Review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

 

This review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: On Poetry, Poets, and Psyche by Michael Greenstein, was published in The Dalhousie Review, fall 2023.

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Stephen Morrissey, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: On Poetry, Poets, and Psyche.

Victoria:  Ekstasis, 2022, 141 pages, $24.95, ISBN 9781771714723

 

The cover of Stephen Morrissey’s The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry displays half of an old-fashioned typewriter, as if to suggest that this book represents half of a book that should be read in conjunction with the author’s earlier volume, A Poet’s Journey (also published by Ekstasis). Nevertheless, this volume is not only interesting and informative, but also quietly impassioned in its autobiographical insights.

                The book begins with two epigraphs addressed to the Muses—one from Bob Dylan, the other from William Blake. Dylan’s “Mother of Muses” (2020) contains the line “Forge my identity from the inside out,” while Blake’s “To the Muses” (1783) ends with “The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!” Morrissey’s Muses navigate between forging identity and forcing sound; his green archetypal field forges ahead and gains force with each entry on poetry and psyche. Two additional epigraphs show other influences. Keats’ statement in a letter of 1818 to John Taylor demonstrates a Romantic strain in Morrissey’s poetry and poetics: “That if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Allen Ginsberg’s advice, reported in the Montreal Star in 1967, also makes its way into Morrissey’s modernist thinking: “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting.” Through Dylan, Blake, Keats, and Ginsberg, Morrissey bares his soul, as Keats’ leaves enter Montreal’s fields.

                Indeed, most of these brief entries and essays were first published between 2008 and 2021 in Morrissey’s blog, Made in Montreal. The first entry, “Poetry Is a Calling,” shows the importance of vocation, avocation, and invocation. Part of the poetic calling may involve collage or the cut-up technique, which is in evidence in the structure of this book. The nine sections of “Beginning with Allen Ginsberg” reveal one form of the cut-up technique that ends with Ginsberg’s words, “scribble down your nakedness.” This soul baring and bearing runs throughout Morrissey’s memories, as he moves to Keats’ symbolism of trees and Hades: “For poets to mature it is necessary to visit the Underworld, as Persephone did; this is a journey into darkness and, if the poet has the courage, it is also a place of great creativity, of revealing what has been hidden or disguised.” Morrissey journeys through the darkness of his own soul, and he also journeys across Montreal to illuminate some of the city’s hidden poetry; both the ground and the sky inform his archetypal imagination.

                When he compares archetypes to the patterns iron filings make in a piece of glass when a magnet is place under the glass, we can see the connection between archetypes and the cut-up technique that is also part of the poet’s craft. William Burroughs is his source for this technique, which he applies to A. M. Klein’s poem, “The Mountain.” Cut-up involves coincidence, flashes of insight that produce metaphor, visual collages, randomness, jesting, and avoiding the imposition of the ego. (When Morrissey compares his own poem, “Heirloom,” to Klein’s “Heirloom,” he reveals his own self-effacement: “It was almost an embarrassment after reading Klein’s.”) In an “Addendum” at the end of the book he presents his version of “The Mountain,” which is significant not only for its cut-up but also for introducing Montreal and its poetry, which fills most of the book.

                Included in his list of Montreal poets are Irving Layton, John Glassco, Frank Scott, A. J. M. Smith, Louis Dudek, and Leo Kennedy. Morrissey gives us a sense of place and poetry with these Montreal poets, and a certain nostalgia lingers for those old days when he was mentored by Dudek at McGill. A younger generation of poets starts out from the Véhicule Art Gallery; these poets include Artie Gold, Ken Norris, and Endre Farkas, and their portraits around Sir George Williams University are as interesting as those of the earlier generation.

                Morrissey’s collage journeys between autobiographical details and universal truths. He describes his grandmother’s home at 2226 Girouard Avenue, which is his psychic centre, and contrasts it with soulless cities in a globalized world. He then shifts to poets, like Dante, who were sent into exile: “Travel, exile, pilgrimage, the desire to return home, all can be found in Homer, Chaucer, and Dante.” His discussions of the archetypal home show the influence of Jungian psychology on his personal and poetic development in a quest-collage.

                In the final section of the book, “Psyche,” we learn about shamanism. Having mentioned his two wives earlier in the book, he now recounts a woodcut given to him by his brother—“a shaman on the back of a grizzly.” The shaman is almost as big as the bear, “head turned so he stares directly at the viewer with an expression of surprise on his face, the shaman and the bear appearing from some unknown place, and always in the continuum of Inner Space.” He interprets the woodcut as an archetype for rebirth after the bear’s hibernation in a cave, a sign of the ursine cycle.

                This hypnagogic, shamanic experience gives rise to one of Morrissey’s poems: “a shaman on the back of a grizzly / the black fur a black streak / moving between the trees / then across an open grassy field.” The entire poem avoids punctuation in order to give a sense of the fluid motion between the grizzly/shaman and the observer, as well as the merging identities of all spectators. The black streak in the landscape contrasts with the white teeth later in the poem, just as the open field yields to the open mouth: “we see the white of his teeth / we see the shaman mouth open / we see him see us / we see them disappear back into the forest / they see us disappear back into the forest / we see him see us.” The final six parallelisms reinforce the streaking disappearance, the back of the grizzly doubles back to “back into the forest,” and the pronouns fuse the hypnagogic effect of our experience of shaman/grizzly. Like the archetypal cave, the mouth’s cavity and the mystery of the hidden forest engulf all of our psyches. From green archetypal field to the mysterious forest, the poet conveys the liminality and fugue states of nature and mankind.

                From this woodcut, the cut in the woods, and the cut-up technique, he returns to Girouard Avenue with its old claw foot bathtub and its subliminal connection to the grizzly’s claws that tug at memory and experience. This ancestral home arrives at an understanding of the quiet zone of old age, as Morrissey’s voice turns wistful and elegiac, especially when he recalls his father’s death, which signalled the “Great Reconfiguration” in his life. He sees faces in clouds (“pareidolia”) and invokes Rimbaud’s voyant, Rilke’s angel, and Lorca’s duende. He is in good company, as The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry establishes its own duende out of mountain, heirloom, and modernism.

                                                                                                —Michael Greenstein