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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Magic Section

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, The Magic Section. Irène Mathieu recently came out with her third poetry collection, titled milk tongue. And she wrote this collection, like, her others, next to her busy day job. She’s a pediatrician. She’s also a researcher and a teacher. And even in med school, when most people would have used any window not spent studying to get some sleep, Irène Mathieu stuck with it, not out of a sense of duty, but out of need: poetry was what kept her sane.

Today, she helps others stay sane, too. She teaches poetry to med students at the University of Virginia, and she researches the mental health of teenagers. For this research, said teenagers actively participate in the work: her lab pays high schoolers to help her team decide what questions to ask, what they want to know, based on what they’re seeing in their own lives and in the lives of their friends.

Helena de Groot: And when you interact with these young people, do you see yourself as a young person? Like, are there things that you, like, flashbacks almost, you know, that you recognize how you used to be?

Irène Mathieu:  Yes and no. I mean, I think right now this is such a particular moment in time. Working with high schoolers who have lived through a couple of years of a pandemic and that disruption in their education, their social lives. And then also just kind of the context of technology today. I mean, when I was a kid, we didn’t have a television in my home. I think we got our first computer when I was in high school, and that was the big screen novelty. But these are kids who are on their phones all day, every day in school. And so, that’s just a totally different social context I think it’s really hard for me to wrap my mind around. At the same time, kids are kids, and I think adolescents are kind of—there’s a constancy across time that, yes, I do recognize and remember being that young person who’s kind of overwhelmed by the possibilities, and, you know, I just want to get out there and do something and get into the world and figure out what is out there for me. And I can absolutely relate to that as well.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wanted to actually go back a little bit to your childhood. You mentioned growing up without a TV. Was that a conscious choice on the part of your parents? You know, for like, this is how we want to raise our kids? Or was just TV was just not a part of what they thought was interesting for them, you know?

Irène Mathieu: Yes. Both. It was a conscious choice for sure. And it was one that I was sort of of two minds as a child. I can remember on the one hand being somewhat resentful, because I was cut off from pop culture, which was this really important way to connect with my peers. And I already felt socially isolated for a lot of reasons. Being a Black Creole girl in small town Virginia, it was just, there wasn’t a lot of ways that I felt I could fit in. But then, at the same time, I distinctly remember still holding in my mind a kind of gratitude, because not having a television sort of gave me the freedom to be as obsessed with and immersed in books as I really wanted to be. And I truly loved reading. And I felt like, well, I kind of have an excuse to not know these TV shows they’re talking about that’s socially acceptable because I can’t control whether or not my parents have a TV. And so, yes, I am probably a nerd to my friends, but also, I don’t have a choice about not having a TV, so I’m just kind of forced to read a lot. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

Irène Mathieu: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, I grew up without a TV also. And, you know, similarly, I just had to read a lot and look where I ended up, you know?

Irène Mathieu: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: So I think, yeah, you and I both. You also said somewhere that you started dictating journal entries to your mother when you were two years old.

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Can you please tell me that story? Like, what, you know, do you still have those journal entries? Like, what do you know about that?

Irène Mathieu: Yeah. So, when I was a toddler, my mom took some time away from working outside the home for about six years. And that started probably when I was around two. And I was in daycare for a little bit. And then she took me out of daycare and essentially did an at-home preschool. And it’s really funny, because she sort of created this alter ego. She called herself Miss Flower, and she would teach me in this persona of Miss Flower. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: And it would be Miss Flower’s school. So from a pretty early age, I remember sitting with Miss Flower. We’re doing finger painting today, we’re reading books. (LAUGHING) And so I’m pretty sure it was in that context that I decided, Well, I want to write some things down. And I couldn’t write yet, because I was really little. And we had these composition notebooks at Miss Flower’s School. And I remember just telling my mom, you know, “Can you write this down for me?” And I don’t know who suggested it. It might very well be true that she asked, “Do you want me to write this down? “Or she started actually writing down what I was telling her. But somehow that started. And so there are these journal entries in her handwriting that say things like, “Today we visited Grandma and Grandpa. Then we made cookies. I like doggies,” (LAUGHING) you know. So I do still have them. They’re at my parents’ house in my old room.

Helena de Groot: Oh, my God. That is so precious. Did you ever ask your mom how the Miss Flowers persona came about? How did she decide to do that?

Irène Mathieu: You know, I’m not sure. My mom is a very creative person, and I remember her coming up with a lot of stuff like that when I was a child. And she’s also very pragmatic at the same time and has this kind of DIY approach to life. I remember her constructing a lot of things for us by hand. So I remember we wanted a doll house once and, you know, most parents would probably go to the store and find a doll house and buy it for their child. But my mom decided, “Oh, I must learn woodworking” (LAUGHING)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING)

Irène Mathieu: and created this really massive, amazing wooden dollhouse and furniture and little curtains. And she has zero background or experience in this. And it’s, you know, it’s a bit rudimentary, but it’s really impressive for somebody who knew nothing about this kind of craft. And so, you know, she made us a doll house. So she was just, she’s just this very, like, creative person who I think had that approach to mothering young children, maybe because she was one of the older of a large family. She was kind of doing that for her siblings, too, I imagine. But I, I don’t know how she actually came up with the name Miss Flower. I’ll have to ask her that.

Helena de Groot: And besides, just say, like making it into like, this is the school and I am Miss Flower, and you know, did she wear something different? Like was there anything else associated with sort of the personality change?

Irène Mathieu: No, I don’t remember her wearing anything different or really anything beyond that. I mean, I guess it was probably her way of putting on a different hat that was not Mom anymore, in a sense, so she could be more of a teacher. I don’t know if it worked. I’ll have to ask her if it actually changed our interactions in any way.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: But I think it was also the novelty and it kind of made it fun. It’s not just Mom sitting down and doing painting with me. It’s Miss Flower, we’re at Miss Flower’s school. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Absolutely. No, no, no, I get it. You know, that you’re like a little bit more, like, reined in, you know? Like, look, I know you can get away with that with Mom, but not with Miss Flower.

Irène Mathieu: Right.

Helena de Groot: And your parents are both physicians, right?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Helena de Groot: Had your mom already graduated med school? Had she done a residency? Do you know when she had you?

Irène Mathieu: Yes, she had me in med school, actually. So she was—she had just finished her second year of med school. And she finished med school and then took a kind of gap between med school and residency. So she was home for six years and then had my sister and my brother and was home with us for six years before she went back and did her residency.

Helena de Groot: And what kind of physicians are/were your parents? Are they still working?

Irène Mathieu: They’re both retired now. She is a, she was a pathologist, and my father was a dermatologist.

Helena de Groot: Oh, okay. And did they talk about their jobs a lot at home?

Irène Mathieu: They did talk about their jobs a lot. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: A lot. There was a lot of medical talk around the dinner table. I wasn’t really interested in it. And I particularly was not interested in their specialties once I got older, and old enough to kind of go to work with them and see what they did. I just had no—I think I was kind of interested in the idea of seeing patients and getting to know people’s stories. But I wasn’t really interested in dermatology as a field or pathology, which, as you may know, is not seeing patients at all. You’re seeing specimens, which are biopsies or pieces of patients that doctors might take to figure out what’s going on with someone. And then my mom would be the one to look under a microscope and say, “Is this a cancer? Is this something else?” That kind of thing.

Helena de Groot: Interesting. So what about, you know, because you said, like, it seemed interesting to me to sort of interact with people and to hear their stories, but, you know, the medicine part, not so much. Did it gross you out? Did it just seem too clinical? Like, what was it about it that didn’t speak to you?

Irène Mathieu: I definitely am not really—I had a hard time with surgery rotations. So I wouldn’t say that I had a fear of blood, but I just, there was a part of it that did kind of create this visceral reaction to me with those more invasive kind of specialties. And in dermatology, you do do surgery on people’s skin. And as a pathologist, you are seeing these very visceral parts of people’s bodies. And that was not interesting to me. And I think I didn’t have a sense as a child of all of the possibilities within medicine, and where I could fit in with my personality and the things that I was able to sort of handle or deal with or wasn’t able to handle.

Helena de Groot: This is so interesting to me, because you’re talking about, you know, what you can and cannot deal with. And then you went into pediatrics, which to me, the uninitiated, sounds like the worst possible thing you can do, because you’re, like, dealing with little kids that are ill.

Irène Mathieu: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: How did that come about?

Irène Mathieu: Well, I should say that I am a primary care pediatrician. So, thankfully, the majority of the patients that I see are not very ill. Primary care pediatrics is a lot of preventive care. It’s a lot of checkups, a lot of school sports physicals. And when children are ill, for the vast majority of the time, it’s a common childhood illness where the child will be fine. And it’s, I think it’s very difficult as a parent to see your child with a fever or to see your child vomiting or uncomfortable in some way. But as a clinician, I can feel very reassured looking at a child and saying, “Even though they’re uncomfortable now, they’re going to be 100% fine in a week and they are not going to have any long term complications as a result of this illness. And this is completely within the normal spectrum of childhood diseases.” So I think there is a clinical distance that you learn or kind of a hierarchy of alarm that you learn, because in residency you do see it all. You see, you do cancer rotations. You do rotations in the ICU, in the emergency room. And I still have cases that, you know, I get goose bumps when I think about them. And I also learned during those rotations, this is not something that I’m emotionally capable of doing. And there are people who are really good and can compartmentalize and kind of turn on that intellectual side of their brain when something really tragic or difficult is happening. And I know myself, and that I’m not a person who can comfortably do that. And I frankly didn’t really want to push or force myself to do that, because I really love primary care. And I, I love that preventive aspect where kids are either completely well or not very sick.

Helena de Groot: Totally. And what is something that still gives you goose bumps when you think about it?

Irène Mathieu: You know, I don’t want to talk about specific cases because of patient confidentiality, but I just remember a few cases where patients died.

Helena de Groot: Kids?

Irène Mathieu: Kids, and in some cases where I was in the room. And those stories will never leave you. And I just realized—I think I knew this before, but it confirmed for me in residency, I am not the kind of person who can do the intellectual work and the healing work in this situation, because this is way too emotional for me.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. And was that a, I mean, it’s also silly to say it like that, but was that a learning curve for you? You know, like, did you ever demand of yourself that you do that, that you are capable of that? And then did you have to sort of bump your head into a wall and be like, oh, actually—like was there some kind of crisis in involved in that learning?

Irène Mathieu: No, I don’t think so. I mean, the other reason I think I was never interested in medicine as a kid is that as I said before, I really love people’s stories. And I had this idea in my head that medicine and literature and storytelling are sort of dichotomous and separate and that they can never, you know, intersect or interact, which is completely false. But I had this idea in my mind, so I had sort of identified myself as a humanities story person and not a science medicine person. But, you know, I started, as I learned more about primary care and actually had more experiences in college around public health and seeing more physicians in action, I started to realize that in outpatient settings where somebody is not so sick that they can’t have a conversation with you, you do get those stories. You do have those opportunities to create meaning with people and to create a shared narrative and to work, like, literally work with the stories in a therapeutic way. I think that’s what you do especially in a lot of mental health cases, but in general. And I think I always knew that that was going to be where I landed because I went into medical school with a very strong interest in primary care. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the science and the medicine of things like the ICU. But I also was not surprised that I could not handle the pain of the ICU. And I was very grateful that I had colleagues who could run headfirst into the situations and not retreat and curl up into themselves like I did. So I wasn’t, I wasn’t too surprised by that. I just, I knew that that was going to be my path.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And again, for the uninitiated, what is something that is different for kids than for adults?

Irène Mathieu: I think one thing is parents or guardians. There’s the, kids always come with adults. There are always other people with kids, right? And so, I think one of the things that’s tough about adult medicine is that sometimes there are patients who have no one. No one is around them. They have no family or maybe no one lives near them. And it’s tough when you have to figure out, who can I partner with to help this person get better once they leave the hospital or leave my clinic? Who’s going to help take care of them? With kids, you never have to wonder that. Now, whether or not the parents or guardians or grandparents always agree with you or whether you can come to an understanding with them all the time, of course, varies a lot. But at least with kids, there’s always somebody that’s taking care of them. Or attempting to take care of them in some way. And I think that that can be both a challenge and a really wonderful thing, but it’s something that’s very different from caring for adults.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I think is so gorgeous in your poetry collection, milk tongue, is the way you write about the body. I mean, unsurprisingly, maybe as a doctor. But I was just thinking about that because, you know, like you’ll, you’ll read that the way that little, little kids experience the world is basically as if they’re tripping. That like every smell, every sight, every sound comes in at like a hundred. And they’re hyper aware of their bodies and how they feel, you know, the energy of the people around them. And I can imagine the last place where you want to be when you’re tripping is a hospital,

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHS) Probably.

Helena de Groot: with, like, beeping monitors and people poking and prodding you and putting a needle in your arm, and, you know, so how do you make kids feel at ease in their little bodies, you know?

Irène Mathieu: That’s a great question. I think you have to—something we say in medicine a lot is “meet people where they are.” And with kids and probably adults, too, I think it means finding out what matters to them and what moves them and what their values are and what they’re passionate about. I think that’s relatively easy to do with young children, probably easier than adults, because you can say things like, “What’s your favorite animal?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Irène Mathieu: You know, “Which sticker do you want? Tell me about the last book you read.” And kind of find a way in to connect with them. And I think that connection is the first step in making somebody feel comfortable. And that’s what people want and need to feel when they’re in a hospital or clinic setting, which can definitely be very foreign and uncomfortable and overly clinical. And I can remember situations where I, I actually have leaned on that really strongly to the extent of using a child’s interest to be part of their therapeutic plan and saying, “Okay, you love trains. We’re going to bring you train pictures in the morning when we come to your room because you’re scared to see us. And I totally get that. So how can we make this a little bit more friendly and comfortable?” And I think that pediatric spaces are a little bit more designed to foster that. And, you know, in the hospital, in large hospitals, we often have a whole department called Child Life, which is, there are specialists who are, have gone through training to basically make kids feel comfortable and help explain what’s going on with their bodies and what’s going to happen to them in age-appropriate terms. And they will come to a child’s bedside before a surgery, for example, and use puppets or dolls and talk them through what’s going to happen, and really partner with them and their families to make the experience less scary. So I do think in pediatrics, we have a lot of resources at our disposal to help with that.

Helena de Groot: Wow. Why do they not do that with adults? We all need that!

Irène Mathieu: Right, Adult Life, yeah. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Exactly! (LAUGHS) Ask me about my passions. Ask me about my pet, you know?

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Just, explain it to me with puppets, please, don’t make it so scary.

Irène Mathieu: Yeah.

Helena de Groot: I’m just going to quickly look something up, because I want to ask you a question, but I forgot her name. There’s this lady who is a neuroscientist. Was she a neuroscientist? Who had a stroke? Jill Bolte Taylor. Do you know her?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-mn.

Helena de Groot: Well, she was a neuroscientist. And then all of a sudden she was at home and she was, I don’t know, going through her morning routine and whatever. And she noticed that she had all the symptoms of a stroke. And so she was actively stroking, but she was also still a doctor, so she kind of knew what was going on. And I think what happened was that her left hemisphere flooded with blood, basically, so that it kind of went off board, you know, and she could only use her right anymore. So she didn’t have any sense of self. Like she didn’t know her name anymore, she didn’t have language anymore. Like she couldn’t express how she felt or, you know, what was going on. And she was, like, extremely susceptible to her sensory world. Right? Like to the world of like, yeah, sights and smells and sounds. And one thing she describes, energy. Like the energy of the people around her.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And so she didn’t—she wasn’t able to express herself with language, and she wasn’t able to understand language. So whoever, a doctor or nurse or whatever came into her room, she couldn’t communicate with them that way. But she describes in her memoir how acutely aware she was of the energy that they would bring into the room. And there were certain people, nurses, doctors that she really did not like, because they would just kind of treat her like an object because she couldn’t talk. And then there were people who she had no idea what they were saying, but there was something about how present they were with her that made her feel safe, you know.

Irène Mathieu: Mm.

Helena de Groot: And I’m just wondering, you know, what you’re talking about now with like, “What’s your favorite animal?” and, you know, we—that is still kids who have access to language. But like, how do you make sure that like, a kid who has not yet gotten access to language, how do you communicate with them in a more sort of energetic way? Or like what are some of the ways that you try and do that?

Irène Mathieu: Well, I think babies are a great example. And you learn as a pediatrician how to interact appropriately with a baby who cannot tell you and give you verbal feedback. And a lot of it is just body language, reading their cues. And I still talk to babies. I tell them what I’m going to do. I say, “Okay, I’m going to check your diaper,” or whatever. You know?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Irène Mathieu: I, I speak to the babies because they’re humans, right? Even though they can’t talk back, I tell them who I am, I ask them if they’re okay, you know. I’m like, “Oh, I know it’s cold. I’m so sorry,” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Irène Mathieu: because I agree with you, I think people can understand the energy that you bring to the communication, regardless of whether or not they can understand the language or speak it back. And so—and this is something that I’ve learned a lot as a parent of a young child, too, even more acutely and more intimately, but I think there is something to that and that it’s really important to still communicate. Even if you’re speaking and the person can’t speak back, that energy, your intention behind your words is still also communicated. And just things like touch, right, like how roughly or how softly or gently are you going to push on somebody’s belly or pick them up, and use kind of these soft hands and loving hands. Even if another touch could be just as safe for their body, what is the touch that’s going to communicate a sense of security and a sense of that kind of good energy? Or that I’m going—I care about you.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Do you want to get to a poem?

Irène Mathieu: Sure, I’d love to.

Helena de Groot: I was thinking we might start with the one titled “self-portrait as a baby” on page 20.

Irène Mathieu: Okay.

Helena de Groot: And before we start, if there’s anything you want to say about this poem, please.

Irène Mathieu: Sure. Well, I will say this poem is an ekphrastic poem. I was actually invited to contribute to an anthology that a retired physician was creating. And the anthology was going to be poems based on the illustrations of Andreas Vesalius, who was a medical illustrator from maybe the 1500s? A long, long time ago. But he made these beautiful medical illustrations, and he asked all of us who agreed to do this to pick one of the illustrations and then write a poem based on it. So this is after the illustration “Portal Veins” by Andreas Vesalius.

Helena de Groot: And Vesalius, like, he made these illustrations based on his studies of cadavers, right?

Irène Mathieu: Yes. Yes.

Helena de Groot: And that was a new thing at the time?

Irène Mathieu: It was. And so there were really no other folks that I know of around the time period who had such in-depth illustrations of the internal parts of the body, the way that he created.

(READS POEM)

self-portrait as a baby

if lifted from the body

the belly’s veins resemble

mangroves: equatorial thicket of spleen,

wrought biliary root like sappy filigree —

half water or blood,

half pillow-shaped sponge.

if I press my finger to a baby’s

pulse while she writhes and

pitches toward mother

I am testing her like a compass,

and all the iron in her body

floods northward.

if eighteen years later

she is found maneuvering

backwater tributaries

without a paddle, call her

brackish wanderer,

call her lost in blood.

if her age quintuples

but her liver keeps its

smooth sheen, say

she has a lucky swamp inside.

what do you carry?

what do you carry?

my hands ask the baby’s skin.

every vein ferrying something, every

child hurrying through the swamp

with what will kill her

tucked under her stomach.

arms wrapped around my own trunk

I cannot see through water this murky.

look anyway, I tell her. the baby

holds a mirror to my face.

the silt thins

at the bottom something gleams.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. It’s so beautiful, the way you describe the body as a landscape. You know, “the belly’s veins resemble / mangroves: equatorial thicket of spleen, / wrought biliary root like sappy filigree.” Yeah, it’s so evocative. And you know, this image of the body as a landscape, I think also, in our current moment, you know, it makes you think of all the damage that we do as humans to the natural world. And then how that damage shows up inside of our bodies.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I was just wondering, like, you know, how did you first start noticing how that shows up in our bodies?

Irène Mathieu: Thank you. I think that I first noticed it probably at a visceral level in myself as a psychological experience. And I say that because I—my first book was called orogeny. And orogeny is the geological term for the formation of mountains, when two continents come together and create mountains. And in that book, I have a character called Pangea, who’s sort of a persona of the first continent, and she is this omniscient narrator who’s watching the things humans have done to the earth and to each other and commenting on it. And I think it was probably after that book, I got invited to speak at a college by a friend, another poet, and she created these posters for the talk and she wrote, “Eco poet Irène Mathieu.” And I remember thinking, “I’m an eco poet, what?” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah! (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: And I started thinking about it, and I realized, you know, for, ever since I can remember, writing has been a way for me, first and foremost, to process my own emotions and kind of try to verbalize things that feel impossible to articulate. And I realized what I’m articulating is this deep sense of grief and this unsettled kind of anxiety that I’m experiencing as a result of what I saw as this rupture, this fracture in relationship, not just the relationship of humans to non-humans, but also humans to one another. And I think that’s a kind of, you know, spiritual ecological sickness. And so I think I probably first noticed that as a psychological phenomenon in myself. And when I was doing my master’s in public health, I started to take classes on climate change and toxicology. And so, I think that I have become much more aware on an intellectual level in recent years. But then also, I’m sorry, this is a bit all over the place, but as I’m thinking about it,

Helena de Groot: No, no, no, that’s great!

Irène Mathieu: you know, when I was a kid I remember my parents were very into organic food and the kind of clean eating way before it was really a thing in the popular imagination. And I remember asking them why and why we couldn’t have the processed foods that my friends were eating, you know, in the ’90s. And they would give me all the scientific talk about how certain ingredients would do X, Y, Z and these chemicals, and so as a kid, I think I had a sense of kind of the impact of ecological devastation on the human body because I knew, “I’m not supposed to eat that thing because Mommy and Daddy said it’s going to hurt me.” So I grew up with this, this kind of learned fear or anxiety about what humans were doing to the earth and to our food system and how that could negatively impact our health. So I guess it was like a multi-phased awareness that I developed. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I mean, we had the same parents: no TV,

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: we also grew up eating—we were raised vegetarian, actually,

Irène Mathieu: Amazing.

Helena de Groot: and everything was, you know, they didn’t call it organic then, but it was, yeah.

Irène Mathieu: I understand.

Helena de Groot: Very considered. Yes. And it definitely did not endear me to my peers, so. (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: Right. Same, I was so obnoxious. I just, I cringe thinking back on the things I must have said. (LAUGHING) People come in with Halloween candy and I’m like, “That has partially hydrogenated oil, I can’t eat it.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: So obnoxious! (LAUGHING)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHING) Oh, my God, that’s amazing. That’s beautiful. And then when did that knowledge that started within yourself, when did you start seeing that in the bodies of your patients?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm. I mean, I think this is not going to be a surprise to anyone, but the mosquito and tick seasons are much longer. I’m seeing mosquito bites and tick bites outside of what I would have considered a normal season when I was a kid. And so, there’s more time in the year where I’m having to tell families, “Let’s think about Lyme disease. Let’s make sure that we’re watching out and protecting ourselves from insects.” Or probably in the past few years, especially, thinking about the effects of disasters. And seeing patients, especially kind of, I remember during the COVID pandemic, a couple of cases of seeing patients who were dealing with COVID in some shape or form, but also dealing with the effects of some kind of environmental disaster, like some once-in-a-hundred-year storm or something or flood that had also wreaked havoc. And it was—so I’ve definitely in the past few years been seeing more patients who are kind of getting exposed to a lot more destruction and damage from environmental disasters. And at the same time, thinking about kind of this increased exposure overall because of the longer season of vector borne illnesses and heat illnesses and things that traditionally had been in a much smaller time period of the year.

Helena de Groot: And so you’re working right now in Charlottesville, Virginia, but you also grew up parts of your childhood in Charlottesville, right?

Irène Mathieu: Yes.

Helena de Groot: And how old are you?

Irène Mathieu: I’m 36.

Helena de Groot: Wow. So even in your super short life, you know, like, you have already noticed like how much more natural disasters there are in the place where you grew up?

Irène Mathieu: Absolutely. And I think the thing that I really struggled with this past winter was the lack of snow. I’ve noticed how the winters have changed. And I have so many distinct memories, and I have the evidence to prove—I have pictures that I drew as a kid of the snowstorms we would get all the time. And, you know, this isn’t the Northeast. They weren’t massive snowstorms. But I do remember having multiple snow days per year. I remember going out and being able to have snowball fights and make snow people and, you know, do the things that kids do outdoors in the snow. And it did not snow once this past winter, which is very abnormal, to not have a single snowfall. And that’s been slowly, the total snowfall has been slowly decreasing over the past few years. I moved back to Charlottesville about five years ago, and I definitely noticed a difference in the past five years as compared to 25 years ago.

Helena de Groot: I mean, it’s really something, you know, it’s like what we were talking about at the beginning where I asked you, do you recognize yourself in these young people that you’re working with? And you said like, well, yes and no. You know, one of the ways in which their life is different from mine at the time was they are, like, digital natives, right? And they just went through a pandemic which, like, you know, you and I didn’t go through. And this is yet another thing that is, like, native to their experience, you know.

Irène Mathieu: Right.

Helena de Groot: And, you know, kids are so resilient and will just sort of take as normal whatever is a part of their life from the start. And so, do you feel like that they are aware of all that, like, in a way that maybe the adults aren’t always?

Irène Mathieu: I think that—so there’s a phenomenon called shifting baseline, which is this idea that as things change, whether it be due to climate change or social changes that happen slowly over time, there’s a kind of generational amnesia and people don’t know what it used to be like. Maybe older people know because we remember, but the young people, younger people, this is all they’ve known. So on the one hand, I think the actual weather patterns are probably, that change is probably not hitting them as hard as it’s hitting me. But what I do see and what I do worry about is the sense of abandonment and the sense of complete lack of faith in a government that has done very, very little to address a major issue that we know how to address and yet refuses to systematically disinvest from fossil fuels.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Irène Mathieu: And I mean, same thing with gun violence, right? Like, I don’t remember having lockdown drills as a kid. That was really kind of before my time. I mean, after my time. And we have kids who now for almost their entire childhoods, who are finishing high school and have seen how this crisis of gun violence has continued and continued, and we have no national governmental adequate response to it. And so, I really worry about the kind of sense of abandonment that this governmental failure is—what that’s doing to children psychologically. And I think that’s a big difference. I don’t remember something on the kind of scale of climate crisis or the gun violence crisis where nothing was done. And so, yeah, I think that’s a big difference for sure.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I want to get to another poem, and it’s that poem titled “After emailing a copy of Audre Lorde’s essay ‘The Uses of the Erotic’ to a friend.” It’s on page 3. It’s the opening poem of milk tongue. And yeah, I was wondering, before we even get into the poem, can you tell me a little bit more about the essay?

Irène Mathieu: Sure. So Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” is kind of a seminal essay that she originally presented as a paper. And I was really just sort of taken by the way that she describes the body as a source of knowledge and the senses as a source of understanding. And the way that she talks about erotic knowledge, not as something sexual, but really as a sort of sensory or sensual knowledge that I think in the US society and probably a lot of Western societies, we devalue. And that was actually—going back to one of your original questions, that was one of the reasons I sort of had a disdain for medicine as a child. I felt like there is this overvaluation of empirical ways of knowing things in these very intellectual cognitive ways of knowing things, and a devaluation of more sensory and poetic and emotional ways of knowing things. And I think that you can actually practice medicine using all of that, but in the Western biomedical tradition, we really aren’t taught how to bring our whole selves to a clinical encounter. So I love this essay because it has really just kind of changed the way that I think about knowledge and knowledge production and the power of other kinds of knowledge. I think that’s probably enough of an explanation. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) I could get into the poem now.

Helena de Groot: Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m not ready. I’m going to ask you a little a few more questions. I mean, one of the questions as you were talking that came up is, I mean, you’re clearly so smart and you grew up with two very smart parents. But still, I was like, wow, that is a really sophisticated insight for a young person to already realize. Like, yeah, I don’t think medicine is for me because it’s sort of over values this, like, analytical, scientific frame, over the more holistic experiential sensory reality of the body. How did you come to that and was that something that you could talk about with your physician parents?

Irène Mathieu: I have no idea how I came to that.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHING) I was a very philosophical child, I suppose. But I did talk to my parents about that. So, I specifically remember a moment in high school. I remember exactly where we were on the road in my hometown, in the car with my mom and telling her, “Yeah, I don’t like medicine because I think it’s very arrogant, and I’m not going to be a doctor because I just think that people value the scientific way too much, and that’s not the only thing there is.” And I went on this whole tirade and then at the end of my mom said, “Well, yeah, but a lot of times it works. I mean, antibiotics do kill bacteria, you know.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: And I remember thinking, Okay, you have a point.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Fair, yeah.

Irène Mathieu: I mean, there are problems with our medical system and we certainly don’t know many, many, many things about the human body. But there are some things that work really, really, really well, like vaccines and antibiotics.

Helena de Groot: Absolutely.

Irène Mathieu: And I think that was the moment where something shifted and I started to think, Okay, I don’t have to be maybe so dogmatic about this. It could be both, and. And maybe there’s a way that I can bring in this these other ways of knowing into my work as a physician, but also, you know, really utilize what does work from the scientific or the empirical and intellectual traditions of Western biomedicine.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah.

Irène Mathieu: So I could definitely—I talked to them a lot about this as a child.

Helena de Groot: That’s so interesting because I feel like, you know, the term “holistic medicine,” I mean, depends on who you talk to, but it sometimes has a little bit of a, I don’t know, what the ring is. It’s not an entirely unproblematic term, let’s just say, right?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: Like it can sort of smack of anti-science, you know, of rejecting vaccines or rejecting things that actually do work, you know.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: But yeah, I really like what you’re saying now, where like holistic medicine, like, including Western medicine.

Irène Mathieu: Right.

Helena de Groot: It’s like part of the whole, you know, it’s not the be all end all, but it’s part of it.

Irène Mathieu: Yeah. And it’s funny because, you know, I’m thinking back to my childhood and my siblings and I—especially my sister and I, she’s the middle child—we kind of always gravitated towards these other ways of healing or knowing things, probably because we were super bored as kids in the suburbs with no TV.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: But, you know, when I was a kid, we made up this whole nature-based religion. We were very into trying to use plants to heal ourselves. We didn’t know what we were doing. Thankfully, we didn’t ingest them, but, you know.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) We think and live to tell the tale, you know.

Irène Mathieu: Yes. You know, I remember us learning somehow somewhere that aloe is healing and finding an aloe plant somewhere and saying, “Oh, we should apply this to our wounds,” you know, these kind of things that kids do. But I was very serious about nature as this kind of healing space that I could turn to. And so, yeah, there was, there’s something, and I’m not sure where that comes from, but there’s something that kind of goes even further back in my childhood about that holistic view of what can be healing or good in the world.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Okay, let’s get to the poem, and then I’ll ask you my other questions after. So it’s on page 3. I’m going to find it with you. Give me a second.

Irène Mathieu: Okay.

Helena de Groot: Okay.

Irène Mathieu:

(READS POEM)

After emailing a copy of Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the Erotic” to a friend

because of what we said at dinner about how

our bodies feel to us. To spell it out,

this is after salting my new yoga mat, which

my teacher swears will help with the slipping,

after walking the dog through piles of melting

slush – December rain on snow on mud –

after skimming an article that suggested our

phones are becoming extensions of our minds,

or something to that effect, while contemplating

all the powers I don’t know I’m giving up

this week, as measured in the light-years

between my language and my body.

Last week, my partner said, when I was falling

asleep I murmured witchcraft witchcraft witchcraft

into the pillow – hypnogogic conjure I must have

inherited somewhere in the last millennium.

You know, I say, holding leaves inside my cheek,

this used to be illegal – meaning the chlorophyll

leaching directly into my bloodstream.

I worry how the screen gathers my energy,

renders my melatonin adrift & inert.

It won’t stop raining this decade, and we did it

with our unfeeling bodies. Eventually,

while falling asleep

I try to fall back a few centuries, sifting through

piles all the women like us left behind – craft

is an exercise in making, a skill that wants practice,

i.e., to become rippled with gold through every

fascial plane, and also completely soluble across

space-time – don’t pretend it makes sense

when I put it like that.

Instead, take the broad leaf, the wax,

the unrolled cloth, mouthfull of river, quartz,

clutch of clay: everything is made of something.

I lay my language on it and then I take that away

and put down something that comes before

language. I put down something that comes

before I put down something and

I come before I put down before

language something that comes

Helena de Groot: I love this poem.

Irène Mathieu: Thank you.

Helena de Groot: There’s so many things I want to say. I mean, one of the things that, you know, keeps coming back throughout your collection is, is witchcraft and witches. And I’m wondering, like, how did that enter your collection or your world as you were writing this book?

Irène Mathieu: I think I’ve always been really interested in the idea of witches as kind of societally maligned women for some sort of power that they are seen not to deserve to have or potentially dangerous power. And I think that links back to Audre Lorde’s essay, too, right, she talks a lot about how the erotic or the sensory has kind of been seen as feminine or women’s power and therefore devalued. And part of that devaluation has been intentional because male-dominated Western society sees that as threatening and dangerous. And I think that, you know, as we have fully entered these ages of multiple global crises, I think that’s the kind of power that we’re missing and that I feel like I need in my life and that we probably need at a global level is other ways of knowing things that are really rooted in the relational and the sensory and the spiritual that have been devalued, at least in a lot of Western societies. So, I think I was sort of gravitating towards witches as a way to, an image or to kind of hold all that. And I remember my sister and I going to this natural food store with our parents and being really interested in what we would call “the magic section,” which is the section with the candles and the handmade soaps and crystals and incense. And we were just always really drawn to that kind of stuff. And I think there was something, for lack of a better word, there’s something a little witchy about that, and that the allure of some kind of powerful way of healing or knowing things that we felt like we weren’t being taught or had to access ourselves rather than somebody teaching it to us or telling us. This is another way that you can know things.

Helena de Groot: And I think also like, witches or women who were labeled as witches often were women who knew about medicine, right.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: About medicinal herbs. And as someone who functions in like an establishment of Western medicine, what is some of that witchy healing knowledge that resonates with you? How do you introduce that in your job without sort of disqualifying yourself in front of your colleagues, you know? (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Irène Mathieu: Right. Well, I would say the biggest way that I use witchy tools in medicine, or I guess maybe we can just say non-Western biometrically accepted tools, would be with stories. I mean, as I mentioned at the beginning, I teach poetry and literature to medical students and we talk a lot about the power of words and how words can be a physical tool that we can use in a patient encounter, but also a tool that we can use on ourselves to change who we are, to become the kind of healing practitioners that we want to be. Because narrative holds a kind of deep power that can actually change our thoughts and our behaviors. And I have given talks to my colleagues, to entire departments of pediatrics at hospitals, and I always go into the talks with a little bit of trepidation. And I wonder, you know, what are these, you know, academic physicians going to think about me saying, “Let’s read some poems together, guys, and it’s going to make you a better person.” And invariably, at the end of the talk, people are so grateful to have heard it. And I’ve had people email me and say, “I started crying when you gave that talk, and this is what I need.” And that’s not to toot my own horn, but to just say I think that there is a space for that, and people sometimes don’t always know what they’re missing or what we need in medicine.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Irène Mathieu: Yeah. Stories are probably the witchiest doctor thing about me. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) And poems.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, that’s also so beautiful about the poem. Let me find the verse. Yeah, there is a verse that has like quite a few sort of, you know, quote-unquote “difficult” words in them. One word, “fascial.” Can you explain that word?

Irène Mathieu: Sure. So fascia is essentially a layer, kind of a thin layer. You can think of a translucent sheet that separates muscles from one another, and it kind of covers different organs in the body to kind of keep things separated. It’s almost like a Saran wrap in your body that holds things in their place. And, you know, we know that acupuncture works. And one hypothesis for why acupuncture works is that it’s manipulating the fascia and by changing the energy in our fascia, because everything is connected through the fascia, that that could be one way that it is effective. But I was really interested in that, kind of the idea of fascia as carrying energy and what was something that we sort of are taught in the U.S. medical schools is just yeah, just it’s just a container for your organs. It’s kind of inert. It’s not really the organ itself that we want to focus on. But what are we missing by not thinking about the fascia? And so, I think that’s why the fascial plane came up in that poem and just kind of imagining what happens on that plane, like what’s going on there with that connective tissue that’s linking our organs together that we kind of often view as an afterthought instead and focus on the organs themselves?

Helena de Groot: Wow. That’s almost like too perfect a metaphor, right? Like this thing that we ignore. It’s translucent, but it connects everything. And if we become aware of it, we can actually heal ourselves in a more holistic way.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: I mean, it’s almost too perfect, you know? One of the things that I find really interesting is the way in which Western medicine has the potential to alienate us from our own bodies.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I think like alienation from our bodies has all these terrible side effects. And I think climate change and the ways in which we do damage to the environment is 100% because we’re alienated from our bodies.

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You know, if we would know, if we would actually be inside our bodies, we wouldn’t pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink and the soil we grow our crops in.

Irène Mathieu: Right.

Helena de Groot: And you write, “It won’t stop raining this decade, and we did it / with our unfeeling bodies.”

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: You have a daughter?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: She’s two, I think?

Irène Mathieu: Yes.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. I mean, two is tiny. Of course, you were dictating diary entries to your mom, but it’s still tiny, I don’t know like what, you know, how much you can convey about climate change and all that at her age. But what are some of the ways in which you are mindful to make sure that she does not get alienated from her own body?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm. I think the biggest thing that I try to do is follow her lead. And as you mentioned earlier, you know, children and young people are so led by their sensory experiences. And I think that as adults, often our impulse is to think, “Okay, but we don’t have time for that. We’ve gotta go. Who cares about this?” You know, we just sort of minimize those sensory experiences because they seem trivial or they don’t fit into our schedules. And one thing that I have really tried to be intentional about is not minimizing those. To the point of sometimes being late for things because she wants to pick a flower and touch the flower and talk about the flower and explore the flower. And I think, “Great! Why not?” So I really try to lean into her sensory experience of the world so that she feels like what her body is telling her is important and needs to be prioritized. Not necessarily all the time or over other people’s needs, but she should listen to her body, right.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Irène Mathieu: And so, and it’s sometimes it’s things like as simple as when she’s eating her food, if she says she’s done, she’s done. I might say, “Are you sure you don’t want to try X, Y, Z? No. Okay, that’s fine. You’re done. You’ve said you’re done. I trust that you know what you need. You are getting all of the nutr—overall in the course of a week, you’re getting all the nutrients you need. So if you tell me today you don’t want to eat X, Y, Z, that’s okay with me.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Irène Mathieu: Taking risks. You know, I, I try not to be too overprotective in the physical risks that she takes as she learns how to use her body. And my mom made a comment a few months ago that it was really remarkable watching her kind of climb on things that seemed a little dangerous or seemed like she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to do it. And she’s very confident. And I think that’s also the daycare. They’re very intentional about that. But letting her be the person who is the expert of her own sensory and bodily experience and letting her take the lead on that.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Earlier when we were talking, you said something that really struck me. We were talking about how you can communicate care and respect to a pre-verbal child. And yeah, you were talking about the ways in which, you know, touch and even talking to them and sort of announcing like, “Oh, this is what I’m going to do now,” not just like pull down their pants. How you do that, even if they might not understand the words, they might understand the intention. And one of the things that you said, you said, “So that’s something that I learned from babies.” And I really love that your use of the word “from,” you know, like babies are my teachers.

Irène Mathieu: They are! (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Like that from them. Yeah. (LAUGHS) Can you tell me, what has your baby taught you?

Irène Mathieu: Oh, my gosh. She’s taught me so many things. I mean, one thing that’s very concrete is she has taught me a new appreciation for birds. She is really obsessed with birds and was from a very early age, and is, I mean, I don’t want to put any labels, but she seems like a birder, a budding birder. And I don’t think that I really noticed birds in a very conscious way before, but it made me feel like, wait am I missing out on something? Like there’s something going on here with the bird thing that I just totally missed. Like, is this the cool thing?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHING) And now I’ve kind of been let in on this secret, which is that birds are amazing. And I, as a result, I have just learned so much about birds and gotten really into identifying species and trying to figure out, you know, which birds are where and why and what do they do or they sound like. So she’s taught me a lot about birds. She’s taught me a lot about the very core fact that people are born completely who they are and with all the tools they need. And they know, they know what they need and they know who they are from birth, from day one. And I think that it may sound ironic as a pediatrician that I didn’t know that before, but I think that in our culture, we sort of have this idea that children are these blank slates and they’re just sort of, you know, you have to guide them and teach them how to be the kind of person you would like them to be. (LAUGHS) And that’s so not true. I think, of course, there’s some guidance you have to give children, but I think that humans are born exactly who they are. And our job is mostly to get out of their way and let them be that person. And it’s just really remarkable. Even the knowledge, as I was saying before, of something like, when am I going to lose my balance? What is safe for my body to do and not safe to do? I think we just have this overprotective assumption that, oh, we can’t let them take risks because they could hurt themselves and they don’t understand that they could hurt themselves. And that’s not always true. I mean, sometimes you may have to tell someone, “Oh, I’ve noticed that, you know, that chair’s a bit high and there’s, you know, this possibility it could fall. So maybe think about that.” And remarkably, children will listen to you. You don’t have to just rip them away with no explanation and just say “No!” You can talk to them. They’re human beings, and they may not understand every single word you’re using, but they understand the attention.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: How do you keep your worries about climate change and her, how that will fall on her shoulders to deal with?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: How do you keep that from running away with you? Like, how do you not spend your days absolutely freaking out about that?

Irène Mathieu: Yeah. I think that I was very uncertain—I went from being very certain that I’d have children to being uncertain for a while, primarily because of climate change. And I think that what tipped the scales was more of an intuitive knowledge that this was something that I needed to do in life, rather than something that I came up with a rational answer to. And I still have, you know, anxieties about the future for her. But I also think that, you know, especially being a person of color and also just living in the United States, which is increasingly a precarious society, you know, aside from climate change, there are a lot of things that I think that I could worry about and be stressed out about. And there are a lot of uncertainties about the future. And I think that I just had to decide, am I willing to live with those anxieties and still try to create a life for my child, or am I going to let those anxieties change what I do?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And you know, you work with young people and their mental health, and I’m sure that they ask hard questions of the adults around them

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: And I’m wondering, like, when your daughter grows up and she’s a teenager and she’s asking you hard questions, if she would ask you, you know, looking around at, like, all the inequities and climate change and racism and, you know, poverty and eroding democracy and all that, and if she would see that, really become awake to it, you know, and she would ask you, why did you bring me into the world?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: What would you tell her?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Irène Mathieu: I would say that I had that awakening, too, and it was a feeling of kind of heartbreak that you kind of grow up in love with the world in so many ways, and then you understand the reality of the situation that you’ve been born into. And that, for me, anyway, having gone through that process of realization and heartbreak, I still feel glad to be here and I still feel like it’s worth it. And I would hope that she has that experience, too.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. And apologies to make you spell it out, but what are some of the things that make it worth it for you?

Irène Mathieu: Mm-hmm. Well, I think it’s the things like, I mean, can I read a poem to answer that question, actually? (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes! Absolutely. (LAUGHS)

Irène Mathieu: (LAUGHING) Because I think it’s in the poems.

(READS POEM)

never have I ever

Mother’s Day I’m at work, where the hospital ward is thick with babies.

I enter room after room to look into their eyes – long-awaited or unexpected guests,

the babies stare at me, solemn and decisive: the next links in a chain of desire older

than any of us can imagine. later that day I order a hands-free breast pump,

giddy with the thought of making myself into food. I love land so much I become it.

I want more so badly I’ll make it from my own body.

behind the final door, an operating room,

parents beaming under heat lamps –

the abundance of twins – my own baby swelling

against my scrubs as I congratulate them.

never have I ever wanted so much – eating ice cream at any hour, crying over the chorus

of spring peepers Dopplering through the passenger window, my whole body a horde of

seventeen-year cicadas wrestling their way out from the dirt. I said I wouldn’t want so much the wiser I

got, but Earth, forgive me: I got drunk on thick-knotted blackberry

rising from the humid flank of this land, breathed a dream of ancient honeysuckle and

crabapple, woke in a wetland clutching cattail & throating a swallow’s nesting song –

this is the Day my mother has made today I walk into room after room.

today I tell the babies: never have I ever known a way to be that wasn’t

velvety white on the tongue sweet salt & fat letters curdled in the mouth,

rising from amniotic foam at the moment of the first shout !

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: Irène Mathieu is the author of three poetry collections: orogeny, which won the Bob Kaufman Book Prize, Grand Marronage, which was selected as Editor’s Choice for the Gatewood Prize and runner-up for the Cave Canem/Northwestern book prize, and, most recently, milk tongue. She’s been awarded the YemasseeJournal’s Poetry Prize, an Honorable Mention and Editor’s Choice in the Sandy Crimmins National Poetry contest, three Pushcart Prize nominations, and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Irène Mathieu is also a pediatrician and public health researcher, and she is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Virginia. To find out more, check out the Poetry Foundation website.

The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT)