Understatement in Poetry (Quieter Than an MRI)

Understatement, or “showing without telling,” makes writing in prose and especially in poetry pleasing to read. Medical training, in contrast, is rife with exhaustive explanation. “Open MRI” demonstrates the effect of understatement. The poem brims with implied yet revealing comparisons: the massive, coldly im personal MRI scanner that swallows the speaker’s mother and the small, oddly intimate denture case kept warm in the hands of the daughter; the eerily soothing, mentally replayed Bowie song lyrics vs the overtly loud magnetic clanging of the machine; the precise processing of details of the mother’ s internal anatomy and the wide-angle zooming out of the daughter’s unexpected out-of-body experience. These accumulate to a complex set of feelings we can imagine that describe not only the mother-daughter relationship, but also how medical tests of the physical body may also fathom the soul. Her e, what is shown but not told is the enduring connection between a mother who, even as she confronts the uncertainty of what her scan may diagnose, puts on a show of bravado to protect her daughter; and simultaneously a daughter whose dissociated, hovering presence joins them in watching over the sc ene, either as inquisitive alien or guardian angel. The poem, ultimately, expresses gorgeously what cannot so easily be explicated, undimmed even as the room’s floodlights are, as if to allow for this passing moment of worry, and of ineffable, deeply shared love.
Source: JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research