For the Zoom launch of the 2020 issue of The Healing Muse, a fine journal of literary and visual arts published at SUNY Upstate Medical University, I was among the writers invited to read one of their poems. Sifting through notes from here and there while thinking about what to say by way of introduction, I stumbled on a couple of quotes that, together, seem to define my approach to healing art.
The first was one I’d clipped from the Washington Post back in October 1998. It’s from Susan Okie, a family physician, poet and former science reporter for the paper: “Americans think of medicine as a scientific search for truth. It’s easy to forget that, like art or politics, medicine is also a shifting expression of our culture.” As a nurse in practice for decades, I know this to be true. It’s made me think very carefully when I weigh expert opinion and consider the merit of new practice standards.
The other is recent and comes from the August 24th issue of the New Yorker in a piece on the British poet Alice Oswald. She says, “I think it’s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing of rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.”
I realized that the poem I planned to read, like so many others I’ve written, did indeed work at the root of my own thinking about uncertainty in health care and life. I recalled poems like “Gold Standard,” “Reference Range” and “Cure.” I titled this one “Pre-need.” Writing these has helped me find clarity and gives me a place to return to when, inevitably, doubts arise.