When my sonnet “All Tuned Up” appeared (Spring 2021 Intima), I was asked to write about another piece published in the journal. I chose “I Picture You Here, But You’re There” (Spring 2020 Intima) by Delilah Leibowitz. Her poem and mine both explore how we think and feel about death.
While my poem uses the regular Shakespearean sonnet format as well as standard punctuation and capitalization, Leibowitz’s poem is three brief stanzas, with no punctuation or capitals, and short—even very short—lines. Her stanzas are like three haiku poems, presenting the mind of a speaker who offers three “if” statements. These mention a picture, memory or dream of the dead person, and they ask about possible results…without any question marks. The speaker takes agency in looking at a picture, willing a memory, or taking a dream as a sign the departed might be reaching back to her/him.
We might say the poem “reads” the reader: what do we feel: the pain will be less (or not?); the dead person is reaching back (or not?). The poem is a lyric of possibility, both intimate and personal, expressed in many short words that touch us more than we know…until we reread more carefully.
By contrast, my poem formally describes, in narrative sentences, a semi-public hospital scene of mortality and morbidity rounds. On the hot seat, a resident physician describes his “proper” medical treatment for a patient who, nonetheless, has died. He asserts the man was “all tuned up,” as if an engine, a piano, or some other physical object. Clearly the doctor’s treatment—and medicine in general—have been betrayed, and this young doctor weeps before his colleagues, because of his grief, perceived failure, and, perhaps, a difficult lesson in mortality. As opposed to the many possibilities in the Leibowitz poem, the residency director gently comforts the distraught doctor: in the case of a very old patient, “Sometimes death’s okay.”
But what is “okay,” a slang word in both poems? “Okay” is neither medical nor poetic. It is imprecise, both laconic and dependent on context. For both poems, the reader is invited to assess the strength of that word, and such is often the best we humans can do, especially given the vast mysteries of pain and death.
Albert Howard Carter, III, PhD., is a faculty affiliate, Trent Center, Duke University. His latest book is In Peril: All People, All Life, Our Earth; In Prospect: Better Healthcare and Medicine (UCMedicalHumanitiesPress.com, 2019). Of five earlier books, one is First Cut, A Season in the Human Anatomy Lab (Picador, 1997). His prose and poems have appeared in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Hiram Review, Ars Medica, Blood and Thunder, Broadkill Review, Statement, The Thomas Wolfe Review, and The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. He has been a pastoral care volunteer in an ER/Trauma Center also a licensed massage therapist and certified Qigong healer working with cancer patients. Carter taught literature at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla., for many years. He and his wife live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His poem “All Tuned Up” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.