I don’t suppose it could come as a surprise that psychiatrists and psychologists are well represented amongst clinical poets. To them there is an obvious commonality between poetry and medicine: both concern the mind; our perceptions of this world. Two well known Australian psychoanalyst-poets are Jennifer Harrison and Craig Powell.  

Jennifer Harrison

 

Hippocrates

 

He has looked into the well

and seen the unwell drowning.

Carotids bleed between his thumbs.

He listens stooped like a bean

for the hearts rumble.

His caress rescues and discards

…those pale methodical eyes

which have been indoors so long…

 

Sometimes he is afraid

of everything that ends

-the corpse falling always

into mossy flight, towards

the cool drinkable water

which resists fate

and gives death only its power

 

            Primum non nocere

first do no harm…poets, too.     

 

 

Jennifer is a Melbourne Psychoanalyst, born in Sydney in 1955. Her experience is translated into a sparse, precisely intelligent poetry. “Boston Poems”, a sequence from ‘Dear B’, concerns a diagnosis of breast cancer in that city:

 

Arriving

 

It was always arriving, although we didn’t realise

until it had arrived, how far

it had travelled, how weary the cancer must have been

to sleep so tenderly, not bothering anyone,

 

and how quickly the word

fitted our lives, easily, as the Charles river

or Thanksgiving, or the story of Martin Luther King

 

how it crept along the soul

like a shadow on Newbury St

 

and drank Paul Revere’s painted vine of blood

so that the freedom trail

would be remembered by the children who followed

            after

 

…

 

Her poems ‘The Society of Psychotherapists’ Fantasy Ball’ and ‘Baron von Munchausen’ have a dark humour, but like ‘Hippocrates’ have depths that cannot be fathomed verbally:

 

Baron von Munchausen

 

Please don’t confuse me with that rogue Raspe.

I’m not a ‘type’ of tall story nor

would I steal the Landgraf gems

after discovering Ossian and publishing Percy.

I’m a more modest braggart something like

the marvellous lover who cannot say goodbye

or the cavalry captain always throwing a party

on the perpetual eve of leaving for Russia.

And who would insist I put down my helmet and lance

to sleep the same soft sleep as the committed man?

The truth is I exaggerate what I know

and the story I tell is the truth in disguise.

If a suspicious tree takes root in your forehead

remember that I’m rich and noble. I’m the Baron of Lies.

 

Consider: Which is the more useful therapy- Psychoanalysis or poetry?

 

Craig Powell 

Powell was born in Wollongong in 1940 and raised in Sydney. He studied medicine and specialised in psychiatry before moving to Canada for 10 years. In this decade he trained in psychoanalysis, in which field he has practiced in Sydney since 1982. 

He is the author of 8 books of poetry, the latest ‘Music and Women’s Bodies’ (FIP 2002) includes translations of the Russian Yelena Mikhailik. His 1968 book ‘I Learn by Going’ (South Head Press) has a strong psychiatric theme, as well as strands related to Catholicism, secret love and death. ‘Madonna and Child' is one of his most often quoted poems:

 

An image of silence: fine dust falling on hair

where two of them sit motionless. The light

glides with a rhythmic stillness out of sight

 

yet leaves a kind of radiance upon

mother and child asleep in a warm chair,

rags stuffed under the door, the gas turned on.

 

 

His experiences as a doctor are rendered in tight poetic structures such as the sonnet and villanelle. He says in his poem ‘The Poet in Ward Two’ that ‘behind the eyeball is the silent country/inhabited by one man’. In 1968 he saw the quiet horror of despair in some patient’s lives with a rare empathy. In this ‘Poem (long overdue) for Mr Meek', Powell uses half-rhyme in one of the sonnet forms:

 

Frederick Meek, as mild as the very name,

speaks to me with wheezed and rasping care.

Icy linoleum snickers on the floor;

there’s always a tang of urine in the room.

 

His lungs are a monument to cigarettes.

Yet he will talk by the hour, as he did one day

of his wife who died of cancer years ago,

and showed me her photo, nibbled by the rats,

 

I don’t believe he suffers much-no wild

and adolescent anguish. No, for his part

he’d chose this clenched and shuttered room, no hurt

 

except the quiet agony of small things:

the toe that hurts him when it rains, the chilled

and useless testicles and the botched lungs. 

 

I suspect the word botched here is a little poet’s joke, because it describes the lungs as well as the line it is in...it doesn’t quite fit, to my ear. 

In ‘Jack Connolly',he asks:

 

‘…

”You know Jack Connolly’s dying?”

 

Jack Connolly doesn’t know.

Not many people do.

He gets a sickness benefit cheque each week,

best wishes from the factory.

Deep in his lung

the cancer bares its knives.

 

Forget all he said or thought.

It wasn’t all that clever.

A skinny little fellow, a forgettable face-

but God! the heart’s draining out of the world,

the wretched world, because Jack Connolly’s dying.

 

Consider:  Which is worse: cancer or loneliness? What would you rather have: a physical or a mental illness?

 

Nembutal Rock 

One o’clock in the morning

she sat up in bed

a fist full of yellow capsules

and screaming in her head.

 

Open the door and the window,

let the stars blow in!

Her lungs are full of thunder

and there’s spittle on her chin.

 

Who cares if you didn’t love her

and you meant to go away?

Forget the slanging quarrels

you spat out every day.

 

Drag her to the ambulance,

go howling through the night,

cry like a silly schoolboy

and screw your knuckles tight.

 

But it’s no use calling the doctor.

She’s learning how to die-

face grown blue as the water,

foam on her mouth gone dry.

 

Four o’clock in the morning

they stretched her out in bed

her fist uncurled and empty,

a cold sheet across her head.

 

Another rather black piece of doctor poet’s humour? This could be Powell’s own words to a popular rock tune of the day (it has been set to music).

 

Consider: Perhaps you have a story you could relate by modifying the lyrics of a favourite song of yours?

 

Finally, for the doubters of poetry, know that most poets doubt too (in common with all serious artists).

Here’s Powell again, from ‘For Janet’

 

Sometimes I wonder what I’ve got to say,

what it is that keeps trying to spatter

outwards, out of my blood or God knows where.

And then I wonder if words could even matter.

 

References and Further Reading 

Harrison J (1994) Michelangelo’s prisoners   Black Pepper

Harrison J (1999) Dear B   Black Pepper

Powell C (1968) I Learn By Going   South Head Press

Powell C (1984) A Face In Your Hands    South Head Press

Powell C (1972) A Country Without Exiles   South Head Press

Powell C (1993) Minga Street   Hale and Ironmonger

www.poetrytherapy.org   You might like to look at this website of the National Poetry Therapy Association, which has a small presence in Australia and New Zealand