Patch Adam Poem
Thank you for sharing this poem and for stopping by my blog, I find romantic and love poems to be one of the hardest themes to truely capture authentically. Neruda does this wonderfully. I look forward to checking out your personal poetry too!
Patch Adam Poem
Hunter Patch Adams : Now you have the ability to keep me from graduating. You can keep me from getting the title and the white coat. But you can't control my spirit, gentlemen. You can't keep me from learning, you can't keep me from studying. So you have a choice: you can have me as a professional colleague, passionate, or you can have me as an outspoken outsider, still adament. Either way I'll probably still be viewed as a thorn. But I promise you one thing: I am a thorn that will not go away
Mr. Adams is author of Gesundheit!: Bringing Good Health to You, the Medical System and Society Through Physician Service, Complementary Therapies, Humor and Joy. He advocates universal free health care. He gave a dramatic recitation of portions of Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road," saying he loves the poem "because poetry is a celebration of life. This poem reflects me. I celebrate life."
Mr. Adams wore his long gray hair in a ponytail with several elastics along its length. A patch on his head to the left of his center part was dyed blue. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with a multicolored tie, tie-died balloon pants, one orange and one blue sock and black tennis shoes. One fork-shaped earring dangled and swung as he recited Walt Whitman's conclusion: "the efflux of the soul is happiness."
Dr. Billington said he liked the poem "Little Gidding" by T.S. Eliot because it "brings a spiritual dimension into our daily lives." He told how Eliot wrote the poem in 1942 as bombs fell on London and explained several interpretations of its elusive text. He confided that he personally interprets the "tongues of fire" in the poem as "the slow fire that consumes us: our own self-preoccupations."
Philip Bobbitt, the creator of the Library's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, read "Preparation," by Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry both Robert Pinsky and 1996-1997 Poet Laureate Robert Hass helped to translate from Polish. "Our prayers are with the 600,000 refugees from the Yugoslav war and the soldiers who have gone to Eastern Europe," said Mr. Bobbitt, who is Lyndon Johnson's nephew. His cousin, Linda Johnson Robb, was in the audience. Milosz's poem recalls earlier strife in Eastern Europe: "Thus: armies/Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse/ In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank/ Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk/ Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire."
"Some poets write with such power and immediacy that they can convince you the poem is about your own life, but it's not," said the final reader, Edward Weismiller, who was billed as 'novelist, counterspy and poet," in the program. He read John Donne's "Twickenham Garden" because "it involves me in a way I can't explain." When he recited it, the audience may have understood with him what it is in a poem that words can't -- but somehow do -- convey.
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heyi dear thanks for your poem.. the words really express my love towards my love.. i am not very good at expressing love but you made my work easier....! thanks and do let me know about any more of such nice things..!
Later I looked up the poem on the internet. Patch attributed the poem to Pablo Neruda. This seems to be a pervasive but incorrect on the internet. The actual author is Marth Medeiros, a Brazilian writer and journalist. I came across many English translation versions of the poem. Below is the version Patch recited.
Critic-Proof: There appears to be an incredible amount of hate directed towards this movie (featuring only a 23% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it was a financial success. Since Williams' tragic death in 2014, the film is often mentioned among many common moviegoers' favorite roles for him. Granted, it is likely just because of Robin Williams and not the movie itself.
Designated Hero: Besides acting like a general Jerkass to his schoolmates in an attempt to make them laugh, Patch also commits several ethically questionable actions, like stealing drugs from a hospital and practicing without a license. Patch's own sense of humor can also come across as offensive to those he's supposed to help, such as making jokes at the expense of a catatonic schizophrenic or designing the university door to resemble a giant woman's vagina in preparation for visiting gynecologists. He still gets treated as in the right, even when it ends up killing two people, and the only people who call him out for his actions are treated as humorless villains. Needless to say, the real-life Hunter Adams did no such thing.
Designated Villain: As pointed out above, the people who have the gall to call out Patch for his actions, or don't think he's as funny as he thinks he is, are treated as asshats who just need to get a sense of humor. Keep in mind that some of the things Patch did are felonies, and that all of his actions led to the deaths of two people, including his girlfriend.
Don't Shoot the Message: Some of the film's fiercest critics are those who believe in new forms of medical treatment and agree with Patch that patients should be treated as more than sicknesses to be cured and there should be services for those without insurance, but detest the immature way these messages are conveyed.
Fridge Horror: At one point in the mental hospital, Patch gets a laugh by putting words in the mouth of "Beanie," a catatonic schizophrenic. That scene becomes this when you take into account that, in real life, catatonic schizophrenics are very aware of what's going on around them during their catatonic episodes, even though they're powerless to respond, and are frequently upset by people doing things exactly like that. Now watch that scene again. Ouch. Just what was it like for him? How bad was it to him?
Funny Moments: Patch making the swimming pool of noodles and swimming in it with the old lady.
Glurge: This movie is supposed to be inspiring and touching but it has a jerkass character committing crimes. Even if you buy into it, it's still layered on too thickly.
Harsher in Hindsight: Patch asks what happens when a doctor becomes emotionally involved with a patient and sarcastically thinks they might explode? He finds out when his girlfriend is shot by a psychotic patient. What makes this worse is that the killer's mental instability could have been detected had Adams run a background check. Like a doctor is supposed to do.
Every single scene where Patch contemplates suicide is incredibly difficult to watch now that his actor, Robin Williams, has committed suicide himself. It's also a lot more unsettling with his line "what's wrong with death, sir?"
It's also much harsher to hear this particular line.
"Our job is improving the quality of life, not just delaying death." Heartwarming in Hindsight: Despite the criticism the movie received, the promotional picture of Patch smiling while wearing his clown nose became iconic enough for it to be forever associated with Robin Williams himself due to it being a genuinely touching image. It's become even more iconic since Williams' death.
Hilarious in Hindsight: You know, the government should pay for health insurance. This was hardly a new idea-most developed countries had universal healthcare by the time the film was made, and President Bill Clinton attempted to pass the same thing in the early 1990s as well.
At one point when Patch is entertaining terminally-ill children, he pretends to be a Cloudcuckoolander doctor who is about to perform surgery: "My name is Doctor... [checks badge] ... Phil."
Narm: This exchange is pretty snarkworthy. Yes, it's meant to show what a humorless jerk the Dean is (even though he is right about Patch's behavior), but instead just sounds like some vain cartoony supervillain.
Patch: "Why am I such a threat to you?"The Dean: "Because what you want for us is to get down on the same level as our patients!" Patch's line "What's wrong with death?" It's supposed to be uplifting and powerful, but that's the last thing you want to hear from a doctor.
Retroactive Recognition: During Carin's funeral, Greg Sestero i.e. Mark from The Room appears as an extra. Oh hai, Mark!
Squick: That stunt Patch pulls to the visiting gynecologists where he places a pair of giant inflatable legs by the college's door so the entrance resembles a giant vagina can come off as just Sick and Wrong.
Strawman Has a Point: The villains argue that doctors should act professionally. Patch's point: professionalism should not supersede humanity. He's criticizing the medical profession's tendency to distance themselves from their patients, to the disservice of the patient's mental well-being. He's not necessarily wrong, it's just that he tends to go too far in the other direction. Also, the film goes to the lengths of making the more professional doctors into strawmen by making them so emotionally distant that they've apparently never heard of bedside manner, such as casually talking about amputating a patient's leg in front of her as if she wasn't even there.
Opposing point: It's important to consider the doctor's mental well-being. Getting too attached to patients and then watching helplessly as they die can really put a person out of sorts. It's why they try to be more distant in the first place. In contrast, Patch does things like mocking the concept of women's health and decides that those who aren't laughing just lack a sense of humor. (Or maybe they just, you know, don't like obnoxious people?)
Philip Seymour Hoffman actually considered it intentional that his character Mitch Roman be something of a jerk with a good argument in order to address those counter issues. At one point, Mitch accuses Patch of cheating, citing the latter's unprofessional attitude towards everything (including studying) and somehow having the highest grades in class. This was infuriating to him as a person because he was studying his ass off to learn medicine and wanted his patients to respect that, not expecting him to be a kindergarten teacher.
They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Instead of trying to be a faithful depiction of Hunter Adams' life and career, the film seems focused on repurposing Dead Poets Society, with doctors: both movies center around an "inspiring" rebel played by Robin Williams who shakes things up in an establishment run by a no-fun-allowed authority figure, in both movies Williams' protagonist forms a group of academics that follow his example, in both films a character important to him dies tragically, and the scene with the ill children wearing clown noses can be seen as the equivalent of the "Captain My Captain" scene from Dead Poets Society. The fact that Patch even reads a poem during Carin's funeral is just the icing on the cake.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: In one chapter of Greg Sestero's book, The Disaster Artist, he recalls his experience on set with Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who he described as very solemn as they were keeping in-character for the funeral scene. It astounded him to realize just how professional a comic actor like Williams could be, especially considering it's a scene fabricating the death circumstances of a real person.
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