Poetry Is A Calling

 Calliope, the muse of epic poetry; detail from a Pompeii fresco

No one makes a conscious decision to be a poet—poetry is a calling, a metaphysical event— poetry calls you. To deny a calling is to step out of the current of life, it is to deny life and the direction in which life is sending you. To deny a calling is to betray your life, it's that fundamental. There are only a few times when you will have a calling in life, perhaps only once, and there aren't many people who have a calling, so to turn down what life has given you is to deny the basic integrity of one's life. Being a poet has always been the biggest event in my life; if you follow a calling you are affirming life at a very basic level; to be a poet is not a conscious decision, poetry calls you to be a poet.

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

Stephen Morrissey

I've been writing poems since I was fifteen years old, over a half century of writing. Writing poems was never a choice or a decision, it was a calling. Where does the "call" come from? It comes from the soul.

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The "call" to poetry came to me in a dream that told me to write down what had happened in my life or my life would be forgotten; waking after the dream I knew that to forget meant to lose my inner being. It is not just writing poetry that was a part of the call, it was also writing a journal and I began page one of my journal on January 14th, 1965; a few months later I began writing poems. Writing my journal and writing poems was a gift to me from the unconscious mind, it began with the dream.

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First you write the single poem and then a lot of poems, and then you gather these poems into a book, and then you have several books and that is one's body of work. If this is your calling then what you are doing is fulfilling your destiny.

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My poetry is concerned with soul making and it is also soul making itself; soul making is concerned with realizing one's potential as a person, with expressing the deeper meaning of one's life.

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The unconscious mind has a proclivity to wholeness. Whether in dreams or day dreams or writing poems or other forms of artistic creativity, we are driven to wholeness. That is the basis of my writing, when I speak of soul making I am also referring to wholeness, life affirmation, and healthy-mindedness.

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I write poems because writing has been a calling for me and one ignores a calling at risk to one's integrity as a human being. You can ignore many things and not damage your inner being but you can't ignore a calling; ignoring a calling is like having a limb amputated; no, it's worse than that, it's like amputating one of one's own limbs.

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I've been fairly passive in life but that may be because I am also introverted. It may also be because I knew all along what I wanted to do in life, and that was to write poems. Whatever poems I've written have been the result of having to write them; indeed, I had no choice but to write. I have been driven to write, but what drove me? What drove me was the urgency of finding meaning and wholeness in my life, of affirming life.

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Writing poems is what I've done with my life. It wasn't my choice since writing poems was a calling. It came to me, not me to it, and if the writing ended this afternoon I wouldn't care. Now I welcome my final years. I've been along for the journey, not in the driver's seat. I've been an observer and not much of an organizer or initiator of events. But I'm getting old and need a rest. In truth, I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me.

How to write a poem

Part of a poet's education is reading poetry and hearing poets read their work. Other people's poems inspire us, not to write like them but to write our own poems, in our own voice, to be a witness of what we have seen and experienced—the geography of your soul—not to copy anyone's poems but an expression of one's own vision. One might say, when hearing a poem being read, that the poem inspires the soul to express itself.

            My test of poetry has always been that if the poems I am reading make me want to write then the work of that poet has enlarged my vision of poetry and life. The poets I continue to read, who for over the last twenty or more years still inspire me, are Charles Olson, Robert Lowell, and Louis Dudek. They are poets of the soul and enlarge one's concept of poetry.

            We also learn about poetry by hearing poets read their own work. Between October 1969 and April 1973 I heard many poets read at Sir George Williams University; I also attended readings at McGill University and Loyola College. Sometimes after a reading there would be a party, for instance at Professor Richard Sommers' home, or at the home of another professor; after the party I'd go home and write about the reading in my diary. It wasn't until 2012 that these diary entries had any importance when I was interviewed about the Sir George Williams University reading series by Professor Jason Camlot at Concordia University (formerly SGWU). Attending so many readings was a wonderful apprenticeship for a young poet. Here are the names of some of the poets that I heard read their work during my undergraduate years.

             Jerome Rothenberg, bill bissett, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Davey, Diane Wakowski, Ron Loewinsohn, Tom Raworth, David Ball, Robert Creeley, Roy Kiyooka, Al Purdy, Joel Oppenheimer, Ted Berrigan, David McFadden, Gerry Gilbert, Jack Winter, Kenneth Koch, Dennis Schmitz, Jackson Mac Low, Michael Horowitz, Gary Synder, Dorothy Livesay, L.E. Sissman, Mac Hammond, Tom Marshall, Irving Layton, W.H. Auden, Frank Scott, Earle Birney, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Alden Nowlan, Margaret  Atwood, Patrick Anderson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Benedikt, William Empson, Anaïs Nin, and others.