Abstract
Towards the end of ‘Sillyhow Stride’, his long, strung-out elegy for the rock musician Warren Zevon, Paul Muldoon relates how despite his friend’s lifelong reluctance to consult doctors, he must have known that an eventual diagnosis of ‘mesotheliomata // on both lungs meant the situation was lose-lose’.1 Zevon’s cancer was linked to a very specific cause, asbestos exposure, but its effects were absolute: Zevon died the year after diagnosis, in September 2003. Muldoon’s poem is a touching tribute of impeccable elegiac manners, commemorating, lamenting and inheriting, but it also attempts to get to grips with cancer as much as grief. In a handful of words here, Muldoon’s language indicates three aspects of the disease — mysteriousness (in the arcane word ‘mesotheliomata’), fatality (plainly declared in ‘the situation’), and in ‘lose-lose’, a hint of sinister and relentless replication — which together contribute to the overwhelming fear that cancer usually commands.
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Notes and References
Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), p. 106.
Margaret Knowles and Peter Selby (eds), Introduction to the Cellular and Molecular Biology of Cancer, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. ix.
This is according to Cancer Research UK (http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/about-cancer/cancer-questions/how-many-different-types-of-cancer-are-there, accessed 18 December 2012). However, Lauren Pecorino states that ‘Over 100 types of cancer have been classified’ (Lauren Pecorino, Molecular Biology of Cancer: Mechanisms, Targets, and Therapeutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 2).
Since age is the biggest risk factor for cancer, and life expectancy is higher, the incidence of cancer is higher today. Paul Scotting writes that before 1800, life expectancy was around 40–45. In developed countries, life expectancy has increased to around 80: ‘Our bodies now provide the necessary time for cancer to develop and so it has become one of the most common causes of death’ (Paul Scotting, Cancer: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2010), p. 6).
Wilfred Owen, Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 117.
Nicholas James, Cancer: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 1. In 2000, cancer was diagnosed in 10 million people worldwide, and caused 6.2 million deaths.
Pecorino, p. 3. In 2011, in ‘Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation’, Hanahan and Weinberg proposed a further two enabling characteristics, ‘genome instability and tumor-promoting inflammation’, as well as two emerging characteristics (there is evidence of their importance, but further research is required): ‘reprogramming energy metabolism and avoiding immune destruction’ (Pecorino, p. 3). See D. Hanahan and R. A. Weinberg, ‘The Hallmarks of Cancer’, Cell, vol. 100, no. 1 (2000), pp. 57–70, and
D. Hanahan and R. A. Weinberg, ‘Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation’, Cell, vol. 144, no. 5 (2011), pp. 646–74.
Terry Priestman describes how each of the three major kinds of cancer treatment ‘has its strengths and weaknesses. Surgery is very good if a primary cancer is still quite small and hasn’t spread. But it can’t be used for big cancers, or when there are multiple secondary cancers in different parts of the body. Radiotherapy is good at treating some primary cancers, and can often cover a wider area of tissue than it would be safe to remove in an operation, and it can help ease symptoms from some secondary cancers. Chemotherapy is fairly ineffective against most primary cancers (although the haematological cancers, the leukaemias, lymphomas and myeloma are an exception to this rule), but has a valuable role in preventing or treating the secondary spread of a cancer’ (Terry Priestman, Coping with Radiotherapy (London: Sheldon Press, 2007), p. 18).
Jackie Stacey, Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 81.
Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (New York: Berkley, 2000), p. 259.
Ruth Picardie, Before I Say Goodbye (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 13.
Lisa Diedrich, Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 68.
Harold Varmus and Robert A. Weinberg, Genes and the Biology of Cancer (New York: The Scientific American Library, 1993), p. 1.
Elisabeth Grosz, ‘Julia Kristeva’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 194–200, at p. 198.
Lawrence Goldie with Jane Desmarais, Psychotherapy and the Treatment of Cancer Patients: Bearing Cancer in Mind (Hove: Routledge, 2005), p. 60.
Robert Bor, Carina Eriksen and Ceilidh Stapelkamp, Coping with the Psychological Effects of Cancer (London: Sheldon Press, 2010), pp. 10–20.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1990), p. 20.
This tension is epitomized in Margaret Edson’s 1995 play W;t, when Dr Kelekian is explaining Vivian’s diagnosis: his statement that ‘“Insidious” means undetectable at an—’ is interrupted by Vivian, who insists, ‘“Insidious” means treacherous’ (Margaret Edson, W;t (New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 8).
Phyllis Hoge Thompson, in Her Soul beneath the Bone: Women’s Poetry on Breast Cancer, ed. Leatrice H. Lifshitz (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. xx.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [1980] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 244.
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals [1980] (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997), p. 58.
Julia Darling, Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2003), p. 16.
Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (New York: Twelve, 2012), p. 3.
John Diamond, C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too (London: Vermilion, 1998), p. 36.
W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, Vintage: 2007), p. 59.
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 97.
James Dickey, The Eye-beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), p. 31.
‘Oh wearisome condition of humanity! / Born under one law, to another bound: / Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, / Created sick, commanded to be sound’ (Fulke Greville, ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’, from Mustapha (1609), Selected Poems, ed. Thom Gunn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 149).
Christopher Reid, A Scattering (Oxford: Areté, 2009), p. 27.
Peter Davison, ‘Under the Roof of Memory’, in Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 245.
Fleur Adcock, ‘The Soho Hospital for Women’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), p. 1744.
We could compare a phrase at the end of Sylvia Plath’s breakthrough work, ‘Poem for a Birthday’, where the speaker describes her recovery in terms of itchiness, suggesting a restlessness that will inevitably lead back to hospital (Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 137).
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© 2015 Iain Twiddy
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Twiddy, I. (2015). Cancer Poetry: An Introduction. In: Cancer Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362001_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362001_1
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