What has gone wrong with Western society? Are we in decline or are we just changing? Have we become a society with few moral values or are different moral values evolving? Are we happier, more fulfilled, better people who think of the other person and not just ourselves? Are we happy, or are we just full of ourselves; or do we have no introspection, no self-doubt, and no self-awareness?
Let’s look at Americans. During the last thirty years Americans have become ultra extroverts, every child is told they can become anything they want, they can do anything they want; everything they do is praised; subsequently, there are very few shy and introspective children left. You see people on television, on the game show The Price is Right; when audience members are called to come forward and be contestants they dance, pull faces, do cart wheels, high five a dozen strangers, scream, yell, and even the old have become cards and cut ups despite arthritic limbs and palsy, even the old behave in a way no one would have behaved just a few years ago. Fame and extroversion seem to go together. Look at celebrities, fame and self-promotion are what they crave but these are no replacement for whatever once sustained us as a society; we have abandoned what is traditional at great cost to society and to our very souls. And since traditional values have been abandoned the young have nothing real to believe in but the desire to be famous, nothing sustains them, they have been psychologically impoverished by cancelling both their traditions and culture, no wonder social media are so important to them, we're all famous on social media.
Today, even small children want to be famous but, like everybody else, not for any real accomplishment but for fame itself; it is fame for just existing, without introspection or thought or education or talent or hard work or love of what you are doing or for caring for other people. The modest person will come in last around here! And since we are all special without doing something that makes us special, then why bother accomplishing anything? Just being ourselves makes us special, we are "special for nothing", like body builders who have big muscles not for doing work but solely for appearance.
No one is special in themselves and fame is for doing something that is a real accomplishment, for commitment and passion, for something that will possibly make you famous --your self-worth is not contingent on becoming famous-- fame is not just for who you already are, it is for doing something that other people have not done before or few have achieved. Fame diverts you from your calling in life, it diminishes your calling, it prevents you from discovering your calling. And no, you cannot be whatever you want to be even though your grade school teachers told you so. What someone accomplishes is done for its own sake, it is your calling in life, it is never to be famous; fame is a by-product of excelling at what you love to do and, even then, fame has limited if any importance. A hundred years ago DH Lawrence wrote of the “bitch goddess success”, we now have our own god, it is fame.
Published on the website of the League of Canadian Poets, July 13, 2022
Reviewed by Cynthia Coristine
Poetry is the soul’s DNA; poetry is the soul’s map.
– Stephen Morrissey
The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche by Stephen Morrissey, Ekstasis Editions, 2022
In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets and psyche, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey draws upon and revisits a lifetime of creative and critical writing.
A member of Montreal’s “Vehicule Poets” in the 1970s and the author of nine published books of poetry, in his new book Morrissey traces the evolution of, and influences on, Canadian modern poetry with a focus on the “Montreal Group” and the “Vehicule” poets. A complement to his previous book A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet(2019),The Green Archetypal Field functions as a master class on poetry and poetics.
Why have once prominent and critically praised Canadian poets such as A.J.M. Smith fallen into obscurity? he asks. What happens when a country loses its collective memory? Should the definition of what constitutes a “major poet” be focused less on the volume and more on the quality of the work – particularly in the case of exceptional poets who may, for one reason or another, have produced a limited number of poems?
Morrissey reflects on a time when older, established poets such as Irving Layton, F.R. Scott and Louis Dudek mentored and nurtured younger poets: “The older poets in Montreal created an environment in which to be a poet was a possibility, not something alien and foreign,” he writes. “We didn’t have to look to England or the United States for what it meant to be a poet. Established poets lived among us, we saw them on the streets where we lived, we read their poems in school, and we read reviews of their books published in local newspapers.”
Louis Dudek, for example, was not only Morrissey’s teacher when the latter was a graduate student at McGill, he was also a mentor and a friend. “He made me feel that the life of a poet was the only one worth living,” Morrissey recalls. He writes movingly of the great importance to him of a meeting he had with Dudek in 1975:
“He read some of my poems, which he liked very much. He gave me something that afternoon that only an older poet can give to a younger poet: he gave me confirmation that I was a poet. I left that meeting feeling that I had nothing to worry about, just keep writing and my life as a poet would unfold. And that’s what I did.” (Dudek went on to write the introduction to Morrissey’s first book of poetry, The Trees of Knowing, in 1978).
In The Green Archetypal Field, Stephen Morrissey traces the origin of his becoming a poet back to the single most significant event of his life – the death of his father (following unsuccessful heart surgery in Boston), when Morrisey was six years old. Suddenly thrust into the role of a “latchkey child” in a single-parent household in which his father was never mentioned, Morrissey’s profound grief and loss went unaddressed, and was therefore unabated.
“For some of us there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life is reconfigured,” he writes in a chapter entitled The Great Reconfiguration. “Life is one thing, and then, a moment later it is something else… Almost every aspect – I believe every aspect – of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before my father’s death.”
Forced at a young age to confront the “impermanence and insecurity” of life, it was only as a result of beginning to write poetry in his teens that Morrissey found a way of both processing and articulating his unresolved grief and trauma. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the course of his future life as a poet had been set. Poetry, he points out, is a calling. “No real poet ever decided to be a poet, it doesn’t work that way.”
Morrissey’s calling to write ‘confessional poetry’ specifically, was bolstered as a result of reading an interview with the American poet Allan Ginsberg, which was published in The Montreal Star in 1967. “Scribble down your nakedness,” Ginsberg advised. “Be prepared to stand naked, because most often it is this nakedness that the reader finds most interesting.”
Although writing confessional poetry often necessitates what Morrissey calls “a journey into darkness”, he believes that “if the poet has the courage, it is also a place of great creativity, of revealing what has been hidden or disguised… [of] meeting one’s shadow, the rejected and dark aspect of our inner being; it is a journey to selfhood.” Ideally, that journey will lead towards “wholeness.”
Central to his life and his work is Stephen Morrissey’s sense of himself as a Montreal poet – as opposed to a poet from any other 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,” he writes. “Without identifying with a specific 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 global society.”
Fifty years of reading, thinking about, and writing poetry have convinced Stephen Morrissey that “We go to poetry with nothing to say, or we go to poetry with something to say that is not necessarily what we end up saying, but in either case we find our voice, we find an authentic expression of what the soul wants to say, and this is poetry.”
June 6, 2022
About the reviewer: A native of Montreal, Cynthia Coristine currently lives in Ottawa. She is the co-author, with Ian Browness, of From Griffintown to the Square Mile: The Life James Coristine (2009).
It is through human expression that we can defeat the over arching digital tyranny; through joy and poetry we can assert our humanity.
--Richard Olafson, Shifting Towards Vitalism (2023)
In the old days, when home computers were just beginning to be available to the public, some poets made poems using computer technology and their own original programmes; some of these poems were permutations of phrases, some resulted in Surrealistic visual images, and while a few of these poems were interesting they were basically meaningless as poetry and never real poems. Now we’ve moved on to Artificial Intelligence writing, well, anything you want it to write including poetry.
There is a short video on YouTube of Joe Rogan telling us that blood, discovered at the bottom of the Ark of the Covenant, had been analysed and was the blood of Jesus Christ, proving both His divinity and His existence. This video was, of course, a creation of Artificial Intelligence, it was a hoax, an attempt to fool or deceive people. This, and other videos created by Artificial Intelligence, gives one pause, what if this video was of someone in authority making some statement that people believed but it was all lies or propaganda? We are concerned with AI because it is one of the recent technologies that could be disastrous for humanity, and excluding some positive uses the existence of AI, for most people, is frightening, it is to deceive the viewer. What do we believe, and who do we believe, if technology can now perfectly duplicate the voice and facial characteristics of people in authority? Or if AI can write fake texts? There have always been false or fake texts and there will be more in the future generated by AI technology.
Why anyone would want to write AI poems is beyond me, there is no money in poetry, there is no fame, there is nothing to gain except possibly some amusement or novelty. AI can write screen plays, articles for Sports Illustrate magazine and newspapers, content for websites, PhD dissertations, term papers, or whatever someone wants and it is inexpensive, fast, possibly accurate, and he/she doesn't have to do the writing or pay an actual human writer. But poetry? Perhaps because poetry is of increasingly less value to society it is doubtful that anyone will write poems using AI except as a prank, a joke, or out of curiosity. But there is something important to learn from this possible use of Artificial Intelligence and poetry: it is to remember what it means to be human.
Can AI ever write poetry? It is not possible for one reason: poetry is the voice of the human soul and computers don't have souls. Even if computer technology becomes so sophisticated that a computer thinks it is an autonomous human being, that it attains "personhood", it will still not be poetry. Poetry requires a human being writing poems and this requires living in the physical world with real life relationships with other human beings. Even if an intelligent human-looking robot could be created, with built-in AI, it is still a computer and it has no soul. Even if you could programme in the functions of a soul--for instance, compassion, understanding, empathy, emotions, spirituality, awe, a family history, and reflection on the past--and this computer writes "poetry", it is still not poetry, it still can't express what the human soul can express. A human has a biological level of existence and a computer is man-made, it is a machine even if it is the most sophisticated machine made by man. And a computer can never have a style of writing that is honed by experience and a multiplicity of events that organize themselves randomly and are the result of events far too complicated to ever be duplicated or created in themselves. AI and its progression, a humanoid robot, is always manufactured by people, or descended from a generation of computers invented and manufactured by people; it is not created by sexual intercourse, there is no hormonal basis to AI, it has no belief in spirituality (or anything else), it has no traditions whether religious, ancestral, cultural, historical, or genetic that human beings have, and if sometime in the future it has some of these qualities, they will always be artificially created and not the result of human interaction; AI will never have genuine human qualities. Even if one day AI can identify as "human" it is still not the real thing. If we come to a time when computers think they are human beings, or the equivalent of human beings, with free will and emotions and mobility, it is possible that robots will take over from human beings, but even then whatever a robot with AI can express will never be real poetry. AI can write a facsimile poem but never a real poem. By definition only a human being can write a real poem just as only a human being can react to that poem with emotions and human reflection. AI and the human soul are mutually exclusive.
What in one is
darkIllumine,
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.
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.
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In The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets and psyche, Montreal poet Stephen Morrissey draws upon and revisits a lifetime of creative and critical writing..JPG)
