A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (6)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

Two dreams when I was young had a profound affect on me; they changed my life. I have written of these dreams elsewhere (see the Preface, Mapping the Soul, New and Selected Poems 1978 – 1998, The Muses’ Company, Winnipeg, 1998) but I feel that they are worth repeating, if only as evidence of the profound influence that dreams can have in a person’s life if he or she accepts the importance of dreams as a message from the unconscious. In the first dream I am still living on Oxford Avenue, in our flat where we moved in 1954. I was perhaps nine or ten years old when I dreamed this. Two men from an orphanage came to take me away; they were waiting at the back door, standing on the grey wooden stairs leading to the lane below. They had come for me from the orphanage with a wooden cage in which I was to be removed. It is this scene of the two men, and that I am to be taken to the orphanage by them, that so frightened me.
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Another dream was also significant. When I was around twelve years old I dreamed that I was in a room that either didn’t have a door or I couldn’t see the door, but that wasn’t the important thing about the room. The windows of the room were covered with mud, although the room was still bright. I remember being in this room and having, when I woke, the crystal clear awareness that I had to write down what was happening in my life or it would all be forgotten, that remembering had great importance for me or I would lose my inner being—the soul that I was born with—and that I knew intuitively was important. The effect of this dream was profound; it has resonated throughout my life: it told me that I have to remember my life, that the alternative to remembering is confusion and confusion is loss of soul. I woke from this dream knowing that I was already forgetting the details of my life. The important thing lay in remembering and understanding my life; the alternative was to sink into confusion and inner darkness. As a child I took this life-changing dream seriously. That was when I began writing a diary, which I have continued writing everyday for over forty years.
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My dream of being taken to an orphanage as a child was a nightmare. It was a dream of having my spirit depleted. However, my spirit was not depleted, stolen, or isolated; I found strategies to survive. Even as a child I knew that I was not the failure the school system told me I was. I wrote poetry; I wrote a diary; I lived a fairly solitary life for a child; I hid from or avoided those who would destroy my spirit. I was not taken to the orphanage; I affirmed life, creativity, and love. I saved myself by lying low, by not bringing attention to myself. I adapted to situations that other people would not have put up with. I survived what others would have not survived. I was not lonely as a child; I was resigned to my life as I knew it. It did not take courage to survive; there was no alternative but survival. I also gained depth and affirmation of life by surviving as I did. I cultivated my inner life, which was also the time of my apprenticeship as a poet. I lived in a kind of suspended animation. My home life as a child was spent being alone much of the time; I felt grief over my father’s death; I attended the many funerals of aunts, uncles, and grandparents; and I felt shame that I had failed two grades at school.
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It is a mistake to think of my poetry as being negative because I have written about grief, death, and loss. The fact that I have written any poems at all is a celebration of life. My poems are in no way a denial of life. All of my work is an affirmation of life and the spiritual aspect of life. All of my work is a celebration of the Divine and a journey towards the Divine.
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My life has been an affirmation of the life force, the triumph of spirit, the survival of the individual despite what has been endured in life. My whole life has been engaged with God, talking to God, God speaking to me through dreams, being separated from God, and then the return to God in my late forties. God does not write or dictate my poems, but an awareness of the presence of God is the foundation on which my poems are written. Writing, for me, is an act of survival, of strength, of courage, and it has always been a part of my life’s journey. I have had in my life and in my writing a dialogue with God.
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There is the story of Scottish poets in the Western Highlands who, up to the seventeenth century, entered a “house of darkness” as part of their apprenticeship as poets. Alone, the poet entered a darkened room where there was no communication with the outside world; the room was windowless, it was a place of solitude necessary for composing poetry, a place also for memorizing poems and communing with the Otherworld. These apprentice poets were Celts from Scotland. It was a Celtic shamanic way to apprentice a poet, and it recognized the importance of dreams and the unconscious mind. When I heard of this Celtic way to initiate poets, I saw my dream of being enclosed in a room as an ancestral memory, a message from the Otherworld to follow my path of poetry. And I did.
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When I read that shamans believed that being “dis-spirited”—losing one’s spirit, the loss of spirit, the diminishment of spirit, the attack on spirit—is one of the causes of spiritual and psychological illness in people, I knew that they were right. By “spirit’ they refer to both our own spirit and to our connection with the Divine, with God. A single phrase, “feeling collapsed inside,” is a diagnosis of being dis-spirited, a condition that was a part of my life until I met CZ in my early forties.

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (5)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

The contradiction in writing is that you write in private, and then you allow others to read what you have written. I am a private person and yet I have also always been a “public” person. The circumstances of my life pulled me out of the crowd when I was a child; these circumstances included the death of my father and failing two grades at school. I write from the private depths of my being, and then I let go of what I have written, get it published, get up in front of a room full of people and read it to them.
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If (as I believe) poetry is the voice of the human soul, then healing and poetry are connected in a fundamental way. Confessional poetry, poetry of witness and Spirit, is a form of healing, by revelation, by catharsis, by discovery of inner truth. Poetry can be healing for the poet and it can also contribute to healing the person who reads poetry. We denigrate this aspect of poetry when we call it “therapy.”
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The poet—who is also the wounded healer—brings psychological and spiritual depth to his work. It is the work of the poet to bring the unconscious to consciousness, to be a midwife to consciousness. Poetry is not therapy, it is poetry, but I believe that some emotional and spiritual healing can be a by-product of poetry. I refer here to both reading someone else’s poems and writing one’s own.
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Good poetry does not moralize, but there is a moral dimension at the very foundation of all poetry and literature. All great poetry, all great art, has a moral dimension grounded in the eternal and universal. It is the nature of the unconscious mind to seek wholeness out of psychic fragmentation, and to assert a moral response to life situations. Morality, what is good and what is bad, is inherent in the human psyche. Poetry, like all great art, has an underlying affirmation of morality.

Emile Nelligan's second childhood home, near Carre St-Louis, still on Laval Avenue



Here I am in front of Emile Nelligan's home on Laval Avenue in the Plateau, April 2011.
Nelligan is one of our greatest Canadian poets.

From Maud Bodkin

Maud Bodkin writes,

When a great poet uses the stories that have taken shape in the fantasy of the community, it is not his individual sensibility alone that he objectifies. Responding with unusual sensitiveness to the words and images which already express the emotional experience of the community, the poet arranges these so as to utilize to the full their evocative power. Thus he attains for himself vision and possession of the experience engendered between his own soul and the life around him, and communicates that experience at once individual and collective, to others, so far as they can respond adequately to the words and images he uses.

We see, then, why, if we wish to contemplate the emotional patterns hidden in our individual lives, we may study them in the mirror of our spontaneous actions, so far as we can recall them, or in dreams and in the flow of waking fantasy; but if we would contemplate the archetypal patterns that we have in common with men of past generations, we do well to study them in the experience communicated by the great poetry that has continued to stir emotional response from age to age.

Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: psychological studies of imagination; Vintage Books, 1958, pages 7-8. First published in 1934

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (4)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

My father died in 1956 and my mother remarried in 1962; then we moved to Montclair Avenue, about a mile west of our old home on Oxford Avenue in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. I was never happy living on Montclair, it was for me a place that was emotionally barren, a place where my stepfather was sick and then died, a place that has few happy memories for me. It was and always will be a bleak house, cold and Dickensian. My stepfather, Graham Nichols, had a terrific sense of humour and was always very good to me; but his last three years were spent in hospitals and convalescent homes, his health deteriorating. I spent a lot of time, from 1966 to 1969 when he died, visiting him in these places with my mother.
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In 1963, when I was thirteen years old, I had my tonsils removed at the Montreal Children’s Hospital; afterwards, I typed a one-page account of my time in the hospital, this was my first “diary.” I began keeping a diary on a daily basis in January 1965. I have never censored my writing. My purpose was to get things written down as closely as I can remember them. I am not saying that there aren’t different versions to the same event, different ways of looking at the same event, but what I write is faithful to the way I have experienced and perceived things at the time of writing. I never intended to show what I had written in my diaries to anyone, it was always something I did for its own sake. The act of writing is what is important and the one rule that I have followed in all of my work—in poetry and prose—is to never censor what I am writing.
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Poetry is the voice of the human soul, speaking across time and distance. Poetry, whether written yesterday or thousands of years ago, is an expression of some aspect of the inner life and journey of the poet. A poem is a meditation and we know when we are in the presence of real poetry because we can feel a quality of spirit and soul communicating to us. My test for poetry has always been: does it make me want to write poetry? If so, it has inspired me, returned me to the spiritual dimension.
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Writing a poem completes a meditation. It is possible to find the resolution to inner conflict by writing. In the act of writing it is possible to have an experience of catharsis, numinosity, and self-transcendence. It is possible to discover and find inner peace and compassion.
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Over a three-day period in late April 1977 I wrote a long poem, “Divisions”. I wrote about things that had deep emotional meaning in my life: mostly to do with my father’s death and my failing at school. I had married the previous summer, in August 1976, and the wedding was immediately followed by marital turmoil. Writing “Divisions” was a catharsis, a purging of emotions; it is a poem of witness, of confession, of what I had seen and experienced. I tried to write the poem many times before, but when I wrote “Divisions” the form of the poem was also important; form is the container of content. Form and content must work together, must be congruent for the poem to work. This is part of the process of finding one’s voice in poetry, of finding a voice that speaks with authority and clarity and is true to one’s inner being. I accomplished this in “Divisions”.
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In my late thirties my first marriage ended in divorce. Despite the unhappiness of the marriage, I was still devastated by the divorce. My old life, as I knew it, was finished. While the marriage was unhappy, I loved my son and I wanted to be with him. Eventually, however, my wife and I agreed on getting a divorce and sharing custody of our son. Still, in the days and weeks that followed the separation, I felt physically as though I had been dragged across a rocky field by wild horses. I remember lying down in a country field and crying out “God help me, God help me.” For astrologers this was a Pluto transit over my ascendant and it lasted about three years. During this time my thirteen-year marriage ended, we had a cult murder next door, and several houses in our small rural community burned down. It was the beginning of the elimination of my life as I had known it. It was my descent into Hades.
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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

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (3)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was concerned with experimentation in my writing. However, even then I was still concerned with the poet as witness, writing from a Surrealistic poetic sensibility, writing that is mostly narrative, and an approach to writing that is “shamanic.”
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The experimental poetry that preoccupied my writing from age eighteen to my mid-twenties was an attempt to circumvent the ego. It was an attempt to write original poems by eliminating the ego’s presence; to enter an oceanic, mystical, non-ego state of mind by either entering a trance state, or by doing experiments in randomness in which the ego couldn’t intervene. That was my motive in experimenting in writing, that was my intuitive approach to writing poetry; it was never to be avant-garde, never to be innovative or daring, never to be cutting-edge, never to be popular. When it didn’t work using the experimental methods I was trying, I dropped it. My concerns in poetry have never been the concerns of most other poets who were experimental or innovative in their work.
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I had two premises on which my early poetry was based. I wondered if experimentation in poetry, mostly in the way of randomness, could produce new and original poems, and I also wondered if I could write from an altered state of consciousness. These experiments included using William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique in which an original text is cut into pieces with a pair of scissors and then reassembled randomly, producing a text that juxtaposes the original words and phrases in a new way. I experimented in automatic writing and other experiments I thought would circumvent the ego. I was also interested in John Cage’s work, sound or performance poetry, simultaneous readings of different texts, and concrete or visual poetry. I was interested in the Dadaists, the Surrealists, concrete and sound poetry. Eventually, I began to realize that these experiments, while interesting, did not address my concerns in writing or produce the desired results.
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My experiments in poetry were part of my apprenticeship as a poet. In my early writing I was attempting to move away from the conditioned ego and I thought I could do this by altering my consciousness. In retrospect, I can see that these experiments are evidence that the inner psychological or spiritual being has always been central to my work as a poet from when I began to write poetry to the present.
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Champlain Bridge

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (2)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

Poetry, in my experience, is written in a moment of numinosity. True poems, real poems, are easy to recognize. My test of poetry has always been that when hearing or reading someone else’s poems, am I moved to want to write a poem of my own? If I am, then the poem is a source of inspiration for me. Inspiration means that the poem is inspiring, it breathes Spirit into the reader. The experience of writing poems is life affirming and it is always exciting to begin writing a new poem. Of course, it is a subjective test, but poems can always be analysed objectively and a critical and intellectual criticism of the poem formulated later.
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What is the nature of writing poetry? For me, writing poetry has always been a way to find order and understanding in my life, a life that was not empowered and that was sometimes dis-spirited. I discovered that writing poems empowered me, returned me to Spirit, and gave me an experience that I have not been able to find in any other activity.
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“Inspired” writing seems to have no ego involved in the writing and afterwards there is no ego-attachment to what has been written. This is writing from Spirit; the writing feels as though it has been dictated and this in no way denigrates the writer’s talent or hard work to produce a written text. Spirit communicates to us in our dreams and in shamanic journeys; writing poems also opens the door to Spirit.
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When I was in university I read Isak Dinesen’s short story, “Sorrow Acre.” This story opened to me the mythological dimension of literature. It gave me an approach to textual explication, literary criticism, and understanding literature. I remember being touched very deeply by the experience of reading this story. It was an epiphanous experience, just as years before reading Steinbeck influenced me in a similar way. I also read the work of many poets, including William Blake and Walt Whitman; however, it was in reading Isak Dinesen’s “Sorrow Acre”—then learning about the Garden Myth and mythology as psychological truth—that I learned my critical approach to literature.
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When I read Allen Ginsberg’s statement, in a newspaper article in 1967—“Scribble down your nakedness because it is the nakedness of the soul that people are really interested in”—I knew that this was my ars poetica and is basic to all of the poems I have written.
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One of the first long poems I wrote (I was about eighteen years old) is entitled “Tumour City,” and it is about my stepfather’s long illness. I began my writing career as a confessional poet, a poet of truth and revelation; my earliest poems were poems of witness, and I have always had a deep commitment to exploring the inner psychological being. The aim of the contemporary poet, in my opinion, is to write a poetry of witness, which includes catharsis, healing, and redemption; the aim is the diminishment of the ego, not its enlargement.
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Home of Emile Nelligan on Laval Avenue in the Plateau (one)

Here is the home of the Quebec-born poet Emile Nelligan.
The spoken-word poet Ian Ferrier and his family live there today.

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (1)

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, 
Ekstasis Editions, 2019

My essay,  A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet, was originally published online in Poetry Quebec. This is the one of the versions of this essay; the final version can be found in

A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet,  Ekstasis Editions, 2019.
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A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet

My life long journey is writing poetry. The poet’s journey is a calling, a mission, a commitment to creating a body of creative work; it is at the core of the poet’s inner being. Being a poet is central to everything the poet does. If the poet is a person of spirit, then poetry is also an aspect of a life awake to the voice of the unconscious mind and an intimate conversation with the Divine. Every poet’s journey is different and unique to the individual poet, but all poets have the same mission: to write their poems and express something of their vision of life.
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I was born at the Montreal General Hospital at 6:23 p.m. on April 27, 1950. This was when the Montreal General was called The Western Hospital and was located in what is now the Montreal Children’s Hospital, near Atwater and Ste. Catherine Street, below Cabot Park, in downtown Montreal. It is a half block away from the old Montreal Forum, the former home of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, and a bus terminus across the street from the Forum.
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Some of the factors that defined my existence include my parents, my brother, my extended family, my race, social class, genetic makeup, physical constitution, the historical time in which I was born, and my own free will. World War Two had ended five years before I was born and we were entering the decade of the 1950s. As well, astrologically, I was born with the sun in Taurus; the moon in Virgo; and my ascendant in Scorpio.
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When I was about fourteen years old—sitting in Miss Poole’s English literature class at Monkland’s High School in Montreal—John Steinbeck’s novella The Red Pony made a deep and lasting impression on me. In this book, Steinbeck describes one of his characters as feeling “collapsed inside.” This phrase from Steinbeck was my first memorable and profound literary experience. I understood Steinbeck’s description right away because at times I, too, felt “collapsed inside.” I recognized what he described as something I had experienced in life. This phrase opened several doors to my thinking. One door was to the power of literature—indeed, to the power of a single phrase—to communicate experiences or nuances of feelings that were familiar and moving to me. This made literature an experience that I was eager to repeat by writing poems of my own and by reading the work of other writers. The other door that opened was to psychological and spiritual truth; Steinbeck’s phrase identified how I felt in life and became so much a part of my reflection on my life’s journey that I am quoting from him over forty years later. I believe that this phrase from Steinbeck’s story also contributed to opening the door to my becoming a poet of confession and witness. I wanted to do in my poetry what Steinbeck did for me in this single phrase of his novella: to accurately describe in words an emotional state that I had experienced and to find order in the confusion of my inner being by describing it in words.
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Champlain Bridge

The Great Year: The Age of Aquarius, c. 2000 - 4000 A.D.

The Age of Aquarius


(c. 2000 - 4000 A.D.)

the world felt itself
at the beginning
of a great change
            --W.B. Yeats

Odysseus took out
Cyclopes' single eye
and for his deed
betrayed himself to louts
and thugs,
ten years in exile and travail.
Is this the dawning
of the Age of Aquarius?
We know the future
less well than ourselves,
ourselves hardly at all.
Like Odysseus we search for home:
waking on board ship to waves
slapping the bow and stern;
moonlight is silver
across foreign waters'
surface. Written on the ship
or starship
the name "Aquarius".
We think of brave Odysseus then
and know the sea,
know the stars and space
calling us with celestial music,
sounds we hear
late at night, when
darkness enfolds us in mystery.
In each port the gurus and gods
have gone, no more Christs
or Buddhas, only fanatics,
eyes on fire with millennial fever.
Still, wherever a harbour or farm
exists we find a home--
this awakens nostalgia
for the homes we had,
exiles and outsiders
on the earth.
Our world is ancient
as giant turtles
or redwood trees,
where electric current
is the new river of life and blood,
making the earth one port,
one living being
in cosmic outer space

The Great Year: The Age of Pisces, c. 100 B.C. - 2000 A.D.

The Age of Pisces

(c. 100 B.C. - 2000 A.D.)

Fish surrounded me
when I was a child,
even my mother's arms felt
wet and cold; I could taste
salt on my lips
and lay with eyes closed
and knew the world
was an alien place.
I was surrounded by fish
all of them with
faces resembling
mother, father,
wife, mother-in-law,
they were sharks, piranha,
salmon, cod, pickerel;
they swam
upstream in my veins
finding a pool of warm
liquid in my heart
where they flung themselves
violently--
what heartache they caused!
At night I prayed
to God, as though this life
would never end,
my prayers were
the sound of water running
in a river until
giant boulders
are worn smooth. Soon
I, too, went to sea
and became a fisherman;
in my small cabin
cluttered with books,
a copy of the Vinland
Map spread across
my desk, and over my bed
was an icon of Christ
in whose arms
I rested; His eyes
followed me
as I moved from one
corner of my cabin
to the next, sometimes
His lips moved
shaping something
resembling a smile,
and I could hear Him
speak, in ancient Aramaic,
words I could not
understand;
I threw sardines
to a school
of dolphins
that swam beside
my ship, then
caressed their sides,
their eyes filled
with compassion.
The sea
is a cathedral
whose ceiling
is the stars
and whose floor
the blue water--
sun or moon reflected
it is a mosaic
of silver tiles,
the kind seen
in Roman palaces,
dolphins frozen
in the ceramic waves.

A "Stop" sign ("Arret") becomes "Art" on Park Avenue

The Great Year: The Age of Aries, c. 2400 - 100 B.C.

The Age of Aries

(c. 2400 B.C. - 100 B.C.)

The moon
blood red,
not with
harvest, but
like the earth,
with blood;
peaceful men
became warriors:
battering rams
at the gates.
In the night sky
Mars is near
the horizon,
the same sky
on land
as on the sea
where Odysseus
sailed;
someone asks,
"how could the goddess
not depart?"
Clouds
gathered
across the moon,
only a white circle
distant
almost disappeared
from the sky--
the sun, too,
is hidden
and everywhere
men leave home
to wander
and impose
their will.