poetry that reflected on the life/work of the latter. At the event, both the poet and the scientist of each ‘team’ spoke about their respective experiences throughout the collaboration. The resulting poetry is wonderfully rich and evocative. It was also very moving to hear the scientists speak, and so poetically, of what the experience meant to them.

Secondly, today I came across a piece in a recent New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2013/10/14/131014ta_talk_singer) on poetry and medicine. John F. Martin is a ‘cardiologist, transatlantic academic, specialist in gene therapies for treating heart attacks, clinician, and published poet.’ I guess the ‘poet’ element is last mentioned in order to heighten the impact of this apparent incongruity. There have indeed been clinicians, such as William Carlos Williams and Dannie Abse, who were also published poets. But they are in the minority. I have not yet come across Martin’s poetry, but I will now seek it out.
Apart from his own poetry, Martin has also initiated an annual poetry competition for medical students both at UCL and at Yale School of Medicine. This project arose out of his concerns that ‘medical students are at risk of becoming “intellectually brutalized”…conditioned to focus upon the microscopic at the expense of the holistic.’
The competition is now in its third year, and I have been reading the work of past winners. Impressive. My favourite is Encounters with Death, by Kevin Woo (Yale University, 2012):

‘In the First Year
I gazed upon a body overtaken by Death
The fingers, withered and cold
Eyes as gray as the stainless steel casket
Call her Cadaver, they explained, and learn
Her lines, her edges…
…And in the First Year, I dissected Death.’

There is a separate stanza for each year, of four.

‘In the Second Year
I memorized the signs of Death
A lung, scarred and emptied
The nodes of Osler revealing infection within…
…And in the Second Year, I pathologized Death.’

‘In the Third Year
I saved a man from Death
His heart, so worn and weary
That it had surrendered its rhythm…
…And in the Third Year, I conquered Death.’

‘In the Fourth Year
I had a conversation with Death
Of what do you remain afraid, Death asked
That you might know Death only by dissection, as pathology, to be conquered?
And I learned that Death
Was a companion along the journey of humanity
Along which we travel
I smiled, because I understood
At last
And in Fourth Year, I accepted Death.’

A most impressive journey in just 4 years. For most of us it takes a lifetime, if we do even manage to arrive.

CQ

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Categories Death and Dying, Doctors, Literature, Medicine, Poetry, Science

Brueghel’s Icarus, and Auden…

September 7, 2013 //
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IMG-20130907-00756

Last night’s viewing of Museum Hours inspired me to re-read Auden’s poem Musee des Beaux Arts today:

‘About suffering, they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…’

‘In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling from the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly by.’

CQ

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Categories Art, Art & Suffering, Poetry

Poem for today, by Clive James

June 1, 2013 //
3

I just came across this poem in the current issue of The New Yorker, and just love it. It is so eloquently sad and moving.

from Leçons De Ténèbres:

‘But are they lessons, all these things I learn

Through being so far gone in my decline?’

‘…I should have been more kind. It is my fate

To find this out, but find it out too late.’

‘… But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air

As if there were not much more of it there

And write these poems, which are funeral songs

That have been taught to me by vanished time:

Not only to enumerate my wrongs

But to pay homage to the late sublime

That comes with seeing how the years have brought

A fitting end, if not the one I sought.’

Clive James

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Categories Ageing, Poetry
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