Preface, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche

 

Preface

 

 

T

he Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche is a collection of essays and short statements on poetry and poetics. This book complements my previous book, A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019) also published by Ekstasis Editions. I’ve spent many years in the solitary work of writing poems and thinking about poetry; this book summarizes, explains, and enlarges on that subject. The book is divided into three sections; they are: ideas about poetry and writing poetry; a discussion of several Canadian poets, including F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Louis Dudek, and the poets I knew from the early days at Véhicule Art Gallery; and shamanism, psyche, or soul in poetry.

 

1          H.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 Canadian Poetics (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).

 

2          In 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?    

 

3          What 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.

 

4          My 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.

 

5          No 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.

John Masefield on having a bird bath

I noticed there was a bird having a drink of water

Here is what poet John Masefield writes about having a bird bath:

    . . . I once had a bird-bath, which was used by many hundreds of birds, & gave great delight to them, & to others.

    It was a stone basin. There used to be a stone-mason at Bibury, just as you turn over the water out of Bibury to go to Cirencester. He used to make them, & had a ready sale for them.

    I had this for years, standing on an old tree-stump, but as far as I can recollect some accident knocked it to pieces: I think a big branch of a tree, or the tree itself, fell on it in a great gale which did fearful harm here about 16 or 17 years ago.

    If you fill your Bird Bath with water everyday, put near it, if you would care for it, a daily meal for the birds. Then (if you go to bed at all) you might wake up & hear them saying

    "Ouak, Ouak, & gogologk" & the rest of it.

    Birds are very punctual things, & expect punctuality in their friends.

                    --John Masefield, Letters to Reyna, Buchan & Enright, Publishers, 

                    London, 1983 (page 420)

Zoom book launch for Ekstasis Editions books

Here is the text I read at the Zoom online book launch for several of this years new Ekstasis Editions books, including my own The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche. This event was online on Sunday, 15 May 2022 at 2 p.m.

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Book Launch, Zoom, 15 May 2022, 2 p.m.

Place in Poetry

Thank you to Richard Olafson for publishing these books that are being launched today, and thank you to Endre Farkas and Carolyn-Marie Souaid for organizing this book launch.

This book, The Green Archetypal Fields of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche isn't poetry so maybe I should just say a few words to introduce the book.

This is my second book with Ekstasis Editions on poetics and memoir, on becoming a poet. The first book was  A Poet's Journey: On Poetry and what it Means to be a Poet. Thank you Richard, I really appreciate your work for poetry.

The background to the book, what created it, its reason for having been written, is that we live in a place, a city or a community, and this is a commitment to a specific geographical location, it is also a spiritual location. For me, this location, this place, is Montreal. In fact, the whole book refers to Montreal. Montreal is my psychic centre.

But think of place in the work of Charles Olson, it's Gloucester; or William Carlos Williams, it's Paterson; or Raymond Souster, it's Toronto; and for Louis Dudek and John Glassco, it's Montreal.

Montreal is where modern English Canadian poetry was born. If you were a poet in Canada you wanted to live, even for a short time, in Montreal. PK Page, Phyllis Webb, and many others lived here for a while, and this is the birth place in the 1920s of the Montreal Group of Poets at McGill University; they included FR Scott, AJM Smith, and John Glassco; also in Montreal were others, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and AM Klein.

This is where we came from and we haven't left.

I also wrote about the Vehicule Poets, "Starting Out from Vehicule Art Gallery", a history of our early days as poets, the Sunday afternoon readings, and that essay is in the book. Of course, the Vehicule Poets are in the line, the lineage, of the Montreal Group and other groups of poets that started here. That is our canonical lineage because all poetry is a part of a canon and a lineage of poets and poetry, however poetry changes it is always in the context of a lineage.

There is also our ancestral heritage in Montreal. For me, personally, my family have lived and worked here since 1840; not as long as my Quebecois and Quebecoise friends, and certainly not as long as the Indigenous people, but still a long time, and I have written about this as well, for instance the Morrissey Family History website.

Poets aren't nomads and we're not from nowhere. We're from a specific place, but this specificity of place is being lost in the economic and political globalism of the world, in every city you visit the condos are all the same, the stores and music we hear is the same, the politics is divided, and what is specific and local is being lost.

More specifically, my psychic centre, what made me the person I am today, is my family history but this is located and symbolized in my grandmother`s home on Girouard Avenue in Montreal`s West End. No one had money but family kept us together.

So place works on a number of different levels, it works as a geographical place, but it's also an ancestral and spiritual place, it's what formed us as people, it's the the birth of psyche.

That's how I became a poet, it began here in the City of Montreal.

Montreal is our home as poets, it's our centre as poets. 

Here is a short excerpt from The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry:

We are increasingly living in a deracinated world, in a global community, but a global community is an abstraction, an invention of committees and legislation and driven for profit and by people’s personal ambition; it is an intellectual construct, it is not born organically, a process that may take hundreds of years of human migration, political and military strategies, layers of cultural change, and spiritual vision. There is also a spirit of place; spirit of place manifests in the natural world, but it also includes our ancestral memory and family history and stories. If we are not careful we will soon be living in Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 world of geographical regions and the repression of creative individuality, not places of vibrant specificity that are containers of soul. A geographical place is specific and local, it is not abstract but concrete; globalism is an abstract concept that has little or no connection to community or place. Abstraction denies the specificity of place; place emphasizes the diverse world of things. Poetry requires community; it requires the diversity of a specific place.

Thank you all for being so patient and listening to this.

 

Poetry, Place, and Psyche (with revisions and post scripts)

                                               

1.

I think of "place" in poetry as referring to two things: place as a specific geographical location, and place as location in a metaphysical sense. I am particularly interested in place as it is shown in the long, sometimes multi-book, poem; place can also be important in single poems that are neither long nor multi-book.

One of the best examples of place is William Carlos Williams' Paterson (1963). Williams' poem works on different levels of meaning, personal, historical, mythological, archetypal, and so on. One of the keys to Paterson is in Williams' preface in which he writes "that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody..." The city Williams is writing about is an outer expression of the poet's inner being, it is Williams himself, no ordinary or average citizen.

Another aspect of place is in Williams' belief in writing the way Americans speak, in the American idiom. Allen Ginsberg, in his essay "Williams in a World of Objects" (1983), writes that Williams was a friend of Charles Reznikoff; he writes, "They composed their poems out of the elements of natural speech, their own speech, as heard on the porch or in talk over the kitchen table."  The way people speak—idiomatic English—also emphasizes place in poetry. Then Ginsberg continues, he writes,

He [Williams] deliberately stayed in Rutherford, New Jersey, and wrote poetry about the local landscape, using local language. He wanted to be a provincial from the point of view of really being there where he was; really knowing his ground. He wanted to know his roots, know who the iceman and fishman were; know the housewife; he wanted to know his town—his whole body in a sense. (340)

The loss of place in American life is also discussed in Wendell Berrry's The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford  (2011); Berry writes:

Without such rootedness in locality, considerably adapted to local conditions, we get what we now have got: a country half destroyed, toxic, eroded, and in every way abused; a deluded people tricked out in gauds without traditions of any kind to give them character; a politics of expediency dictated by the wealthy; a disintegrating economy founded upon fantasy, fraud, and ecological ruin. Williams saw all of this, grieved over    it, and accused rightly... (176)

  

2.

Many critics don't rank John Glassco's chapbook length poem Montreal (1973) very highly; I think they are mistaken. Glassco's poem is a short history of Montreal, from pre-historic days to around 1967, it also represents Glassco as a man who rejects what his city has become. Urban development is destroying the city in which he grew up, not much is left of the Victorian architecture and ambiance of daily life which Glassco once experienced. This is seen in the demolition of historic family homes in the Golden Square Mile area of the city and it continues to this day with the gentrification of once poor neighbourhoods. Glassco writes, "Last night I heard again all your chanting voices / Fetched from my own dead childhood..." This is no conventional history or critique of modernity, this is history seen through the eyes, memory, and aesthetic sensibility of one of our prominent writers. This is a history grounded in Glassco's emotional response to modern-day Montreal, it is not a positive one. This is the city where Glassco lived and grew up, it is a subjective history that is based on objective historical fact filtered through his aesthetic sensibility.

Glassco refers to living in a rented room in the Crescent Street area of downtown Montreal. I remember meeting Marian Dale Scott in the fall of 1970 at a reception at McGill's Thomson House on McTavish Avenue, she recounted how her husband, the poet Frank Scott, and Scott's friend John Glassco, both elderly, would talk about the past as they walked along Crescent Street; I would like to think that at least part of the genesis of Glassco's poem was on these mid- to late-1960s walks with Frank Scott. If the poem was completed in 1968 then, reasonably speaking, this is possible. I remember thinking at the time that Marian Scott was a lovely grey-haired lady (I was about twenty years old); later that evening I spoke with Frank Scott about poets he used to know and life in Montreal as it used to be. I had recently been at Patrick Anderson's reading; Anderson was an old friend of Scott's from the 1940s, and Scott mentioned that Anderson wished to make the acquaintance of young Montreal poets, he wanted to hear about contemporary Montreal poetry.

Glassco's treatment of the Indigenous population in his poem is also interesting; to him they represent an age of innocence, of sexual freedom before the arrival of Europeans. But he also recalls the French colony that became Montreal as a time of innocence; he associates it with the past, with when he was a boy collecting stamps. This, then, is Glassco's place: it is nostalgia for the past, disgust with what the city has become under Mayor Jean Drapeau's regime, and an enduring sense of loss that he has become estranged from his home city. He is contemptuous of Expo 67, the highly successful Montreal World's Fair of 1967, promoted and brought to completion by Mayor Drapeau. In effect, Montreal is the place of Glassco's lost innocence and his nostalgia for the past. In his other writing Glassco is cosmopolitan but as a poet he is a nativist. 

3.

Poetry, I believe, is the voice of the human soul, it is the voice of psyche; psyche is manifested in things, places, objects. This is how soul is recognized in someone's life, it is recognized by how it appears in things, not only by how they change and grow in their consciousness or awareness.

I agree with Williams that "poetry feeds the imagination and prose the emotions" but it is important to emphasize that place evokes both emotion and imagination; we have an emotional attachment to place and the emotions that are evoked there are important to us; place also moves us more deeply into imagination. Emotions connect to place, no matter how significant that place may be to other people. We have an emotional attachment to 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. Without 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 society. 

4. 

I also believe that "the soul revels in specificity"; that is, the soul is not an abstract entity, the soul loves the material world and is manifested in specific things. The soul loves "things", not just "ideas". Soul is not disembodied; it is embodied, or manifested, in our time and place, by a specific person living in a specific place at a specific time.  

Place, a geographical location, is one of the ways we discover psyche.  Place is the source of tangible things, as well as images, metaphors, and archetypes. So, personally speaking, I believe that psyche is essential to poetry, and by extension place is essential because it is where we find our psychic center, that place we identify with and resonate to.

A few examples of poets and place:

Charles Olson’s Glouester; William Carlos William’s Paterson; Whitman's Manhattan; Yeats' Sligo; the Lake District for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. In Canadian poetry we might think of Ameliasburg, Ontario, for Al Purdy; Montreal for John Glassco, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, A.M. Klein, and Irving Layton; the Tantramar Marshes and Sackville, New Brunswick, for Douglas Lochhead; PEI for Milton Acorn. All are places that are identified with these poets, they are places that have been transformed by poetry into an archetypal geography that contains the human condition; they are psychic centers, places of numinosity and soul. 

5.

The world is a place for creating one's identity, a place of intentionality and meaning. John Keats, in a famous letter to his brother and sister, George and Georgiana Keats, dated 28 April 1819, identified the purpose of the world, not as a "vale of tears" but a "vale of soul making"; soul-making refers to inner transformation, discovering one's purpose and meaning in life. Soul-making includes meeting one's Shadow, the rejected and dark aspect of our inner being, it is the journey to selfhood when entering the darkness that resides within each person. Keats emphasizes the importance of soul-making, that it is done in the "world", and that the world has this essential role in one's life.  The "world" refers to place, refers to living in the world and being engaged in the transformative quality of place.

To continue this line of thinking, Frank Bidart has referred to Robert Lowell's "confessional" poetry as "soul-making"; Bidart writes that the commonly used "confessional" label, first used in a review of Lowell's work by M.L. Rosenthal, is inaccurate and derogatory. It has become derogatory partly because of the academic prejudice against the personal and emotional. Place in poetry is one of the access points, one of the portals, to the inner or spiritual dimension of life and the poet's effort at soul-making. 

6. 

My own "place" in poetry, in life, is Montreal where my family have lived since the early 1840s; but more specifically, place for me is my grandmother's home at 2226 Girouard Avenue in Montreal where she lived from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. This was my first home (my brother remembers our mother going to the hospital for my birth at the Western Hospital that was located on Atwater Street near Ste. Catherine Street).

I first realized the psychic importance of Girouard Avenue in my dreams, it was a place of significance for me long before I began writing about it; this place was the home of my grandmother, and it was the place and home of other family members who lived with my grandmother or had once lived with her on Girouard.

For many years I thought it was individual family members, especially my grandmother, that were the reason I returned so often to this place, in dreams, poems, memory, even driving by her flat everyday on my way to work long after she died and always looking up at the living room windows that faced the street, always hoping I would see her looking out into the street. All of this is important to me, and perhaps fanciful, but one day I realized that it was the place itself that I was returning to, not only the people, for the place was the container for the people and our life there. This place, my grandmother's flat at 2226 Girouard Avenue, is my psychic center.

My history at my grandmother`s Girouard Avenue flat is what I wrote about in my book Girouard Avenue (2009) but also in other essays and poems that are about or refer to living on Girouard Avenue, for instance in my memoir Remembering Girouard Avenue (2015). About ten years ago I returned and visited the inside of the flat on Girouard when the building was for sale; incredibly, not much had changed during the intervening 45 years since my grandmother had lived there, except that the building was more run down than ever. The rooms were empty or contained boxes of the current renter's possessions; after the place was sold it was totally renovated and it now holds no interest for me, it now exists only in the imagination. 

7.

What is left that is distinct in today's big cities? One thinks of historical sites, art galleries and museums, literary gatherings, restaurants and theatre, gay villages, China Town, botanical gardens, university districts, natural beauty, large parks, all are places that make cities worth visiting. But mostly, in every city, we find the usual sixty story office buildings, condos everywhere, malls with the same stores in them as in every other city, people dressed in the current fashions, some people are homeless, some people are having the same conversations about sports or entertainment as people in other cities, people are watching the same television shows and movies, they are listening to the same inconsequential popular music, they have the same opinions as people everywhere. No wonder we call these cities soulless places.

More and more people live a transient existence, they are not homeless but they move from one city to another, one state or province to another, one country to another. It doesn't really matter to these people where they live, it can be in any of the soulless places they find themselves. These people no longer identify with a specific city or place, they are people with no substantial connection to anywhere in the world. They are, lamentably, citizens of the global world, identifying with nowhere, engaged with nothing, and loyal to no one.

8.

E.K. Brown, although largely forgotten, is one of the foremost scholars and critics of Canadian literature; indeed, he supported and helped define our national literature when many critics were ambivalent about the value of Canadian literature, some of these critics thought that Canadians were colonials and what was written here was a poor second cousin to literature written in the United Kingdom. Place is important to Brown, it creates who we are, our identity; we have an emotional and intellectual connection to place. Brown is a "nativist", not a "cosmopolitan", as these terms were defined by A.J.M. Smith in his Introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943). The nativists are concerned with what makes Canada a distinct place, we have moved out of a colonial age and into nationhood, and place is a natural concern for them. The cosmopolitan poets, usually formalists and therefore adhering to a poetic tradition found in the UK or Europe, are more conservative than the nativists, they have a traditional approach to poetry that does not necessarily adhere to the importance of place.

Here is Brown writing in 1947 about his own early life:

The central and northern parts of Toronto are where I am most at home. The narrowness of lower Yonge Street, the rows of its shabby and sometimes seedy shops between College and Bloor, the huddling curves of South Rosedale, the vista from Casa Loma, the shadeless streets of that suburb so oddly named Forest Hill, they are all beautiful in my eyes. ("Now, Take Ontario", 1947)

And then we turn to Laura Smyth Groening's excellent biography of Brown, E.K. Brown, A Study in Conflict (1993), and we read of Brown's "ever-growing fascination with Canadian Literature"; Groening writes,

The theory of national literatures that he was developing, as we saw from his work in On Canadian Poetry [1943] and the articles leading up to that book, was strongly rooted in ideas about the essential relationship between writers and their grounding in a specific place... in the 1930s he believed that universal quality was most securely present in the work attached to a definite time and place. (132-133)  

9.

Soul-making requires place, being uprooted from place is to dig up the roots of one's inner being from the psychic ground, from the material ground of place; if a tree is uprooted then the tree dies, people who have lost place in their lives are uprooted, they are deracinated. The soul flourishes in specific things, in small and large things, in a specific place and in all of the details that make a specific place unique and soulful; this includes historical places, buildings, neighbourhoods, architecture, and people one sees on the street.

We are increasingly living in a deracinated world, in a global community, but a global community is an abstraction, an invention of committees and legislation and driven by people's personal ambition; it is an intellectual construct, it is not born organically, a process that may take several millennia of human migration, political and military strategies, transformation of the arts, and spiritual insight. If we are not careful we will soon be living in Orwell's world of geographical regions, not places of vibrant specificity that are containers of soul. Place is specific and local, it is not abstract but concrete; globalism is an abstract concept that has little or no connection to community or place. Abstraction denies the specificity of place; place emphasizes the diverse world of things. Poetry requires community; it requires the diversity of a specific place.

                                                                                                January 2020

Essay revised: 06 February 2020, 22 March 2020


Post Script, 1 of 2: Here is a quotation from C.G. Jung that seems appropriate (my italics),

“The question of overriding importance in the end is not the origin of evolution but its goal. Nevertheless, when a living organism is cut off from its roots, it loses the connections with the foundations of its existence and must necessarily perish. When that happens, anamnesis of the origins is a matter of life and death.”
                        --C.G. Jung, Aion




PS, 2 of 2: Of interest regarding the relevance of A.J.M. Smith's statement about Canadian poetry, and the larger discussion of politics, being divided between "cosmopolitan" and "nativist" is this quotation from a recent communication from Conrad Black; Black writes (not about poetry but about the Davos economic summit): "He [not Black] credits capitalism with the triumph of globalization, and with it of freer and more prosperous societies, after what he bills as a close battle against communists, socialists and nativists." Since my subject is poetry and not politics I conclude from this that nativist poets rightly condemn globalization as lacking a human element and creating the soulless environment found in many major cities. Black should have omitted the word "nativist" from his essay, it might have been more convincing. 

Post Script 3, 24 November 2022: I can see that I've been a lot more concerned about the meaning and value, and the importance, of poetry than most contemporary poets. Perhaps I've been wrong about this, I always thought it was a part of the work of being a poet. Most poets write their poems but they don't write anything on poetics and some of them are critical of me for being as concerned about poetics as I am. But poets have always been concerned about poetics, about the meaning and value of poetry, why poets write, and the significance of poetry. Poetics has always been a concern since it deals with, personally speaking, my understanding of why I write poetry and my place as a poet in the world. 

BTW, regarding Conrad Black, above, in another article Black quotes from a poem by Irving Layton; I was impressed by this because it showed to me that Layton is a living presence in our cultural life, this is as it should be for any nation but in Canada to quote from or acknowledge the existence of our poets is the absolute exception and rarely the rule.