I've spent a lifetime writing: a diary I've kept everyday since January 1965, books, poetry, book reviews, criticism, and correspondence. Why did I do so much writing? On one hand, I enjoy solitude and being creative. On the other hand, there were things that happened in my life that I understood better in the act of writing; writing helped me to understand something about life and expressing this in a poem was both to discover something new and to have a numinous experience.
This writing I am talking about has to be fearless, the writer is going to a place that is marked with signs saying "No Trespassing", "Do Not Enter", and "Enter at Your Own Risk". The important things in life are not easy and they aren’t free, they are a lot of work. You may be afraid to write something down, or afraid to follow where your thinking is going, you may be inclined to censor your writing; just remember that no one else need ever read what you are writing, you can tear it up after you've written whatever you want to say, but you need to have courage and be fearless to do the writing. How could it be otherwise? Writing has to be a precise expression of what the soul has to say, what the soul perceives; this is more difficult than you might think.
What I am saying will mean very little to most people, but this is not meant for most people, it is meant for poets. A poet wants to write an authentic poem, a poem that is authentic to what the poet wants to say, to be true to the poet's inner being, and this requires years of writing and rewriting poems. All of a poet's work can be seen as one long poem, it is the poem of one's life, continuous and unbroken. You don't just sit down one day and write something you call a poem and think that makes you a poet, there is a lot more to it than this.
Writing poetry is not an obsession or even a compulsion, it is that there is no alternative but to do the writing that presents itself to you; it is what one does and to do anything else is to deny the Call to do this work; if you deny the Call you have betrayed your life, betrayed your mission in life. Not even God is as important as your soul, you can live very nicely without God but if you betray your soul you will have no life at all, just confusion and denial. Don't worry, God will forgive you for not believing in Him, He doesn't need your belief, He doesn't even need you. To see life, the particulars of life, and to express them, is to communicate things of the soul and poetry is the voice of the soul. Writing is always a movement in the direction of wholeness and understanding, of creativity, of making something new. It is a triumph of formulating and expressing in an exact way the thing you want to write, it is the achievement of wholeness over division. So, at the basis of writing is finding wholeness, truth, and Oneness with life. That's how important writing is to a poet and why poets need to be fearless when writing poems.
Soul is what makes us more than a pile of chemicals and a
tangle of neurons; soul is that essence of consciousness that
enables us to know ourselves and our world, to recognize
what is unique in us as individuals and what each one of us
shares with the immense totality of which we are a part.
–June Singer,
Boundaries of the Soul (1994), p. xi
1
No poetics should ignore the place of psyche or soul
in writing poetry, this is because poetry is the voice
of the soul. Of course, some people don't believe the soul
exists, they associate it with organized religion
that they oppose as irrational and superstitious.
We know what a soulless city looks like, it is sterile,
plastic, glass, concrete, stainless steel, and lacking
the human dimension, lacking the uniqueness of the individual.
The soul made itself known in my life when I was a child,
with dreams that changed my life and writing poetry
that allowed me to be creative and express my inner being;
how much less my life would have been without poetry.
I believe that the soul is fundamental to poetry,
going back to the "Epic of Gilgamesh", going back
to the beginning of time and the first poem, and going
forward to the next century and the next millennium;
as long as the human spirit exists people will write
poetry and the soul will express itself. For this reason,
poetry will never die; it may become scarce, but
it won't die.
2
"Break the line when you run out of breath", sd/ Charles Olson,
but is this applicable to poets other than Olson and his cohort?
Is breath so significant in writing poetry that it should be used
to indicate line breaks? This may seem obscure but it is important,
it has to do with how poems are written, how lines of poetry scan,
and where lines end and other lines begin. It also affirms the importance
of the human soul in poetry.
Although in a different way than Walt Whitman,
Olson follows Whitman in affirming the importance of the physical body;
however, Whitman celebrated the human soul as much as he celebrated
the body; in fact, it is Whitman's soul that is celebrating "the body electric",
it is Whitman's soul that is celebrating the physical side of life.
Other poets, Pound, Eliot, H.D., and Yeats, (there are too many others to list),
affirm a more practical way of putting words on a page; free verse and traditional
metrical verse don't place importance on breath indicating line breaks.
Instead of Charles Olson's theory, in "Projective Verse",
think of poems as transcriptions of the soul, and lines of poetry
are patterns of thought, they are what the soul has to say:
what the soul perceives, the poem says.
With deference to Charles Olson, here is a different model
for how poems are written; it pertains to the deep language of poetry:
From the soul to the brain;
from the brain to thought;
from thought to the pen
and the poem is written.
3
The vocabulary of the soul includes Jungian terms,
it includes archetypes, synchronicity, the human shadow,
anima/animus, individuation, and others; these are
descriptions of how the soul manifests itself,
not instructions on what to write.
You have had an experience of the soul
when you know something intuitively, or if you've
fallen in love, or spent years writing poems, or had
a synchronistic experience, or been moved by dreams—
by a dream that changes one's life—or by a work of art
or literature, by a movie or a play, or music; these experiences
can change how we see ourselves and our world, they can change
the direction of our life, they can deepen our understanding of life,
they are a part of our journey, including what we do in the future,
what we become, and who we are.
4
Whatever people around us may think, freedom is not negotiable,
whether it is freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom
to think whatever you want. No one can make art that is authentic
to their vision and maintain their integrity as a poet if they live in fear
of being censored; censorship and creative expression are mutually exclusive.
There is state censorship and censorship by social media,
which is cancel culture, and we also censor ourselves; self-censorship
comes from within us while other types of censorship come from
outside of us, but both are pernicious and dangerous to creativity and
free expression. No poet can accept silence imposed by cancel
culture or state censorship, it would be soul suicide to do so.
We don't live in what Keats described as a "vale of soul making"
just to pander to people who are ignorant, or intolerant, or bullies.
My rule is: write exactly what I feel hesitant about writing, what I
want to keep silent about, what I want to censor; that's where poetry
lies, it is found in the shadow of consciousness.
No matter how offensive something may seem to be,
freedom of speech is essential to the arts and to democracy,
it is more important than catering to someone's sensibility,
or giving in to the fear of being attacked by them, verbally or in print,
or their demand for censorship and the denial of freedom
that has been hard won over many centuries. When a poet sides
with those who would censor the writing and statements
of others, that poet has joined the gang of repressors,
that poet has denied poetry and the work of being a poet.
In this life there is always somebody who wants to impose
what they think is best for everybody else, who wants to close down
a conversation, ban works of art, and censor what people are saying.
But poetry isn't written to make anyone happy or safe; the soul doesn't care
if you are happy or not, the soul cares about the truth of your existence.
5
I began writing poems when I was young
and I've described this as the beginning of my journey
as a poet. "All my heroes were poets" writes Ken Norris,
as poets were also my heroes: including Allen Ginsberg,
Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, William Blake,
John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Chaucer;
and in my own country, my poet heroes are
the Confederation Poets, the McGill Group of poets,
Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Alden Nowlan,
and others. A young poet writes for the love of writing poems
and, if the poet is lucky, the soul appears, the soul is awakened;
a new maturity and intelligence in the writing is the appearance
of the soul's presence in the poet's work.
The nature of psyche, which is a synonym for soul,
is to find meaning and wholeness in life; and where is love?
Love is in every expression of the soul, every poem, every
insight, every action coming from the soul's awakening;
the soul has a propensity for individuation;
the soul gives joy to life;
the soul follows the bright star of love;
the soul lights the darkness surrounding us.
Author Bio
Montreal-born poet Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University in 1973. In 1976 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Vehicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 – 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995.
Original:
First published at https://artisanalwriter.com/2022/12/01/on-poetics/, 01 December 2022:
Also available as a podcast. To listen on Spotify click here.
"Soul is what makes us more than a pile of chemicals and a
tangle of neurons; soul is that essence of consciousness that
enables us to know ourselves and our world, to recognize
what is unique in us as individuals and what each one of us
shares with the immense totality of which we are a part."
–June Singer,
Boundaries of the Soul (1994), p. xi
1
No poetics should ignore the place of psyche or soul
in writing poetry, this is because poetry is the voice
of the soul. Of course, some people don't believe the soul
exists, they associate it with organized religion
that they oppose as irrational and superstitious.
We know what a soulless city looks like, it is sterile,
plastic, glass, concrete, stainless steel, and lacking
the human dimension, lacking the uniqueness of the individual.
The soul made itself known in my life when I was a child,
with dreams that changed my life and writing poetry
that allowed me to be creative and express my inner being;
how much less my life would have been without poetry.
I believe that the soul is fundamental to poetry,
going back to the "Epic of Gilgamesh", going back
to the beginning of time and the first poem, and going
forward to the next century and the next millennium;
as long as the human spirit exists people will write
poetry and the soul will express itself. For this reason,
poetry will never die; it may become scarce, but
it won't die.
2
"Break the line when you run out of breath", sd/ Charles Olson,
but is this applicable to poets other than Olson and his cohort?
Is breath so significant in writing poetry that it should be used
to indicate line breaks? This may seem obscure but it is important,
it has to do with how poems are written, how lines of poetry scan,
and where lines end and other lines begin. It also affirms the importance
of the human soul in poetry.
Although in a different way than Walt Whitman,
Olson follows Whitman in affirming the importance of the physical body;
however, Whitman celebrated the human soul as much as he celebrated
the body; in fact, it is Whitman's soul that is celebrating "the body electric",
it is Whitman's soul that is celebrating the physical side of life.
Other poets, Pound, Eliot, H.D., and Yeats, (there are too many others to list),
affirm a more practical way of putting words on a page; free verse and traditional
metrical verse don't place importance on breath indicating line breaks.
Instead of Charles Olson's theory, in "Projective Verse",
think of poems as transcriptions of the soul, and lines of poetry
are patterns of thought, they are what the soul has to say:
what the soul perceives, the poem says.
With deference to Charles Olson, here is a different model
for how poems are written; it pertains to the deep language of poetry:
From the soul to the brain;
from the brain to thought;
from thought to the pen
and the poem is written.
3
The vocabulary of the soul includes Jungian terms,
it includes archetypes, synchronicity, the human shadow,
anima/animus, individuation, and others; these are
descriptions of how the soul manifests itself,
not instructions on what to write.
You have had an experience of the soul
when you know something intuitively, or if you've
fallen in love, or spent years writing poems, or had
a synchronistic experience, or been moved by dreams—
by a dream that changes one's life—or by a work of art
or literature, by a movie or a play, or music; these experiences
can change how we see ourselves and our world, they can change
the direction of our life, they can deepen our understanding of life,
they are a part of our journey, including what we do in the future,
what we become, and who we are.
4
Whatever people around us may think, freedom is not negotiable,
whether it is freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom
to think whatever you want. No one can make art that is authentic
to their vision and maintain their integrity as a poet if they live in fear
of being censored; censorship and creative expression are mutually exclusive.
There is state censorship and censorship by social media,
which is cancel culture, and we also censor ourselves; self-censorship
comes from within us while other types of censorship come from
outside of us, but both are pernicious and dangerous to creativity and
free expression. No poet can accept silence imposed by cancel
culture or state censorship, it would be soul suicide to do so.
We don't live in what Keats described as a "vale of soul making"
just to pander to people who are ignorant, or intolerant, or bullies.
My rule is: write exactly what I feel hesitant about writing, what I
want to keep silent about, what I want to censor; that's where poetry
lies, it is found in the shadow of consciousness.
No matter how offensive something may seem to be,
freedom of speech is essential to the arts and to democracy,
it is more important than catering to someone's sensibility,
or giving in to the fear of being attacked by them, verbally or in print,
or their demand for censorship and the denial of freedom
that has been hard won over many centuries. When a poet sides
with those who would censor the writing and statements
of others, that poet has joined the gang of repressors,
that poet has denied poetry and the work of being a poet.
In this life there is always somebody who wants to impose
what they think is best for everybody else, who wants to close down
a conversation, ban works of art, and censor what people are saying.
But poetry isn't written to make anyone happy or safe; the soul doesn't care
if you are happy or not, the soul cares about the truth of your existence.
5
I began writing poems when I was young
and I've described this as the beginning of my journey
as a poet. "All my heroes were poets" writes Ken Norris,
as poets were also my heroes: including Allen Ginsberg,
Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, William Blake,
John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Chaucer;
and in my own country, my poet heroes are
the Confederation Poets, the McGill Group of poets,
Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Alden Nowlan,
and others. A young poet writes for the love of writing poems
and, if the poet is lucky, the soul appears, the soul is awakened;
a new maturity and intelligence in the writing is the appearance
of the soul's presence in the poet's work.
The nature of psyche, which is a synonym for soul,
is to find meaning and wholeness in life; and where is love?
Love is in every expression of the soul, every poem, every
insight, every action coming from the soul's awakening;
the soul has a propensity for individuation;
the soul gives joy to life;
the soul follows the bright star of love;
the soul lights the darkness surrounding us.
Author Bio
Montreal-born poet Stephen Morrissey is the author of twelve books, including poetry and literary criticism. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, Honours in English with Distinction, from Sir George Williams University in 1973. In 1976 he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from McGill University. In the 1970s Morrissey was associated with the Vehicule Poets. The Stephen Morrissey Fonds, 1963 – 2014, are housed at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library at McGill University. Stephen Morrissey married poet Carolyn Zonailo in 1995.
For
the most part, poets don't choose what they write about; a poem is given to us,
it comes from deep within the psyche. Of course, everything takes a lot of work;
poets need a foundation on which to write their poems, this includes reading,
education, and years of commitment to poetry and writing. As all poets know, when
a poem is given to them it has to be listened to; some poets get up in the middle of the night
to write down a poem before it is forgotten. The most famous example of losing the
thread of a poem when the writing is interrupted is Coleridge's anecdote of the
"visitor from Porlock"; because of this interruption Coleridge felt
that one of his most famous poems, "Kubla Khan", was never fully completed.
What
a poet writes is an expression of deeply felt psychic issues. The soul deciphers what it perceives and begins writing (or dictating) a poem. Over time the
writing will change, but what doesn't change is the need to write poems. Poetry
is one of the places in life where we see the surrender of conscious choice; it
is a demand on us by the soul, a demand that we listen, a demand to write our
poems as they are given to us, and a demand to be faithful to writing poetry
over a lifetime.
We
poets were once a tribe, as Margaret Laurence described the community of
writers back in the 1960s; but the tribe has broken up, it has dispersed, it
has been fragmented. Nevertheless, what we write about doesn't really change; perennial
themes supersede what is newly fashionable or entertaining. What has importance
is our creativity and depth of perception, our visceral need to write poetry, and
our knowledge that after everything else has disappeared from life, it is
poetry that will still be there. This is my experience.
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.
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.
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. ----------------
Two other minor examples of
poetic thinking: when I returned to live in the neighbourhood where I grew up,
I would regularly see people who I used to see in the streets when I was young.
They were not older versions of themselves, they were the same people that I
used to see, as though, over the intervening years, they had never changed. I no
longer see these people, they seem to have departed, where they have gone to I
don’t know, but I would often see them, just as they were so many years ago. A
second example: I have always believed that when we think of someone we used to
know, but have lost contact with them, and they suddenly come to mind, for no
reason at all, at that same moment they are thinking of us. For example,
sometimes we think of an old friend with whom we have lost contact and then,
only a few seconds later, the phone rings and it is the person we have been
thinking of. Synchronicity reminds us that there is some kind of cohesion and meaning in life if we can see it. ----------------
It is the essence of the
shamanic journey that what is perceived is not a product of the imagination but
is “real”. The important thing is the experience in which our awareness and
consciousness is not always subject to cause and effect. Dreams juxtapose
images that are usually not associated with each other. In essence, the dream is
a collage or a "cut-up" (see Brion Gysin). Dreams fascinate us when
they open the door of archetypal association. A door, for instance, allows us
to enter a room, but a "door" for William Blake is an image opening
our awareness and our perception of the symbolical world of the psyche. Almost
two hundred years later Jim Morrison resonated to Blake's perception and the
music of The Doors followed, music that is shamanic and archetypal. ----------------
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.
----------------
Poetry deals with
the soul and soul making. Just about any subject can be transformed into
poetry, but a poet’s soul is needed for this transformation of the everyday
into poetry. The poet is the soul's alchemist. Poetry is transformation.
Dreams are another form of alchemy; they transform everyday reality into an expression of the psyche
or the soul, and these dreams can sometimes give us access into our own souls.
Many of C.G. Jung’s psychological concepts
and related interests—for instance, shadow, archetype, symbolism, alchemy,
animus and anima, mythology, the collective unconscious, and so on—are also interests
of many poets. The major difference between poetry and psychology is that
poetry is the voice of the human soul, while Jungian psychology tries to
explain how the soul works; most other schools of psychology don't acknowledge
the existence of the soul.
----------------
Poetry and psychology are two very
different disciplines. The Irish poet, Patrick Kavanaugh, writes in one of his
poems, “He knew that posterity has no use/ For anything but the soul…”
Kavanaugh’s poems resonate for us because we recognize in them, as we do in all
great poetry and poets, someone who speaks to our inner being. We can tell if a
poet is genuine or not, inflated or not, and if the poet’s work is an authentic
expression of the soul. We resonate to the authentic expression of the inner
being of a fellow human being. Great poetry is an expression of “where psyche
is leading one.” This phrase, from one of James Hollis’s books, that we need to
find “where psyche leads us,” is the quest for an authentic life, an expression
of where soul will lead us if only we follow.
----------------
C.G. Jung’s comments on the relationship of
the collective unconscious and poetry in Modern Man in Search of a Soul are worth referring to in relation
to poetry, they also help explain something of the importance of Patrick Kavanaugh’s
poetry.
----------------
Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely
miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the
collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought upon the
conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of
importance to everyone living at that age. A work of art is produced that
contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men. --C.G. Jung
----------------
James Hillman’s “idea of psychopoesis” is also important; Hillman suggests that
a poem is always at the heart of things. Depth psychology is referred to as
soul making; however, poetry doesn't "make" the soul, it reveals the
soul. One of the concerns of both poetry and depth psychology is the human
soul: the intention of depth psychology is to unfold the complexity of a
person’s life so that it can be better understood, and perhaps placed in a
mythopoetic context; the poet’s intention, also to do with the soul, is to
write poetry that is authentic to his or her soulful vision.
----------------
Some poets are wounded healers; however, these wounds may also be the source of
the poet’s creativity and, as such, something that he or she may not want to
give up. Poetry isn’t therapy— poetry is a form of art—but as anyone who reads
literature knows, poetry can have a healing and transformative quality.
----------------
The intention of poet and psychologist is
substantially different; the difference is that while poetry is an expression
of the soul, psychology speaks about the soul if it mentions the soul at all. The two disciplines should not
be conflated or confused; we need to remember that poetry is the oldest art
form while psychology is about a hundred years old and, in some ways, it is still in its infancy. With this perspective in mind, we need to re-evaluate the
importance of poetry and remember its relationship to soul. ----------------
I wrote these notes before a reading at the Visual Arts Center in Westmount, QC, on 17 October 2017:
Poets aren't nomads, we all come from somewhere; and this "somewhere" is our psychic center, our home, the place we identify with, the place where we have a history. Personally, place is very important to me—I think it is essential in poetry—and I identify with Montreal, the home of my family since we moved here 180 years ago. Everywhere I go in this city I find something that expresses my soul, my inner being, the place of my ancestors and my family. That is why I say I am a Montreal poet, for nowhere else I have been is home as much as Montreal is home. So, not only is poetry an expression of location but it is also a place of history, of what happened in the past, of names, places, dates, events; that is to say it is a place of psyche, of the soul.
Lane behind Girouard Avenue.
Lane behind Girouard Avenue.
Lane behind Girouard Avenue.
Looking towards Girouard Park, one street west of Girouard.
A few years ago when they renovated 2226 Girouard, my grandmother's home from 1925 to 1965, they didn't put in a new door (as seen above) that leads to the basement.
Looking up at the back porch of my grandmother's flat on Girouard.