B12
Public Record
Excerpt from All Knowledge entry.

Glosy Mantell.

[…]

Clinical Poetry

Clinical Poetry was a poetic genre that emerged from the Post-Historic art movement. Clinical Poetry was created by deconstructing academic essays and editing them to look and read like poems. Glosy Mantell invented the artform during a period in her life in which she was “writing a lot of poetry and studying myself to death in medical school.” In an interview in the Red Parker Quarterly, Mantell described how the style came about: “Sometimes I would read these very rigid, scientific statements and think, ‘You know, in a different context, that could be a very profound thought.’ So I would write them down, word for word, as these little poems. And somehow, after I had tweaked the spacing and played with the punctuation and grammar for a while, I was usually surprised by the end product. […] What’s very interesting to me now is that I can look back at these small — usually between one and two-hundred word — poems, and I can know immediately what happened the day I made it, based just on the arrangement of the words and the passage that I had picked. Each one just says so much about what I was interested in learning about at the time, what I phrases stood out to me that day, and what mood I was in that allowed me to arrange them in this very specific, thoughtful way. There was a reason that those words stood out to me that day, do you know what I mean? […]

“One critic called Clinical Poetry ‘the least-creative written art form,’ which, honestly I would have to agree with in most cases. But — at least for me — these poems are deeply personal. I mean, of course they are, you know? I chose the journal, and the essay, based on what I was presently interested in, and then I spent time with these words — words that weren’t my own but were, for some reason or another, important to me in that moment. And so this thing I’ve given shape to, if it is able to succinctly express an emotion or experience that is relatable to other people, I have a hard time saying that isn’t art.” […]

When asked, “Which of your poems is your favorite?” After a pause Ms. Mantell replied, “Timelessness. I don’t remember what it’s called, but there was this one essay that I read about ‘what timelessness is,’ and whether it could be quantified or identified. I still think about that one all the time. It was sort of about, you know, what makes this so obviously irrelevant, versus what makes this other thing timeless. It was very interesting. But really I think what made it so interesting was thinking about the fact that the people writing this essay and performing this research — they’re all up against this stuff. So in the poem I wrote using that essay, there is this real desperation coming from the narrator, you know, like, ‘I just gotta know, you’ve got to tell me: What can I do that will last forever?’ And by the end of the paper, it seems like they pretty much shrug and say, ‘I guess we’ll just have to be forgotten with the rest of them.’ I remember every time the word ‘timeless’ came up I capitalized it, because they just made it into this giant of a thing. I had just finished reading Frida Bilson’s novel ‘with Abandon,’ and she did some really great stuff with letter cases and stuff, and I just really love her work, so that was something that just sort of jumped in there.” […] Mantell died of a stroke at 31 years old. […]

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