Raúl Zurita at the School of Nursing: The Poetics of Healing

As part of the Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice, a series of events sponsored by The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University (curated by Eleni Stecopoulos and supported by the Creative Work Fund), Chilean poet Raúl Zurita, together with translator William Rowe, and trauma therapist Dr. Nuri Gene-Cos, read at UCSF, the busy medical school and teaching hospital high on Parnassus Heights, in San Francisco.

It was bizarre losing my way in the halls of the School of Nursing as I went searching for this lunchtime poetry reading, and that feeling of dislocation had me thinking about all the ways poetry’s place gets “fixed” within a system of social value -- a system ensured by hardened divisions of labor that keep the “culture work” of poetry at some remove from the body work of medicine.

Zurita at the Medical School defamiliarized poetry’s proper context, and dislodged it from its contained site. Indeed, the reading drew attention to the ways context often works to normalize, discipline, and neutralize poetry, if only by determining its proper venues. That afternoon, in the School of Nursing, poetry was suddenly framed by a medical profession that would otherwise seem to be uninterested in it. As commonsense goes, medicine heals the body's pain whereas poetry does little more than lend expressive voice to the suffering of the individual "soul" (personal expression, and the like). But if the experience of suffering is poetry’s reason for being, how can it be healed without poetry sacrificing itself?

So much for commonsense. The Poetics of Healing is successfully challenging such limited views of poetry's relation to bodies and pain. What if poetry were understood to do something more than merely express personal suffering? How might poetics and healing inform each other in ways that refuse to identify poetry with the pain of the individual who sings? These seem to be among the questions guiding this series of events.

Zurita read from his recent book INRI (Marick Press). It’s a long poem that does the seemingly impossible work of finding adequate language and form for the brutal events that resulted in “the disappeared” under Pinochet, and it does this work without recourse to the cathartic, and without the default poetics of the merely expressive. Here’s a page from the poem:

You can hear whole days sinking, strange sunny
mornings, unfinished love, goodbyes cut short
that sink into the sea. You can hear surprising
baits that rain with sunny days stuck to them,
loves cut short, goodbyes that not any more.
Baits are told of, that rain for fish in the sea.

The blue brilliant sea. You can hear shoals of fish
devouring baits stuck with words that not, days
and news that not, loves that not any more.

It is told of shoals of fish that leap, of whole
whirlwinds of fish that leap.

You can hear the sky. It is told that amazing
baits rain down with piece of sky stuck to then
upon the sea.

These fish will go on to become tombs for "strange baits," the strained phrasing of which pushes the poem outside the range of the normally voiced. Similarly, "not any more" slips in between impossible syntactic conventions, exceeding the nonsense of grammatical error to become part of the poem's sustained ideolect, exquisitely poised on the verge of failing to sound the sense of social catastrophe. Too bad the Marick Press volume is not bilingual, but Will Rowe's translations no doubt register the poem's difficulties.

Zurita’s reading was a remarkable event, and the ensuing discussion around issues of catastrophe and poetic form was unusual for its interdisciplinary tenor, combining a concern for the poem with a set of reflections on the trauma of our barely acknowledged complicity in social crises of every sort.