How JFK Killed My Father

How JFK Killed My Father

Doctors. Those with MD on their license plates. Dr. So and So affixed to their name gets a choice restaurant table. We resent them. We revere them. We share confidences with them. We fear them. We fantasize about them. Richard Berlin is a medical doctor who writes poetry. Or is he a poet who practices medicine? He has been a psychiatrist, practicing in the Berkshires, most of his adult life. When he joined a writing workshop several years ago, the writing of poetry came suddenly, fast and furiously. That was before I thought to write more than a patient's history in a chart, before I knew what lets us breathe easier, before their stories engraved me like stone. He has been writing since. Many of his poems have appeared in medical journals like Psychiatric Times and Medicine & Behavior, in addition to being regularly featured in the Berkshire Medical Journal. In 2002, his manuscript 'How JFK Killed My Father' won the prestigious Pearl Poetry Prize. Berlin donated the $1,000 he received to establish a creative writing award for medical students at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he is an associate professor of psychiatry. Now Pearl Editions has published 'How JFK Killed My Father' as a handsome paperback. The book begins with an epigraph from fellow poet/doctor William Carlos Williams. 'As a writer I have never felt that medicine interfered with me but rather it was my very food and drink, the very thing which made it possible for me to write. Was I not interested in man? There the thing was, right in front of me. I could touch it, smell it.' Doctors are modern seers, the ones who have seen the interior of the body, who know 'the shapes inside: smooth chestnut, soft orange, stone in a muddy field,' writes Richard Berlin. They are our augurs, acquainted with the physiology of disease and death, diviners of the past and future. They often play a role as our Cassandras, carriers of the bad news, the evil message. Oh, if we knew what they know! But could we live with that dark knowledge of our mortality? This is what strikes me as I read with deep, thoughtful pleasure this intriguing collection of poetry. It's like being initiated into a landscape where I?ve just been a gawking bystander, even when it?s been my own body. Berlin has been there and he has much to tell the reader. His poetry is vivid, yet the style is highly accessible. He describes what he has seen of life and death. How we die without appetite and the way we live with hungers that consume our hearts like another kind of dying. He views his work not unlike his father's in a leather shop, where the cutters 'trace a rim of brass, grinding blade through calfskin, steady as a scalpel.' The metaphor fits his work as a doctor and as a poet. Often he wields that double-edged sword. The language of his poetry is like that scalpel, cutting excess, the polite and politic, the obligatory, to offer us an honest, unsentimental, but compassionate vision of the human condition. Berlin's father manufactured sweatbands for hats. Who even knew hats had sweatbands? But this fact explains the title poem of the collection, 'How JFK Killed My Father.' It begins, 'It was a time when men wore fedoras.' He writes of Truman?s Homburg, Ike?s ?bald head steamed in fur felt,? and Stevenson?s Stetson. ?But when thick-haired Kennedy rode top down and bare-headed, men all over America took off their hats?. Hat factories closed quiet as prayer books, and loss lingered in my father's guts like unswept garbage after a big parade. The poem concludes with his father's death. 'The old men murmur in the graveyard, Kennedy did it to him, fedoras held close to their leathered hearts.' Berlin's knowledge extends beyond the merely physical as he?s primarily a doctor of the psyche. A psychiatrist. Shrink in the lingo. In the poem 'Tools,' he shares with us secrets of the trade. It feels almost sinful to be allowed into hi

How JFK Killed My Father

I am neither a poet nor a psychiatrist so I appreciated first how accessible Richard Berlin's poems are to the reader. He pays careful and fearless attention to both the person he is writing about and to the physicians involved and honors each with honesty. Berlin is clearly unafraid to remember what is like to be vulnerable on either side of the hospital bed, or therapeutic chair. His poems remind us, in a way that medical practice often does not, that an ill person remains human, and that physician's hearts are often deeply moved by what they witness. This is a book I wish my physicians would read so that we might begin our appointments with a shared sense of humanity. I believe that most doctors (and patients) wish as Berlin says, 'for a stronger magic' with which to heal; few of us are capable of naming that wish with such beautiful and forceful language.

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