In his video “Inside Anxiety and Depression,” William Doan’s words “writing is drawing” were a reminder of my existence as a poet and artist, and how the latter is an identity I felt uncomfortable with for a long time. I squirmed at the creation of “art” out of another’s suffering, even though my father’s illness felt like the only thing worth writing about. Now I sit with a different question: whether anyone’s suffering is entirely separate. I think owning suffering defeats the very aim of why we move it to articulation—to release it, to divide the burden of it, and to comprehend it with others.
“There were times my brain only seemed able to record its own suffering,” marks Doan. I look back to my poem, “Dictum Wisdom,” the wincing images of my father’s deterioration adopted and regurgitated as my own suffering. Was it as much mine as it was my father’s or sister’s? Was my father the principal owner, as our suffering would not have existed without his to react upon? Did we worsen his suffering by feeding it with our eyes and art?
What does it mean to borrow grief? What does it feel like to mourn someone else’s losses? For me, it felt wrong. But my articulations of grief through poetry were some of my most honest reflections. I did not care to make his last depictions pretty. It felt of the utmost importance to me to get the last versions of him right, to use the most fitting analogies and similes so any reader would see what I saw of my father’s body on the stretcher that day. By aiming for exactness, was I not trying to make my suffering so recognizable so that I could share it, divide up the burden of carrying his image with other readers?
This video nudged me to reflect deeply and sincerely on why we as artists try to “get it right.” In my poetry, I think getting it right was about the same thing that drawing was and is to William Doan: “making marks to put myself into the world each day” even when the pain of suffering tempted me to grieve separately. By being resilient enough in our art, maybe we make it so that we don’t have to be as resilient with our suffering. Our suffering.
Ceren Ege is a Turkish-American poet currently based in Massachusetts, where she works at the Attorney General’s Office to help advocate for affordable energy. Ege gripped onto poetry as a safe practice of self-care around the time her father's cancer tightened its grip into metastasis. She continues to write to normalize conversations of grief and loss, especially during COVID-19 when everyone has grieved the loss of something—whether it was a person, place, amenity, or an idea of how life would be. Advocacy and social justice draw her to one day practice law, while creative writing keeps her soft in a world bedecked with adversities that tempt us to harden. “Pomegranate Protocol” “is an acknowledgment of the need to grieve and permission to do so.” “Dictum Wisdom,” also in the Fall 2021 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, is “an acknowledgement of Ege’s father's life, of the shared pains that allow us to connect, and a proposition that we should,” said Ege.Her poetry has won a Hopwood Undergraduate Award and the Arthur Miller Award through the University of Michigan's Hopwood Program.