Fierce Verse: Cancer and Imaginative Redress

Abstract

The British poet Peter Reading’s collection C (1984) is a sequence of 100 100-word compositions about cancer. Set in a hospice, it documents the suffering of imagined characters adjusting to a terminal diagnosis. C comprises different forms, including limerick, sonnet, acrostic, choriamb, haiku and tanka, 100 variations of the same essential material. The formal restlessness indicates a bind between potential and restriction, where poetry’s forms embody physical changes that can be ameliorative or degenerative. Since C’s lifespan is known in advance, the main narrator, who has abdominal cancer, confides that although his mental wellbeing ‘demands lies’, or the ‘comfort of make-believe games — // such as this one that I play now in distich, almost pretending / verse has validity’, poetry is ultimately ‘fuck-all use here, now.’¹