ABSTRACT
We sketch briefly the chief problems poetry faces in medical education circles: an insistence on instrumentalist deployments such that poetry is always given a task, objective, or learning outcome to accomplish; or it is subsumed under a narrative umbrella, wrested from a world of sound and image and into a chronological (prose, and often prosaic) understanding. Poetry is very rarely appreciated as itself. We introduce some major characters in the book, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, providing their thoughts on poetry that guide and shape what comes later. Through Williams, we introduce Charles Olson’s idea of “Projective Verse” and the “field”, a space into which a poem “fits”, placing emphasis on lyric poetry as spatial rather than temporal (narrative’s domain). Medicine provides a field for poetry, but not just as subject matter. Rather, poetry and medicine project one into the other at the level of form (as modes of reasoning) and this is a key idea developed throughout this book. Why poetry does this in different ways from narrative medicine is introduced. We remind readers also that “creativity” is at the heart of a poetic imagination, but is generally referred to as a catch-all in the narrative medicine literature. We identify various kinds of creativities reflected in poetic forms.
