Preface, A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet

 

Preface

  

This is a compilation of some of the essays and reviews I wrote from 1975 to 2018. My main concern in these essays is with two aspects of poetry, the poet's journey and the art of poetry; indeed, these topics have fascinated me from when I began writing poetry in my early teens. Visual or concrete poetry also interests me and I have included some examples of my experimental poetry. 

            Whether poets are born or made every poet is on a unique journey, this is the journey to writing original poems in an authentic voice. This journey includes poets who are one's mentors; the poet friends of one's youth; the poets who are an influence on one's work and thinking; and the varied experiences of life that are important to the development of the poet. The art of poetry includes ideas about poetry; poetry as the voice of the human soul; visionary poetry; the purpose of experimental poetry; confessional poetry; and finding an authentic voice in poetry.

            Some aspects of the poet's journey have changed over the years. We have more people today writing poetry, giving poetry readings, and trying to publish their poems than possibly ever before. Most of these people aren't reading or buying poetry books but poetry is still very much alive, it's just not the same type of involvement as it was in the past. The poetry scene today is less sophisticated than it was forty years ago; back then there were fewer poets, fewer prizes and awards, and fewer creative writing courses. I remember when new books by Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and others were given extensive and serious reviews in newspapers and periodicals.  New books by Canadian poets, for instance Irving Layton, P.K. Page, and Earle Birney, were also given serious and intelligent reviews in newspapers and periodicals. These poets from a previous generation had an important place in our culture but there are no poets today with the same cultural relevance and prominence that poets once had. This does not signal the end or even the diminishment of poetry. Poetry endures for one specific reason: poetry is the voice of the human soul and it gives access to the inner life both when reading poetry and when writing poetry. For this reason, as well, poetry will never die.

             Many things have changed in this post-postmodern world in which we live; however,  some things will never change. Are people really all that different now than they were five hundred or five thousand years ago? The human spirit endures, human kindness and human malice endure, and the fundamental vision of art endures when it is acknowledges the human spirit. All art is an expression of the visionary capacity to see what is below the mundane surface of things; indeed, all art is vision in its transformation of the complexity and depth of the unconscious mind. All poets who have set forth on this extraordinary journey of self-discovery, creativity, and writing poetry know they must find their authentic voice and that this voice is an expression of the poet's vision, and this expression has a perennial place in the consciousness of humanity.

             

        

                                                                                    Stephen Morrissey

                                                                                    Montreal, Quebec

                                                                                    December 2018

Morrissey, Stephen. A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet. Ekstasis Editions, Victoria. 2019

A Poet's Journey, on poetry and what it means to be a poet

I am very happy to announce the publication of my new book, A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, just published by Ekstasis Editions in Victoria, BC. This is a compilation of essays and reviews written since 1975. Thank you, Richard Olafson, for creating such a beautiful book, this means more to me than anyone knows. Here is the cover and the table of contents.

Jean Cocteau on Poetry

Self-portrait by Jean Cocteau, 1939

Excerpts from Opium, by Jean Cocteau, (Icon Books, London, UK, 1957). Cocteau's notes were written in December 1928 while he was a patient in a clinic near Paris for opium addiction. In the following, I have excerpted only his notes on poetry.
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     One cannot translate a real poet; not because his style is musical, but because his thought has a plastic quality, and, if this changes, the thought changes.
     A Russian said to me: ‘The style of Orphée is musical in the opposite way to what the public calls musical. In spite of its lack of music, it is musical because it leaves the spirit free to profit from it as it wishes.

*

     A poet, unless he is a politician (such as Hugo, Shelley or Byron), must only count on readers who know his language, the spirit of his language and the soul of his language.

* *

     What of a poet or a dramatist endowed with the Indian fakir’s power of mass-hypnosis? Why do you boast then about not being in the realm of illusion and of seeing the trick behind the curtain? It is a case of people making fun of genius because they cannot be touched by it. That is the whole difference between us and the camera with its coweye. Many minds are confused between being touched and being victimized, admiring and being the dupe. They brace themselves against hypnosis. It is easy, alas! because the poet uses his fluid indirectly and possesses only the feeblest means of persuasion.
     A museum is only justified to the extent that it bears witness to ancient activities, and keeps what remains of the phosphorescence around works, the fluid that emanates from them, and thanks to which they succeed in overcoming death.

* * *

     Once a poet wakes up, he is stupid, I mean intelligent. “Where am I?”, he asks, like ladies who have fainted. Notes written by a poet who is awake are not worth much. I offer them only for what they are worth, at my own risk. One more experience.

* * * *

     The inexplicable importance of poetry. Poetry considered as algebra.
     First of all, poetry only solicits the toughest minds, minds which should scorn it as a luxury; the worst of all.
     If it were proved to me that I would condemn myself to death if I did not burn “L’Ange Heurtebise,” [A poem which Cocteau first published in 1925. (Tr.)] I would perhaps burn it.
     If it were proved to me that I would condemn myself to death if I did not add to or take away one syllable from the poem, I could not change it, I would refuse, I would die.
     When I see all the artists who used to make a practise of despising the fashionable world because they had not as yet been received into it, lapse into snobbishness after the age of forty, I congratulate myself on having had the possibility of going into the fashionable world at sixteen and on having had enough of it by the time I was twenty-five.

* * * * *

     Legend gathers round poets who live in glass houses. If they hide and live in some unknown cellar, the public thinks: “You’re hiding, you want us to believe there is something where there is nothing.”
     On the other hand, if they look at the glass house, the public thinks: Your over simple gestures conceal something. You are deceiving us, you are mystifying us; and everyone begins to guess, distort, interpret, search, find, symbolise, and mystify.
     People who come close to me and fathom the mystery, pity me and become angry; they do not know the advantages of a ridiculous legend: when they throw me to the flames they burn a lay figure who is not even like me. A bad reputation should be maintained with more love and more luxury than a little dancer.
     In this way, I can explain the fine phrase that Max Jacob wrote to me: One should not be known for what one does.
     Fame in one’s lifetime should only be used for one thing: to allow our work, after our death, to start out with a name.

* * * * * *

     I wonder how people can write the lives of poets since the poets themselves could not write their own life. There are too many mysteries, too many true falsehoods, too many complications.
     What can be said of the passionate friendships which must be confused with love, and yet nevertheless are something else, of the limits of love and friendship, of this region of the heart in which unknown senses participate, which cannot be understood by those who live standard lives?
     Dates overlap, years mingle together. The snow melts, the feet fly away; no footprints remain.