The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities

265 Pages·2018·1.652 MB·English

by  Johanna Emeney

S W L
TUDIES IN ORLD ITERATURE
“Johanna Emeney’s The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry will be recognised as
a tour-de-force in disability studies, for it combines a sure grasp of poetic discourse Vol. 5
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with a comprehensive understanding of how the confluence between the two is o
h
nourished and enlivened through successive generations of poets, doctors, and pa- a
n
tients. If the shamans of old were known to be poet-doctors, then Emeney must be n
understood as their griot in modern guise. She writes everything with lucidity and a
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deep compassion.” m
Ato Quayson, University of Toronto, author of Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Repre- e
n The Rise of Autobiographical
sentation, and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism e
y
“oTf hai sg rboouopk osuf cccoenedtesm mpaogrnairfyi cNenetwly Zine aillalunmd ipnoateitns,g oafn cihmaplloerntgainntg sltihcee odfi stphaer awgoinrkg T Medical Poetry and the
views of some of their reviewers. The whole book is written with subtlety and light- h
e
ness of touch, yet a sharply persuasive edge. It draws attention to a topic of great R
social importance: the need for modern medicine to treat not just the disease, but is
e Medical Humanities
the whole person, and for medical professionals to find creative ways to communi- o
cate with their patients in the most humane ways possible.” f
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Mike Hanne, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland u
t
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“Emeney’s skill in using close reading to reveal the compelling emotional machin- b
io
ery of the poetry is evident.” g
Thom Conroy, School of English and Media Studies, Massey University, author of The Naturalist ra
p
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ic
In this fascinating book, Johanna Emeney examines the global proliferation a
of new poetry related to illness and medical treatment from the perspective l M
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of doctors, patients, and carers in light of the growing popularity of the medi- d
cal humanities. She provides a close analysis of poetry from New Zealand, ica
the USA, and the UK that deals with sociological and philosophical aspects of l P
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sickness, ailment, medical treatment, care, and recuperation. e
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JOHANNA EMENEY, PhD, works as a tutor of Creative Writing at Massey Univer- a
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sity in Auckland and as co-facilitator of the Michael King Young Writers’ d
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Programme for senior school students. Emeney read English Literature and h
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Japanese at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She has published two books of M
poetry: Apple & Tree (Cape Catley, 2011) and Family History (Mākaro Press, e
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2017). ic
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S W L m
TUDIES IN ORLD ITERATURE a
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Series Editors: Janet Wilson, Chris Ringrose ie
s
ISBN: 978-3-8382-1128-2
Johanna Emeney
ibidem ibidem
Johanna Emeney

The Rise of
Autobiographical Medical Poetry
and the Medical Humanities
S W L
TUDIES IN ORLD ITERATURE

Editors: Advisory Board:
Prof Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK Dr Gerd Bayer, University of Erlangen, Germany
Dr Chris Ringrose, Monash University , Australia Dr Fiona Tolan, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
The book series STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE is devoted to the analysis of global literature, and the
multiple, sometimes contradictory, tendencies it accommodates. Its field of enquiry is the ‘new’
world literature, a category currently emerging through multiple changes from the old Romantic
concept of Weltliteratur, attuned to the challenges posed by postcolonialism and multiculturalism,
the increasing globalisation of literature (but also its reverse trend, regionalisation), and the
diversification of the market place. STUDIES IN WORLD LITERATURE encourages research which
celebrates and critically assesses a phenomenon that can be understood, as Pheng Cheah points
out, as the ‘literature of the world—imaginings and stories [...] that track and account for
contemporary globalization as well as older historical narratives of worldhood’.
World literature can be brought into dialogue with postcolonial writing through scrutiny of
how it is written, read, circulated, and received transnationally within the contemporary circuit of
global cultural capital. The series also responds to the need to examine the inherent
contradictions in the concept of a world literature and dependence on a hegemonic (often
English‐centred) literary and critical discourse.
The series seeks to address these tensions, and consequently welcomes:
1) volumes which debate such matters theoretically (including definitions of what counts as
‘world literature’ and the place of postcolonial literary production within this larger category);
2) comparative studies of texts and genres from different countries and cultures under common
headings or concepts such as memory, ethics, and human rights.
Volumes on national literatures, when these are set in a world/comparative or generic context,
will also be considered, and the series will include discussions of other complementary aspects of
discourse, narratology, and media. While writing by ‘canonical’ authors will be covered, the series
will additionally propose wider cultural and intellectual genealogies for ‘minor’ or occluded
writers. A key aim of this series is to redeploy the familiar rhetoric of postcolonial theory and
discourse in relation to concepts relevant to world literature by introducing arguments that will
be integrated with the evidence of individual literary practice. This emphasis on contesting
definitions of ‘diasporic’ or ‘postcolonial’ writing, ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ literatures
and ‘world’ literature as used by writers, critics and thinkers may lead to a reconsideration of the
boundaries that divide and intersections that link these related fields.
Recent volumes:
1 Nadia Anwar 3 Bruce King
Dynamics of Distancing in Nigerian Drama From New National to World Literature
A Functional Approach to Metatheatre Essays and Reviews
ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0862‐6 ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0876‐3
2 Vincent van Bever Donker 4 Gareth Griffiths, Philip Mead (eds.)
Recognition and Ethics in World Literature The Social Work of Narrative
Religion, Violence, and the Human Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary
ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0867‐1 ISBN 978‐3‐8382‐0958‐6
Johanna Emeney

THE RISE OF
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEDICAL POETRY
AND THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES
ibidem- Verlag
Stuttgart
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
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Cover picture: Jan Steen: The Sick Woman. Oil on Canvas, between 1663 and 1666. Public Domain.
ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-6938-2
© ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
Stuttgart, Germany 2018
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Contents

Preface
New Zealand as the Literary Locus of this Study ........................................ 7 
Introduction
The Modern Marriage of Medicine and Poetry ......................................... 11 
The Medical Humanities ..................................................................................... 13 
Medical Poetry ......................................................................................................... 15 
Critical Perspectives .............................................................................................. 21 
The Autobiographical Lyric in the Context of Confessionalism ......... 30 
Narrative Perspective ........................................................................................... 38 
Social Commentary and Subversion via the Manipulation of
Discourses .................................................................................................................. 41 
Chapter 1: The USA and the UK ........................................................... 47 
Introduction: The Early Adopters ................................................................... 47 
A Knowing Art .......................................................................................................... 54 
Dannie Abse .............................................................................................................. 63 
Rafael Campo ........................................................................................................... 72 
Children and Parents ............................................................................................ 83 
Sharon Olds ............................................................................................................... 83 
Philip Gross ............................................................................................................... 93 
Chapter 2: New Zealand’s Doctor‐poets:
Glenn Colquhoun, Angela Andrews, and Rae Varcoe ................. 105 
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 105 
Glenn Colquhoun .................................................................................................. 108 
Angela Andrews .................................................................................................... 128 
Rae Varcoe ............................................................................................................... 139 
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 152 
5
Chapter 3: New Zealand’s Patient‐poets: C.K. Stead,
Jenny Bornholdt, and Sarah Broom ................................................. 155 
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 155 
C.K. Stead ................................................................................................................. 157 
Jenny Bornholdt .................................................................................................... 168 
Sarah Broom .......................................................................................................... 180 
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 189 
Chapter 4: New Zealand’s Parent‐poets: Ingrid Horrocks,
Anne Kennedy, and Jessica Le Bas ................................................... 193 
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 193 
Ingrid Horrocks ..................................................................................................... 200 
Anne Kennedy ........................................................................................................ 210 
Jessica Le Bas ......................................................................................................... 222 
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 233 
Epilogue .................................................................................................... 237 
Bibliography ........................................................................................... 245 

6
Preface
New Zealand as the Literary Locus of this Study
This book concentrates largely on poetry published in my
home country, New Zealand. I first noticed the abundance of poetry
collections based on personal stories of illness and medical treatment
at the time I began piecing together my own medically based collec‐
tion, Family History, in 2010 (Emeney 2017). When I looked further
into the context of this proliferation of medical poetry, I noted both the
academic and popular interest in the medical humanities, and the
larger trend in medical literature of which my country appeared to be
a part. Indeed, New Zealand makes a fitting microcosm for the inves‐
tigation of how ideas contained in so many of these poetry collections
reflect global thinking about healthcare, and the doctor‐patient rela‐
tionship.
Since the new millennium, a large number of poetry collec‐
tions which are both autobiographical and medically themed have
been published in New Zealand, a small island nation of some 4.5 mil‐
lion people. Several of these books have sold very successfully, and
won national prizes for literary merit, made an impact on the commu‐
nity and gained popularity with the reading public. In addition, the
country’s two medical schools at Otago and Auckland universities in‐
clude the medical humanities in their curricula, and each possesses an
associated website or journal—corpus.nz belongs to Otago Univer‐
sity’s Division of Humanities, and Atlas Literary Journal is edited by
Helen Ker, an alumna of Auckland University’s Faculty of Medicine and
Health Sciences. It is fair to say that both medical poetry and the med‐
ical humanities are reasonably well established in New Zealand.
As part of a global model, New Zealand is a useful literary lo‐
cus when exploring the ways in which ideas underpinning the medical
humanities appear in the poetry written during the period of its intro‐
duction and propagation. Put simply, the sociological and philosophi‐
cal principles that originally launched the medical humanities can be
7
8 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEDICAL POETRY AND THE MEDICAL HUMANITIES

summarised thus: “An education that includes the arts can help doc‐
tors to be more reflective, compassionate practitioners and diagnosti‐
cians, and may also draw attention to the deficits and inequalities in
the doctor‐patient relationship that preclude the best medical out‐
comes”. The need for those empathetic doctors who can listen to or co‐
author patients’ stories, and who can balance the biomedical and the
personal, negotiating hierarchies and barriers of language, is commu‐
nicated in these poetry collections published from 2000 onwards.
New Zealand, having looked to adopt the medical humanities in the
late 1990s, reflects a pattern, both in its tertiary medical training and
in its literature, which began in the countries that introduced bioethics
and the medical humanities some two decades earlier.
The recent surge of autobiographical medical poetry in New
Zealand attracted criticism from some quarters for craftless solipsism
on the part of the poets. At the extreme end of critique, reviewer Hugh
Roberts, who teaches at the University of California Irvine, USA, wrote
for the New Zealand Listener that poetry about personal medical expe‐
rience was “a new genre that could be described as exercises in Higher
Blogging: free‐verse ruminations on Stuff That Has Happened To Me
Lately” (2010b, par. 1). However, it can more seriously be viewed as an
example of literature that voices concerns about medical treatment in
New Zealand—concerns that are universally relevant in terms of their
perception of the doctor‐patient relationship and the often dehuman‐
ising nature of medical treatment.
These are collections that reflect life in New Zealand—Māori
words and customs feature in at least three of the collections, prob‐
lems of racist assumptions loom large in one, allusions to artists and
authors most familiar to a New Zealand readership abound in at least
two more—but as World Literature scholar David Damrosch (2009)
says, “the writers who prove to be of real importance are those who
negotiate most creatively the tensions as well as the possibility of their
cultural situation” (107). In Walking to Africa (2009), Jessica Le Bas
presents us with the situation of being a monolingual Pākehā who un‐
derstands more of the visiting Māori elder’s prayer in Te Reo Māori
PREFACE 9

than the medical terminology used to describe her daughter’s treat‐
ment plan. In Anne Kennedy’s Sing‐song (2003), the mother of a child
covered in eczema likens her family’s inability to receive a treatment
that works from the doctor or the pharmacist to the contentious
Treaty of Waitangi signed by the Māori and the Pākehā settlers of New
Zealand. Yet, there is nothing local that cannot be understood (in
terms of transliteration, at least) by a global readership. The rest is
empathy.
These collections deserve attention not only in the medical
humanities classroom of a local medical school; they demand a read‐
ership that is global, because what they have to say is a commentary
on human nature under duress. Their central tensions hearken back
to Foucault (1997) and notions of the “privilege of expertise” (44);
their presentation of doctor‐patient talk echoes Bakhtin’s (1981)
ideas about the “professional stratification of language” (289). The
ways in which the poets choose to mediate the areas of conflict in their
works are common for postcolonial writers, “code‐switching”, or en‐
acting a “social contest […] for which the language variance is synec‐
dochic” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1989, 73). The poets to be dis‐
cussed appropriate medical language and amalgamate it with per‐
sonal, vernacular language and “poetic” language, thereby weakening
its power or lessening its frightening otherness. As scholar and poet
Bill Manhire (2011) puts it, New Zealanders have a history of
“mix[ing] the hieratic with the demotic” (401) to subversive, some‐
times comedic, effect.
At the emotional core of these poems, though, lies something
more than subversion, and more than wresting power from one site in
order to bestow it upon another. It is finding a place of common
ground and a place of understanding. Again, in keeping with the aims
of the medical humanities, this poetry seeks to address inequities and
share a view of experience in order that gaps between people close.
Current Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, one of the New Zealand
poets who has published a collection with a personal, medical theme
(Dark Sparring 2013), sums this up beautifully in her poem “Unity”,