A sunny day in July (three)

A sunny day in July (two)

A sunny day in July (one)

oooohhh baby... in Plateau Mont Royal

The Grey Nuns' Residence

Now a residence for Concordia University's downtown campus, the old Grey Nuns' residence is located on Blvd. Rene Levesque.

C.G. Jung on poetry

C.G. Jung on 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. So Faust touches something in the soul of every German. So also Dante’s fame is immortal, while The Shepherd of Hermas just failed of inclusion in the New Testament canon. Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment. This is effected by the collective unconscious in that a poet, a seer or a leader allows himself to be guided by the unexpressed desire of his times and shows the way, by word or deed, to the attainment of that which everyone blindly craves and expects—whether this attainment results in good or evil, the healing of an epoch or its destruction.

                                                      --C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Cedar and Pine Avenue, Summer 2011

Lost, found, missing

News Flash! Montreal is the North American capital for deserting animals when people move. It's more than 75,000 animals left behind, dropped off on the roadside, left at the SPCA, or otherwise disposed of as Quebecers move, en masse, every year on July 1st. Maybe people think someone else will move in and adopt their cat, dog, hampster, guppies, or other animals... Individual social responsibility (as opposed to imposed collective action) was never a high point in la belle province. Bob Barker, where are you when we need you?

Re. these photos: I love finding repeated actions on city streets; for instance, lost, found, and missing pet posters. Always home made, they are often plaintive cries for the return of their missing pet. Photos of disappeared cats or dogs, or parrots, taken when the animal wasn't lost, a time of happiness, become mug shots of possibly miserable animals. All of our childhood fears of being deserted by our parents return to us as we look at these posters; context is everything for transformation; the animal now becomes an archdetype for our fears of abandonment.

Alexis Nihon Plaza

Carlton Card Store, Alexis Nihon Plaza

Alexis Nihon Plaza

Ralph Maud in 1995

Ralph Maud is the foremost Charles Olson scholar. I must have ten books by Ralph on Olson, who is also one of my favourite American poets. After Butterick it's Ralph Maud. 

Ralph Maud and CZ.

Ralph Maud

Ralph Maud

Nellie McClung in 1991

Here's CZ and Nellie McClung in the fall, 1991, Vancouver. Nellie dropped in with a friend from Quebec's Eastern Townships.

CZ and Nellie.

Nellie.

Poetry Must be Authentic to Psyche

In addition to all of the important qualities a poet must have—talent, intelligence, and a passion, an obsession, or a compulsion to write—a poet’s work must also be authentic to psyche.

There is an expression of our psyche in everything we do including writing poetry. Great poetry is always authentic to psyche, that is, it is an expression of the psychology, of the soul, of the depth of perception of the poet.

All poets face the question of whether or not they will censor what they write, this is something a poet must decide each time he or she sits down to write if there are any doubts about the writing. We need to ask ourselves, “If I censor what I write am I being authentic to psyche?” We don’t have to write everything that crosses our mind, but most of the time we need to be true to ourselves in our writing.

All poets go through years of apprenticeship to learn how to write poetry, the lyf so short,

the craft so long to lerne. There is also the necessity to be aware of the “insecurity of art”, that being creative, writing poetry, requires an attitude of insecurity, not thinking you know all the answers. There is also the important quality of investing in our writing an authenticity to the psychic content. Without this authenticity, I don’t feel that poetry has much, or any, significance.

What does it mean to be authentic to psyche? Poetry that is authentic to psyche is poetry that people anywhere, at any time, will respond to; they will find this poetry consistent with their own vision of life, or find their vision enlarged by poetry. Readers can identity poetry that is authentic to psyche because they resonate to these poems that speak directly to their soul; it is the reader’s soul that identifies the authenticity of these poems that speak the truth of life, of existence, to the reader.

To be authentic to psyche is to be aware of a mythic quality in poetry. This removes poetry from the merely personal and quotidian to an impersonal and universal context while still relying on the details of the personal and quotidian. Being authentic to psyche is to write poetry that represents the archetypal dimension of psyche. “Real” poetry is always authentic to psyche, it contains psychic content; that is, there is the presence of archetypes, symbolism, metaphor, and so on.

 All poetry requires emotional content, we need to be moved by the poem, if not greatly moved, or moved to an epiphany, then at least “touched” by the poem so that the poem says something to us. These are poems that we spend a lifetime pondering, they unfold for us the complexity and beauty of life, they reveal a deeper truth about life that we can refer to again and again as we get older. In this context, I think of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and so on in many other poems. For instance, Williams Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, the poems of William Wordsworth and John Keats. I think also of D.H. Laurence’s poems and the poems of William Carlos Williams. The work of David Ignatow, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath also speak to an authenticity of psyche. Melville’s Moby Dick is not poetry but it is authentic to psyche. A good anthology of poetry is invaluable in this sense; every young person should be given a good anthology of English poetry. I grew up reading Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury and I still enjoy reading the poems in this book. These poems I’ve mentioned here, and so many others, are deeply moving and one of the reasons for this is that they are authentic to psyche. In this the unconscious is opened and changed, our psyche is spoken to, and our existence is reflected upon.

Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and Stephen Morrissey

Here are the rest of the photos from our evening out at a Chinese restaurant on St. Laurent. Here's Ken Norris on the phone before they had cell phones...

Here's Ken at the Gazette's book fair back in 1993.

Here I am (ever the conservative) with Ken Norris.

There's SM, Ken Norris, and Artie back in 1993.

Visiting Irving Layton in 1997

Irving Layton, CZ, Noni Howard.

Irving and Noni.

Irving Layton and SM.

Irving Layton lived in his old age on Monkland Avenue, just a few blocks from where we live. I knew Layton's nephew/best friend, Bill Goodwin, who taught at Champlain College when I first began teaching there. Bill would have Irving read at the college every year. I remember, after one reading, driving home with Irving and Bill and talking with Irving. Noni Howard is a poet and an old friend Irving Layton's, she is also an old friend of CZ's,  so when she came to visit in 1997 (or 1998) we all went down to Irving's and visited. These photos are from that occasion.

Coracle Press will publish a chapbook of Noni Howard's poems this summer: visit Coracle Press.