on poetry

Have you ever been so moved by poetry, the words have just sunk into you? And not just gathered at the bottom, but mixed homogenously, so that afterwards, there is no evidence of it having being present, except a slight change of colour?

I have this happen to me all the time. I wish it would happen to me more often, like once a day. By the end of the week, I could be a startling shade of blue or completely opaque, made thick and rich by the words. Something internal breathing a sigh of relief, because someone has managed to translate those expressions, emotions and observations to a language—a form of communication—that can be comprehended by the slow physical body it is inhabiting.

That said, I have the utmost admiration for poets. Real poets. Not just a string of words, arranged artfully in the guise of a poem, like the fact that a couple of brushstrokes on a canvas do not make art. It’s some higher concept, but I couldn’t tell you in strict terms why I consider Sylvia Plath’s works poetry and something else’s angsty teenager self-loathing. I could go on and on about the feelings they evoke, the imagery, the language, but they’re still comprised of the same mechanics—twenty six letters, a few drops of punctuation, and a couple of line breaks.

The first poem that hit the resonating chord (enough to hear a first overtone in the faintness of my mind), I’ll never forget, was Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like A Star.” I had read poems before, and liked them. I thought they were clever, or funny, or explored interesting subject matter. I must have been in ninth or tenth grade. It couldn’t believe so shallow a page housed more depth than an iceberg. It was like an entire world existed in there, never a word wasted. Say something! What a demand. It is the darkness that makes the star shine brighter, and we plead to understand its mysteries, for it to say something, and it only says, “I burn!” But we beg for it in terms, in measurements we understand. Still, unmovable, it asks us only to reconsider cautiously those we idolize and stay our minds on the distance and root ourselves in reason.

I always thought it was ironic that it would be this poem. I chose a star, all right. Quickly followed by other poems that jolted me to the core—Ezra Pound’s “In A Station Of the Metro,” T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” are just a few. “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti. Several works by E. E. Cummings. Billy Collins’s “Thesaurus” will always have a special place in my heart, for I know too “there is no such thing as a synonym” and admire the imagery of two words falling in love, standing side by side in a poem, “a small chapel where weddings like these, / between perfect strangers, can take place.”

I am upset with myself for not remembering some of the names of the poems (or the poet). There was one I read in English class; it was a war poem, about the speaker shooting another man that, in different circumstances, he would have shared a drink with had they met in a bar. Or another one I used for the literary magazine valentine fundraiser, the one Guen’s been after (hey, did you find it?) It was the most utterly romantic love poem I have ever read, and I too am dying to find it again.

Anyway, what sparked this entry was that I read William Butler Yeats’s “He wishes for the cloth of heaven.” It’s such a romantic poem, beginning with the blanket of the night sky, the speaker wishing he could lay it at his lover’s feet. But since he is poor, he has only his dreams to offer: “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

public health and arsenic

I thought this was an interesting argument put forth by a guest lecturer in my pre-professional class the other day, who is a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health. He’s also a professor in the EAEE department (I know, because I sort his mail).

This fellow is pretty impressive, as we are expecting him to receive a Nobel Prize any moment now, especially for his paper “Preferential induction of necrosis in human breast cancer cells by a p53 peptide derived from the MDM2 binding site.” That basically translates to “I found a non-harmful peptide that can selectively kill cancer cells!”

In any case, he said, “If you want to cure diseases, become a doctor. If you want to prevent diseases from spreading in the first place, become a public health professional.”

This struck me, because it’s true that doctors only provide secondary prevention not necessarily removing the risk of disease (or arsenic-poisoning in Bangladesh, in this lecture’s case), but mitigating it. Arsenic can become methylated (made non-toxic), but the risk of exposure is still there.

The problem with Bangladesh was that, in the 60’s and 70’s, people discovered that the surface water was microbially contaminated and contributed to many diarrheal diseases. So UNICEF went in and installed about a million tube wells, only to find that many of them contained unsafe levels of arsenic (about 50 micrograms per liter—keep in mind that the “accepted” amount is 5-10) about two decades later. (This reminds me of CFCs, in the case that solving one problem leads to another, like global warming—bah, depressing!) Because arsenic is tasteless and colourless, people were not aware of the problem until the symptoms began appearing in the 90’s, the kicker being brownish spots on the palms of the hands, and later nasty-looking skin lesions. I figured that since people work mostly with their hands, there must be a huge productivity loss (if we’re going to be heartless and measure humanity in dollars) of about $42 million/year because of the disease burden of arsenic in drinking water. THIS is actually more than the previous problem of contaminated surface water, though we cannot really blame UNICEF.

I think that biggest challenge to public health is getting the people to respond to the findings. Professor Brandt-Rauf’s team figured out that deeper wells in Bangladesh were clean, while the shallower ones were contaminated, and they went around and marked every shallow well with a poison sign, and green-lighted every “good” well. The problem was that some of these wells are 6 feet apart from each other. After spending a day explaining the dangers of arsenic to a young mother, the team went on to discover that, by evening, the woman still went to draw water from the contaminated well. When confronted, she merely said, “that water tastes better.” Still, after hearing about public health professionals researching this problem and finding a safe short-term solution (use the deeper wells!) it begs the question:

Why aren’t public health professionals paid more than doctors? I have my theories, but I’m not quite sure. Maybe it’s one of those “don’t panic until it’s too late” and you’re already sick types of situations, or the mindset of “it can’t happen to me.”

I just get this feeling of being kicked in the stomach when people scorn me for wanting to go help people in poorer parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. “Isn’t there enough people here who need help?” they ask. “Why travel so far when there are homeless people on the streets of New York?” True and true. But you never hear of problems like arsenic or lead in drinking water in New York City. There are some places in the midwest that have arsenic problems, but not at 50 micrograms per liter! We have the groundwork of a healthy society already in place, at least tending to our basic needs (water and food). The point of making the whole sustainability argument is that it is possible to engineer these areas out of poverty—similar to “the goal of the philanthropist is to put himself out of work.” I mean, cheers to Adam Smith, who said it first and best: “Common years of sickness and mortality…cannot fail to diminish the produce of industry.” In order to promote any sort of societal progress, people must be healthy first.

I don’t know. It’s stuff like this that gets me out of bed every day, and plug and chug through my inane chemistry lectures, because I want to do something about it. Not necessarily public health, but engineering for a better planet. At the same time, it’s stuff like this that makes me want to hide under the covers, daunted by the massive scale of these problems.

Besides, we all know that Bangladesh is going to flood in about thirty years as a result of global warming, but that’s a whole other rant.