Editor shares poetry from Upstate journal's latest edition

Host Amber Smith: Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York invites you to be "The Informed Patient" with the podcast that features experts from Central New York's only academic medical center. I'm your host, Amber Smith. The new issue of Upstate's literary and visual arts journal, The Healing Muse is available, and its editor, Deirdre Neilen is here to tell us about some of the work in this 24th edition. Welcome back to "The Informed Patient," Dr. Neilen.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Thank you so much for having me, Amber. It's always a highlight of the year when I get to talk to you.

Host Amber Smith: Well, I know you get submissions on a variety of subjects, but let's look at how different writers respond to some universal experiences. There are several examples, but let's start with "Follow Up Visit With My Mother." What can you tell us about this?

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: This is one of my favorite poems in the issue, Amber. It's not as though... I can't really define the universal themes, but it seems to me that this poem encapsulates how strong the bond between parents and children is. And we think about that in a delightful way when the children are young, and their growing up and everything is so much fun the first time, et cetera. But as our parents age, and we are in a new, in a new version of ourselves with them, the poignancy of life comes to the fore.

And David Ram sent us this poem, and he has it as an epigram. He says, "for Mary Ram, 1923 to 2001." So he lets us know right from the get go, this is about his mom. And I'd just like to read it if that would be all right.

Host Amber Smith: Sure.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: "Follow Up Visit With My Mother."

When I see in the phone my silhouette

reflected in the photo of a store

display, I remember your instruction

about a common childish frustration:

we cannot be in two places at once;

lacking the power of bilocation,

your words, we must choose between here and there.

Ages later we're sitting side by side

in your neurologist's waiting room,

when out of the blue, you say, "People who

don't know me don't know I am not myself."

I know you. I know you are both here and

someplace far beyond my understanding,

a place from where you will never return.

Sitting across from the doctor, he asks

where you are. You tell him confidently

you are here. When he asks following up

where here is, you sigh, then slowly, as if

for a little child, enunciate,

"I am here, and you are there," gesturing

both hands at this innocent getting schooled

in logic by his Alzheimer's patient.

He goes on asking who I am. You shrug

silently. He repeats his question.

Looking at me, you say "He's a good guy."

You may not know where we are or our

relationship, but you know here and now.

I'm a good guy. What more, Ma, could one ask?

Host Amber Smith: Very nice.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Oh my goodness. That poem, the absolute emotion of being with your mother and accepting that what is happening is far beyond both of your control, but you love her. You have that relationship, and she's still teaching as she schools, the wise neurologist asking what appears to her to be a very silly question. I am here and you are there. So I loved it because at the end, his acceptance, his mother says he's a good guy. And, really, for those people who have gone through the experience of having a loved one in the various stages of Alzheimer's, you know, some days are a really good day when the person you're taking care of says you've done well, or they're happy with something because so many of the days are not like that.

So I loved this poem because it does what the Muse is supposed to do: let us meet people at a moment of sometimes crisis, sometimes faith, sometimes acceptance, grief, and we get to know them, and we get to think about our own lives with it. And I think we're all enriched by doing that.

Host Amber Smith: It's very, very nice.

Well, let's look at "Escape from Cincinnati." What is that about?

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yeah. OK. So here's a very different poem by a poet named Lane Falcon. And she's talking about several things here, the very serious illness of a child, but it's taking place in the backdrop of Cincinnati, Ohio, which has a drug crisis as many of our big cities do, and we know that the marketplace is being flooded with knockoffs of fentanyl and what that's wreaking, how that's wreaking havoc with people.

But we also know, those of us in the medical field, that fentanyl can be a very beneficial drug to reduce very severe pain. So we meet this speaker, this mother, who tells us about her escape, metaphorical, from Cincinnati.

I still haven't gone back to that place -- the vacuosness

I felt while they dripped fentanyl into my son's bloodstream

after his second reconstruction surgery. How I'd go

on a panicked run every day in a city where opioids reigned

where a man fell to his knees, a woman froze under the overpass.

In the waiting room, a grandmother cried, her daughter

just dead from overdose, her grandson, just waking

from general anesthesia. How (f****d up) it felt

that night when I begged the nurse to hurry

and give my son more drugs, enough to sustain him, dull his pain

and mine, his pupils blooming with fear when he started to wake.

How small a measure they lent. How small the graces we get

when we're rowing in grief.

Host Amber Smith: Wow.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: You know, so there's another example of language and the setting of this poem, at the son's bedside, when the person in pain begins to awake, whether it's from you're awakening from anesthesia, your awakening from sleep, and that look in the patient's eyes that, oh, I'm coming back into what I know is going to be severe pain. And her begging at the beginning of the poem, she wants the nurse to hurry, hurry, give that fentanyl. It just drips, drips, drips.

And then she goes off on those frenzied runs, and she's aware of her surroundings. And she gives us very stark images of what this drug is doing to people. And it's, I think, a clarion call. I don't know what we are being asked to do. I guess, maybe, just to be aware to, to open our eyes.

And the drug problem is not merely good guys and bad guys. The drug problem is so many layers of people getting caught in the addiction cycle. And yet, this drug provides a lifesaving function, and we have to somehow steer our way between those two absolutes, I guess. I just liked it because I thought there's no one who loves you like your mother. And this mother is running for her life and running for her son's life, and and she's got us with her, you know, we're just, we're just right there with her.

Host Amber Smith: Very true. This is Upstate's "The Informed Patient" podcast. I'm your host, Amber Smith. I'm talking with editor Deirdre Neilen of The Healing Muse, Upstate's literary and visual arts journal, and we're talking about the 24th edition of the journal, which you can learn more about and purchase from TheHealingMuse.Org.

So can you talk about "Out of Reach," by Patricia Behrens?

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yes, yes. This is a lovely poem as well. This one reminds us of what partners, spouses, caregivers, what they go through while watching the person they love have to go through the disease cycle.

And she gets us at a moment when the person is frustrated. Something happens, the person has hoped for something, and it doesn't happen.

So, "Out of reach:"

It's dropped. What you'd planned

to eat -- a ripe peach with cream --

lies splotched like a Pollock

on our stone floor, one more thing

slipped out of your grasp

and now beyond your reach.

It's my job to clean up the mess,

replace the loss, find something else

to substitute for what you'd wanted.

It's my job, too, to tell you, hands on mop,

that everything will be all right.

And yes, it falls to me to try to call

back out in you the laughing man

who'll share the rue of this

before he slips beyond our reach.

So this poem is, the speaker sees what's coming, and perhaps the person who's ill also sees what's coming, the deterioration that there will be no going back. But at this moment, yes, the hoped for peach has dropped to the floor. This person cannot pick it up, for whatever reason. The spouse or caregiver will clean up the mess, but she's talking here about so much more than that initial satisfaction of wouldn't that peach and cream taste good?

You know, she's talking about the satisfaction of, you're a person, you make me laugh, I you, there are things we do together. Don't let's lose that. I am going to make you come back. And even though she knows, she says before he slips beyond our reach.

So, again, what I think poetry does is to crystallize for us the evolutionary process that we're all engaged in. And we all do our best. I think most of us, anyway, are doing our best all the time to make it be as good as it possibly can be. But at these moments of illness, wow, it calls for every bit of strength you have to keep smiling and tell that person you love, it's going to be all right, when you know nothing's going to be all right. You know, nothing's going to be, really, all right.

So, again, I just really liked how matter of fact it was, and yet really beautifully profound.

Host Amber Smith: "The Refugees" is by Sylvia O'Connor. What can you tell us about the author and her poem?

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Well, this one, this one is really good because, what did you think when you first saw that title?

Host Amber Smith: Well, of course I'm thinking about the crisis, at the border.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Right, right.

Host Amber Smith: But that's not it at all.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: No.

Host Amber Smith: So it was a little surprising.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yeah. She's a local poet, Sylvia, and I liked that she did that because I think it's done deliberately. Refugees are in our minds on a daily basis. They are being vilified, many times, by different forces out in the world that want to use them for their own purposes. The image of a refugee is someone who doesn't have a home and is on the move and is attempting to reestablish ties, bonds, you know, everything.

So what Sylvia does is to remind us that there are many kinds of refugees, and the one that she's choosing in this poem is to talk about our senior citizens. And I found this poem very hard to read because I like to think that we want to honor our parents and our grandparents, that as their life comes to the end of the road there, that we will continue to take care of them. But as we know from reading the newspapers, certain places that make a promise to us that they are going to care for the people that are residents do not. And there's lots of excuses. We don't have enough staff. We don't train them very well. We don't pay them very well. We don't.... But listen to this poem, "The Refugees." We're going to meet one of them named Anne, and this is how it begins:

Anne extends an empty palm, offering

the life she left just one month ago

before coming to the Home.

I was very sick, she said.

Only one month gone and all

my things distributed.

My daughter says, I don't need

those things anymore,

my favorite things.

She packed my life into a power boat.

I sit as on the beach of an island

in my wheelchair.

I am a refugee.

We are all refugees here.

I could bring only a few

of my things with me.

Just one month ago

they took me to the hospital.

Late at night they came.

Now I will live out my life here,

but I want you to know that

just one month ago I had

beautiful things --

I had a beautiful life.

Host Amber Smith: Very nice.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would like to put this up in every health care facility that we have to remind us that yes, people have lives. And just because there's a transition, I mean, and sometimes it's for a person's own safety, they cannot stay on their own, perhaps. But that does not mean we should treat them, as she says, her daughter, I mean, if I were the daughter in this poem, I would feel so guilty, right, to tell your mother you don't need those things.

I mean, we're very quick to say you don't need that, mom. But it's like, that's your mom. She gets to tell you things like you don't need that. And yet we, we know all the time that our roles shift. And I just can't imagine what it must feel like the first time you hear your child say, "that's ridiculous. You don't need that. And I'm taking it, and it's gone. And here you are." And you know, the poem opens with that empty palm that she's offering it. This was my, this was my life. And it closes with, I had a beautiful life. I am a person here. So I thought it was very simple, structured, but so powerful. Really, really a very fine poem.

Host Amber Smith: Well, author Nancy Christopherson also takes us to a nursing home. What can you tell us about "Dearfoams?"

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yeah, so Dearfoams, you know, do you remember Dearfoams? I'm surprised, I guess, that they're still selling Dearfoams, but that's an old fashioned kind of slipper company.

And, Nancy Christopherson makes sure that she has the trademark in her poem that she writes it down there. So, I don't know if some of our readers would never have heard of Dearfoams, but they were a very comfortable slipper. So in this poem, I think the hardest part, the most difficult part of the poem is the opening stanza, because she wants to talk about suffering. And that's not something we're very comfortable talking about. We all want to avoid it. We don't want to give it to other people. And if somebody we love says, I am suffering, we want to do anything we can to stop it. But just listen to how she says, "Dearfoams (TM)"

We are meant to suffer

so that by the time the suffering

eases we can no longer

feel it as such

and it seems like nothing less

than the highest form

of praise.

That's how I'd put it.

The two of us walking the grounds outside

the nursing home along the smooth

paved sidewalk well beyond the high rise,

apartments built for retirees.

A few ash trees, some maples,

some lovely dense azaleas, boxwood along

the edges and flowers in pots

on balconies, their doors slid open, screens

exposed on the windows.

Happy, relaxing days near the end.

Mom with her softly slippered feet

padding alongside my sneakered ones

holding my hand and

gazing around at all the marvelous

wonders, saying not one word

but two, mahvalous dahling, in her tiny

size 6 ivory Dearfoams (TM).

Her hair by then

pure-as-a-seagull's-wing white.

We have a very different view of "the home." The person is visited by her daughter. The two of them are taking a very companionable walk. But we know from that opening stanza that there has been great suffering, and she's asking us to think about those times that it lifts, like if you've ever been in great pain, and I don't know if it's that somebody then gives you a shot to relieve it or the pain passes, the cramp is over. You get to take that first deep breath. And she says, how there's nothing like that. Then the pain is totally gone. And she says, it seems like you're happy. You have the highest form of praise.

And then she swings into this walk with her mom and the two of them looking around at what they see, and it's nothing terrific except that in this home, windows are open, plants are growing and blooming. Things seem to be alive. And she says her mother -- I think, anyway, the idea we get is that her mother -- is indeed happy. It's a marvelous day to be walking with your daughter outside, enjoying all these lovely flowers. So I like this one because it's not our, oftentimes, very sad note that we have when we feel our parents are not being treated the way they should be.

Host Amber Smith: Does The Healing Muse receive a lot of submissions that deal with aging and Alzheimer's every year?

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yes. Yes. We really do. I mean, I think maybe because Alzheimer's is so much more talked about in the news, you know, the statistics are rising as to who has it, who's going to get it, et cetera. And the new ideas they have, they hopes they have for drug treatments. Yes, we do get a lot of that.

Also, I think the Muse, I mean, we call it The Healing Muse, and we say that we are interested in any issue surrounding the body. So not all of our works are medically oriented, but we do get a preponderance of people thinking about the medical aspect of, living, so, yeah, Alzheimer's, we do get quite a bit of that.

We don't really have themes. We tried one time with a writing contest that we were running within the university. And we picked a theme, and we asked people to write on it. And we were very disappointed in what we got back. And I think it was a good lesson that art does not necessarily go where you want it to go. Like you can say, I would like to do a theme on parents and children. And everybody is a child, was a child once and maybe a parent or stepparent or whatever,but that doesn't mean that even though you loved that role or that you have great memories, that you're going to write something that's really beautiful. And what we got back was just not good. I mean, we ended up not having a prize because there was not something there to reward. So it taught us a lesson that it's better to just say, we're interested in all the different aspects of the body, throw it open and see what we get.

Host Amber Smith: But, you know, during COVID, we got a preponderance of things about COVID, and then directly after the pandemic seemed to ease, we got, again, a preponderance. Now we haven't, we get one or two about that now, but not that many. And I think many of our medical people are writing more and more about their own reflections, how they feel about what they do. And I find that very interesting too. Well, looking ahead to the 25th anniversary next year, writers and artists out there, they can find information about making submissions at TheHealingMuse.Org website. Is that correct?

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Yes, Amber. If they go there, they can find out information and will be taken to our website and we are actually open now. We have just recently opened for submissions for next year's issue, so you don't have to do it right now because, I mean, we'll tell you within two months if you are accepted or not, but you won't see it in print until next October.

Host Amber Smith: So we have time. And I have found that many of our writers seem to be coming from places where they met as a group with other writers and worked on their writing, either formally or informally, and then got the courage up to send out to a few places. Because it's been fun to see how some of our writers mention others of our writers, and it's like, "well, I was talking to him or her, and they said I should try you." And it turns out I didn't know that their connection was to those people, but that it turns out that yeah, you did a good job. We want you in there. Well, thank you so much for making time to tell us about this issue.

Deirdre Neilen, PhD: Thank you for giving me the time. I love to talk about our Muse. I really appreciate your taking the time on the show to do it.

Host Amber Smith: My guest has been Dr. Deirdre Neilen, the editor of Upstate's literary and visual arts journal, The Healing Muse. "The Informed Patient" is a podcast covering health, science and medicine, brought to you by Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York, and produced by Jim Howe, with sound engineering by Bill Broeckel and graphic design by Dan Cameron. Find our archive of previous episodes at upstate.edu/informed. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend to listen too. And you can rate and review The Informed Patient podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you tune in. This is your host, Amber Smith, thanking you for listening.