Straus, Marc J.: Monday






	Monday (Excerpts from commentary and a reading delivered at the NYU School of Medicine, December 4, 2002)

	Marc J. Straus

Commentary	Audio

	"I began to write seriously only eleven years ago. It was for me very interesting because I'd been writing some poetry and certainly writing a lot of science and it was this mid-career thing where it was clear that I always wanted to do this. Then I became interested in the fact that many of our very best doctor-poets in history rarely wrote about medicine, so it was strange for me that people wondered why I did. I always think that what you write best is what you know the best or at least where your imaginative process takes you and for me, although perhaps half of the poems do not deal directly with medicine, there's always been this intersection--the lives that criss-cross in this unconscious process. I was in Miami Beach joining my wife for a very esoteric conference and I was getting bored, so I started writing this poem."


	Audio and text of commentary reproduced with the permission of Marc J. Straus.
Reading	Audio

	Miami Beach: Everyone is eighty-two. Fourteen men walking on the boardwalk look exactly like my father. It is inauguration day in Washington, Martin Luther King Day, and back in New York the temperature's twenty-two. The last time I was here I spent three days in the ICU, my father on a cardiac monitor, IVs supporting his pressure. I am attending a conference on memory. An anthropologist speaks about anti- aesthetics in the museum world. A curator talks about the controversy surrounding the installation of the cattle car in the Holocaust Museum, how a survivor on the board refused to step into the building if she was required to walk through. I am thinking about Mr. Vallone. The pain in his hip has increased again and the PSA levels are higher. I am thinking about my father returning three months later jaundiced, about his sister who said I was criminal to treat him, about the day he had gram-negative sepsis, the walk we took in Belle Harbor after he responded. A man going by has the same mustache. My father asked me to grow a beard. I kept it six years after he died, and then it was gray, and my son married. I'm trying to think of a treatment for Mr. Vallone.
	Text from Symmetry. (Evanston: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press) 2000 . Copyright © 2000 by Marc J. Straus. All rights reserved. Permission for electronic use of audio and text granted by Marc J. Straus and Northwestern University Press.