Sutures into Corn Snakes and Other Transformations

As poets, we are most often attentive and lifelong students of the body. An observation as simple as a bruise blooming from impact on an injured knee can elicit images of the cosmos: the blues, greens, purples, and blacks of trapped blood beneath the skin creating images of galactic clusters and celestial unknowns. We use the body as a vehicle for exploration, transformation, and meaning making, even through periods of uncertainty. What presents as a cluster of freckles spread across a writer’s collarbone can transform with ease into constellations or specks of sand, or ants, all through imagery.

Recently, I have been investigating the way this exploration of image changes when external forces, such as medical intervention, intercede with the body. Medical intervention exists within two broader categories: preventative or therapeutic. Preventative treatments can be as simple as the excision of a mole that has grown or changed. When clusters of pigment-producing cells grow entirely on their own, sometimes they pose a future threat and doctors opt to remove them. Once the excision is done, a patient is left with a scar: a physical reminder of something removed, altered. The body is changed, perhaps not fundamentally, but still in a way that feels transformative. These scars can take on new meaning when crafting imagery: what was once mastectomy stitches or a spinal fusion suture can complicate a poem when coupled with the image of a crescent moon or a corn snake. Perhaps, there is something to be said for making the unknown more familiar or leaning further into the strangeness. 

Interventions can also be therapeutic in nature, such as bone stimulators. These devices aim to release electric impulses into a bone that has failed to heal properly with the hope of creating a union in the fractured pieces. These processes and images, when treated with the proper care within our poetry, edge us toward a greater understanding of meaning within our own lives and within our poetic practice. Some may argue poetry is also a form of therapeutic care for those living with terminal diagnoses. In his thought-provoking piece “A Doctor, a Patient, and Their Poetry” Ofole Mgbako, a physician treating Jim Gallagher, a patient with prostate cancer, asks “What gives you purpose as you face your own mortality?” Jim then proceeds to produce a “leather calendar book” of poems and states “I’ve always appreciated the verse.” 

Let’s take a look at a poem where illness and transformative language coincide to further understand the purpose of transformational imagery in coping with diagnoses and crafting meaningful, imagistically rich poems. 

Part One: Reading 

“Portrait of Illness as Nightmare” by Leila Chatti

Pay close attention to the way in which Chatti uses surrealism throughout the piece to create opportunities for surprise within her images. As a reader, take inventory of her images. A doctor’s stethoscope becomes “suddenly a snake” and a “blue paper gown” recedes “in the back like the ocean.” Pills transform into “moons on your tongue” and tumors catch the light “like jewels.” With each image, try to visualize both the physical item, such as the pill, and the image itself, such as the moon on her tongue. 

Part Two: Prewriting 

With the previous exercise in mind, explore a site of medical intervention on your own body. This could be as simple as exploring the site where your wisdom teeth were removed or the place where you needed stitches above your eye with a hand mirror, or referencing x-rays or other photographs. Work to write a detailed description of the site. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What memories come to mind immediately? What memories are still there, though potentially more distant? Is there any pain, discomfort, or numbness? What do you envision exists below the surface of the site? Feel free to record these descriptions in bullets or paragraphs, with keen attention to descriptive language that utilizes the five senses. 

Part Three: Shaping an Ode 

An ode, in its most simple definition, is a poem of celebration. Some wonderful poems to utilize as examples are Lucille Clifton’s “poem to my uterus” and Walt Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric.” With the images you have carefully crafted in the previous prewriting activity, begin to shape an ode. Depending on the strength of the images, you may be able to formulate an ode entirely dedicated to that scar, suture, or other site you carefully observed. If not, you can utilize the image in a larger, more general ode to the body. Start by considering that which is proximal. If you observed where your tonsils or wisdom teeth used to sit, perhaps start with just the mouth or the face. If you observed a scar along your spine, perhaps an ode to the back could be formed, paying close attention to other features surrounding the scar, such as freckles, acne, or muscles and tendons woven under the surface. How does that section of the body move? Is there stiffness or renewed movement? Let language be the main driver of this inquiry—don’t worry if the poem feels narratively loose or if you don’t have the opportunity to connect the images back to memory.

Part Four: Retrospection

Writing about the body is a particularly meta process: you are writing from within the body you are writing about. Consider how this process made you feel. Was there any shame or pain that needed to be navigated before giving yourself permission to write the ode? Were you surprised by what images you were able to create? Did you return to your own poetic touchpoints or obsessions, or find new ways to describe the body?