T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems, review by Cynthia Coristine

 


Farewell, Darkness

   Selected Poems

by Stephen Morrissey

Ekstasis Editions, 2023

Review by Cynthia Coristine

I found my voice in poetry when I was able to turn the darkness of my life experiences into poems; I affirmed what I had seen and I said, “thank you, darkness” and “farewell, darkness”; and that is the birth of the poet.
                                            - Stephen Morrissey

In Farewell, Darkness, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey presents a selection of some eighty of his poems written between 1971 and 2021. These poems have been selected from his nine earlier published books of poetry, and from six of his eight chapbooks.

Morrissey’s poems have, as he writes in the preface to the book, consistently focussed on the themes which have been central to his life, namely "the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members, and romantic love”.  Having been written in the shadow of a mountain, (Mount Royal), his poems resonate with Morrissey’s sense of himself as a Montreal poet.

Stephen Morrissey’s personal experience with the transience, and fragility, of life began early: in November, 1956, when Morrissey was six years old, his 44-year-old father died following heart surgery in a Boston hospital.

As he was later to write, “My father died, and the light went out”. Compounding the darkness of the loss, was the fact that his father was never spoken about in the immediate family again, and his unmarked grave (at Montreal's Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery), never visited.  This failure to address what had happened in any meaningful way set the stage for the lack of resolution and the unexpressed grief which affected Morrissey as child, and which followed him into later life. He felt “damaged” in some indefinable way which was beyond his ability to express: “I was all alone / just a bone without flesh / or face, just / a hollow sound / a ball bearing / rattling in an empty can.” (From “When Father Died”).

Morrissey realized that the remnants his father’s life which had been left behind, were a poor substitute for what he could now, never, come to know about him.

The Return of Memory

returning to the basement in mother's house

my father's business papers once stored

in my cupboard as a child

are still wrapped in brown file folders

it seems no time has intervened

that it is still possible for him to return

and return to these papers ...

what remains of father

expense accounts, business letters to strangers

in daily life we show no more

than these letters reveal…

Determined to preserve, at least, the events of his own life, beginning at the age of 14, Morrissey began to keep a daily diary. He also meticulously chronicled the lives of his extended family members, including those of (unmarried) great aunts and uncles, to ensure that their lives would not be “lost”.  He would also go on to capture something of their lives in his poetry.

Three Poems on a Single Theme

…my mother's uncle

who lived his last forty years

in a mental hospital

for the poor

left there by his brothers

after their mother died

he took with him

what he owned

breath gone   memories

dispersed

seagulls over the grey sky...

Home

I return to Grandmother's

flat although she's dead

almost thirty years,

walk up the grey front stairs

feel the door knob turn

in my hand and smell the

dusty stairwell leading to

the flat's entrance: a large

lace-covered table, a sideboard

and gramophone player broken

many years. I sit with her in silence,

childhood's timeless years,

hours spent staring out a window

at passing streetcars, or playing

with toy cars on a glass-topped

tea wagon.

...off the kitchen is where

her aged father slept; later

it became a junk room, a red

cardboard carton of Cokes

always by a bureau for visitors,

and Auntie Mable returning home

with lemon squares from Woolworth's

downtown. Or Saturday night hockey

on black and white television.

Morrissey found that writing poems was a way – in fact, the only way – in which he was able to find his “voice”. "Scribble down your nakedness" Allen Ginsburg had advised in a 1967 interview read by the seventeen-year-old Morrissey. "Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting." After reading Ginsburg’s words, Morrissey's course as a poet was set:  rather than censor what he wrote, his poems would instead cut to the emotional core of life as he experienced it. This is a path from which Morrissey has never deviated, and one which gives his poems their emotional resonance: to a greater or lesser degree, we have all been there.

The Things She Left

The things she left are not many,

furniture divided, years of photographs

sorted through, freezer and piano

rolled into the back of a truck.

A coincidence: the movers were the same men

who moved us here, ten years older,

they are fat and nervous.

Days unwind, a tapestry with threads

cut from a tangled mass of colour

and pulled across a year of leaving.

A thread breaks and the whole

tapestry unravels, becomes a new image:

my wife and son, dog in the back seat,

drive away – her final kiss, but for what?

That I made it easy for her to leave, didn't argue?

Behind me a half-empty house,

no diversions possible in the echoes

of a summer afternoon…

Morrissey's poems are also an affirmation of life, and of the things which sustain it. The sentiments expressed in The Divining Rod and in Reincarnation are recognizable to anyone who has ever survived a bad marriage, and then been “reborn” into a good one.  Rescued by it.

The Divining Rod

...With her I left behind

my old life, with her

I left a dark place

of   sleep and endurance,

with her I stopped being

a monk to a dying religion,

my prayers whispered

as I slept as though dead,

vapour, mist, a body

animated by silence and sorrow…

Reincarnation

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

…With you I have

returned home, not to a place

where walls enclose silence,

but soul meeting soul

in the ancient movement of time.

The pared down simplicity of the exquisite Her Red Duffle Coat are emblematic of Morrissey’s work.

Her Red Duffle Coat

Her red duffle coat

lies on a hall bench;

the coat is a pile of cloth

without the presence

of her body in the coat.

Her red duffle coat is cold

without her animating

spirit. It is a limp

rag, less each

day without her

wearing the coat

to give it

reason to exist,

to  give the coat

a life force

which is love.

The coat’s sleeve

hang by its side,

no embrace

from this red coat;

without her wearing it

it’s an empty shell.

The coat

is a prisoner

of her love, when

she wears the coat

it is not

any coat.

but hers.

Morrissey’s poems pair the elegiac with the life-affirming, two of the elements which constitute his “signature” as a poet.  This is reflected in Everything Must Have an End,  which is also the last poem in the book.

Everything Must have an End

What is not possible is greater than what is possible

that’s what you know about life when you’re older

than sixty or seventy years; the limits of existence…

And in the end, what is it you remember?

Thirty-five years teaching?  Adult children

gone off to make their own lives? Investments

and the mortgage paid off?  Great art and poetry?

Books you’ve read?  Friends you’ve had?

Or the one you loved, the one who breathed life

into your once young body and soul, that person

you still love in the land and geography of old age.

"Poetry is nothing if not passionate”, as Morrissey writes in the preface to Farewell, Darkness. "Passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing defines poetry."

Morrissey's own refusal to tailor his writing to "fashion" is what gives his poems their resonance and their emotional accessibility: by affirming a shared human experience, they  can be read again and again, with the unabated pleasure of a first reading.

--January 8th, 2024

About the reviewer:  A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine is the co-author, with Ian Browness, of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life of James Coristine.


Sunday, December 3, 2023

Preface, Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems







Preface

 What in one is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support

                            —John Milton

 

T

his selection of poems is taken from books and chapbooks I published from 1971 to 2021. When I began writing poetry my themes were the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members, and romantic love. These many years later I am still writing about the transience of life, family, grief at losing close family members, and romantic love, but giving more emphasis to some and less to others. My experience is that where we begin as poets is where we end. What is our journey as poets? It is the great theme of literature; it is the journey to self-awareness.


1

These poems are presented here without section breaks; this is the model Ken Norris suggested to me, found in Robert Creeley's Selected Poems (1991). The text of Creeley's book has a continuity that is unbroken by titles of books and dates published, as one finds in most selected poems, and I've used the same approach in presenting the poems in this book; it is the book of poems of my life. Of course, bibliographical information is still available in both the Books Published page and the Contents page.


 2

 We learn something from every poet we read. In 1967 I read Allen Ginsberg's statement, "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"; it was an important insight for me and has influenced my writing to this day. But other poets were also important; these include William Blake; the Romantic poets; Walt Whitman; the Beats; Charles Olson; Louis Dudek; and George Johnston.


3

Poetry isn't antiseptic, it's passion for life. Poetry is love and death and tears of joy and tears of sorrow. It's messy, it's stuff we don't want to talk about, it's betrayal and jealousy, it's love and sex and tenderness and grief and regret and awe and divine inspiration; it's the shadow falling across one's life. Poetry is nothing if not passionate; passion, not the intellect, not fashion, not popularity, not what other people are doing, defines poetry.


4

We all experience darkness in our lives: some of us have descended to the underworld; some have been lost in a dark forest; and some of us have had to begin life again in middle age—we lost everything—for nothing was as we believed. But darkness can be place of creativity, of self-awareness, of meaning, and of rebirth. I found my voice in poetry when I was able to turn the darkness of my life experiences into poems; I affirmed what I had seen and I said, "thank you, darkness" and "farewell, darkness"; and that is the birth of the poet.


5

My wife, the poet Carolyn Zonailo, is always in my thoughts and heart; to her my thanks, my love, and my deepest appreciation for our over thirty years together. I want to thank Richard Olafson for his commitment to publishing—the year 2022 was Ekstasis Editions' fortieth anniversary—he has made an important contribution to our national literary life; he has helped many creative people realize their potential and their dream.

 

                                           Stephen Morrissey

                                           Montreal, Quebec

                                           20 November 2022


Morrissey, Stephen. Farewell, Darkness: Selected Poems. Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2023.

Thursday, November 30, 2023

Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems

 



I am very happy to announce the publication of my new book, Farewell, Darkness, Selected Poems, published by Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, BC. Thank you to all who helped bring this book to publication, including Richard Olafson, the publisher of Ekstasis Editions, my wife Carolyn Zonailo, and thank you, Nellie McClung, whose painting "Sailboats off Kitsilano" is the cover image. The poems in this book were published between 1971 and 2021, and best represent what I have tried to do in poetry.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

The season of October

Let's make October a season unto itself, that's how October felt this year; warm, blue sky, beginning with green leaves, then yellow leaves, and now the leaves have fallen. The transition from late summer to fall is impressive. There are even a few flowers left in the garden; so far, no frost.

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You know what poets need? They need to write a few poems that people like, that people refer to when they think of that poet's work. Poets don't need a lot of poems but they need at least one or two poems that speak to people, that speak to the inner being of people. If poets write and publish a lot of books and poems most of that output will be fairly meaningless, just more dross, if they don't have a few poems that are identified with them as poets. 

One of the worst things for a poet is to be obscure in their work. Mary Oliver isn't obscure in her work and some poets complain that her work lacks depth, but many others love her work and she is one of the most popular poets of the last thirty or more years. You can be obscure and some people will think you are clever and really smart, taking poetry to the next level, but it takes just one person to see that the obscurity in this person's work is meaningless, pretension, and then the whole house of cards will fall. A really good poet can be obscure and with time it will be explained or speculated on and it will be interesting to read about, it might even benefit that person's reputation as a poet; but minor poets, when they are obscure, it might be that they just aren't very good at writing poems, they didn't have anything to say. 

Here we are, walking on the hidden trail, just a few days ago. It's one of the most beautiful Octobers, it's the new season of October and it was a great day for a walk. 





















Thursday, September 1, 2022

"Robin Redbreast" by William Allingham (1824 - 1889)

                                                          
 

Good-bye, good-bye to Summer!
For Summer’s nearly done;
The garden smiling faintly,
Cool breezes in the sun;
Our Thrushes now are silent,
Our Swallows flown away, —
But Robin’s here, in coat of brown,
With ruddy breast-knot gay.
Robin, Robin Redbreast,
O Robin dear!
Robin singing sweetly
In the falling of the year.

Bright yellow, red, and orange,
The leaves come down in hosts;
The trees are Indian Princes,
But soon they’ll turn to Ghosts;
The scanty pears and apples
Hang russet on the bough,
It’s Autumn, Autumn, Autumn late,
’Twill soon be Winter now.
Robin, Robin Redbreast,
O Robin dear!
And welaway! my Robin,
For pinching times are near.

The fireside for the Cricket,
The wheatstack for the Mouse,
When trembling night-winds whistle
And moan all round the house;
The frosty ways like iron,
The branches plumed with snow, —
Alas! in Winter, dead and dark,
Where can poor Robin go?
Robin, Robin Redbreast,
O Robin dear!
And a crumb of bread for Robin,
His little heart to cheer. 






Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Review of GEC's J'Accuse (Poem versus Silence)

Here is my review of George Elliott Clarke's J'Accuse, in which GEC fights back against the kancel kulture that tried to destroy his literary career, and could have succeeded. 

Go to https://poets.ca/review-gec-jaccuse/





Friday, July 15, 2022

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/



Friday, July 8, 2022

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).

 


Monday, May 16, 2022

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.

----------------------

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.

 

Monday, December 27, 2021

The Leonard Cohen memorial postage stamp

Here are photos of a Canada Post delivery truck advertising new postage stamps in memory of Leonard Cohen. I have never really been a fan of Leonard Cohen's poetry but I do like some of his songs; Leonard Cohen has written some of the best popular music since 1970. But for a great poem made into a song listen to Patrick Kavanaugh's "Raglan Road", sung by Van Morrison, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, and a few others; what a great lyrical, emotionally moving, and loving poem. It takes a great poet to write about love, unrequited love, romantic love, or sexual love. Cohen is a great song writer, along with Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and, best of all, Van Morrison. But Cohen is not a great poet, Kavanaugh is a great poet. "Suzanne" is a great song, one of Cohen's better songs, but placed beside Kavanaugh's "Raglan Road", Cohen's "Suzanne is only a good song; it's Patrick Kavanaugh's poem that I keep returning to. Poetry trumps song writing.






Updated on 25 December 2021

Friday, November 5, 2021

Mother of Muses, sing for me, by Bob Dylan




                                                Mother of Muses, sing for me

                                                Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea
                                                Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest
                                                Sing your hearts out, all your women of the chorus
                                                Sing of honor and fate and glory be
                                                Mother of Muses, sing for me
                                                Mother of Muses, sing for my heart
                                                Sing of a love too soon to depart
                                                Sing of the heroes who stood alone
                                                Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone
                                                Who struggled with pain so the world could go free
                                                Mother of Muses, sing for me
                                                Sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott
                                                And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought
                                                Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
                                                Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
                                                Who did what they did and they went on their way
                                                Man, I could tell their stories all day
                                                I'm falling in love with Calliope
                                                She don't belong to anyone, why not give her to me?
                                                She's speaking to me, speaking with her eyes
                                                I've grown so tired of chasing lies
                                                Mother of Muses, wherever you are
                                                I've already outlived my life by far
                                                Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath
                                                Things I can't see, they're blocking my path
                                                Show me your wisdom, tell me my fate
                                                Put me upright, make me walk straight
                                                Forge my identity from the inside out
                                                You know what I'm talking about
                                                Take me to the river, release your charms
                                                Let me lay down a while in your sweet, loving arms
                                                Wake me, shake me, free me from sin
                                                Make me invisible, like the wind
                                                Got a mind that ramble, got a mind that roam
                                                I'm travelin' light and I'm a-slow coming home
               
Songwriters: Bob Dylan
Mother of Muses lyrics © Special Rider Music, Universal Tunes