Review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                —Michael Greenstein

Review in the Montreal Review of Books

Ken Norris sent me this link, a review of our three new Ekstasis Editions books in the Montreal Review of Books. Great to see the review and many thanks to Robyn Fadden who wrote the review.

Here is the link, https://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/vehicule-poets-farkas-morrissey-norris/?fbclid=IwAR31auEvflf89eeI_V6jJeOffNzzhBzDGRB9HzTfJ_bKen1ErOiWSAl_dGs

Review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

Here is a link to Cynthia Coristine's review of my new book, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry; what a terrific review for which I am very grateful!

The review can be found here, or copy and paste the following: https://poets.ca/review-the-green-archetypal-field-of-poetry-stephen-morrissey/

The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

Here is the front and back cover of my new book, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche, published by Ekstasis Editions a few months ago. The book was published at the same time as Ekstasis Editions published books by Ken Norris and Endre Farkas, both of whom I've known since the mid-1970s. I thought I had reached the end of writing, now it seems I have a few more years left in me. 

Books can be ordered from Ekstasis Editions.

The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche gathers a selection of essays and short statements on poetry by Stephen Morrissey. While best known as a poet, Morrissey’s critical writing is an important part of his literary work. In this book he writes on the legacy of Canadian poets who helped bring modernism to Canadian poetry. Morrissey’s approach to poetics reminds us of the enduring importance of Beat, Romantic, and shamanic poetics. Morrissey suggests that poems originate in what he calls the green archetypal field of poetry. This is Stephen Morrissey’s second volume on poetry and poetics, after The Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019).

 

Zoom book launch for Ekstasis Editions books

Here is the text I read at the Zoom online book launch for several of this years new Ekstasis Editions books, including my own The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche. This event was online on Sunday, 15 May 2022 at 2 p.m.

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Book Launch, Zoom, 15 May 2022, 2 p.m.

Place in Poetry

Thank you to Richard Olafson for publishing these books that are being launched today, and thank you to Endre Farkas and Carolyn-Marie Souaid for organizing this book launch.

This book, The Green Archetypal Fields of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche isn't poetry so maybe I should just say a few words to introduce the book.

This is my second book with Ekstasis Editions on poetics and memoir, on becoming a poet. The first book was  A Poet's Journey: On Poetry and what it Means to be a Poet. Thank you Richard, I really appreciate your work for poetry.

The background to the book, what created it, its reason for having been written, is that we live in a place, a city or a community, and this is a commitment to a specific geographical location, it is also a spiritual location. For me, this location, this place, is Montreal. In fact, the whole book refers to Montreal. Montreal is my psychic centre.

But think of place in the work of Charles Olson, it's Gloucester; or William Carlos Williams, it's Paterson; or Raymond Souster, it's Toronto; and for Louis Dudek and John Glassco, it's Montreal.

Montreal is where modern English Canadian poetry was born. If you were a poet in Canada you wanted to live, even for a short time, in Montreal. PK Page, Phyllis Webb, and many others lived here for a while, and this is the birth place in the 1920s of the Montreal Group of Poets at McGill University; they included FR Scott, AJM Smith, and John Glassco; also in Montreal were others, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and AM Klein.

This is where we came from and we haven't left.

I also wrote about the Vehicule Poets, "Starting Out from Vehicule Art Gallery", a history of our early days as poets, the Sunday afternoon readings, and that essay is in the book. Of course, the Vehicule Poets are in the line, the lineage, of the Montreal Group and other groups of poets that started here. That is our canonical lineage because all poetry is a part of a canon and a lineage of poets and poetry, however poetry changes it is always in the context of a lineage.

There is also our ancestral heritage in Montreal. For me, personally, my family have lived and worked here since 1840; not as long as my Quebecois and Quebecoise friends, and certainly not as long as the Indigenous people, but still a long time, and I have written about this as well, for instance the Morrissey Family History website.

Poets aren't nomads and we're not from nowhere. We're from a specific place, but this specificity of place is being lost in the economic and political globalism of the world, in every city you visit the condos are all the same, the stores and music we hear is the same, the politics is divided, and what is specific and local is being lost.

More specifically, my psychic centre, what made me the person I am today, is my family history but this is located and symbolized in my grandmother`s home on Girouard Avenue in Montreal`s West End. No one had money but family kept us together.

So place works on a number of different levels, it works as a geographical place, but it's also an ancestral and spiritual place, it's what formed us as people, it's the the birth of psyche.

That's how I became a poet, it began here in the City of Montreal.

Montreal is our home as poets, it's our centre as poets. 

Here is a short excerpt from The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry:

We are increasingly living in a deracinated world, in a global community, but a global community is an abstraction, an invention of committees and legislation and driven for profit and by people’s personal ambition; it is an intellectual construct, it is not born organically, a process that may take hundreds of years of human migration, political and military strategies, layers of cultural change, and spiritual vision. There is also a spirit of place; spirit of place manifests in the natural world, but it also includes our ancestral memory and family history and stories. If we are not careful we will soon be living in Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 world of geographical regions and the repression of creative individuality, not places of vibrant specificity that are containers of soul. A geographical place is specific and local, it is not abstract but concrete; globalism is an abstract concept that has little or no connection to community or place. Abstraction denies the specificity of place; place emphasizes the diverse world of things. Poetry requires community; it requires the diversity of a specific place.

Thank you all for being so patient and listening to this.

 

The Archetypal Field of Poetry

Published in 2022

Published in 2022, Ekstasis Edition, Victoria, BC, Canada

C.G. Jung made archetypes one of the central concepts to his approach to psychology, and this has been elaborated upon and expanded on by some of his followers, for instance James Hillman. An archetype is a psychological concept, it is a blue print, a prototype, an image, or a pattern of behavioural experience. It is also a term, used popularly today, suggesting that the experience of mythological characters is a pattern that can be seen in the behaviour of average people (as explored in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s books). Another contemporary Jungian thinker who has been influenced by the concept of archetypes is Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst and author of Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche (Spring Publications, Woodstock, 1999).

In poetry an archetype, as an image, or as a narrative, gives depth and sophistication to a poem letting it work on several levels of meaning simultaneously. Maud Bodkin, in Archetypal Patterns In Poetry, Psychological Studies Of Imagination (Vintage Books, New York, 1958) examines C.G. Jung’s “hypothesis in regard to the psychological significance of poetry.” She writes,

The special emotional significance possessed by certain poems—a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed—he attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images,” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same types,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience.

An archetype can include psychological complexes—it is a way to analyze and find patterns in any behaviour. Conforti extends the concept of archetypes to posit, if I understand him correctly, an external existence to the archetypes independent of the psyche, or of psychology. Archetypes, for Conforti, are not only psychological constructs, they also have an empirical existence, such as the pattern iron filings on a piece of glass will make when a magnet is placed under the glass. The division between the inner, psychological and spiritual domain, and the outer domain of consensual and empirical reality, is blurred, even eliminated. Conforti’s concept of archetypes seems to be both outside of time and space, and also firmly located in their expression inside the temporal and spatial. It is a fascinating and, some might say, a mystical idea, one that will be rejected by some (or many) clinical psychologists.

While hearing Conforti speak, to the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal last fall (2008), I realized that his concept of archetypes is one of the clues I had been looking for regarding how poetry is composed. It occurred to me that there is an archetypal field of poetry, which does not mean that poems have already been written and poets merely record what they “hear,” although this is what some poets describe as their experience when writing or composing poems. I suggest (and it’s just a thought) that there is an archetypal field of poetry, a psychological state accessed by poets when writing poems. Writing poems is a [“kind-of”] shamanic journey or process in which images (which can also be archetypal) are retrieved and expressed in composition. This should not conflict with the popular division of poets into romantic (or spontaneous) and classical (or formal).

It is very difficult for us to conceive such a thing, but the reality—not just the idea—of the static ego, formed and unchanging, might one day be replaced with a different concept: of a perceiving entity in the active present moment, a constellation of selves with an identifiable Persona, moving in and out of time and space, and possibly existing in the “undifferentiated unity of existence” (W.T. Stace, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World, A Mentor Book, New York, 1960). We may, one day, conceive of a poem as an existing entity that both exists and doesn’t exist before it is written, and that it comes to us uninvited to be transcribed by the poet. Just as J. Krishnamurti described, during his lectures—including lectures that I attended in Saanen, New York City, and Ojai—that an apparently living entity came to him—not as an invention of his psyche—but as, for instance, a living presence that had a quality of goodness or love that exists outside of his individual consciousness, an entity perceivable at times by him, as existing in the world by itself. There is no “how” as in “how does one access this experience?” There is only the work of creating a foundation for the work to come if it does come or if it is to come.

So, if asked where my poems come from, I would answer that they are from the archetypal field of poetry.