Monthly Archives: March 2011

This past week has been Spring Break at our university, but we had a group of die-hard poetry and prose fans that met at our usual time and place. Since we have finished our first quarter of Poetry and Prose Rounds, I started this week with a check-in on how it is going—what people like or would like to see done differently. There was general consensus that having the Rounds self-contained in terms of readings and people being able to come as schedules permit is a big positive. People like the opportunity to write, and several people are using some of their Rounds writing to spin off new work. Several people mentioned that they enjoy being introduced to new authors/works that they didn’t know about. They like the posted readings and blog posts/writing prompts to be able to follow along when they can’t make it to Rounds.

We agreed to continue the Rounds ‘as is,’ and we will mix in opportunities to do informal sharing/work shopping of writing we are working on. In addition, I will continue my networking with local authors to share their work and lead discussions in Rounds. I also hope to have spin-offs in the future of longer, more intensive workshops on the craft of writing in the realm of narrative medicine.

After the check-in discussion, we shared what we are currently reading ‘for pleasure.’ Then, in an effort to balance out the heaviness of world events, the first writing prompt was “Happiness—what makes you happy or brings you happiness?”

And then—I just had to do it: we read and discussed Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils and the bliss of solitude: “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”  Who knew that daffodils crackle as they open? That’s not in the poem, it came from one of our Rounds participants. From what I understand, you need to take a bunch of them—still in bud but ready to open—into a quiet room or car, and you can hear them open. I have had a soft spot for daffodils and for this poem, since coming across a “host of daffodils” (and the poem posted on a sign) in the midst of the squalor and bombed out buildings of Belfast. I’ve been waiting for Spring in Seattle to be able to use this poem in Rounds. So now, it is out of my system….

Our second reading was a short story by Tolstoy entitled “Work, Death, and Sickness.” Written in the form of a parable, it deals with the origin of—well-work, death, and sickness. Tolstoy states that it is a legend from the South American Indians, and Tolstoy was a collector and re-teller of ‘peasant’ folk tales from around the world. Towards the end of his parable Tolstoy writes: “That the sight of sick folk might not disturb the pleasures of the wealthy, houses were arranged in which these poor people suffered and died, far from those whose sympathy might have cheered them, and in the arms of hired people who nursed them without compassion, or even with disgust.” A sobering thought as we sat in a hospital.

The final writing prompt was: “Write your own parable—or children’s bedtime story—of happiness and health.”

Next week we’ll turn to one of my all-time favorite books, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

This week we widened our view of health and illness to include social ills. Perhaps an outdated term, but we started out writing about whatever came to mind with the term “social ill.” It wasn’t a particularly effective writing prompt, so I don’t recommend using it. At the moment, I don’t have a better one that goes with this week’s readings.

We read William Carlos William’s poem “The Poor,” wit the first stanza: “It’s the anarchy of poverty/delights me, the old/yellow wooden house indented/among the new brick tenements” Most of us agreed it was a difficult poem to read and comprehend at first. As with many of William’s poems, it is complex and plays with the ‘rules’ of poetry. We discussed it for awhile, and then turned our attention to Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” We did a dramatic reading of an excerpt towards the end of Act II when Osvald is divulging to his mother that he’s been diagnosed with congenital syphilis, “vermoulu,” worm-eaten. “The sins of the fathers are visited on the children…” according to Osvald’s doctor. We discussed how Osvald searches for whereto place  blame for his condition, first blaming himself, then wishing he had ‘inherited’ it. We talked about how common this feeling is in patients, wanting to know what ‘caused’ their illness, and having feelings of guilt and remorse. Also, how as health care providers we can fall into the blame trap, such as blaming obese patients for costly complications of diabetes. We discussed the social stigma of illnesses like syphilis and HIV/AIDs, and the suffering that the stigma causes. Mostly though, it was fun to do a dramatic reading of a piece of a play on the bottom floor of the Health Sciences Library. It just seemed so healthily incongruous.

I tried to end on an upbeat note, asking people to write about the words “redemption and renewal”—a springtime motif. Unfortunately, with all of us surrounded by the weight of the tragedies in Japan, along with the themes of social ills for the day, all of our writing ended up in a heavy place. Mine, for instance, was a poem that started with a crocus and ended with the finger of a corpse curled around it. There is nothing light about illness narratives, and trying to force redemption on it doesn’t really work.

The Program on Values in Society is happy to announce that our annual Rabinowitz symposium will take place April 8, 2011. The topic this year is “Telling Stories, Revealing Narratives: Perspectives on Illness and Care.”

We have three great speakers on the theme of narrative ethics and medicine; each will have a local commentator.

Hilde Lindemann, PhD (Michigan State University)
“5 Things to Do with Stories”

Cheryl Mattingly, PhD (University of Southern California) “The Contested Creation of a Machine Baby: Moral Debate from a Narrative Perspective”

Vincent Lam, MD (University of Toronto)
“Narrative Medicine – Who Needs Stories in an Age of Evidence?”

The day will start at 10 a.m. and continue until 5 p.m. (with regular coffee breaks and a lunch break at 1:15 p.m.), and will take place in the South Campus Center, Room 316.

A more complete schedule of events can be found on our website, at http://www.phil.washington.edu/POV/TellingStoriesRevealingNarratives.htm

What is the color of healing for you? Write about it in whatever form you desire. That was our opening writing prompt for this week’s Rounds. I remember a kaleidoscope of colors resulting from the group’s writings: wound-healing fake skin color Band-aid pink, Cascade mountain green, changing auras, and juicy exuberant tangerine.

This week we read two pieces from local author Judith Kitchen. The first was her chapter “Red” from her collection of essays Distance and Direction. It begins: “’Red’/ Thread. If you turn your closed eyelids toward the sun, you see blood spin in veins so tiny they color only the dream. Skein of oxygen. It pumps itself up. Heartbeat. Heart beat. Heart break. The valentine cuts itself in two, and your old life folds outward.”

Written more in the form of poetry, Kitchen packs a lot in just four stanzas. The poets in our group pointed out the use of off-rhyme and the rhythmic folding inwards and then forwards movement of the piece. We ended up reading it twice out loud as a group to experience the music of it more fully.

Our second short reading was “F-Stop,” an essay by Judith Kitchen published on her website  (http://www.judithkitchen.com). This is from a collection of lyric essays she is writing under the title “Absolute Grey.” She explains that the essays are from her interactions with old family photographs. Adapting this idea, I brought in a collection of art cards I’ve collected from my travels to Southeast Asia and Venezuela. For our last writing exercise, I had people choose one card and write about it—not describing it, but rather writing the emotion it invoked.

One of our Poetry and Prose Rounds members has recommended the addition of plays to our repertoire of readings. I think it’s a grand idea, so now we will be (unofficially) Poetry and Prose and Plays Rounds….Next week we’ll read an excerpt from Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” as well as the poem “The Poor” by William Carlos Williams.

~Josephine Ensign

This week we discussed the concept of “sehnsucht,” the German word said to be untranslatable into English, with the closest meaning being ardent yearning, longing, obsession. C.S. Lewis is credited for bringing the essence of the word into the English language. In his The Problem of Pain he describes this yearning as a longing for a far-off country: “It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want.” Of course, the C.S. Lewis as Christian apologist was linking this universal longing with the pull of unity with God. Having grown up with the Narnia series, I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what faith or lack of faith, resisting the urge to open that wardrobe door.

Our first writing prompt was: “What do you most yearn for? Write about it.” We then briefly discussed how intensely personal and private that inmost yearning is, and how it can be difficult to articulate it even to ourselves. Then we read and discussed Marie Howe’s poem “What the Living Do.” Written as an elegy to her brother John who died of AIDs, a pivotal stanza is:

“I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it./ Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called/ that yearning.” The poem ends with: “I am living, I remember you.”

Our second reading was a poem by Angela Armstrong, published in Bellevue Literary Review, and entitled “Watching You Nap Beneath a Faded Quilt.” In the poem she writes: “So I wasn’t surprised to learn that dust is mostly skin cells,/particles of you and me/that float in winter sunlight.” We ended with the writing prompt: Write about your memories of dust. We found that the resulting writings were easier to share with each other, and that they took us in surprising directions.

Which leads to our main reading for next week: Judith Kitchen’s Distance and Direction, specifically her final chapter “Red,” which is written more in the form of free verse. A beautiful book of essays by a (now) local author.

~Josephine Ensign