Preface, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche

 

Preface

 

 

T

he Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche is a collection of essays and short statements on poetry and poetics. This book complements my previous book, A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019) also published by Ekstasis Editions. I’ve spent many years in the solitary work of writing poems and thinking about poetry; this book summarizes, explains, and enlarges on that subject. The book is divided into three sections; they are: ideas about poetry and writing poetry; a discussion of several Canadian poets, including F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Louis Dudek, and the poets I knew from the early days at Véhicule Art Gallery; and shamanism, psyche, or soul in poetry.

 

1          H.W. Garrod in his book, Poetry and the Criticism of Life (1931), writes that it was Seneca “who first said, what Ben Jonson and many others have said after him, that the critic of poetry must be himself a poet.” There is a tradition of poets writing about poetry; Louis Dudek’s writing is full of a contagious enthusiasm for poetry; Irving Layton wrote with bravado about the importance of poetry in Waiting for the Messiah (1985), and there are important statements on poetry in the prefaces of some of his books. Three other books of essays and commentaries on poetry need to be mentioned: co-edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967); An English Canadian Poetics (2009) edited by Robert Hogg; and On Poetry and Poets, Selected Essays of A.J.M. Smith (1977). I also recommend George Whalley’s extraordinary Poetic Process, an essay on poetics (1967).

 

2          In Canada we rarely celebrate our poets, I refer to poets of previous generations; even poets who died only five or ten years ago seem to have never existed judging by their absence from our cultural or daily life, or their being mentioned for their poetry, or their poetry being quoted. We don’t name bridges or airports after our poets, that’s reserved for dead politicians no matter how dubious their contribution to our national life. This collective amnesia does not augur well for our future; if we can't even remember a few dead poets who helped define what Canada means, then what kind of a country will we end up having?    

 

3          What are the perennial qualities of poetry? There is the dichotomy between two approaches to poetry, two types of poets, Apollonian and Dionysian, classical and romantic, formal and informal, cosmopolitan and nativist. No matter which group of poets one falls into one of the things that makes for great poetry is if the poet has found his or her authentic voice: has the poet written something that is true to their inner being and is insightful of the human condition; and the corollary of this: does the poem move us emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually? This is the type of poetry that interests me; these perennial qualities make for great poetry.

 

4          My approach to poetry has always been intuitive. Intuitive people know that intuition gives us knowing but without proof, while intellectual knowledge is substantive but often lacks the insight and originality of intuition. When intuition precedes intellectual understanding, as it does, then it is necessary to find evidence for one’s intuitions. Most of my insights into poetry—for instance, and I’m obviously not the first to say it, that poetry is the voice of the human soul—originated intuitively. In this book I am trying to substantiate my intuitive insights into poetry, this has helped me to better understand my thinking on poetry and, I hope, it is of interest to readers.

 

5          No real poet ever decided to be a poet, it doesn’t work that way; if it was a decision they probably didn’t last long writing poetry. I answered a call to do this work and now I ask, is there closure on this activity that has dominated my life? This book is closure for my writing about the meaning of poetry but, as for writing new poems, I don’t want to end up as some old poets do, and that is publishing perfectly written but meaningless poetry. I hope I will be long gone before that happens. Of course, there may still be a few poems to write, and a few odds and ends to write about poetry; there is no age for retirement for poets, there is just the slow act of disappearing.   

 

 

                                                                                                Stephen Morrissey

                                                                                                Montreal, Canada

                                                                                                16 November 2021

Morrissey, Stephen. The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche. Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2022.

Zoom book launch for Ekstasis Editions books

Here is the text I read at the Zoom online book launch for several of this years new Ekstasis Editions books, including my own The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche. This event was online on Sunday, 15 May 2022 at 2 p.m.

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Book Launch, Zoom, 15 May 2022, 2 p.m.

Place in Poetry

Thank you to Richard Olafson for publishing these books that are being launched today, and thank you to Endre Farkas and Carolyn-Marie Souaid for organizing this book launch.

This book, The Green Archetypal Fields of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche isn't poetry so maybe I should just say a few words to introduce the book.

This is my second book with Ekstasis Editions on poetics and memoir, on becoming a poet. The first book was  A Poet's Journey: On Poetry and what it Means to be a Poet. Thank you Richard, I really appreciate your work for poetry.

The background to the book, what created it, its reason for having been written, is that we live in a place, a city or a community, and this is a commitment to a specific geographical location, it is also a spiritual location. For me, this location, this place, is Montreal. In fact, the whole book refers to Montreal. Montreal is my psychic centre.

But think of place in the work of Charles Olson, it's Gloucester; or William Carlos Williams, it's Paterson; or Raymond Souster, it's Toronto; and for Louis Dudek and John Glassco, it's Montreal.

Montreal is where modern English Canadian poetry was born. If you were a poet in Canada you wanted to live, even for a short time, in Montreal. PK Page, Phyllis Webb, and many others lived here for a while, and this is the birth place in the 1920s of the Montreal Group of Poets at McGill University; they included FR Scott, AJM Smith, and John Glassco; also in Montreal were others, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and AM Klein.

This is where we came from and we haven't left.

I also wrote about the Vehicule Poets, "Starting Out from Vehicule Art Gallery", a history of our early days as poets, the Sunday afternoon readings, and that essay is in the book. Of course, the Vehicule Poets are in the line, the lineage, of the Montreal Group and other groups of poets that started here. That is our canonical lineage because all poetry is a part of a canon and a lineage of poets and poetry, however poetry changes it is always in the context of a lineage.

There is also our ancestral heritage in Montreal. For me, personally, my family have lived and worked here since 1840; not as long as my Quebecois and Quebecoise friends, and certainly not as long as the Indigenous people, but still a long time, and I have written about this as well, for instance the Morrissey Family History website.

Poets aren't nomads and we're not from nowhere. We're from a specific place, but this specificity of place is being lost in the economic and political globalism of the world, in every city you visit the condos are all the same, the stores and music we hear is the same, the politics is divided, and what is specific and local is being lost.

More specifically, my psychic centre, what made me the person I am today, is my family history but this is located and symbolized in my grandmother`s home on Girouard Avenue in Montreal`s West End. No one had money but family kept us together.

So place works on a number of different levels, it works as a geographical place, but it's also an ancestral and spiritual place, it's what formed us as people, it's the the birth of psyche.

That's how I became a poet, it began here in the City of Montreal.

Montreal is our home as poets, it's our centre as poets. 

Here is a short excerpt from The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry:

We are increasingly living in a deracinated world, in a global community, but a global community is an abstraction, an invention of committees and legislation and driven for profit and by people’s personal ambition; it is an intellectual construct, it is not born organically, a process that may take hundreds of years of human migration, political and military strategies, layers of cultural change, and spiritual vision. There is also a spirit of place; spirit of place manifests in the natural world, but it also includes our ancestral memory and family history and stories. If we are not careful we will soon be living in Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 world of geographical regions and the repression of creative individuality, not places of vibrant specificity that are containers of soul. A geographical place is specific and local, it is not abstract but concrete; globalism is an abstract concept that has little or no connection to community or place. Abstraction denies the specificity of place; place emphasizes the diverse world of things. Poetry requires community; it requires the diversity of a specific place.

Thank you all for being so patient and listening to this.

 

Poets All Types

                     

              

                                                            Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
                                                            The poets are coming to town.
                                                            Some in rags, some in jags,
                                                            And some in velvet gowns.

Poetry and art is our refuge from darkness.

It is not up to poets to affirm anything. What we need is negative thinking; don't accept what people say; don't believe anything; give up trying to be a somebody.

My life was so small as to almost not exist; I avoided people, lived quietly, and never felt at home anywhere: I had become a permanent resident of Inner Space.

The poets were magnanimous, no cause was too small if it included getting published or a reading; they were garrulous and self-conscious, they were almost imposing.

She was published in dozens of online zines; when the zines went offline it was as though she never existed.

They wanted to be poets but what they wrote lacked meaning and authenticity. They refused to enter Inner Space.

Hard days at the poetry factory when production exceeds demand.

We used to laugh at creative writing courses, now no one gets the joke.


When a great poet dies the world is a darker place, we grieve their loss, they are not forgotten by us.

A prick without talent is just a prick.


He won many awards for his poetry, but no one remembers the poems, no one even remembers what the awards were all about.

This poet said she was a star; she hung out at bars, she had affairs with other poets, she was a poet until she joined AA, then she quit poetry.

It's the Great Decline, the end of history, the end of time, the river polluted, the old abandoned.

The first people we threw out of Inner Space were the poets. Plato made us do it.


Among poets I am looking for good people, loving people, who put the other person first; that means as much to me as what they write.

It is a sad day when a friend dies and you realize you were writing with him in mind, he was your audience and now you've lost both a friend and your audience.

These poets were all bigger than life, I was smaller than life.

Years of life elegiac; years of life spent remembering.

They were aggressively ambitious, but ambition without talent and hard work isn't worth anything.

If they don't have the talent to be eccentric poets, they should just be nice people.

           

F.R. Scott's family grave at Mount Royal Cemetary

Percy Leggett forty-three years later

Here is more information on Percy Leggett. The original clipping (below), from June 1965, is a newspaper article on Percy's death; I cut the article from the Montreal Star when I read it, and kept the clipping all of these years.

There is a certain charisma and attractiveness to eccentrics like Percy Leggett, perhaps they have reduced life down to a measurable level of apprehension, deleted the randomess of life, and come up with their own diagnosis of life's suffering and how to live a happy life, but all of it slightly nuts and impossible to conform to in a middle class life. And yet, they also infleunce some of us, not an influence to do anything as much as to know that there is an alternate way to do things, you don't have to be at the mercy of life, of the demands of life, and so on. You can be yourself, be a poet, write your poems, think your own thoughts, go your own way, march to your own drummer...

Perhaps this is the legacy of someone like Percy Leggett. We have very few eccentrics in North America, we are burdened with conformity in a society that allows you to do whatever you want, but always under the strictures of political correctness. Be careful what you say, the thought police are listening.

At this point, I think also of Roy MacDonald, whose Paradoxical Logic I reviewed in the May 1984 issue of CVII. I remember knowing Roy in the late 1960s/early 1970s when he hung out at Sir George Williams University where I was a student at the time. Roy was a mystic, a Beatnik, a poet, and we all seemed to look up to Roy as this eccentric who had something wise to say. He had a beard down to his waist and sold posters of himself. Maybe he also had something to say; he impressed a lot of young people -- he was a mystic -- or was I the only one who was impressed by him, everyone else only humouring him? I wonder. I believe Roy also came from Hamilton, ON, and, I suppose, Roy is also no longer among the living. There aren't many today like Roy, or Percy Leggett.

Here is an article on Percy Leggett, forty-three years after his death in 1965. It is taken from http://sites.google.com/site/hamiltonartsandletters/pantlesspercy

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Pantless Percy and the Good Life

by Samuel Isaac Robinson

Forty three years ago Hamilton’s best-loved eccentric died. The Globe and Mail wrote that he was “as well known as any civic dignitary.” Once, when he threatened to abandon Hamilton and walk to Vancouver, a tug-of-war ensued between the mayors of the two cities. Both wanted him.

Percy Leggett was an institution in Hamilton, and a living monument to stubborn self-determination. From 1956 to 1965, he walked wintry streets in his distinctive and unchanging outfit of baggy, revealing shorts without underwear, black rubber boots without socks, and a flimsy jacket. Every school kid knew him. The Spectator reported his words and deeds on a regular basis. He had the mayor’s ear, whatever his complaint.

Like all visionaries, he had questioned and resolved, with elegant simplicity, the existential contradictions years before the rest of us had taken note of them. From the 1940’s onward, Percy Leggett questioned the foods we eat, our obsessive work habits, and the nature of the good and fulfilling life. He wanted to ponder the eternal questions in solitary peace, but his eccentricity only attracted attention. He constantly displayed an unintended flair for the theatrical.

The conflict between the Midtown Seniors’ Centre and Percy Leggett was a focus for most of his philosophies on The Good Life. The Midtown was a drop-in centre for senior citizens. Percy Leggett had visited the club daily for four years. He played sacred songs on the piano, sang old-time favourites, and danced joyfully. But in May of 1964, a group of ladies at the centre raised vocal objections to the revealing nature of Percy Leggett’s shorts. He was told by the centre’s director that he’d have to wear more modest garb or be banned forever.

“I refuse,” said Percy. “I will not dress to conform. I will expose this trend in the old people’s clubs. It’s a trend that says you must conform – or get out. I live right. Clothes confine. Let the air get at you, massage you. It stops you getting tender. No socks. My body breathes."

He went straight to the Mayor’s office to protest and he threatened to leave Hamilton’s stuffy attitudes behind and walk to Vancouver. Mayor Victor Copps quickly announced that he was ready to fight to keep long pants off Percy Leggett. After all, you just don’t go around covering up civic monuments. But before Vic Copps could go to battle on behalf of sartorial indecency, word of Percy Leggett had spread across the nation. Mayor Bill Rathie of Vancouver announced that he would personally welcome Percy Leggett to his city “with or without pants.”

Percy Leggett was far from being an exhibitionist and clowning eccentric. His claim that he’d strangle in a collar and tie was as much literal as metaphorical. He had lived the straight-laced, upright life. And he had lived it successfully. He found it unbearable. Several decades before the popular concern with stress, nutrition, physical fitness, and environmentalism, Leggett had diligently, and with some distress, developed a life devoted to a simple enjoyment of exercise, health, quiet study, and a passive relationship to the environment. He also worked hard at self-sufficiency, though he wasn’t always successful.

Born in London, England in 1892, the son of a carriage maker to King Edward VII, Percy Leggett came to Canada in 1911. he worked for the Grand Trunk Railway for seven years, rising to the rank of locomotive foreman. He then turned to plumbing and eventually became a business executive. The Second World War seems to have triggered in him a repugnance for technology and a wary discomfort with the pressures of mass society. “I got rid of that uniform – pinstriped suit and white shirt – ran away from the human race and let my face be (free) from the razor.” He had become a vegetarian under the influence of Bernard MacFadden, a popular and wildly successful health faddist in the early decades of the century. In 1946 Leggett left Montreal for the northern woods and began his apprenticeship in the unencumbered life of the hermit. It was far from easy, and for many years he periodically landed in trouble with the authorities.

In many ways he was not a successful hermit. He seems to have had a gregarious quality that always brought him back to town. Like many idealists he hated society but had an affection for people. In the mid to late ‘40’s, Percy lived around Kirkland Lake, Englehart and Charlton. Generally he built a flimsy shack in the woods and lived on a meagre diet of raw grains, nuts, and potatoes. But he seems to have been unmotivated, or perhaps unskilled, in pioneer ways. He never learned real self-sufficiency. One winter he stayed in his shack for a full month without getting out of bed, feeding himself with dried peas and grain. He believed that to move around would use up more energy and make him eat more of the food he was rationing until spring. In 1949, he collapsed from malnutrition while trying out a diet of potatoes and oatmeal. But most winters he was lured into the nearest town by the dream of a warm, secure jail cell. With a mixture of temperance, idealism and self-preservation, he’d hurl a brick through a liquor store window. “Breaking the windows was my protest against the liquor traffic, though I also wanted to get food and keep warm. They treated me very well at Haileybury jail.” When no brick was sent through the liquor store window one year, the police sought him out fearing he’d frozen to death.

He seems to have been full of wonder, and like a child easily distracted from practical matters. His shacks, according to one visitor, were “as full of holes as gorgonzola cheese and just as fragrant.” A wood stove fought valiantly against the north wind. “When it’s 40 below outside, it’s 20 below in here,” he said. During the summers, he worked for the CNR and CPR on their northern lines. Yet his shack was without even a tar paper cover. While he planned a garden that would give him real independence, he never in fact put any of his land under cultivation.

While living in Montreal, he had sung tenor in a church choir. He always kept a bundle of sheet music near at hand. During his life in the woods, passersby on the road were often startled to hear his clear voice raised in melodious praise as he sang an old hymn from deep in the forest.

Eventually, he drifted south spending one winter at Brantford Jail Farm, before making his triumphant entry into Hamilton in 1956. His nine years in Hamilton were happy in most respects. He perfected his simple diet of wheat hearts, oatmeal, raw fruit and vegetables. His days began at 5 a.m. with exercises in his rented room. After a brisk walk, he’d lift weights at the YMCA, run a mile around the indoor track, and float in the pool for more than an hour. Eventually, he’d arrive at the library’s main branch where he read most of the day. In his travels around Hamilton, he was accompanied by a gaggle of children, and adults leaned out of car windows to greet him. But he knew that he was considered crazy because of his flimsy clothing, his unkempt appearance, and his disdain for grinding work. “But they’re the crazy ones. And their lives get crazier all the time … they worship money … they rush …” Then with a sigh, he added, “I would have been happier in ancient Greece.” He was keenly aware of the weaknesses inherent in huge, highly organized social structures. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was favourite reading for him, and he often drew parallels between ancient civilizations and the contemporary world. During the evening, Percy visited the Midtown Seniors’ Centre. Aside from playing inspiring hymns on the piano, he’d hold forth on The Good Life, on opera, on the news of the day, on job schemes for the unemployed. His life was very full and he knew that he’d found a secret that few shared. He often said that he knew he’d live to be at least a hundred. “I’ve found the way to ‘ealth and ‘appiness,” he’d say in a Cockney accent. “Only thing’ll kill me before I’m a hundred will be a car. Almost as bad as people, no sense at all.”

But all the good exercises in the world, a healthy diet, serious reading, and hymn singing won’t stand up to the rejection of the human community. Even an idealistic and failed hermit seems to need a community’s warmth. Percy Leggett’s rejection by the Midtown Seniors’ Centre seemed to take the wind out of his sails. It threw him back on his belief that he could live outside the human circle. A group of business people, The Hamilton Men’s and Boy’s Wear Guild, with Mayor Copps’ intervention, persuaded Percy to don a new set of shorts. But he vowed never to return to the seniors’ centre. He began to visit the Wesley Centre, and he demonstrated against the city’s snow clearing inadequacies by clearing a full city block in one hour. But within the year, Percy Leggett announced he was leaving Hamilton, heading for the northern woods and The Good Life.

In ten days he walked a hundred miles to north of Orillia. He slept during the day and walked in the cool of the night, pushing his few possessions along in a wheeled shopping cart. On the night of June 10, 1965, Percy Leggett was struck by a car and killed. The driver, who had been drinking, was convicted of careless driving and fined $35.

Mayor Copps declared that the City of Hamilton would pay for a proper burial in Hamilton, if relatives were not located. Percy Leggett had become a civic institution. Two brothers and a nephew were found around Montreal. Percy was buried, in his shorts, in Orillia. Two of my teenage chums drove up to Orillia for the funeral. In a park before the burial they met a nine-year-old boy who’d never been to a funeral before and to whom Percy had given a nickel for an ice cream cone a few days before. The three of them, along with his three relatives, saw Percy buried. Eight bouquets of flowers adorned the casket, one from the Hamilton Downtown Association, one from family, and the rest from Hamilton friends.

Two years before his death, Percy Leggett sat on a curb in Hamilton after almost being run over by a bus. He composed this epitaph for himself:

Here I am, interred in this place,
Now twice removed from the human race,
I beat the germs, I beat the cold,
I’m immune to disease, the new, the old.
But alas I’ve lost, I’ve become a crumper,
Not to a virus, but a ruddy car bumper.

Poetry, D.H. Lawrence, & the Apocalypse

D.H. Lawrence writes the following in Apocalypse:

To get at the Apocalypse we have to appreciate the mental working of the pagan thinker or poet – pagan thinkers were necessarily poets – who starts with an image, sets the image in motion, and then takes up another image. The old Greeks were very fine image-thinkers, as the myths prove. Their images were wonderfully natural and harmonious. They followed the logic of action rather than of reason, and they had no moral axe to grind. But still they are nearer to us than the Orientals, whose image-thinking often followed no plan whatsoever, not even the sequence of action. We can see it in some of the Psalms, the flitting from image to image with no essential connections at all, but just the curious image-association. The Oriental loved that.

To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-off-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images. Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge.

The old method of the Apocalypse is to set forth the image, make a world, and then suddenly depart from this world in a cycle of time and movement and event, an epos; and then return again to a world not quite like the original one, but on another level. The ‘world’ is established on twelve: the number twelve is basic for an established cosmos. And the cycles move in sevens.

            --From Apocalypse, by D.H. Laurence, Penguin Books, 1974, p. 54-55