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: A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet by Stephen Morrissey

                               

Published on The League of Canadian Poets website, March 3, 2020.

Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine

Poetry is the voice of the human soul, speaking across time and distance

– Stephen Morrissey

 In A Poet’s Journey Montreal native Stephen Morrissey shares four decades of insight about what it means to be a poet and the process by which a poet can discover his “authentic voice”.  The book  includes astute impressions of other poets Morrissey has met along the way, among them George Johnston, Keitha Macintosh and Artie Gold who, like Morrissey, was one of “The Vehicle Poets” in Montreal, beginning in the mid-1970s.

What makes Morrissey’s book such a fascinating read is the thing which makes his poetry so indelible:  accessibility, and a hard won, pared-down wisdom.

Stephen Morrissey’s father died when he was six, his life abruptly and permanently reconfigured by fatherlessness.  Unable to verbally articulate his emotional devastation, at the age of 15 Morrissey began to express his feeling of being “damaged” and “different” from his peers (and from people in general), in poems.  The inexpressible had become expressible.  Profoundly “dispirited and disempowered”, he had found a way to connect / re-connect with his “spirit”, and to empower himself, by himself – through poetry.  He instinctively knew that this was his only way forward.

A section from Morrissey’s poem The River:

Because I did not grieve

when I was a child,

I have spent a lifetime

grieving, always on the edge

of sorrow

and from My Shadow:

always the shadow

of Father who died-

always the presence

of the knowledge

of death – my burden

I carried even as a child,

my shadow

Morrissey analyzed his life, in his diaries and poetry, during the years in which his stepfather was dying (when Morrissey was in high school), and following the dissolution of his first, early marriage.  During these years he came to the realization that “real art lies in the insecurity of life” – in the ability of art to capture life’s fragility and evanescence.

Early on, Morrissey made the decision not to self-censor.  This was due to his belief that, as he writes In A Poet’s Journey, “A poem that has been censored, that does not hold within it emotional, psychological or spiritual insight, has lost its poetic truth.”

As expressed in these lines from "Divisions" (1983):

all along I have worked at

emancipating my being

cutting through to the truth

this for me was always

the point   the single point

Uncovering his “authentic voice” has lead Morrissey to a meticulous, lifelong examination of his Shadow.  The pursuit of that Shadow, together with his decision against censoring what he writes, has taken him to places in his life that other poets might just as soon forget.  Forgetting is not an option for Morrissey, however.  He believes that “to forget is to lose part of our inner being, part of our lives, part of our soul.”

That includes not forgetting “the ancestors” who have come before.  Some of Morrissey’s most evocative poems feature vignettes of who his family members were as individuals. Not having had the opportunity of getting to know his father, Morrissey was determined “to remember as much as possible” about his ancestors, in order to “keep an accurate record against time”.  During the process of which he became, in his words, “an archivist of memory.”  These poems are an exploration of human nature and of the interconnectedness of family over generations – in Morrissey’s case, as set against the backdrop of 20th century Montreal.   He calls them “poems of witness”.

“The ancestors visit us if we listen to them,” he writes, “whether it is in our dreams or by their actual presence”.

As exemplified in these lines from "The Dead of My Life":

how often I return to them

the dead in my life

who inhabit dreams

memories while rocking

my son to sleep or a

dream that my Uncle Alex

was alive although we

thought (in the dream)

that he had been dead

these seven years

they are like flies
beating against an autumn window
… this ever diminishing
circus parade of old
people I hang onto
as though without them
I too would cease to be

As an undergraduate in college (Louis Dudek would later become a mentor at McGill), Morrissey intuited that the “central myth” of his life, and the central theme of his poetry was the Garden Myth – the “fall from innocence to experience”.  As he has said, “My nine published books follow the progression of my life as it fits the template of the Garden Myth.”  The Garden Myth is inherently fascinating and may be one reason why Morrissey’s poetry is so compelling.

Although a life-long observer “of the architecture of darkness” as he puts it (in his poem "Waking at 4 a.m.") in another important sense Stephen Morrissey’s poetry is, as he writes, “an affirmation of the life force , the triumph of the spirit, and the survival of the individual despite what has been experienced.  This is the foundation on which my poems are written.”

The following extract from "Reincarnation" is reflective of this:

We meet again, again flesh

and blood, again bone, tendon

and memory. Events of old lives,

clothes divested as I divested

the past in meeting you,

in meeting you again

and again and again

into infinity.

Forty years of waiting for you,

a dark delirium of the soul;

we met apparently for the first time

but home is where we are together

in this room, this house,

the two square feet we occupy

in a single embrace

The “mapping of the soul” is Stephen Morrissey’s signature – and his genius.  His ability to transform the “the personal” into the “the universal” in his poetry is also what makes A Poet’s Journey an invaluable resource for anyone who aspires to become a poet.

About the reviewer:  A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine currently lives in Ottawa.  She is co-author of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life James Coristine

Review: The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche by Stephen Morrissey

                                 

Published on the website of the League of Canadian Poets, July 13, 2022

Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine

Poetry is the soul’s DNA; poetry is the soul’s map.

                                               – Stephen Morrissey

 

The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche by Stephen Morrissey, Ekstasis Editions, 2022

 

In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets and psyche, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey draws upon and revisits a lifetime of creative and critical writing.

A member of Montreal’s “Vehicule Poets” in the 1970s and the author of nine published books of poetry, in his new book Morrissey traces the evolution of, and influences on, Canadian modern poetry with a focus on the “Montreal Group” and the “Vehicule” poets.  A complement to his previous book A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019), The Green Archetypal Field functions as a master class on poetry and poetics.

Why have once prominent and critically praised Canadian poets such as A.J.M. Smith fallen into obscurity? he asks. What happens when a country loses its collective memory?  Should the definition of what constitutes a “major poet” be focused less on the volume and more on the quality of the work – particularly in the case of exceptional poets who may, for one reason or another, have produced a limited number of poems?

Morrissey reflects on a time when older, established poets such as Irving Layton, F.R. Scott and Louis Dudek mentored and nurtured younger poets: “The older poets in Montreal created an environment in which to be a poet was a possibility, not something alien and foreign,” he writes.  “We didn’t have to look to England or the United States for what it meant to be a poet.  Established poets lived among us, we saw them on the streets where we lived, we read their poems in school, and we read reviews of their books published in local newspapers.”

Louis Dudek, for example, was not only Morrissey’s teacher when the latter was a graduate student at McGill, he was also a mentor and a friend. “He made me feel that the life of a poet was the only one worth living,” Morrissey recalls.  He writes movingly of the great importance to him of a meeting he had with Dudek in 1975:

“He read some of my poems, which he liked very much.  He gave me something that afternoon that only an older poet can give to a younger poet: he gave me confirmation that I was a poet.  I left that meeting feeling that I had nothing to worry about, just keep writing and my life as a poet would unfold.  And that’s what I did.”  (Dudek went on to write the introduction to Morrissey’s first book of poetry, The Trees of Knowing, in 1978).

In The Green Archetypal Field, Stephen Morrissey traces the origin of his becoming a poet back to the single most significant event of his life – the death of his father (following unsuccessful heart surgery in Boston), when Morrisey was six years old.  Suddenly thrust into the role of a “latchkey child” in a single-parent household in which his father was never mentioned, Morrissey’s profound grief and loss went unaddressed, and was therefore unabated.

“For some of us there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life is reconfigured,” he writes in a chapter entitled The Great Reconfiguration. “Life is one thing, and then, a moment later it is something else… Almost every aspect – I believe every aspect – of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before my father’s death.”

Forced at a young age to confront the “impermanence and insecurity” of life, it was only as a result of beginning to write poetry in his teens that Morrissey found a way of both processing and articulating his unresolved grief and trauma.  Although he didn’t know it at the time, the course of his future life as a poet had been set.  Poetry, he points out, is a calling. “No real poet ever decided to be a poet, it doesn’t work that way.”

Morrissey’s calling to write ‘confessional poetry’ specifically, was bolstered as a result of reading an interview with the American poet Allan Ginsberg, which was published in The Montreal Star in 1967.  “Scribble down your nakedness,” Ginsberg advised. “Be prepared to stand naked, because most often it is this nakedness that the reader finds most interesting.”

Although writing confessional poetry often necessitates what Morrissey calls “a journey into darkness”, he believes that “if the poet has the courage, it is also a place of great creativity, of revealing what has been hidden or disguised… [of] meeting one’s shadow, the rejected and dark aspect of our inner being; it is a journey to selfhood.”  Ideally, that journey will lead towards “wholeness.”

Central to his life and his work is Stephen Morrissey’s sense of himself as a Montreal poet – as opposed to a poet from any other place.

“Poetry returns us to place; poetry explores place, it extols the humanity of place over the anonymity of the contemporary and soulless built environment,” he writes. “Without identifying with a specific place there is a levelling off and diminishment of what makes us human; there is the emergence, as we see in the world today, of a dehumanized global society.”

Fifty years of reading, thinking about, and writing poetry have convinced Stephen Morrissey that “We go to poetry with nothing to say, or we go to poetry with something to say that is not necessarily what we end up saying, but in either case we find our voice, we find an authentic expression of what the soul wants to say, and this is poetry.”

June 6, 2022

 

About the reviewer:  A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine currently lives in Ottawa.  She is the co-author, with Ian Browness, of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life James Coristine (2009).

Review of 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).