Parkinson’s Poetry
If you use any Internet browser to search “parkinson’s disease + poetry,” you’ll come up with a wealth of sites to check out. Here are just a few:
- Poems for Parkinson’s
- Poems for World Parkinson’s Day
- 30 Days of Parkinson’s: A Parkinson’s Poem
- Walking the Line – An Anthology of Parkinson’s Writing
- Journey with Parkinson’s: Poetry to Parkinson’s
You might even run across this item, “Turning the Page with Parkinson’s,” which, if you click on it, begins “Teachers College alum Bruce Ballard (Ed.D. ’94) is the author of his own story, from pedagogy to poetry,” and goes on to describe a book I recently published which combines poetry about Parkinson’s Disease with fiction on a variety of related topics.
For the most part, the poems you can find online are heartfelt and hopeful, with resentment and anger easily expressed at this horrible disease. At least, that has been my reaction when reading them.
Then I came across Galway Kinnell’s “Parkinson’s Disease,” which struck me as overwhelmingly horrifying. You can find it on many sites (e.g., click! click! click!) and you can hear Kinnell read it aloud (click again!). Every time I reread the work, I find more and more that shocks me. I’ll describe its effect on me now as I read through it again.
First, the title. “Parkinson’s Disease.” It’s simple and piques my interest, but I don’t know what I’ll feel as I read the text.
The poem then presents me with these lines:
While spoon-feeding him with one hand
she holds his hand with her other hand,
or rather lets it rest on top of his,
which is permanently clenched shut.
My reaction: I assume the man in the poem has PD, and that the woman is taking care of him. For some reason, her spoon feeding him doesn’t bother me too much, but when she can’t hold his hand because it’s “permanently clenched shut,” I wonder if this is a condition I’ll face in the future, and what the implications are of having both hands permanently balled up like fists. It scares me, as I haven’t read about this condition before. But I go on reading the poem…
When he turns his head away, she reaches
around and puts in the spoonful blind.
He will not accept the next morsel
until he has completely chewed this one.
His bright squint tells her he finds
the shrimp she has just put in delicious.
So it appears that he can’t talk, either – only his cheerful eyes communicate that he’s happy with the meal. His condition is worse than I thought. I know firsthand what it’s like to have voice problems as a Parkie, although my situation isn’t this bad…yet.
Next to the voice and touch of those we love,
food may be our last pleasure on earth—
a man on death row takes his T-bone
in small bites and swishes each sip
of the jug wine around in his mouth,
tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt
this supper out of him.
So, Kinnell posits that food is one of our final pleasures on earth, then slips in the reference to a man on death row and how he eats his final meal, drawing it out by cutting it into small bites and swishing the wine around in his mouth, as “tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt / the supper out of him.” This puts me on heightened alert – is Kinnell implying that we’re all on death row? I don’t have too much time to think about this, because the last line of this section (“this supper out of him”) isn’t over. So far, the opening part of this poem places the periods at the comfortable end of a line. But not this time, and I get a small jolt as my mind hopscotches over the period in the middle of the line, rushing me into the next part of the poem:
…………………………………………She strokes
his head very slowly, as if to cheer up
each separate discomfited hair sticking up
from its root in his stricken brain.
Standing behind him, she presses
her check to his, kisses his jowl,
and his eyes seem to stop seeing
and do nothing but emit light.
We’re back with the sick man and the woman helping him. We read about her stroking his head with its afflicted brain and kissing him, but he still doesn’t talk, communicating once again with his eyes, which “…seem to stop seeing / and do nothing but emit light.” I feel he’s shutting down internally, leaving just a shell that beams light. In case you’re not already thinking about this, the poem’s next lines make the reference to death clear:
Could heaven be a time, after we are dead,
of remembering the knowledge
flesh had from flesh?
Then we have the long sentence that seems to summarize the man’s life:
……………………………………..The flesh
of his face is hard, perhaps
from years spent facing down others
until they fell back, and harder
from years of being himself faced down
and falling back in his turn, and harder still
from all the while frowning
and beaming and worrying and shouting
and probably letting go in rages.
I’m not sure what Kinnell is referring to here – falling is a major problem for people with Parkinson’s. In fact, a recent study I reviewed in this blog (click! ) cites falling as one of the three most likely ways you’ll die if you have Parkinson’s. (The other two culprits are aspiration pneumonia and urinary tract infections.) And the word “fall” has such a long history of scary or dangerous links: falling to the ground (“ashes, ashes we all fall down”); dropping from a height; the collapse of a building; dying in battle (“soldiers who fell during the last war”); the collapse of an entire civilization (“the rise and fall of the Roman empire”); the beginning of the night (nightfall); falling sick. But in the poem Kinnell speaks of facing down someone until they fell back, or having them face the man down until he fell back. Not only is there a lot of falling here, but all the time he falls he’s also performing all these other actions, primarily negative ones: frowning, worrying, shouting, letting go in rages. The only positive one is “beaming,” which he seems to be doing now in the poem, with his “bright squint” and his eyes doing nothing but “emit[ting] light.”
But despite this scuffle, the man’s face softens and he shows us how he can still use his hands to pick up a cookie:
His face softens into a kind
of quizzical wince, as if one
of the other animals were working at
getting the knack of the human smile.
When picking up a cookie he uses
both thumbtips to grip it
and push it against an index finger
to secure it so that he can lift it.
So much work for a simple reward! However, he is not capable of much else, as we learn in the next line:
She takes him then to the bathroom,
where she lowers his pants and removes
the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle
to his old penis until he pisses all he can,
then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants.
These lines are so stark for me. I feel embarrassed to read them, and they force me to realize that someday I may need someone to hold the neck of a bottle for me to pee into. There’s still been no dialogue between the two of them, because he’s unable to speak and communicates purely through his bright, shining eyes. The woman, I assume, could talk, but she hasn’t so far in this poem, making the man removed and remote. Kinell has created an austere and haunting atmosphere that goes over the top in the next section, when we find out that the woman and man are related – she’s his daughter:
When they come out, she is facing him,
walking backwards in front of him
and holding his hands, pulling him
when he stops, reminding him to step
when he forgets and starts to pitch forward.
She is leading her old father into the future
as far as they can go, and she is walking
him back into her childhood, where she stood
in bare feet on the toes of his shoes
and they foxtrotted on this same rug.
She’s his daughter and she’s simultaneously leading him into his past, when she and he used to dance together, and into the future, which can only be death. I was shocked to read this, and was even more shocked by the following lines:
I watch them closely: she could be teaching him
the last steps that one day she may teach me.
This then implicates Kinnell in the poem, suggesting that he, too, will someday die. And after he dies, who among us is next? One effect of using the first person here (“I watch…teach me”) is that you say it in your mind while reading these lines, making you a participant in the events Kinnell describes.
This poem has been a series of heavy propositions. Then the final three lines make it all seem so simple. We’ve been set up by everything in the poem so far:
At this moment, he glints and shines,
as if it will be only a small dislocation
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.
The bright, beaming eyes that appeared on the man’s face earlier now seem knowing: He’s in one paradise now and soon will slip into another one, no problem. But is this current one really paradise?
Kinell published this poem in 2003. It’s probably dated by now, but I’m not sure, because so far, my life as a Parkie has been focused on physical fitness and what some people call “the honeymoon period” and “the middle years” of the disease. I have very little knowledge of what my future will be like, and I only know of a few people with Parkinson’s disease who have passed away.
Here’s Kinnell’s words on writing poetry in general:
“I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”
I have nothing to add.
