As a medical student, I've gotten into the habit of saving folded-up scrap paper from the hospital and stealing moments during rounds or lectures to jot down scattered words and phrases. They're things I can't get out of my head, like "white cheddar Cheez-its® and stale cigarettes" or "I'm not a bad Mom." Snippets that don't make sense on their own, but together they have a strange sort of alchemy. The distilled essence of a day's humanity. A tragicomic piece of found poetry. After my first year of clinical rotations, I decided to sit down and see what I could cobble together to find out whether meaning would come if I made space for it. What arrived was, if not meaningful, at least interesting, and it eventually became "Self Portrait of the Artist as Medical Student."
A writing teacher once told me that poetry is for when something is too fresh for prose. She was talking about poetry as a sort of grasping through shadows, a subtle naming of that which is too raw to submit to the staid structure of a paragraph. I think reading poetry can often feel the same — like loose, glittering tissue paper strung over the tip of a live wire. Not quite palatable, not quite tamed.
In "Here, Ellipses," poet Suzanne Edison collages together fragments of presence from the miasma of the pandemic. Reading it made me uncomfortable in the way that all good poetry does. With a smattering of floating, disembodied images, she evokes the dizzying proximity of the mundane to the apocalyptic. Ambulance sirens in conversation with baby hummingbirds — and, thrumming through the space between, a profoundly relatable current of doubt.
Another lesson from writing class: When things don't make sense, sometimes we have to gather all of the scattered pieces, lay them out next to one another, and read them back. And sometimes, what echoes back to us is larger and weirder and more honest than what we first set down. Sometimes, it's even beautiful. Suzanne Edison sifts through the senseless and makes of it a symphony — and in doing so, reminds us that even the garish present can glisten if held to the light.
Anna Dovre is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, planning to specialize in Family Medicine. She is passionate about the power of narrative in shaping how we relate to patients, each other and ourselves. Dovre spends her free time devouring baked goods and library books, in equal measure.