I asked Chat GPT "who reads my blog?"

 

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:

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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:

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How to Find Readers from Singapore on Blogger

1. Log in to your Blogger account.

2. Go to your Dashboard.

3. Click on “Stats” in the left-hand menu.

4. Look under the “Audience” section.

5. You’ll see pageviews by country — check if Singapore appears in the list.

6. 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

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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

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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

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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!                                                                 

                 

How to write a poem, and reading poems

 

29 May 2014

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. 

Revised: 07, 08, 11 May 2025

On Louis Dudek’s "Continuation"

Cross-Section: Poems 1940-1980 (Coach House Press, 1980), Louis Dudek

 

My copy of Louis Dudek’s  Cross-Section: Poems 1940-1980 (1980) used to belong to my friend Sonja Skarsteft, it is one of several books given to me by Sonja’s husband, Geof Isherwood, after Sonja’s passing and it is a book that I treasure because it was Sonja's and it was inscribed to her by another friend, Louis Dudek. Cross-Section is a selection of Dudek’s previously unpublished poems, organized in chronological order from 1940 to 1980. A poem entitled "Fragment of Continuum", the final poem in the book, immediately caught my attention, written in 1980 it is similar to Dudek's Continuation poems in its form and content; the poem is conversational, it is a stream of consciousness that easily fits as a part of Continuation, albeit not quite as good as Continuation, but there must be some connection between this poem and Continuation.

Dudek was uneasy about publishing Continuation, it is idiosyncratic, unlike anything else he wrote, and either readers are willing to extend their idea of what poetry is or they dismiss it as obscure and without artistic value. Continuation was not well received even by Dudek's friends; for instance, Mike Gnarowski was condescending about the poem when I mentioned it to him a year or so before he died. But Louis persevered, as any poet must persevere who writes something considerably out of the main stream of contemporary poetry or their usual work; however, Continuation is also similar to Dudek’s previously published long poems and it is a development on his previous poems. It was years in creative gestation before it was finally published; it also parallels Dudek's growth as a poet.  

Here (revised) is the publishing history of Continuation from my essay, "Reading Louis Dudek’s Continuation: An introduction to a major Canadian poem", published in "Montreal Serai" around December 2013: 

The publishing history of Continuation is interesting; Continuation I ( 1981) and Continuation II (1989) were published as separate volumes by Vehicule Press; Continuation III was never completed but parts of it were published in two separate books, they are:

Continuation III, found in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997), has four sections; “Bits and Pieces”, included in The Caged Tiger, was section five of Continuation III.

Dudek’s last book, The Surface of Time (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 2000), concludes with "Sequence from 'Continuation III', which would be section six of "Continuation III".

In Dudek's "White Book", his Collected Poetry (1971), there is an excerpt from "Continuation I" which he subtitled "An infinite Poem in Progress". Dudek’s explanation of "Fragment of Continuum", published the year before Continuation I was published, is also explained but in a footnote to the poem, and it could also describe what he is doing in Continuation; a "continuum" he defines as "Something in which a fundamental common character is discernible amid a series of insensible or indefinite variations". As in Continuation.

There should have been Continuation III, not only excerpts published in two of Dudek’s books.  I am told that Dudek’s literary executor was Mike Gnarowski, but probably due to old age or dislike of Continuation, Professor Gnarowski never published a complete three volume Continuation; there should be three volumes to this work--it should be triadic--the number three suggesting completion, a creative and archetypal manifestation of the creative spirit. Continuation remains incomplete as two volumes; the number two as an archetypal number suggesting the absence of completion, and this reminds us that the poem remains unfinished.

Multiple book length poems are difficult to write and to get published, and difficult to sustain to completion; for instance, some long poems do not cohere, think of Pound's Cantos or Olson's Maxiumus Poems. Dudek's Continuation ends in the poet's acknowledgement that old age preoccupies his thinking and his daily activity and the poem shows the effect of being old; with the exception of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, the long poem is not the domain of old poets as Dudek experienced. Of course, there are exceptions, there always are, but still, few old people have the energy required to maintain a sustained creative effort such as the long poem. That’s just common sense.

Defining Voice in Poetry

The discovery of a poet’s voice brings authenticity to the poet’s work, that the work communicates the content and form of the poem as well as the poet’s inner being, his or her soul or psyche. 

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It isn’t the sound of your voice or how well you read a poem out loud that is voice. It isn’t a poem for several voices. It isn’t slam poetry or performance poetry. It’s the essence of who you are as it is expressed in the way you write, it is your own original distinctive individual voice.

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Voice in poetry, to be authentic, must be true to the self of the poet, to the inner, subjective, self-perception, self-knowledge, of the poet. Voice has to be authentic and true to the poet’s inner perception. Poetry happens when psyche has access to the world.

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The point is to discover one’s voice, and then you continue writing and voice changes in what one writes, but the discovery of one’s authentic voice is a border one needs to cross in order to write the work that follows, work that one can stand behind, that gives one the self-assurance to expresses one’s vision. 

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Voice is a vehicle for the content of poetry; content expands when an authentic voice is discovered. Voice is not style, style changes but voice is the expression of the inner, psychological dimension of the poet; voice is the expression of psyche. Voice changes just as our bodies change with age, but once an authentic voice is discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the poet is saying or in what form it is being said.

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There is no way to find one’s voice, it must be discovered by the poet, but not all poets find their voice in poetry; in a way, an authentic voice finds the poet. After voice is discovered the person writing poems is a real poet, not someone who also happens to write occasional poems. Voice in poetry comes to you, you can work on your poetry but that doesn’t guarantee you will find your voice; voice is like any other creative work that comes to the person. If someone who writes poems never finds his voice, he or she is not a poet. How can they be when writing poetry is predicated on writing from an authentic voice? This does not diminish what a poet writes before the discovery of voice, some great poems can be written before voice is discovered as a prelude to finding one’s voice, as a precursor to the discovery of the poet’s authentic voice.

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First, you have to be born a poet and realize you are a poet by writing poetry, then you have to put in your 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. There’s nothing romantic or fun about being a poet. It’s a lot of hard work to be a poet and as you get older it gets harder and harder, not only because it is solitary work but because of all the additional work that comes with writing and building a body of work; for instance, the time consuming work of organizing and placing one’s archives, working on one’s selected poems, keeping up correspondence, managing what you have created over a lifetime, and the effort to meet the demands of life as one gets older. If you live long enough you, too, will not be immune to the demands of old age.

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Voice is the expression of the poet’s integrity as a poet. Voice is the expression of the poet’s character, sensibility, and integrity as a human being. This is why it has such importance to poets.

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Discovering one’s voice does not disqualify or negate what the poet wrote before this discovery, but it is a sign of the poet’s maturity as a poet. 

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Voice is when we speak from the heart, from the soul, without pretension or affectation, but with honesty and truth without censoring ourselves, with only one conviction, to be true to our inner necessity, to what we have to say (not what we want to say or should say, or think we should say) but abandoning these things of the self, to speak from the real and authentic self, not the layers of self, but from the heart and from the soul.

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The genesis of both the content of the work and the voice expressing the work are simultaneous, they can’t be separated. An authentic voice is discovered in writing poems.

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Voice in poetry is not one’s “style” of writing; style may be narrative, minimal, formal, visual poetry, or what have you. Voice is access to psyche from which poems are written. If a poet hasn’t discovered his or her “voice” they haven't become a poet.

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A poet can’t “search for a voice”, but all poets need to find their voice. Voice comes to the poet, it isn’t something you can “find”. Voice is the expression of the poet’s psyche; it is the congruence of events that allow the poem to authentically express the inner, spiritual and psychological being of the poet.

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Stephen Morrissey                                            

November 2012 – June 2013,  Montreal

 Revised: 2 October 2024

"I like to sit and write . . . "

 

20 January 2016, Blvd de Maisonneuve, Montreal

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.

Vision in Poetry

It is a constant struggle to write from one’s vision
when there are so many people who oppose what one has to say.
It is a constant struggle to be true to one’s vision,
to be true to one’s self over a lifetime of writing.

It is a constant struggle
to be strong, strong in one’s vision,
not give up, not surrender, not lose one’s vision.
 

Instant Shaman (three)

There was a time when I would have agreed with William Everson, certainly one of the major proponents of shamanism in poetry—his famous proclamation for poets is “Shamanize! Shamanize!”—when he writes regarding spirits “… these spirits are collective images, actually we call them today archetypes, but in primitive times they were thought to be separate consciousness.” This makes perfect rational sense. But I also think of work of Dr. Raymond Moody, who is a scholar of the classics, and a doctor of medicine and psychiatry, and whose seminal book Life after Life has had a profound affect on our society’s way of looking at death. A more recent book by Dr. Moody, written with Paul Perry, is Reunions, Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones (Ivy Books, New York, 1993) which describes various techniques of encountering the dead, one of which is mirror gazing. I have heard Dr. Moody speak several times at the annual conferences held in Montreal by the Spiritual Science Fellowship and he is an excellent and fascinating speaker.

On several occasions I have visited mediums and astrologers, and I remember one medium in particular, who told me important information that could not have been known to her, that was specific in detail and importance only to myself, and that gave me immediate relief from what I was concerned about. I have also walked along a street and seemed to feel the presence of spirits walking with me, not of just one or two, but of dozens, so many in fact that it seemed they were pressed up against me. I have also sat with one of the most famous astrologers in the world, Nöel Tyl, and listened while he summarized my life experiences giving not only the year in which experiences occurred but also the exact month, from my birth to the present. Astrology is very different than Spiritualism but both indicate that there is a dimension to existence other than our consensual reality, and we suffer a loss in vision when people rationalize, justify, and excuse away what lies outside the bounds of rational and intellectual thinking.

Another important editor and author on poetry and shamanism is Jerome Rothenberg. I remember the excitement when I first read his anthology of “primitive” poetry Technicians of the Sacred (Anchor Books, New York, 1969). Rothenberg, in his Introduction, writes that the assembled poems show “some of the ways in which primitive poetry and thought are close to an impulse toward unity in our own time, of which the poets are the forerunners.” Then he describes the areas where these intersections of “primitive & modern” occur, one being “the poet as shaman, or primitive shaman as poet & seer thru control of the means… an open ‘visionary’ situation prior to all system-making (‘priesthood’) in which the man creates thru dream (image) & word (song), ‘that Reason may have ideas build on’ (W. Blake).” And in a sidebar he lists the following as examples of this, they are: “Rimbaud’s voyant, Rilke’s angel, Lorca’s duende, beat poetry, psychedelic see-in’s, be-in’s, etc, individual neo-shamanism, works directly influenced by the ‘other’ poetry or by analogies to ‘primitive art’: ideas of negritude, tribalism, wilderness, etc.

In Reunions, Dr. Raymond Moody writes that for the ancient Greeks “visions took place in a state between sleeping and waking.” This psychic state can be accessed by various means, for instance, by mirror gazing, or for the ancient Celts, by gazing into a cauldron of water. Moody has constructed a “psychomateum,” which he describes as “a modernized version of the ones found in ancient Greece, with the same goal in mind, that of seeing apparitions of the dead.” Moody writes,

The word psychomateum, taken literally, implies that the spirits of the dead are summoned as a means of divination so that they can be asked questions about the future or other hidden knowledge…the facility I created for this study is not a psychomateum since our purpose was not to arouse the dead for divination. Rather people came (and still come) in hopes of satisfying a longing for the company of those whom they have lost to death…

Regarding shamanism, Moody writes,

In Siberia…Tungus shamans used copper mirrors to “place the spirits.” In their language the word for “mirror” was actually derived from the word for “soul” or “spirit,” and hence the mirror was regarded as a receptacle for the spirit. These shamans claimed to be able to see the spirits of dead people by gazing into mirrors. He also writes, … most people who hear for the first time about shamanism assume that the shamans were either charlatans, mentally ill, or that they possessed some extraordinary faculty that most of us lack. We have already seen that shamans claimed to be able to take voyages into the spirit world through their magic mirrors, where they then saw spirits of the dead… the inner world of those ancient tribal practitioners is accessible to us all.

Instant Shaman (two)

I remember, as well, in my late teens experimenting writing poetry. I would play loud music and write, thinking the music could help me access the poetic experience, as though it could somehow block the ego that is usually situated, like a filter, between the poet and what he is writing. All of my experimental writing was done with this in mind, whether concrete or sound poetry, or the cut-ups and visual collages that I also did. I know that some people have tried writing while on various “recreational” drugs, or while intoxicated after drinking alcohol. Alcohol never much interested me, it is only in the last ten years or so that I have the occasional social drink, and I did try hallucinogenic drugs a few times but found the results dismal. Mainly I felt that I didn’t like having my consciousness played around with by alcohol or hallucinogens. I also spent years sitting at my desk for several hours every evening writing hundreds of poems, being alone, telling no one what I was doing, and filing these poems in the small cubbies on either side of the desk, with no thought whatsoever of this writing having any purpose other than that I enjoyed writing poems.

The shamanic experience, the shaman’s journey, is usually described as one in which the shaman listens to repetitive drumming in order to enter a hypnogogic state. This type of religious experience seems to be caused by the release of endorphins in the brain. This does not refute the content of the experience, it only explains the physiological response to an experience and the experience of the Divine is possible without drumming, or any outside stimulant. There is something greater than the individual ego, it is what W.T. Stace described as “the undifferentiated unity of the universe.” I remember this phrase very well because Stace’s book on mysticism, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World (A Mentor Book, New York, 1960) had a profound affect on me when I was still in high school. I remember going to a used book store in downtown Montreal, where a cousin worked, and buying two books, one was by W.T. Stace and the other was Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet which I never read. I still have both of these books. When I was in high school I read Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics (Wilshire Book Company, Hollywood, 1968), a book that teaches self-hypnosis. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who discusses, in this book, how a visualized experience of something is the equivalent, for the mind, to actually having had the experience. I read Maltz’s book and learned his technique for self-hypnosis and visualization. Self-hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation in which the conscious mind is situated between wakeful consciousness and sleeping unconsciousness. Meanwhile, I also remember my brother was interested in hypnosis and that he once hypnotized me, around 1962-63 when we still lived on Oxford Avenue, and he gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion, that I would get up and get a drink of water, and I remember walking to the bathroom and drinking from the tap (as we did for some reason) immediately after coming out of the hypnotic state. To this day I practise Maltz’s self-hypnosis when I can’t sleep, and over the last ten years or so I have used it for entering shamanic journeys.

Instant Shaman (one)

Back in the early 1970s, when I was a student at Sir George Williams University, I took a line from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and made it into a visual poem. The poem became a visual representation of the content of Rimbaud’s statement: “regard as sacred the disorder of my mind.” Rimbaud’s approach to poetry is an ancient one, it is also shamanic. When he writes, in Lettres du voyant, “Je est autre,” he becomes the “other,” and we re-vision the poet not only as an individual entity but as a medium for the Divine. God communicates with people through dreams and angels, but communication from the Divine can also occur in a trance state, or in a state of deep relaxation, in a synchronistic experience, in the creative act, or possibly under other heightened conditions of consciousness. This experience is not unfamiliar to many of us who write poetry, for creative people there is often an experience of transcending the ego in the act of creating, and there is usually a sense of wonder that something was created that had not existed before.

My assumption—my intuition—has always been that there is something inherently important in the act of writing poetry. It was Rimbaud’s aim to access the unconscious by entering a trance state, to go beyond or transcend the known by disordering the senses. This could be done, he writes, by «un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.» In other words, he would disorder the senses, disorder rational thinking, in order to find the spirit world, the world of archetypes, wherein lies poetry. An important author on this topic is William Everson, author of Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations (ed. Lee Bartlett. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1982). He writes, “The shaman enters a trance-like condition in order to engage the archetypes (spirits) of the collective unconscious and stabilize their awesome power, appease the demons, as it were. This is precisely the function of the poet today.” He also writes, “…the poet, too, can only work through trance…no creativity is possible that does not involve a trance-like state of possession.” Order exists in the universe, even if it is projected by the human mind, for the mind abhors disorder, craves order, and will create order. I remember as a child lying in bed and seeing faces and shapes in the chintz pattern drapes in my room, or walking along Oxford Avenue to Terrebonne and watching the clouds move across the sky as though they were following me in an intimidating way, or lying on our front lawn and watching the clouds assume the appearance of shapes and faces (this experience, of seeing faces in clouds, is called pareidolia), and I also remember the sound of water dripping from a bathroom tap had the effect of sounding like a voice that was repeating some phrase, over and over again, suggesting some coherent statement.