Poetry - Corpus

Swapping the scalpel for the pen: a surgeon writes

3 October 2016 4 Comments

Kevin Pringle

The first poem I wrote about a patient was when I was working in Iowa City at the University of Iowa as a professor of Paediatric Surgery. Matt was a classmate of our younger daughter Fiona in Junior High (roughly equivalent to New Zealand’s Intermediate). He developed a tumour on one of his ribs, which I attempted to remove, unsuccessfully.

Bittersweet. Bitter more than sweet.
I did my best, and felt I let you down.”

– from “Matt” by Kevin Pringle

Tasty medicinal words! Poems by Alan Roddick

26 September 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

… Now we insert the point
of an elevator in the peridontal space.”

– from “A Patient” by Alan Roddick.

There are not many poets who can confidently use the phrase ‘peridontal space’ in a poem. Indeed, I know only one: dentist poet Alan Roddick, whose long awaited second collection, Getting it Right, has just appeared. It follows at a stately remove from its predecessor, The Eye Corrects, which was published in 1967. The poems collected in Getting it Right feel honed, polished, clear. They celebrate the natural world, love and life (there is only the one poem which overtly mentions dentistry, so dentophobics need not fear opening the book), and Roddick brings his steady eye and hand to every line.

Big Minty Nose

19 September 2016 Leave a Comment

Jenny Bornholdt

“Big Minty Nose” is one of six long poems that made up my book The Rocky Shore. They’re about all kinds of things, mostly illness, death (keeping it cheerful here!), the garden, kids and family. “Big Minty Nose” is the final poem in the book. I was recovering from a year of pain, then hip surgery; our friend Nigel had died of cancer and I was thinking about my father’s death from melanoma some years earlier. Writing about these things helped me find a place for them inside our daily life, which is where they will always be.

[Read more…] about Big Minty Nose

Working between science and the soul

22 August 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Leah Kaminsky

A physician works at the border between science and the soul … the wise doctor probes not only the organs of his patient but also his feelings and emotions, his fears and hopes, his regrets and his goals. And to accomplish that most important task of applying wisdom, the physician also needs to take his own emotional temperature.” – Jerome Groopman, in the foreword to Writer, M. D., a collection of works by doctor-writers edited by Melbourne GP and writer Leah Kaminsky.

Kaminsky writes: Writing for me can be a kind of thermometer, where I check the rising mercury of my own beliefs, biases and uncertainties. It is not a place I hope to find answers—rather, I use the blank page to try and understand what kind of questions a doctor needs to ask. My medicine has always fed and informed my writing. But more importantly, literature has, I hope, made me a better physician.

“I give you my guessing tubes”: 4 poems by Rae Varcoe

18 July 2016 3 Comments

Dr Rae Varcoe was a Leukaemia and Lymphoma Physician at Auckland Hospital for 30 years. She has been a poetry reader for much longer and began writing verse at Victoria University’s inaugural MA class in 1997. Poetry has been one of the buttresses of her life in medicine.

“I sing the body electric”: Walt Whitman

11 July 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”—Walt Whitman (1819-92).

Walt Whitman was a journalist and poet who volunteered as a nurse in 1863-4, during the American Civil War. His major work, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was revised and expanded over the course of nine editions during his lifetime (with a tenth edition published posthumously in 1897).

Whitman’s poetry is intensely observant of the physical world, and deeply attuned to seasonal cycles and the passage of time. Birth and death, aging, disease, injury, love and passion all appear in his work, which is renowned for its oratory style, and its celebration of the embodied nature of human experience. “I sing the body electric”, he wrote. “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”

The poem continues: