Foreword

Richard M. Berlin, American psychiatrist and poet, was born in 1950 and grew
up in the provincial town of Teaneck, New Jersey. He graduated from the
Medical School of Northwestern University, in the Chicago area. He is a senior
affiliate in Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He
lives and practices Psychiatry in the small town of Lenox, in the Berkshire Hills
of western Massachusetts.

He has published two collections of poetry and a third one is forthcoming. In

2002, his first collection of poetry, How JFK Killed My Father, won the Pearl
Poetry Prize, awarded by the literary magazine Pearl, which was published in
Long Beach, California, from 1974 until 2014. The collection was published in
2004 by Pearl Editions. His second collection of poetry, Secret Wounds, was
awarded the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry from the BkMk publishing house of
the University of Missouri – Kansas City in 2011, and in that same year it was
published by the same publishing house. It was also named the best collection
of poetry in the USA for 2011, by the USA Book News Award organization. His
third collection of poetry, Clinical Practice, is forthcoming from the Brick Road
Poetry Press.

Berlin’s poetry has appeared widely in anthologies and such scientific journals
as JAMA and The Lancet, and in literary journals such as Nimrod. His column
“Poetry of the Times” has appeared for more than ten years in the monthly
“Psychiatric Times” journal, published in print and online. He has published
more than sixty scientific papers on the doctor-patient relationship, sleep
disorders, and the psychiatric care of the medically ill. He has edited Sleep
Disorders in Psychiatric Practice and Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness,
Treatment, and the Creative Process. His website is www.richardmberlin.com.

The influence of the great American pediatrician and poet William Carlos
Williams (1883-1963) is evident in Berlin’s poetry. The poet, novelist, essayist,
playwright, translator and doctor William Carlos Williams was born in
Rutherford, New Jersey where he lived for the greatest part of his life as a
practicing pediatrician; he was Chief of Staff of the pediatrics clinic of a county
hospital for forty years.

Berlin himself, in a personal communication, writes: “William Carlos Williams

was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. He tried to
write in an “American” voice (compared to T. S. Eliot). His medical practice
was a few towns over from where I grew up, and my father died in the
hospital where Williams had been Chief of Staff. Even though Williams was a
doctor, he wrote very few poems about medical practice. His influence on me
has been the idea that “a doctor can write poetry”. His work is easy to find on
the web. “Spring and All”, “This is Just to Say” (which he may have written on
a prescription pad), and the crazy little poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” are
three of his best-known poems. “The Red Wheelbarrow” expresses his dictum:
no ideas but in things, which I usually take to mean: let the specific, concrete
details express what you might want to say instead of using abstract words.”
Berlin also refers to the influence on his poetry of two other poets, the
cardiologist-poet John Stone (1936-2008) and the renowned American poet
Stephen Dunn. Berlin writes that Dunn’s poem “Tenderness” is one of his
favorites and considers this line masterful:

The abstract is just abstract

until it has an ache in it.

Berlin was the keynote speaker at a meeting with Stephen Dunn, and in the last
poem in Berlin’s fist collection, entitled “What I Love”, under the headline is
the phrase “– after Stephen Dunn”.

Our paths with psychiatrist-poet Richard M. Berlin crossed a few years ago,
when I was reading the journal “Psychiatric Times” and discovered a poem
that thrilled me, entitled “Anatomy Lab” 1, by a psychiatrist named Richard M.
Berlin. I was also impressed by the fact that a psychiatric journal maintained a
monthly poetry column. I was astounded by the poem’s subject because I
myself, as a second-year medical student, had made a short film in the Human
Anatomy Lab, the antechamber of initiation into Medicine for the uninitiated. I

1
It was published in ENEKEN, issue 32, June 2014.
felt it was fateful that two second-year medical students from two such distant
continents had dealt with the same harsh subject with such out-of-place
sensitivity, through two different art forms that each one of them expressed
himself in. This was the trigger that led me to contact the American poet, and
from that contact was born the insert you now hold in your hands. I especially
wish to thank my friend Giorgos Giannopoulos, the editor of ENEKEN, for his
full support in the publication of this insert.

What is most charming in Berlin’s poetry is the mix of frightening hospital

events, almost always involving death, either by heart attack or due to cancer
or some other grave medical condition, and the poetic tenderness with which
he describes these. Berlin possesses the divine grace to be able to merge his two
natures into one. I liken him to a sensitive seller of skulls, who wraps his
craniums in a wrapper made of blue skies, shinning stars and fragrant flower
scents.

He is a worthy descendant of the great school of modernist American poetry

and its patriarch, William Carlos Williams. But Berlin differs from his fellow
artists, even from the doctor-poets, because the vast majority of his poems are
devoted, with a persistence that resembles compulsion, to the subject of the
medical practice, even when it involves his father’s death from cancer, or his
doctor wife’s problems with conceiving. The same is true of his Psychiatry
practice, where he doesn’t just describe his patients, but also himself being
analyzed by a colleague.

The development of these recurring themes in his poetry was decisively

influenced by his experience during the mandatory hospital training he had to
complete before becoming a resident in Psychiatry, the internship (a training
that has no equivalent in Greece). His experiences in the Emergency Room,
Surgery, the Oncology Clinic, General Pathology, the CPR Unit, and finally in
Psychiatry, combined with his penetrating gaze and his artistic nature to mark
his subsequent course in poetry.

In this insert, with the poet’s permission, we have translated 23 of the 52

poems from his first collection of poetry, and one from his forthcoming third
collection. His first collection, How JFK Killed My Father, includes five
sections; each section takes its name from the title of one of the poems in it,
never the first one. The sections are the following: 1. Learning the Shapes (7
poems, we translated 4); 2. Role Models (8 poems, we translated 4); 3. Code
Blue (12 poems, we translated 8); 4. What a Psychiatrist Remembers (14
poems, we translated 3); and 5. What I Love (11 poems, we translated 4). We
also translated the poem “Playing God in the Hospital” from Berlin’s
forthcoming third collection of poetry, so in total there are 24 translated
poems. The poems from the first three sections and the forthcoming collection
were translated collaboratively by Angelos Grollios and Miltos Arvanitakis;
two poems from the third section, “Spring Planting” and “The Most Common
Time”, were translated by Angelos Grollios, while the poems in the last two
sections were translated by Miltos Arvanitakis.

We felt it was necessary to translate selected poems from all five sections,
because only by reading all five sections one can see the unfolding of Berlin’s
evolution over time and in quality, both in medicine and in poetry.

In the first poem of the collection and of the first section, “Anatomy Lab”, the
second-year medical student Berlin dissects with poetic sensitivity the corpse of
a young blond beauty; in the last poem of the final section and of the
collection, “What I Love”, which is also the longest, Berlin, now an
accomplished psychiatrist, reminisces about the decades he has spent in training
and in practice and dissects why he fell in love with medicine.

The final lines of the poem recall the key scenes from the greatest film of all
time, “Citizen Cain” by Orson Welles.

And I love to take of my white coat, the stethoscope,

forget the big words and listening’s weight,
all the sounds and smells and tests
of this life I have chosen,
and remember the white and bloodless world I knew
before I fell in love.
Welles’ film opens with the scene of Cain’s death. Cain dies holding in his hand
a glass snowflake ball, and as he whispers his final word, “rosebud”, the glass
ball falls from his hand and shatters. Rosebud is the name, and the image,
carved on his wooden childhood sled. This scene includes a close-up shot of
the snowstorm inside the glass ball. White snow dominates not just inside the
glass ball, but also in the white landscape of the sole scene from Cain’s
childhood that appears in the film. When young Cain is forcibly removed from
his parents forever, the landscape of the yard is white with snow.

White snow also dominated the world where Berlin lived before he fell in love
with medicine. It was the white snow forever left behind by young Cain at the
moment when he was violently forced into the adult world; it was the white
snow forever left behind by young Berlin when he was initiated through love
into medicine’s world of blood.

Finally, another film scene is recalled by the shortest and final poem in this
insert, from the forthcoming collection of poetry, Clinical Practice, entitled
“Playing God in the Hospital”. Here the poet presents us with a short
masterpiece and succeeds in walking side by side with his deceased patriarch,
Williams. With just 15 lines of austere, sharp words, that carry in them the
strength to transform images into ideas, a short film scene with seven frames is
created.

A fly buzzes
black complaints
at the glass.

Drawn by sunlight
reflected off snow,
it is trapped

without design
to know another way.
My pager calls

code blue.
And for no reason
 at all

I lift the window

and blow a little life
back into the world.

And here is the film scene with seven frames:

1. A snowy landscape in the yard of a hospital (exterior, extreme long shot).

2. The sun shines and the heat is reflected off the snow onto the hospital’s glass
windows (exterior, long shot).

3. A fly, guided by the warmth, enters through a half-open window into an

office and gets trapped on the inside of the glass (interior, medium long shot).

4. Because it does not possess the intelligence to find a way out, it buzzes on
the window pane and its end is near (interior, close-up).

5. A doctor sits at his desk and is alone with the fly (interior, medium long
shot).

6. The absolute silence is broken by the sound of the pager in his coat pocket,
urgently calling him to an incident requiring cardiopulmonary resuscitation
(interior, close-up).

7. The doctor, before rushing off to the incident, rises from his desk,
approaches the window, and for no reason blows the fly out the half-open
window to the outside world (interior, medium long shot).

In the 174 letters of the 44 short words of this 15-line poem, “Playing God in
the Hospital”, life and death are condensed, without images of doctors,
patients, hospital wards, surgeries, cardiopulmonary resuscitations, blood and
chemotherapies. Just a doctor’s sterilized office, a tiny black fly, a half-open
window and a pager; just these few images are enough for us to feel the idea
of the succession from life to death in just a moment, and the randomness of
existence.

The doctor plays God and, and by blowing life like the Biblical God, saves the
fly, but randomly, without possessing any divine plan, in the random way that
life itself was created. At the sound of his pager he becomes a doctor again and
rushes off to save a patient, but not being sure he can save him, while with the
fly he was as certain as God.

It could be said that the previous 23 poems are distilled into this final 24th, and
it would be enough to just read this one. But one must read all of the previous
poems and arrive at the last one, because that is the only way one can live his
entire life in the few seconds left before he dies.

Miltos Arvanitakis