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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