After reading F.R. Scott's Events and Signals (1954)

It's a different experience to read someone's individual books than it is to read their collected poems. For instance, F.R. Scott's Events and Signals (1954), which I've just read, gives the reader an insight into Scott's thinking that changes one's perception of Scott, it softens and humanizes him; perhaps this side of Scott isn't as evident as in his Collected Poems. In fact, the Frank Scott in this book is quite fascinating and revealing. "Departure" seems to refer to his separation from P.K. Page in the late 1940s. I think we only see now, after Peter Dale Scott's poem in last fall's Pacific Rim Review of Books, that "A L'Ange Avant Gardien" and "Will to Win" refer to the artist and dancer Francoise Sullivan, but if I'm wrong then correct me. And we know that he had also a romantic relationship with the artist Pegi Nichol which perhaps gives us a different perspective on his poem "For Pegi Nichol". There were so many affairs with or without the possibly silent approval of his wife, Marian Dale Scott. "Invert" and "Caring" give an insight into these affairs: it is that Scott was always looking for love but also afraid to leave his marriage with someone he also seemed to love and (of course) lose his social position. Even today we don't look on affairs with approval or kindness; affairs come across as sordid and someone is always betrayed and hurt by them.

Cover of Scott's Events and Signals

On Dreams, Poetry, and the Soul

I always assumed that everyone had “big dreams” at some time in their life. Everyone dreams but most people don’t listen to their dreams, they forget them as soon as they wake, or if the dream is remembered it is either ignored or sloughed off. They don’t want to be disturbed by dreams, or by re-visioning their life, or by becoming more conscious, or by the discomfort of psychological insight. This is how poets think: they allow for the presence of dreams as a form of communication from the unconscious, and the dream is then listened to.

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God communicates to people in two ways: through angels and through our dreams. If you want to communicate with God, or receive a message from God, then be open to your dreams. Dreams coming from God are the “big dreams”, and we may have only a few of these during our whole life. Dreams have some interest for poets and artists, dreams are psychic collages juxtaposing images that one would probably never put together. They are of interest in an aesthetic sense, as a curiosity, and importantly for therapists as a door into the psyche of their client. Discussing a dream is a way—an entrance, a door—into the psyche, it is a catalyst for discussion. Surrealism as a movement grew out of Freud’s positioning of dream interpretation as an important part of therapeutic work. The Surrealists were more fascinated by the dream as an aesthetic event than by its therapeutic value. Dreams, then, as life changing events, can be an important aspect of how poets think; as well, dream imagery can be transformed into a poem.
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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.
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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.
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Dreams, Tarot cards, Sabian Symbols, the Aquarian Symbols, archetypal images, paintings by Odilon Redon, Magritte, and others, photographs by Man Ray, all help open an entrance into the deeper levels of the psyche. At this deeper level we become conscious of people, we can explore events that were formerly left unconscious, and a narrative becomes available to the conscious mind. I would include fairy tales and mythology as ways to access the unconscious mind.

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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.

                                                                                                     

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me

Stephen Morrissey

I've been writing poems since I was fifteen years old, over a half century of writing. Writing poems was never a choice or a decision, it was a calling. Where does the "call" come from? It comes from the soul.

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The "call" to poetry came to me in a dream that told me to write down what had happened in my life or my life would be forgotten; waking after the dream I knew that to forget meant to lose my inner being. It is not just writing poetry that was a part of the call, it was also writing a journal and I began page one of my journal on January 14th, 1965; a few months later I began writing poems. Writing my journal and writing poems was a gift to me from the unconscious mind, it began with the dream.

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First you write the single poem and then a lot of poems, and then you gather these poems into a book, and then you have several books and that is one's body of work. If this is your calling then what you are doing is fulfilling your destiny.

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My poetry is concerned with soul making and it is also soul making itself; soul making is concerned with realizing one's potential as a person, with expressing the deeper meaning of one's life.

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The unconscious mind has a proclivity to wholeness. Whether in dreams or day dreams or writing poems or other forms of artistic creativity, we are driven to wholeness. That is the basis of my writing, when I speak of soul making I am also referring to wholeness, life affirmation, and healthy-mindedness.

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I write poems because writing has been a calling for me and one ignores a calling at risk to one's integrity as a human being. You can ignore many things and not damage your inner being but you can't ignore a calling; ignoring a calling is like having a limb amputated; no, it's worse than that, it's like amputating one of one's own limbs.

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I've been fairly passive in life but that may be because I am also introverted. It may also be because I knew all along what I wanted to do in life, and that was to write poems. Whatever poems I've written have been the result of having to write them; indeed, I had no choice but to write. I have been driven to write, but what drove me? What drove me was the urgency of finding meaning and wholeness in my life, of affirming life.

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Writing poems is what I've done with my life. It wasn't my choice since writing poems was a calling. It came to me, not me to it, and if the writing ended this afternoon I wouldn't care. Now I welcome my final years. I've been along for the journey, not in the driver's seat. I've been an observer and not much of an organizer or initiator of events. But I'm getting old and need a rest. In truth, I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me.

Some Notes on Poetry and Soul (edited and revised)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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                                                          Edited and revised on 23 March 2018

                                                          Stephen Morrissey

Meeting F.R. Scott in 1971

Reading one's old diaries or journals is like meeting a stranger you used to know, that stranger is yourself when younger. Back in November 1971 I was at a reception at Thomson House, part of McGill University, for the English poet Michael Horowitz. I remember this only because I wrote about it in my journal. I met Marian Dale Scott, F.R.Scott.'s wife. She was very nice as was Frank Scott who I met later that evening. Apparently, and I don't remember this at all, Earle Birney was also there. What I can see from this diary entry is that all of these were lovely people who were kind and considerate to this kid they'd never met before. I heard Patrick Anderson read a few days before and Frank Scott said that Anderson regretted not knowing the younger poets. One thing that might interest Brian Busby is that Marian Scott said that her husband and John Glassco would walk on Crescent Avenue and talk about the past, the days of the Montreal Group of poets. Let's see, that was almost fifty years before the Thomson House reception and right now is about fifty years after the same reception. Time flies but you have to write something down or it's all forgotten. 

On the bravery of Luci Maud Montgomery

Walk in 2010

On International Women's Day both the CBC and CTV news mentioned this video of Luci Maud Montgomery who, they say, battled rejection, depression, and sexism and was "mentally ill". Negative emotions are now confused and conflated with mental illness, but they are emotions, not mental illness. Montgomery's husband, Ewan was mentally ill and Montgomery had to keep what was considered a stigma secret. She lived in an age of sexism but she also published twenty novels and was the most successful Canadian author of her generation; sexism affected the lives of all women but she seems to have survived and thrived as a writer. She also had to contend with her son acting up, he was a real bounder, and this was a concern for her. Earlier in her life she was conflicted about her choice of husband and she made what turned out to be a bad choice. Was she addicted to barbiturates? I've known people who were addicted to different legal and illegal drugs and they weren't mentally ill. Montgomery faced rejection in her writing but what writer hasn't received multiple rejection letters that make one question one's life work, continuing writing and publishing and also feel depressed? Montgomery committed suicide and if it weren't for legal doctor assisted suicide I would say that this is a mental illness, it is now a decision, an escape route from being kept alive in a reduced state. I see Luci Maud Montgomery as life affirming, she struggled to write her books and she succeeded. She was depressed over her husband's genuine mental illness, he ended up in a sanatorium, but anyone who has someone close to them that is seriously ill knows that worrying and extreme unhappiness, grief and sadness, are not mental illness, they are natural feelings and a by-product of being caught in an existential state that is possibly resolved only by the death of one's loved one. That's depressing but it's not mental illness, it is strength of character. I prefer to see Luci Maud Montgomery as a healthy-minded and brave woman. Hard times can be overcome, life can be affirmed, healthy-mindedness is more common than mental illness.



This is a one minute Heritage Minute on Canadian TV.

The Garden Myth

Bee balm in our garden, summer 2021

If there is a myth that speaks most directly to my experiences in life it is the Garden Myth, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. I first learned of this from William Blake by way of Northrop Frye; we have all fallen from the innocence of childhood into a dark forest of experience, a state of self-consciousness. What can be done about this? Is there redemption? Is there a religious experience that will free one from suffering? What is the answer? How do we do it? Christianity? Buddhism? Carl Jung? Krishnamurti? 

__________________

There is a mythological basis to all of my work; the work, the poetry, returns to a central story, a myth. A myth is also a way of looking at one's place in the cosmos, of finding one's spiritual place, of understanding one's life. Finding one's myth is not so much discovering something new as it is rediscovering something that is essential to one's inner life; a myth gives order to one's life, it explains events, it is the foundation of one's experienced life. A myth is the soul's story and the soul loves a narrative, specificity, and order. The Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience, is the basis of my writing.

 

For those born on February 6th

When I heard that Gord Downie was born on February 6th I knew he was even more genuinely extraordinary than I originally thought. He also wrote one of my favourite songs , "The Poets", performed by The Tragically Hip. Who else is born on the 6th? Louis Dudek on February 6,1918, poet and McGill professor, who transformed Canadian poetry and also discovered Leonard Cohen and published Cohen's first book of poetry. Also the astrologer Axel Harvey, born in 1940, whose first wife was descended from Aaron Burr, and Aaron Burr was also born on February 6th. Ilona Martonfi, another poet, born on the 6th of February, she has bravely re-visioned her life through poetry and gone deeply into the interior. There is also my cousin, Herb Morrissey, born on February 6th 1938 in the Town of Mount Royal; Herb was a magician and businessman, founder of Morrissey Magic, and a truly unique man, loved and admired and missed by many.

This just in today: when I was growing up we used to spend the summer at a summer cottage in St. Eustache, QC, across the street from my grandmother, my Auntie Mable, and my Uncle Alex and Auntie Ivy. They were wonderful years. Next door to our cottage was where the writer Joseph Schull lived, in a cottage where he wrote behind his mother's house. Thinking back on it Joseph Schull was the first writer that I was aware of and I'm thinking of reading a few of his historical novels. He was born in North Dakota but grew up in Canada, he died in Montreal on 19 May 1980. He was born on February 6, 1906. 

On Leo Kennedy

On the right is the Kennedy family home on Rushbrooke Avenue in Verdun where they lived in the 1920s.
They had a private tennis court adjacent to their property. 

On Leo Kennedy

Ken Norris told me that in the 1970s he and a Montreal publisher invited Leo Kennedy to publish a book of poems, it would have been Kennedy's first book since The Shrouding (1933). Kennedy arrived at the meeting with a garbage bag full of poems (not an auspicious beginning!) and the meeting failed to produce a book; it would have been only his second book in forty years. One wonders about this meeting. Did Kennedy sabotage an opportunity to publish a second book so late in life? Was it a way to get out of publishing what may have been inferior work? Did he dislike my friend or the publisher and not want to work with them, then why go to the meeting? Or was there some psychological complex that had held him back from writing new poems or publishing them? Still, despite the dearth of new poems by Kennedy he always insisted that he was a poet, he was not shy about his place in Canadian literature, nor should he have been.

When I heard this story about Kennedy I thought that he was a fool to have passed up on a publishing opportunity; however, I've known other poets like him who had lots of talent but who never fulfilled themselves as poets, they stopped publishing for several decades or never published again after some early success. Am I the only one to think of this as a failing on Kennedy's part? Perhaps I am. During the years after The Shrouding Kennedy didn't publish much original poetry but he did publish book reviews and even some poems in Poetry (Chicago). Patricia Morley in As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy's Story (1994), her biography of Kennedy, mentions that these reviews were perceptive and incisive. As well, Kennedy was also interested in socialist ideas that were at odds with his work in an ad agency as a copywriter for consumer goods. Kennedy was one of the early "Mad Men" as depicted in the television show by that name. It seems that his creative energy went into copy writing.

Perhaps the circumstances of Kennedy's personal life need to be considered. After 1935 Kennedy had to make a living to support his family; he had a second marriage and years later he took care of an invalid wife. Indeed, he had a successful career in copy writing and the family moved several times because of his work. He had three sons—one with his first wife and two with his second wife—and he helped raise two grandchildren which is what brought him back to Montreal in the 1970s. Kennedy was no puer aeternus, the Jungian term that describes a man who does not take on full adult responsibilities like gainful employment, maintaining long term and meaningful relationships, supporting his family, and being a fully functioning adult in society. He lived a responsible life of stability and middle class respectability and was well-liked and respected by his colleagues; however, perhaps (solely as conjecture) this middle class life conspired to end his career as a poet even though others have lived middle class lives such as his and they continued being poets. So what gives?

What gives is that after hearing of the "poems in the garbage bag" episode I saw Kennedy in a new light, as a kind of archetypal trickster, a coyote figure in mythology, someone who punctures the appearance of respectability in others. The anecdotes that Morley recounts of Kennedy shooting squirrels and storing them in his freezer, and other stories, suggests to me that Kennedy had a bit of the joker in him; perhaps even his copy writing career is a job suited to the jester, to someone aiming to sell stuff to people who don't want or don't need the stuff up for sale. This is just to suggest an explanation for some of Kennedy's behaviour and perhaps his work as a poet.

Kennedy is someone who had lots of talent as a poet, he is a formalist in his work, in some poems he is counting syllables, he has an incredible vocabulary in his work, and his images, metaphors and similes can be stunning. There is also something "old fashioned" in his work, I am not sure that he is a truly modern poet except that he was active as a poet in the Modern period; he's some kind of an aberration, a solitary voice that is self-invented. Kennedy has a depth of perception that is sometimes greater than the other Montreal Group of poets from McGill University. But I don't think he felt included among the Westmount poets who dominated English language poetry back in the 1930s. F.R. Scott made some cracks about Kennedy coming from working-class Verdun even though Kennedy had as much talent as FRS as a poet; Kennedy was not truly a working class person, his father owned a successful business located in Old Montreal and their home in Verdun was substantial. It is ironic that Scott is the defender of the working class, one of the founders of the CCF, a precursor of the NDP, and yet he is snobbish with Kennedy. Could Kennedy not have been offended by this, or contemptuous of Scott because of this? A response to Scott and his patrician lifestyle and social class might be to become even more eccentric. This, of course, speaks to the considerable class divisions that English-speaking Montreal experienced in the past; the wealthy lived in Westmount and had little or nothing to do with the English in Verdun, NDG, Griffintown, or elsewhere in the city of Montreal.

It's also curious that in 1926 AJM Smith published a poem entitled "The Shrouding", seven years before Kennedy published his book with this same title. Was there some conflict between them because of this? Small things divide poets! A friend published a poem with the same title as one of my poems and I always wondered what that was all about. BTW, his poem was inferior to mine... But I also published a poem entitled "Heirloom" after reading AM Klein's poem "Heirloom"; with its allusion to Klein my poem was to honour the older poet and it was published years (in the mid-1970s) after Klein's death. Was Kennedy making some kind of a comment, positive or negative, about Smith or the poems that Smith was writing by using Smith's poem title for his book?

I also question some aspects of Patricia Morley's biography of Kennedy; she treats Kennedy in a benign way, but you also get the feeling that she thought of him as her personal pet project, she was writing his biography and she was proud to have him captive. She insinuates herself into his life story and becomes a part of Kennedy's biography. She comments that there is no biography of AJM Smith; Anne Compton's A.J.M. Smith, Canadian Metaphysical  (1994) is not a biography but a discussion of his work. Kennedy has a biography and the biography was a big deal for Leo Kennedy as it would be for any poet. It must have made him more impressive with his family and with other poets, it also returned him to public attention. I doubt we would pay him as much attention as we are (for instance this essay) if the biography hadn't been published, it raised interest in Leo Kennedy, poet. Kennedy was serious about the biography but he must have realised how little he had achieved in poetry; indeed, later he has difficulty collecting any archival material when requested to do so. There are no extensive Leo Kennedy Fonds; he came up with very little archival material.

Now, I'm just thinking about Leo Kennedy and trying to figure him out and maybe he's not a trickster at all. One of the things critic do, one of the things some readers do, is try to figure out some explanation of the writer or the writer's work that he or she is currently reading. Another thing is to build on what we read, to develop some of the ideas we read and make them a part of out own insights into life. We find something curious, or something that appeals to us, or something that deepens our feelings and understanding about life, or we find something that speaks to us as human beings and we need to explore that writer or his or her work for ourselves, to apply it to our own understanding of life. That's what I've tried to do here.

Note: Kennedy may have published a second book in 1972 or 1992, Sunset in the States published by Diane Press; this seems to be a summary of some kind of legislation in Michigan, it is not mentioned in Morley's book on Kennedy. Perhaps it is not Kennedy's work but wrongly attributed to him.

18 January 2018

A visit with Charles Nichols

My stepfather's brother, Charles Nichols, was the editor of the old Toronto Telegram newspaper. My interest in reading began with Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and Charles sent me copies of the newspaper with excerpts from a then new Bond novel. Anyhow, my mother and I were driving to Woodstock, Ontario and stopped to visit Charles at his Yorkville home in Toronto around 1968. Everything was run down. We sat in the backyard, the grass uncut, and for supper he brought out a tureen of lukewarm soup; there was a butter dish and my mother whispered to me that the butter was rancid. Then Charles recounted that as a reporter he had visited Hitler's bunker at the end of the War and that there were Christmas cards for Hitler lying on the bunker's floor. Then he commented that he wasn't too impressed with hippies, they annoyed him; he said they hadn't earned their beards. What would he think of today's hipsters? These two comments of his have stayed with me all of these years. It was a rather strained visit made more so because when we prepared to leave our car wouldn't start and we had to stay the night. I remember paint peeling from the ceiling in the upstairs bedroom where I slept that night.

Childhood days at St. Joseph's Oratory

These 15K year old caves below an area in Montreal are an incredible discovery. Photographs of the caves make it look like the walls are lined with brick, but this is stratified rock as I learned in high school geography class (Mr. McGee?), and the ceiling looks as though it was carved out by people. This also reminds me of when we were kids and used to take the bus to St. Joseph's Oratory, a few miles from where we lived, and we'd walk around looking at the thousands of crutches that belonged to people Saint Brother Andre (he's been made a saint) healed, the smell of candles and incense, Brother Andre's heart in a container in a separate room and the heart was stolen by someone and returned many years later, Brother Andre's corpse (minus his heart) lay in a black granite casket with little notes folded and squeezed between the cracks of the casket with requests for healing of various sorts. What a great place to grow up! You won't find this in white bread North America! But I also remember that one winter we discovered man-made caves located, I believe, to the left of the Oratory building, below where the garden of the Stations of the Cross was located, as you stood looking up from Queen Mary Road. We would enter these "caves" and walk around exploring. Always exploring. Our parents didn't know anything of our adventures because we never thought to tell them and would they really care? Probably not, we weren't yet filled with the fear of predators, clowns, deviants, or pornographers. After time spent there, when it was dark at 5 p.m., we'd take the bus home with frost bitten toes in the short dark winter days.

Images of St. Joseph's Oratory, Montreal:

Remembering Hilde by Dennis Johnson

Remembering Hilde by Dennis Johnson: I edited letters from Dennis Johnson to make this short memoir of Dennis's wife, Hilde Johnson. and published it online back in 2004 on the Coracle Press website. Of course, it's not only about Hilde Johnson, it's about their relationship and Dennis's love for his wife. Included is my preface to the memoir and Carolyn Zonailo's "The Turtle Poems" dedicated to Hilde and Dennis.

Living with Animals

Last spring when I began working in the garden I wondered why birds and squirrels were afraid of me but not afraid of each other. Then I thought of Walt Whitman's poem (section 32 of "Song of Myself") about living with animals. Do we need to be like St. Francis of Assisi to be on friendly terms with animals? I soon realized the simple answer, just be outside a lot and the birds and squirrels will soon get used to you and not run from your presence. In fact, they'll ignore your presence. Today I began feeding the birds again for the winter. Soon I had a beautiful red cardinal and then chickadees arrived and then some squirrels who didn't seem to like each other. Here is Whitman's poem:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are
so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with
the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that
lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince
them plainly in their possession
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?

William Carlos Williams: Experiment in Autobiography

From last summer's reading: in I Wanted to Write a Poem, The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958) William Carlos Williams discusses each of his many books with some additional commentary on his life. When he was sixteen or seventeen Williams had a cardiac event and during his convalescence he began to read and then write poetry. Towards the end of the book he writes: "Among the younger poets, I should like to pay tribute to Irving Layton, who seems to me the most accomplished writer of verse in Canada who has come to my attention in the past year." He also discusses his greatest work, Paterson, and complains about some negative reviews by Randall Jarrell and Marianne Moore... Poets have long memories. Do people still read Williams' fiction? Personally, it never interested me, but most fiction doesn't interest me.

Visiting St. Philip's Anglican Church in Montreal West

A quiet walk on a November morning and visiting St. Philip's Anglican Church in Montreal West.

A shaman on the back of a grizzly

The bear is a symbol of rebirth, for the bear hibernates during the winter which is a kind of death, and then in spring he emerges from his cave, as though brought back to life, as though reborn. The shaman is a representative of the world's oldest spirituality.

Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are?
                                                 —Herman Melville, Moby Dick

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held
                                                 —Delmore Schwartz, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me”

The moon was high now, sailing in icy splendour of solitude
over the immensity of the ancient wood.
                                               —Charles G.D. Roberts, The Heart of the Ancient Wood

                                          Cave paintings from the Cueva de la Vieja, Alpero, Spain. 

Years ago my brother gave me a wood cut print entitled "Shaman on the back of a bear"; I kept this wood cut for many years but when we moved to this house I was hasty and discarded it. I regret that I no longer have this piece of art, but I did write a poem that was inspired by it. Here is the poem:

a shaman on the back of a grizzly
the black fur a black streak
moving between the trees
then across an open grassy field
a shaman eyes blackened
hair hanging limply down over ears
& arms holding to handfuls of bearskin
he leans slightly forward
knees pressing to flanks
the grizzly face down & mouth open
a bewildered look on his face
we see the white of his teeth
we see the shaman mouth open
we see him see us
we see them disappear back into the forest
they see us disappear back into the forest
we see them disappear back into the forest
we see him see us

(1972)

Perfecting the Art of Living

Who has perfected the art of living? Who lives a life worth noting? My wife's parents come to mind, they were married to each other for over sixty years; several times a week they had relatives or friends drop in on them, everyone was made welcome. They were good people and we miss them. I think also of my friends George and Jean Johnston, they had a large family and many friends, they were generous and kind people, and it was a blessing to have known them. And now I include Bill and Dora who live up the street from us. They go out for breakfast everyday and then sit outside their home reading the paper; many people walking by will stop and chat, some people on the street sit and talk with them. They're good people and Bill gave me the single clue to living a healthy life (he said it was given to him by their family doctor): it is to socialize; but socializing isn't just for health, it`s also how to live a good life and how to perfect the art of living.

Heading for Samhain

Heading for Samhain, the season of the soul; the unconscious opens to the conscious mind, in dreams, something caught fleeting in peripheral vision, and the long days to winter solstice.

Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec

Here is my review, published in The Malahat Review, issue 197, winter 2016:

Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec

Languages of Our Land, Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec,

Langues de Notre Terre, Poèmes et Récits Autochtones du Québec 

Susan Ouriou, ed., and Christelle Morelli, trans., 

Banff Centre

Banff, 2014

I

f you read Languages of Our Land / Langues de Notre Terre with any preconceptions about Indigenous writing, then you will be surprised by these twelve writers from Quebec; they are all unique and talented voices. All of these authors write in French and for the most part they live either north of or in the Quebec City region.

            I suspect that many readers of this book will be English-speaking. What might be interesting for them is to read the English translation and the French text together. Don’t just ignore the original text; even with thirty-year-old high-school French you can benefit from this reading. With no offense to Christelle Morelli, who translated this book into English, you will see the limitation of translation. There is an almost ineffable quality to a text in its original language that can elude even the best translator. For instance, here is the beginning of Mélina Vassiliou’s wonderful poem “Birthing/Writing.” In English the text is flat: “birthing / writing // writing / my future.” But in the original French you have the wonderful sound of the words, as Mélina Vassiliou wrote them; they have a vigour not found in the English translation. Here is the same passage in French: “progéniture / écriture // écriture / mon futur.” These are powerful words in French, and you can get the full force of the words by reading them out loud several times, “écriture / mon futur”—“écriture / mon futur.” It becomes mantra-like, an inspiring motto reminding poets that the profundity of our existence lies in communicating our vision, it is our present and our future.

            In “Roadblock 138–Innu Resistance,” the Innu poet Réal Junior Leblanc asks, “How can we / defend our heritage / and our children’s future / against the moneyed giants?” I used to live near the New York state border on Route 138, the highway that Leblanc refers to. It is mostly a secondary highway that runs its 1400-kilometre length slightly diagonally east and west through country and city across the province of Quebec. In some ways, this road is an asphalt soul of the province connecting, linking, joining people from north to south. I am reminded of the Mohawk blockade of the Mercier Bridge, on Route 138 as it enters Montreal, back in 1990, and the reaction of the majority of the population against this manifestation. Any answer for Leblanc’s question, “how can we defend our heritage?” is both difficult and complicated; however, Leblanc writes, “I weep / for all the rivers / they will divert / for all the forests / they will plunder / for all the lands / they will flood / for all the mountains / they will raze // To them, I will say always / from the depths of my soul / No.”

            It might be difficult to maintain a “No” when the force of modernity and so-called progress surround one. So much is political in Quebec: French, English, First Nations. We who live here know that our identity is in the language, or languages, one speaks; it is our endless conversation, our endless dance. Even though writing in French, Manon Nolin, in her poem “The Land of My Language,” is referring to her Innu-aimun—her Innu language:

           

                                    Roots of our ancestral lands
                                    a word, a language
                                    that of my ancestors
                                    bear my promised land

                                    The language of my cradle
                                    becomes my land
                                    and so the territory of my tongue
                                    remains my life’s Innu-aimun.

            If poetry is the voice of the human soul, as I believe it is, then these Indigenous writers are the voice of the soul of their community. As editor Susan Ouriou writes in her Introduction, they bring to us a “reinterpretation of history and a rediscovery of spirit.” There is so much of interest in Languages of Our Land / Langues de Notre Terre that I regret not being able to discuss each author in some detail. However, perhaps the poet Johanne Laframboise speaks for all of the writers in this book when she writes, “One cannot kill / poetry // it withstands all / for us // we owe it to ourselves / to be poets / in this century” (“Emergence”). “One cannot kill / poetry” is a statement of survival and transformation and a wonderful affirmation of the creative spirit. These writers bear witness to their vision and their community in this excellent anthology.

Poetry as place, history, 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.