aside from ear infections, the screaming that entailed, & trying to hide behind coats in the front hall closet from the doctor with his little black bag who came to the house every day to give me a shot of penicillin, aside from that my mother said I was a perfectly behaved child, silent, played for long periods with the nearest toy, not until I was three did the doctor explain that I was deaf & that taking my tonsils out would fix it, mostly it did — the black & white earsplitting spiral of anesthesia, waking in the green ward in a bed between beds, two long rows of beds, at a distance a uniformed nurse, my soft white mother, my tall suited father — my throat hurt, I clung to her, I hid from him, not that he cared, he was the beast, I terrified, begging her to take me home where I could once more become invisible
Bending the Bow [excerpt]
by Robert Duncan
For these discords, these imperatives of the poem that exceed our proprieties, these interferences — as if the real voice of the poet might render unrecognizable to our sympathies the voice we wanted to be real, these even artful, willful or, it seems to us, affected, psychopathologies of daily life, touch upon the living center where there is no composure but a life-spring of dissatisfaction in all orders from which the restless ordering of our poetry comes.
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