The Collapse of America

                                                                                 
                                                                                  Stephen Morrissey

                                                                   

Canto One

The empires of the past have fallen, collapsed

into dust, great behemoths of fools and folly,

banks of black clouds on the horizon, places of darkness

and abandon, waves crashing on the stormy ocean shores;

people have gone soft, lazy, and vain, their vision is narrowed,

concentrating on ephemeral material stuff, jibber jabber,

Yankee Doodle Dandy, Citizen Kane, monopolies,

day traders, and Las Vegas gambling, a landscape of sky scrapers

for worshipers at the Church of Mammon, that's the real religion;

opiods and meth labs, elder abuse, anything if there's a buck in it;

a place where successful business men are sociopaths,

including Donald Trump, and factor in narcissism,

how great Trump says he is, but we hear this from Americans

everyday; as a student told me, "Of course I can be

anything I want, my teachers told me so";

Gatsby:  "‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously.

‘Why of course you can!’"; Americans held hostage

by their own myth, the American Dream, rich careless people

worshiping Mammon; Lou Reed: "Give me your hungry,

your tired your poor, I'll piss on 'em that's what

the Statue of Bigotry says"; the "peanut crunching crowd",

angry and betrayed, outside a cinema in The Day of the Locust,

the American Dream is not for them; it's not

for the fly-over states, "Who'd want to live down there

in the middle of nowhere", asked Jason Aldean,

down there's where the "basket of deplorables" live;

black clouds of locust on the horizon, twilight and the silenced

morning chorus. And remember George W. Bush?  

He's a war criminal I was told at a Christmas party

by the adult children of rich white people living in Harlem,

professors and psycho-analysts, you know, exposed brick walls

lined with books, abstract paintings, the whole place contemporary,

do-gooders busy grabbing up (I mean "gentrifying"...) working class

neighbourhoods, oblivious to the long-term residents

who have to move or be homeless / the dollar is mightier

than anything ... anyhow, they said W., including his cohort,

Rumsfeld and Cheney, are war criminals, deserving

prosecution and time served in a federal prison;

in eight years half a million dead by these terrifying caricatures

of human beings; their god is money, they'd water board you

in heaven if it meant a profit. And remember Mr. Obama in 2008:

elevated to sainthood and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize,

what was that all about? "You go into these small towns, the jobs

have been gone now for 25 years, each successive administration

has said these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,

they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people

who aren't like them ..." This is how he saw hard-working Americans,

patriotic to a fault, generous and hopeful of the future,

betrayed by their leaders who supported the global economy

over their own people. What about small towns in Libya?

How did Libyans feel when invaded by Obama and Hillary's orders?

Bombed to hell for oil, Ghadafi beaten and shot, a failed state

of war lords, an armed camp, and some guy driving a white

Toyota pick-up truck with a heavy machine gun mounted on the back.

Canto Two

America, where the weekends are reserved for mass killings,

it's just one symptom of decline and collapse;

the imagination is barren, soul sickness infecting the world;

when society is corrupt, bring out the clowns: "Don't you love farce?

My fault, I fear, I thought that you'd want what I want Sorry, my dear!";

be an entertainer or an actor, "Just around the corner,

There's a rainbow in the sky. So let's have another cup of coffee,

And let's have another piece o' pie!" There's a future in dancing

and singing, it's the old desperation rag; where are the world's

great leaders? it's all get rich quick, Mammon is god;

"Money for nothing and the sex is free".

When did the Great Decline begin?

                        The Viet Nam War? Reagan? 9/11? 

                        Or when beliefs and values

                        were abandoned by well-meaning

                        people, convinced that

                        what they believed was wrong

                        and always had been wrong,

                        that they must accommodate

                        the future order of things, and only later

                        did some of these same people realize

                        the consequence of surrendering

                        their traditions and values,

                        discarding what had once been

                        the basis of their lives, what had been

                        true and good about life;

                        they hadn't yet experienced

                        the Mammon god, avarice and greed,

                        the loss of meaning and belief

                        in something greater than themselves;

                        they ended soul dead, living

                        an inauthentic life, and treading

                        water in oblivion.

Canto Three

                        America, be careful,

                        if your soul is sick

                        you may as well

                        have no soul,

                        you may not recover,

                        you may end up soul dead;

                        the age called for great leaders,

                        for men and women of depth

                        and intelligence, soul

                        and compassion,

                        and who came forward?

                        Politicians out for power

                        and a lucrative book deal

                        leading to the lecture circuit.

Canto Four

The old ways are finished,

there is no return to traditions

and values, the familiarity

of friends dropping in on each other,

hospitality and family;

now it's a roof collapsing

on people sitting in the kitchen,

the radio in the background

some right wing phone-in show;

termites in the support beams,

dry rot in the timbers and the hard wood

floor sagging by the dining room window;

the foundation is built on sand,

it cannot hold up these walls

these stone walls that have heard

talk of wars, revolutions, governments elected

and defeated, anger and a fist banging

on the kitchen table; but others found wealth

in America and transformed wealth into greed,

paradise into hell: think of Bezos and Musk,

Zukerberg and Uber's Kalanick,

Page and Brin; "Bezos sees corporations

like his own as being way more efficient

at structuring and organizing society

as compared to governments." It's an

unholy alliance, business and politics.

What do politicians want? Power

and control of government;

every election is a coup d'état,

the whole stinking edifice

of deceit and lies, betrayal

and avarice; they're the walking dead

looking in the window at you, surveilling

emails, recording phone calls, CCTV,

government watching you; there's nothing

like a war to keep the public motivated,

not just world wars lasting five years

but several simultaneous wars

lasting decades, it's perpetual war,

fireworks and the red white and blue.

There is no repentance or forgiveness

on America's green and lonely shores,

the scales of greed have slipped too far;

one man on HGTV has a 20K square foot house,

an infinity pool in the back yard overlooking

the Pacific Ocean, and in the garage

his collection of antique automobiles

built in an age when few would have

understood this wealth, this greed.

Canto Five

The spiritual border is porous

but the physical border can't be breached,

on the American side, sharp shooters lying

on the custom building's roof

checking out cars for tourist-terrorists;

America is under quarantine, they're

sick with the American disease,

a virus in the blood, headaches,

addiction, stage four insanity.

Canadians rejected union

with the United States in 1867

and we'd reject it again today,

saying back then Americans are too violent,

they aren't religious, and all they care about

is making money; but not to worry,

we still eat your chocolate bars,

watch your violent and sentimental

television shows, are shocked

at your news on NBC ABC CBS

PBS CNN and FOX;

                        the American Dream

destroyed by what the American Dream

has become; so giddy on up El Paso way,

bodies bouncing off the aisles of shampoo,

TVs, and children's clothes in Walmart;

oh jeezus, fuck Walmart, bodies lying

where they fell; did the shooter

buy his ammo at Walmart? And, thus,

Walmart enters history as a crime scene,

a place of commerce and death.

Canto Six

The world has been Americanized, movies, music,

food and fashion! Subway and McDonald's

in a remote town somewhere in northern China,

a province in the future United States of the World,

a division of One World, One Corporation, Inc.,

serving fat Chinese boys on skateboards;

everything old must be destroyed / that's

where we're headed / that's the message,

intelligence is out of style, social media

has people screaming at each other;

buy your way into USC / lies taught

as historical fact,  the anti-fascists are fascists,

statues pulled down by angry mobs,

I am more afraid of the mobs

than of the statues; it's a Cultural Revolution,

re. China 1966 to 1976—The American

Little Red Book of the Dead, filled with epigrams

and angry poems of malice and hate—

and see where that left the Chinese, the whole society

caught in violent upheaval; you can't make up

what politicians will do to stay in office: start a war?

regime change? invade a neighbour? deny millions

of people the vote? gerrymander electoral districts?

fix an election? divide up the spoils, who gets what now

and who gets what next time? Keep people in perpetual

debt, poverty, fighting in perpetual wars;

the higher the office the greater the corruption.

Beelzebub old buddy, let us kiss your hairy ass:

Trump ripped the scab off of American life

exposing more than he intended, the whole edifice

is corrupt; Ronald Reagan at the service of Mammon,

     closing mental hospitals to cut costs, cut taxes

     for the rich, now every city has the homeless,

     hoards of them, a new social class for the 21st Century:

     call them American Dhalits.  

    Canto Seven

Ezra Pound was right about usury, "Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura"; lending money at exorbitant interest rates

is evil, and who benefits? Banks and credit card companies benefit,

both are financial pedophiles grooming the public with advertising,

point awards, vacation packages to exotic places, but only

if you accrue debt on credit, only if you live beyond your means;

half the population is in debt, seduced by VISA, Master Card,

American Express, pay-day lenders, even social media have plans

for their own currency, for a piece of this lucrative deal.

The wealthy, people like Jeffrey Epstein and friends,

slobber down roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,

gravy running down the corners of their mouths,

bottles of wine consumed, while families need

three salaries to survive, one salary no longer enough:

whoever indebts another is evil; credit at 22% and more

is not a service or convenience, it is usury for banks' profit;

dressed in Friday casual wear, blue jeans and a T-shirt,

bankers are the same thugs as loan sharks who break your legs

if you don't pay their compounded interest; their aim is to replace

currency with credit cards and to profit twice from every

financial transaction: 2% or more paid by the stores

and 22% or more paid by consumers on unpaid debt.

This is the evil of our age: bank pimps, money launderers,

and pyramid schemers, all of them whoring for money;

over half the country is in debt and believe they'll always

be in debt; the banks' formula for success: the interest

they are owed must always be increasing and greater

than the amount borrowed; and get the suckers to pay up,

and better yet, get them to borrow from one credit card

to pay a second credit card; pay interest on the interest;

corporate profit not one billion but 10 billion

per quarter. The banks are angry when you can't pay,

they meet you in the manager's office

for the ritual of cutting up your credit cards,

the disapproving branch manager and the failed

financial adviser are present with their twisted

moral turpitude, they are angry because they've lost

collecting the usurious interest that you once paid;

the old morality, save for the future, self-denial,

live within your means, now impossible;

only deadbeats pay their monthly balance;

average people driving to work in second hand cars,

their children at state run schools, parents

who don't want their children deprived of the stuff

advertised on TV; people bankrupt and made homeless;

not even a poor house or debtors prison for refuge,

now it's a back lane, a bus shelter, a park bench,

the back seat of a car, a tent in a city park;

and always more consumer goods, more stuff to buy,

all of it made on the cheap in foreign countries,

seducing average people into perpetual debt

and keeping them there.


Canto Eight

            What people want

            is freedom, not hands

            bound behind their backs,

            eyes blindfolded, mouths taped

            shut, the police at the front door;

            people want freedom of speech,

            freedom from religion or to be religious,

            freedom to think one's own thoughts,

            freedom of expression,

            freedom to own property /

            or to get up and move far away,

            to live in peace /

            freedom to make money

            or / best of all /

            freedom to be left alone.

Canto Nine

I've been watching American news too long,

since the war in Viet Nam, Watergate, and Nixon's

departure on a helicopter from the White House lawn;

it begins to repeat, mass shootings, perpetual war,

fighting in the streets / and now we're driving home,

listening to The Fugs singing "Kill, kill, kill for peace ";

education and the news media keep people pacified

and contained, ignorant of their ignorance:

ask someone "what happened 100 years ago?"

or just yesterday? No idea. Who cares?

What does it matter? If The Donald didn't exist

he'd have to be invented; it's the end of satire

when it's all satire; Paul Robeson: "The words

of old Abe Lincoln, of Jefferson and Paine,

of Washington and Douglas, and the task

that still remains." Instead, we hear a creaking

sound, the sound of collapse; voices in the night,

from the next room, from just outside

your window, first the roof collapses

and then the basement fills with water;

where is John Brown? where are the heroes?

where is the heart and soul? not the God damned

phony heart and soul on TV or the latest degenerate

popular movie with its corrupt moral values,

not some movie actor telling us what we should believe;

interviewed or giving speeches at the Golden Globe Awards,

every Hollywood actor is an authority on politics and morality;

they're actors for God's sake, trained to convince others

that they know what they're talking about; in appearance

many actors have "very little back or top to their head.

It is almost all face, like a mask" (Nathaniel West);

the camera loves their big smiling faces,

and on Sunday mornings they're on the golf course

with their politician friends, or screwing

whoever they can get hold of.

What about our own voice, telling the great

empty cosmos that we are here? Speak up

and celebrate life, always the cosmic "yes"

despite the politicians and actors,

the blue sky overhead and the sun warm on one's face;

            it's the Great Decline, the end of history,

            the end of time, the river polluted,

            the old abandoned; a country gone soft

            in the service of its own enslavement.

Canto Ten

John Brown,

an old man

with integrity

and a belief

in freedom

and truth,

as opposed to

            the new American vision,

            diminished, crude, and violent;  

            the Yew tree in the graveyard,

            that's where this greed and excess leads;

            too much of everything followed by

            not enough of anything  

            and expected to last into perpetuity;

            ignorance placed above intelligence;

John Brown's "last written message" before execution,

a month after the Harpers Ferry defeat,

            "I, John Brown, am now quite certain

            that the crimes of this guilty land will

            never be purged away but with blood.

            I had as I now think vainly flattered

            myself that without very much bloodshed

            it might be done."

A country of entertainers, children hamming it up for the camera,

pulling faces and contorted limbs, and middle-aged parents

indulging them in a sing-song voice. A divided country that believes

fame is more important than moral depth; they were sold an illusion;

films and TV shows cranked out to convert people

to the Corporate Dream; the Slave State is back, chains and a whip

are in style: destroy the old, embrace what is popular, buy more stuff,

if it's new it's gotta be better: Hollywood's pimps

gonna lead you to the promised land ...

            Walt Whitman: "I would sing how an old man, tall,

           

            with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia,

            I watch'd you old man cool and indifferent,

                 but trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds you mounted".

Canto Eleven

Forget nothing: we've become a society of amnesiacs;

was it this morning, last week, last month, a century ago,

what was it we were talking about? It's disappeared

behind a black curtain of forgetfulness.

We are displaced persons lost in a cloud, or on a dark plain;

Q: What do you remember? A. Not much, maybe nothing.

It's easier to forget than to remember, and as for the news media,

articles to scroll through on a tablet before they're deleted

or revised, it's all forgotten as its read to be replaced in seconds

by new lies, new biases, new interpretations, the publics'

attention span is down to seconds; because you have already

been drugged or lobotomized, you accept what is reported

as normal: perpetual war, perpetual debt, a million homeless people

living on the streets, someone lying on a hot air vent or on a piece

of cardboard across the sidewalk on a downtown street,

in winter, in 0º F; all the bullshit poetry, novels, movies streaming

into your home, meaningless and vapid, at the service of this evil,

a part of the new world culture, forget high culture / no one's

even heard of it, who remembers what that was all about?

"Believe nothing", that's my motto. What's left in the

collective forgetfulness, what was refuted, rewritten,

it's all lies, including Facebook memes, network news,

newspapers, people are intolerant of anyone disagreeing

with them: "How can you say that?" "You are a POS!"

"Go fuck yourself you fascist!" "When they go low,

we go even lower" is how the world works.

A mob of walking dead, old people sharing a room

with someone's corpse; it's a holocaust at the end

of a collapsing civilization; thank God we'll all be dead

by morning, it's the only escape; nobody gets out of here

alive; and the future is a place of corporations,

if you think politicians were bad just wait—CEOs,

CFOs—their god is Mammon and they're true believers,

converts at birth, and the public are lining up to pray with them.

Canto Twelve


Spirit is destroyed, people shuffling

through the streets staring at iPhones;

two evils: perpetual war and perpetual debt;

constant propaganda to keep people

ignorant, the power of television and movies,

popular entertainment seducing people

to buy what they don't need, to believe

what few believed in the past, to accept values

that their parents, grandparents,

even their ancestors just off the boat

would find horrifying; the edifice of state

is collapsing, a circus tent with elephants

standing upright on their hind legs;

here come the clowns, make-up always

a metaphor for death, white face and a red

downturned mouth, a single tear painted

under the left eye, and the tent collapsing

trapping everyone inside—it's Grand Guignol,

Punch and Judy, the testimony of generals,

Judas Iscariot, and newly hired concentration

camp workers, cameras on everyone, the guy

at the next urinal is a state spy, workers

for the government's Public Scrutiny Department

observe with interest what's happening

at Hell Incorporated; a danse macabre,

the collapsing tent, manipulation of people

for the enrichment of the few, politicians fellating

each other in public toilets; Professor so and so

says these are brilliant poems you've written,

deconstructions of telepathically received

gibberish; history rewritten by government hacks;

the informer is your father hiding behind a curtain

in your living room, he's eager to turn you in;

CCTV cameras on every block recording

who does what, who goes where, algorithms

to detect dissent and control behaviour;

everything you say will be used against you;

I hear the anthem of the New American Republic,

sung by a hundred thousand upright members of society,

sedated and compliant; meanwhile, whatever

defined our society in the past has been downgraded

from mediocre to obsolete; someone is planning

a future where everyone looks the same, blonde hair

mannequins with blank stares and always smiling

with the whitest teeth possible; they think

this is just great, folks, it's never been better!


Canto Thirteen

To articulate the collapse of America:

darkness in the dead of night,

a dying man's final breath,

a tent collapsing, an envelope of darkness.

Lying on a deserted beach, a dead fish with a belly full

of maggots; politicians are smooth talkers

but as for truth, they have none;

a stinking corpse dumped on the side

of the road. Divide people into two groups:

one made up of workers, average people;

the other are the politicians, out for power,

spending other people's money, taxed at source,

legislating for perpetual debt, no altruism

or benevolence but for self-gain.

It was no different in the past, in the old days

when a circus tent was set up in a farmer's field,

near the cattle pens at the railroad station,

with the sun setting on the other side of the field,

and entering this tent the locals were sold

fake remedies for arthritis, bad nerves,

or impotence by hucksters and liars;

and during elections, politicians gave speeches

at the rear of passenger trains crossing the country

and crowds eager to hear these speeches;

even the towns were divided in two,

on one side of the tracks those with money

and on the other side is where the poor lived;

but still the yokels cheered hearing of reform and a society

in which promises would be fulfilled for the betterment

of the people, but it rarely happened that way:

the circus tent collapsed during the second

performance of the evening, clowns and animal trainers

spitting up bile and blood, then the apocalyptic fire,

everything up in flames; the next morning

as the sun appeared on the horizon,

a pile of smoking ashes

and embers floating into the sky;

                 Oh, ye poets, your obsolescence

                 is guaranteed, so speak the truth

                 or be forever excluded from public

                 discourse and solitary union with eternity.

                                         Stephen Morrissey

                                         August 2019 - January 2020

Note: The photograph of John Brown's grave,

located at his homestead just outside of Lake

Placid, New York, was taken by Stephen Morrissey

in the mid-1990s.

The Collapse of America, Preface

John Brown homestead, 1995

Preface

"The Collapse of America" is a long poem that I began in August 2019 and completed in January 2020.  •  What impressed me about America in the past no longer impresses. Instead of American confidence I now see empty bravado; instead of greatness I see a country that is a caricature of its former self; instead of democracy I see excessive wealth and power in the hands of a small minority; in other words, I see a country on the edge of moral collapse. That's what I'm talking about, a country on the edge of moral collapse.  •  Many of us were very fond of the United States, we used to travel back and forth across the border on business, as tourists, visiting family members, or just on day-outings to buy a few groceries or see a movie. But our porous Canada-America border, "the longest undefended border in the world", has lost its once friendly nature. A few years ago I saw sharp-shooters lying on the roof of an American border crossing building, their guns aimed at us, tourists who wanted to spend money in the United States; at LaGuardia Airport in New York City I was questioned by a woman customs agent after I said that my wife had packed my carry-on bag, "isn't that suspicious?" she asked; well, no, I saw nothing suspicious in it at all. •  I never wanted to write on politics, just talking about politicians makes me feel contaminated by them. Politicians are shapeshifters instantly assuming whatever disguise they feel will convince you of their integrity and the correctness of what they say. In his essay, "Up to Easter", Matthew Arnold writes, "Nothing I should like better than to feel assured that I should never have occasion to write on politics again. I write on other subjects with much more pleasure."  Stephen Morrissey April 2020

"The Improved Binoculars" by Irving Layton

Fire at the port of Montreal

The Improved Binoculars
by Irving Layton

Below me the city was in flames:
the firemen were the first to save
themselves. I saw steeples fall on their knees.

I saw an agent kick the charred bodies
from an orphanage to one side, marking
the site carefully for a future speculation.

Lovers stopped short of the final spasm
and went off angrily in opposite directions,
their elbows held by giant escorts of fire.

Then the dignitaries rode across the bridges
under an auricle of light which delighted them,
noting for later punishment those that went before.

And the rest of the population, their mouths
distorted by an unusual gladness, bawled thanks
to this comely and ravaging ally, asking

Only for more light with which to see
their neighbour's destruction.

All this I saw through my improved binoculars.

[1955]

"My Lost Youth" by A.J.M. Smith

Westmount Park, around 1920

My Lost Youth 

by A.J.M. Smith

I remember it was April that year, and afternoon.
There was a modish odour of hyacinths, and you
Beside me in the drawing room, and twilight falling
A trifle impressively, and a bit out of tune.

You spoke of poetry in a voice of poetry,
And your voice wavered a little, like the smoke of your
    Benson & Hedges
And grew soft as you spoke of love (as you always did!),
Though the lines of your smile, I observed, were a little
     sententious.

I thought of my birthplace in Westmount and what that
     involved
-- An ear quick to recoil from the faintest 'false note'.
I spoke therefore hurriedly of the distressing commonness
     of American letters,
Not daring to look at your living and beautiful throat.

'She seems to be one who enthuses,' I noted, excusing
     myself,
Who strove that year to be only a minor personage out of
     James
Or a sensitive indecisive guy from Eliot's elegant shelf.
'What happens,' I pondered fleeing, 'to one whom Reality
     claims . . . ?'

            •                   •                •

I teach English in the Middle West; my voice is quite good;
My manners are charming; and the mothers of some of my
     female students
Are never tired of praising my two slim volumes of verse.


A.J.M. Smith, Poems, New & Collected, Oxford University Press, 1967

"The Break-Up" by A.M. Klein

The Break-Up

by A.M. Klein

They suck and whisper it in mercury,
the thermometers. It is shouted red
from all the Aprils hanging on the walls.
In the dockyard stalls
the stevedores, their hooks rusty, wonder; the
wintering sailors in the taverns bet.

A week, and it will crack! Here's money that
a fortnight sees the floes, the smokestacks red!
Outside The Anchor's glass, St. Lawrence lies
rigid and white and wise,
nor ripple and dip, but fathom-frozen flat.
There are no hammers will break that granite lid.

But it will come! Some dead of night with boom
to wake the wagering city, it will break,
will crack, will melt its muscle-bound tides
and raise from their iced tomb
the pyramided fish, the unlockered ships,
and last year's blue and bloated suicides.

[1945-46] [1948]

"Lyrics of Air" by Louis Dudek

Lyrics of Air

by Louis Dudek

This April air has texture
of soft scented ocean on my face --
no ripple against the skin
but open waves, parabolas from some April place
in the sky, like silk between the fingers
from old Cathay, blown about, or like gigantic roses
whose petals, waving, fall on my face
with a faultless petaline smoothness.

Delicate as a pear, this milk-white air,
to pour over the crust of windy March.
Give me a mouthful of such air, digestible as water,
to rarify in the bones and flow
                                    upward, until
from the bud of my cold lips poetic leaves may grow.

Small Perfect Things (DC Books, Montreal, 1991)

Sunny March day at Vincelli's Garden Centre

I took these photos of Vincelli's Garden Centre from Westminster Avenue on 24 March 2020 around 4 p.m..

Snowy March Day at Vincelli's Garden Centre

I took these photos of Vincelli's Garden Centre from Westminster Avenue on 23 March 2020 around 4 p.m..

In the midst of the virus, mid-March

The COVID-19 virus preoccupies the news; everyday the number of infected people is rising, people are dying, people are recovering. The virus has become a part of everyday life, restaurants and gyms are closed, concerts and other gatherings are cancelled, some people are quarantined, others are self-isolating at home, our Canadian border is now closed except to Canadians returning home and some Americans. Only four airports are open to international flights, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. Truly, most of us have never lived through anything like this before.

Our deserted street...

Our IGA grocery store at the Cote St-Luc Shopping Centre,
located a half block from where we live

For a few days people were stock-piling food and a few of our grocery store
shelves at the local IGA were depleted, but this didn't last long 

This was the section for toilet paper and paper towels at our IGA

Our pharmacy at the same shopping centre as the IGA; the other day people were streaming out of this place clutching packages of toilet paper, 8, 12, 24 rolls . . .  I don't known why the mania for buying toilet paper began
but it swept North America, as though there would be a shortage of toilet paper . . .  

Trinity Memorial Church

I was in the area yesterday and took these photos of what used to be Trinity Memorial Church, closed a few years ago despite great protest by the parishioners. My parents were married here in 1940; about fifteen years ago I went to Christmas services at Trinity; and in the mid-1970s I lived just up the hill from Trinity on Northcliffe Avenue. 

This reminds me that Anglican churches in Montreal, in the 1950s, used to show movies and host dances in their church basements. Unfortunately, those days are long gone, the parishioners have moved away, the churches are closing, and we live in a secular society. A friend who grew up on Chesterfield Avenue, in Westmount, remembers going to dances at Trinity; he added that he and his Westmount friends were afraid to go beyond Decarie Blvd or Girouard Avenue because kids in Notre Dame de Grace were tough and would beat them up... 

My parents outside of Trinity Memorial Church on 30 March 1940, just after their wedding.

Northcliffe Avenue entrance to Trinity Memorial Church.

The "For Sale" sign is an unhappy conclusion to this place of worship.

Front door of Trinity Memorial Church, on Sherbrooke Street West near Decarie.

Windows on Northcliffe Avenue side of building.

Mid-February Cold

A mild January has given way to a very cold and snowy February, over 50 cm. of snow fell last week and it's -20 C this morning ...

Poetry, Place, and Psyche (with revisions and post scripts)

                                               

1.

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.