ERM on a business trip, late 1930s-early 1940s

This final photograph shows George and Freddy D'Alfonso, who was the chef on the train.

My mother in the late 1920s, early 1930s

At Rondeau Beach, 1932

Back in the 1930s.

2226 Girouard Avenue, Montreal (three)

It's around 1997 and I'm making my first visit back to 2226 Girouard Avenue, the first visit since 1968 or 1969.

SM in front of 2226 Girouard Avenue.

Lovell's Montreal City Directory, 1844-45

First appearance of Laurence Morrissey in Lovell's Directory.

ERM in Miami, 1920s

In the late 1920s or early 1930s my father went on a holiday, by himself, to Miami. Here are some photographs from that trip.

I am always impressed by how well dressed many people were in old photographs. Always well turned out, always a tie and suit, always very dapper...

A day at Westmount Park, around 1953

Here I am, around 1953, all dressed up. I believe that's Academy Road (running parallel to Ste. Catherine Street) behind me, which is the most southern boundary of Westmount Park, between Melville on the east and Landsdowne on the west (I could be wrong about these names). This is a truly lovely park with foot paths, hills, an artificial lake, and an excellent library and green house--both on the park grounds--that are both open to the public. Our old Hillman, bought second hand from the Meldrums, of the moving company family, can be seen in the background. I remember lying down length-wise on the back seat of this car, it was that small. They don't make cars like that anymore, pity.

There's the Hillman behind me, and a public school. I wonder where this outfit came from...

That's the corner of Academy Road and Melville behind me... This is actually a great location in which to live, although I always found the stretch of Ste. Cathrine Street, parallel to Academy Road and running through Westmount just a block south of here, particularly bleak and depressing. So, avoid Ste. Catherine Street until you get to Atwater. Louis Dudek lived for many years just a few blocks from here on Ingleside.

My brother and I.

On Avonmore, 1948 - 1949

Here's my brother around 1948 - 1949.



Here's my brother, before I was born, in the Avonmore apartment, our parents' first home after they married in 1940. This is around 1948 - 1949; it's Christmas and the cards are on the book shelf in front of the living room window. I think those chintz drapes were recycled to our home on Oxford Avenue. Entertainment back then was the radio and reading--no TV, no internet--I think I still have some of the books that are on the shelves beside and under the radio, or I've given them to my son.

Here is what Avonmore looks like today. Photo taken around 2004. One day my mother was followed home by a strange man; she phoned her father who was a fireman for the City of Montreal, and he sent around a police officer to check out the problem. Her parents were very protective of their daughter. Another time, she received a phone call from a neighbour, someone had been killed by a streetcar that ran on the far left (between two streets) of the above photo. Maybe it was a suicide. Streetcar service in Montreal ended in 1959, I remember the tracks on Decarie Blvd. being removed from the road, but you can still see some tracks embedded in asphalt, for instance the corner of Sherbrooke and Elmhurst; as well, where the tracks ran perpendicular to Avonmore, behind someone's fence, you can find the old tracks, maybe ten feet are left.

Here is what Avonmore looked like in 1940, just a single street then, now it's a crescent and the front door of the apartment opens directly onto the street. My parents lived here from 1940 to 1952 or 1953, after I was born. Back then a lot of the old neighbourhood was still country.

Girouard Avenue, 1910

Here's a photograph, from the Fraser-Hickson library, of the old streetcars or trams running along Girouard in 1910, before our family moved to the street. Back in the day when this area was like the country...

2226 Girouard Avenue, early 1950s (two)

Here is my brother, John Morrissey, pushing a pram with me in it. Behind us is Girouard Avenue and the photograph was taken in N.D.G. Park (more commonly called Girouard Park), I would think this is the late fall, maybe early winter, 1950 - 1951.

My brother on his sled, winter 1950 - 1951 at Girouard Park.

Here I am, fall-winter 1950, maybe January 1951, looking grumpy.

My mother and I, back porch off the kitchen, at 2226 Girouard Avenue, around 1953.

With my mother, around 1953, back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue.

P.S. The large N.D.G. Park is more familiarly called (by locals) Girouard Park, because it is on Girouard

2226 Girouard Avenue, late 1930s and late 1990s (one)

Here is my grandmother, Edith Sweeney Morrissey, holding my cousin Herb Morrissey, a few months after his birth in 1939. Photo taken on the back porch at 2226 Girouard Avenue in Montreal.

Ivy Lewis Morrissey, my Auntie Ivy, holding Herb.

Above: this is Alex Morrissey, my uncle, holding his son, Herb.


I took the following photographs of 2226 Girouard around 1997:

Front door.

The upstairs living room window on the left; Auntie Mable's bedroom with the balcony off of it.

In the lane behind the flat, the kitchen window on the far left of the second floor; the dining room window upstairs on the far right.

The oldest photos

These two photographs seem to have been taken the same day. In the top photo, I believe the older boy is my Uncle Herb Morrissey. The woman, third from the right, looks like my great aunt Essie, my grandmother's sister. The woman on the far left looks like my grandmother, Edith Sweeney. I can't identify the others...

FAMILY ALBUM

Family Album

When my mother moved to Toronto, at age 91, she gave me an old shoebox of family photos. It is a fascinating experience to sort through these images--mostly black and white but also some colour photographs--images of ourselves from when we were young, and of our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, relatives, friends, those faces to which we can’t attach a name, and some photographs of the old neighbourhoods where we used to live.

Here, then--on my 59^th birthday--is the beginning of the next month or so of posting old family photographs. Everyday, to the end of May, a different set of photographs will be posted, and a brief explanation will accompany the photographs. This is also the beginning of the process of digitalizing all the old family photographs in my possession and making them available to anyone who wants to see them. Even if you don’t know any of these people, the images may still be of interest. The approximate dates of the photographs are mid-1920s to early 1960s. May I also suggest visiting the Morrissey family history website?

Stephen Morrissey
Montreal, 27 April 2009

The woods in south western Quebec, winter (two)

The woods in south western Quebec (one)

Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978 - 1998

Preface to Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978-1998 (Muses’s Company, Winnipeg, 1998)

When I was growing up, I had two dreams that profoundly affected the shape of my life. I was six years old when my father died; the first of these dreams occurred three years after his death. I dreamed two men from an orphanage came to take me away. They were waiting for me at the back door; they were going to put me in a wooden cage. This dream made a deep and lasting impression on me, not only as a reminder of the insecurity and transience of life, but also as an encounter with the powerful depths of the unconscious. In retrospect, this dream began my awareness of the imagination, vision, and what psychologist C.G. Jung calls “the shadow.” It also informed me of my own separateness from the world in which I lived.

The second dream came when I was around thirteen years old, and it is responsible for my embarking on a lifetime of being a poet and diarist. In this dream I was imprisoned in a room where the windows were covered with mud. Once I could see outside, but now I was enclosed and cut off from the world. However one may interpret this dream, my own interpretation as an adolescent was that I had to write down the truth as I knew it--what people had done and what I had done. Only by writing could I see things clearly. I knew intuitively that writing could clarify, order, and give perspective to experience. My concern was with saving my inner being, which I was afraid would be lost if I were unable to remember events. My conviction, even then, was that there is a heroism and bravery to the average person’s life and I was responsible for recording as much of what I perceived of this as possible. I awoke from this dream knowing I had to write and ever since this dream I have written poems as well as kept a diary.

In addition to these two dreams there was a third influence to the kind of poet I became. In 1967, when I was still in high school, I read an article in a newspaper; in it the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, gave advice for poets. He said, “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked...” This statement made a lasting impression on me. It validated what I was already trying to do in my own poetry. For the first time I realized that the kind of subject matter I was grappling with as a teenager--content that was personal and confessional--belonged to a literary tradition and had meaning to other people. Even if I hadn’t read Ginsberg’s statement I would not have been deterred from continuing the writing I was doing--writing that attempted to understand deeply felt experiences. However, to discover that there was a public context for this kind of writing was enormously empowering, and allowed me to identify myself as a poet. My first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), published when I was in second year university, contains poems that have a thematic continuity extending from those early poems up to the work I am writing now. This present collection, Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978 - 1998, presents a selection of twenty years from my body of writing. This selection is chronological, beginning with my first published book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978) up to the present selection from new, unpublished poems.

For years I struggled in my writing to express early experiences of grief and failure. I wrote many poems on these subjects, but none articulated exactly how I felt, or dealt adequately with what I needed to say, until I wrote the long poem “Divisions.” This poem is central to my early work--in it I was finally able to deal aesthetically and personally with the experience it discusses. Everything came together in the writing of “Divisions”: content, form, and the insight necessary for its writing. This was a breakthrough poem for me, written over a three day period in April 1977. I was finally able to express in poetry what I was attempting to do since I was fifteen years old. I photocopied “Divisions” and mailed it out to other poets and critics, including Northrop Frye and Louis Dudek, both of whom responded generously: Frye with a letter, and Dudek with an offer to publish the poem. In 1983 bp Nichol published the poem in my book Divisions, with Coach House Press.

There are two more factors that I believe have contributed to my writing. The first is the fact of being born in Montreal of a large, but dwindling, family of Irish descent. This Irish background is rich in experience and family history; names such as Callaghan, Flanagan, and Sweeney are all a part of the family which has been in Montreal since before 1840. They were not wealthy people, although a few made names for themselves, but they were hardworking and improved conditions for the lives of their descendants. Their values, religious faith, and large families made them what they were. I am grateful for being a part of this ancestry.

A final factor that has helped shaped my poetry is the tradition of writing poetry in English-speaking Montreal. Growing up in Montreal in the 1950s, I always took for granted that poets lived and worked in the community in which I lived. Poets were never “someplace else”—they were right here. So the idea of becoming a poet was never unusual. Just as I appreciate my Irish heritage, I also benefited from the poetry community into which I was born. In the 1970s I was associated with Vehicule Art Gallery where I attended and organized readings while a graduate student at McGill University. I associated with other poets, and my first full-length collection of poems was published.
I have always aimed at a directness of statement and emotion in my poems, to communicate an image and a strong emotion; to merge the personal self with the archetypal self. Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet. These poems, selected from twenty years of published work, map the convolutions, terrain, and geography of the soul.

My poetic journey, from the early dreams and writing to the publication of this Selected Poems, has been a reaching out to other people. From the initial isolation as an adolescent poet until now, I have been blessed with meeting certain individuals who have encouraged and inspired me. My association with poet and editor Carolyn Zonailo began in 1989 with the publication, by Caitlin Press, of my book Family Album. CZ has edited my poetry and helped to prepare manuscripts for publication. We have shared a collaboration in writing and in life, living most of the year in Montreal, but spending as much time as possible each year in her native Vancouver, British Columbia. I would like to thank CZ for selecting the poems in this collection, urging me to write this preface, and for editing.

I would like to thank Louis Dudek for being my teacher and friend from McGill University days to the present. George and Jeanne Johnston extended to me friendship and the joy of discussing poetry and literature. Ken Norris, a colleague since the early 1970’s, has offered on-going encouragement. Jake Morrissey has often listened with appreciation to my work. Sonja Skarstedt and Geof Isherwood began Empyreal Press in Montreal in the early 1990s; with bravado and a belief in the importance of poetry they published each volume of The Shadow Trilogy. I would like to thank Endre Farkas and Gordon Shillingford for offering their support through the Muses’ Company. Finally, I would also like to thank the Canada Council for writing time during two grants, and for project grants in support of individual books.

Stephen Morrissey
Vancouver, British Columbia
August 7, 1998

regard as sacred

"Regard as sacred the disorder of my mind."
-- Arthur Rimbaud

Notation: The various line breaks in this concrete or visual poem, the reordering of the words, and the permutations and fragmentations of the words suggest both the disorder of the mind and a new “sacred” order of the text from the deconstruction of the original text. Reading the poem, not necessarily from the upper left hand side of the page scanning right and down, but beginning in the middle, or at the bottom and scanning left and up, or through the middle, in other words randomly, with the white spaces signifying a unit of silence, equivalent to the missing word, and beginning with a single voice but then also adding, and reading simultaneously, with a second (or third or fourth) voice, turned the concrete poem into a sound poem, again suggesting disorder but also creating a new aesthetic order or experience.

(This is how we read this poem in performance; pretty standard instructions. But it also emphasized that the way a poem is presented on the page is the notation of how the poem is to be performed; again, pretty standard instructions).