Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)
Reviews:
Dan Davin / Alistair Paterson / Johanna Emeney
Johanna Emeney. The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities. Studies in World Literature, 5. ISBN 978-3-8382-0938-8. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2018. RRP €29.90. 264 pp.
I have to declare an interest here. Together with my colleague Bryan Walpert, I was one of Johanna Emeney’s two supervisors for her PhD. This book reprises – to a large degree – the critical section of her thesis.
It’s safe to say, then, that a good deal of this material is quite familiar to me. Not all, though. Jo has greatly expanded the book, adding a considerable new chapter on UK and US poets, and swelling it to its present impressive length in the process.
What is it all about? Well, the reason I thought it should be reviewed in this issue of Poetry New Zealand is mainly because it has so many important and valuable things to say about an important recent trend in our poetry: the preponderance of books about medical matters, from both sides of the equation: Doctors and patients.
To be precise, Jo Emeney identifies three tropes or variations on this situation: Doctor-poets, such as (in New Zealand) Glenn Colquhoun, Angela Andrews and Rae Varcoe; Patient-poets, such as C. K. Stead, Jenny Bornholdt, and Sarah Broom; and Parent-poets, such as Ingrid Horrocks, Anne Kennedy, and Jessica Le Bas. She parallels this with overseas Doctor-poets such as the Welshman Dannie Abse and the Cuban-American Rafael Campo, and Parent/ Patient-poets such as the American Sharon Olds and the Englishman Philp Gross.
The first thing Jo points out is the generally positive critical response which the various doctors have received to their work, and the far more mixed (and even, occasionally, quite negative) response which has greeted the writing of the patients, not to mention the parents or relatives of patients. Dannie Abse’s medical practice was described by one critic as ‘what trench warfare was to Wilfred Owen’s poetry’, while Rafael Campo’s multivocal approach to writing poems is called ‘an act of humility and service, just as healing is.’
The same trend continues among New Zealand reviewers: Glenn Colquhoun’s bestselling collection Playing God (2002) was praised as ‘heartbreaking and beautiful’ for its ‘intense, almost fragile self-awareness.’ Angela Andrews’ Echolocation (2007) was said to foreground a speaker in whom ‘the concerned eyes of a loving granddaughter combine with the precise observation of a doctor.’ Completing the hat-trick, Rae Varcoe’s Tributary (2007) was commended for its ‘honest’ approach – ‘she stops off to offer advice from time to time but mostly she assures us that she’s no surer than anyone else.’
What, then, of the patient-poets? Well, Jo Emeney is probably right to see the reaction to them as part and parcel of the Kiwi intolerance of whingers. US-based reviewer Hugh Roberts, for instance, chided C. K. Stead for resorting to the ‘gut-spilling impulse of the “confessional” mode’ in the poems about the aphasia caused by his stroke in The Black River (2007). Poet and critic Joanna Preston said of Jenny Bornholdt’s The Rocky Shore (2008): ‘reportage is not art. Neither is mere depiction’ and went on to explain that ‘You don’t get brownie points any more just for making the world your psychotherapist.’
The tragic circumstances of young mother and fledgling poet Sarah Broom’s early diagnosis with lung cancer may have spared her some of the more comprehensive demolition jobs aimed at the other poets, but even there Joanna Preston was careful to stress, of Tigers at Awhitu (2010), that even though she ‘didn’t like poems like “Three Exercises for Oncologists” and “Panther”, they aren’t badly written. Just not up to the same standard as the rest.’
It’s not that Jo Emeney is suggesting the existence of a vast conspiracy: reviewers paid to puff Doctor-poets and put down any witnesses to their actual practice of the craft of medicine. Many of these opinions are clearly very sincerely held.
After all, I too figure in the rogue’s gallery of ‘misunderstanders’ of the nature of this new genre of Autobiographical Medical Poetry as a result of certain reservations I expressed in a review of Jessica Le Bas’s Walking to Africa (2009).
I stated there that: “It’s an odd decision, to say the least, to make someone else’s suffering the subject of such a set of confessional poems.” I stand by that. It is an odd decision. I went on, however, to praise the protagonist of her poems for honesty in daring to describe so frankly her own reactions to the awful situation she finds herself in: “She’s not saintly, not all-knowing, wise, patient – she’s human, flawed, peevish. Maybe that’s worth saying at such length. And maybe not. Who knows?”
My review concluded:
I do believe in the purity of her motives, the honesty of her self-scrutiny – the fact that she believes that it might help others in similar trials. Telling them it’s okay not to be a saint. Who knows, it might even make some of us feel a bit better. What more can one really hope of any poem?The enduring value of Jo’s book is, I think, the fact that she points out the larger context for Le Bas’s work in this field: the joint project by both patients and doctors to break down the barriers of medical jargon and replace (or at least supplement) them with the language of what Jo calls ‘the life-world’ – the world the rest of us inhabit.
There is something a bit disconcerting in the sheer inconsequentiality of many of Jenny Bornholdt and other recent poets’ passing observations which might tempt us to agree with Hugh Roberts in seeing them as ‘exercises in Higher Blogging: free-verse ruminations on Stuff That Has Happened To Me Lately’.
Joanna Preston sees the moment for confessional poetry as definitively over: “it was brave and it was important, because this was opening up poetry to a range of subject matter that had been deemed out of bounds. But that … happened a fair while ago.” Hugh Roberts, similarly, has no time for the old maxim that the personal is political.
The value of Jo Emeney’s book is its careful scrutiny of the evidence: the extensive close-readings of poems, the marshalling of evidence, designed to show that all three shadings of ‘Autobiographical Medical Poets’ are engaged in the same enterprise: breaking down the barriers between suffering and empathy, identifying and refuting myths of stoical acceptance and ‘hysterical’ over-reactions to experience.
‘Where Id was, Ego shall be,’ said Sigmund Freud. Strange as it may seem, these poets turn out to be engaged in much the same project: providing us with guidebooks for our own (inevitable) sojourns in Hell, heartening us with the bolshie defiance of the best of these poems, and simply informing us that cancer, AIDS, dementia, mental illness, and all those other bugbears that haunt us can – and must – be faced, and that the doctors have at least as much to learn here as any of their patients. I now see that my puzzlement at Jessica Le Bas’s book was mostly prompted by ignorance of this context, and of the larger project she and other poets were engaged in. Jo Emeney’s long critical (and creative) exploration of the subject has left me – and others – with no excuse for such ignorance in the future.
This is, finally, a brave and wise book, by a fine poet who knows her subject thoroughly: both personally and in the abstract.
(12-13/9/18)
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 310-13.
[1228 wds]
Poetry NZ Yearbook 2018
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