ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the poetry collection or sequence as a genre, the way it deals with time in a way that’s different from conventional narrative but also different from (though it may include) the short imagistic poem. I argue that this genre is useful for conceptualizing the doctor–patient relationship, which always includes different temporalities that don’t perfectly collapse: we understand an experience of illness in sequence (which is necessary), but this doesn’t mean we ever fully inhabit whatever sequence the patient lives – if that’s how they live at all. The argument is organized around literary representations of dementia, refusing both mystery-fiction shapes and stoic refusal where dementia is unknowable. In contrast, I also draw on Pia Tafdrup’s Tarkovsky’s Horses, a sequence of 50 short poems in the first person about the poet’s father’s last years with Alzheimer’s. Can the poetic sequence force us to think about the way we compile information in time, how this is always made of imperfect exchanges across shared instants/instances, and how there is no grand narrative to figure out but changing temporalities shifting into/out of accord with one another?
