diVERSES reKINDLED: In Conversation With Poet Zoe Karstadt

The doctor has good news. That pain in your shoulder that has been nagging at you the last two weeks is completely curable. All it takes is a pill that has no side effects. Insurance covers it. He even has a box in stock.

There’s a problem. He doesn’t give it to you.

The artist has good news. She has on her laptop the draft of a poem that will help you reconnect with a memory of your mother. In fact, it has a line that, if you heard it, you’d tell it to someone else. That’s how powerful the image is.

There’s a problem. She doesn’t give it to you.

In speaking with poet Zoe Karstadt, we entered into one of the difficulties with art, which is the sharing. It is easier to keep art away from others than to give art to others. It is easier to think the job of an artist is solely the creating.

It is possible that an artist only makes for the self. It is possible that a doctor learns medicine to only treat the self.

What is more likely is that, when we make, we want to share what we make. We are social creatures. For millennia, our livelihood depended on contribution to community. Though it is possible now to survive alone, biology takes time to catch up. We still have desires to impact others. Artists are not immune to the pull to connect.

If a doctor has the ability to help us, and chooses not to, we probably won’t go back to that doctor.

If a doctor, instead, gives us the option to be helped—to accept what they believe to be a cure—we assume the doctor is doing their job. Even if we decline, even if we get a second opinion, the beauty is that the doctor has worked not for the self, but for us.

If we make art, and we believe in the power of the art to make other people’s lives better in a way that they desire, the challenges becomes being selfless instead of selfish. It does take energy to tell others about the art. It does take rejection from people who do not see the benefit. It does take energy to tell patients about the medicine, or order the pills, or find the clinical trial.

Being a doctor is not just having treatments, but delivering.

Full conversation with poet Geoff Anderson and poet Zoe Karstadt: https://youtu.be/-QdYN-_g1Yo