Saving Faces: Art and Medicine Ted Kooser Thursday - UNMC

28 Pages·2006·0.06 MB·English

Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

Thank you all for coming. It’s a wonderful honor for me to be here. Dr. Lydiatt and the
University of Nebraska Medical Center saved my life and I owe them a great deal. I managed
to survive head and neck cancer and then all these wonderful things happened to me. I
wanted to begin tonight with a little poem that I wrote recently. Lots of my friends come up and
put their hand on my shoulder and say, “How are you doing? How are you holding up under all
that stuff? Are you doing okay? How is Kathy doing? Is she all right,” that kind of thing. So I
wrote this poem in answer, and it’s called “Success.”
SUCCESS
I can feel the thick yellow fat of applause
building up in my arteries, friends,
yet I go on, a fool for adoration. Do I care
that when it sloughs off it is likely to go
straight to the brain? I am already showing
the first signs of poetic aphasia,
the words coming hard, the synapses
of metaphor no longer connecting.
But look at me, down on my knees
next to the podium, lapping the last drops,
then rolling in the stain like a dog,
getting the smell in my good tweed sport coat,
the grease on my suede elbow patches,
and for what? Well, for the women I walk past
the next morning, the ones in the terminal,
wheeling their luggage, looking so beautifully
earnest. All for the hope that they will
suddenly dilate their nostrils, squeeze
the hard carry-on handles, and rise to
the ripening odor of praise with which I have
basted myself, stinking to heaven.

My internist, Scott Rasmussen is here tonight, and he too was worried about the fat of
applause building up in my arteries and ran me through an ultra-fast heart scan not too long
ago.
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

A little history. At the end of 1997, my mother was dying. She had emphysema and heart
trouble and I was going back and forth to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from Lincoln, to visit her every
other week or so and it was a tremendously stressful time for me. I had had canker sores over
the years and I developed what I thought was a persistent canker sore on the back of my
tongue. But I was so preoccupied with mother that I didn’t do anything about it. My wife and I
went to a wedding in Tennessee in early May and it was sore and I was thinking well, maybe I
ought to have somebody look at this, but then there was mother again. So I put off doing
anything and cancelled my dental appointment in mid-May because by that time there were
some estate issues my sister and I were working on. I finally got to the dentist the first of June
and he looked me over and cleaned my teeth and said, “ Well, everything looks okay,” and I
said, “Take a look way back on my tongue on the left side. There’s something there that’s
been bothering me. He looked and said right away that he had better send me over to the
dental school for a biopsy. So we did that and then I was referred to Bill Lydiatt and we drove
to Omaha and of course, I was terrified. I came up here to the Med Center and Bill did the
initial interview and looked me over and he said, “ I’m going to have to take a sizable chunk out
of your tongue. Do you do any public speaking?” And I said that there was none that I
couldn’t give up to get better. My wife was there and she said, “Well, you know, he is a poet.
He does do poetry readings.” And that was all that was said about my writing. We had another
appointment in another ten days and we came up and discovered that Bill had taken the time
to go to the Omaha Public Library and check out my books and read them. I thought, this is the
doctor for me. And he’s been the doctor for me ever since. I’m going to read some things
tonight about the experience I went through and, as Bill said, I would be happy to take
questions and I’ll tell you anything about me. This first poem was written at the Med Center in
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

the waiting room, or notes were made at that time, waiting for a follow-up checkup at the
Cancer Clinic.
At the Cancer Clinic
She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

I saw that sort of thing time and again in those waiting rooms. It was a marvelously humbling
experience.
There’s a poem in “Delights and Shadows” that really sets up the experience, showing how,
after you stare death in the teeth, how important the world is, how vivid it seems to become.
Surviving
There are days when the fear of death
is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates
everything. Without it, I might not
have noticed this ladybird beetle,
bright as a drop of blood
on the window’s white sill.
Her head no bigger than a period,
her eyes like needle points,
she has stopped for a moment to rest,
knees locked, wing covers hiding
the delicate lace of her wings.
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

As the fear of death, so attentive
to everything living, comes near her,
the tiny antennae stop moving.

Now about this book, “Winter Morning Walks.” I had surgery and then radiation in Lincoln, and
finished that at the end of August of ’98. I was pretty well blown apart by radiation. Head and
neck radiation is very difficult and I was on liquids for several months. But I knew that I needed
to get my strength back, and my radiation oncologist, Dr. Dina Howell-Burke, who was
practicing in Lincoln, told me to stay out of the sun because of photo-sensitivity. So I would get
up before dawn and walk a mile down the road and a mile back. I started doing that early in
September and my writing, although it had been a passion all my life, was very far from me. I
was completely self-involved, trying to get enough nutrition and keep going. To those of you
who haven’t gone on a liquid diet, I might say it is a bitch to get 1700 calories a day. You have
to be drinking all day long, so that was a major undertaking right there. Later on in the fall, one
morning I had gone out walking and come home, and I had seen something along the road
and I wrote a little poem about it and was tremendously pleased that I had finally rediscovered
my ability to write. One of my very dear friends is Jim Harrison, a novelist, screen writer and
poet, who spends the winters in Arizona. So I taped this poem on a postcard and sent it to Jim
and the next morning I wrote another one and taped it on a postcard and sent it to him. I did
that all winter, wrote 130 of these short imagistic poems in sequence and then took a hundred
of them and made a little book. I didn’t really intend to be writing a book. It was just something
I was doing.

Poetry is a way of establishing a little package of order, sometimes from a very disorderly life.
A little square of words with everything just exactly where they should be. It’s only this big and
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

disorder is all around you, but if you can do that little thing, you feel better about things. The
same would be true of drawing or painting, Or composing a little music. There was tremendous
reassurance in being able to convince myself that there was still some order that I could define
in that way.

You know, after September 11th, the internet was absolutely choked with poems about 9/11
and they were heartfelt, every one of them. We’re not talking art here and there were some
pretty clumsy things, but I think what was happening was that people all over the world really
had suddenly been exposed to an enormous body of complete disorder and chaos and were
trying to find some way of reckoning with it and poetry came to mind as being that solution.
I’ll read a few of these morning poems and then we can talk a little. The very first poem in the
group was actually written later. I wrote it because I wanted a preface. It sets up the gravel
road I walked every day, down to the end and back. My late father was a store manager, who
at one time had been a drapery salesman. He loved bolts of cloth, and I This one sets up the
poems to follow.
The quarry road tumbles toward me
out of the early morning darkness,
lustrous with frost, an unrolled bolt
of softly glowing fabric, interwoven
with tiny glass beads on silver thread,
the cloth spilled out and then lovingly
smoothed by my father’s hand
as he stands behind his wooden counter
(dark as these fields) at Tilden’s Store
so many years ago. “Here,” he says smiling,
“you can make something special with this.”

So every day, I tried to make something special from that gravel road.
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

Here’s the very first one I wrote. This was on the 9th of November and each of these poems
has the date and then a little note about the weather.
November 9 – rainy and cold.
The sky hangs thin and wet on its clothesline.

A deer of gray vapor steps through the foreground,
Under the dripping, lichen-rusted trees.

Halfway across the next field,
The distance (or can that be the future?)
Is sealed up in tin like an old barn.

November 10 – high winds all night
Most of the snow passed north of us,
But this morning we’re given the fancy white lace
At the edge of that blanket,
Every weed on the roadside coated with ice.

Behind the counter at the post office,
Somebody’s small carton stamped with block letters:
ANGEL MOMENTS WITH SNAIL.

I drive very slowly all the way home.

November 12 – 4:30 AM
On mornings like this, as hours before dawn
I walk the dark hall of the road
with my life creaking under my feet, I sometimes
take hold of the cold porcelain know
of the moon, and turn it, and step into a room
warm and yellow, and take my seat
at a small wooden table with a border of painted pansies,
and wait for my mother to bring me my bowl.

November 14 - in the low 40’s and clear
My wife and I walk the cold road
in silence, asking for thirty more years.
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

There’s a pink and blue sunrise
with an accent of red:
a hunter’s cap burns like a coal
in the yellow-gray eye of the woods.

November 18 – cloudy, dark and windy
Walking by flashlight
at six in the morning,
my circle of light on the gravel
swinging side to side,
coyote, raccoon, field mouse, sparrow,
each watching from darkness
this man with the moon on a leash.

There was always this, all through this period of course, there’s this forboding. You know, I
had just gotten through this treatment. Who knows how well it worked, you know. This poem
is pretty typical of that.

November 20 – clear and still, a heavy frost

The pale gray road lit only by stars.
A rabbit runs ahead, then stops
at the edge of the sound of my footsteps,
then runs ahead and stops again,
trembling in darkness
on the cold outer rim of the present.

November 28 – chilly and clear
There was a time
when my long gray cashmere topcoat
was cigarette smoke,
and my snappy felt homburg
was alcohol,
and the paisley silk scarf at my neck,
with its fringed end
tossed carelessly over my shoulder,
was laughter rich with irony.
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

Look at me now.
And you know, this fastening on detail, as I did with that ladybird poem. Looking at everything
as if there was something there for me.

November 29 – breezy and warm

A round hay bale,
brown and blind, all shoulders,
huddled, bound tightly
by sky blue nylon twine.
Just so I awoke this morning,
wrapped in fear.

Oh, red plastic flag on a stick
stuck into loose gravel,
driven over, snapped off,
propped up again and again,
give me your courage.

Celebration Dec 4 – foggy and dripping
Notice the way this one opens.
I was alive and looking
the right direction
when hundreds of starlings
were perched on the sky,
or so it seemed,
thought they were really
sprinkled all over
the aluminum roof of a barn
that in fog was sky,
the color and wetness of sky.
They made a noise
like water dripping as they pecked
at the slippery gray,
but only for the instant
in which I was to be their witness,
For then, without a sound,
Both sky and roof went blank,
and cleanly separate,
and every bird was gone.
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

I want to find the one about my dear dog. I should have marked these a little bit better. I love
them all. This is the most important book I ever wrote, at least to me, because it was so
intimately connected with the experience of getting better. Here I am, right at the end of the
year, December 31st, looking back.

December - Cold and snowing.
The opening pages forgotten,
then the sadness of my mother’s death
in the cold, wet chapters of spring.
For me, featureless text of summer
burning with illness, a long convalescence,
then a conclusion in which
the first hard frosts are lovingly described.
A bibliography of falling leaves,
an index of bare trees,
and finally, a crow flying like a signature
over the soft white endpapers of the year.

And of course, I was writing about our home life as well. I’m pretty fond of this little
picture…my wife, Kathy, works as the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star and was of course
going to work every day while I was staying home feeling sorry for myself.

January 4 – four below zero
My wife took an apple to work
This morning, hurriedly picking it
up and out of a plastic bag
on the kitchen counter, and though
she has been gone an hour,
the open bag stillholds in a swirl
the graceful turn of her writs,
a fountain lifting. And now I can see
that the air by the closet door
keepts the bell-like hollow she made
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Saving Faces: Art and Medicine
Ted Kooser Thursday, January 26, 2006 7:00pm

spinning into her winter coat
while pushing her apple through a sleeve
and back out into the ordinary.

Okay, here’s the dog poem I was looking for. This is me with my very old spotted dog, Hattie,
who was literally on her last legs. We say that very flippantly but she really was.

January 19 – still falling greasy

Arthritic and weak, my old dog Hattie
stumbles behind me over the snow.
When I stop, she stops, tipped to one side
like a folding table with one of the legs
not snapped in place. Head bowed, one ear
turned down to the earth as if she
could hear it turning, she is losing the trail
at the end of her fourteenth year.
Now she must follow. Once she could catch
a season running and shake it by the neck
till the leaves fell off, but now they get away,
flashing their tails as they bound off
over the hill. Maybe she doesn’t see them
out of those clouded, wet brown eyes,
maybe she no longer cares. I thought
for a while last summer that I might die
before my dogs, but it seems I was wrong.
She wobbles a little way ahead of me now,
barking her sharp small bark,
then stops and trembles, excited, on point
at the spot that leads out of the world.

The last one in the book was up here on the screen at one time. I continued to write poems,
but as far as this particular type of thing I was doing, I quit in the spring, on March 20th, on the
vernal equinox. And this one is not typical of my poems because it is such an overstatement.

March 20 – The vernal equinox
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