A torrent of accidental poems

Neurology journal Neurocase has an interesting study of a women who started compulsively writing poetry after having brief epileptic amnesia treated with the anti-seizure drug lamotrigine.

A 76-year-old woman reported having a poor memory and short periods of disorientation and was eventually diagnosed with transient epileptic amnesia – brief recurrent seizures that lead to short periods where affected people can’t lay down new memories.

Several months after starting lamotrigine [a common and widely used anti-seizure drug], the patient suddenly began to write original verse. Whereas poetry had never previously been among her pastimes, she now produced copious short poems (around 10–15 each day) on quotidian topics such as housework or about the act of versifying itself and sometimes expressing her opinions or regret about past events. These poems often had a wistful or pessimistic nature but did not have a moral or religious focus. Her husband characterized them as “doggerel” because they were generally rhyming and often featured puns and other wordplay.

My poems roams,
They has no homes
Yours’, also, tours,
And never moors.

Why tie them up to pier or quay?
Better far, share them with me.

Prose – now, that’s a different matter.
Rather more than just a natter.
Prose is earnest, prose is serious
Prose is lordly and imperious
Prose tells you, loud, clear, that
Life – life is dear.

This versifying had a compulsive quality: she spent several hours per day writing poetry and became irritated if attempts were made to disengage her. However, she appeared to derive pleasure from the activity and there was no evidence of associated distress. She did not produce prose passages, diaries, or other examples of hypergraphia, nor did she develop new interests in other “creative media,” such as visual arts or music.

When reassessed 6 months after the onset of versifying this apparent compulsion had diminished, but she continued to produce occasional poems. She had also developed a more general fondness for wordplay, frequently using puns in speech, making humorous word associations, and identifying word patterns in everyday objects such as car license plates. Throughout this period there were no associated mood symptoms, features of a thought disorder, or other changes in her behavior or cognition to suggest hypomania or another generalized neuropsychiatric disturbance.

The article mentions the exclusion of hypomania and thought disorder because these are two other phenomena that appear as compulsive rhyming or punning in speech.

The article also mentions some similarities between the compulsive poem writing and hypergraphia – compulsive and copious writing that is a well-known although not particularly common symptom of epilepsy.

The difference in this case, however, is that hypergraphia often appears as meaningless, rambling or disorganised, and this particular patient produced competent, if not particularly high quality poems.

One of the most interesting implications of these cases is that rhyming, punning and poetic speech, which we normally think of as something that needs specific conscious effort and attention, can appear spontaneously to the point of overwhelming our normal forms of communication.
 

Link to open-access scientific article.
Link to DOI of same.