Juliet Cook on Her Poems
My poem, "Severed Into Unspeakable Compliance," was partly inspired by watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, reading/thinking about that movie and related elements, and reading/thinking about treatment in past mental institutions, especially lobotomies.
I read about Walter Jackson Freeman II, a physician neurologist psychosurgeon who popularized lobotomies. It felt like a horror movie to me, but it was a reality.
I incorporated a few words/lines/thoughts in the poem from some of my research and some ideas/quotes of Freeman's, part of which is noted/quoted below.
While never widely accepted by the medical community, the lobotomy was popular in mental institutions, and it’s easy to understand why: It makes people compliant. In his 1950 book Psychosurgery, Freeman illustrated this with a description of Oretha, an institutionalized patient who required five attendees to hold her down for her pre-lobotomy anesthesia. Afterwards, “We could playfully grab Oretha by the throat, twist her arm, tickle her in the ribs and slap her behind without eliciting anything more than a wide grin or a hoarse chuckle,” Freeman wrote.
Then not long after completing my "Severed Into Unspeakable Compliance" poem, my "I Don't Like Primary Colors" poem began to emerge, as a more personal variation on the matter of brain damage and related factors.
Then the two poems after that ("Intervention" and "Both Similar and Dissimilar") were partly derived from bad dreams fused with disturbing elements of real life damage.