Image by Zanda Rice (2024)
I.
Nobody likes to go to the dentist, not even a poet.
However, several poets have attempted to write of the experience and aftermath of dental surgery, particularly the sense of loss and trauma that follows an extraction.
One thinks of Simon Armitage's 'For the Record', for example, a humorous yet savagely detailed account of having four wisdom teeth pulled; a procedure which leaves him talking with another man's mouth [1].
And one thinks also of Stephen Alexander's 'Reflections on the Loss of UR6' which formed the very first published post on his long-running blog Torpedo the Ark back in November 2012 [2], and it's this poem - reproduced below - that I'd like to offer a commentary on here.
II.
Reflections on the Loss of UR6
Extraction is dental-speak for an act of extreme violence,
carried out in the name of oral hygiene: a final solution
to the
question of what to do about those teeth that cannot be
coordinated into a Colgate-clean utopia.
Afterwards, your mouth feels like a crime scene;
a bloody site of trauma and violation rinsed with
a saline solution.
The sense of loss is palpable: it makes me think of her
and the manner in which I too was extracted like UR6.
Yet Bataille insists that a rotten tooth - even after removal -
continues to function as a sign and provocation, just like an
abandoned shoe within the sphere of love.
III.
Like Simon Armitage, Alexander uses a mundane surgical procedure as a darkly comic metaphor for an emotional trauma that seems to extend far beyond the dentist's chair. I love the way he juxtaposes terms in order to strip away the façade of clinical sterlity that modern dentistry prides itself on and exposes the underlying physical violence.
And I love too how his closing reference to Bataille adds a pleasing philosophical layer to the work [3], although his attempt to elevate the poem from being merely a poignant personal account into a political critique of fascism is not entirely successful; describing a dental extraction as a final
solution is a hyerbolic historical allusion that some will find insensitive, to say the least.
My main disappointment with the poem, however, is the fact that it fails to develop the tragic love story at its heart: I want to know more about her and what it means to be extracted (and abandoned) like a troublesome tooth. Ultimately, political metaphors and philosophical references need to be balanced with more concrete images and personal details. Alexander tells us his sense of loss is palpable, but he doesn't allow us to share the actual feeling and that, unfortunately, is a serious weakness in any piece of writing.
And yet, for the record, I still prefer it to Armitage's (technically superior) poem which, in my view, lacks danger or any underlying sense of menace. Indeed, if asked at drillpoint by a Nazi dentist I would have to say it's safe.
Notes
[1] Simon Armitage, 'For the Record', in CloudCuckooLand (Faber and Faber, 1997). The verse can be read on Google Books: click here.
The poem was also published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 19, Issue 16 (21 August, 1997) and subscribers can access it by clicking here.
[2] This post - which comes with a photograph of Alexander's dentist at the time, Georgie Cooper, BDS (Hons) MFDS RCS Eng. MSC - can be accessed by clicking here.
[3] An academic colleague of mine insists that the Bataille reference is problematic in that it relies on
the reader having a specific intellectual background and that without such the final stanza may appear to be an unnecessary philosophical footnote rather than a thoughtful poetic conclusion. I don't agree with this, however.
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