Poets and Poems: Ann Keniston and "Somatic"

A psychosomatic illness is one in which an individual imagines a sickness; it may be as real to the person as a real illness. A somatic illness is a real one, with real symptoms, but it, too, can be associated with a disorder, when the response to the symptoms is out of proportion to the reality. 

I’ve been fortunate with not having been directly affected by a relative or friend having been affected by either a psychosomatic or somatic disorder. But I’ve heard of or known people who have. And it’s all too true that just because “it’s only an illness in the mind” doesn’t mean it can be ignored or discounted; the impact on the individual and those around him or her can be devastating. 

 

In her new collection, Somatic: Poems, Ann Keniston explores these illnesses. And she does so from what seems clear as first-hand experience with a close family member. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“To a Wreath of Snow,” poem by Emily Bronte – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: Pelican Brief, Pod, Pouch, Scoop, or Squadron – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

A Ghibli Advent: Peace – Megan Willome.

 

“The Owl,” poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"From Depths We Rise" by Sarah Rodriguez

Sarah Rodriguez was a young woman from Oklahoma who decides to move to New York City to work. Her family is (justifiably) concerned and tell her she needs to have a job to go to. She manages to get one and makes the move. And she eventually meets Joel, an almost quintessential New Yorker, they fall in love, and the new couple move back to Oklahoma to start their life together.

They want children, but have trouble conceiving. Sarah has surgery to remove cysts, but still no pregnancy. So they talk about in vitro fertilization (IVF) but go on about their lives, including training for a half-marathon together. They run the race. Not long afterward, Joel is diagnosed with cancer.

From Depths We Rise: A Journey of Beauty from Ashes is the story of Sarah and Joel and their battle to beat Joel’s cancer. It’s also the story of Sarah’s faith and resilience, her courage and strength. And her strength. It’s a story when, on most days, she didn’t feel faithful or resilient or brave or strong. Most days, she felt overwhelmed.

Joel’s cancer goes into remission after a year of treatments. They decide to use IVF to conceive, Sarah becomes pregnant, and they have a healthy baby boy.

And then Joel’s cancer returns. He will experience strokes. And Sarah finds herself singing one medical authorization after another. And it will seem that every time there’s hope, the hope is quickly snatched away. His medical situation goes from bad to worse to worst. Sarah will bury the husband she loves so much.

Sarah Rodrigues and her children

The story doesn’t end there. There are still two frozen embryos from the IVF process, and Sarah will decide to get pregnant again. And that becomes another journey is faith, when joy quickly turns to nightmare.

We never know what we can stand when life begins to throw rocks and boulders. Sarah Rodriguez found out. She had family, friends, and church to support her, but all the help in the world wouldn’t stop the awfulness.

From Depths We Rise is a remarkable story. Sarah Rodriguez is a strong woman, although she would likely be the first to say her own strength had nothing to do with it.

Top photograph by Alessio Lin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Jen Karetnick: Pondering the Often Invisible

Publishing a collection of poetry is a big deal. Publishing two books of poetry with different publishers within a span of four months is a huge deal. And that’s exactly what poet and writer Jen Karetnick has done.

In May, Winter Goose Publishing published Karetnick’s American Sentencing, a collection of 71 poems that generally address the subject of illness. Karetnick dedicated the collection to “those who suffer from chronic, invisible illnesses” and to “their physicians and caretakers.” The title contains a kind of irony – we in America are known for our “problem-solution” outlook on life and our discomfort with illness and disease that stubbornly resist categorization and treatment. Shouldn’t a pill or surgery fix everything?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Poetry of Illness

This post was originally published at The Master’s Artist. I’m periodically reposting some of the articles here.

Can poetry speak to illness? Can poetry speak to something as personal, terrifying and life-changing as breast cancer? Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver says yes.

Silver is an associate professor of English at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Her poetry has been published in such journals as Image, New Ohio Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature and Anglican Theological Review. And it’s also been published in a collection entitled The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems.

The heart of this volume is a series of extraordinary poems about breast cancer, from biopsy and diagnosis through mastectomy and recovery. These poems are about shock and fear, heartbreak and hope, and all the clinical trials and details in between. Like the illness they describe, these poems find their own discoveries, their own processes and flows, as the mind and the heart tries to make sense of what is happening.

After the biopsy and confirmation of diagnosis, Silver begins with a blessing that is simultaneously a kind of mourning.

Blessing for My Left Breast

Your skin slit round with a scalpel:

be brave.

Rise to the aluminum tray, the biopsy needle.

Go, nipple, go, milk ducts, go, veins.

Take with you my lymph nodes,

canaries of illness, blood cells’ puff balls.

Blessed be my chest wall for surrendering.

Now you will never shrink and wrinkle with age,

clove-studded orange, bittersweet.

Taken in your beauty, let the last hands

that hold you

be gentle.

She survives the surgery, but now comes the follow-up – the procedures like radiation and chemotherapy which sound so “medical” and yet are personal, invasive and themselves destructive. Yet even here she finds a dignity and even an unexpected intimacy, a pouring of grace upon the terrible.

 

Everything is Perfect

If my cancer recurs,

if I vomit from chemo,

help me follow the one who knew

she was dying, who turned

to the man wiping clean her face

and said, Everything is perfect.

Scrape me like a nutmeg, Lord.

Release my fragrance.

And then later, post-recovery, a kind of normalcy resumes, but it is only a kind of normalcy, because what was cannot be recovered; only what is can be grasped, and only what will be can be hoped for.

Ash Wednesday

How comforting, the smudge one ach forehead:

I’m not to be singled out after all.

From dust you came. To dust you will return.

my mastectomy, a memento mori,

prosthesis smooth as a polished skull.

I like the solidity of this prayer,

the ointment thumbed into my forehead,

my knees pressing hard on the velvet rail.

If God won’t give me His body to clutch,

I’ll grind this soot in my skin instead.

If I can’t hold the flame that burned my breast,

I’ll char my brow; I’ll blacken my pores; I’ll flaunt

with ash this flaw in His creation.

She finds comfort in the familiar Ash Wednesday ritual of the forehead smudge, simply because it is familiar and she’s alive to recognize the familiar. And while the last five lines of this poem seem almost jarring, like a fist being shook in God’s face, they are also a declaration of survival, in spite of the “flaw in His creation.”

These poems are a journey from despair to hope. Poetry does speak to illness, in profound and yet very human ways.