This poem was published in The Kenyon Review in 1991, and since I only moved to California in 1989 after finishing my MFA, I must have written this poem during MFA school. I think this poem was probably workshopped in Yusef Komunyakaa's class, though there is a connection with my professor David Wojahn as well (described below). The poem is about my father's mental illness, specifically his stays in psych wards. (There's a blog post from 2009 on this poem, also.)
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Vin, that psych ward is Dante's Inferno — circles
within circles, you climb and climb. The sons
of bitches in white, they're monsters and devils.
You see, son, you're paying for your sins
while you're there. Each circle a privilege
you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion,
the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed's
made up with wet sheets and you become Satan
on ice — the teeth chattering inside your head,
stones rattling round and round in a can.
Then once a week, they take you down for shock,
the mouse killed again with an elephant gun.
First time was '46: the bed just like
an electric chair — electrodes, colored wires —
That's all I can remember. Except for that shock,
vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes.
And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds
or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies.
Closest to outside is the circle called grounds
privileges, they let you walk all the way out
to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding
the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers,
the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas,
saying you're different from real people. But how
do you get there? Between is a tortured drama:
wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass
— mixing with real lunatics, the gamut
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running from rapists to certified pigstickers,
manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils
in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it's
always the walk I'll remember. The Thorazine shuffle.
We're all diviners doomed to Dante's Eighth
Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal.
We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish
it would end . . . we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle
in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle
in line . . . our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh.
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Here's an excerpt of what I said about this poem in the earlier blog post mentioned above:
My father was a schizophrenic. This doesn't mean he had multiple personalities — the layperson's usual (mis)understanding of schizophrenia. It meant, among other things, that my father sometimes heard voices, saw visions. In the Philippines, this meant Martin Avila Gotera was considered a visionary man. In the US, it just meant he was crazy.
During my childhood, my father was often in and out of psych wards. In "Newly Released . . ." I imagine Papa telling me what life is like inside the psych ward at the VA hospital. Some of the material in the poem comes from things my father did tell me, for example, about his being given shock therapy at Letterman Army Hospital, though the details about that in the poem are wholly imagined. The wet-sheet treatment is also something Papa endured.
I suppose some readers of the poem may think of the Dante connection as arising out of my literary background. Well, first, my father was himself a fiction writer who studied literature avidly and so quite likely could connect with Dante. In fact, he was quite an aficionado of The Divine Comedy. Second, my grandfather, Papa's father, Tatay, had in his sala (the formal living room), a copy of The Divine Comedy, an edition with the Doré engravings; as a small child, I used to sneak into the sala (I think now that maybe that room was off limits to the grandkids, because I remember sneaking) and pore over that huge volume. Not for the text so much — I didn't really read Dante until I was in college — but for those illustrations. I remember vividly the one that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future. There was also another showing sinners rending their chests open . . . for what infraction I have no clue. . . .
When I was in the Army, my MOS ("military occupational specialty" or job) was Military Pay Clerk. For a time, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center, where I helped mentally ill patients (all military service members) with their pay problems. This was where I learned about the system of privileges (that we see also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the poem, I have my father use as a metaphor for that system the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno. (Ironically, my father was also a mental patient at Letterman Army Hospital three decades before I worked there.) It was also at this job that I witnessed what everyone called "the Thorazine shuffle," the way the drug Thorazine made patients essentially catatonic.
With regard to the poem's poetics, here is what I said before about that:
This poem is also the result of a one-sided competition with my former teacher David Wojahn at Indiana University, where I earned my MFA in poetry. "One-sided" because I don't think David knows about "our" competition. I remember one day in an MFA workshop, 20+ years ago, David had us read and discuss Craig Raine's poem "In the Kalahari Desert" which ends with this striking line: "Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh . . ." At a poetry reading some months later, David read a poem that also featured the word "Shhh" in the last line, and he may have even mentioned his own competition-of-sorts with Raine. Not to be outdone, I eventually produced my own poem with "Shhh" as an ending, however petty and unpoetic that might sound.
In terms of craft, the poem is written in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, etc. Of course, as I suggested was my frequent mode in the previous post, I use slant rhyme, very slant rhyme. For example, "sons" / "sins" / "seclusion" or "kiss-ass" / "——stickers" / "Vin, it's." Quite distant rhyme in some places, then . . . in the case of those last three words given in that example, the two similar vowels, the trochee stress pattern, and the ending /s/. With regard to meter, perhaps predictably, a "roughed-up" pentameter (again, see the last post).
This poem is a fascinating amalgam of my father's and my own experiences in connection with the Army and mental health, especially how both are connected with Letterman Army Hospital (later Medical Center).
As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.
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