On a life of fearless writing

 

I've spent a lifetime writing: a diary I've kept everyday since January 1965, books, poetry, book reviews, criticism, and correspondence.  Why did I do so much writing? On one hand, I enjoy solitude and being creative. On the other hand, there were things that happened in my life that I understood better in the act of writing; writing helped me to understand something about life and expressing this in a poem was both to discover something new and to have a numinous experience.

    This writing I am talking about has to be fearless, the writer is going to a place that is marked with signs saying "No Trespassing", "Do Not Enter", and "Enter at Your Own Risk". The important things in life are not easy and they aren’t free, they are a lot of work. You may be afraid to write something down, or afraid to follow where your thinking is going, you may be inclined to censor your writing; just remember that no one else need ever read what you are writing, you can tear it up after you've written whatever you want to say, but you need to have courage and be fearless to do the writing. How could it be otherwise? Writing has to be a precise expression of what the soul has to say, what the soul perceives; this is more difficult than you might think.

    What I am saying will mean very little to most people, but this is not meant for most people, it is meant for poets. A poet wants to write an authentic poem, a poem that is authentic to what the poet wants to say, to be true to the poet's inner being, and this requires years of writing and rewriting poems. All of a poet's work can be seen as one long poem, it is the poem of one's life, continuous and unbroken. You don't just sit down one day and write something you call a poem and think that makes you a poet, there is a lot more to it than this. 

    Writing poetry is not an obsession or even a compulsion, it is that there is no alternative but to do the writing that presents itself to you; it is what one does and to do anything else is to deny the Call to do this work; if you deny the Call you have betrayed your life, betrayed your mission in life. Not even God is as important as your soul, you can live very nicely without God but if you betray your soul you will have no life at all, just confusion and denial. Don't worry, God will forgive you for not believing in Him, He doesn't need your belief, He doesn't even need you. To see life, the particulars of life, and to express them, is to communicate things of the soul and poetry is the voice of the soul. Writing is always a movement in the direction of wholeness and understanding, of creativity, of making something new. It is a triumph of formulating and expressing in an exact way the thing you want to write, it is the achievement of wholeness over division. So, at the basis of writing is finding wholeness, truth, and Oneness with life. That's how important writing is to a poet and why poets need to be fearless when writing poems.

William Carlos Williams: Experiment in Autobiography

From last summer's reading: in I Wanted to Write a Poem, The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958) William Carlos Williams discusses each of his many books with some additional commentary on his life. When he was sixteen or seventeen Williams had a cardiac event and during his convalescence he began to read and then write poetry. Towards the end of the book he writes: "Among the younger poets, I should like to pay tribute to Irving Layton, who seems to me the most accomplished writer of verse in Canada who has come to my attention in the past year." He also discusses his greatest work, Paterson, and complains about some negative reviews by Randall Jarrell and Marianne Moore... Poets have long memories. Do people still read Williams' fiction? Personally, it never interested me, but most fiction doesn't interest me.

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (10)

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

Marriage between a man and a woman—the expression of male and female energy—is a basic archetype of life. In the archetypal dimension we come close to universal laws that govern life. To deviate too far from the archetypes is to lose touch with what connects us to humanity, wisdom, and the eternal. It is also dangerous to be absorbed or possessed by an archetype, to lose the separateness of individuality and archetype.
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A number of years ago, out of curiosity, I became interested in the Holy Spirit. I read the bible—in several translations—for the first time. I made notes and studied what I was reading. I began by trying to remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer, which I had forgotten, and with some effort the words returned to me from my youth. I thought about each sentence of the Lord’s Prayer, it seemed incredible that I could have wandered as far from God as I had, because I felt very close to God as a child.
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The root meaning of the word “enthusiasm” is to be “filled with God.” To be “filled with God” is to have a spirited approach to life. Dis-spirited people drag themselves through life, they aren’t “filled with God.” To have lost our enthusiasm is to be dis-spirited at a very basic level of everyday life. Someone who is spiritually and emotionally depleted, has been dis-spirited. As a child I knew what it meant to feel “collapsed inside”—“The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, / My face turns green and pale,” as William Blake describes someone looking back on his unself-conscious youth. It was a struggle to survive the life that I was born to, but I created a new life, and I always affirmed life; this was accomplished, at least in part, by writing poems. The spiritual, for me, is nourished by and manifested in the poems I am writing.

Stephen Morrissey
2003 - 2008
Montreal, Canada

A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (9)

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

When I heard that a friend’s sister, living in New York City, was a “shaman,” I thought it was mildly humourous. Then, by chance, I read a transcript of one of her shamanic healing journeys. I found it fascinating. I said, “ I can do that.” It is not really “hard” to journey, but I also had years of foundational work before I could begin exploring shamanism. It is now clear to me that I began my shamanic work when I was a child and had experiences and listened to dreams that made a deep impression on me.
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The shamanic journey is not the product of imagination and it is not a guided meditation; it is also not “active imagination.” What you do on a journey is watch, observe, and later record what one experiences. It has nothing to do with influencing what happens on the journey, and it is not dreaming or lucid dreaming in which you attempt to control your dreams. The intentionality of the journey is the shaman’s, but the details of the journey are only discovered during the shamanic journey.
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When I read some of the astrological degree sets invented by other people, I knew that this was something I wanted to do and that I could do. Then Carolyn Joyce and I spent several weeks during which I dictated what I saw on shamanic journeys and we wrote The Aquarian Symbols (Coracle Press, Vancouver, Montreal, 2000). Each degree is a symbol; it is what was seen in each of 360 shamanic journeys. I did not know for which degree or sign I was journeying to write a symbol, this was all done without my being told this information; all I did was the journey and then report what was seen.
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The Aquarian Symbols are archetypal images, one for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac. The Aquarian Symbols were not channeled, but the result of 360 individual shamanic journeys. They are to be meditated upon. For each symbol I “flew” over Vancouver, the city where they were written, and descended where the archetypal image would be given to me. Nothing was decided by me or determined by me, or by anyone else. Sometimes I entered a tunnel and sped, on a roller coaster-like ride, to the inside of the earth. What was seen during the journey was then recorded.
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The language or imagery of the shamanic journey is made up of archetypes and symbols, both are found in the collective unconscious; however, what one sees during a shamanic journey is what is literally seen on the journey, not as archetypes, not as symbols, but as fact. The poet’s journey is not the same thing as the shaman’s journey, but there are some similarities.
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A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (8)

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

As a woman animates and brings to life a man’s potential, CZ has animated me to live more fully and deeply. She is a person of compassion and intelligence who has helped many people, including myself, fulfill their talent and destiny. She is a brilliant poet who has also worked as an editor and publisher. We have been together since we met in June, 1991; she brought love into my life and gave me a new and fuller life. I love her dearly and my life revolves around her. She is my life partner, my creative partner, my friend and partner in family affairs. All of my life I had wanted to find someone like her, and I thank God that I did find her.
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Family history is a quest that can take up years of one’s life, but eventually it returns us to our own life, more fulfilled and with a deeper appreciation of life. You don’t necessarily go on a quest knowing you are on one; it is something that gradually preoccupies much of one’s time. My quest was to find my ancestors, to list them genealogically, and to find information about them: who they are, their dates of birth and death, where they lived, and some facts about their lives. Writing poetry is not a quest, it is a calling; family history has been a quest.
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When I was a child I knew, intuitively, that the stories I heard my relatives tell about the family were important. I felt there was heroism to life, not the traditional heroism and bravery of the battlefield, but heroism involved in everyday life by everyday people. I felt that there was something of importance to remembering the past. I recorded the stories I heard about my relatives and ancestors. Even as a child I always felt that the real heroes of everyday life were average people, the ones who survive and who go about their lives with dignity. It is the ordinary people among us who I found to be of great interest.
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I often think about the ancestors. I work through all the generations of my family, beginning with the first family members to move to Montreal. My great great grandfather, Laurence Morrissey, moved from Ireland to New Brunswick, Canada in 1837 in the company of his parents (my great great great grandparents Patrick Morrissy and Mary Phelan) and his six siblings: John, Michael, Mary, and Patrick who were all older than Laurence, and Catherine, the youngest of the children. The whole family uprooted themselves from where they lived, possibly in Mullinahone, County Tipperary, and moved as a group to Canada. Patrick, Laurence’s father, was a saddler by profession and not a young man when he moved here; he may have been as old as fifty years. What caused them to move, whether by necessity or the desire to improve the material prospects of the family, isn’t known. I believe Laurence married within months of arriving in New Brunswick and a few years later he and his wife, Johannah Meany and their son, or perhaps two sons, moved to Montreal.
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I honour and respect the ancestors by remembering them. I am in a direct line of ancestors according to family dates of birth and death. I was born just days before the first day of the Celtic season of Beltane, on May 1st, which for the Celts was the first day of summer. Beltane, with Samhain, winter, is the time when the Otherworld is closest to our material world. Samhain, which begins on November 1st, is the first day of winter for the Celts, and is a time when the days grow shorter and the fabric between the material world and the world of the ancestors and spirit is at its thinnest. This is when the ancestors communicate with us the most, whether it is in dreams, or their physical presence.
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One November night I sat in a restaurant with some friends. After we ate a band played music. While the others listened I was filled with deeply moving memories of my father and later that night wrote a poem about the final days of his life, of his journey to a hospital in Boston where he died a few weeks later. The next day I discovered it was the forty-seventh anniversary of my father’s death. The ancestors visit us if we listen to them. On many occasions I have walked on the street and felt the presence of ancestors walking with me; I have felt them pressing against me when they have numbered in the hundreds.
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The work of writing poems, honouring the ancestors, the work of healing in poetry, all of this is given to me. I have really been very passive in life. My life was given to me, it was presented to me as a mission in which I am sometimes little more than an observer of what happens. This is the work that was given to me: writing poems, honouring the ancestors, giving time, care, and love to my family, and loving God.
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I love all of the ancestors, no matter how elevated or how lowly their social position when they were alive. Some of the ancestors are a daily presence in my life, as though they were physically present. I believe I have a connection, extending across my whole life, with the ancestors. I loved my grandmother, Edith Sweeney, who died one month short of her ninetieth birthday, on April 23, 1965, and who was buried the day before my fifteenth birthday in April 1965. My great grandmother, Mary Callaghan was born on my mother’s birthday, March 1st, and died in 1906 on my birthday, April 27. Mary Callaghan’s father died on my birthday, in 1905. My great great grandmother, Johannah Meany, died on April 26th, 1880. Her husband, my great great grandfather Laurence Morrissey, married Marie Emma Mercier, a year to the day after Johannah’s funeral, on April 29, 1881. Out of all the dozens of dates of family members’ births and deaths that I have recorded, these are some of the people I feel are the closest to me in my family history, all are in a direct line of family ancestors. I have in my own way and to the best of my ability honoured seven generations of family members.
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A Poet's Journey: Notes on Poetry and What it Means to be a Poet (7)

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

Reg Skinner was my mentor and friend for many years. Our initial connection was a shared interest in the writings of J. Krishnamurti, but we also discussed other things. From 1974, when I first met “RR” (Reginald Rice) Skinner, to the mid-1990s, when he died in his late eighties, we corresponded on an almost monthly basis; during this time I also visited RR at his home, first at “Boisville,” near Camberley, and then later at Felpham, near Bognor Regis, both in England. I heard RR’s life story in considerable detail, and I also learned something of spirituality, healing, dowsing, and bee keeping from him. It was not uncommon that we would sit for ten hours and he would talk about his life and what he called “things appertaining” which referred to a spiritual and psychological understanding life. Knowing RR has been a blessing in my life, one for which I am deeply grateful.

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Being a part of a community of poets is a wonderful thing, especially when you are young. In a group, it is not necessary to write poems that are similar to someone else’s poems; to be creative is to write from your own soul and inner being. The important thing is that poets in a community respect each other. My community, when I was young, was other young poets; later we were known collectively as The Vehicule Poets. There were other poets I knew as well, and all of my poet friends from when I was young have a special place in my heart.
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A community of poets includes the elder poets, people we respect for their dedication to writing and for the body of work they have created. It is the work of young poets to know the tradition they are working in and to respect the older poets. But older poets must also mentor younger poets. It is a wonderful experience to receive the “blessing” of the older poets we grew up reading; I have had this experience and it sustained me for many years—even now I am thankful for the kindness, affirmation, and teaching I received when I was young from poets who were older, wiser, and more mature than I was at the time. Louis Dudek and George Johnston were especially kind and helpful to me.
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Poets can be insurance salesmen, janitors, lawyers, teachers, unemployed, or unemployable and on welfare, but these are jobs of convenience or of necessity to survive. The commitment of a poet is to writing poems, and this requires vision, dedication, single-mindedness, and determination in order to do the work the poet was born to do.
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Soon after I married for the first time, I knew that the marriage was something to be endured. I lived a dis-spirited existence, not a life-affirming and expansive one, just as I had before the marriage. Then, in my thirties, I didn’t write much poetry at all and what I wrote I didn’t like; that was why I turned my attention to writing book reviews. Much of the poetry I managed to write reflected my spiritual emptiness and unhappiness. These poems were not an expression of the Temenos that is entered when the poet is in touch with Spirit. I am not blaming the marriage for this; I take responsibility for the mistakes I have made in my life and in my first marriage. I was dis-spirited before the marriage, and the marriage itself only emphasized my emotional and spiritual condition.
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In the 1990s, I wrote “The Shadow Trilogy” (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997), books that came from an awareness of the shadow aspect of the human soul. The shadow is an important archetype in Jungian psychology; it is made up of what we reject in ourselves and project onto other people. “Owning one’s shadow” refers to being aware of one’s dark side, being responsible for one’s psychology instead of projecting its negative aspects onto other people, and examining one’s life. Writing these three books was an important journey for me, it was a time when I tried to make sense of the first half of my life.
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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.

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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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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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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Vision in Poetry

It is a constant struggle to write from one’s vision
when there are so many people who oppose what one has to say.
It is a constant struggle to be true to one’s vision,
to be true to one’s self over a lifetime of writing.

It is a constant struggle
to be strong, strong in one’s vision,
not give up, not surrender, not lose one’s vision.
 
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I wrote the above on staying strong, not being deterred from one's poetic vision, after experiencing how pernicious this can be, when even people you thought were your friends end up not being friends at all...

The rowan tree tells us to embrace the future and our vision of life

Rowan trees in Vancouver

You don't see many rowan trees in Montreal but they are common in Vancouver. The abundance of the rowan berries and their deep orange colour make it a particularly visible tree, it stands out among all of the other trees. And it must have always stood out from other trees, it was important to the Celts who gave it added significance as a source of divination. The rowan also suggested to the Celts the presence of the divine in the mundane.

Often, when the unconscious mind makes itself heard, it is when we have passed through a significant time in one's life, a time of change, or insight, or struggle. This may happen when we become aware of messages from dreams, or some other experience occurs, a series of synchronistic experiences, a period of creativity, or an experience of the divine, of God communicating to us. Perhaps we are not aware of the significance of what is happening when it is happening, but it is clear later on that one has passed through a important event in one's life. This is what the rowan tree suggests to me when I place it in the context of what I have written and done this summer, it confirms to me the psychic importance of this summer.

Despite even my own expectations and idea of myself, I have always embraced the future, believed in the future and believed in going where life may take me. I may seem fairly conservative but that's my persona; in fact, I have not really lived a conservative life at all. I have had an introverted and mental life, a life of creativity and deeply felt emotions, a life of poetry, teaching, partnership with my wife, family, and a lifelong relationship with God. The rowan tree, whether fully grown on a residential street in Vancouver, or not much bigger than a shrub on Spanish Bank Beach also here in Vancouver, reminds me of this lesson in life: we need to embrace the future and speak our vision of life no matter how few people agree with us. This is what life is all about if you want to live fully.

Note on Poetry: Soul

                                                                It strikes me that so many

                                                                people writing poetry,

                                                                who claim to be poets,

                                                                lack the one essential

                                                                for all poets: it is

                                                                to have a poet’s soul.

The Great Reconfiguration

Taken while driving over the old Champlain Bridge

For some of us, there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life was reconfigured. Life was one thing and then, a moment later, it was something else. For some of us, this is how change occurs, not a slow progression but a sudden reconfiguration of everything that constituted our “life.” It may take years, even a lifetime, to understand this sudden, radical change; it may take years for the full consequences of this change--what I have termed the "Great Reconfiguration"-- to make itself known to us, but eventually it does become known.

I was a six year old child with two parents and a brother. We lived a middle-class life in a middle-class neighbourhood. Life was not perfect because of my father’s bad health, but it was, by 1950s standards, a “normal” life. Then, my father died on November 16, 1956, and my life as I knew it was over. All of the family dynamics changed. I was now a child whose father had died, a child in a one-parent home. I cannot impress on you too much the radical changes in my life that occurred because my father’s death. The whole family was affected by his death. It has affected my entire life and it has been the Great Reconfiguration of my life. It probably made me into the poet I am today, someone who is obsessive, filled with grief, regret, and failure, preoccupied with death, and always concerned with the spiritual side of life.

Silence fell on our house after my father died. His death was met with silence; he became a topic I always felt uncomfortable about and unable to discuss. I was ashamed that he had died. I was now different from all of my friends. I was never consoled in my child`s grief but met with silence; I was expected to deal with my grief by myself. This was not a home where we shared fond and loving memories of my father, it was a home in which the man who is my father was not mentioned. There were no trips to the cemetery to visit his grave, there was just silence, and it was decades before I visited where he is buried.

I will always remember lying in bed as a six year old child, praying to God that my father come home. I will always remember the little toy train engine, powered by batteries, my mother brought home for me from Boston when my father was in hospital there. Someone, perhaps a cousin, stepped on it almost as soon as I received it and broke the wheels; and then the engine, because it had a light on it, became a light I took to bed with me. It was, as I remember, when the toy train was given to me that my mother told me, only a day or a few days after my father had died, “It is better this way, it is better that he not suffer.” And that was the end of that.

No wonder, at university only thirteen years later, when I read William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” and Isak Dinesen’s wonderful short story “Sorrow Acre,” I found the single myth that was to preoccupy and define my life for many years. It was the biblical story of the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience. It was a myth, a psychological truth, that described my own great reconfiguration. It was the event that saw the beginning of the end of my childhood puer existence and the birth of my senex concerns; it was the event in which I was conceived as a poet and the person I am today, many years older. It was the birth of my soul as a poet.

The Great Reconfiguration affects every aspect of one’s life and unless you have undergone such a radical re-organization of your life, it is difficult to understand how life changing a single experience can be. This new organization of life variables created for me a life I probably would not have had if my father had not died. Almost every aspect—I believe every aspect—of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before his death. My life was made harder, I was given a challenge that most children do not receive at age six years. It was the challenge to understand the impermanence of life. To do this, I turned to writing poetry. Poetry was my calling in life, a calling that was presented to me by necessity, by the grief and experience of my father`s death. What my life would been like otherwise is impossible to say, that life that was denied is gone, never to have been. It is only with the perspective of age that I see these events as clearly as I now do; this life journey I am on became something different from what it could have been, it has made this journey difficult but certainly interesting.

A Visitor From the Future

Poster for poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery, and
showing interior of the gallery

One fall evening, back in the mid-1970s, at the old Véhicule Art Gallery on Ste. Catherine Street West, I was scheduled to give a reading of my poems. It was dark and rainy outside as I waited for an audience so I could begin. I remember the arrival of a bearded man as he came up the stairs from the street outside. He asked if “Stephen Morrissey” was giving a poetry reading and I remember speaking with him. He had just arrived in Montreal, he said, on a train from New York City and he had seen my name advertising the reading in the newspaper, and he had a few hours between the arrival of the train and his departure from Dorval Airport that same evening on a flight to Ireland. He wanted to know if I had any poems about being Irish and when I answered that I didn’t, he turned and left. I remember being annoyed by him, and thinking, as well, that whatever was implied by writing “Irish poems” didn’t interest me. I remember that his brief appearance at the reading, before it even began, caused a stir, as others also gathered around him when he entered.

The memory of this stranger has stayed with me all of these years; indeed, I see his visit in a different light now that I have spent the last ten or more years researching my Irish family history and writing what might be called “Irish Poems,” such as “The Colours of the Irish Flag” and “The Rock, A Short History of the Irish in Montreal.” I now think of this stranger as a visitor from my future, someone who came to remind me of what I would one day be writing. In retrospect I see that what I was writing back in the mid-1960s, and on through the years to what I am writing now, is a single continuum, although I was not conscious of this back then. I think of this visitor from the future not as someone who came to change what I was writing, but as someone reminding me of my themes in poetry: poems of family, memory, the ancestors, grief, and the knowledge that underlying everything we do is this journey we are on—this journey between being born and dying—that it is in every instance holy and divine.

A Poet's Journey

When you see your life as a journey, right away you've mythologized it, placed it in an experiential framework, a narrative with a beginning, middle, end--you've thought the way poets think.