Showing 71 - 80 of 751 Poetry annotations

The Dust of the West

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A blind father, covered with dust, rides through dust clouds carrying camera equipment belonging to a famous photographer of the West. The father believes that each piece of dust has a soul and that if he can sensuously perceive that dust he can release its soul--"Blessings of dirt, gathering and rising"--a kind of resurrection out of the dust.

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Complications

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This poem describes the deterioration of a man after the death of his spouse, as he ends up drunk, penniless, and in jail. The physician is asked to certify the cause of his death. He decides that the complex social factors leading to his death can only be summarized as "complications".

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Appetite

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The poet considers the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, who recommended "wipe out imagination, check desire, extinguish appetite" in order to achieve contentment. The author sees living examples of the contrary in these tough motorbikers in leather, who are "fifty if they’re a day." There is a note of envy in his voice as he observes their rebelliousness, spirit, and sheer freedom.

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Anatomy Lesson

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Chen, Irene

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry — Secondary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

This poem describes how, during the anatomy lesson, the medical student feels curiosity about the wonders of the human body. He is torn between his desire for knowledge and the horror he feels in cutting up a dead body: "the violence of abomination." This marks a transitional point in the student’s medical career path.

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What the Body Told

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Terry, James

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

Many of these poems are confessional accounts of gay love and sexuality. Another group clearly draw on the author’s clinical experiences as a physician. A few poems (e.g. "For You All Beauty", "Her Final Show") mix those broad categories in talking about the care of AIDS patients.The 11 short poems under the sequence title "Ten Patients, and Another" are the most clinical. They mimic clinical presentations during rounds in several ways: individual poems under patient initials--Mrs. G, John Doe; opening lines with the patient’s age, race, and gender; even presenting complaints with hospital shorthand. For example, in "Kelly" Campo begins: "The patient is a twelve-year-old white female. / She’s gravida zero, no STD’s. / She’s never even had a pelvic. One / month nausea and vomiting. No change / in bowel habits. No fever, chills, malaise." But in this poem and others of the sequence, the clinical gradually turns to the personal: "Her pelvic was remarkable for scars / At six o’clock, no hymen visible, / Some uterine enlargement. Pregnancy / Tests positive times two. She says it was / Her dad. He’s sitting in the waiting room."The cumulative effect of the series is a kind of horror at hospital cases and how they get there: a three-year-old who’s ingested cocaine, a homeless man with eyelids frozen shut, one man beaten, another man shot, an abused wife, a suicide, a drug overdose. To feel empathy for these cases, and to turn them into poetry, Campo has practiced the art of medicine as a form of love.Campo also writes as a patient who has experienced a serious arm fracture and subsequent threat of cancer in the 16-poem sequence "Song Before Dying." This changes his perspective on care-giving, as he writes in "IX. The Very Self." " . . . more dying waits / Downstairs for me. I almost hear their groans. / Same hunger, bones. Same face we all consumed. / As I examine them, I find the tomb / Toward which they lead. I know it is my own."

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Technology and Medicine

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A short (13 line) poem in which the poet-as-doctor describes his "transformation" from flesh-and-blood person into a machine in which "My hands are hypodermic needles, touch / Turned into blood . . . ." This doctoring-machine desires "a kind of intimacy / That won't bear pondering." For example, his mouth turns into "a dry computer chip" that cannot touch or feel or even say consoling words.

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Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The subtitle of this collection is "A Voyage to the New World." In the first section, Campo begins his voyage to a new world of self-understanding by experimenting with the language of family, intimacy, healing, and magic. In "I Don’t Know What I Can’t Say, or, Genet on Keats," the poet writes: "There are two sides to life. The side where life / Remains unconsummated, reticent" and the other, which is "the act itself laid bare--a hand / Inside the lion’s mouth . . . . " Campo chooses the latter.In the next section, his voyage takes him through several connected series of 16-line sonnets; each of these series plumbs the depths of a different intimate relationship: Song for My Grandfather, for My Father, for My Lover, and for Our Son. Some of Campo’s finest poems are in this section, including (just a handful from the many) "Grandfather’s Will," "Anatomy Lesson," "Planning a Family," "My Father’s View of Poetry," "Translation," and "Political Poem."In the final section, Campo brings the insight of a seasoned voyager to his day-to-day life experience as a gay Latino physician: "To teach me my own life, to share my grief." ("Planning a Family," p. 49)

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The Distant Moon

Campo, Rafael

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

A four-part poem that begins with glimpses of a man suffering the ravages of AIDS: "He stayed / Four months. He lost his sight to CMV." The man connects with his doctor through the stories he tells, but also through blood: "I'm drowning in his blood . . . . "The doctor at first tries to maintain distance from his patient ("I can't identify with him.") and even feels "residual guilts" when the patient says it's okay that "doctors could be queer." In the end, though, the healer has formed a bond with his patient. After the man dies, the doctor further identifies with him: "His breath, / I dreamed, had filled my lungs--his lips, my lips / Had touched."

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The Stethoscope

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

The physician-narrator ponders the symbolic significance of the tool that typifies his profession, the stethoscope. Through it he has heard "the sound of creation"--the sound of life to be born--and the absence of sound that signals death. Should he, therefore, treat the stethoscope as if it were a religious icon?"Never! Yet I could praise it." Were he to praise it, he would "celebrate my own ears" that can hear "Night cries / of injured creatures" and "the wind / traveling from where it began."

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Pathology of Colours

Abse, Dannie

Last Updated: Oct-06-2015
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In this haunting poem, Abse compares the colors found around us to colors found in illness and death. The poem begins prettily, "I know the color rose, and it is lovely," an image which is immediately juxtaposed with a tumor ripening into the same color. Similarly in the same quatrain, another image of nature, "healing greens", is compared with "limbs that fester" of the same color. To emphasize the tension of the similarity and difference, Abse ends the two lines with the same word. However, the nature image is "so springlike," while the illness image is "not springlike."By the second quatrain, the images become more grotesque and frightening, as the colors of "the plum-skin face of a suicide" and the "china white" eyes or figure of a car accident victim are described. In the following quatrain, the tensions mount, as "the criminal, multi-coloured flash / of an H-bomb" is described as "beautiful" and compared to the stunning and glorious image of the mesentery dissected during an autopsy: "cathedral windows never opened."The poem closes with the rainbow, seen not only in the sky, but also in "the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirror," as well as in the striped "soldier's ribbon on a tunic tacked." Life and death, nature and pathology, health and illness are hence all united by common colors; colors which are reflected in that "sunlit mirror."

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