The title story of J.C. Hallman's recently published story collection, The Hospital for Bad Poets (Milkweed Editions, 2009) is both funny and a little bit sad. The funny is easily found within Hallman's writing, both situational and specific lines. The little bit sad is that any writer or publisher reading the story is going to catch themselves nodding along at times, and not with any great news about what they do.
The story starts off with the narrator being discovered on the floor of his room, by the maid, about two months after he started writing poetry. She calls 911 and an ambulance crew comes out. One of them, Bob, is much more experienced and appears to be mentoring the other, Mike.
"What are our pertinent negatives?" Bob said.
"No blood. Poet reports no pain, but that can be deceiving. No obvious deformities. No suicidal ideations, which might be expected given the nature of the call."'
"Good," Bob said. "How about signs? The entire scene may be filled with clues."
Mike scanned my room until Bob nodded him to my typewriter. My latest dangled from the spool like a sheet of half-rolled dough. The boy ripped the page free to examine it. "Is this the last thign you were working on?"
"It's not finished," I said. "Obviously."
"Notice," Bob said, "that a lot of the time poets aren't 100 percent cooperative even when the goal is to help them. God knows why."
But the boy wasn't listening. His eyes rode the toppled columns of my lines.
"This is awful," Mike said.
I groaned and my head hit the floor; perhaps for the second time.
"Watch that C-spine, Mike!" Bob said. "You can't be held liable for disliking the work of a bad poet, but you are responsible for insufficient care. Granted, we're not dealing with the penetrating trauma of a slam poet or gangsta rapper here, but even a standard verse emergency runs circles around your typcial diabetic episode. This is a poet! And poets can go south fast. Look the wrong way and even Wordsworth will take the big six-foot dirt nap. Poets have feelings up the ass."
They end up deciding to take him to the hospital, which turns out to be a teaching hospital, leading to this scene:
"We're a teaching hospital," Dr. Krupp said. "These are some of our students. With your permission they'll simply observe." He didn't wait for an answer, unwrapping his own stethoscope, an electronic-assist model, and setting the earpieces in place. He tapped the diaphragm once to test it. "Now you won't see it in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine," he told the class, "but the latest coming out of literary circles is something called 'intimacy theory.' The basic idea is that poets control readers' breath sounds. They breathe together. The relationship between poet and reader is closer tot he relationship between conductor and musician than between conductor and audience. Who reads poetry? Anyone?"
It took a moment for the students to work out the grammar of the questioning.
"Poets read poets, doctor," said an intern.
"Yes. Now we could simply lament this and complain that our sanitized world has turned our main streets into a sterile vacuum of high-tech malls, that culture is what we scrape from the bac of the poet's throat and send to the lab for tests, but this, I'm afraid, would miss the subtler point.
And the doctor continues on from here, and I absolutely plan on continuing to read the rest of Hallman's collection.
Comments