WRITE MORE THANK-YOU NOTES

Deconstructing a New Year's Resolution





It's good. Really good. Possibly the second-best New Year's resolution I've ever made! (First best is still Drink more water, but that's for another post.) I am so pleased with this one that I started in October, for the Jewish New Year.





Write

In the last few pages of Atul Gawande's book, Better, he offers five short but broad suggestions for a surgeon, physician, or anyone to improve his performance. One of these is "Write something." Every day, write something. It doen't need to be perfect, but you should choose your audience. Write something that you know, or think may be read. I liked this suggestion. Really, I liked the whole book, and have tried to enact a number of the suggestions Gawande recommends.



Write more

OK, been there. I once had resolved to write more...anything when I felt like I wasn't incorporating creativity into my daily life, and musings. I wrote letters, I started a blog, and then another, and another. I wrote poems, then another and another. I couldn't stop. I still can't.

In preparation for his confirmation, my son has to document some service to the community. The requirement was minimal - 15 hours or so. I thought, "No problem, he volunteers at school events, and serves at the altar at Mass on Sundays. He's set." Then we found out, the community service mut be something new, something he's not already involved with.

So it should be with New Year's resolutions. I shouldn't resolve to do something if I'm already doing it.



Thank-you

This time of year, we hear a lot about gratitude. The holiday season kicks off with a feast based on thanks. We count our blessings. We thank our gods. We appreciate the goodness in our lives. But what of the power of thanks directed? Attempts to engage and involve the people whose actions, whose very beings make us truly grateful are rewards in themselves.

Thank-you notes

There, I've said it. Consice, directed, filled with gratitude, framed in context, yet forward-looking. Mary Hunt, business writers, writers everywhere have extolled the contents of a good thank-you note. I'm giving myself a year to write more of them and figure it out myself. Happy New Year. And thank you for reading.

OBAMA PICKS POET FOR INAUGURATION DAY

When I first listened to this interview with Elizabeth Alexander, called Obamapoetics, I had not heard of her. Now, she joins the ranks of Robert Frost, Miller Williams, and Maya Angelou who will read their poetry at a Presidential inauguration.

Poetry and Medicine at JAMA

Great news, everyone, three of my poems were accepted this week for publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I am tickled, of course. Feel like I've given birth to triplets! This certainly took some of the sting out of having to watch and root for the Phillies this postseason. Cheers!

Poetry: The Sound of the Stock Market Crashing

Christ Among the Moneychangers, 1929
by William Logan

Among shivering bankers the coin went false,
and on damp walls the shreds of tapestry
repented the cost of flowers under glass,
the foul pool swollen with fish, small vanities
whose scales were weighed out coolly in silk thread.
The stink of plaster corrupts the polychrome
and carp convert in secret to the cause
of wall-eyed ancestors flaking under crests
now mangy lions rise rampant to protect,
their hair shirts still acrawl with louse and worm.
The raggled matrix of an hour’s peace
cannot reform crude factions of a state
never alone except among the mad,
who on their knees vomited up pale blood
that splashed like taxes on the flagstones.
Sumptuous deaths in the shade of politics,
and then the posthumous careers, the charter bus,
the cure of hunting hawks and not their masters.

William Logan, “Christ among the Moneychangers, 1929” from Vain Empires. Copyright © 1998 by William Logan. Reprinted with the permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. For online information about other Penguin Group (USA) books and authors, see www.penguin.com.Source: Vain Empires (1998).

This and other poems can be found in the substantial Archive at The Poetry Foundation.

Poets Save the Economy, and Sarah Palin's Words to Nowhere

Couldn't resist reading this piece in The Onion, NEA Funds Construction of $1.3 Billion Poem. I think this is the best use of federal funds that I've heard in weeks, don't you?

Are we having fun yet? EVERYONE who loves to play with language, and especially those nutty folks who love to study language is having a blast with Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In Slate magazine, Hart Seeley examines the Poetry in the Governor's words, while Kitty Burns Florey (which I think may be a pseudonym for my 6th Grade English Teacher) makes a noble attempt to Diagram Sarah Palin's sentences. Enjoy!

I NEVER MET HIM

An erudite, opinionated, extremely intelligent, and sublimely talented (the best kind of) poet died tonight. His name was Reginald Shepherd, and although I never met him in person, I had often turned to his blog when I needed a boost of humanism and intellectualism to fill that which seemed missing from my otherwise full, busy life. I remember when he got colon cancer, and following his continued attempts to write and write and write, even when he wasn't feeling so great. The last few months he had been so sick, with a horrifying spread of the cancer to his liver. The most recent entry in his blog had been composed from his hospital bed, and transcribed by his partner, Robert. In it, he memorializes a mentor of his, Alvin Feinman by applying all the critical skill he could muster to a luscious, piece of heartbreak, "True Night." I'll link to his posting here, and on Reginald's true night and the eve of our truly darkest day, post an exerpt from this poem:

True Night



So it is midnight, and all

The angels of ordinary day gone,

The abiding absence between day and day

Come like true and only rain

Comes instant, eternal, again:



As though an air had opened without sound

In which all things are sanctified,

In which they are at prayer—

The drunken man in his stupor,

The madman’s lucid shrinking circle;



As though all things shone perfectly,

Perfected in self-discrepancy:

The widow wedded to her grief,

The hangman haloed in remorse—

I should not rearrange a leaf,



No more than wish to lighten stones

Or still the sea where it still roars—

Here every grief requires its grief,

Here every longing thing is lit

Like darkness at an altar.



As long as truest night is long,

Let no discordant wing

Corrupt these sorrows into song.

from, "True Night," by Alvin Feinman, discussed on Reginald Shepherd's Blog and in his book, Orpheus in the Bronx.

POETRY AND COLONOSCOPY

Leave it to a poet to turn a colonoscopy into a political statement! Click and read, Colonoscopy Sonnet by Sandra M. Gilbert. Now I KNOW I missed my calling.

A BIG TASK FOR SMALL HANDS

Two weeks ago I joined an ad-hoc committee with some other physicians on our medical staff. We are organizing efforts to visit Legislative Day in Albany on March 4, 2008 to express our concerns about the medical malpractice crisis. Click here to survey national efforts, here to join our state and local efforts, and here to read my own (too) personal account. Thanks.

Aura and Mystique

I thought I was over him. Really done. Convinced myself it was a stupid infatuation. This was the news, the real deal breaker. Getting a 24 year old Brazilian girl pregnant...how could he?

In a jealous frenzy the likes of which I only vaguely remember from high school, college, OK medical school, too, I scrambled the internet for a cool 15 minutes, investigating the rumor, looking for reliable news sources, pictures, confirmation. These jealous frenzies are much easier now that there is an internet. In the past, confirming such infidelities required hours of sleuthing, sneaking, not to mention driving. And with each mile under my wheels, each sad song on the radio, my jealous anger would dissipate, undermining the power of a woman scorned.

And now it was happening again, every news clip, every glossy picture makes my heart melt and think how could I every begrudge, bemoan, besmirch or be over him?

Then, I found it, a journal entry, in his own handwriting, on the internet. He confirms it, a baby due in six months. Says he's "stoked and wowed." But just reading the words, seeing his face again, listening to the music he loves, understanding how he's gone on with his life and I with mine...I realize I'll probably never be over him. I can only be happy for him and remember the only advice he's ever really given me, "just keep living."