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The Kent State University Press - Jerald Winakur

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79 pages

English

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Patients and physicians are adrift in this era of rapidly changing medical paradigms. Perhaps it has always been so, though it seems that lately the dissatisfaction on both sides has intensified.Doctors today are struggling: debt, divorce, substance abuse, burnout, suicide. They succeed or fail on professional treadmills; patient encounters measured out with coffee spoons. The doctor patient relationship is crumbling. Bureaucratic and corporate masters make their never-ending arguments of insidious intent. The overwhelming questions: Now where to turn? How do physicians- and their patients-avoid being crushed by the demands of science, of perfection, of expectations? How do we recover the awe we once felt in this world in which we expend our life force every day? How can we find joy once more?Human Voices Wake Us is a plea, a prayer, a path for caregivers and patients, for all of us who struggle in difficult circumstances for understanding, enlightenment, and healing. This book is a treatise on the importance of self-reflection, attentiveness to our own inner voice and needs, as well as to those who are struggling with illness, age, infirmity, and loss. It is a call to nurture our idealism: that solid foundation grounding empathic responsiveness and our own humanity.

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USA

United States of America

Poetry

États-Unis

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	10 août 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631012907
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Advance Praise for HUMAN VOICES WAKE US
“Jerald Winakur’s Human Voices Wake Us carries the reader into that deep place where poetry and medicine intersect and generate healing. His poems celebrate beauty in the natural world, not in abstract terms but in its particularity, in bluegills, dragonflies, dust devils, and prickly pear. They celebrate the wisdom of story, as when a student asks him, ‘Are butterflies birds?’ Or when he tells the story of Mick and the hamburger. And they celebrate the practice of medicine in all its sorrows and joys, but especially compassionate solidarity with patients. In ‘This Sadness,’ a poem about cancer, Dr. Winakur writes, ‘this sadness / does not speak the language.’ But this poet-physician does speak the language, the language of healing through poetry. A marvelous collection!”
—J ACK C OULEHAN , author of The Wound Dresser
“Jerald Winakur’s Human Voices Wake Us is more than a collection of exquisitely crafted poems. There is such poignancy here, such humility, such a keen, painful awareness of the fleetingness of our little lives, of the agonizing drifts and decisions facing us as we age, that it is impossible to put this book down. Winakur’s poems are wide open to anguish and joy—especially the small but intense joys we can find in great blue herons, forsythia, dogwoods, redbuds, owlet moths, wheatgrass, little bluestem, tall fescue, and maidencane. As he says in ‘A Denunciation of Quarks,’ ‘I am no longer certain what matters, want / only to touch the thing itself for once.’ And touch the things of this living world Winakur does, with vividness and care, even as we mourn the limitations of our little lives. ‘I have done the best I could,’ laments Winakur in ‘Out of Practice,’ and these poems certainly convince us that before retiring as a physician, Winakur did more than his best. If only we could have been fortunate enough to have been one of his patients. But how lucky we are to have these poems that, even as they mourn the limitations of the best medical practices and the often humiliating and agonizing realities of our aging, offer us medical advice for all our lives, to live wide awake to the sensory joys that continually surround us.”
—W ENDY B ARKER , author of One Blackbird at a Time
HUMAN VOICES WAKE US
Human Voices Wake Us
Poems by
JERALD WINAKUR

THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio
© 2017 by Jerald Winakur
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2016055041
ISBN 978-1-60635-334-9
Manufactured in the United States of America
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Winakur, Jerald, author.
Title: Human voices wake us / Poems by Jerald Winakur.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2017] | Series: Literature and medicine
Identifiers: LCCN 2016055041 (print) | LCCN 2017007337 (ebook) | ISBN 9781606353349 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781631012907 (ePub) | ISBN 9781631012914 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Physician and patient. | Medicine and art. | Poetry.
Classification: LCC R727.3 .W56 2017 (print) | LCC R727.3 (ebook) | DDC 610.7306/99--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055041
21 20 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1
FOR MY DAUGHTERS
and, of course, for
LEE
Contents
Foreword by Alan Shapiro
Introduction
First Do No Harm
The Emu in the Graveyard
Vigil, 1958
Forest Hills Park, Spring 1994
Pawn Shop Dreams
Are Butterflies Birds?
Taos, 4 July, 2100 Hours
A Denunciation of Quarks
Blown Pupil
There
The Breast Exam
Low Water Crossing
This Sadness
To the Medical Student Who Jumped From the Roof of the Hospital
Happiness Is Genetic Too
Out of Practice
Non-Stop Flight
Gardeners
Common Texas Grasses—A Guide
Shock and Awe in Comfort, Texas
What I Remember of Embryology
B-Ball Lament
What Mick’s Got
On Slipping Through Terminal 1, Concourse C at O’Hare
The Teens For Christ Convention At the Holiday Inn
Flu Season
The Whistler
What We Said
Triage
Letting It Go
A Sigh on Rounds
Discharges
Sherbet
Clinic
Side Show
Hometown Girl
Raising Money for Medical Bills
The Tyranny of Aging
Redbud
Blue Period
Moon Over Twin Sisters Peak
Dragonfly
Mowing
Red Oak
Free Range
Feeding the Fish
Plastic Caskets
Goshawk
Perseids
Dark Side
A Paper Anniversary at 52
Blue Norther
The Day It Came In
Overwinter
Auscultation
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Foreword
On Human Voices Wake Us
ALAN SHAPIRO
On every page of Jerald Winakur’s Human Voices Wake Us we are reminded of the kinship between art and medicine, poetry and healing, how care for the vulnerable and mortal body isn’t merely rational or scientific, but a supreme act of imagination. The love, insight, and sensitivity embodied in this humane and beautiful book demonstrate how at their best both medicine and poetry (and art in general) engage a combination of faculties we normally think of as antithetical, but in the hands of such an accomplished poet (or healer) become different facets of a single act of attention. The ideal doctor is capable of both appreciating beauty and analyzing symptoms, of empathic devotion and professional distance in the same way that a poet at his or her best must exercise both sympathetic understanding and intellectual clarity in translating pain and suffering into language whose beauty refuses to simplify or ignore what it can’t redeem or transcend.
The poems in this book are unflinchingly direct, plainspoken, and elegant. They confront and embrace the inescapable realities of human vulnerability, attachment, loss, and time; they acknowledge the limits of care even while they celebrate the irreplaceable value of care. The book reads like a novel in verse. And yet the poems themselves are individually strikingly distinct. Many are unadorned poems of direct statement that employ a minimum of figuration and punctuation, and thereby generate a noticeably unnoticeable beauty:
THIS SADNESS
is a cancer
for which there is no cure
a surgeon might
cut it out from its roots
but it would grow back
an obstetrician might attempt
a high forceps delivery
a psychiatrist might try to talk it out
but this sadness
does not speak the language.
There are poems like “Plastic Caskets” that satirize with great wit the business of death that preys on anxiety and fear:
Anticipating the boom in the demise of Boomers
they’re fashioning terminal boxes out of space-age
material selling them mail-order through Amazon.
The same stuff as your hula hoop and Tonka toys
like the bumpers on your BMW like the tiles
on the Shuttle for God’s sake …
In “What We Said,” we find a rueful unforgettable prose poem that’s part narrative, part mini-play about the discrepancy between what the doctor wants to say to a terminal patient desperate to be cured, and what his profession obliges him to say:
Here is what I wanted to say: Go home. Get out of this place. Eat chocolate
and pizza, ice cream and French fries when you can, go fishing, take a trip
around the world, tell your kids you love them, read mystery novels, go
to the movies, watch the clouds drift by, write your memoir, make love to
your wife. But go just go.
I guess I should fight this thing right doc? he said.
You should I said.
And then there are stunning pastoral poems in this book, like “Gardeners,” another form of healing, or “Redbud,” an exquisite lyric celebration of persistence and beauty in a mutable death-haunted world:
March—I walk
the ravines, the treed
windbreaks, the creek bottom
all the wooded places
searching for redbuds.
One hundred acres and you
are the only one I have ever found
and I never know
waiting through each winter
if you have survived—
your spindly trunk
born from the side of dead oak
and year after year
you bend more and more
toward the light which filters
through the canopy
of hackberry and cedar.
In one night a winter-hungry deer
might strip your bark
down through the cambium
and you’d be gone.
But this morning here you are
your blossoms fragile, so few
the color so faint it’s fanciful
to call it red.
Here you are
and here I am
hanging on.
From poem to poem, Winakur engages passion and cool judgment, sense and intellect; he combines empathy and critical awareness, the long metaphysical view and the up close and personal perspective. He is painfully aware of the limits of medicine, but that awareness only deepens his devotion to the healing arts. That commitment to what he recognizes as inadequate though necessary is a measure of this poet-doctor’s humane and inclusive vision of what it means to be alive. Human Voices Wake Us should be required reading not just for every medical student or health care professional, but for anyone (meaning all of us) giving or receiving care, having to live, love, and celebrate under the shadow of death.
A LAN S HAPIRO
William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
Introduction
My high school homeroom class counted the last seconds out loud together before the final bell each morning. They waited to see if I might make it before Mr. Martin closed the door; or if he, once again, would be forced to reach for his pad of tardy forms and send me to the principal’s office.
If I scuttled through on time the class applauded and I blushed. I have always had a problem with blushing. Mr. Martin, who was also our English teacher, soon stopped sending me to the principal if I was late. I realize now that he watched my approach from his desk, through the window that overlooked the half-deserted school yard. I have no doubt that he saw me there, dawdling after all the others came in. Saw me watching the cardinals call from the tops of the stately oaks, or the eastern towhees forage under the hedges. Or just sitting on the steps watching the last yellow forsythia blooms drop to the ground.
Which is perhaps why, when it was th