Living With Cancer: A Quilt of Poetry
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In her book "My Poets," Maureen McLane reminded me of a poetic form called the cento. It consists of snippets of verse composed by other writers.
The genre speaks to me because I am a quilter who cuts out small bits of fabric to join to other small bits of fabric. Quilters call the process of sewing together different swatches of cotton "piecing."
After reading a number of poems about cancer, I set out to piece a cento by stitching a line or two from one writer to a passage from another. I was inspired by poems that appear in collections like "The Poetry Cure" and "Her Soul Beneath the Bone," as well as poems that individual poets published in books of their own work. Part of the appeal of the cento is its concluding apparatus - the works cited at the end. These footnotes offer readers a chance to explore the wider selection of verse abridged here.
According to Ms. McLane, poets "make the chaos of inner feeling not only sentient but shareable." The chaos of feeling that surrounds disease differs for men and women subjected to quite different cancers. So I used visceral verse by both men and women to convey a chaos of feeling that all of us can share.
Here is a pieced poem, with thanks to the authors who are footnoted below it. I hope it inspires readers to post a few lines of verse about living with cancer, so that together, we can piece another poem about our shared experiences.
My mouth opens and closes around the word cancer. Try saying fear. Now feel Your tongue as it cleaves to the roof of your mouth. Once again I dress in white paper and climb onto the table. Together we explore my inner landscape on the screen. He plots a course and charts me frame by frame. And then there's the blood tests. How many blood tests? (Too many to count.) Negative = Positive, Positive = Negative = Bad.
Even the surgeon who puts you to sleep knows you will wake up robbed. What awaits you: the leg bag, the IVs, the foreskin looming like a skunk's tail ... Each wound speaks its own language. What is the splendor of one breast on one woman? They've emptied your body of its enemies, they're filling you with sterile juices.
I return across the darkened ward; the grunts, coughs, and farts sound as if I'm billeted on an active volcano. The windows grow dark and the grim snort rasping from the next bed never lets up, makes the night shudder. Was it for this, this, become a patient, transformed to a shivering sack of blood to be spilled? And the dark night tracing of malevolent lymph tracks, fear scaling the ice-rungs of my spine?
I need to see my tumor dead A tumor which forgets to die But plans to murder me instead. I don't know how to die yet. Let me live!
Joan Halperin, "Injunctions," in "Her Soul beneath the Bone" Alicia Suskin Ostriker, "The Mastectomy Poems," in "The Crack in Everything" Sandra Steingraber, "Outpatient," in "Post-Diagnosis" Pat Borthwick, "Scan," in "The Poetry Cure" Lucia Perillo, "Needles," in "The Body Mutinies" Susan Deborah King, "Everywoman's Lexicon of Dread, with Commentary (Minimal)," in "One-Breasted Woman" Pat Gray, "Cancer in the Breast," in "Her Soul Beneath the Bone" Gustavo Pérez Firmat, "Post-Op," in "Scar Tissue" Richard M. Berlin, "Wounds," in "Secret Wounds" Lucille Clifton, "Consulting the Book of Changes: Radiation," in "The Terrible Stories" Sandra M. Gilbert, "For My Aunt in Memorial Hospital," in "Emily's Bread" Ifor Thomas, "Poleaxed," in "Body Beautiful" Abba Kovnar, "The Windows Grow Dark," in "Sloan-Kettering" C. K. Williams, "Cancer," in "Writers Writing Dying" Harold Pinter, "Cancer Cells," in "Various Voices" Marilyn Hacker, "Cancer Winter," in "Winter Numbers"