2 bodies of work about the human body

Poets have had an urgent concern with the human body since ancient times. So it comes as no surprise to find two local poets, Timothy Kelly and Peter Pereira, who are body-focused. What's startling is the genuinely new light they shed on the wonders and frailties of the flesh. Their freshness of approach is tied directly to their careers — Kelly's as a physical therapist, Pereira's as a doctor at a West Seattle community clinic.

Pereira, in his 2007 collection, "What's Written on the Body" (Copper Canyon, 101 pp., $15), shares insight into the ailments and medical dilemmas addressed by physicians. Kelly goes even deeper, seeing almost all experience through the prism of human biology and anatomy, in his 2008 collection "The Extremities" (Oberlin College Press, 68 pp., $15.95).

Recently I had an e-mail exchange with them about their body-intense verse.

Seattle Times: I can think of one famous doctor-poet, William Carlos Williams. But when I look through his verse, I don't see much on doctoring or anatomy. In incorporating your medical careers into your poems, were you conscious of breaking new ground? Or did you have models to guide you?

Timothy Kelly: The old saw of "Write what you know" applies for me. Lots of other writers have drawn bodies into their work; Sharon Olds always shocked me with her frankness; L.E. Sissman, writing much earlier, about his impending death.

Peter Pereira: Some of the physician-writers/scientist-writers I admired early on were Lewis Thomas and Richard Selzer. Both wrote nonfiction. Thomas' "Lives of the Cell" was an amazing book about the intricacies of biology, and Selzer was a surgeon who wrote with devastating directness about the human body.

ST: Both of you engage with the specialist vocabulary of your professions, again in a way I haven't seen elsewhere. Is there a special challenge to bringing medical and anatomical terminology into verse? And special rewards?

Pereira: I love the vocabulary of medicine. I think there is great music, and exactness, and a certain sense of embodiment in medical terms. Certainly, some of the terms are overly Latinate, but still beautiful: amnion, tinnitus, aphasia, clavicle. But I like the common ... words as well, such as dropsy, piles, stroke, sprain.

Kelly: There's always that two-edged sword when you use jargon. On the one hand it's often the most precise word, and certainly other providers understand immediately. But you run the risk quickly of losing the noninitiated. It has to be done in a way that brings the reader in to your understanding.

ST: How aware are your patients of your poetry? Are there ethical issues at play in what you choose to reveal?

Kelly: The majority of patients who turn up in my poems are inspired by a specific, real person, but I almost always choose details which are, I hope, credible, but make the real person into a hybrid, so I don't have to worry about violating any privacy issues.

Pereira: I feel incredibly honored to be let in to the stories of patients' lives, and also I want to be very respectful of how I may use these stories in poems. One of the things I do is always to disguise something about the story (change the gender, or the ethnicity, or the disease) so as to hide the true identity of a patient, while still remaining true to the story, the moment, the ah-hah of the poem.

My Cambodian poems, for instance, are all composites of several patients' stories. ... The truth of the poem belongs to all of the Cambodian community. And in this way I hope I am helping to preserve their stories. especially since many of the Cambodian patients I have written about are illiterate, even in their own language, and never would have had the chance to preserve their stories.

ST: Both your books make me think your profession is not for the fainthearted. Do the poems provide some kind of release from the workday? Or is there some other kind of dynamic involved?

Pereira: I think the writing is a way to process all the intense emotions, and reactions, and irresolvable dilemmas that I see everyday working with an underserved community-clinic population, and put it into a poem — remove it to a distance where perhaps all the difficulty can be understood, where I can come to terms with it, even if for a moment.

Kelly: I can't think of anything, outside of sex, which is more intimate than working on people. ... I am certainly driven to write, and come around to the beauty (and, dare I say, pathos and privilege) of those encounters when I'm wrestling with what to say. ST: What surprises you most about the human body?

Kelly: Its resiliency.

Pereira: I think the thing that surprises me most [is how people] store memories of a past trauma or abuse, or a sorrow or great loss, in the form of back pain, abdominal gripe, headache, dizziness. And in this way the body becomes a kind of book, or journal, of a person's life.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com