Poetry - Corpus

“When the body shrinks, the spirit grows”

27 November 2017 2 Comments

Jan FitzGerald

I fell into becoming a professional caregiver after caring 24/7 for a terminally ill husband with a brain tumour. Needing to pay funeral expenses, all savings exhausted in the fight for his life, I was weary of having been turned down for jobs as “too qualified” and so settled for $9.50 an hour in a private hospital/rest home, where I worked as many shifts as I could. On account of age and life experience (having had three children and nursed ailing elderly parents and husband), my roster was soon changed from downstairs Rest Home to upstairs Palliative Care.

I felt very comfortable there. There is an honesty of heart shared by poets and the terminally ill. Words and emotions are not wasted. Often, as a qualified grief counsellor, I was asked to stay behind after a death on the shift to “talk with family,” but I think the best contribution I made was to listen. Really listen.

“The Poetry Pharmacy”

20 November 2017 2 Comments

Emma Storr

Can poetry be therapeutic? William Sieghart, editor of the recently published The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried and True Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul, certainly believes in the power of a carefully selected poem to comfort and to make sense of feelings that threaten to overwhelm us at times of great stress. He argues that a poem can help us understand our emotional state and alleviate our fear that we are the only person who is suffering in this particular way. The inspiration for the book arose from a friend’s suggestion that after his talk at a poetry festival, Sieghart should offer short consultations to audience members and prescribe a suitable poem for their individual state of mind. It proved a great success and Sieghart subsequently toured the UK offering poetry pharmacies in libraries and festivals. As he states in the introduction to the book:

In all of this, I learned how much most people’s heartaches have in common.”

Writing Minnie Dean

20 November 2017 Leave a Comment

Karen Zelas

Minnie Dean is the only woman to have been hung in New Zealand (Invercargill, 1895). Her story wasted no time entering our country’s mythology and to this day she remains a cautionary figure used by some parents to foster compliant behaviour in their children. Earlier this year, Mākaro Press published my verse biography: The Trials of Minnie Dean.

I first became acquainted with her circumstances a hundred years after her death, when asked to review Lynley Hood’s 1994 biography Minnie Dean: her life & crimes for the International Journal of Child Abuse and Neglect. At that time, I was a Child and Family Psychiatrist, accepted as a specialist in this area. From Hood’s research I was satisfied that, at least in part, Minnie Dean became a scapegoat of Victorian morality. She cared for unwanted young children, raising some to adulthood. It was inevitable that there would be deaths, since the infant mortality rate at the time was extremely high (up to 90% in institutional care). I drew a parallel with contemporary fostercare and the undervaluing of the role of fosterparents.

[Read more…] about Writing Minnie Dean

Heart risk 1; Sore puku 0

6 November 2017 5 Comments

Kyle Eggleton

I’m a doctor who has been writing poetry for about a year. My poetry writing was born out of a need to more deeply understand the world. Sometimes this need to understand the world arises from a frustration, like a dry seed head lodged in a tramping sock that rubs and chaffs and spoils an otherwise leisurely walk. Sometimes my need to understand stems from my lack of inner comprehension. By exploring the dusty and cobweb filled recesses of my inner self I often uncover a truth about myself and where I fit in the world.

The colours, smells, sounds and emotions invoked by poetry creates what my poet mother calls ‘word pictures’. My work as a general practitioner is full of these word pictures – like the silvery trails left on a father’s face as he talks of the suicide of his child; the cloying, pungent aroma of poverty; the dry hacking paroxysms wracking the frail body of a man without hope.

Elegant feet and gentle noses: anatomical drawing and personhood

30 October 2017 2 Comments

Monica Carroll and Adam Dickerson

A description of a collaboration between a writer (Monica Carroll) and a philosopher (Adam Dickerson).

Through Husserl’s phenomenology we explored the idea of forms of writing that could be coherent with lived experience and with an experience of the body. We found that specialised forms of description, such as anatomical description, shaped and portrayed some parts of lived experience while leaving others parts unspoken. Our explorations in this field produced an artists’ book of loose-leaf folios that point towards unspoken areas of the body, both animated and lifeless.

Work

23 October 2017 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

In New Zealand, every fourth Monday in October is Labour Day, a public holiday that commemorates the introduction of the eight-hour working day. This achievement dates back to the 1840 campaign of Wellington carpenter Samuel Pickering. The public holiday dates from 1890, and was ‘Mondayised’ in 1910.

Work is extremely important to health and wellbeing (read a Corpus take on this by Matt Blackwood here). It can enrich a life, or grind a person into dust. As ever, balance is all, and Corpus is taking a mini-break for Labour Day (just one post this week), because…

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Philip Larkin, from Toads [Read more…] about Work