This is powerful, thanks for sharing your experiences Amy. From your last poem, what strikes me is the overlap between post-COVID symptoms and PTSD symptoms and I can't help wondering if these two things are intertwined for many people? And if our immune systems also took a massive hammering from the stress we all lived through? I'm glad not to be the only one who's still speaking out on these subjects, while most of the world remains eerily quiet on it....
Yeah, the neuropsychiatric symptoms definitely have a lot of overlap. I'm sure there's a relationship, though I'm not sure we'll ever come to have a substantial understanding of it.
Whoa~I had never heard of blackout poetry, that's fascinating. Thank you for sharing as I know it's a vulnerable thing. This makes me want to do this with my medical records from delivering my kiddo.
This is stunningly profound. It is resonant of my experience of Covid in the hospital as well. I cried while reading it. I've thought about writing about Covid, but haven't been able to yet. It feels both so raw and so distant. I'm still emotional about it and numb at the same time. Thank you for putting words to it.
And on a logistical note - I hadn't heard of erasure poetry, what a cool concept! Also, I am way too familiar with spotted lantern flies as we've been dealing with them on the East coast for a few years and they are terrible!
Thank you Christine. I totally relate to the combo of raw and distant. Having someone else’s raw materials definitely helped me find words that are difficult to come by. Spotted lanternflies haven't made it here yet so for now I appreciate their beauty while fearing their tree destruction. I think the sap sucking and prone to fungus feels relevant to many of our post-COVID emotional states though.
Your poetry is so powerful- thank you for braving sharing it. And visually the black lines and erasure tells its own story.
I feel like you need to create a pause after each poem and allow the reader to breathe and really hear the words in your poetry. They give such a powerful feel of the lingering effect of the pandemic.
I didn’t work in the front lines but I think this represents what happens in trauma- how memories are snatches and jumbled.
I have not heard of erasure poetry before, but by golly this is so powerful.
These need to be published.
Or shared with those making public health decisions!
Thanks Jo. I appreciate the additional layers you found in the erasure poetry. In the future I definitely will provide more space, maybe keep them as separate pieces entirely. This felt kind of like word vomit, I just kind of needed to expel all that from my system *sorry for the graphic description). I'll have to think about if this or something similar needs another home or broader audience. The experience of hospital administrators, state public health and government officials, and national officials, while stressful was definitely different than being in the trenches. And I think few if any leaders made the effort to learn what the trenches were like.
I love how uniquely creative you are in expression. I have never heard of erasure poems.
I too was exasperated by how everyone pecked at me to the bone for everything nonstop for years but very few checked on me then or even now. I cant believe i was flabbergasted that admin paid no attention whatsoever to what our ID dept offered our community and offered and still offers no support. No only is there lack of support but they also take away our support. Anyone who expresses outrage is shown the door and replaced by another foolish bamboozled up to their knees im debt doctor.
I thank everyone for their selfish and cruel ways. I learned more from the experience than any book. I think most people are controlled by either fear or greed or both.
I am grateful for the way hospital admin normalized treating us with little to zero worth even after what we did. I cant believe i was shocked. The institutions we humans built normalize harm that is the most reliable thing.
It was the awakening I needed to learn to check on myself and get out of this horrible matrix once and for all. To me the lack of community reciprocity spoke volumes about the fundamental root rot of our modern, transactional, built to isolate American society.
Thank you! It's very healing to be complimented for my creativity. I definitely didn't identify as creative until a year ago. During the peak of COVID when we were so burned out that we couldn't get colleagues to cover the shifts within our own EDs, our admin was still having our docs cover shifts in the ICU.
I totally hear what you're saying this as emblematic of our isolationism. I also wonder if because of that we can only sustain attention on the suffering of others for so long before we kind of say, ok time's up, get over it.
Wow, that's powerful stuff. What I read so far totally resonates, though I think I'm going to take it in small bites. I was never in the thick of it like New York. Our small hospital struggled to most after all of the states of emergency had ended. Once ICUs couldn’t be compelled to take patients they would stay in our tiny solo coverage ER for days while I was trying to manage dozens of other patients. I think the hardest part is knowing the right thing to do and it being absolutely impossible to make it happen. Maybe not the hardest part, but a part that really, really sucks.
This is fantastic, powerful work. I love the gold branches you added to the second poem and the lantern fly with the tree on the 3rd. Brilliant. I also don't think it's melodramatic. You have expressed here feelings that are proper for what you have been through. I didn't get long covid, but I was terrified of it because one of my good friends got it right away at the very beginning before we really even knew what we were getting into. She shared openly about her suffering. She has adjusted her life in a way that is outwardly very beautiful, shifting from being a nurse to an artist. However, I appreciate your reminder to check in with people.
Thank you Heather. To be clear, I didn't have long COVID, I was just referring to the ongoing emotional and spiritual "symptoms" from the experience. My husband thought I was referring to actual long COVID symptoms so I wanted to make sure it didn't throw others off. And yeah, I think a wound I am still working through is that any big negative emotion is dramatic as a way to avoid feeling it is important and expressing it, so I appreciate you validating that.
I did misunderstand that analogy. Thanks for clarifying. I guess it is emotional long covid. There are so many such symptoms in the people I am around. Sorrows and social ineptitudes. I would say that a confidence has left me about the world and how we will all agree to navigate it. But I think that's also the political context that exploited covid fears. Thought provoking work. I am also in writing in the dark. It's a really cool exercise! I really like how you defined the text you would use.
Yeah, now I'm going to try to be a little more artsy or nature-y with some novels I found in little free libraries. I am so looking forward to exploring this in an embodied way in the upcoming course!
I hope you do turn itinto a post. I would love to see it. And regarding teaching, I wonder if we had more exposure to these different ways of being creative if fewer people would carry that "not creative" wound. I think I carry a wound of dismissing any big negative emotion as too dramatic, so it's something I'm working through by putting it out there anyway and hoping the understanding that it's just real and not dramatic (or not that bad to be dramatic anyway) comes after.
This is powerful, thanks for sharing your experiences Amy. From your last poem, what strikes me is the overlap between post-COVID symptoms and PTSD symptoms and I can't help wondering if these two things are intertwined for many people? And if our immune systems also took a massive hammering from the stress we all lived through? I'm glad not to be the only one who's still speaking out on these subjects, while most of the world remains eerily quiet on it....
Yeah, the neuropsychiatric symptoms definitely have a lot of overlap. I'm sure there's a relationship, though I'm not sure we'll ever come to have a substantial understanding of it.
Whoa~I had never heard of blackout poetry, that's fascinating. Thank you for sharing as I know it's a vulnerable thing. This makes me want to do this with my medical records from delivering my kiddo.
Oh, that would be fascinating to "play" with. If it's not too personal, I'd love to see what you come up with.
Wow, just wow.
This is stunningly profound. It is resonant of my experience of Covid in the hospital as well. I cried while reading it. I've thought about writing about Covid, but haven't been able to yet. It feels both so raw and so distant. I'm still emotional about it and numb at the same time. Thank you for putting words to it.
And on a logistical note - I hadn't heard of erasure poetry, what a cool concept! Also, I am way too familiar with spotted lantern flies as we've been dealing with them on the East coast for a few years and they are terrible!
Thank you Christine. I totally relate to the combo of raw and distant. Having someone else’s raw materials definitely helped me find words that are difficult to come by. Spotted lanternflies haven't made it here yet so for now I appreciate their beauty while fearing their tree destruction. I think the sap sucking and prone to fungus feels relevant to many of our post-COVID emotional states though.
Your poetry is so powerful- thank you for braving sharing it. And visually the black lines and erasure tells its own story.
I feel like you need to create a pause after each poem and allow the reader to breathe and really hear the words in your poetry. They give such a powerful feel of the lingering effect of the pandemic.
I didn’t work in the front lines but I think this represents what happens in trauma- how memories are snatches and jumbled.
I have not heard of erasure poetry before, but by golly this is so powerful.
These need to be published.
Or shared with those making public health decisions!
Thanks Jo. I appreciate the additional layers you found in the erasure poetry. In the future I definitely will provide more space, maybe keep them as separate pieces entirely. This felt kind of like word vomit, I just kind of needed to expel all that from my system *sorry for the graphic description). I'll have to think about if this or something similar needs another home or broader audience. The experience of hospital administrators, state public health and government officials, and national officials, while stressful was definitely different than being in the trenches. And I think few if any leaders made the effort to learn what the trenches were like.
I love how uniquely creative you are in expression. I have never heard of erasure poems.
I too was exasperated by how everyone pecked at me to the bone for everything nonstop for years but very few checked on me then or even now. I cant believe i was flabbergasted that admin paid no attention whatsoever to what our ID dept offered our community and offered and still offers no support. No only is there lack of support but they also take away our support. Anyone who expresses outrage is shown the door and replaced by another foolish bamboozled up to their knees im debt doctor.
I thank everyone for their selfish and cruel ways. I learned more from the experience than any book. I think most people are controlled by either fear or greed or both.
I am grateful for the way hospital admin normalized treating us with little to zero worth even after what we did. I cant believe i was shocked. The institutions we humans built normalize harm that is the most reliable thing.
It was the awakening I needed to learn to check on myself and get out of this horrible matrix once and for all. To me the lack of community reciprocity spoke volumes about the fundamental root rot of our modern, transactional, built to isolate American society.
Thank you! It's very healing to be complimented for my creativity. I definitely didn't identify as creative until a year ago. During the peak of COVID when we were so burned out that we couldn't get colleagues to cover the shifts within our own EDs, our admin was still having our docs cover shifts in the ICU.
I totally hear what you're saying this as emblematic of our isolationism. I also wonder if because of that we can only sustain attention on the suffering of others for so long before we kind of say, ok time's up, get over it.
This is probably the best contemporaneous series from that time: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-er-log-week-two.html
Wow, that's powerful stuff. What I read so far totally resonates, though I think I'm going to take it in small bites. I was never in the thick of it like New York. Our small hospital struggled to most after all of the states of emergency had ended. Once ICUs couldn’t be compelled to take patients they would stay in our tiny solo coverage ER for days while I was trying to manage dozens of other patients. I think the hardest part is knowing the right thing to do and it being absolutely impossible to make it happen. Maybe not the hardest part, but a part that really, really sucks.
This is so. very. powerful, Amy. ❤️🩹 Thank you so much for sharing your blackout poetry.
Thanks Karla.
This is fantastic, powerful work. I love the gold branches you added to the second poem and the lantern fly with the tree on the 3rd. Brilliant. I also don't think it's melodramatic. You have expressed here feelings that are proper for what you have been through. I didn't get long covid, but I was terrified of it because one of my good friends got it right away at the very beginning before we really even knew what we were getting into. She shared openly about her suffering. She has adjusted her life in a way that is outwardly very beautiful, shifting from being a nurse to an artist. However, I appreciate your reminder to check in with people.
Thank you Heather. To be clear, I didn't have long COVID, I was just referring to the ongoing emotional and spiritual "symptoms" from the experience. My husband thought I was referring to actual long COVID symptoms so I wanted to make sure it didn't throw others off. And yeah, I think a wound I am still working through is that any big negative emotion is dramatic as a way to avoid feeling it is important and expressing it, so I appreciate you validating that.
I did misunderstand that analogy. Thanks for clarifying. I guess it is emotional long covid. There are so many such symptoms in the people I am around. Sorrows and social ineptitudes. I would say that a confidence has left me about the world and how we will all agree to navigate it. But I think that's also the political context that exploited covid fears. Thought provoking work. I am also in writing in the dark. It's a really cool exercise! I really like how you defined the text you would use.
Yeah, now I'm going to try to be a little more artsy or nature-y with some novels I found in little free libraries. I am so looking forward to exploring this in an embodied way in the upcoming course!
I hope you do turn itinto a post. I would love to see it. And regarding teaching, I wonder if we had more exposure to these different ways of being creative if fewer people would carry that "not creative" wound. I think I carry a wound of dismissing any big negative emotion as too dramatic, so it's something I'm working through by putting it out there anyway and hoping the understanding that it's just real and not dramatic (or not that bad to be dramatic anyway) comes after.
Creativity has been Hugh for me. I was not creative at all until about 1.5 years ago. I found all these new feelings and had nowhere to put them.