INCISIVE MIND

The Baltimore Sun

"In my hand, an opera sings."

So writes Michael Salcman - neurosurgeon, art collector, poet - in his first book of verse.

That elegant image is contained in the poem "Small Bones." In just eight syllables, the author exultantly paints a picture of five fingers working independently but coming together in a harmonious whole.

The line depicts the hand as a complex, emotionally powerful work of art in its own right. Surely, that must be true of the fingers and palms belonging to surgeons and poets, and Salcman should know.

The physician's first book of verse, The Clock Made of Confetti, was released yesterday. A smattering of the 80 pieces are about his medical work, and it's no coincidence that both activities call upon similar skills: an unsparing eye, a steady hand with the scalpel and a precise, detailed knowledge of the workings of the human brain.

Salcman has a third passion that's every bit as important to his life as the other two: modern art. He is a self-taught, voracious collector. He and his wife, Ilene, have amassed more than 200 paintings and sculptures by such modern masters as Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. He also served on the board of Baltimore's Contemporary Museum for nine years, the last three as president.

The three pillars of Salcman's intellectual life - surgery, poetry and modern art - might seem to have little in common. But all are different ways of exploring his favorite organ, which is about the size of a cauliflower and nestled inside the skull.

"Operating under the microscope is beautiful," Salcman says.

"It really was a fantastic voyage, and it occupied me intellectually for most of my life. I'm not operating any more, and I miss it. But art and poetry are complex enough to fill the void."

Salcman's medical career is winding down. At age 60, he is trying to reinvent himself as a poet. Like all artists, he dreams of making a lasting contribution, but fears that his best efforts will fall short. One of Salcman's favorite sayings, and the projected title for his second full-length manuscript of verse, is The Enemy of Good Is Better.

That phrase means that nothing short of perfection will suffice - not for Salcman's patients and not for his poetry.

Salcman always has had a ravenous hunger for knowledge, one that was sharpened, perhaps, by early hardship.

The only child of Holocaust survivors, he overcame a childhood bout with polio. He didn't walk again for six months.

"It made me hyper-sensitive. It made me weak. It made me dependent. And it made me fearful," he says.

But the boy was born with an intelligence remarkable for both its breadth and its incisiveness. As a young man, he shot to prominence in the medical field. But, in his mid-40s, he came to a heartbreaking crossroads and left the academic world, where the most important scientific research is carried out.

Like a dancer or a professional athlete, a surgeon must be in tiptop physical shape, and Salcman is. Though short, he is powerfully built, with a large head and a thick neck. Perhaps a slightly oversized cranium is needed to house that prodigious brain, just as his nose - slightly flattened at the tip - might express a fondness for a rousing intellectual brawl.

The doctor's movements are quick and decisive. Though he retains vestiges of a slight limp, Salcman seems to be always suppressing an impulse to bounce.

Even his aftershave reflects an aspect of Salcman's personality. He wears Calvin Klein's Obsession.

"It fits," he says with a laugh, "because I'm obsessed with so many things."

Presents in hand

On a recent wintry night, Salcman attended a meeting of his poetry writing group at the home of his friend Jennifer Wallace.

The bungalow overlooks Lake Montebello, and the night was so cold that the division between the ice and the atmosphere above it was barely perceptible; both water and air seemed made of the same thick, dark, slushy substance.

But the bungalow was cozy, and Salcman held the pages written by his fellow authors as if they were made of some velvety material that caressed the hand. He also distributed extra copies of a recent issue of Poetry magazine.

"Michael always comes with presents," says one member of the group, Darlene Bookoff.

Indeed, Salcman constantly copies articles or poems and hands them out to members of his book group, his medical staff, chance acquaintances and strangers on the street. His favorite role always has been that of the teacher.

"Michael is incredibly generous," says Wallace, who teaches poetry and essay writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

"He's extremely well-read and very opinionated. He makes these grand pronouncements, and he doesn't like to be contradicted. In another person, that could be a recipe for elitism.

"But Michael's love for the art form is so huge that he will spend 12 hours working with someone on a poem, or giving me a list of books he thinks I should read. He has lectured for free, both at MICA and at Sarah Lawrence, and he never asks for anything for himself."

Every wall adorned

Salcman also frequently opens his North Baltimore house to the public for art tours that take two hours, and that he conducts himself. "Ilene and I don't come from wealthy backgrounds, and we began collecting early in our careers," he says.

"We didn't have furniture, and we didn't have lamps, but we had prints. The sun would go down, and we wouldn't be able to see the artwork."

Each room of the Salcmans' home showcases work from a different decade starting with the 1960s. Paintings and sculptures are displayed on virtually every smooth, flat surface, horizontal or vertical, with the possible exception of the refrigerator. There even are original oil paintings and watercolors hanging inside closets.

During one such tour, Salcman gestures toward the lavatory. "This is guaranteed to be the only bathroom in America," he says, "with a work by Hans Hofmann." (The most significant paintings created by the Bavarian-born abstract expressionist routinely sell for six figures at auction.)

But Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum, notes that each piece in the Salcmans' collection was chosen for a single, overriding reason: because the owners love it.

"Other collectors have these huge, museum-scale pieces," Vikan says. "But not Michael and Ilene. Lurking behind those brick walls are pieces that are very private and small in scale, pieces you can get close to and feel in an intimate way."

Salcman can more than hold his own with the art experts. Some are even his students. In the 1990s, he taught a course in modern art for Towson University's adult education program. Vikan was one of those enrolled.

"Michael's art history is really dense and comprehensive," Vikan says. "I learned a lot from him."

'Lives in the ear'

Salcman's knowledge of poetry is similarly wide-ranging. His bookshelves are piled with first editions of such renowned writers as Elizabeth Bishop and Ted Hughes. But he's just as apt to pull out a treasured volume by a literary luminary less familiar to Americans, such as Yehuda Amichai, the German-Israeli author known for his love verses.

Roger Lathbury, editor of Orchises Press, read up to 500 unsolicited manuscripts in 2004. From that pile, he chose two books to publish. Salcman's was one.

"Michael's poetry lives in the ear," says Lathbury, an English professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. He ordered a press run of 1,000 copies for The Clock Made of Confetti - quite respectable for a first book of poems.

"The pauses at the end of his lines set up a tension for the next lines," Lathbury says. "His stanzas have an orderliness and shape. The poems also are informed by Mike's medical skills, his interest in art and his sense of humor. Despite the varied nature of his interests, there's a coherence to the whole collection."

Some of Salcman's best verses are suffused with a poignancy as unmistakable as the smell of approaching rain. At the end of "The Clock Made of Confetti," the title poem in his book, he writes:

I repeated your name each day

until snow covered the lawn

with its white leopard's breath,

and when it melted and spring came,

I knew you were gone.

Salcman estimates that he lost more than 70 relatives to the concentration camps. After the Nazis overran Czechoslovakia in 1939, both his parents escaped. Barely.

Salcman's mother, Edith, was in her teens when her relatives were rounded up and shoved aboard an Auschwitz-bound train. Picking up an empty pail, Edith pretended to be a milkmaid "feeding" the forced laborers. The girl's disguise was preserved when the men pretended to drink the imaginary milk.

Later, Edith changed her name and posed as a Christian, went to church and Salcman writes, "crossed herself as often as necessary."

In 1949, Edith, her husband, Arthur, and the 2 1/2 -year-old Michael caught the last train out of Prague before the Czech borders were closed.

The immigrant family settled in Brooklyn. In 1951, 5-year-old Michael collapsed into a puddle and couldn't stand up. The doctor who examined the boy looked him straight in the face and told the child that he had polio.

"I knew even then that he had enough respect for a little kid to tell me the truth," Salcman says. "It was that day that I decided to be a doctor."

Initially, he thought of becoming a heart surgeon.

"But I decided that the heart was just a stupid muscle," he says, "and that its only purpose was to feed the brain."

Salcman recovered, but gradually. Though he was ostracized by some of the kids, he was welcomed by "literary types." With his new friends, Salcman began writing poetry when he was in his teens.

His lifelong love of art was nourished by Edith Salcman, who took her precocious son on regular trips to New York's great museums.

In 1963, the then-17-year-old began a six-year program at Boston University that combined college and medical school. Salcman graduated first in his class in 1969, with a B.A. and M.D.

During Salcman's last year of medical school, he was set up on a blind date with an energetic, brown-haired former homecoming queen. Michael and Ilene Salcman wed in 1969, a mere four months after they met. (She is now chief marketing officer for a financial consulting firm.)

After stints at Columbia University and at the National Institutes of Health, Salcman began his academic career at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1976.

Liked being in control

For all that time, throughout medical school and his residency, Salcman had been writing poems and submitting them to small literary journals.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, the poems were rejected. So, for 10 years, Salcman stopped writing.

That decades-long inability to publish "was the most horrible, most painful, most arbitrary thing you can imagine," Salcman says.

"I was crushed. It's that super-sensitivity I was talking about. Finally, I stopped writing because Ilene got sick and tired of me getting upset whenever I got a rejection."

Besides, Salcman's medical career was becoming increasingly demanding. In 1984, at age 37, he had become Maryland's chairman of neurosurgery.

Two reporters for The Evening Sun, Jon Franklin and Alan Doelp, chronicled Salcman's surgical work in their 1983 book, Not Quite a Miracle. The book followed the surgeon as he operated on a teenage girl afflicted with a tumor on her pituitary gland.

Their writing portrayed Salcman as having an almost uncanny ability to mentally manipulate a complex visual image, in this case the brain and its component parts, which the doctor was operating on upside down.

"I loved doing pituitary surgery," he says. "It was a very elegant procedure, and you could often change people's lives just by surgery alone."

In 1991, Salcman was elected to the prestigious post of president of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He lectured around the world.

Salcman always had traveled fast, both literally and figuratively. His car now is a gray BMW Z4, a convertible that he drives with the top down - an interesting choice for a brain surgeon. But it also indicates Salcman's confidence that he can zip around any hazards looming in the roadway.

Most of the time, his reflexes guide him to safety. But, once they did not.

Salcman is a forceful personality, and he enjoys being in control. He can be demanding, and some of his staff members at the University of Maryland rebelled. He and the university hospital came to a settlement, and in 1991, he left.

"I liked being the visiting professor," he says. "I liked being the star brought in to other universities. That got to me eventually. Instead of traveling so much, I should have been taking care of politics at home."

Then he adds, almost wistfully: "I think I still have something to teach people about the brain."

After leaving the university hospital, he went into private practice. Though he later served for five years as chief of the neurological division for Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Salcman had exited the world of academia.

Driven to write

The urge to write never went away, despite the packed schedule. In 1987, Salcman began crafting poems again. By the mid-1990s, he was admitted to a summer writing workshop at Sarah Lawrence College, taught by the poet Thomas Lux.

"Tom is the greatest teacher of anything that I've ever had in my life," Salcman says. "He taught me the mechanics of writing."

Slowly, the rejection letters changed to acceptances. To date, more than 200 of Salcman's verses have been printed - a record that most poets can only envy.

Salcman has accomplished much in his life:

He has saved the lives of, by his estimate, more than 1,000 people.

He has written six medical textbooks and published nearly 200 scientific articles.

In addition to The Clock Made from Confetti, Salcman's fourth chapbook (or pamphlet) of poems is scheduled to be released this year by the Wisconsin-based Parallel Press.

That isn't even counting his numerous articles about modern art published in such journals as Urbanite, Neurosurgery and Creative Non-Fiction.

Yet, Salcman is haunted by his fear that, at age 60, he may have missed his chance to achieve a lasting artistic milestone.

"Poets peak young," he says. "I'm enough convinced of this theory that I've always worried about myself."

In his four decades of writing verse, Salcman has started many different poems titled "Obsession."

"But," he says, "I've never finished one."

mary.mccauley@baltsun.com

Michael Salcman

Born: Nov. 4, 1946, in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia

Residence: Baltimore

Occupations: Neurosurgeon, art collector, poet

Prominent posts: Director of the Division of Neurological Surgery of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, 1984-1991. Chief of Neurosurgery, Sinai Hospital, 1995-2000. President, College of Neurological Surgeons, 1991. President, board of trustees of Baltimore's Contemporary Museum, 2002-2005.

Publications: Nearly 200 scientific papers and six medical textbooks; one full book of poems, The Clock Made of Confetti; three poetry chapbooks: Plow Into Winter (2003); The Color That Advances (2003) and A Season Like This (2004). A fourth chapbook, Stones in Our Pockets, will be published later this year.

Personal: Wife, Ilene; son, Joshua; daughter, Dara

A Lamentation of Swans

Like immortal cells growing in a dish

the alien swans multiply beyond our wish

for silent beauty. And the buried day rises as a dream -

how to kill the mute swans its theme,

one Tchaikovsky never penned,

is now debated in shore side bars and fens,

by oystermen who lift their glasses

in sad farewell to black skimmers and underwater grasses;

they mourn the native tundra swan

and the least tern before it too is gone,

and if alien beauty must be trapped or shot

or poisoned, its nested eggs addled not

to hatch, they're willing to concede

how often beauty breeds dark necessity.

- By Michael Salcman

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