Ann Keniston uses poetry to explore illness and symptoms.
A psychosomatic illness is one in which an individual imagines a sickness; it may be as real to the person as a real illness. A somatic illness is a real one, with real symptoms, but it, too, can be associated with a disorder, when the response to the symptoms is out of proportion to the reality.
I’ve been fortunate with not having been directly affected by a relative or friend having been affected by either a psychosomatic or somatic disorder. But I’ve heard of or known people who have. And it’s all too true that just because “it’s only an illness in the mind” doesn’t mean it can be ignored or discounted; the impact on the individual and those around him or her can be devastating.
In her new collection, Somatic: Poems, Ann Keniston explores these illnesses. And she does so from what seems clear as first-hand experience with a close family member. It’s as if a curtain is opened on the life of a family, and you see an illness in all of its pain, disruption, and consequences, both the individual who suffers and close family members.
It’s a rather sobering, rather stunning collection. Keniston writes the reality, without any need to heighten the drama or emphasize the impact.
The collection is divided into four sections.
The first is a group entitled “Lament / Praise: Elegies,” in which she introduces the illness her mother experienced. Included is this poem:
Redundant
I must have loved her weakness
when she began to weaken
when everyone was harmed
the humiliations exposed themselves
some daily and mundane humiliations
too expensive to contain
inside I found a seed
like seeds embedded in a raspberry
like a bird with a broken wing
as if what were valuable had been broken
as if what is costly has been repaired
the cost is holding secrets in
as if the parts could be glued
the glued-together parts exist
so I can make an elegy
so I can write an ode
an ode entwined around unloveliness
an elegy untethered
detached from its object.
While poetry doesn’t provide an explanation of how or why, poetry can serve as a means of separation and understanding, “detached from its object.”
The next section is “Displacement: Odes,” followed by “Symptomatic: Anna’s Arias,” and “Assemblage: Odes.” Keniston connects the idea of an operatic aria to hysteria, because she explains in her introduction, “The aria…strikes me as an especially hysterical form.” Hysteria is how symptoms of these illnesses often manifest themselves.
Ann Keniston
Keniston, a professor of English ar the University of Nevada-Reno, previously published The Caution of Human Gestures: Poems and the chapbook November Wasps: Elegies. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Yale Review, Gettysburg Review, Water-Stone, and Literary Imagination, among others. She’s received numerous grants and fellowships and has held residencies at the CAMAS Arts Center in France, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Blue Mountain Center. She also served as coeditor of The New American Poetry of Engagement: a 21st Century Anthology.
Somatic is one of the most structured poetry collections I’ve read. It’s as if the science of illness and its symptoms have been poured into various poetic forms. Keniston has accomplished something intriguing and profound here, using poetry to explain and amplify conditions which are still difficult to grasp.
Photo by , Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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