T.L. Morrisey

Thursday, March 29, 2018

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me




I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

Stephen Morrissey



I've been writing poems since I was fifteen years old, over a half century of writing. Writing poems was never a choice or a decision, it was a calling. Where does the "call" come from? It comes from the soul.
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The "call" to poetry came to me in a dream that told me to write down what had happened in my life or my life would be forgotten; waking after the dream I knew that to forget meant to lose my inner being. It is not just writing poetry that was a part of the call, it was also writing a journal and I began page one of my journal on January 14th, 1965; a few months later I began writing poems. Writing my journal and writing poems was a gift to me from the unconscious mind, it began with the dream.
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First you write the single poem and then a lot of poems, and then you gather these poems into a book, and then you have several books and that is one's body of work. If this is your calling then what you are doing is fulfilling your destiny.
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My poetry is concerned with soul making and it is also soul making itself; soul making is concerned with realizing one's potential as a person, with expressing the deeper meaning of one's life.
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The unconscious mind has a proclivity to wholeness. Whether in dreams or day dreams or writing poems or other forms of artistic creativity, we are driven to wholeness. That is the basis of my writing, when I speak of soul making I am also referring to wholeness, life affirmation, and healthy-mindedness.
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I write poems because writing has been a calling for me and one ignores a calling at risk to one's integrity as a human being. You can ignore many things and not damage your inner being but you can't ignore a calling; ignoring a calling is like having a limb amputated; no, it's worse than that, it's like amputating one of one's own limbs.
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I've been fairly passive in life but that may be because I am also introverted. It may also be because I knew all along what I wanted to do in life, and that was to write poems. Whatever poems I've written have been the result of having to write them; indeed, I had no choice but to write. I have been driven to write, but what drove me? What drove me was the urgency of finding meaning and wholeness in my life, of affirming life.
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Writing poems is what I've done with my life. It wasn't my choice since writing poems was a calling. It came to me, not me to it, and if the writing ended this afternoon I wouldn't care. Now I welcome my final years. I've been along for the journey, not in the driver's seat. I've been an observer and not much of an organizer or initiator of events. But I'm getting old and need a rest. In truth, I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me.


1 comment:

Steve Canty said...

Stephen, this is a touching, insightful, matter of fact lyrical account of the way creative writing becomes an essential part of one's daily experience of simply being alive, acknowledging its elemental necessity to you - and to other writers (and as one similarly moved - or afflicted, as the tone of your words seem to intimate with necessary honesty, as this process does not fit into the capital economy that is our shared context), your words are poignant and reassuring; and though you end with the hope to 'put this behind me', my guess is you will be doing this outside, as much as you have been doing this inside, of time. I will make the effort now to track down some of your work, as your writing is alive with delicacy and insight. Thank you.