List

The last day of my children's school year was the third emergency room visit: May 27th.
Since then here's a list of the things I wasn't expecting to experience in my 34th year.

• Ambulance rides: 2
• Hospital stays: 9 for an approximate 55 days total (thus far)
• rounds of chemotherapy: 7 with one to go
• surgeries: 3, one for a biopsy, one to install a port for the chemo, and one to remove the tumor.
• number of staples post-tumor removal: 55
• home health equipment: walker, bedside commode, and elevated toilet seat
• number of interns: who can count?
• Doctors on my treatment team: 3
• cat scans complete with barium swallows: 4
• average number of times it takes to thread an I.V. into my arm, even with the I.V. team: 3
• times I've lost my hair: twice. It grew back when I had a break from chemo after surgery.
• poems I've written about this experience: 4
• Days where C. Dale's blog has been too difficult to read: several, especially when he's had patients with terminal diagnosis.
• prognosis: very good. the cancer responded to the chemo even though there was only a 40% likelyhood that it would.
• what my 8 year old said: "I'll love you when you're bald"
• new vocabulary words (medicine): zofran, anti-nausea
• number of labs (ie blood drawn): twice per week
• days I feel lucky to have such a supportive husband: every minute of every day

I've had a difficult time writing about this, obviously it's taken 6 months before I could even broach it on the blog. One of my doctors has encouraged me to write about my experiences, I don't know that I have much that is helpful to say, I don't feel brave or strong or as if I've had an epiphany along the way, but I can say, "here I am, here's what I know." Perhaps that can be enough.

***

Before the CT Scan

by Amy D. Unsworth

The older gentleman looks my way
a time or two.

It isn’t difficult to figure
a diagnosis:
no hair equals chemo
equals cancer equals my familiarity

with the IV team, needles, and
the shooting pain of a tube
threaded in the vein.

I’m not used to this sort of thing,
he tells the nurse
who mentions bee stings and
a few moments hum of the scan.

His doctor wants to rule out
a mass, a blockage, anything
visible that causes
a little dizziness,
a little trouble breathing.

The nurse forgets to draw the curtain
before pulling the elastic tourniquet tight.
I can’t meet his eyes
as she fails three times to find a likely vein.

Book VI and other musings

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless--each of us with his or her right upon the earth
Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.

-Walt Whitman


Jeff has been talking about the poetry boards and how many current po-bloggers used to participate at the various sites. I found the on-line poetry community at a time when I had just returned to writing after a long break. I had three small children and no time to go find poets in the city where I was living. The fellow poets I've discovered and admired and have listened to over these past six years have moved with me across three states. The boards gave me an opportunity to participate that otherwise I wouldn't have found.

My faith in my own writing grew while I participated at the boards, and without them I probably would not have taken the next step to return to graduate school for the more formal education in poetry. Jeff also talks about the negative comments that were inevitable, but I found that over time, I learned to listen to both the comments from other writers and to my own internal editor. Learning to judge what was a helpful suggestion and what would not work with my vision of the poem has helped me be a stronger writer.

What has also been amazing has been the many publications in journals and the many, many books that this community has produced. Perhaps when they look back to speak of what was happening in poetry in the 00's they'll mention how the internet brought us together.

Carry on friends.

Carried Alive into the Heart

Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which give competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature.

--William Wordsworth

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

What do you believe?

In a recent conversation someone mentioned that they didn't believe that books could make a difference or changes in people's lives. I found this rather shocking, actually, because I feel that books and stories and poems and songs help to shape our views of the world.

I offer up Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry as a way of seeing how if the fairytales of our youth were different, so might be our perspective on the world. I read poems and see ways to live more completely, more responsibly, and more in tune with the world around me. And if you see the world through the perspective of a holy text, how much more are you shaped by what you read?

I heard a few years ago that medical students were being asked to read humanities texts that detail suffering and the experiences of being sick. The hope was that this would make the students more sensitive to their patients' ordeals. I don't know if it works, but it sounds plausible.

How will we know what others know and have known if we don't read? Unlike reality TV, literature has already been proven to pass the test of time.

Touchstones

I recently found out that I'm going to be the Poetry Editor for Touchstones which is the literary magazine here at Kansas State University. We only read work from graduate level writers, and we're taking the 2006 issue to AWP. (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to make it to Austin.)

The official submissions announcement will come out on the 1st of October, but the news is that we're taking electronic submissions for the first time. So, if you're in a graduate program and are interested in guidelines or if you're teaching and know of any eligible writers, *please* send me an email to small_branches (at) hotmail.com and I'll forward the complete guidelines to you as soon as I have them in my in-box.

Whew.

It's been busy around here, but mostly in a good way.

More books on the way

The 'net seems full of announcements about publications these days. Steve Mueske has a book forthcoming from Ghost Road Press: A Mnemonic for Desire. And recently I recieved a flyer from Word Press that David Cazden's Moving Picture has also been released. Congratulations, I believe, are in order.

Cheers!

The Powers of Poetry

The very interesting essay by Bly "What the Image Can Do" lists several "powers of poetry" or traits that make poetry work.

1. the image.
2. Frost's "Sentence Sound"
3. psychic weight
4. sound
5. drumbeat ( or Hall's "goatfoot")
6. the narrative

I am always interested in lists like these as while they seem to capture important elements of poetry writing, they rarely seem complete to me. There are other aspects that seem important that are not on the list. What about the visual / page placement / line breaks /stanza breaks?
Since I spent many years as a musician, I know that the rests are as important as the notes and they need to be heeded for the music to conform to what was composed. I feel that the same goes for poetry. To me the written page works as a score for the aural / oral experience of the poem. What else should be added to the list?

Read some Bly on-line.