Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Associate Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

Poems and Process in the Narrative Medicine Context

Catherine Rogers

Introduction:
Poetic Form and the Clinical Encounter: Seeing Acts of Seeing

These poems by Matthew Eck, Lauryn Jones, and Daniel Ryan originated in a class project for the Fall 2022 Columbia University Master of Science in Narrative Medicine course Applied Writing in the Narrative Medicine Context and Beyond. Narrative medicine is an international discipline at the intersection of humanities, the arts, clinical practice, and health care justice with conceptual foundations in narratology, phenomenology, and liberatory social theory. Arising at Columbia University in 2001, narrative medicine has developed principles and practices that equip clinicians to better comprehend their patients’ experiences and perspectives so as to deliver equitable and effective health care (“Division of Narrative Medicine”).

Applied Writing, a multi-genre required course in the narrative medicine MS program, explores the act of creative writing, how it is done, what it is for, how it works on our minds and bodies, and how it can be used to engender meaningful change in the medical and healthcare environment. We reflect on the fundamental question that my colleague Nellie Hermann lays out in The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine: “Why writing? Why should doctors, or medical students, or anyone in the healthcare community know anything about how to write?” (Charon et al. 215).

Prior to assigning students to write a poem in the poetic form of their choice, our Faculty Associate, poet Alexis Almeida, and I provided a series of craft readings and model poems. We discussed Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, Inger Christensen’s alphabet, articles by Stanley Fish and Mary Ruefle, along with a packet of poems from diverse authors in a variety of poetic forms such as Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art,” Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” Monica Youn’s “Palinode,” Randall Mann’s pantoum “September Elegies,” and John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

In our first of three poetry writing sessions, Alexis and I discussed poetry and narrative medicine with the students using Oliver as a starting point. In the following session, Alexis gave a lecture/discussion on the Fibonacci sequence as poetic form in alphabet, and we assigned students to write the first draft of a poem in the poetic form of the student’s choice.

The third poetry session was led by guest lecturer Tatiani Rapatzikou, PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece. Dr. Rapatzikou introduced the class to poetic form and materiality beginning with an examination of Nox by Anne Carson and Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer. Students then gave workshop readings of the first drafts of their poems offering one another comments and questions on their works in progress. Dr. Rapatzikou followed the lecture and workshop readings with a hands-on creative exercise guiding the students to transform their textual work into 3-dimensional artifacts. Inspired by Dr. Rapatzikou’s mindful lecture and creative exercises, the students then rewrote their poems and developed the accompanying process essays.

In the act of writing and revising and reflecting on their writing processes, these student writers are reflecting on that fundamental question “Why writing?” As Hermann observes, writing is an externalizing act, a way to move feelings and experiences outside ourselves, to create room for new experiences. Lauryn Jones writes, “My goal in crafting this poem was to express the breadth of exhaustion I felt in the moment of writing. Writing it was a form of catharsis. This might explain the rhythm and the free verse nature of it.” Writing in the narrative medicine context, according to Hermann, we transform thoughts and feelings through words into objects to be examined and reflected upon, “literal objects, text on a page, that can then be examined at different angles as an X-ray can” (Charon et al. 215). Like the photograph or the X-ray, the poem can stop time, externalize a moment, capture a fleeting thought or feeling so as to make it available for closer observation. Alexis Almeida says “[t]he idea that a photograph can become a discrete object of knowledge” is something that can be interrogated through the process of writing poetry.

Additionally, writing is a way to express what we may not even realize we know, to say the unsayable. Matthew Eck describes his own poetry writing as a way to “convey themes that at times feel unconveyable.”

Further, in asking narrative medicine students to write in a specific form, we’re asking them to consider “Why write in a given form?” We’re asking the students not only to bring their thoughts and experiences to the page, but also to express those thoughts and experiences via conscious use of line, rhyme, meter, stanza length, and repetition as demanded by the form they choose. Summing up the experience of writing in a pantoum for the first time, Daniel Ryan explains that the choice of form reveals something about the poem’s meaning, “I found comfort in the boundaries of form . . . . I give the lion’s share of credit for that to the form of the pantoum itself. . . . [I]t used repetition in raw and intentional ways . . . .Without it, I would have forgotten how often cycles repeat.”

All of this said, how can writing to a chosen poetic form and sharing the poem with others engender meaningful change in the clinic? Hermann quotes from William Gass’s Finding a Form: “Language, unlike any other medium, is the very organ and instrument of the mind” (Charon et al. 226). When the poet writes a poem, they lay down what they see in a form available to readers to witness. In Gass’s words, the reader of a poem is “seeing an act of seeing” (Charon et al. 227). As the poem gives form to the poet’s act of seeing, and that act is shared among readers who themselves are engaged in acts of seeing, a sense of affiliation is possible. In the case of the clinical world, when patient, clinician, and caregiver are invited to the shared experience of a “seeing an act of seeing,” the experience can open beyond individual preconceptions to honor the voices and visions of all involved in the clinical encounter.

WORKS CITED

Bishop, Elizabeth. “One Art.” PoetryFoundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poe
m/47536/one-art. Accessed 26 May 2023.
Carson, Anne. Nox. New Directions, 2010.
Charon, Rita et al. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. Oxford UP, 2017.
Christensen, Inger. alphabet. Translated by Susanna Nied. New Directions, 2001.
“Division of Narrative Medicine.” Columbia University Irving Medical Center, https://www.mhe.cuimc.columbia.edu/division-narrative-medicine. Accessed 28 Apr. 2023.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard UP, 1980.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Tree of Codes. Visual Editions, 2010.
Hayes, Terrance. “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” PoetryFoundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/
143918/american-sonnet-for-my-past-and-future-assassin. Accessed 26 May 2023.
Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” PoetryFoundation, www.poetryfoundation.
org/poems/ 44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn. Accessed 26 May 2023.
Mann, Randall. “September Elegies.” poets.org, poets.org/poem/september-eleg
ies. Accessed 26 May 2023.
Oliver, Mary. Poetry Handbook. Harcourt, 1994.
Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. Wave Books, 2012.
Youn, Monica. “Palinode.” poets.org, poets.org/poem/palinode. Accessed 26 May 2023.

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