Yale Professor Meghan O'Rourke Uses Poetry to Navigate the Invisible Kingdom
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:03]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show and learned endless amounts about
[0:09]storytelling, reinvention and life itself because when you talk about books, you're really
[0:13]talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors, the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:27]Megan O'Rourke is the author of the story of the body, poems of illness and recovery.
[0:32]Megan is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom Reimagining
[0:37]Chronic Illness, the best-selling memoir The Long Goodbye, and three poetry collections, most recently
[0:42]Sun in Days.
[0:44]She teaches creative writing at Yale University and is executive editor of the Yale
[0:48]Review.
[0:49]Welcome, Megan.
[0:50]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about the story of the body, poems
[0:55]of illness and recovery.
[0:57]Congratulations.
[0:58]Thank you so much, Zibi.
[0:59]I'm thrilled to be here.
[1:00]Take listeners back to what you meant in the first line when you said when I was in my
[1:06]early 30s, I got very sick.
[1:08]There's a whole book about that, but for those who have not read your prior book and
[1:13]don't know much, give us some context so that you can explain how you ended up doing
[1:17]this anthology of poetry all about healing and wellness and recovery, all the things.
[1:24]Yeah, the last time we spoke was about the prior book, The Invisible Kingdom where I describe
[1:28]this mysterious experience I have that turns out, I think, to be startlingly common
[1:33]of getting kind of oddly sick going on a rollercoaster of seemingly vague symptoms like fatigue
[1:41]and brain fog, joint pain, rashes, which really began actually in my early 20s right
[1:47]after graduating from from university.
[1:51]And it took more than a decade for really any doctor to believe me.
[1:55]I think that there was something going on and instead I got a lot of, well, maybe you're
[2:00]anxious, you need to drink more water or go to work on your sleep habits.
[2:06]And basically I turned out to have an autoimmune disease as well as tick-borne illness that
[2:10]just hadn't been tested for or caught.
[2:13]All I was sick, I'm both a poet and a journalist by training and so I had started kind
[2:17]of reading and researching and found that this was shockingly common, that I was hardly
[2:21]alone, as alone as I felt in the experience I was hardly alone.
[2:24]So, you know, basically that book and in some ways this book came out of my desire to shine
[2:31]a light on the experience of illness that I think we often will look away from when so many
[2:35]of us go through some form of illness and are met with this kind of like, maybe you're
[2:40]fine.
[2:42]So frustrating for those who have not been properly diagnosed and, yeah, basically your
[2:47]prior book, I've read many books since of this, this same thing happening.
[2:53]Is there something and I want to talk about the poems, but just a few seconds, like, is
[2:57]there something in doctor's training or is there something systemically that is possible
[3:03]to fix this because as you said, it is so common and whether the issue ends up being
[3:08]a giant thing or a small thing that's missed, like, it really ruins people's lives.
[3:14]And they often say I went to 10 doctors and nobody knew anything, nobody paid attention.
[3:19]Yeah.
[3:20]No, absolutely.
[3:21]It's funny, I just got a very powerful email from someone yesterday who was sick for years
[3:26]and then her heart literally stopped.
[3:28]She has a rare genetic disorder and then she, you know, they brought her back to life.
[3:32]And even now when she goes to doctors, they're like, maybe you just need to go to bed
[3:35]earlier or drink more water, literally.
[3:37]So I do think that we have a kind of systemic problem and that's what I very much tried
[3:43]to diagnose in the invisible kingdom with an aim toward explaining how we got here, right?
[3:49]And the line I like to use a lot, which is maybe hokey, is sometimes going to a doctor's
[3:53]office is very confusing for a person who's feeling unwell.
[3:57]And it is the analogy I came up with was that it's like if we went to a restaurant,
[4:03]like a really good restaurant, there's a great chef you've been looking forward to it.
[4:06]You look at the menu and you think, I really want to have the salmon, the waiter's like,
[4:10]great.
[4:11]And then comes back out with the chef and the chef's like, you know what, I just don't
[4:13]think you're hungry today.
[4:14]Right?
[4:15]Like it's a very mystery.
[4:16]So I do think that's kind of a systemic problem that we could retrain our medical system
[4:23]to put more value in patients testimony to kind of move away from the algorithmic thinking
[4:30]to really become aware of its own internal and unconscious, I think, sometimes biases.
[4:36]And to think about both the incredible value that are pivot toward measurement brought us
[4:42]in the 20th century, we have longer lives because we can give tests, but it doesn't help
[4:48]medicine solve the question of what to do with people whose bodies live at the edge of
[4:52]medical knowledge, right?
[4:53]If you don't have the test yet to test for the condition or you're too early in your
[4:58]sickness.
[5:00]to the anthology, I would say that's one of the really interesting things about the anthology,
[5:03]the practice of putting together this anthology for me was finding this moment when suddenly
[5:08]in the early 20th century poets start writing kind of obsessively about their experience with
[5:14]the medical system because it's so strange in some ways to be at our most vulnerable
[5:19]in this very bureaucratic system. Yeah, so interesting. Well, you assembled, you wrote a very
[5:24]powerful introduction and then introduce the sections that are filled with beautiful works
[5:30]past and present about how people really feel about their lives, their bodies, their health,
[5:38]their frustrations and all of that. I'm sure the reservoir repository, I don't even know,
[5:44]say the amount of you could have picked from a bazillion homes. How did you pick these?
[5:49]Oh, so hard. I mean, it was a fun and hard process, as you can imagine. So the book,
[5:52]I have a little advanced copy here. So it has 82 poems, actually 83 of you include an epigraph,
[6:00]I snuck another in. They're all English language poems. That was one way I limited myself because
[6:05]I thought if I brought this to translation, I'll never choose. And I very much wanted them to be
[6:10]transhistorical. I wanted to find what I thought were kind of some of the best English language
[6:14]poems about illness. And I very much wanted to cover this kind of arc of experience that I ended
[6:20]up outlining in the book from crisis and diagnosis to kind of integration and resilience and
[6:26]sometimes recovery. So having that arc really helped me, there were a lot of poems that are among
[6:31]my favorite illness poems that I didn't include just because they kind of duplicated other
[6:36]poems that I liked more that were representative of crisis or diagnosis. But the process was me,
[6:40]and a few, I'm a professor of writing at Yale. I had a few graduate students. We kind of
[6:45]gathered a big, big massive list of probably about a thousand poems. And then I started winnowing
[6:50]over time. And until the last minute was searching and finding and people were sending me
[6:55]recommendations. But I wanted there to be a real balance of, you know, illness obviously is like
[7:00]upsetting and devastating and can be tragic. But there's also room for a kind of rearrangement of
[7:06]meaning for joy, for laughter, for human connections. I wanted all of that to be in the book.
[7:12]I don't know if you've read or know Alice in Sweet Grant who has a book of poems about her
[7:17]illness coming out called lump have you read it yet? Oh, I haven't read it. And I didn't know
[7:20]about it. So that's fantastic. Oh my gosh, I have to introduce the two of you. I feel like
[7:24]you would have, you should do an event together. We should. I'm going to get her back for
[7:28]your book. The two, the two of them should be like a gift set as well. You know, because it's like
[7:34]her one deep dive into personal experience and you have a breadth of knowledge. So I don't know,
[7:39]taken together. It's like, let's make art out of this mess. Can I read maybe a little bit of one poem
[7:46]just to give people a sense? Yeah, please do. Can I read time by Louise Gluck? What are my
[7:52]absolute favorites? Oh my gosh. And I had not known that poem. I'm a deep Louise Gluck
[7:57]Stan as I said, but I just had not known that poem. Yeah. Me neither. Okay, there was too much
[8:03]always then too little childhood sickness by the side of the bed. I had a little bell. At the
[8:08]other end of the bell, my mother, sickness, gray rain, the dogs slept through it. They slept on the
[8:13]bed at the end of it. And it seemed to me they understood about childhood best to remain unconscious.
[8:19]The rain made gray slats on the windows. I sat with my book, the little bell beside me.
[8:23]Without seeing any sign of the spirit, I determined to live in the spirit. The rain faded in and out
[8:29]month after month in the space of a day. Things became dreams, dreams became things. Then I was
[8:34]well. The bell went back in the cupboard. The rain ended. The dogs stood at the door,
[8:39]panting to go outside. I was well. Then I was an adult. And time went on. It was like rain
[8:44]so much, so much, as though it was a weight that couldn't be moved. I was a child half sleeping.
[8:49]I was sick. I was protected. And I lived in the world of the spirit. The world of the gray rain,
[8:54]the lost, the remembered, then suddenly the sun was shining. And time went on, even when there was
[8:59]almost none left. And the perceived became the remembered, the remembered, the perceived. Oh my god.
[9:06]Oh, that's incredible. Oh my gosh. So beautiful. She, I love how she gets at
[9:14]anything. A lot of the poems in the book do this, you know, the kind of inherent mysteriousness of
[9:19]our existence, right? Like that we're moving through the world in these bodies that we take to be
[9:23]almost like transparent vessels that are feel permanent to us, right? And then as time goes by,
[9:29]the very nature of time and perception changes. And I think the kind of recompense we have,
[9:34]I don't know how to say that word is, is this feeling of being able to make meaning of it,
[9:37]right? Being able to articulate, this is what it's like to be human. And I think that poem does it so
[9:42]beautifully. Oh, it's so amazing. They all just make you want to like sit back in your chair for a minute
[9:48]and take it in and think it through and just put yourself in other shoes and just
[9:54]and also marvel at the language and the like, I mean, it's different when you read it, obviously,
[10:00]a lot of it is in how it's written on the page and the line jumps and all that, which is
[10:04]also beautiful and moving, but it's really amazing. No, no, it's all good.
[10:08]No, I'm looking down because my puppy found a computer wire. They always find the thing you
[10:12]don't want them to find. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Megan, tell me a little bit about when you got involved
[10:20]at Yale and all your great work that you do at Yale and the teaching and just go into that
[10:25]timeline wise and everything. Like when were you sick, when did you join? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[10:30]I so, you know, one of the strange things about my sickness, I say in the book, I got sick the way
[10:34]Hemingway says you go broke, which is to say gradually and then suddenly. So I never really know
[10:39]exactly when I got sick. I think that I actually was probably bitten by a tick right after I graduated
[10:45]from Yale. I got a graduation party in Old Lime, Connecticut. And I think that was the weekend that I got
[10:53]bitten. So I had again this kind of roller coaster of symptoms. And basically in my 30s,
[10:59]realized something was quite seriously wrong when I was driving a colleague home from Princeton where
[11:05]I taught at the time. And I looked at him and I was like, I know I know him, but I don't know who he
[11:09]is. And that was the moment where I then saw treatment and basically got treated. You know, took
[11:16]a long time to find the answers between 2011 and 2014. I was really, really seriously ill and
[11:21]starting to get some answers, but it wasn't until 2013 that I kind of stood a lot of Lyme disease
[11:26]treatment, heart and ill treatment and got much better had two children went through my the death
[11:31]of my father, who got ill. And then in 2019 when my younger son was 10 months old moved to Yale
[11:40]to become a professor of creative writing and run a wonderful prestigious magazine, long prestigious
[11:45]magazine called the Yale Review that had fallen a little bit out of sight out of cultural public
[11:50]because it never made that transition to the digital era. And you know, it was so excited for a new
[11:56]chapter and then six months later the pandemic hit. So, but I will happily say that over the past
[12:01]six years, you know, getting to teach writing at Yale and helping restore this magazine, I think
[12:06]to some of its kind of evidence and relevance has been just an extraordinary project. And we
[12:12]have an amazing student program. And you know, a lot of what I do is work with both writers in the
[12:17]world and students at Yale, hand in hand. And it's been, it's been fantastic. We publish poems and
[12:23]fiction and nonfiction and essays and reviews. And it's been an extraordinary place to be.
[12:29]Yeah. Do you teach undergrads or only grad students? I do both. I mostly teach undergrads actually.
[12:34]I mostly teach undergrads. And, you know, I was saying to a friend, I was like, the thing I love
[12:38]about teaching is it keeps you kind of forever young in a certain way. You know, I think Louise,
[12:42]who's probably just read also was a professor writing at Yale. And, you know, there's just this
[12:47]way in which like they had a word the other day in class where I was like, what does that even mean?
[12:52]You know, and then they've developed a critical vocabulary that they identify ways of describing
[12:57]experience that I just didn't have available to me as a student. So it was called body core. I
[13:03]can't remember what it was. It doesn't say why I'm middle-aged now. But yeah, but you know, I do,
[13:07]I do love it. And the students are so brilliant. And they so love poetry as a place for reflection
[13:15]as a space outside of a kind of productivity-oriented culture. And I think it's a space for making
[13:22]meaning and in a world that feels really, really chaotic to all of us probably right now.
[13:26]Yeah. So when you're having a tough day, do you turn to poetry? Or do you read fiction? Or do you
[13:31]just read for work? Or like, how do you get through a tough time now? Oh, God. That's a good question.
[13:36]I definitely sometimes watch like reassuring escapest TV. So let's, you know, I'm not, I'm not,
[13:42]not a TV person. But the books are my deepest solace, I think, and poems, particularly because
[13:49]they're so short. They're like talismans. I talk about this in my introduction. Like, you can,
[13:53]you can be pulled in 5,000 directions. And you can, but I really wanted this book to be is like,
[13:58]the work is finding the poems. I wanted it to be here. So you could just open the book and be like,
[14:02]there's the poem. It's reassuring me. I had five minutes. Now my entire day has been kind of
[14:07]of rearranged by this like deep encounter. And I just love the ways in which they're like
[14:12]songs or like talismans or like spells that we can go back to over and over. And so I really do
[14:18]turn a lot to poetry. So, you know, I have two young kids. I have a job sometimes. I read a lot of
[14:22]novels, a lot of novels, but that moment of like, I need something to kind of pierce my soul and reset
[14:28]me. It's like the best two things are reading a poem or jumping in a cold body of water.
[14:33]And one takes far less time. What takes far less time? And it's more available. And it doesn't
[14:38]require a hair dryer. Exactly. Exactly. Oh my gosh. Have you thought about how to inspire kids to love
[14:47]poetry? Because I feel like poetry has such a bad reputation. Like, it feels kind of stodgy. Like,
[14:53]you know, hard enough to get kids to read. Like, the idea that I would ask my kids to be like,
[14:57]well, let's read poems tonight. You know, like, how do we read?
[15:00]brand poetry a little bit for this. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one way that I think it
[15:04]is happening is like Instagram posts, you know, just that, that is great. And
[15:08]just to show, like, it doesn't have to be stodgy. It can be here on this
[15:10]media. It's really short. I think it's it's funny. I was thinking about this.
[15:14]I was thinking about how when I was at college, I was obsessed with the
[15:16]poet John Ashbury, who was taught to me by, you know, my very eminent
[15:20]professor was asked this like, brilliant extender of the poetic tradition of
[15:25]Keats and I thought I met him and all he wanted to do was like kind of talk
[15:28]about the movie flirting with disaster. And I was like, wait, you're
[15:34]John Ashbury. You're a person. And I do think bringing the person back to
[15:39]poetry and not making people feel like there's some secret code that you
[15:44]have to crack. Like all you have to do is read it and like have a feel like if
[15:47]you have a feeling reading the poem, great, you don't have to understand it. I
[15:50]don't understand every pop song I listen to, but they can give me a feeling.
[15:54]And so I really think kind of bringing back into life, which is what again, I
[15:58]think the aim of this book is is to show us how poems are kind of tools for
[16:01]living. And they don't have to be stodgy. And they don't have to be understood.
[16:05]They actually primarily need to be felt.
[16:08]They think, Megan, thank you so much. The story of the body is beautiful. The
[16:13]work is so moving. Thank you for taking the time to take the thousand poems.
[16:18]And I don't know how to do that ourselves. I definitely didn't want it to be
[16:23]at home. It's like, no, it's so it's so thin.
[16:26]Yes. Yeah. It's perfect. Thank you so much. And thanks for chatting and
[16:30]hope to read that in person. Thank you so much. And for having me in
[16:34]yes, I hope to connect. And it's great to see you. Thank you for
[16:37]you too. Good luck with your, good luck with your puppy.
[16:41]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone
[16:45]have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[16:50]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[16:55]Oh, and bye the books.