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Literature & Medicine: From the Inside Out
Interview with Cortney Davis :::
bio, by Jolynn Tumolo :::
bio
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| Jolynn Tumolo |
Jolynn Tumolo, Managing Editor of ADVANCE for Nurse Practitioners, recently had the opportunity to speak with Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner in women’s health at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, as well as an award-winning poet and author. Ms. Davis is co-editor of two collections of poetry and writings by nurses that have been very popular with Literature & Medicine groups — Between the Heartbeats (University of Iowa Press, 1995) and Intensive Care, the latter of which was named a 2003 Book of the Year by the American Journal of Nursing. Her most recent poetry collection, Leopold’s Maneuvers (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.
"The Story Teller"
An Interview with Cortney Davis
JT: Why did you decide to call your newest book Leopold’s Maneuvers?
CD: Leopold’s maneuvers are the four hand positions used to determine the position of an unborn baby when examining a pregnant woman. The official definition is “the four maneuvers used by an examiner to determine the lie of an unborn child.” I thought that was a great metaphor: putting hands on the body, trying to determine the way a child will enter the world. I also appreciated the double meaning of “lie”—the lie of childhood, the idea of safety, the idea of promise. There are so many layers that you can peal away from the image of a clinician examining a pregnant woman and trying to determine the future of this unborn child.
Once I decided “Leopold’s Maneuvers” would be the epigraph poem, it was easier for me to select poems and find an order for the book. The book begins with a poem about childhood and ends with a poem about the death of my mother. Woven in between are other poems of family and clinical relationships, life and death.
JT: Did your mother recently pass away?
CD: My mother died in 1991, but I didn’t write about her death until years later. As often happens, I don’t write about an event right away because, if the experience is painful, it takes time for me to sit back and gain some perspective on what I might want to say about it.
JT: What’s your process for writing a poem?
CD: I tend to write a poem when two events come together, sparking against one another like two sticks rubbed together to start a fire. Most often, I’m busy with my “other” life, being a nurse practitioner, a wife, a mother or grandma, or I’ll be reading a book or thinking about something or listening to music when, all of a sudden, that present moment connects to something that comes up from my past, a memory from my subconscious-what the poet Stanley Kunitz calls “key images,” those hidden images, metaphors that influence our lives. It’s when those two moments, past and present, come together that a first line or an idea for a poem may be born. I carry that impulse around with me until I have time to sit down and re-enter those moments. Once I start writing, it’s almost as if the poem takes over. Ideas and lines and phrases come to me, and I end up with a “blob” of writing, from which I go back and try to carve out the poem. And of course, after the initial writing, there is revision to be done. I want my poems to transcend personal memories and reach a more universal consciousness.
JT: Why do you continue to practice as a nurse practitioner?
CD: I believe that writers are better writers if they’re not writing in isolation. If I wasn’t engaged in clinical nursing, I wouldn’t feel sufficiently engaged in human activity. Working with patients, witnessing their suffering and recovery is very humbling; it connects me to the world in specific ways. I don’t think I personally would be happy in another line of work, although I can imagine other lines of work that are equally wonderful, equally engaged in real life.
JT: Is there one poem in Leopold’s Maneuvers that stands out as a favorite or really means a lot to you?
CD: I’m particularly close to the poem about my mother dying, “How I’m Able to Love,” which is the last poem in the book. In it, I reflect on how my being a woman and a caregiver who has lost my mother, having to be both nurse and daughter at the moment of her death, connects me to the entire cycle of living and dying in a unique way-a cycle begun, in the book, with the poem “Leopold’s Maneuvers.” It’s a very hard poem for me to read in public, because reading it transports me back to my mother’s bedside.
I’m also close to the poems about childhood because they evoke for me that wonderful feeling of being a loved child, the sounds and scents and comforts, in spite of all the dangers and the other strange things that are a part of any childhood.
JT: I especially enjoyed “The Brightest Star Is Home.”
CD: That’s also one of my favorites. When we look back on our childhoods, I wonder if we all tend to remember what’s good, what’s really magical, and put away less pleasant memories. This poem makes me feel again my childhood in a very luminous way. I’ve tried to capture those images, which are important to hold on to.
JT: When you give a reading, how do you decide which poems to read?
CD: I’ve seen some poets give readings during which they leaf through their book until they find a poem that strikes them as the right one to read at the moment. I have to say that kind of aggravates me-I think in some ways their lack of preparation dishonors the poems. I much prefer listening to poets who have prepared their reading with both the audience and the poems in mind. That’s what I try to do. I try to think of who my audience will be and the time I’ve been allotted, and I try to put together a group of poems that, together, have a beginning, a middle and an end, with some sort of emotional arc, some sort of imagistic thread that connects them. Like a little chapbook. It’s fun getting ready for a reading.
JT: Writing is such a private activity. Is it difficult to read your poetry out loud, or does it come naturally?
CD: Reading poems publicly seems to come very naturally to some poets, but I occasionally find it difficult. When I write, I try to reach deep, not avoiding significant or uncomfortable memories, so a lot of my poetry is very personal. When I’m writing a poem alone in my room, I relive the moment of the poem, privately, and so while I may be unsettled, I’m not feeling vulnerable. But when I stand up in front of an audience and read the more personal poems, it can be very difficult to be that revelatory in public. It’s almost as if when you write a poem, you write your deepest secrets. When you publish a poem, the secret is out, but you aren’t there to witness a reader’s reaction-you’re distanced then from the poem. But when you read a poem in public, you are there, the poem is there and the audience is there. It’s very much a sharing of my life’s narrative with others.
JT: How do audiences react to your poetry?
CD: In general, I’ve found that American audiences tend to be reserved. They most often sit and listen respectfully. Perhaps poetry slams are an exception! I’ve found that, at my readings, women are often more emotional in their reactions than men. Sometimes, when I’m doing a reading, I’ll look up and see a woman nodding or crying. Or at the end of a poem, I’ll hear somebody sigh. That kind of overt reaction is very affirming. Hearing or seeing the audience respond viscerally, you know you’re really connecting. Then there are the times when I finish a reading and have no idea if anyone was touched by any of the poems. Then afterward, someone might approach me and say, “Oh, I was so moved.” And I had no idea. I find that kind of delayed or more private reaction particularly when reading to medical audiences. They may be processing the poems very intimately, but because they have been trained as medical professionals-you know, we always feel we have to be in control-they aren’t comfortable responding openly. When we are at a patient’s bedside and something very moving occurs, we sometimes hold back, too; then, later, our responses overwhelm us. As caregivers, we participate, always, in such important life events.
JT: Your poem “To Make Nothing out of Something” expresses that idea.
CD: I was driving to work and listening to a CD of poets reading in this kind of breathy poet-voice about things that seemed to be so common and without much substance. This poem contrasts going from this CD to the hospital where things were happening that seemed, to me, to be so remarkable. Big moments that were taking place in those fleeting moments behind the clinic door: someone talking to a patient about a serious illness, a patient responding to a diagnosis or a pregnant woman hearing her baby’s heart for the first time. I feel very privileged to be part of it, and I try to remember to write about those moments with respect.
JT: That reminds me of the poem “Story Teller,” about the nurse who tells stories about those moments and, at the end of the day, is able to leave them at work. But you have a difficult time with that.
CD: That’s another situation that actually happened. There was a nurse at work who was standing with her legs crossed, with her hand on her hip, going on and on about some tragedy that had happened at work. And I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness, she’s talking about this traumatic event so easily that it seems she’s able just to let those moments go. But I can’t forget those moments when I go home. I take them with me, and I see them reflected in everything.” At the same time, I understand that I’m being a little disingenuous. I’m the one who’s writing these momentous events into poems-not to shock readers but to connect them, empathically, to the patient’s or caregiver’s experience. At the end of the poem, I write that I am “mute and disingenuous at the story teller’s side.” So I’m also a story teller. Even though the poem is about the story teller who seems to say things so easily, isn’t that me as well?
JT: Do you ever hear from colleagues who think they see themselves in your work and object to a portrayal? I’m thinking of Yanna, the junior resident in I Knew a Woman?
CD: I do. Particularly about the characters in I Knew a Woman. Some of the residents came up to me and said, “Is that me?” (laughs) And I’d tell them, “No.”
What happens more often is that people will come up to me and say, “That same thing happened to me, and I never knew how much it moved me until I read your poem.” I’ve also had people say, “How dare you write about that.” It’s almost as if they’re afraid I’m revealing some esoteric caregiving information that shouldn’t be revealed. A good example is a poem in my first book called “What the Nurse Likes.” The poem is a list of things that I like about being a nurse. One line reads, “I like watching patients die.” Once, a man asked, “How can you say that?” But if someone doesn’t understand what I mean, then they are misunderstanding the whole poem. What I’m suggesting is that if I, as a caregiver, have to be with someone who’s dying, then I want my patient to know that I am there with openness and joy and privilege at sharing death’s moment; that I won’t run from the room and hide. There’s a fine line between saying something that’s a little risky and shying away and only saying what’s safe. I prefer to be open and honest about revealing the risky parts, too.
JT: In addition to writing, you have collected and co-edited two collections of poems and prose written by nurses. With your own writing and clinical practice keeping you busy, why did you take on those projects?
CD: I thought it was incredibly important that nurses’ voices be heard. At the time that Between the Heartbeats came out, the poetry and prose of physicians was very much in the limelight, spilling over into the mainstream poetry and literature world. But the nurses were silent-or so I thought. Judy Schaefer, the co-editor, and I were lamenting that there was no collection of writing by nurses, and then one day I called her up and suggested we do it. So we blundered our way through the process, discovering that there were hundreds of nurses who were writing but not doing anything with their writing. We felt it was our duty and privilege to bring those voices to light. One of my main interests is encouraging other health caregivers to write.
JT: What are you working on now?
CD: For some reason I have fallen in love with prose poetry. There’s a wonderful prose poem journal called Sentence that I’m just devouring. I have written 50 or 60 prose poems, and I don’t know if they might someday become a book. I haven’t thought that far in advance, but they do seem to be falling into a group.
I’m also writing a series of essays on religion. Some of them touch on the interrelationship between religion and caregiving. And I’m always writing book reviews and articles and essays. I’m grateful to have a livelihood that brings me close to all life’s wonderful, essential events. And it’s an honor to write about them.
To learn more about Cortney Davis, visit: www.cortneydavis.com Read Cortney Davis’ poem, “How I'm Able to Love.”
Is there a Literature & Medicine author that you would like us to feature? Please let us know! Email Lizz Sinclair.
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Literature & Medicine has received major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.