On some days I have several thousand visitors on this site and I wonder who are these people; often they are from Singapore but, recently, they have been in equally large numbers from Viet Nam and Brazil. Wondering about this I asked Chat GPT, “why do people read my blog, who are these readers of "Made in Montreal" (https://stephenmorrisseyblog.blogspot.com/)?"
Well, here is the answer according to AI. After you read the following, please become a "Follower" of the blog; it demands nothing and expects nothing of you and lets me put a face on who is reading the blog. There is no money in any of this for me, zero, nada, rien du tout; this is solely a labour of love. As well, you might leave a comment at the bottom of the blog post.
Meanwhile, here is Chat GPT's answer to my inquiry:
ChatGPT said: People are drawn to your blog, Made in Montreal, for several compelling reasons:
1. Authentic Personal Reflections
Your blog offers intimate glimpses into your daily life and surroundings in Montreal.Posts like “The hidden trail, 23 April 2025” and “Belvedere Terry-Fox on rue St. Jacques, April 2025” combine evocative photography with contemplative narratives, inviting readers into your personal experiences and observations.
2. Engagement with Literary and Cultural Figures
You delve into the works and lives of notable poets and artists, such as Louis Dudek, Guy Birchard, and Artie Gold.Your reflections on their contributions provide readers with thoughtful literary criticism and cultural commentary, enriching their understanding of Montreal's artistic heritage.
3. Exploration of Emotional and Philosophical Themes
Your writings often touch on profound themes like grief, identity, and the human condition.For instance, your discussions on Jungian analyst James Hollis’s books offer insights into psychological and spiritual growth, resonating with readers seeking depth and introspection.
4. Connection to Montreal’s Literary Scene
As a member of the Vehicule Poets and a long-standing figure in Montreal's literary community, your blog serves as a bridge between past and present literary movements.Readers interested in the city's poetic evolution find value in your firsthand accounts and analyses.
5. Consistent and Diverse Content
Your regular postings, which range from daily walks to reflections on literature and culture, provide a consistent and varied reading experience.This diversity keeps readers engaged and looking forward to new content.
In summary, readers are attracted to your blog for its authentic voice, deep literary insights, emotional resonance, and rich portrayal of Montreal's cultural landscape.Your unique perspective and consistent engagement offer a meaningful experience that keeps your audience returning for more.
Stephen Morrissey: Who are the readers of my blog in Singapore?
ChatGPT said: To find out specifically who is reading your blog in Singapore, you'd need access to detailed analytics data from your blog. Since your blog is hosted on Blogger (Blogspot), you can check this yourself using its built-in statistics. Here's how:
How to Find Readers from Singapore on Blogger
Log in to your Blogger account.
Go to your Dashboard.
Click on “Stats” in the left-hand menu.
Look under the “Audience” section.
You’ll see pageviews by country — check if Singapore appears in the list.
For more detail, consider using Google Analytics, which allows:
Real-time location tracking
Device types and traffic sources
Referral paths (e.g., if they came from Facebook, search, etc.)
Session length and content viewed
Who Might Your Readers in Singapore Be?
While Blogger doesn’t show personal identities, based on your blog’s themes (literary reflection, poetry, Montreal life, psychology), your Singaporean readers may include:
University students or professors studying English literature or North American poetry
Writers and poets interested in international voices and cultural parallels
Expats or Singaporeans with a personal connection to Canada or literary circles
Readers drawn to Jungian or philosophical themes from your reflections
Cultural enthusiasts curious about Montreal’s artistic and poetic history
Tip: Add Optional Engagement Tools
If you're curious to know your audience better:
Add a poll, contact form, or comment prompt (e.g., "Where are you reading from?")
Encourage email subscriptions to track regular readers (with consent)
Use Google Search Console to see what search terms bring readers from Singapore
Let me know if you’d like help integrating Google Analytics or interpreting your traffic data.
Stephen Morrissey:Excellent advice!
ChatGPT said: Thank you! I'm really glad you found the advice helpful. If you ever want assistance setting up Google Analytics, interpreting visitor patterns, or even brainstorming new post ideas to engage your international readers, just let me know. Keep writing — your blog adds a valuable voice to the literary landscape!
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
--Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d"
Some contemporary poetry is obscure, some of it has an intellectual affectation, it might say to the reader—the reader might intuit—that this poetry is meaningless and that perhaps it was written more for insiders than average people. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being difficult, I applaud being difficult; what is difficult today may be obvious to future readers. But, still, this poetry is more an extension of life's confusion, not an understanding of it, not clarity, not even clarity grounded in an aesthetic presentation, only more confusion. I like direct plain concise language which is an achievement in expression, it is also a very difficult achievement. Poetry deals with the human condition, it isn’t about language, it isn't word play, it isn’t being clever, it isn't jibber jabber, gibberish, abracadabra, or intellectual flim flam... The clue to understanding poetry is that it must be authentic to psyche—that’s all it has to do—otherwise it is meaningless to the reader, it is obscure, obfuscating, pretend intellectual, not real poetry, it doesn’t communicate or offer communion with the reader, it just adds to the overall confusion of life.
There is writing poetry and there is reading poetry, these are two different experiences. If you write poetry then the process is that writing poetry precedes having ideas about poetry and it may take you places—the unknown—in your writing that you never knew you would visit, but if you have preconceptions about what you want to write then you will never visit these new places and new themes in your poetry. It used to be popular to be a Marxist and write about Marxism in one's poems, that is now outdated and old fashioned; today, the popular thing is gender and gender dysphoria, but writing about gender dysphoria doesn't produce real poetry although real poetry may be about gender and gender dysphoria. Poetry isn't prose and some poets should turn to prose if they want to communicate a specific message on some topic of importance to them.
Writing poetry is different than reading poetry; even though it might be one’s calling in life, writing poetry may only be temporary. Coleridge wrote poems for only two years, it was his calling but it was only for two or so years. Some poetry you read stays with you for a lifetime; poetry or some other art form, for instance visual art or music, changes and deepens as you get older, as you return to it at different times in your life and as you mature as a person, then it gives you a new perspective on what you used to believe. Poetry can also work at an intuitive level, or be an intellectual apprehension, or work at a deeper or different perspective of one's life, and whether one is reading poetry or writing poetry one must always be authentic to psyche. Poetry is visionary and an expression of the soul, it isn't a treatise, a dissertation, it isn't propaganda, it isn’t fiction or prose; for this reason poetry doesn't have a greater place in our contemporary world even though reams of poetry are written and published every year.
I was recently interviewed by Sabyasachi Nag, the author of Hands Like Trees (Ronsdale Press, 2023), and the interview was published in The Artisanal Writer on 18 February 2024; see below:
Award-winning Montreal poet, Stephen Morrissey talks to Sabyasachi Nag about a compilation of Selected Poemsfrom 1971 to 2021, Farewell Darkness (Ekstasis Editions, 2023).
Sabyasachi Nag (SN): In this collection, (it seems to me) you have selected more poems from your latter works than from your earlier works. Is that a fair conclusion? What were the considerations at play in the selection process? How did you choose to leave out the work that you ended up leaving out? When you went back to poems that you wrote 30 or 40 years ago how did you know which poems to select (or rather, what were the considerations that informed your choices)
Stephen Morrissey (SM): Some of the early poems in Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems were published in my first selected poems, Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems 1978-1998 (1998). The poems published after 1998 are taken from Girouard Avenue (2009), A Private Mythology (2014), and several chapbooks. I included poems that were thematically consistent with the other poems in the book. Unlike most selected poems, there are no chapters or dates indicating which book the poems were taken from or when they were first published, it is a single body of work, it is one long book made up of poems written and published over a fifty year period that represents what I have done in poetry.
SN: In your long, illustrious, and extremely productive career that includes nine books of poetry, several chapbooks and two volumes on poetics what has been the most challenging work for you to write? Why?
SM: I began writing poetry in 1965 but I didn’t feel that what I was writing really expressed what I wanted to say. My first “real” poems were written in the early 1970s, when I was in my early twenties; for instance, “there are seashells and cats” and other poems that were in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978); my apprenticeship as a poet was from when I began writing poems in 1965 to when I wrote what I felt were poems I could stand behind from around 1974. A second experience of writing a “real poem”, a long poem that was significant to me, was in April 1976 when I wrote “Divisions”; it was an achievement to write this long poem, it was cathartic and confessional.
SN: In the preface of this collection you say, “My experience is that where we begin as poets is where we end.” Can you elaborate?
SM: What concerned me in my writing, themes that were present from when I began writing poems, are still present in what I am writing now. Something like the transience of life is a universal theme, all of my themes are universal and timeless. I didn’t invent these themes, I discovered them as I wrote new poems; you don’t always decide what you want to write, the writing comes to you.
SN: If one may attempt to summarise the main themes in this collection being (awareness) and belonging (loss) seem to have been important drivers for your poetry. Your father’s early death had a profound influence and the past is a recurring theme. You point out in the preface “When I began writing poetry my themes were the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members and romantic love…many years later I am still writing about the (same) but giving more emphasis to some and less to others.” What made you stay close to these themes particularly? What do you make of the changes in emphasis?
SM: I wrote about “The Great Reconfiguration” in The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), it is when an event causes one’s life to change radically. One’s life changes from one minute to the next; for instance, I was born into a middle-class family, we rented a large flat in Montreal and we had a country home, we had a car, we were a family of two parents and two children, we had many relatives, we were a 1950s family. And then my father died and everything changed—his death was the “great reconfiguration” of my life—with his death, we became a single-parent family, we were two sons raised by a single mother; my mother had to find employment and my brother, who was only ten years old, helped her keep track of the family expenses, he also worked washing floors in an apartment building. For me, even as a six-year-old child, it was a descent into grief, death, guilt, and remorse. But this was also the descent into the underground, into the darkness where one suffers at one level but at another level, one may also discover a richer and more significant life, as I did with poetry; it is a new life deepened by what you have learned about life. In Greek mythology this is the myth of Hades, of Persephone’s journey to the underworld; and while the descent to Hades is a journey to darkness, it can also be the discovery of one’s authentic and meaningful life. There is a second myth that represents my psychological or spiritual journey, it is the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience; and, as we read in William Blake’s poems, there is a higher innocence after the fall; the higher innocence is a meaningful life.
SN: You started writing in the early seventies, right after the post-war avant-garde movement and about when the Beat generation (Ginsberg and Kerouac) and the New York School (Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Ashberry) and the Black Mountain poets (Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov) were working feverishly down south. There is an aspect of confessionalism and existential angst in your poetry through those years that seems to be similar to some of Robert Creeley’s work but at odds with the works of the Beat Generation poets and say the NY school and the post-modern work of other Black Mountain poets. And you say, “The great theme of literature is the journey of self-awareness.” Was this choice to situate your poetry among family and grief and love a conscious defiance of the ‘trends’ or something else?
SM: By “confessional” I mean writing poems that deal with aspects of one’s life that are usually kept private. Up to the mid-1950s, with W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, most poets weren’t overly confessional. Confessional poetry refers to expressing the darker experiences in one’s life and even T.S. Eliot was confessional in some of his poetry however much he deplored the self in poetry. John Keats, in 1819, referred to the world as a place of “soul-making”; confessional poetry is also an aspect of soul-making, it emphasizes the journey to self-awareness. What confessional poetry has always aimed to do is bring to awareness the “human shadow”, that area of consciousness we are either not aware of or that we keep hidden; and this is the journey of self-awareness.
SN: How conscious have you been about modernity in your poetry? What poets, trends or movements have impacted your work the most? As a teacher of poetics, how important is ‘modernity’ as an ideal for a young poet?
SM: All I can suggest is what I have learned from experience. Young poets need to read widely, this includes poets from the Modern Period, poets who rose to prominence from approximately 1915 to 1945; for instance, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, HD, and William Carlos Williams. But, as well, young poets should know something of what is being written today; I did concrete/visual poetry, cut-ups, sound poetry, visual collages, and other experiments in poetry that were current at the time. It is also important to meet and be friends with other poets, to talk about poetry, to lay the foundation of being a poet. Poets need to listen to their inner voice, that is where creativity is discovered; creativity has nothing to do with what is fashionable.
SN: Through this collection, you seem to be aware of your poetics– “poetry/creating areas of silence” pg. 38; “only poetry justifies language/and when poetry ceases there’s disharmony” p39; “we should let the poem grow” pg. 41; “Poetry is only the modification of the old” pg. 53; “I am sick to death of these old poems that wear blank expressions” pg. 54 etc.? Can you say a few words about your career-long curiosity about poetics and how it evolved?
SM: I am curious about the mechanics of writing poetry, remembering that a poet sometimes discovers what he or she wants to say in the act of writing. But I also felt, when I was young, that the actual act of writing was somehow special and if this is so then it is special because it is the voice of one’s soul. This is a shamanic approach to poetry, an approach that includes the ancestors and significant dreams.
SN: At one point in the collection, you say “emancipating my being…was always the point…the single point of education” pg. 34 and a few pages earlier (in what seems like one of the early attempts at concrete poetry) the line “Regard as sacred the disorder of my mind” repeats through the page in various motifs, lengths, and degrees of clarity. When you juxtapose the two ideas – poetry as the process of awareness of the psyche (the current state of affairs in the mind, such as disorder) and as also the saviour, the emancipator (if you will) – do these ideas look counterpoised in any way, or are they the same thing – you become aware and hence you are saved?
SM: That was my premise; my intuition was that if I could write about something then I could resolve that issue, I could express it, make sense of it; from an early age I was concerned with expressing my inner self, with “emancipating my being”. I had a lot to work on; for instance, I was always an outsider; my father died when I was six and my stepfather died when I was nineteen; I was the youngest of a large extended family and the older members, aunts and uncles and grandparents, were all dying over a several year period; I failed twice at school and this certainly makes one an outsider, children can be cruel about anyone they can make fun of. What made these events worse, for me, is that nothing was ever discussed, my father died, and he was rarely, if ever, mentioned again until we were all much older. I did not come from a demonstrably loving family, I resigned myself to this life. No wonder, in the mid-1960s, I turned to both writing poetry and writing a diary as a way to express myself, as a way to understand my life; no wonder I became a confessional poet without having heard of this type of poetry. Human consciousness has a natural intelligence and a desire for wholeness and love; consciousness has an innate proclivity to move towards wholeness and love. It was J. Krishnamurti’s books that helped me the most, and hearing Krishnamurti speak at Saanen in Switzerland, at Ojai in California, and in New York City. And in all of this, my focus was poetry not because I wanted to be a poet, but because it was my path in life, it was my calling.
SN: Can we talk a bit about the formal choices in these selected works? Nearly all the poems are unpunctuated (or sparsely punctuated), the lines are short (two/three/four words mostly), the language crystal clear and the breaks are startling at times yet devoid of any showiness; sometimes empty spaces denote the pauses in breath; the tone is confessional, and the voice carries an aspect of endearing vulnerability that makes the reader trust it. How did you arrive at this form? In so much that most of the titles included in this collection are formally similar, what made you stick to the forms that you started with?
SM: Punctuation, line breaks, length of lines or fragments of lines, like themes, this is all discovered in the act of writing. And to write directly, honestly, authentically, and without artifice, you have to be brave to write something—to enter the unknown—even though your desire is to censor what you are writing. The main thing is to have the courage to write without censoring yourself, it is the truth-telling function of poetry, of consciousness. I wanted to be as direct and simple in my writing as possible, the line breaks indicate how the poem is to be read, the length of lines is direct and simple but this is a lot more difficult to do than one might expect, it requires a lot of editing, of living with the poem and working on it until you feel you have said exactly what you need to say.
SN: In reading this book it is impossible to walk away without experiencing a strong undercurrent of a cyclical worldview as we encounter in Zen and Hindu philosophies (“the whole earth is a movement of waves and stones” pg.18; The Secret Meaning of the Alphabet…discover/…becoming/ the rain running/ down the windowpanes. p..g 52; “death/is not the closing of doors; pg. 65; “I divested/the past in meeting you,/and meeting you again/and again and again/into infinity.” pg. 118. In some places “the emancipation of the being” leaps out of the page and through the clear, unambiguous, enormously vulnerable voice brings an awareness in the reader that is available mostly in the reading of philosophy. Could you talk a bit more about it?
SM: When I was young, in the late 1960s, I used to visit my brother, who was a student at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts; I remember visiting the Harvard Coop and buying V.K. Chari’s Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism (1964), a book I still own. I read Colin Wilson’s Poetry and Mysticism (1969) and W.T. Staces’ The Teaching of theMystics (1969), and later I wrote several essays on R.M. Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness; Bucke was a friend of Walt Whitman and wrote about Whitman’s cosmic vision. There were other books that made an impression on me, for instance, books by John Cage and D.T. Suzuki, and others. But after I began reading Krishnamurti’s books in the early 1970s I knew that no organized set of beliefs, no organized religion, was really of interest to me. Krishnamurti was, for me, the great teacher of exploring the psyche, more so than C.G. Jung. Late one night about twenty years ago I took a taxi from the Vancouver airport to where I was staying; I asked the Indian taxi driver, “Who do you think is the greatest Indian of the Twentieth Century?” His answer, which shouldn’t have surprised me, was Krishnamurti. For Krishnamurti freedom is a pathless journey, it is a journey to awareness.
SN: Has there been a relationship (in your writing life, that you are aware of) between your writing practice and how your writing has been more or less of a spiritual activity integrated or interdependent on the community around you?
SM: Community is important, but poetry is a solitary activity and we must defer to this; fortunately, for me, as an introvert, I have enjoyed the company of a few people, I didn’t need a lot of people around me. All of my life I met people who were kind and compassionate, who saw more in me than I saw; for instance, a high school teacher, Mrs. Sophia Monton; but also, at McGill University, I was a student of Louis Dudek, and he was a terrific influence and an inspiration for what the poet’s life can be. In the early 1980s, I became friends with George Johnston, a poet, translator, and by then a retired professor at Carleton University; he was a wonderful generous man. And I had many long conversations about Krishnamurti with R.R. Skinner at his home in the UK. Also, my wife, the Vancouver-born poet Carolyn Zonailo, has been a blessing to me for the over thirty years we have been together. This doesn’t really answer your question but one never knows where life will take you; the constant is to be aware of life and to understand your life; for me, this meant writing both a diary and poetry, and that has made all the difference in my life.
About the Author
Stephen Morrissey was born in Montreal, the city where he still lives. He was educated at McGill University; while at McGill Morrissey won the Peterson Poetry Award. He has published ten books of poetry, several chapbooks, and two volumes on poetry and poetics; Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems (2023), which collects poems that were published from 1971 to 2021.
The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 – 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library of McGill University. Visit the poet at http://www.stephenmorrissey.ca
I like to sit and write, I like to put words on a page and form sentences, paragraphs, statements, poems, inconsequential scribblings, or meaningful insights, body, coherence, expressions of what I think and feel, or where something is uncovered or something unfolds out of apparent nothingness, something is born to awareness or something is created where there was nothing, and slowly something meaningful is written down, slowly I uncover who I am with words, words that are ink, squiggles, scribbles, sentences, shapes, and shadows on a sheet of lined white paper, and this is done in this room where I am alone, and the room is a place of solitude, (writers must love solitude, must love the physical act of writing), and something new is created as this writing forms a single entity, and I am no longer alone, there is also this new entity, it is this writing that seems to have come out of nowhere. And that is how a poem or this paragraph are written.
1H.W. Garrod in his book, Poetry and the Criticism of Life (1931),
writes that it was Seneca “who first said, what Ben Jonson and many others have
said after him, that the critic of poetry must be himself a poet.” There is a tradition
of poets writing about poetry; Louis Dudek’s writing is full of a contagious
enthusiasm for poetry; Irving Layton wrote with bravado about the importance of
poetry in Waiting for the Messiah
(1985), and there are important statements on poetry in the prefaces of some of
his books. Three other books of essays and commentaries on poetry need to be
mentioned: co-edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967); An English CanadianPoetics
(2009) edited by Robert Hogg; and On
Poetry and Poets, Selected Essays of A.J.M. Smith (1977). I also recommend George
Whalley’s extraordinary Poetic Process,
an essay on poetics (1967).
2In Canada we rarely celebrate our poets,
I refer to poets of previous generations; even poets who died only five or ten
years ago seem to have never existed judging by their absence from our cultural
or daily life, or their being mentioned for their poetry, or their poetry being
quoted. We don’t name bridges or airports after our poets, that’s reserved for
dead politicians no matter how dubious their contribution to our national life.
This collective amnesia does not augur well for our future; if we can't even remember
a few dead poets who helped define what Canada means, then what kind of a
country will we end up having?
3What are the perennial qualities of
poetry? There is the dichotomy between two approaches to poetry, two types of
poets, Apollonian and Dionysian, classical and romantic, formal and informal,
cosmopolitan and nativist. No matter which group of poets one falls into one of
the things that makes for great poetry is if the poet has found his or her authentic
voice: has the poet written something that is true to their inner being and is
insightful of the human condition; and the corollary of this: does the poem
move us emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually? This is the type of poetry
that interests me; these perennial qualities make for great poetry.
4My approach to poetry has always been
intuitive. Intuitive people know that intuition gives us knowing but without
proof, while intellectual knowledge is substantive but often lacks the insight
and originality of intuition. When intuition precedes intellectual
understanding, as it does, then it is necessary to find evidence for one’s intuitions. Most of my insights into poetry—for
instance, and I’m obviously not the first to
say it, that poetry is the voice of the human soul—originated intuitively. In
this book I am trying to substantiate my intuitive insights into poetry, this
has helped me to better understand my thinking on poetry and, I hope, it is of
interest to readers.
5No real poet ever decided to be a poet,
it doesn’t work that way; if it was a decision they probably didn’t last long
writing poetry. I answered a call to do this work and now I ask, is there
closure on this activity that has dominated my life? This book is closure for
my writing about the meaning of poetry but, as for writing new poems, I don’t
want to end up as some old poets do, and that is publishing perfectly written
but meaningless poetry. I hope I will be long gone before that happens. Of
course, there may still be a few poems to write, and a few odds and ends to
write about poetry; there is no age for retirement for poets, there is just the
slow act of disappearing.
Stephen
Morrissey
Montreal,
Canada
16
November 2021
Morrissey, Stephen. The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche. Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2022.
I've spent a lifetime writing: a diary I've kept everyday since January 1965, books, poetry, book reviews, criticism, and correspondence. Why did I do so much writing? On one hand, I enjoy solitude and being creative. On the other hand, there were things that happened in my life that I understood better in the act of writing; writing helped me to understand something about life and expressing this in a poem was both to discover something new and to have a numinous experience.
This writing I am talking about has to be fearless, the writer is going to a place that is marked with signs saying "No Trespassing", "Do Not Enter", and "Enter at Your Own Risk". The important things in life are not easy and they aren’t free, they are a lot of work. You may be afraid to write something down, or afraid to follow where your thinking is going, you may be inclined to censor your writing; just remember that no one else need ever read what you are writing, you can tear it up after you've written whatever you want to say, but you need to have courage and be fearless to do the writing. How could it be otherwise? Writing has to be a precise expression of what the soul has to say, what the soul perceives; this is more difficult than you might think.
What I am saying will mean very little to most people, but this is not meant for most people, it is meant for poets. A poet wants to write an authentic poem, a poem that is authentic to what the poet wants to say, to be true to the poet's inner being, and this requires years of writing and rewriting poems. All of a poet's work can be seen as one long poem, it is the poem of one's life, continuous and unbroken. You don't just sit down one day and write something you call a poem and think that makes you a poet, there is a lot more to it than this.
Writing poetry is not an obsession or even a compulsion, it is that there is no alternative but to do the writing that presents itself to you; it is what one does and to do anything else is to deny the Call to do this work; if you deny the Call you have betrayed your life, betrayed your mission in life. Not even God is as important as your soul, you can live very nicely without God but if you betray your soul you will have no life at all, just confusion and denial. Don't worry, God will forgive you for not believing in Him, He doesn't need your belief, He doesn't even need you. To see life, the particulars of life, and to express them, is to communicate things of the soul and poetry is the voice of the soul. Writing is always a movement in the direction of wholeness and understanding, of creativity, of making something new. It is a triumph of formulating and expressing in an exact way the thing you want to write, it is the achievement of wholeness over division. So, at the basis of writing is finding wholeness, truth, and Oneness with life. That's how important writing is to a poet and why poets need to be fearless when writing poems.
I was interviewed by Artisanal Writer, a web site dedicated to the art of writing poetry. To read the interview on their website requires getting a free subscription; otherwise, here is the text of the interview below.
Stephen Morrissey talks to Sachi Nag about his craft and artisanal habits.
1. "There is an elusive quality in these poems, a sense that the author is unconcerned whether you read them at all", says Michael Cameron about your first title, The Trees of Unknowing, Montreal Writer's Forum, 1979. Do you agree? Was there any specific life event that evoked this collection? What are some of the key influences in this work? Does this title in any way coincide with your own spiritual journey?
I understand what Michael Cameron is saying, but no one publishes a book unless they want it to be read. The important thing for me regarding The Trees of Unknowing (1978) is that these are the poems in which I found my voice as a poet. Finding your voice is significant for any poet, it's when you have the authority to write without second-guessing your work. No single event lead to writing this title, it was a series of events: I published my first chapbook in 1971; I started writing the poems in The Trees of Unknowing in 1973; I was a student at Sir George Williams University and graduated in 1973; I attended Krishnamurti's talks in Saanen, Switzerland, in 1973; I completed my M.A. at McGill, where I studied with Louis Dudek, that was in 1976; I met poets who became life-long friends and I gave poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery. The title of the book alludes to the 14th century spiritual text The Cloud of Unknowing, but The Trees of Unknowing isn't influenced by it at all except for the title.
2. "Mostly short lines, down to one word a line "spaced out" so the reading of the poem is slowed down; part of the reading is the placement of the poem's talk on largely empty pages," says Isaac Osborn about Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983). "Its silences border on an art transcending technique and even viewpoint. The images are elemental, there are few adjectives," Michael Cameron says of The Trees of Unknowing; could you talk about how you achieve this silence on the page—is it premeditated or is it something that happens during your writing—when what is spoken is framed in by the unspoken or unspeakable?
This is something, the subject of composition in poetry, which I have thought about for a long time. Years ago I spoke with Allen Ginsberg and he repeated what many poets were saying in those days, referring to Charles Olson's essay "Projective Verse", that lines in a poem correspond to the length of the breath of the poet. I never agreed with Olson's connection of breath with composing poetry; to me, the lines of free verse, as printed on a page, are consistent with readability, with communicating with the reader, and with the emotion the poet wants to communicate. Years ago I saw that poetry is the voice of the human soul, this is not original to me but it was something I knew intuitively. Instead of Olson's connection of breath with line breaks, it seems to me that if a poem is the voice of the human soul, then poems are transcriptions of the soul, and lines of poetry are patterns of thought, expressing what the soul has to say. What the soul perceives, the poem says.
3. This sense of family memories is the unflinching recognition of the fact that "grief anchors us to points in time" and that we define ourselves through our experiences of loss," says William Blackburn of Family Album. Why did you write this book? In what way is this title related to previous titles?
Snap shots of family life, glimpses of the past, anecdotes, and long forgotten memories recalled in poems, existential doom and gloom, a bleak Edward Hopper environment, this is some of what is in Family Album (1988). My mother spoke often about the family; she had a terrific memory for the names of relatives and what they did; of course, poets can be interested in family and family history and never mention this in their poems. For me, beginning in my first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), I wrote about family, I didn't choose this subject, it was given to me, and more is involved in this than grief. From when I was young I kept a diary and I wrote down what relatives told me about their lives and their memories of the past; I was always writing something. I felt there was heroism to everyday life and I worked to record what people did, what people said, and some of this went into what I wrote in poems. In fact, I have written on a lot more than grief, love poems for instance. And yet, grief is an emotion that we don't leave behind, it comes paired with other emotions and events in addition to losing someone; and while grief diminishes it doesn't go away. Remember Queen Elizabeth II's comment, "Grief is the price we pay for love."
4. You have said somewhere that Carl Jung influenced the Shadow Trilogy. J. Krishnamurti's influence on your previous titles is widely acknowledged. Can you say a bit more about these two influences? Do you see them as influences that compete with and balance each other or do you see them as complimentary?
I am not an expert or authority on the writings of C.G. Jung or the teachings of J. Krishnamurti and I am not a follower of any philosophy or any person's ideas about life. Jung's approach is to go deeply into one's psychology and he gives some terms that help one to do this; Krishnamurti's approach is to free oneself from preconceptions, he advises to question everything. In either instance the direction is towards thinking for oneself. The thing about Jung is that he affirms life, he says that the psyche has a natural affinity to wholeness, and I have experienced this in my life. Krishnamurti's teaching, very simplified, is to question everything including what is currently popular or fashionable, to be your own authority; he writes, "Truth is a pathless land." Jung and Krishnamurti are different but both have made enormous contributions to our attempt to understand ourselves.
5. Much like Family Album, Girouard Avenue is about family history. Could you speak a little on how and why family history plays such an important role in your work?
Family history, one's ancestors, is a part of our inner being, but many people don't know the names of their grandparents, they know little about their family history. Everyone wants meaning and purpose in life, to connect with the past, with where we live, and to see ourselves as more than isolated people stranded in the present moment, but we are increasingly a people who have no history, no traditions, and who are part of a growing deracinated global population that doesn't care where they are living. I've spent a lot of time researching family history, it is something my brother and I have done together, and it is also a part of my spiritual journey.
6. What made you a poet?
"The Great Reconfiguration" is an essay in The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), and is about how a single event in one's life can be sudden and change a person to the roots of their being. I came from a middle class family, we had a nice home in a nice neighbourhood, we owned a car, we owned a country home, and my father had a good white collar job. All of that ended when I was six years old and my father died. Everything changed; we became a single parent family and my mother had to work; my brother, who was only ten years old, assumed adult responsibilities beyond what are expected of a child; and I was left to more or less fend for myself in an emotional sense, to deal with grief by myself. The death of my father is the Great Reconfiguration of my life, it is when everything changed in my life, and a few years later I met these changes by writing poems about my father, my family; and yet writing poetry was a calling, it was never a conscious decision on my part. The genesis of writing poetry began with my father's death, it set me apart from other people, it influenced my whole life and got me writing poetry; writing poetry actually saved my life.
7. What does it mean/suggest for you to think about your craft with each published work? If you were to associate an image with the development timeline of your writing craft what would that look like?
Each book is a part of a continuum, each book builds on the previous book and, when seen as a totality, a poet's books are the books of his or her life, they are the narrative of one's life. But as for an image that represents this body of work, beginning with my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978), the single image would have to be the tree, the tree of life, the family tree, and the tree that is on the landscape or in one's backyard. It reaches into the sky, to the light, but its roots go deeply into the earth, into the darkness. Both the light of the sky and the darkness of what is below the surface of the earth are symbolized by trees—branches and roots—; one moves us upward and to being creative, and the other moves us downward, into Hades, and we know that this is also a place of great creativity. But I also love trees for themselves; we live in a small house but we have an apple tree, a sumac, a tamarack, a ginkgo, a maple tree, a fir tree, and a row of cedars, all on a small city lot.
8. What was the most satisfying aspect of your recently completed work?
My recently published work on poetics, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry (2022), brings me a lot of satisfaction, a lot of happiness, it is a summing up of years of work, years of thinking about poetry, years of being a poet; it follows and develops on what I wrote in my previous book, A Poet's Journey (2019). Poets write poetry but part of being a poet is to write on poetics, to say why we write, what it means to write; writing on poetics isn't poetry but it explains something of the poet's vision. I suggest to young poets to go with their intuition, don't be afraid to theorize about poetry and to take risks, don't be afraid if your ideas are eccentric, non-conformist, or different from what everybody else is saying. Just go ahead and write them down, you may be on to something important.
9. What are you writing against or towards?
I have written about grief and regret, death and loss, but there is more to my writing than this; in fact, my writing has been an affirmation of life. The act of writing poems is an affirmation of the creative spirit. I am always writing towards affirming life.
10. What is your definition of a successful piece of writing? Who decides that?
I don't have a definition of a successful piece of writing, but a poem that doesn't work is easy to spot. That's part of the beauty of poetry, it is elusive, it changes, it is different according to various factors including the poet, when it was written, and what it is about. No single factor produces a poem that works, two poems may be successful for different reasons. As for the poem's critical success, T.S. Eliot wrote that time is the only real critic, or test, of poetry and he was right. Poets have no way to control which of their poems, if any, will be read, or discussed, and for how long.
Author Bio
Montreal-born poet Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University in 1973. In 1976 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Vehicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 - 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995.
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