Editor's Note
Poetry and Practice
“Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote/The Droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote ….”
My voice cracked as I stood in front of my high school English literature teacher, Mr. Reichert, reciting my memory selection from Chaucer. I didn’t like English, I didn’t like Mr. Reichert, and I especially did not like poetry. It seemed so frivolous, so unnecessary, and definitely so unmacho at a time when macho was a high priority. And Mr. Reichert insisted on us remembering this ridiculous passage written in an English that no one used any more, reciting it with trilling Rs and guttural GHs.
I rolled my Rs like a thespian, I virtually spit out my “Droghte,” and I stumbled out of Reichert’s room sure that poetry had no place in my life. Yet today, 40 years later, I remember line after line of this passage. Poetry has staying power.
As I meandered through college, mostly intent on a medical career but straying from science to major in history and to taste literature and even poetry, I picked up a paperback book of poems with the picture of a kindly gentleman, bespectacled and wearing a broad-brimmed hat, on the cover. His poems were like nothing I had ever read, with unusual lines prancing across the page, sudden jolts of revelation, wisdom rooted in the commonplace. I discovered that he was a physician, a general practitioner from Rutherford, New Jersey, who frequently wrote fragments of verse on scraps of paper as he drove to the hospital in the middle of the night to deliver a baby. To him, he said, medicine and the poem amounted “to nearly the same thing.”
He fed his poems with the humanity he encountered in medicine, and he nurtured his medical soul with his poetry. He wrote in his autobiography: “To treat a man as something to which surgery, drugs, and hoodoo applied was an indifferent matter; to treat him as material for a work of art made him somehow come alive to me.” Dr. William Carlos Williams brought me back to poetry.
During my two years of writing creative nonfiction while pursuing an M.F.A. degree at Bennington College, I received a heavy dose of poetry. I heard New Hampshire poet Donald Hall memorialize his deceased wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. I was mesmerized by Minnesotan Robert Bly’s reading of ghazals, an Urdu form of poetry. He finished each poem, paused, and said, “Let me read that again.” And, miraculously, it meant something different the second time.
There is something truly miraculous about poetry. With an economy of words, it awakens dormant recesses of thought and emotion. It mines unexplored caverns of our language, exposing unique meanings and recreating the words. And for medicine, it can uncover hidden, almost mysterious, facets of our profession, what Williams called the “secret gardens of the self,” which held the “secret world of perfection” he sought to portray.
So perhaps it should have been no surprise that all three winners of Minnesota Medicine’s annual writing contest were poets. Medicine is a rich garden from which to harvest poetic truth.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief
Dr. Meyer can be reached at
cmeyer1@fairview.org.