Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/49290

Marilyn Hacker's 1994 collection Winter Numbers attempts to come to terms with cancer, including the death of friends from the disease, and Hacker's own mastectomy and chemotherapy. Cancer is problematic for poetry, and for elegy in particular, for a number of conceptual, ethical and mimetic reasons. As it seeks to make progress away from the disease through the patterning of rhyme and meter, metaphor, and the assertion of fertility, cancer poetry finds itself replicating the creatively destructive qualities of the disease. The poetry's capabilities are further limited by the need to maintain ethical integrity in its figures, in order not to exploit cancer's metaphorical potential. Winter Numbers is rigorous in its concern over poetic process. Its keystone, the "Cancer Winter" sequence of sonnets, attempts to establish a body of ethics, to identify precisely what is permissible and possible in representing cancer and cancer deaths. This essay addresses the ethical and mimetic binds which restrict the representation of recovery; it assesses whether it is possible to document the experience of cancer faithfully and ethically at the same time, as the poems mediate between the physical and metaphysical worlds, and between the poet's self-protective impulse and society; finally, the essay seeks to account for the intensity of the poet's ethical commitment.