IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING

Just in case you were wondering where I got the name, The Wounded Surgeon, I must admit, I didn’t make it up. There is a series of poems, The Four Quartets, by TS Eliot, which contains this beautiful and apt image:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's
art

More recently, a book of literary criticism called The Wounded Surgeon was written by Adam Kirsch. In it, Kirsch explores the lives and writing of six modern American poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, and Delmore Schwartz. The title just struck a cord with me, somewhere in between poetry and real life, between the aphorism, "Nothing new under the sun," and "Hey, I was just about to say that!"

When we're born, our parents give us a name. Seems it's taken me all this time to realize that the best ones are already taken.