 
Gazette Staff POET Margaret Robison had been to Cape Cod for a weekend. This was early May a year ago. She had taken a whale-watching cruise and had seen whales spouting and dolphins leaping. Watching them was like listening to music.
She remembers saying to her friend: "No matter what happens to me I will always have these beautiful images of Earth's abundance and exuberance." And then she remembers thinking that that sounded just a little melodramatic.
She thinks now she probably knew even then that a storm was brewing on her life's horizon. She says she had probably been "working on it—"the stroke"—for some some time. There had been signs." Sudden goings-numb of her limbs, for instance.
The morning after her return from the Cape, back in her apartment in Shelburne Falls, she lit a cigarette. "I kept dropping it. I was puzzled." She sensed something was wrong. She called a friend.
"I started to talk. All this noise came out, all this awful language. Something was badly wrong." She doesn't know how she managed to form the word "Help."
Now it is a year and some weeks since the crisis, and Margaret Robison has just gotten up from her wheelchair—for a long, suspenseful moment it wasn't certain to those onlooking whether she was going to be able to rise—and she is standing behind a rolling table in the rehabilitation gym at The Cooley Dickinson Hospital, bracing her good right hand on the tabletop.
To an audience of physical and occupational therapists, to whom she has been introduced by hospital speech therapist Barbara Jenkins, Robison is reading a poem, "Stones." It is one of a number of poems she has written since her stroke, and it is a meditation on how the stroke changed her whole being.
No. Not the smooth round pebbles Her pronunciation of each word is effortful. This evident strain gives each word an extra weight and dimension and tension.
These are the stones I gathered at the Cape. The room is silent. Everyone's eyes are full.
Robison now looks up from her text with a triumphant smile.
"And I am standing," she announces.
Robison will read to the therapists seven or eight other poems, most of them
written since her stroke, They vary in tone from meditative, like "Stones," to
exuberant ("Hey, River!" a poem about the day she first stood up without help) and
wryly humorous. "After My Stroke" is a love song from her good right side to her
paralyzed left side, and it swings.
These poems are remarkable for the charged yet spare language Robison uses
to explore the mysteries of stroke and recovery from stroke—mysteries few
survivors have been able to describe even roughly.
As remarkable as are the poems themselves, Jenkins points out, what is truly
amazing is Robison's being able to read them aloud and to read them with a
credible degree of expressiveness. In the year since her stroke, Robison has had to
do nothing less than rebuild her voice from just about nothing.
Her stroke never clouded her thinking, Robison says, but it did leave her
with "damaged speech," a phrase she uses in her first stroke poem, "Apraxia."
Speech apraxia is the medical term for an inability to sequence the multitude of
muscle movements required to create comprehensible sound.
Being mentally lucid in the aftermath of her stroke only intensified her panic at
the prospect of not being understood, says Robison. For a while, she communicated
almost exclusively by scratching notes in a spiral notebook. Her writing did not
come smoothly. Maddening lacunas would appear in her sentences, and she would have
to go back over them and fill in the inexplicable blanks. But "to write helps so
much," she wrote in the notebook. "If I write I don't feel so much panic."
When she first started to speak, the words came slowly and without inflection,
or tone. "I sounded like a computer," or like "a poorly sent telegram," Robison
now recalls.
By the time of her release from Mercy Hospital in Springfield last August, she
was speaking proficiently enough to be able to negotiate "activities of daily living."
Apparently as far as the hospital staff was concerned, socalled ADL proficiency
was good enough, because nobody thought to recommend her for any outpatient
speech therapy, according to Jenkins.
By the time of her release, however, Robison was already making large strides
in many aspects of her recovery. Fortunately, she says,
her reaction was a deep, resistant anger when her neurologist had pronounced her case hopeless and another physician recommended she go to a nursing home. She says it was from an attitude of defiance that she was able to draw energy and motivation. "I would not accept
this sentence on my life," she says.
From this point of resolve, Robison had progressed far enough in the recovery of her balance, in the use of her limbs as well as her voice, that she had begun to
consider the possibility of resuming her career as a teacher and writer. A former painter,
the 55-year-old Robison has been writing since 1971. She has published two books of poetry, "Here" and "The Naked Bear."
She knew she needed to develop her speech well beyond the ADL
plateauwell beyond normal speech, for that matter, as poetry is the art of exceptional
speech. Thus began her sessions with Jenkins.
A certain strife characterized the relationship between the two, both agree. "It was an interesting time for both of us," Jenkins told the therapists, "We had to come to a level of trust."
It was a classic confrontation between the analytic mind and the creative
mind—between scientific and intuitive thinking. Jenkins' aim and focus was, and is, on
"correct" speech, Robison, says Jenkins, was more concerned with the color of her
speech, with her voice "tone," with re-establishing the inflections of her Georgia dialect.
"She thought I'd make her lose that accent," says Jenkins.
"She's got a wonderful, analytic mind—like a detective," says Robison. Phonetic
shorthand spellings of some words—"drencht" for drenched, "kree-a-shun" for
creation—have been penned in between lines in some of Robison's poems to help her
with pronunciation. Accent marks have been sprinkled on words here and there as
reminders to Robison of where to put emphasis. A little pear has been sketched
beside the word "paralyzed." These are small but measurable clues to the eventual
fruitfulness of the collaboration between therapist and poet.
Between Robison's reading of her poems, Jenkins pointed out to the hospital
therapists what a marvel it was to hear Robison pronounce "oriental bamboo" and
"neurologist" and "fluorescent" with such apparent ease. Jenkins wanted her
colleagues to be aware of the struggle that had gone into Robison's utterance of these
words—to be aware of just how devilishly complex the saying of a single word can be
when speaking has ceased to be automatic.
Robison ended her brief reading with a poem she had written several years prior
to her stroke. "Here! in This Room, In This Prison"is an attempt to answer a
question raised by an illiterate woman prisoner during a writing workshop Robison had
led for women inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Lancaster in
the mid-80s. Through the '80s Robison had devoted herself almost exclusively to
leading writing workshops for disadvantaged schoolchildren in Holyoke, the elderly and
other relegated to the margins of society and often rendered thereby voiceless.
"How do you begin again?" the woman prisoner, Zeneida, had asked.
Zeneida had blossomed in the workshop, Robison recalls. Zeneida's writing,"
like that of most of the prisoners in the workshop, took the form of stories and
poems spoken onto recording tape. "Zeneida's Last Tape" is the title of the monologue
she composed during the time she lay dying of AIDS in Shattuck State Hospital in
Jamaica Plain, Boston.
Robison had edited the monologue, and then she and Northampton theater
artist Sheryl Stoodley had incorporated "Zeneida's Last Tape" into a theater piece
entirely based on the women prisoners' writings and called, "Ain't No Man Dragged
That Moon Down Yet." The piece was staged at Smith College two years ago.
"I've thought about Zeneida so often," Robison said before the hospital reading.
"I have to write about the part she has played in my own healing. I keep thinking of
her line, 'I am reaching for my life.' I think of what words mean to her—the story of
her life. I will have to write something about these things. I have to find ways to say
a great deal now."
"We begin here," her poem begins |
- Shattered Words, part 2
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