I thought to delay the answer, camouflage
it, by waiting until he asked another
question. But he prefaced the question with,
I know you”™re not God. This is commonly said
to me, second in frequency only to, What
would you do if it was your father, or wife,
et cetera? I accept this statement of my undeity
to be rhetorical, a mechanism to permit me
to be imprecise, to use phrases like it depends
upon many factors and a range of. But lately
I”™m increasingly tempted to say, How do you know
I”™m not God? What gives you such certainty?
Do you say this to your lawyer, accountant,
or mother-in-law? And if I”™m not God, then why
ask me a question that only God can answer?
”“Â “Not God,” by Marc J. Straus
The austere cancer-ward room behind him is a stage set, though the poet and playwright knows intimately the real thing from 35 years in practice. Facing a small rainy-Sunday audience at Luna Stage in Montclair, N.J., Dr. Marc J. Straus is hot on a stool under white stage lights. They dim. Â
“Oh, that”™s better, thanks,” says the semi-retired oncologist from Chappaqua, who, in an accomplished career spanning clinical medicine, academia and business, founded the former Access Medical Group in White Plains and MDX Med-Care Inc. in New Windsor. “I don”™t know how they do it up here.”
Two actors, playing a dying female patient and a male oncologist, have just performed a pas de deux of alternating voices in Straus”™s movingly eloquent play in verse, “Not God.” He fields questions from the audience about the play, its poetry and meaning, and a cancer doctor”™s work among the hopeful and the faithful, the dying and death.
Straus, who is also a collector of contemporary art and co-founder with his wife of the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, came to poetry as likely the most highly published oncologist in the Hudson Valley, with three textbooks on lung cancer and nearly 100 papers to his credit. “About 18 years ago, I had an idea to start writing poetry,” he says on stage. Straus, whose soft-spoken manner belies a highly competitive nature, was accepted into a poetry workshop at the 92nd  St. Y in Manhattan. “After two hours, I thought, OK, I”™m home. I”™m going to do this.”
His first workshop poem was written “in this voice of a little old lady who is really pissed off at her doctor,” he says. The audience laughs in recognition. “That began this journey. I”™ve continued without an interruption since then.”
Without interruption when away from the office or hospital, that is. He never writes at work. He never takes notes on the job, though the musings of the unnamed doctor in his play might suggest that.  Â
At the start, he would wake up wide-eyed at 2 in the morning and shake his wife to share his revelation: “I found a better word!” Those nights are past for the seasoned poet and his spouse.
Success as measured by poets came quickly for Straus. Within the year after his initiation into the lyrical art, his poems were accepted in major literary journals. He was invited to Yaddo, the writer”™s colony in Saratoga Springs, where William Carlos Williams was the only other versifying physician before him. “Not God” was his third book of poetry published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.
Straus has written novels too, though success has not come as easily in that literary field. “Poetry for me is the most fulfilling,” he says. “Every single word counts.”
“I don”™t write any of this consciously to solve anything” that arises in a cancer doctor”™s practice, he says on stage. “All of this is an unconscious process. The patient started talking one day” and the poet heard and wrote.
Straus applied for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship with a proposal to write a series of linked poems in the cancer patient”™s voice. Rejected, the pride-sore poet determined to forge ahead. Â
After writing a few of the patient”™s poems, “I knew it was supposed to be a play,” he says. “Here I had the voice of a patient in my head. Then I had the voice of the doctor in my head,” a voice that was not a mere echo of his own clinical experience. “What is really wonderful is to hear a professional translate it” for the stage.   Â
 “Not God” will close at Luna Stage on May 17. The doctor goes on writing for another stage.
“I”™m working on an opera,” he says.” It is called “Aphasia.” And yes, it is set in a hospital.
