SHADOW

Newly you are near again
Reminders of my comrades killed in the war
Olive of time
Memories altogether one memory
As one hundred skins make a single coat
As thousands of wounds make a solitary headline
Impalpable somber apparition assuming
The changeable form of my shadow
An Indian on guard throughout eternity
Shadow you crawl near me
But you no longer hear me
You can no longer know the divine poems I sing
But I hear you I still see you
Destinies
Polyshadow may the good sun guard you
You who love me so much you will never leave me
You dance in the sun but raise no dust
Shadow sun's ink
Light scripture
Gun-carriage of regrets
A god prostrate

 

Guillaume Apollinaire

 

On the center for programs in contemporary writing: cpcw, you can find the original poem by Guillaume Apollinaire with a

 translation by Charles Bernstein, followed by Anne Greet’s English version. 

I accepted Obododimma Oha’s suggestion to venture another anthology together, after the excellent experience we had with While the He/art pants, a collection meant to support the social effort suffered for the presidency of the United States. Obododimma Oha has been the most accommodating and intelligent co-editor I could ever hope for and the present anthology is the outcome of another sincere collaboration. To follow our call:   "Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I'd no concern with you people. But now that I've seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody's business." from The Plague by Albert Camus   HEALTH & ILLNESS (Poetic Works on Health & Illness in Human Experience) The body as a text or network of texts - as a sign, a signified or a signifier, as a myth - articulated and performed by the self , the I, or by instinct, and read variously by the other, the I, the we, the subject, or the object, achieves complexity especially when set in illness and health narratives. The languages of the body in such contexts, as configured in cultural works, especially through a poetic insight, would be undoubtedly useful in trying to understand how health related to the vegetal, animal or human world is art and/or science, or how possible contaminations between science and art can transfer to scientific art, or artistic science by considering psychology and sociology as sciences of the behavior respectively of the single and of the many, religion and philosophy as sciences of the mind or of the metaphysical, medicine and biology as manifest sciences of the body. Poetic works that feature, interrogate, or probe health/illness representations in culture and society are hereby invited for publication on the Poets’ Corner. The editors, Obododimma Oha and Anny Ballardini, are particularly interested in artwork that presents illness and health in unusual but inspiring modes with the aim of shedding light on the nature of both. Unusual and intuitive readings should become tools to dismantle the spiraling maelstrom of malady or to forge a consciousness to enlighten the human being in the acceptance of what is if and whenever change or improvement is impossible. Poetry should rise to the height of medical science as an assistant, an advisor, or as the healer, be it at a physical or metaphysical level. Welcome are works that seek to present poetic languages of the mentally challenged, the aphasic, the traumatized, the schizophrenic, as well as any kind of disease, be it infectious like AIDS, or “generational” like cancer, be it connected with what is usually seen as a seasonal minor collapse like viral influenza, or with accidents that change the lives of the victims. The present contextualization could broaden to include the idea of a nation as a single community, a constitutional body characterized by illnesses or healthy states. It could also visualize, and still not be limited to, various economic systems with their dangerous trends/breaths sweeping away hopes or bringing in new ambitious projects, be them healthy or ill. The same history of art or literary criticism could be reviewed under the lens of variables that determine the health or the illness of the category.  Visual artwork, poems, poetic fiction, poetic nonfiction, and photographs to be submitted for consideration should go beyond the traditional mimetic to narrate distortions, out-of-the-body experiences, virtual thrills and/or gratuitous hallucinations.   Visual works and photographs are to be saved in JPEG format; texts, which should not have rigid formatting, in Word. All submissions should be emailed to the editors anny.ballardini@gmail.com and obodooha@gmail.com by December 1, 2009 with "Health & Illness" in the Subject line.   My idea of a Health and Illness anthology draws back to animism, nature worship, shamanism, literally exalted by La Mère’s writings - and I cannot but remember kari edwards who, in hir last trip, went to Auroville. La Mère, in her pseudo-religious interpretation, drew a comparison between the earth and our body. She offered as a solution to our physical ailments: the levelling of injustice, the end of wars, and a social awareness that goes beyond our limited interests to feel the extent of each human being who is one of the uncountable parts of an animic and physical entity. Arcimboldo (1527-1593) already portrayed the nature of our bodies, made of vegetables, game and fish, or homunculi. Daniel Bell, in his book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, quoted by Jűrgen Habermas, sees “a religious revival to be the only solution” to the deep crisis of the developed Western societies; “religious faith tied to a faith in tradition will provide individuals with clearly defined identities and existential security.” Within a narrower context, and by following Judy Kaye’s and Senthil Kumar Raghavan’s study, it seems that spirituality can “help reduce vulnerability, morbidity and mortality,” although they underline that further research has to be carried out  to understand the possible causal relationships that are inevitably interwoven “between spirituality, and psychological and physical health” conditions. Spirituality and depression, spirituality and stress, the effect of spirituality on the psychoneuroimmunological response, are areas in need of further investigation. The Authors suggest that funding is available for “studies that are not exclusively biomedical in focus,” by the National Institutes of Health’s new centers for Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Moving is Roger Rosenblatt's emotional response to the death of his 38-year-old daughter, Amy: "The God I am talking to is not the God of my comprehension. The God of my comprehension said, 'I'm sorry, I did the best I could.'" You can listen to an interview with the author of Making Toast on npr. Drawing back to La Mère, each continent resonates with an organ of our existential body, and diseases can be reconnected to the tumults taking place in a specific region. Useless to add, she sees perfect health as the outcome of peace, without which we will always be doomed to ailments. Although her philosophy could be rightly viewed as being naïve, its essential focus and clearness echo other discourses that have developed around the concept of health and illness.  Arakawa and Gins, the poetic voices of architecture, envision the illegality of death by tactically posing “surrounds/tutelary abodes,” and by being organisms that person who interact with organisms that person. They state: “To think that human beings are not interdependent is an illusion.” And they continue: “There can be no trickery in associative coordinating skills of organisms that person, and, across and between all scales of action, bioscleavic emanations animate the world. (p.122)”  Slavoj Zizek gives a faithful picture of our present global situation with his sharp criticism:   We pride ourselves for living in a society in which we freely decide about things that matter. However, we are constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge. This is frustrating: although we know that it all depends on us, we cannot predict the consequences of our acts. We are not impotent but - quite the contrary - omnipotent, without being able to determine the scope of our powers. While we cannot gain full mastery over our biosphere, it is in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process. · Slavoj Zizek   What can be fully appreciated by Zizek is his capacity of seeing through the events as they quickly disappear in a ghostly sedimentation through the unstoppable succession of newspapers and of programs offered by other information media. He can be deemed capable of outlining an analysis of facts as they are, possibly without any interference meant to manipulate contents. The following are random notes I took while watching Living in the End Times on YouTube:   It is absolutely ridiculous to refer to some ethical values: like the Vatican said this is not the crisis of capitalism it is the crisis of our values… the system itself that pushes you towards violating some elementary ethical rules. Let’s not approach capitalism as a psychological problem. Charity is part of the system itself, through charity capitalism can redeem itself. A crucial ideological problem. The global irrationality of capitalism. It is built on trust. One should never underestimate the plasticity of capitalism, it continuously regenerates itself. Slavoj Zizek   It is thus the system, like an enormous ‘body without organs,’ without sensitivity, nor intuition, nor intelligence – if not finalized to the keeping of its own status and omnipresence, that blindly moves us like mechanical preset puppets within the firmly laid labyrinthic walls of already established wishes, denials, loves, and hates. An amorphous amoeba that dictates inhuman steps.   Lacan, who knew Jung but not Freud, quotes the latter through Jung’s remembrance when Freud in front of the Statue of Liberty says that they are “bringing them the plague.” To a solid and stable institution, psychological introspection could mean the beginning of the great fall, as much as the light to unmask traps, intrigues, hidden conundrums, the need to face unwanted and uncomfortable truths. I am grateful to Jaques-Alain Miller for the present quotation. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde is most fascinating in his making of Sir Simon’s supposedly dramatic performance a lovely farce, the Otises are grand at Canterville Chase.  Maure Spiegel and Rita Charon in Editing and Interdisciplinarity: Literature, Medicine, and Narrative Medicine, coeditors, Spiegel from the English department, and Charon from the Department of Medicine at Columbia, join medicine with literary studies to coin the term narrative medicine. They find a series of interrelationships between literature and medicine, besides a kind of language suitable for the two fields. Interesting is their citation of a special issue titled Difference and Identity (Metzl and Poirier, editors) that investigates “questions of gender, race, size, and physical build as sources of the self.” They quote Paul Ricoeur in “Life in Quest of Narrative,” where the French philosopher sets himself beyond technical issues of interdisciplinarity by underlining the need for a text to find its completion which takes place only “in the living receiver of the narrated story.”  The living receiver!  On the other hand, and with reference to the concept of interdisciplinarity which has been taken highly into consideration in the latest years, Rudolf Steiner already suggested a kind of medicine that had to involve the study of patients in a holistic way. The practitioner’s approach does not have to be limited to a diagnostic gaze – as defined by Foucault in his ‘structural study aimed to disentangle the conditions of the history of medicine from the density of discourse' (paraphrasing the Author in his Preface to The Birth of the Clinic). Steiner’s medical theory and practice add to the usual physical check-ups and clinical routines, the study of other dynamics that might be disturbing, by setting the study of the patient in his environment with issues tied to his family, job, neighborhood, historical , economical, and astrological trends and changes. Rather a healer’s investigation of the soul and the spirit, entities dear to Steiner, as much as of our physical bodies. A set of keys to venture further in the attempt of understanding why a disease has found a fertile terrain on which to grow, or why the person has allowed or invited the disease to enter, or why the patient does not want to let nature follow its healing path.  Tele- is another term that has been receiving remarkable attention lately. Arushi Shina has highlighted the progress recorded in medicine thanks to technological and computerized devices that have brought us to telemedicine and telehealth programs. Although she leaves space for unanswered questions on several fundamental aspects regarding "the current political, economic, and ideological climate" within which this kind of medicine operates, she is positive in her envisioning telehealing:   In telemedicine, the health care system has found the ultimate expression of Foucault's medical gaze, where the physician's vision is the primary medium of perception necessary to arrive at diagnoses. Mediated by contemporary high-tech telecommunications devices, telemedicine allows the health sector to fulfil the trend chronicled by Foucault - that is, the expansion of its own influence.    Foucault’s analytical knowledge can shed further light on several concepts attributable both to a single illness as much as to the fallout of our society, the obscure fringes, be them violent or white-gloved circuitous moves to approach the Big Chair, wherever it might be.    The condition of its truth is the necessity that blurs its outlines. Hence the strange character of the medical gaze; it is caught up in an endless reciprocity. It is directed upon that which is visible in the disease—but on the basis of the patient, who hides this visible element even as he shows it; consequently, in order to know, he must recognize, while already being in possession of the knowledge that will lend support to his recognition.    His medical gaze could find appropriate matches in the economic, financial, even literate world. A rationalistic, scientific disquisition of terms, the mere satisfaction of the intellect at the expenses of the other.  Karl Kraus, through Walter Benjamin's definition that wants him the one who "struggles against the empty phrase, which is the linguistic expression of the despotism with which, in journalism, topicality sets up its dominion over things" would cry out against the mechanical era of reproduction, the aseptic necrosis of our idolatrous state for the perfected made up still, the unadventurous sterilized metallic contacts clenched through grips of psychological luring moves, the void and compulsively aggressive, calculated steps to approach the nonexistent power each micro-society can offer, - the price of which are an estrangement of the disease, the hospitalized or recluse dimension of the sick, of the old, the weak, the different, the poet.  I hoped to find in the contributions possible answers to physical, metaphysical, social, and economic problems. There are solutions, laughter and word plays (John M. Bennett), irony and teasing (Halvard Johnson), self-irony (Meg Withers), search and the decision of being in the present (Marton Koppany, Daniel Godston, Margo Berdeshevsky). The eclectic and amusing answer of the Creative who swiftly slides through the minuscule passages left open (Jessica Fiorini, Silvia Levenson) by - what Zizek would probably define - the wanted psychological problems fomented by the closed all involving system. A clear distressed sight of the trajectories man has been made to run with in- exhaustible/effable prayers (Jim Leftwich). The magnifying of a perfect moment (Daniel Zimmerman & Mom), echoing Simone de Beauvoir, that resides in us and does not ask for anything, although - and within the context - our eyes have unwillingly seen/imagined the ineluctable change. Change could be the keyword for Grzegorz Wroblewski and Elizabeth Oakes. Or malady defeated (Ingrid Wendt)! A past accident re-projected into the present moment with all its intensity (Charlotte Mandel), the moment of writing, and minimized as to what was perceived as being disastrous at the time, or the chanting of the ups and downs of life in its recurrent cycles, like an unstoppable –made poetical- litany (Jeff Harrison, Ric Carfagna, Ed Baker). Otherwise, the description of problematic social (Michael Rothenberg, Luc Fierens, Obiwu, Judith E. Johnson) or personal evidence (Christina Pacosz, Ruth Fainlight, harry k stammer), poems in which illness has mattered as a problematic of the symbolic apparatus as Jerry McGuire writes (Amy MacLennan in The Sister, Marco Giovenale), in/direct requests for help (Evelyn Posamentier, Helen Ruggieri, Barry Alpert, Emma Bolden), often unanswered and unanswerable questions (Wendy Vardaman, Malaika King Albrecht, Penelope Scambly Schott, Kathrine Durham Oldmixon, Sarah Rae, Tom Savage, Drew Riley), personal grief (Ned Condini, Tony Trigilio, Alan Sondheim,  Penny Harter), existentialist disorientation - displacement (Peter Ganick, Fan Ogilvie, Christopher Flynn), the surreal experience of a disease and its palliatives (Elizabeth Smither, George Bowering, Jean Vengua and Michael A. Fink, Richard Dillon, Musa Idris Okpanachi), the surreal ancestral dream coming alive (Douglas Clark, David Howard), bitterness (Marian Veverka), violence suffered – be it personal or observed  (Wendy Carlisle, Rebecca Seiferle), observed and empathically shared by the healer (Nuri Gene Cos, Eileen Tabios, Richard M.Berlin, Marjory Wentworth), the obsession of tragedy when it hits your personal sphere and does not let go the way nightmares are - perhaps, eventually forgotten (Peter Ciccariello,Jameela Nishat, Sola Olatunji). The negative tension built up by the unexpected (Dennis Barone) with its culmination in nothingness, or the nothingness of daily steps and actions scanned by disaster (Marilyn Hacker), with its dichotomous side of a full simple living and the unsaid but mentioned and sad departure (Hoshang Merchant). The disease of poetry (Geoffrey Gatza), and a particularly refined ode, an ode to Death (Sohrab Sepehri).  It has been both playful and painful to go through the submissions, as the same title of the Anthology required in its dichotomous outline.  Health/life in illness/death. Death/illness in health/life.   […] the one who was asked which was the stronger, life or death, answered: "Life, since it supports so many ills." Plutarch in describing Alexander the Great’s encounter with the ten gymnosophists.    The answers are honest and true. They imply two forms of partaking, an empathic approach, and the viewpoint of the epic dramatist as set by Bertolt Brecht. The poem performed at our private theaters often reproduces the actual setting. We are invited to enter other people’s stages/tragedies, and we are forced to take an action. Be this action simply a thought, a reawakening, or an equal sharing that stems from our tormented experience. Rather than insisting on the efficacity of poetry as a therapeutic mean, I'd interpret the Greek projection of Poetry and Medicine onto Apollo, the God, in terms of a mastery of the discipline. Apollo the doctor is also the poet, the intuitive, the one who sees through the obscure entanglements of illness, as much as he can seize the emotional complex texture of man's animus and anima.  The present anthology, in its straightforwardness, with its many witnesses, styles, approaches, statements, accusations and  hopes has shifted further my awareness, if it acts on yours, too, then the work of the many poets, along with Obododimma Oha’s and mine, has been useful.   Anny Ballardini

Apollinaire, Guillaume. The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, (Trans. Donald Revell), Middletown, CT, Weslayan University Press, 2004. Print.   Apollinaire. From Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916). the center for programs in contemporary writing. The University of Pennsylvania. Web. 24 Jan. 2010.  http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Apollinaire-Ombre.html   Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic, (Tras. A.M.Sheridan), Tavistock Publications Limited, 1973. Print.   Gins, Madeline, and Arakawa. Making Dying Illegal. Berkeley, Ca, Roof Books, 2006. Print.   Greetings from Auroville. Mar. 2005. Web. 14 Jan. 2010. http://www.auroville.org/index.htm   “Gymnosophists.” Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, 2001. Web. 24 February 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnosophists   Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity--An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster, Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983: 3-15.   Kaye, Judy and Senthil Kumar Raghavan. “Spirituality in Disability and Illness.” Journal of Religion and Health Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall, 2002), pp. 231-242. Jstor. Web. 20 Februray 2010.   La Mère. “The Mother on Art.” Sir Aurobindo Institute. 21 Feb. 2003. Web. 7 Jan. 2010. http://www.sriaurobindoinstitute.org/container/cultural/galerie_la_mere/The_Mother_on_Art   Miller, Jacques Alain. “The Desire of Lacan and his complex relation to Freud.” Lacan Dot Com. Web. 3 Jan. 2010. http://www.lacan.com/frameXIV2.htm   Rosenblatt, Roger. Interview by Melissa Block. “’Making Toast’: Simple Gestures For Moving On.” All Things Considered. Natl. Public Radio. WBUR, Boston. 11 February 2010. Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123610749   Shina, Arusi. "An Overview of Telemedicine: The Virtual Gaze of Health Care in the Next Century." Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp. 291-309   Spiegel, Maura, and Rita Charon. “Editing and Interdisciplinarity: Literature, Medicine, and Narrative Medicine.” Profession 2009. Ed. Rosemary G. Feal. United States of America: Modern Language Association, 2009. Print.   World Health Organization. Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948. Web. 12 February 2010. http://www.who.int/about/definition/en/print.html   Zizek, Slavoj. “Rumsfeld and the bees.” The Guardian, 28 June 2008. Web. 10 Jan. 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/28/wildlife.conservation   Zizek, Slavoj. “Living in the End Times (1/6).” YouTube. Web. 15 Jan. 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ECbDpF-1g&feature=player_embedded