I am interested in the juxtaposition between my use of poetry to shed traumatic experiences and memories from medicine, and the description of William Carlos Williams by Britta Gustavson (“Re-embodying Medicine: William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Attention,” Spring 2020 Intima).
Gustavson points out that Willams’s poetry intersected with his medical practice and adds to observation, imagination, empathy and introspection. “To reunite medicine with the body we can look to ways Williams’s writing can help us ‘train’ our senses. For Williams, a focus on sensory particulars in order to ‘discover the universal’ was a key foundation for both his medical practice and his writing.”
I’m curious about this. I was trained to observe my patients, sync with their rhythms, then accurately reflect their lives, pain, and future. This was an art and skill impressed on me like a wax seal from the metal of my mentors.
But my influences have widened to shamanic medicine, ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and yoga. These healers don’t observe the same way; they also vary widely in their use of writing. It’s very Western to write about your patient extensively as a means of treating them.
Anthropologists have documented that Indigenous shamanic healers around the world “eat” their patient's disease, sucking it out of them. These healers don’t try to reflect it accurately. They don’t write about it. It’s processed subconsciously by their own immune system.
Certainly William Carlos Williams is a master craftsman, and reading his poetry I wish I could have seen him with his patients. The refinement he demonstrates, which Gustavson so eloquently uncovers, is a gift to the world.
In contrast, I know my poetry is not a careful true-full reflection of my observations. It’s an unthinking regurgitation of my patient’s pain, interlaced with my own. I wake at 3am, stumble to my computer and write it without any editing in its final form. It is not of me, not something I consciously crafted, it is something Other.
I wonder then, are there two kinds of poetry? Perhaps an in-breath and an out-breath? In the daytime I leave poetry in my patients’ medical charts, punctuated careful pleadings for their health, inexpertly modeled after Willams and my other heros. And then in the nighttime I write poetry to expel the pain I have consumed in their care.
Is it possible I have merged my influences, and after all the years of treating patients with writing, I don’t shit out their disease like my indigenous brothers, but shit poems?
Drea Burbank is a MD-technologist, who runs an international consulting group specializing in preventive medicine products and prototypes. A digital nomad with a yoga addiction, Burbank has a propensity to profanity and only pretends to live in San Francisco. Her poem "Bleeding" appears in the Fall 2021 Intima.