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The Poem’s Body/The Body’s Poem: On Poetry and Illness

I want to talk about poetry from the place of illness. Also about illness from the place of poetry.

My idea is to talk about the ways that someone who is living with illness – as I am— might choose to write about that illness, and the ways that this living with illness might shape or shade the kind of poetry a writer writes, and perhaps also the ways writing poetry might shape or shade the way a writer experiences his illness. My idea is to talk about how the poem the writer writes is itself a kind of body, and to consider what the relationship might be between the poet’s body and the poet’s poem. As to whether the reverse could be true, that a poet’s body—such as my body—might be a kind of poem, that’s worth considering too, as is the question of whether such a body-as-poem could be re-written or revised. My idea is to talk about what it might mean to perform poetry that comes from the place of illness, that is bound up with a particular body, someone else’s or my own. And what it might mean to put the poet’s body, to body the poet’s poem, out there for all to see. It is my idea to talk about some of these things. And to read some poems.

In speaking of illness, I am thinking about the kind of illness that is a major interruption in one’s life, that significantly affects not only one’s body but also one’s being in the world, that changes a person irrevocably and demands adjustment, alteration, response... and that demands description. Yet it may not readily give itself to description. Words fail; words fail to convey what’s going on inside the body, what’s happening to one’s life. Words refuse.

Still there is this compelling need to describe, to tell not only what’s going on in the moment, but also to narrate the illness’s history over weeks or months or years, to explain how this happened and then this happened. This is in a way a reflection and extension of an interior telling that often takes place, a sort of self-narrative that is in part an attempt to make sense, construct, master, and that is constantly being re-written and re-read in response to the illness's changes.   And yet actually making sense, creating any kind of coherent narrative may not be all that easy to do in the context of an experience characterized by disruption, disjunction, and loss.

So I arrive at poetry.

Poet Madge McKeithen, writing in the context of her son’s degenerative neurological illness, writes that, “Poems can suggest and value incompleteness, the understanding that derives from partiality, the knowing in part that is both horrible and beautiful. … I look for, I need, words, lines, even ones falling short, maybe lying, incomplete, imperfect.. . . Poetry does partiality well. A part can suggest a larger whole or be all in itself.”

Poems can convey, or embody, fragmentation.   They can exist outside of narrative coherence, can foreground being rather than arriving, the momentary rather than the sequential.   They can present/portray rather than tell/narrate.   They can also hide as well as reveal. That is, they allow for both a desire to tell and a sometime reluctance to do so, a desire to show, and yet also to keep private.

How much does a poet want to be seen/known in his illness?   How much does the poet wish to remain hidden; to have her illness remain invisible?

The poem that comes from the place of illness, that is about illness, in a way seeks both proximity and distance— to say in effect: this is what it’s like, while saying also that there is no full knowing of what it’s like, that this particular, internal experience of illness cannot be known fully. And, at times, that I am not comfortable telling any more fully.

Flannery O’Connor, writing of her lifelong experience of lupus, observes that “in a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it is always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow.”

This is plainly true; others cannot follow one into the intimate location of illness, which is always for them a foreign country. At the same time they do participate in imagining its landscape; that is, they do enter into the life of the ill person and they do co-create the meanings of the experience.   They do find themselves similarly confronted with, if not directly experiencing, the frailty and vulnerability of the human body, and the limitations of our abilities to heal or relieve pain.

What is the place of poetry, the use of poetry in the kingdom of illness—in the actual place of illness? Can I name my nameless illness—can I map out the provinces of my illness, with language that familiarizes, that makes known, yet also somehow defamiliarizes: that is, that announces this as something unfamiliar, difficult, to the observer, the outsider, even to myself?

I think there is a reaching out, an attempt to move out from the interior space of illness, of the ill/isolated body, out to the place where others—in their difference/indifference/likeness—reside. I think it must be that the poem is at once an intimate thing and a public thing…. a baring of what lies hidden/interior, and a remaining safe, the poem always only words on a page, leaving the poet—the poet’s body—safely distant, hidden, from the view, the knowing, of the other.

And yet what happens when a poet—such as myself— reads/performs his poems? When the body in the poem becomes—actually or by representation—the body in the room? When I am reading a poem out loud, performing it, there is no getting around my body; it is… or rather I am, here in the flesh, the words are formed in my mouth, my lungs, with my physical gestures, facial expressions… meanwhile my illness like an ogre—asleep or awake—lies hidden from view in my belly. But there is no hiding my body from view, which is to say from those to whom I am presenting these poems, these bodies of words, these words of my body.

And another thought: If one has an illness that is invisible, if one is therefore able to “pass” as healthy, what is at stake in outing oneself as ill in one’s poetry? Can one come and go freely in and out of the land of the sick?   That is, can I identify myself as ill, and wish both to be read in the context of my illness—this illness as something that shapes my experience of life and my poetry—and to be seen as not essentially defined or finally limited by my illness?

Literary theorist John Vernon writes in Poetry and the Body, “The poet is a real person in a concrete situation, and his words are always a product of his incarnateness, of the performance, the gesture, the act, the carving out he draws up from his environment through his body…”

Should I imagine, and want others to imagine, that my ill body is somehow always present in my poetry? Must we imagine that the poet’s body is always present in the poet’s poem?

Here is the playwright Charles Mee, who contracted polio as a teen, on the place of his body in his writing:

I find, when I write, that I really don't want to write well-made sentences and paragraphs, narratives that flow, structures that have a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of dependable cause and effect, solid structures you can rely on. That is not my experience of the world. I like a book that feels like a crystal goblet that has been thrown to the floor and shattered, so that its pieces, when they are picked up and arranged on a table, still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself lies in shards. To me, sentences should veer and smash up, careen out of control, get underway and find themselves unable to stop, switch directions suddenly and irrevocably, break off, come to a sighing inconclusiveness. If a writer's writings constitute a "body of work," then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented.

This feels familiar to me, commodious. I am attracted to the idea of my poetry as fragmented, off-kilter, in a way that reflects my experience of my body. Yet I also recoil in reading this passage. Is it really the case that the poet’s body must exactly equal the poet’s poem? In fact, later in the passage Charles Mee says, “And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop.”

Exactly. The poem may be tied in some essential way to a poet’s body, and yet, and yet... the poem—written, printed on the page—this thing that is so readily described metaphorically as a body, exists separate from the poet’s body. It is a kind of object that the poet builds, indeed might even be appealing to the ill poet for just this reason. I am certain that I take pleasure in being able to make something happen with words and lines of poetry –in creating this poetic object, this poetic body—that I can’t make happen easily with my own body, that I have a certain—what? control, power, capability, effectuality—with poetry that I have in only limited ways with my illness.

Poems

I have tried to enter

I have tried to enter poems
as one would a pool,
up to my knees, waist, neck.
I have tried to take in a poem
as one would a plum,
into my mouth, stomach.
But always one’s body
insists on making trouble.
So I read poems as they are:
printed on a page
possessing only
the slimmest
substance.

Losing Myself

I want to lose myself
in poems, but mid-stanza
or mid-line, mid-word even
my body asserts itself
like a tantruming two-year old
saying you’re not the boss of me.

My body has little
patience for poetry--
we have trouble standing
still while the poem
moves so damn slowly
into the room.

Get on with it already
my body shouts
we don’t have all day.
Big talk.
My body isn’t going
anywhere.

The delivery of groceries

The delivery of groceries to my apartment
causes me to cringe and cling:
too many peaches! cans of tuna!
How possibly can I eat it all?
How can I endure it here
in my kitchen?
I must eat it all
now
before its overabundance over-
whelms.
I am just a narrow me
trying to move through the world
unaccosted.

Oh secret

Oh secret
pineapple muffin
sample, small
and soaking the napkin
dark, sweet
pineapple and sugar,
wet wet oil
of my darkness
too rich twin
of plain toast
which too
much is with me.
With what boldness
with what heedless
ness, defiance I
do bite, I do.
grab with three
fingers and shove
take in and down
to the fragile vat
of my stomach. O
dangerous world.

If I had no

If I had no memory I
would think today the first day
of my illness:
Oh! What is this?
I might find it an interesting item
like a twig, or a frog with two heads.
A frog with two heads one
would look at twice,
maybe feel a certain stomach
queasiness, but
certainly it would not would it
give rise to disdain
or despair? Oh leap
little frog!
With each leap I take you
into my heart my body anew.

Dragonflies

Twenty, thirty times a day
the dragonflies alight my chest, my throat.
How did I come to be alive?
When did I make of myself
a house of sticks:
fearful wind, dreadful dragonflies
remind me of my purchase:
the calm
of the just after now.
But they are nothing
say I but dragonflies
smaller than a hand
than the word dragonfly
three breaths and they are gone.

Keats died of pulmonary tuberculosis
(excerpt from “Keats: The Terminal
Disease and Some Major Poems” April 1969
by H. Alan Wycherly)

Keats died of pulmonary tubercu-
losis while yet only twenty-five
years old, leaving behind a rather
slim body of verse varying from
the mediocre to the stunningly and
permanently beautiful.

When I Fall
Mary had a little lamb / its fleece was white as snow
and everywhere that Mary went / the lamb was sure to go.

It is little more than this:
a bleat in the bliss,
soft-wool and feeding,
is calmed by my reading.

At night I fall into sleep,
the lambs lost of sense
have at the pretty fence;
they cripple as they leap.

What is it to live in a pasture?
to always pastoral seem
happy in your nature
(unhappily you dream).

Morning comes hard,
the grass heavy with dew,
mud is in my garden,
the sky blue.

It just goes on, you know,
the grass growing
and even sweet smelling;
I watch the mower mow.

O to be strong
as a body is to be strong.
Oh, and how might that be?
asks the garden of me.

I long to be hungry
to be red and hungry,
to quiver
as the hummingbird’s quiver.

Alone says the tree
is alone, as though
I didn’t already know;
I can see

the ground giving to the day
as the day falls away.

Consumption

The big cat having consumed enough
to last it several days
reclines against the warm rock
whence comes its solitude if not its strength
this the accumulation of its prowling years
the placement of its paws--
also its mind, its vision of its terrain
secretly a creature of its own creating
its very saliva the substance of its dreams.

The cat content in its way spurns further meat
exultant thinks it could fast hereafter
stalk and pounce nevermore, not once
again the hard work of downing prey
the torpor of digestion, the languor of its own entrails.
How the cat likes the lightness,
the days it lives free--
how much greater are its desires.

Ode

Ode to concavity
and depravity
to the play of gravity
to my pleasures in their brevity
and the important absence of all levity.
Hooray for nativity
my own, my proclivity
to tender with kindness
and proper civility.
Ode to humility
and laughing ha ha at my dark disability.

Let us say that my pilgrimages

Let us say that my pilgrimages to the café
where I take my cups of tea
and am surrounded by platefuls of food
and people in their moments of pleasure
are not in fact palaces of absence
for me, nor places of denial or longing.
Let us suppose that smell is akin to taste,
nearness not at all far from closeness,
delight, deliciousness,
I am not then doing without
however much I crave,
suck the gram of sugar
from the bottom of my tea.

Someone is pounding at my abdomen

Someone is pounding at my abdomen
the way a two-year old
will at his mother or father pound
I hate you I hate you
then bury himself
in the bear-like body
his small-bellied body
safe and sound.

On pain

crawl then I into bed
white quilt quiet
fresh flinch
first shiver
my body is this

i have fallen in love with the bed
how tender at night
to reside

day long
I am limbed and jointed
jolted
now defiantly I child:
I won't get up
not ever

first wince
then these parts pulse
hip muscle tendon
calf ankle tender.

sweetly so soon
I'll asleep
first savor
then quiver
I am not scared
to be alive.

Cleanse!
if only
I could clean out the inside
of my body
and stuff it with those
green leaves of daffodils!
—Maekawa Samio (tanka.translated by Makoto Ueda)

On late-night TV the make-believe doctor
is scolding me for the accumulation of crud
in my colon.   Cleanse! He recommends—
my body as ship (if not shipwreck)
whose poop deck needs swabbing,
whose hold needs unholding.
I think: what a lifetime of detritus must
be holed up in there by now,
all the unpopped corn kernels,
all the undigested marshmallow fluff.
My intestines it seems are elephantine
and oh! how they suck up fluids
like a trunk its trumpet withheld
like dizzy gillespie cheeks puffed full
fully wanting, aching to expel
in one perfect blast.

Nose Bleed

Since a child my nose bled
how I loved my bloody nose, my nose bleeding--
tilt back your head said the nurse at school
yes said I to her in her white dress
as though I didn’t already know how this was done
how fine a bloody news I mean a bleeding nose
could stop the world cold, in fact on cold days
especially, the air so dry
but that was then in the city of my childhood mornings
now we bleed less bloody my nostrils and I
but they remain like twin brothers to me
who can tell them apart on a snowy February day?
What I mean to say here is that yet today
yet after all this time they are still bloody
still boldly bleeding and we are fond of this.
Who in God’s name would wish for a perfect body
all its rough surfaces sealed smooth
little enough am I able to effuse,
how the blood from my face flows
how perfectly wounded am I
in the inside where none but my occasional
finger or tissue strays, how incapable
of keeping the bloody blood in its place
in the palace of my body,
how still it wants to stop me in my tricks
and how still I warm to it, despite the site of it
the sight of its tracks on my hand, my shirt-front
how my beauty is so affronted but it cannot help
but be warm, it can only warmly its warning offer,
my living keep running.

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Selected Bibliography

Behn, Robin. Paper Bird. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1988.
Berger, Suzanne. Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Donne, John. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; together with Death’s Duell. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1926.
Ferris, Jim. “The Enjambed Body: A Step Toward a Crippled Poetics”. The Georgia Review. 1994. 58(2): 219-233.
Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Lawlor, Clark. Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
McKeithen, Madge. Blue Peninsula: Essential Words for a Life of Loss and Change. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Mee, Charles. A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir.   NY: Little, Brown, 1999.
Mukand, Jon, ed. Articulations: The Body and Illness in Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.
Nelson, Cary. The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
Ofri, Danielle, ed. The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2008.
Ostriker, Alicia. The Crack in Everything. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
Perillo, Lucia. I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 2009.
Perillo, Lucia. The Body Mutinies. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996.
Vernon, John. Poetry and the Body. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
Woolf, Virginia. "On Being Ill." The Essays of Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986.

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