Illness and Poetry

My friend the poet and critic Christopher Hennessy, who maintains a fascinating blog on the multiple relationships between identity (particularly gay identity) and creativity at Outside the Lines, recently asked me, after I described to him one of my chemotherapy side effects, that even picking up a piece of cold fruit burns my hands, whether I planned to write about the experience of having cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. Some excellent poetry has come out of that experience, most notably the late L. E. Sissman’s Hello Darkness. The very much alive Marilyn Hacker has a fourteen-poem sequence called “Cancer Winter”? in her book Winter Numbers, dealing with her experience of breast cancer. There is also, in prose, the late cultural critic Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and, more problematically, AIDS and Its Metaphors, and the late Audre Lorde's Cancer Journal. I have not encountered the stigmatization of cancer Sontag writes of, though I am very familiar with the stigmatization of HIV, which has absorbed much of the “you brought this on yourself”? discourse that used to surround cancer.

I don’t plan to write much poetry about my experiences as a cancer patient, though one can never predict what will come to one. Although the experience is very wearing, very time-consuming, and very expensive, although the staff in the small office of the large oncology practice where I get my chemotherapy are quite nice and very knowledgeable, and although I’ve met very nice people who for the most part I would never interact with in my normal life (there is a real camaraderie among cancer patients, and much mutual support), I still don’t find the experience very interesting or engaging. In fact, it’s astonishingly dull. I bring books to read, but it’s hard to concentrate, and I often find myself falling asleep, which has the advantage of making the time go by more quickly, and of off-setting the insomnia some of my medications induce.
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I’ve written of HIV as “my doom before me,” a destiny laid out for me the day that I was born, perhaps even before, since the virus might not have existed in 1963. Though I’ve not written much poetry about it, there is something both poetic and reproachful to poetry in HIV’s literalization, its materialization, of the sex/death nexus so common as a poetic trope. It certainly has always made sense to me that pleasure could lead to death.
When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, it served to confirm the sense I’d had since my Bronx ghetto childhood that I was destined to be destroyed by the world, a sense that my late mother, a very lonely woman terrified of losing me to the very things she aspired to for me, encouraged with her constant assurances that no one would ever love me but her. So it didn’t really change my sense of self, and hasn’t really been a major element in my poetry, though I’m sure that, like the death of my mother, about which I’ve also rarely written directly, it is a ghost presence in many poems.
There are poets who write powerfully about the experience of living with HIV and AIDS, and about its social and symbolic significance. In their very different ways, D.A. Powell, a gay man almost exactly my age, has done so in his trilogy Tea (1998) ("dead boys make the sweetest lovers"), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004), and the late Tory Dent, a heterosexual woman, in What Silence Equals (1993), HIV Mon Amour (1999), and Black Milk (2005) (“For seventeen years, I’ve said ‘I won't live another year’”), have done so. In the early days of the epidemic, the late Tim Dlugos addressed the topic in such poems as “G-9,” about his experience in the AIDS ward of Roosevelt Hospital (for some reason this poem is not included in his posthumous selected poems volume, Powerless), and the late Paul Monette wrote his impassioned Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988). Among poets who don’t themselves live with HIV but who have written extensively about it, one can number Rafael Campo, the late Thom Gunn, especially The Man with Night Sweats (1993), Rachel Hadas, Eileen Myles, and Richard Tayson, as well as Aaron Shurin in the lyrical prose (including prose poems) of Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997).
In part HIV hasn’t been a major presence in my poetry because it hasn’t been a major part of my life. I’ve had many medical crises since my HIV diagnosis, but most have not been related to my HIV status—my recurrent kidney problems, including painful kidney stones, are a major exception, since most seem to have been caused by various HIV medications I have taken over the years. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve had medical coverage and access to medications for this whole time, and my medications, whatever problems they’ve caused, have not had debilitating side effects, and have induced my HIV to behave itself like a good guest in my body—“I’m sitting here not bothering anybody. Don’t mind me.” That’s the sort of relationship I want to have with HIV, if I must have one (and apparently I must). I hope that it will continue. I’ve often thought that if HIV were my only problem, even my only medical problem, I would be pretty damned well off.
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My colon cancer, with which I was diagnosed and for which I had major surgery in November, and for which, because it has spread to my liver, I am now undergoing chemotherapy, has played a much larger role in my life. Besides the excruciating pain it caused me intermittently (pain that in retrospect I was lucky to experience, as many people with colorectal cancer have no symptoms until it’s too late), I have had one major and one minor surgery because of it, with more surgery to come. In the first surgery, I was gutted like a fish to remove the golf-ball-sized tumor, the associated lymph nodes, and a portion of my colon (I believe that it’s called a hemicolectomy, and also a colon resectioning). In the second, I had a subcutaneous mediport installed for the efficient infusion of my chemotherapy medications.
I have recently completed my fifth round of chemotherapy, which is a major and intrusive part of my life. Every two weeks or so I spend several hours three days in a row hooked up to IV drips of various medications, spend two days carrying around an infusion of yet another medication attached to me by a thin transparent tube (on those days I can neither shower nor exercise), and then go in the following day for a shot to boost my immune system, which is already compromised by HIV, and which chemotherapy runs down even more.
All this is wearying and wearing, but not, for me, a source of poetic inspiration, though it may someday make good memoir material. In the meantime, I soldier on with the fatigue, the nausea, the diarrhea, the insomnia, and the inability to drink or touch anything cold, dreaming of the day when the tumors on my liver have shrunk sufficiently enough to be surgically removed, and I will be able to say goodbye, at least contingently, to the IV drips and infusion pumps, and will be able to drink anything I want at any temperature at any time. That will be a glorious day, a poem in itself.
By the time I was diagnosed with colon cancer, the sense of my own physical fragility and vulnerability had been pretty much pounded into me by my HIV diagnosis, my bout with Bell’s palsy (especially frightening since there are no treatments if the facial paralysis doesn’t end on its own accord), my subsequent hospitalization for a shingles infection in my inner ear which left me with only half the hearing in my right ear, my bouts with kidney disease and recurrent kidney stones (mostly caused by various HIV medications), the hearing distortion in my left ear which no manner of tests has been able to diagnose, let alone treat, an episode of secondary polycythemia, a condition in which one produces too many red blood cells which also earned me a hospital stay, since my blood was turning to jello and I was in imminent danger of a stroke, and my osteoporosis, because of which I’ve suffered several painful bone fractures. This not to mention more mundane matters like my low testosterone and my high blood pressure (the latter has come down since I’ve started exercising and losing weight).
Cancer came as a highly unpleasant surprise (though it did at least explain the excruciating pain I was suffering even after I had a lithotripsy to break up my most recent set of kidney stones), but psychologically it just confirmed my sense of my body as frail and vulnerable at best, or set on betraying me yet again at worst. I’ve never really identified with my body, have always seen it as distinct and separate from, even in opposition to, my “self.” It has felt more like a burden than anything else. Perhaps all these illnesses are my body’s revenge, its way of reminding me that I am it and it is mine, that it is me. What, after all, would I be without a body, however frail and ailing?