Inhabiting Duration: Contemporary Poetry, Chronic Illness, and Environmental Time (original) (raw)
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Word and Text, 2022
Though 21 st -century poetics is informed by protests and increasingly nuanced conversations about intersectional experiences, representations of chronic and acute illness are fairly rare. Even in the post-confessional era, with poets embracing vulnerability, ableism continues to dominate the genre. However, several poets have embraced their respective illnesses, centring their experiences not as wholly traumatic but as gracefully human. I argue that poets like Danez Smith, Andrea Gibson, Rachel McKibbens and others help insert acute and chronic illness into conversations about American poetics. American literature has long been complacent regarding the erasure of people living with illness, as well as its tendency to sensationalise trauma rather than centre the human experience in stories of illness. 21 st -century poets are challenging this paradigm, effectively transforming their respective illnesses into a catalyst for activism and grounding their experiences in representations of the corporeal as flawed, vulnerable and yet miraculous.
Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice
This contribution is, in essence, a collection of poems that the two authors wrote over a period of four weeks. The temporal element is interesting. It speaks to a commitment to “go on” (Wittgenstein, 1953) at a time of illness and recovery. Duoethnography, as collaborative activity, invites new meaning by layering what could be seen as separate narratives and creating a dialogue between the evolving stories. This enables new meaning to evolve and intertwine. Undertaking an inquiry through poetry was an important decision. The intention being to provoke and promote creativity, to generate feelings of wellbeing at a time of depleted energy. Writing to and with each other was both an act of generosity and an act of self-preservation. Mutual support, maybe one way to frame it, but it was also outward looking, connecting with how we practice as therapists, how we are in the world, the causes we care about, all part of the awkward dance of living with health challenges. The poems provide...
Picturing Illness: History, Poetics, and Graphic Medicine
Research and Humanities in Medical Education, 2015
Comics have often been treated as a juvenile and sub-literary art form; however, taking cues from the new-found cultural acceptance of comics, particularly with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragedy (2006), there have emerged, over the past decade, a new breed of comics dealing with the patient/caregivers’ experiences, perspectives and identities. Christened as graphic medicine, these illness narratives use comics as a medium to address wide ranging disease/illness related issues. The present review examines the following issues: What is graphic medicine? Is there a tangible relationship between underground comics and graphic medicine? If so, can we regard underground comics as historical precedent to graphic medicine? What are the uses of comics in medicine? Broadly put, drawing examples from various graphic medical narratives, the paper seeks to trace the histo...
Poetry in a Time of Sarcomas, Plastic, and Prions
Environmental crisis and human costs, eds. Ozdag and Gavillion, Benjamin Franklin Institute, Alcala Spain, 2015
Poemesis is certainly a far cry from emotion recollected in tranquility, definitely also something different from ecopoetry as it has often been described, namely as a poetry that has been gathered by “the children of Linnaeus,”(Elder and Finch 1990: 19) poets devoted to capturing and cataloguing “small green things”(Street 2013: xl) in verse “field guides,”(Felstiner 2010: xiv) poets intent on proffering poetic reflections on time spent sustainably “rooted”(McKusick 2010: xi) in nature. Unlike these more typical “bright green” forms of ecological writing, which seem to imagine both the poet and reader as figures in full health, the idea of poemesis bespeaks a close connection between poetic writing and sickness that might be better associated with what Timothy Morton, in his recent talks and writings, has taken to calling “dark ecology”(dark as opposed to bright green).(2012: 59) One might perhaps say that poemesis is the form that poetic writing takes when it tries to reckon with the consequences of our ongoing ecological catastrophe.
Special Supplement: “Creative/Artistic Narratives of Illness”
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 2003
I ture into the field in the previous issue, we are confident that readers will be not only moved but entertained by the distinctive characters in each of these pieces. We intend to publish a series of pieces relating to cancer in the next CBMH. Submissions of poetry, short fiction, and personal narrative (no more than five pages double-spaced) are invited, and should be sent to:
An Economy of Illness: The Poetics of Women in Pain
Literature and Medicine, 2018
This essay examines the position of illness within a capitalist economy, exploring how labor, production, and consumption change through the bodily experiences of illness. Using contemporary poetry by Elizabeth Arnold and Anne Boyer, I suggest first that the experience of illness places women in an alternative economy, not unlike the familiar ways in which women are routinely devalued when their labor is under-appreciated or under(/un)compensated. I argue that being ill often challenges the productivity required by capitalism, and that as a response, experiences of illness play a role in the formation of an alternative economy. Within these new economic structures, affective experiences of pain and disgust—typically devalued in a capitalist economy—become foundational features of taste formation. The poets I examine here explore this complicated affect to suggest that experiences of pain can have important economic and affective effects.
Literary Configurations of Illness and the Refiguration of Health and Well-being
Literary Configurations of Illness, 2021
The essay examines three literary memoirs of illness (Giving up the Ghost (2003), Love’s Work (1995) and Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)) and their location in the recent development of illness narratives in anglophone culture. I showcase within a phenomenological framework how the three books defamiliarize the critical moment of diagnosis, reject readers’ sympathy and invite readers to broaden their repertoire of what well-being might feel like (including chronic illness).
Representation of Illness in the Select Poems of Raymond Carver
The Criterion: An International Journal in English, 2020
We the “pestilence-stricken multitude” live in a world where inexorable illness informs our existence. Our speech, our joy, our breathing, our laughter is fraught with illness. ‘Our best songs are those that tell of illness’; our existence becomes pathological and poems become pathographies, a reflection of selves of those who suffer different kinds of illness, offering several perspectives on illness. Such poems of the American poet Raymond Carver as “What the Doctor Said” and “Proposal” are minus any illusion of illness. The poems are the dispassionate rendering of illness and are dialogic exchanges on illness, unraveling the fact that illness is a natural phenomenon to our ontology. But the patient-poet’s response to the diseased condition is not at all passively dejecting. He revels in poetry, lively records the context, and celebrates life on the face of death. His poems reveal and heal.
ILLNESS: NARRATIVES, IMAGERY, AND POLITICS Remarks on a Seminar, an Exhibition, and a Conference
The article uses the review of a seminar, an exhibition, and a graduate conference, which took place at Tallinn University in the 2020–2021 academic year, as an occasion to reflect on the different ways in which illness has been represented in literature, the arts, and film across the history of Western culture. The specific focus of the article is on the theoretical contribution of the humanities to a more complex and adequate understanding of the phenomenon of illness. The study of illness narratives reveals different patterns and strategies of constructing the illness experience into a coherent and meaningful story, but also the resistance that the disruptive impact of illness on our everyday lives poses to narrativisation. The complex historical imagery which endows the biological fact of being sick with additional cultural and social meaning has also to be critically investigated in the humanities and social sciences. Metaphors about illness and the use of illness as a socio-po...