T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Review: The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche by Stephen Morrissey

                                 


Published on the website of the League of Canadian Poets, July 13, 2022

Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine

Poetry is the soul’s DNA; poetry is the soul’s map.

                                               – Stephen Morrissey

 

The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche by Stephen Morrissey, Ekstasis Editions, 2022

 

In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets and psyche, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey draws upon and revisits a lifetime of creative and critical writing.

A member of Montreal’s “Vehicule Poets” in the 1970s and the author of nine published books of poetry, in his new book Morrissey traces the evolution of, and influences on, Canadian modern poetry with a focus on the “Montreal Group” and the “Vehicule” poets.  A complement to his previous book A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019), The Green Archetypal Field functions as a master class on poetry and poetics.

Why have once prominent and critically praised Canadian poets such as A.J.M. Smith fallen into obscurity? he asks. What happens when a country loses its collective memory?  Should the definition of what constitutes a “major poet” be focused less on the volume and more on the quality of the work – particularly in the case of exceptional poets who may, for one reason or another, have produced a limited number of poems?

Morrissey reflects on a time when older, established poets such as Irving Layton, F.R. Scott and Louis Dudek mentored and nurtured younger poets: “The older poets in Montreal created an environment in which to be a poet was a possibility, not something alien and foreign,” he writes.  “We didn’t have to look to England or the United States for what it meant to be a poet.  Established poets lived among us, we saw them on the streets where we lived, we read their poems in school, and we read reviews of their books published in local newspapers.”

Louis Dudek, for example, was not only Morrissey’s teacher when the latter was a graduate student at McGill, he was also a mentor and a friend. “He made me feel that the life of a poet was the only one worth living,” Morrissey recalls.  He writes movingly of the great importance to him of a meeting he had with Dudek in 1975:

“He read some of my poems, which he liked very much.  He gave me something that afternoon that only an older poet can give to a younger poet: he gave me confirmation that I was a poet.  I left that meeting feeling that I had nothing to worry about, just keep writing and my life as a poet would unfold.  And that’s what I did.”  (Dudek went on to write the introduction to Morrissey’s first book of poetry, The Trees of Knowing, in 1978).

In The Green Archetypal Field, Stephen Morrissey traces the origin of his becoming a poet back to the single most significant event of his life – the death of his father (following unsuccessful heart surgery in Boston), when Morrisey was six years old.  Suddenly thrust into the role of a “latchkey child” in a single-parent household in which his father was never mentioned, Morrissey’s profound grief and loss went unaddressed, and was therefore unabated.

“For some of us there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life is reconfigured,” he writes in a chapter entitled The Great Reconfiguration. “Life is one thing, and then, a moment later it is something else… Almost every aspect – I believe every aspect – of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before my father’s death.”

Forced at a young age to confront the “impermanence and insecurity” of life, it was only as a result of beginning to write poetry in his teens that Morrissey found a way of both processing and articulating his unresolved grief and trauma.  Although he didn’t know it at the time, the course of his future life as a poet had been set.  Poetry, he points out, is a calling. “No real poet ever decided to be a poet, it doesn’t work that way.”

Morrissey’s calling to write ‘confessional poetry’ specifically, was bolstered as a result of reading an interview with the American poet Allan Ginsberg, which was published in The Montreal Star in 1967.  “Scribble down your nakedness,” Ginsberg advised. “Be prepared to stand naked, because most often it is this nakedness that the reader finds most interesting.”

Although writing confessional poetry often necessitates what Morrissey calls “a journey into darkness”, he believes that “if the poet has the courage, it is also a place of great creativity, of revealing what has been hidden or disguised… [of] meeting one’s shadow, the rejected and dark aspect of our inner being; it is a journey to selfhood.”  Ideally, that journey will lead towards “wholeness.”

Central to his life and his work is Stephen Morrissey’s sense of himself as a Montreal poet – as opposed to a poet from any other place.

“Poetry returns us to place; poetry explores place, it extols the humanity of place over the anonymity of the contemporary and soulless built environment,” he writes. “Without identifying with a specific place there is a levelling off and diminishment of what makes us human; there is the emergence, as we see in the world today, of a dehumanized global society.”

Fifty years of reading, thinking about, and writing poetry have convinced Stephen Morrissey that “We go to poetry with nothing to say, or we go to poetry with something to say that is not necessarily what we end up saying, but in either case we find our voice, we find an authentic expression of what the soul wants to say, and this is poetry.”

June 6, 2022

 

About the reviewer:  A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine currently lives in Ottawa.  She is the co-author, with Ian Browness, of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life James Coristine (2009).

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Preface, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche

 




Preface

 

 

T

he Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche is a collection of essays and short statements on poetry and poetics. This book complements my previous book, A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019) also published by Ekstasis Editions. I’ve spent many years in the solitary work of writing poems and thinking about poetry; this book summarizes, explains, and enlarges on that subject. The book is divided into three sections; they are: ideas about poetry and writing poetry; a discussion of several Canadian poets, including F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Louis Dudek, and the poets I knew from the early days at VĂ©hicule Art Gallery; and shamanism, psyche, or soul in poetry.

 

1          H.W. Garrod in his book, Poetry and the Criticism of Life (1931), writes that it was Seneca “who first said, what Ben Jonson and many others have said after him, that the critic of poetry must be himself a poet.” There is a tradition of poets writing about poetry; Louis Dudek’s writing is full of a contagious enthusiasm for poetry; Irving Layton wrote with bravado about the importance of poetry in Waiting for the Messiah (1985), and there are important statements on poetry in the prefaces of some of his books. Three other books of essays and commentaries on poetry need to be mentioned: co-edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967); An English Canadian Poetics (2009) edited by Robert Hogg; and On Poetry and Poets, Selected Essays of A.J.M. Smith (1977). I also recommend George Whalley’s extraordinary Poetic Process, an essay on poetics (1967).

 

2          In Canada we rarely celebrate our poets, I refer to poets of previous generations; even poets who died only five or ten years ago seem to have never existed judging by their absence from our cultural or daily life, or their being mentioned for their poetry, or their poetry being quoted. We don’t name bridges or airports after our poets, that’s reserved for dead politicians no matter how dubious their contribution to our national life. This collective amnesia does not augur well for our future; if we can't even remember a few dead poets who helped define what Canada means, then what kind of a country will we end up having?    

 

3          What are the perennial qualities of poetry? There is the dichotomy between two approaches to poetry, two types of poets, Apollonian and Dionysian, classical and romantic, formal and informal, cosmopolitan and nativist. No matter which group of poets one falls into one of the things that makes for great poetry is if the poet has found his or her authentic voice: has the poet written something that is true to their inner being and is insightful of the human condition; and the corollary of this: does the poem move us emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually? This is the type of poetry that interests me; these perennial qualities make for great poetry.

 

4          My approach to poetry has always been intuitive. Intuitive people know that intuition gives us knowing but without proof, while intellectual knowledge is substantive but often lacks the insight and originality of intuition. When intuition precedes intellectual understanding, as it does, then it is necessary to find evidence for ones intuitions. Most of my insights into poetry—for instance, and Im obviously not the first to say it, that poetry is the voice of the human soul—originated intuitively. In this book I am trying to substantiate my intuitive insights into poetry, this has helped me to better understand my thinking on poetry and, I hope, it is of interest to readers.

 

5          No real poet ever decided to be a poet, it doesn’t work that way; if it was a decision they probably didn’t last long writing poetry. I answered a call to do this work and now I ask, is there closure on this activity that has dominated my life? This book is closure for my writing about the meaning of poetry but, as for writing new poems, I don’t want to end up as some old poets do, and that is publishing perfectly written but meaningless poetry. I hope I will be long gone before that happens. Of course, there may still be a few poems to write, and a few odds and ends to write about poetry; there is no age for retirement for poets, there is just the slow act of disappearing.   

 

 

                                                                                                Stephen Morrissey

                                                                                                Montreal, Canada

                                                                                                16 November 2021


Morrissey, Stephen. The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche. Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2022.

Friday, June 24, 2011

From Maud Bodkin




Maud Bodkin writes,

When a great poet uses the stories that have taken shape in the fantasy of the community, it is not his individual sensibility alone that he objectifies. Responding with unusual sensitiveness to the words and images which already express the emotional experience of the community, the poet arranges these so as to utilize to the full their evocative power. Thus he attains for himself vision and possession of the experience engendered between his own soul and the life around him, and communicates that experience at once individual and collective, to others, so far as they can respond adequately to the words and images he uses.

We see, then, why, if we wish to contemplate the emotional patterns hidden in our individual lives, we may study them in the mirror of our spontaneous actions, so far as we can recall them, or in dreams and in the flow of waking fantasy; but if we would contemplate the archetypal patterns that we have in common with men of past generations, we do well to study them in the experience communicated by the great poetry that has continued to stir emotional response from age to age.

Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: psychological studies of imagination; Vintage Books, 1958, pages 7-8. First published in 1934