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.