During medical school, I had Nowlan, a New Brunswick poet who developed thyroid cancer at the age of thirty-three, as my major tutor in pain. Before he was diagnosed and eventually underwent three major surgeries, he wrote a poetry of fine lyric, a mainly descriptive poetry that stuck to stanza. But after his cancer, his style exploded: he started to write about himself, about his own impressions and feelings, about his own frailties and how they manifested themselves in others and, most importantly, about his own life-threatening illness.

“The Boil” is typical of the kind of poem Nowlan wrote in what I call his middle period; perhaps enamoured of William Carlos Williams’ variable foot, with great attention paid to breath. There is great attention paid to typography, meant to simulate the rolling of a boil—“prying it”—between one’s fingers, and the gasps as one does so. The words “master” and “servant”, though, have pride of place, occupying a line each. Nowlan’s poem provides a benign optimism: that the patient can understand her illness for what it is, and thereby steal its mastery. Nowlan’s poem describes how one can literally take a problem between one’s fingers and exchange servitude for perhaps not mastery (for the boil, though pierced, may form again, and it always levies pain), but at least a measure of control. And good poems are controlled performances…

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posted by Arc on June 14, 2008 permalink | comments
cats: Features
tags: Alden Nowlan | Shane Neilson | poetry | poets