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Thursday, September 1, 2022
"Robin Redbreast" by William Allingham (1824 - 1889)
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Bishop's University honours Noni Howard
Irving Layton, Carolyn Zonailo, and Noni Howard, at Layton`s home on Monkland Avenue, Montreal, 1997. Photo by Stephen Morrissey
Bishop's University's blog has honoured one of their famous alumnus, Noni Howard. Many thanks to Jeremy Audet who initiated and completed this projected. Noni would be both honoured and flattered by this attention to her and her work as a poet.
Thursday, September 17, 2020
Poetry is the Soul's DNA
Poetry is the soul's DNA, the memory of the human race. Poetry, not prose, not history, not fiction or drama or short stories or religious texts, but poetry is the expression of the collective unconscious. This DNA is the container and memory of everything humanity has done or will do, the Akashic record of everything that has happened in the past and will happen in the future; it does not recognize divisions of time into past, present, and future. Poetry is the single collective entity, the body of work, the distinct expression of the soul's DNA. Each poem is a separate expression of some aspect of the soul, the archetypes, emotions, intellectual musings, shared by all people living, to be born, and those that have died. It is both an expression of the Anima Mundi, the spirit of the world, and a celebration of humanity.
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Poetry Is A Calling
Calliope, the muse of epic poetry; detail from a Pompeii fresco |
No one makes a conscious decision to be a poet—poetry is a calling, a metaphysical event— poetry calls you. To deny a calling is to step out of the current of life, it is to deny life and the direction in which life is sending you. To deny a calling is to betray your life, it's that fundamental. There are only a few times when you will have a calling in life, perhaps only once, and there aren't many people who have a calling, so to turn down what life has given you is to deny the basic integrity of one's life. Being a poet has always been the biggest event in my life; if you follow a calling you are affirming life at a very basic level; to be a poet is not a conscious decision, poetry calls you to be a poet.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
A poets' body of work: how much is too much, how much is too little?
After a life of persistent devotion to literature, he has left enough poems to make a single small volume (less, certainly, than a hundred poems in all), a single volume of prose, a few pamphlets, and a prose translation of the poems of Poe.
Saturday, May 25, 2019
(Mostly) Anonymous in Inner Space
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Believe Nothing
I am not the Pope's nose but I can still smell shit when it's all around me.
Mister, in Inner Space we don't have room for anybody but poets and nihilists, so you'd better high tail it outta here before you're discovered.
Photo taken at the Montreal Botanical Gardens, 2009 |
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Poems are Reports from Inner Space
The first experience we have of Inner Space: our dreams.
Of course, if we censor our reports from Inner Space we end up with poetry that lacks authenticity.
I come from a dark place—I know that it will always be dark—I have spent too long in Inner Space.
Poetry has its own archaeology: it's what we excavate in Inner Space.
Did you follow your vision? Did you hear the voice calling you from Inner Space?
We fear the unconscious; it is a portal to Inner Space.
It was not a part of my repertoire of emotions; I was trapped in Inner Space.
Poems are reports from Inner Space.
November is "Inner Space Month".
Artifacts and the detritus of Inner Space wash up on the shores of consciousness.
One day everything you said from Inner Space will be used against you.
All artists are nihilists; they destroy the old in the act of reporting from Inner Space.
The poet's journey in Inner Space is the shaman's journey.
I live at the inn of Inner Space, the inn on the road through a forest; few come this way, few visit the inn, the Yew Tree Inn.
Where we live, those outposts of Inner Space.
I am sending out probes into Inner Space.
Someone emerges, one born from the genetic debris of Inner Space.
Monday, April 2, 2018
On Dreams, Poetry, and the Soul
I always assumed that everyone had “big dreams” at some time in their life. Everyone dreams but most people don’t listen to their dreams, they forget them as soon as they wake, or if the dream is remembered it is either ignored or sloughed off. They don’t want to be disturbed by dreams, or by re-visioning their life, or by becoming more conscious, or by the discomfort of psychological insight. This is how poets think: they allow for the presence of dreams as a form of communication from the unconscious, and the dream is then listened to.
God communicates to people in two ways: through angels and through our dreams. If you want to communicate with God, or receive a message from God, then be open to your dreams. Dreams coming from God are the “big dreams”, and we may have only a few of these during our whole life. Dreams have some interest for poets and artists, dreams are psychic collages juxtaposing images that one would probably never put together. They are of interest in an aesthetic sense, as a curiosity, and importantly for therapists as a door into the psyche of their client. Discussing a dream is a way—an entrance, a door—into the psyche, it is a catalyst for discussion. Surrealism as a movement grew out of Freud’s positioning of dream interpretation as an important part of therapeutic work. The Surrealists were more fascinated by the dream as an aesthetic event than by its therapeutic value. Dreams, then, as life changing events, can be an important aspect of how poets think; as well, dream imagery can be transformed into a poem.
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Dreams, Tarot cards, Sabian Symbols, the Aquarian Symbols, archetypal images, paintings by Odilon Redon, Magritte, and others, photographs by Man Ray, all help open an entrance into the deeper levels of the psyche. At this deeper level we become conscious of people, we can explore events that were formerly left unconscious, and a narrative becomes available to the conscious mind. I would include fairy tales and mythology as ways to access the unconscious mind.