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Сентябрь
2024

Imagery, Poetry, and Seeing Medicine

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With the aid of imagery, poetry locates us in a world more keenly perceived, akin to the way imaging studies in medicine can provide detailed, compelling pictures of our bodies. In work by the likes of Diane Wakoski of the “Deep Image” school of poets whose plainspoken images call up submerged associations from the depths of consciousness, to Craig Raine of the “Martian poetry” movement whose uncanny imagery depicts its subjects as if being freshly experienced from an alien perspective, we are able to see (and feel and taste and hear, for imagery can draw on all the senses) more vividly and more memorably. In “A Year Ago Today,” the speaker of the poem shows a patient after open heart surgery as if he had just left the operating room, with “Tubes and wires dangling/(surgeons wire the bone/back together).” This startlingly juxtaposed image, with its enjambment like the sternotomy wound itself embedded in it, recurs throughout the poem, offering distinct, mutually enhancing perspectives on the patient it soon feels readers too have come to see. With “They forgot to close/my chest” later in the poem, the gaping wound reappears, again using enjambment to help us visualize what becomes not just the physical incision but also an emotional rent. The final line visually reinforces the shared yet separate pathos of potentially life-threatening (yet paradoxically life-sustaining) surgery that the poem’s imagery so masterfully evinces in us too: “We both/carry a scar.”