Sitting down and writing a poem hardly fits with the image of doctors as portrayed in Casualty and other doc-dramas. Yet many doctors write poetry, some of it very good poetry at that. And many reflect on their work in their poetry.
Here's a cry from the heart from New Zealand doctor Glenn Colquhoun:
Today I do not want to be a doctor. Nobody is getting any better. Those who were well are sick again and those who were sick are sicker. The dying think they will live. The healthy think they are dying.
These lines, from poem Today I do not want to be a doctor, illustrate the clarity Colquhoun brings to his writing. His collection Playing God sold 6,000 copies in New Zealand, an astonishing figure for a poetry collection.
Examination of the mental condition of a person who seems to have dementia might seem like an unpromising subject, but I think there's something beautiful in Colquhoun's poem A mini mental status examination. Here's the first verse:
She told me that it was summer and that we were in the south of France. The night before we had heard a man sing beautifully on the street Her father was important and young men had always sought her. I was no exception. She complained of the heat.
The most famous doctor-poet in the modern times was William Carlos Williams who had a paediatric practice in Rutherford in the USA and who died in 1963. He remains one of the most important figures in modern English poetry. Here is his 1923 poem The Red Wheelbarrow:
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
Williams drew his images and language from everyday life, listening to the rhythms of his patients' speech, frequently jotting down poems or fragments of poems on a prescription pad between consultations. He suffered from depression and had strokes at a relatively young age. After a stroke, according to his protegé Allen Ginsberg, Williams had difficulty moving back the carriage of his typewriter when it reached the margin of the page. It was easier for him to turn the roller on which the page rested so that the next line down began below the point at which the last line had ended. This pattern occurs in some of his poems (not The Red Wheelbarrow). Williams, a master craftsman, made this arrangement of lines work very well.
Williams worked with images, with objects and there is a deceptive simplicity about his writing. In Complaint, he writes of making a house call after midnight:
The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps labouring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! The poem ends: I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
Here in Ireland, the surgeon Oliver St John Gogarty was our most famous doctor poet in the last century. He was a prolific writer and was regarded by WB Yeats as "one of the great lyric poets of the age," a judgment I suspect not many people would agree with today. Gogarty was also a senator and a champion athlete - a busy man. He was immortalised by James Joyce as "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" in Ulysses. I like these lines on his headstone in Connemara:
Our friends go with us as we go Down the long path where Beauty wends, Where all we love forgathers, so Why should we fear to join our friends?
Back to the modern doctor-poets:
In paradise hospital beds Are under ageless Mahogany and Sycamore, Bearing every kind of fruit.
These lines - with a whole new take on hospital beds - are by Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician of internal medicine. He has been a field member of Doctors Without Borders and his political awareness is reflected in lines such as
Which vineyard did you grow your cluster bomb in? And your Depleted geranium, your thistle Spray by the emerald sea...
("depleted geranium" is a play on "depleted uranium." I don't understand the referece to "thistle spray by the emerald sea" but that's ok: you don't have to understand every line of a poem).
Why write poetry? Who knows? Glenn Colquhoun writes in his poem, In other words:
a poem is a way of knowing you are alive as shocking as fish leaping out of deep water as sharp as light stabbing through a row of trees, as bold as opening up your eyes during prayer as simple as lying awake in the middle of the night listening to the sound of people snoring.
As I said at the start of this article, many poems by doctors reflect their experiences at work, perhaps to a greater extent that is the case with poets in other professions. Readers might recognise the scene in the following lines from In Primary Care: More poems by physicians, (University of Iowa Press) in which Dwaine Rieves writes:
By 3AM our unit's beyond coming or going no flourescence only bedside lamps and a voiceless blue. It's an ICU sky, techs returning like comets, you with your pressure falling into a range where stars form so quickly we can't keep up with the numbers.
I wonder how a poem from an Irish ICU would read! Over to you.
