”On the Operating Table”. The hospital experience in modern Polish women’s poetry

Abstract

The essay concerns „hospital verses” collected from modern women’s poetry: poems thematizing hospital space, taking place in it as well as describing typical hospital communicative situations. The author analyzes the poems using devices of geopoetics and identity studies – in her interpretations she is searching and confronting categories of places autobiographical and atopical. In the analyzed poetry a hospital appears as a „non-place”: a no-(wo) man’s-space, incomprehensible and inhospitable. Its corridors, windows and operating rooms must be first rationalized and domesticated; they provoke questions on sense and identity. „Surgical incision”, so often described in women’s poetry analyzed here, is a cut opening not only the body, but also the consciousness; it opens up new metaphysical and eschatological perspectives and problematizes the psyche – soma relation.