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).

Review of Farewell, Darkness: Selected Poems, by Stephen Morrissey

 

Review by Anne Burke published in December 2023 by the Prairie Journal, online, http://www.prairiejournal.org/reviews.html?fbclid=IwAR20QWzG3s4QbDhU4uRkWFJk6AZKnc2gYKqibJpYjprkD62FbJuJ2nl5zO4

Review of Farewell, Darkness: Selected Poems, by Stephen Morrissey (Victoria, B.C. Ekstasis Editions, 2023) 203 pp. paper.

The epigraph of this full-length poetry collection reads: "What is in me is dark, /Illumine, what is low raise and support [That to the heihth of this great Argument I may assert th’ Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.”] an excerpt from John Milton's "Paradise Lost". Morrissey has proclaimed, “All of my work is a celebration of the Divine and a journey towards the Divine". His "God" poems are composed of silence or absence; his mysticism comes from astrology, Jungian psychology, and the dream-state; the young son's formative trauma of his father's death is haunting and almost consuming. With a failed first marriage, he grieves openly until passion ultimately overtakes him with a new and sustaining love.

The poet adopts an unbroken continuity for arrangement of the selected poems while acknowledging their sources in his previously published books. From an early chapbook Poems of a Period (Montreal: 1971), the poem "A Quebec Evening" finds the poet at nine years of age at a St. Eustache country cottage with his grandmother, aunt, and Uncle Alex. Morrissey's shadow relatives come from generations of his ancestors and he has published online a comprehensive history of his family at: www. morrisseyfamily history.com.

The Trees of Unknowing (Véhicule Press, Montreal, 1978) was his first full-length collection, with traditional poems, experimental concrete and sound poems, and a selection of photographs. The title poem "The Trees of Unknowing" recalls the obverse of The Biblical Tree of Knowledge; it contains the frenetic spelling of "cld" for "could", "wld" for "would", "washt" for "washed" and others; four other poems in this section are titled by using the first line of each poem. "Regard as Sacred" is a concrete or pattern poem.

The long poem from Divisions (Coach House Press, Toronto, 1983) was written over a three-day period as a catharsis, a purging of emotions, when Morrissey was finding his authentic poetic voice. Thus, "the poem becomes a written thing" because—or in spite—of "endless repetition in time/of divisions". Furthermore, "entering spaces / areas of silence/this is poetry". In "The Dead in My Life" the poet ponders "the mouth to come out/as words this language/of flies & the dead". "The Poet's Progress" identifies the moment when "we were actually/proud of our/being hidden/this became the/key to our future". In "Language" "my/ mind has become/a writing machine" and this, apparently, includes "the/ contra/ dictions". "The Secret Meaning of the Alphabet" further explores how "I/want to cut/the alphabet open". Experiments in his early writing were drawn from John Cage, the Dadaists and the Surrealists; William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin's "cut-up" technique produced new texts. For more on this, see: "The Cut-up Technique" in The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (Ekstasis Editions, 2022).

"Christos's Fence" was inspired by a European conceptual artist, who erected an 18-foot high, 24-mile-long nylon fence along the Californian coast. "The poem was influenced by and celebrates that fence". Another example of silent division, "that has no end &/no beginning/" as a Chinese screen or calligraphy, in the poem "out the back door" dedicated to Canadian poet George Johnston (1913–2004).

From Family Album (Caitlin Press, Vancouver 1989) the long poem "Preludes" in five distinct sections spans the season and anticipating the years, resulting in "a reliquary of/events". "The Middle of a Life" draws its title from a 1973 novel In The Middle of a Life by Canadian author Richard B. Wright" (1937‒ 2017). The poem praises Christmas family reunions, reflects on an apiary on the Morrison Bridge, and, considering the past, the poet ponders: "would I have lived differently"? In "Three Poems on a Single Theme" he meditates on what death is not: "this leaving anger/in a forest of words". His mother's uncle was committed to a mental hospital. Death is "an unfolding/of flowers/smell/of bergamot/lines/in my grandfather's face".

"In Mexico" for Louis Dudek (1918–2001) a Canadian poet who instructed at McGill University, Morrissey observes children playing/as they have/always done". "A Day in 1957" was composed on the occasion of his father's funeral, "when I was a child". In "Aunt Mable in P.E.I." he recalls that the furniture was awkward when her "death came like sleep". In "The Return of Memory" he takes inventory of "what remains of father". Recalling his grandmother and Aunt Mable he believes in: "Not grief or death/but life for life, love for love". "Early June in Malone, New York" is about a painting by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) who was the foremost realist painter of 20th-century America. His work is celebrated in this ekphrastic poem, which is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. In "July Near Huntingdon" hieroglyphics is not a place for imagination. Instead, "we become our inheritance". In "End Notes" old beliefs are gone, he holds a dead hummingbird, with intimations of "cycles of death". Instead, "new light on old walls" invigorates his spirit.

The title poem "Farewell, Darkness" from Family Album has an apostrophe in this ode which contains a double entendre: the past is evoked with simulated dividing lines; there is a full moon so that shadows are cast; there are "last" indications (repeatedly) related to "who I used to be". A title poem from a chapbook The Divining Rod (Greensleeve Editions Edmonton, 1993) deals with the underground river "in a land of darkness" through a series of personifications associated with divination by "a magic wand, /a unicorn's horn, a wizard's staff"; to reveal his unearthed woman who frees him from his darkness of sorrow. This resurrection theme continues in "Asleep in Her Arms" a poem from a chapbook The Beauty of Love (The Poem Factory (Vancouver, 1994) in which a refrain describes his love for her many manifestations in the natural sphere. Three briefer works from The Carolyn Poems (The Poem Factory, Vancouver, 1995) are: "I know when a woman..."; "As much grief..."; and "Dig here...." The first mentioned poem emphasizes a man's sense of emptiness by appropriate metaphors; the second poem a symbol for his passionate and grieving heart; and the last, his dreams buried in a darkened sky.

Morrissey’s “The Shadow Trilogy” is composed of The Compass (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1993); The Yoni Rocks (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1995): and The Mystic Beast (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997). "The Compass" alludes to the body as a needle describing the new direction of passion. The apple is red and delicious (symbolizing lust). "Two Tales" is divided into "The Well" which he climbs to reach his beloved and "The Amphora", a two-handled storage jar; they were sometimes used as grave markers, as containers for funeral offerings, or human remains. Lovers "transform themselves/ into God and Goddess". In "Some Days" the poet empathizes with zoo animals when he considers how his family has become invisible. "The Clothes of the Dead" are those he received grudgingly and they are now rendered to ashes. "Bitter Fruit" is about his unhappy first marriage; "You are attracted to darkness, she said". The apple core signifies a "millennia of birth and death". In "The Things She Left" a tapestry unravels and walls collapse; so that we exist alone on Planet Earth. "The Edge" is where the poet experiences emptiness, when "not believing in either God/or His Help". The epitaph is from an American poet Howard Nemerov (1921–1991) whose Collected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize. "The Dummy" advises that, although his second child was never born, the poet's half-life has been replaced with a renewed desire for living.

"The Yoni Rocks" are said to Increase libido, ease cramps, and balance hormones. A hymn to a woman, the goddess, and all are intended to avoid "dissolution into nothingness", with an allusion to "Winter Evening", a poem by Canadian poet Archibald Lampman (1861–1899) but Morrissey seeks "this presence ending grief". In "Fiddling For Love" the music brings him back to childhood, until "we return to the routine/of daily living". He listens to Irish music on the radio or "Elegy" by the French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924).

"Home" is tempered by the past, with a refrain of "going back", from "this/planet third from the sun", where he feels exiled. The poet takes inventory of his Grandmother's house and her belongings, but "the night is dark"; he is moved by a man's love for his son. "In The River" is a metaphor for this mystical and magical transportation from grief through memory, as in a dream, for his Father and son. "Reincarnation" moves into infinity, to gods and goddesses, "Bardic voices, Druid's potion", when "shadows fall". In "Ghosts" he returns to his former home with black-and-white photographs. He contemplates being separated "as though/the other never existed." "On Woden's Return" alludes to Norse mythology in which the god Odin rides across the sky on a mighty eight-legged horse named "Sleipnir". Although the god "lies across the earth", the dead do not rise from their grief.

From The Mystic Beast, "Under the Shadows Flee" is about the poet's imposing "a gothic silence" before visting his father's grave. "When Father Died" takes a more direct approach and the tone is agoninized grieving, the moreso, because the child must be alone, and the death was "never spoken of again, / no comfort offered". In "Skin" the metaphor of intact flesh is shed and this missing layer functions as a double (or shadow). Ghosts haunt aboveground while the dead are in underground chambers, catacombs. A Shroud of Turin," on which the image of the Crucified Christ was preserved, and a choreography of death" pervade. "Green Eyes" are variable and removable, "as though from another/planet". "The House of Minimal" means a sense of shame and a refrain of "surrender". "World Gone Wrong" is a place of loss for the prisoner. "Lines From Magritte" offers an excerpt "The Forbidden Universe (or Olympia)" on The Forbidden Universe to extol "Every woman/is a Goddess"; in particular, she was the goddess of women and childbirth, marriage, and family.

Morrissey acknowledged his dreams, individual family members, and his grandmother's flat at 2226 Girouard Avenue as his first home. This place figures so much in "my imaginal and creative life" because it was a place of the soul, "it was my beginng, it was my pychic centre." Sample poems from Girouard Avenue (Coracle Press, Montreal, 2009) contain excerpts from three longer poems. "Girouard Ave Flat" is dedicated to Canadian poet, memoirist, and novelist John Glassco (1909–1981). While Morrissey believes that the City of Montreal was that author's spiritual place and evokes the lost innocence he possessed as a boy, this assessment may be made of Morrissey himself. Glassco's Selected Poems won the Governor General’s Award in 1971. Morrissey's poem was, in part, also inspired by the book title of The Dance is One from F.R. Scott's poem "Dancing". This epitaph is also the inscription on Scott's (and his wife Marion Dale Scott's) headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. A photo of Morrissey's wife Carolyn Zonailo posing with it was posted by him in his online blog. https:// stephenmorrisseyblog .blogspot.com / 2017/08/fr-scott-dance-is-one.html. Morrissey adopts the mantle of a voice for the souls of the dead. Both Glassco and F.R. Scott were members of The McGill group during the nineteen-twenties, and Morrissey opines, "None of the Montreal Group of poets wrote large bodies of work except for A.M. Klein.

Morrissey praises his Irish working-class roots, "We have come far. we descendents of Irish immigrants to this country; we have come far and achieved much." His poem "Hoolahan's Flat, Oxford Avenue" has an epitaph from "Eighth Elegy, Children's Elegy" by American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) whose Elegies was first published by New Directions in 1949. There is a Hawks Nest Workers Memorial and Grave Site. Rukeyser wrote a group of poems The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the industrial disaster when hundreds of miners died of silicosis. Morrissey's poem links with coal mining and cinders. since it is a historical fact that coal was fed "to fifty furnaces". Harvard and Oxford are streets in Montreal where Morrissey grew up. The poem refers to his father's death with an ode to commemorate him, based on archived papers and diaries. As a function of the poet, "I became an archivist of memory, / an archeologist of the soul". Morrissey posted online photographs, email from an extant neighbour Audrey Keyes, and a link to this poem about Oxford Avenue flats.

There are excerpts from the third long poem "November" with an epigraph from Moby Dick, a novel by American author Herman Melville (1819 ‒ 1891). This month is when the poet feels "closest to the unconscious mind, to dreams, to the ancestors, and to Spirit". He wants to remind the reader there is epiphany, spirituality, and dignity in all people. "An Evening in Old Montreal" is set outside the Centaur Theatre at Sainte Francois-Xavier; and, while walking up to Rue Notre Dame, he recalls a mythological centaur. Chiron, in Greek mythology, was the wisest of all the centaurs and known as the "wounded healer" because of his knowledge of medicine. "An Evening in 1957" takes place after a father's death, when the poet and his brother watched boxcars pass by. In the same manner, these years have left him "dark and cold at night". "The Summing-Up", with an epitaph from Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale", happens in November, when the poet feels his burdens, this love of God is similar to the faith he once had as a child. " Beginning with dreary November days, "The Rock, Or A Short History of The Irish in Montreal" is about the migration from that Island's potato famine to Montreal; ancestors whose burial remains are in mass graves, in darkness, near an abattoir, now closed. There are emblems in "The Colours Of The Irish Flag" which are Green (field, cold dawn), White (sheet of paper, snow and sky) and Orange (orange sunset, darkness). For Morrissey, "it is also a poem about perseverance, not being defeated, and of inner strength".

From A Private Mythology (Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2014) "The Poet's Coat" is composed of shadows. "Her Red Duffle Coat" denotes cold, empty, and loneliness without "her". "The Shaman's Coat" is borrowed and has a life of its own. Shamanism is central to Morrissey's journey of the soul; it helped him to understand important life experiences and his concerns in poetry. "The Coat of My Inner Self", although worn since birth. is now wet and old. "The Pillow Coat" portrays a heart beating "as though the earth were a living being". "An Inventory of Coats and Garments" on Chabanel Street" describes a wholesale market in textile, garments, carpet and leather products. Outside that sphere, you may be "wearing last year's dated, worn, and shabby winter coat".

Morrissey believes deeply Poetry Must be Authentic to Psyche ("Visits from Psyche"); she was the goddess of the soul in ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Born a mortal woman, her beauty rivaled that of Aphrodite (Venus) and inspired the love of Aphrodite's son, Eros, god of desire. She visited the poet in "water the depth of dream and memory"; in a second dream, then the third. "Standing Outside The Cedars" is where he lived under the Perseids meteor showers. Given that the first wife was unimaginable, he wrote poems alone. "The Journey Is Complete" provides alternate routes his father may have taken to ask for help from heart specialists at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, in 1956, when he was close to dying. This occasion is the 47th anniversary of his Father's death. "Waking My Love" occcurs in an almost completely darkened room. In "The Room of Love", there is playing some Radio Classique from Ile Ste. Helene where God is silent. "Something Happened" at their not so sweet parting, in the underground parking lot. "That Moment that destroys/everything we have lived for." Cars can be repaired ("A Blue 1954 Chevy") unlike people who are broken and defeated. "A Saturday Afternoon" details the geography of Morgan's Department Store, Philip's Square, downtown Montreal; Woolworth's basement, Ste. Catherine's Street, then Eaton's and Simpson's.

"A Drive in the Country, 1960" describes the Oka Road, the moon, the Francoeur girl near the Trappist monastery; that memorable drive into the darkness, a farmer's market. These fragments are about being contained in the car "with my family, my father dead, [and] what was left of us". "Visitng Girouard Avenue" involves his Grandmother's flat, being in a parked car; Christmas Eve, the poet as a man and as a child. In "Christmas 1970" the poet confesses that he was never a young Icarus, who, in Greek mythology, flew too close to the sun; or as in "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" a painting by Pieter Breughel the Elder (1525–1569). The poet asks himself, "Did I know then/ that I was on my soul's journey? / Sitting writing poems,/ did I know this was the source / of my redemption, my vision?" In "Waking at 4 a.m." he is in darkness, silence, waiting for morning. It is the architecture of darkness, "this is when the poem/of morning is created;/ we are workers in the darkness, / early risers, busy with/the enterprise of light." The poem "Hanging by a Thread" pertains to how the family hangs on, attached to memory and duty, so that into darkness we fall. The poem pulses with an apostrophe to "Oh thread, oh broken strings".

From Everything Must Have an End (Coracle Press, Montreal, 2021) the poem with this title has an epitaph from Glassco's "The Death of Don Quixote". The poet confesses, "I was born on an island", the soul's great journey is on the rivers of the world. It is about memory and salvation, like the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, the Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628–1688). As a poet, "I collected the minutiae of daily life...." His neighbourhood resembles the "Edward Hopper House"; singing of "Me and My Shadow"; expressing the futile attachment to things. Though Hopper also worked in etching and watercolor, he is best known for his oil paintings, which often convey a sense of melancholy or isolation. As in an earlier poem "Late June in Malone, New York", the poet has apparently stepped into an Edward Hopper painting, since the dated decor has been unchanged since 1955.

To conclude, what ultimately matters most is "The Great Reconfiguration" when his existence uderwent a radical reorganization due to a single event, that being the premature death of his father. For Morrissey, he found the single myth to define his life for years. Instead of "The Trees Unknowing", the Biblical story of the Garden myth was the fall from innocence into William Blackean experience. "It was the birth of my soul as a poet; it was the beginning of my journey as a poet".

Anne Burke

Review of James Hollis's Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path

"Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path". 

Review of James Hollis' Creating a Life, 

Toronto: Inner City Books, 2001. 159 pages. 

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis' latest book, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path , gives the reader the wonderful experience of sitting with an intelligent and articulate person, and listening to their reflections on the meaning and value of life. This is Hollis' sixth publication for Inner City Books. Like the other books he has written, this one helps the reader grapple with his or her own meditation on life, as well as initiate new areas of thought.

In the first section of Creating a Life , Hollis refers the reader to the increasing number of contradictions we are faced with as we get older, and the confusion that is caused by our inability to resolve them. Hollis uses Greek drama to describe experiences that seem to be common to many people. Hollis says that our lives are circumscribed first of all by "Fate, or moira , [which] embodies the world of givens, the world of limitations, the world of cause and effect. Our genetics, our family of origin, our Zeitgeist, the interplay of intergenerational influences--each is part of our fate." He goes on to say we also complicate and make worse our lives with hubris, "Which means arrogance at times, a character flaw at others, or sometimes simply the limitation of possible knowledge." A third aspect of the human condition is hamartia or "the tragic flaw," what Hollis calls "the wounded vision." Hollis writes, "Each protagonist believed that he or she understood enough to make proper choices, yet their vision was distorted by personal, familial and cultural history, dynamically at work in what we later called the unconscious."

Psychology has added to and changed the names of the terms by which we describe the human condition, but human experience, in essence, is the same now as it was in classical Greek times and before. Today we speak of psychological complexes that "lie at the core of who we think we are." Hollis writes that the reader "will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself." Indeed, it seems to be fate that the tragic vision of the Greeks is re-enacted by each of us in our equally tragic and wounded lives.

In this, as in his other books, Hollis refers to C.G. Jung's suggestion that "the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents." This refers to the parents' unexamined life and subsequent psychological projections onto their children. The child is left responsible for doing the emotional and psychological work the parents didn't do. In turn, this becomes a part of the core complex through which our perceptions of the world around us are filtered. In some ways, this parental burden forms the basis of our shadow work, and while it is painful when left unconscious, it can lead to an exhilarating awareness for the participant in a more examined life.

This is not a book for the faint of heart, for those who desire an intellectual quick-fix for what ails them, or for the individual who believes that a guru, a romantic partner, or anyone else will come along and save them. Hollis discounts the cure-all approach of both New Age adherents and fundamentalists of all religious persuasions. It is here that Hollis makes his "modest claim", and this is the basis on which the book's thesis is developed.

The thesis of Creating a Life is that to create a life one must examine one's life, and out of this examination comes an awareness of the true nature of one's soul. Our psychological foundation is made up of many things, including core complexes that we wish we could eliminate altogether, but that cannot be easily dealt with. Indeed therapy can't eliminate them either. According to Hollis, what therapy can do is help you observe the core complex. This, in turn, will help the individual become a more conscious person with a maturer vision of life. Hollis writes, "Therapy will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting." Thus, the examined life is the more interesting life, and the corollary that follows from this is that "Consciousness is the gift and that is the best it gets."

If the result of our choices or unreflected actions are akin to Greek tragedy or drama, then we might also ask ourselves what is the myth that best represents our life journey? What is the myth that best explains our existence to us? Hollis writes that myth "as it is used here, refers to those affectively charged images (imagos) which serve to activate the psyche and to channel libido in service to some value." Are we living second hand lives, the unresolved cast-offs of our parents' experience? Are we living reflectively or are we living reactively?

By now most readers must be aware that we are not dealing with the activities of the first half of life. This text is not about ambition, career, or even traditional domesticity. It isn't Hollis' project to tell the reader what kind of life to create--his purpose is simply to define the foundation of understanding necessary to create an authentic life. An examined life best expresses the soul's purpose. Hollis' book is addressed to those people who have entered the second half of life, who have survived what Hollis calls the "gigantic, unavoidable mistake" of the first half of life. For Hollis, "The larger life is the soul's agenda, not that of our parents or our culture, or even of our conscious will."

This book is a meditation on the life journey of individuation. Jung's concept of individuation "has to do with becoming, as nearly as one can manage, the being that was set in motion by the gods." This, then, at a practical level is a process of psychological and spiritual maturity. A test for this maturity lies in one's capacity to deal with anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Hollis writes, "The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the developmental and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge."

Part two of Creating a Life is comprised of twenty short chapters dealing with "attitudes and practices for the second half of life." These include: amor fati, the necessity to accept and love one's fate; that the examined life is one of healing; that the examined life is also healing for our ancestors; and so on. Some readers may feel overwhelmed by Hollis' listing and brief explication of these necessary "attitudes and practices." However, he is reassuring and directing the reader to observe his or her own unconscious as the primary authority in one's life. Individuation lies, in part, in the process of reflecting upon the processes of the unconscious mind.

Part three of Creating a Life brings to a conclusion James Hollis' meditation on how to approach the second half of life. Certainly, above all else we need to be grateful for being alive at this most liberal and tolerant of times and places in the history of humanity. Hollis refers to the myth of Oedipus that is suggestive of our own human condition.

How did Oedipus live out the second half of his life? We may each have our own personal myth to discover, a myth with which we identify and which gives our life substance, meaning, and depth. Oedipus, however, is an archetype representing everyman in his flight from the darkness of his core complex to his discovery of soul and meaning. Hollis writes,

After Thebes, after the stunning humiliation of midlife, Oedipus spends his final years in humble wandering, wondering what it is that the gods wish him to know. He learns, he absorbs, he winds his weary exile to Colonus, where he is blessed by the gods for the sincerity of his journey. It was not so much that he created his life, as that he allowed at last that life might create him, as the gods had intended. The price of this gift, both precious and perilous, was exile and suffering; the price of not finding his calling was ignorance, pettiness and annihilation of the soul.

James Hollis reminds the reader of what a profound and exciting journey we have been invited to undertake. It is the journey of individuation, sometimes frightening, never exempt from the many experiences and emotions that are part of the human condition, and always demanding we extend ourselves beyond what we thought possible. We continue to create our lives because, simply put, it is all we can do, if we have the gift of consciousness and are sensitive to the soul's command that we look inward.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, March 2001. 

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Review of Robert Johnson's Balancing Heaven and Earth

Review of Balancing Heaven and Earth 

by Robert Johnson, with Jerry M. Ruhl. 

1998: Harper Collins, New York. 307 pages

By Stephen Morrissey

Robert Johnson's Balancing Heaven and Earth is a memoir and celebration of the inner life, the world of dreams, active imagination, and mystical vision. Johnson writes, "I sometimes wonder if all suffering is a vision of God too great to bear." It is suffering that led Johnson to the inner life. As a result of a car accident at age eleven Johnson's leg had to be amputated below the knee. The injury was further complicated with gangrene and a second operation; this health crisis resulted in a near-death experience in which Johnson had a "vision of the glory of paradise." A second mystical experience at age sixteen, returned Johnson to what he called the "Golden World." These early mystical experiences brought Johnson to the dilemma that has preoccupied much of his life and is the concern of this memoir: Johnson asks, "How does one continue to live on the face of the earth when he or she is blinded and spoiled for anything else?"

Johnson quotes C.G. Jung who wrote that "the earthly world and the Golden World are two faces of one reality." For most people the first half of life demands making one's way in the world, finding a career, having a relationship, building a family. However, as a young man, Johnson's concern was only partly in that direction. At that time Johnson found mentors who contributed to his inner growth. He also found the world-renowned spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti. Johnson moved to Ojai, California which was for many years Krishnamurti's base in the United States. But eventually it became clear to Johnson that Krishnamurti was not the spiritual teacher he needed. Krishnamurti further awakened the "alchemical gold", the soul, in Johnson, but he did not offer any guidance as to how to reclaim the inner gold.

While the universe may appear to be random and meaningless, for Johnson it is held together by a superior intelligence. For Robert Johnson there are "golden threads", a kind of connective tissue linking one experience to the next; indeed, "golden threads" may be perceived as synchronistic events. Another way alchemical gold can be experienced is through dream analysis and active imagination. Johnson writes that dreams have an intelligence and wisdom that awaits discovery:

...dreams are the speech of God and that to refuse them is to refuse God... Dreams are highly curative and affirming... you can dialogue (with dreams) and use them to inform your life.

At a time of inner turmoil a dream informed Johnson that he needed something other than what Krishnamurti could offer. He then entered analysis in Los Angeles. By coincidence the analyst Johnson found to be his therapist had been a student of Carl Jung. "How do you learn psychology?" Johnson once asked his analyst, Dr. Kunkel. Johnson says that he provided a wonderful answer:

...dreams are the speech of God and that to refuse them is to refuse God... Dreams are highly curative and affirming... you can dialogue (with dreams) and use them to inform your life.

There are three ways: one way is o read all the ancient Greek mythology, because it is all right there. A second way is to read the collected works of Carl Jung. And the third way is to wait and watch-that is really the best way.

Despite Johnson's later training as a Jungian analyst, the third way of waiting and watching most closely approximates how Johnson learned psychology, illuminating for Johnson that psychology deals with the human soul.

By the fall of 1948 Johnson, while a tourist in Europe, decided to enroll at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich in order to study to become an analyst. It would be splendid if life were a straight line of conscious rational decisions resulting in our arrival at a certain preconceived destination. "But the truth is," Johnson writes, "that a slender thread, not any rational plan, led me to Jung's door...About the only virtue I can claim is that I didn't get in the way when destiny called."

During this time of study, Johnson had a life-changing meeting with the great Dr. Jung himself, when Jung analysed one of Johnson's dreams. The dream and Jung's interpretation are recounted in Johnson's memoir, but Carl Jung's advice (although it was presented more as a command!) was essentially that Johnson should not join organizations and that he should respect the solitude he required for individuation. Again, this is the dilemma around which Johnson centres his memoir: to be in the world, but not feeling fully of the world. He writes,

I speak and write of two worlds, when in fact the two are one. To everyday consciousness, however, there is a veil between the Golden World and the earthly world.

And later,

I now understand that the most profound religious life is found by being in the world yet in each moment doing our best to align ourselves with heaven, with the will of God.

Many of us have read Johnson's other books, including He: Understanding Masculine Psychology; She: Understanding Feminine Psychology; and We: Understanding the Psychology of Romanic Love. They are short, insightful works exploring the nature of being a man, woman, or a couple, using Jungian terminology, archetypes, and mythology. Johnson's memoir doesn't explain the writing of these books, but he does say that the income from them has allowed him to visit India many times. His visits to India have been profound and highly significant for him. It was on his first visit to India that he experienced a third mystical experience, a joyous experience of transformation.

It was only after living in India during my fifties and being among others of a similar temperament that I gained insight and courage enough so that I could come back to America and live an introverted, feeling life without continually bearing a sense of inadequacy.

India, writes Johnson, was a "feast of feeling and relatedness." The western world's emphasis on thinking and sensation has resulted in great scientific advances, but at the price of feeling and intuition. Johnson writes, "America is, collectively speaking, an extroverted culture that prizes rational thought above all else and values people accordingly." Only in India could there be the custom of approaching a stranger and asking that person to be "the incarnation of God," as Johnson did while visiting Calcutta (Kali's city).

Johnson describes being overwhelmed by the poverty and suffering he found in this city, and falling into a profound depression. After pouring out his heart to a complete stranger, an Indian gentleman who accepted to perform the role of being an "incarnation of God" for Johnson, Johnson discovered that he had spoken to a man who was also one of the few Roman Catholic priests in Calcutta. This is a synchronistic experience, a golden thread imbuing life with meaning and epiphany.

As one would expect, there are many anecdotes in this memoir, always with the effect of returning us to the importance of the inner world. The resolution of life's contradictions lies in becoming more conscious, and this sometimes requires the ritualization of the mundane; Johnson describes how a broken clock that was unceremoniously discarded was later retrieved from the garbage. Alone, he made a ceremony of burying the clock, a ritual during which he remembered with fondness the many events the lock awoke him for, including leaving for Europe, visiting Dr. Jung at him home, and so on.

Balancing Heaven and Earth is a highly readable and inspiring book. Robert Johnson is a man of depth and profound insight and the reader cannot help but be rewarded by reading his memoir. Indeed, this important book has the effect of helping to remind the reader of the alchemical gold residing in each of us. Johnson is man of spirituality, who uses Jungian terminology for its convenience and accuracy at describing the inner world, while in fact being himself a mystic.

This book belongs beside C.G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections ; it will greatly reward the reader with its inspiration, instruction, and insight.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal

Love Partners, lecture by Guy Corneau

LOVE PARTNERS: IS THERE REALLY A CHOICE?

Lecture by Guy Corneau before The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, fall 1999

Review by Stephen Morrissey, The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, February 2000

A lecture by Guy Corneau is a special event, as those in attendance at Corneau's lecture on "Love Partners: Is there really a choice" recently experienced. Corneau manages to make a room overflowing with strangers a place of intimacy and warmth, a place where it is safe to look deeply inside of oneself. Romantic love, the subject of Corneau's lecture, is a transformative experience, springing from a longing for a deep communion with another person. When we are "in love" there is a feeling of wholeness, of being united with the world, and not at odds with it. We forget that for many people the experience of romantic love is their only experience of identifying with the Self and the universal.

But Corneau goes beyond this view of love, his aim is "to look into the hidden intelligence of what you are." When we fall in love we embrace the perfection the other person sees in us. Love, then, is a mirror of oneself; unfortunately, if love is a mirror of oneself, we may have the other person before us, but all we really want is the mirror. If we are aware of this projection we may also see that this can be a key into who we really are, for many aspects of ourselves are revealed to us. In this way, love is a tool of self-revelation; we see the higher parts but also the shadow aspects of ourselves. As Corneau said, "You may not find a perfect partner, but you may find a perfect attitude to yourself and someone else."

The key to keeping romantic love alive is to become more conscious of ourselves. Couples may separate because they become tired of on-going conflict, finding it too difficult to integrate shadow material. This shadow, of course, is also a replay of childhood experiences; we hang on to what we know, even though it may be painful and manifest in not being able to maintain relationships, but the known is felt to be safer than risking the unknown.

Corneau's advice is to accept your shadow side, become most fully what you already are, which is a self that is plainly human. The universe gives us experiences so that we will learn things about ourselves; we need to love ourselves, to feel compassion for ourselves, without judgement, and without expectations, but just to be with what is there. Indeed, Corneau suggests we consider the effort and energy it takes to avoid opening up to love. The real problem is our attachment to pain, our need to hang on to suffering because our suffering is what is most familiar to us. Life seems to be easier when it doesn't go well because we can hold on to what we know, we can repeat experience that reinforces our entrenched concept of ourselves, rather than risk the new.

True love, Corneau said, is when one comes to have confidence and deep intimacy with one's own self. Love gives you a place where you choose to change. Love partners give us a mirror of who we are; in this we can find love for oneself and completion, but not perfection. We may want to be perfect, but personality involves limitations. Some psychological and emotional wounds cannot be resolved but can only be lived with. For Corneau, love is a context for your own evolution. If we accept Corneau's definition of romantic love, we will have less expectations that the other person will resolve the dilemmas of our life for us; then the possibility of romantic love lasting increases. Romantic love may not be the path for everyone, but for many people it is the most immediate way to becoming more conscious of ourselves, and in this there is the possibility of transformation.

Published: Review by Stephen Morrissey, The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, February 2000

Review of James Hollis's Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
James Hollis, Ph.D.
Gotham Books, New York
276 pages, ISBN 1-592-40207-0


Review by Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's new book, Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, begins with the premise that while the first half of life is outer directed, such as to building a family life, or owning property, or being employed, the second half is more inner or spiritually directed. As we age, if we have not done the important work of examining our life, we may one day find ourselves in the "swampland" of life's second half. At that time there is an urgency to deal with our psychology, as confused, alienated, and fragmented as it may be.

Hollis asks, in a series of spiritually and psychologically probing questions that open the book, "Why is the life you are living too small for the soul's desire?" Hollis writes: "As Jung once put it humorously, we all walk in shoes too small for us. Living within a constricted view of our journey, and identifying with old defensive strategies, we unwittingly become the enemies of our own growth, our own largeness of soul, through our repetitive history-bound choices."

Why do we keep wearing shoes that are too small? One reason lies in our belief in "the false self" which encompasses "the values and strategies we have derived from internalizing the dynamics of our family and our culture." Our too small shoes keep us from stepping "into the largeness that the soul expects and demands." We know the signs of the soul being denied. There may be a depression, often treated relatively inexpensively by medication, but not treated deeply or thoroughly. There may be a problem with addiction, or an awareness of psychological complexes.

In the chapter on "The Dynamics of Intimate Relationship" Hollis discusses romantic love and marriage. It is a fairly bleak discussion of something that is supposed to bring us great happiness and fulfillment but is all too often filled with fantasy, complexes, transference, projection, and the desire to find the "magical other" or the person "who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, and ... spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our own needs."

We live in a world that idealizes romantic love; indeed, we believe it can fulfill many of our needs, especially those in life's first half when it is only natural to want to have a partner and family, to fulfill ourselves in our careers, and to work for something greater than our individual selves. However, Hollis contends that we place a greater emphasis on the importance of the romantic relationship than it can fulfill. Central to his thinking is an emphasis on living as authentically as possible to the soul's purpose; unfortunately, romantic love may not be the fulfillment of this purpose, and Hollis seems to contend that it may also be the negation of it. The important thing, for Hollis, is not romantic involvement, which sometimes ends up as simply being an expression of co-dependence and a fear of being alone. Hollis suggests that we continue on our journey of self-understanding, and then, possibly, we will find that we are more tolerant and loving of others. "It is love not only of the other, but love of this life, this journey, and love of this task of soul." It is difficult to disagree with Hollis without appearing naïve, but I am not totally convinced by Hollis's argument which seems overly pessimistic. Sometimes even a bad romantic relationship can be a vehicle for waking up to the psychological complexity of life, and when better to wake up than the first half of life?

Our experience of family changes after mid-life. Some marriages collapse after the children have left home. They may have been a diversion or buffer, allowing the parents to continue to co-habit but also a means for couples to avoid relating to each other. A pathology in the family that Jung identified, and which Hollis discusses in this book and in his previous books, exists in the relationship of some parents and their children. It is the important observation that some children are burdened with "the unlived life of the parents." This refers to the parents' failure to reflect on their own life, to "finally, really grow up." Inevitably, the children will have to do the inner work that the parents never dealt with. Subsequently, Hollis writes, because "The parent has stopped growing, is intimidated by fear, is unable to risk, that model, that constriction, that denial of soul will be internalized by the child."

In the last chapter of this book, "The Healing of the Soul," Hollis answers the series of questions he presented at the very beginning of the book. Healing the soul can be the work of psychology, as Hollis feels it must be, for the etymology of "psychology" refers to "psyche" or the soul. The soul is a subject that religion has traditionally dealt with and psychology has avoided as unscientific or in the jurisdiction of organized religion. There is, Hollis writes, "A mystery so profound that none of us really seems to grasp it until it has indisputably grasped us..." This mystery is "that some force transcendent to ordinary consciousness is at work within us to bring about our ego's overthrow... That force...is the Self, the architect of wholeness, which operates from a perspective larger than conventional consciousness." The Self is a spiritual aspect to our totality as human beings; the Self seeks wholeness and life affirmation despite the psychic fragmentation we experience. A dream, and the understanding of the dream, that leads to a greater understanding of some aspect of our life is an expression of the Self.

James Hollis's book, intended for a mass market, is an introduction to only some aspects of C.G. Jung's work; for instance, there is little or no mention of the shadow, anima and animus, or other discoveries that Jung made in his long career. Nevertheless, for many people, James Hollis's Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up is an excellent place to begin this important journey into the second half of life.

Published: The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, November 2006

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.