Review: A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet by Stephen Morrissey

                               

Published on The League of Canadian Poets website, March 3, 2020.

Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine

Poetry is the voice of the human soul, speaking across time and distance

– Stephen Morrissey

 In A Poet’s Journey Montreal native Stephen Morrissey shares four decades of insight about what it means to be a poet and the process by which a poet can discover his “authentic voice”.  The book  includes astute impressions of other poets Morrissey has met along the way, among them George Johnston, Keitha Macintosh and Artie Gold who, like Morrissey, was one of “The Vehicle Poets” in Montreal, beginning in the mid-1970s.

What makes Morrissey’s book such a fascinating read is the thing which makes his poetry so indelible:  accessibility, and a hard won, pared-down wisdom.

Stephen Morrissey’s father died when he was six, his life abruptly and permanently reconfigured by fatherlessness.  Unable to verbally articulate his emotional devastation, at the age of 15 Morrissey began to express his feeling of being “damaged” and “different” from his peers (and from people in general), in poems.  The inexpressible had become expressible.  Profoundly “dispirited and disempowered”, he had found a way to connect / re-connect with his “spirit”, and to empower himself, by himself – through poetry.  He instinctively knew that this was his only way forward.

A section from Morrissey’s poem The River:

Because I did not grieve

when I was a child,

I have spent a lifetime

grieving, always on the edge

of sorrow

and from My Shadow:

always the shadow

of Father who died-

always the presence

of the knowledge

of death – my burden

I carried even as a child,

my shadow

Morrissey analyzed his life, in his diaries and poetry, during the years in which his stepfather was dying (when Morrissey was in high school), and following the dissolution of his first, early marriage.  During these years he came to the realization that “real art lies in the insecurity of life” – in the ability of art to capture life’s fragility and evanescence.

Early on, Morrissey made the decision not to self-censor.  This was due to his belief that, as he writes In A Poet’s Journey, “A poem that has been censored, that does not hold within it emotional, psychological or spiritual insight, has lost its poetic truth.”

As expressed in these lines from "Divisions" (1983):

all along I have worked at

emancipating my being

cutting through to the truth

this for me was always

the point   the single point

Uncovering his “authentic voice” has lead Morrissey to a meticulous, lifelong examination of his Shadow.  The pursuit of that Shadow, together with his decision against censoring what he writes, has taken him to places in his life that other poets might just as soon forget.  Forgetting is not an option for Morrissey, however.  He believes that “to forget is to lose part of our inner being, part of our lives, part of our soul.”

That includes not forgetting “the ancestors” who have come before.  Some of Morrissey’s most evocative poems feature vignettes of who his family members were as individuals. Not having had the opportunity of getting to know his father, Morrissey was determined “to remember as much as possible” about his ancestors, in order to “keep an accurate record against time”.  During the process of which he became, in his words, “an archivist of memory.”  These poems are an exploration of human nature and of the interconnectedness of family over generations – in Morrissey’s case, as set against the backdrop of 20th century Montreal.   He calls them “poems of witness”.

“The ancestors visit us if we listen to them,” he writes, “whether it is in our dreams or by their actual presence”.

As exemplified in these lines from "The Dead of My Life":

how often I return to them

the dead in my life

who inhabit dreams

memories while rocking

my son to sleep or a

dream that my Uncle Alex

was alive although we

thought (in the dream)

that he had been dead

these seven years

they are like flies
beating against an autumn window
… this ever diminishing
circus parade of old
people I hang onto
as though without them
I too would cease to be

As an undergraduate in college (Louis Dudek would later become a mentor at McGill), Morrissey intuited that the “central myth” of his life, and the central theme of his poetry was the Garden Myth – the “fall from innocence to experience”.  As he has said, “My nine published books follow the progression of my life as it fits the template of the Garden Myth.”  The Garden Myth is inherently fascinating and may be one reason why Morrissey’s poetry is so compelling.

Although a life-long observer “of the architecture of darkness” as he puts it (in his poem "Waking at 4 a.m.") in another important sense Stephen Morrissey’s poetry is, as he writes, “an affirmation of the life force , the triumph of the spirit, and the survival of the individual despite what has been experienced.  This is the foundation on which my poems are written.”

The following extract from "Reincarnation" is reflective of this:

We meet again, again flesh

and blood, again bone, tendon

and memory. Events of old lives,

clothes divested as I divested

the past in meeting you,

in meeting you again

and again and again

into infinity.

Forty years of waiting for you,

a dark delirium of the soul;

we met apparently for the first time

but home is where we are together

in this room, this house,

the two square feet we occupy

in a single embrace

The “mapping of the soul” is Stephen Morrissey’s signature – and his genius.  His ability to transform the “the personal” into the “the universal” in his poetry is also what makes A Poet’s Journey an invaluable resource for anyone who aspires to become a poet.

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

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).

Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems, review by Cynthia Coristine

 

Farewell, Darkness

   Selected Poems

by Stephen Morrissey

Ekstasis Editions, 2023

Review by Cynthia Coristine

I found my voice in poetry when I was able to turn the darkness of my life experiences into poems; I affirmed what I had seen and I said, “thank you, darkness” and “farewell, darkness”; and that is the birth of the poet.
                                            - Stephen Morrissey

In Farewell, Darkness, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey presents a selection of some eighty of his poems written between 1971 and 2021. These poems have been selected from his nine earlier published books of poetry, and from six of his eight chapbooks.

Morrissey’s poems have, as he writes in the preface to the book, consistently focussed on the themes which have been central to his life, namely "the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members, and romantic love”.  Having been written in the shadow of a mountain, (Mount Royal), his poems resonate with Morrissey’s sense of himself as a Montreal poet.

Stephen Morrissey’s personal experience with the transience, and fragility, of life began early: in November, 1956, when Morrissey was six years old, his 44-year-old father died following heart surgery in a Boston hospital.

As he was later to write, “My father died, and the light went out”. Compounding the darkness of the loss, was the fact that his father was never spoken about in the immediate family again, and his unmarked grave (at Montreal's Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery), never visited.  This failure to address what had happened in any meaningful way set the stage for the lack of resolution and the unexpressed grief which affected Morrissey as child, and which followed him into later life. He felt “damaged” in some indefinable way which was beyond his ability to express: “I was all alone / just a bone without flesh / or face, just / a hollow sound / a ball bearing / rattling in an empty can.” (From “When Father Died”).

Morrissey realized that the remnants his father’s life which had been left behind, were a poor substitute for what he could now, never, come to know about him.

The Return of Memory

returning to the basement in mother's house

my father's business papers once stored

in my cupboard as a child

are still wrapped in brown file folders

it seems no time has intervened

that it is still possible for him to return

and return to these papers ...

what remains of father

expense accounts, business letters to strangers

in daily life we show no more

than these letters reveal…

Determined to preserve, at least, the events of his own life, beginning at the age of 14, Morrissey began to keep a daily diary. He also meticulously chronicled the lives of his extended family members, including those of (unmarried) great aunts and uncles, to ensure that their lives would not be “lost”.  He would also go on to capture something of their lives in his poetry.

Three Poems on a Single Theme

…my mother's uncle

who lived his last forty years

in a mental hospital

for the poor

left there by his brothers

after their mother died

he took with him

what he owned

breath gone   memories

dispersed

seagulls over the grey sky...

Home

I return to Grandmother's

flat although she's dead

almost thirty years,

walk up the grey front stairs

feel the door knob turn

in my hand and smell the

dusty stairwell leading to

the flat's entrance: a large

lace-covered table, a sideboard

and gramophone player broken

many years. I sit with her in silence,

childhood's timeless years,

hours spent staring out a window

at passing streetcars, or playing

with toy cars on a glass-topped

tea wagon.

...off the kitchen is where

her aged father slept; later

it became a junk room, a red

cardboard carton of Cokes

always by a bureau for visitors,

and Auntie Mable returning home

with lemon squares from Woolworth's

downtown. Or Saturday night hockey

on black and white television.

Morrissey found that writing poems was a way – in fact, the only way – in which he was able to find his “voice”. "Scribble down your nakedness" Allen Ginsburg had advised in a 1967 interview read by the seventeen-year-old Morrissey. "Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting." After reading Ginsburg’s words, Morrissey's course as a poet was set:  rather than censor what he wrote, his poems would instead cut to the emotional core of life as he experienced it. This is a path from which Morrissey has never deviated, and one which gives his poems their emotional resonance: to a greater or lesser degree, we have all been there.

The Things She Left

The things she left are not many,

furniture divided, years of photographs

sorted through, freezer and piano

rolled into the back of a truck.

A coincidence: the movers were the same men

who moved us here, ten years older,

they are fat and nervous.

Days unwind, a tapestry with threads

cut from a tangled mass of colour

and pulled across a year of leaving.

A thread breaks and the whole

tapestry unravels, becomes a new image:

my wife and son, dog in the back seat,

drive away – her final kiss, but for what?

That I made it easy for her to leave, didn't argue?

Behind me a half-empty house,

no diversions possible in the echoes

of a summer afternoon…

Morrissey's poems are also an affirmation of life, and of the things which sustain it. The sentiments expressed in The Divining Rod and in Reincarnation are recognizable to anyone who has ever survived a bad marriage, and then been “reborn” into a good one.  Rescued by it.

The Divining Rod

...With her I left behind

my old life, with her

I left a dark place

of   sleep and endurance,

with her I stopped being

a monk to a dying religion,

my prayers whispered

as I slept as though dead,

vapour, mist, a body

animated by silence and sorrow…

Reincarnation

We meet again, again flesh

and blood, again bone, tendon

and memory. Events of old lives,

clothes divested as I divested

the past in meeting you,

in meeting you again

and again and again

into infinity.

Forty years of waiting for you,

a dark delirium of the soul;

we met apparently for the first time

but home is where we are together

in this room, this house,

the two square feet we occupy

in a single embrace

…With you I have

returned home, not to a place

where walls enclose silence,

but soul meeting soul

in the ancient movement of time.

The pared down simplicity of the exquisite Her Red Duffle Coat are emblematic of Morrissey’s work.

Her Red Duffle Coat

Her red duffle coat

lies on a hall bench;

the coat is a pile of cloth

without the presence

of her body in the coat.

Her red duffle coat is cold

without her animating

spirit. It is a limp

rag, less each

day without her

wearing the coat

to give it

reason to exist,

to  give the coat

a life force

which is love.

The coat’s sleeve

hang by its side,

no embrace

from this red coat;

without her wearing it

it’s an empty shell.

The coat

is a prisoner

of her love, when

she wears the coat

it is not

any coat.

but hers.

Morrissey’s poems pair the elegiac with the life-affirming, two of the elements which constitute his “signature” as a poet.  This is reflected in Everything Must Have an End,  which is also the last poem in the book.

Everything Must have an End

What is not possible is greater than what is possible

that’s what you know about life when you’re older

than sixty or seventy years; the limits of existence…

And in the end, what is it you remember?

Thirty-five years teaching?  Adult children

gone off to make their own lives? Investments

and the mortgage paid off?  Great art and poetry?

Books you’ve read?  Friends you’ve had?

Or the one you loved, the one who breathed life

into your once young body and soul, that person

you still love in the land and geography of old age.

"Poetry is nothing if not passionate”, as Morrissey writes in the preface to Farewell, Darkness. "Passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing defines poetry."

Morrissey's own refusal to tailor his writing to "fashion" is what gives his poems their resonance and their emotional accessibility: by affirming a shared human experience, they  can be read again and again, with the unabated pleasure of a first reading.

--January 8^th, 2024

About the reviewer:  A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine is the co-author, with Ian Browness, of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life of James Coristine.