A brilliant article by Adrienne Rich on the importance of poetry, especially in these dark times.

Devil's advocate reflections on the foregoing: True, symbols can become sym-bull, and on the golf green of poetry, you sometimes have to duck before the flying meta-fores. But is it not also true that seeking likenesses enhances perception? At certain times, to really travel, that tenor needs a vehicle to drive around in.

To your health!

Andrew Shields has some interesting points to make in response to my Rock Stone Plum Review essay on "Can Poetry Matter". As he says,

One very good reason for poets to want to get credentialed (MFA) and tenured (Professor of Creative Writing)—or even just working for a university in some way—is to get health insurance.

This is particularly true of American poets. Here we have public health insurance -- although a succession of "conservative" governments has hardly helped to conserve the quality of that care, and private care is starting to make serious inroads. Right now waiting for a doctor in a Canadian hospital is a cross between Waiting for Godot and Fear and Trembling Unto Death.

Seeing -- just SEEING!

My thanks to Debra Ager who in turns thanks Diane K. Martin for pointing out this Linda Gregg essay. We all love what Gregg says here:

I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically "see" things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become "old men with snow on their shoulders," or the lake looks like a "giant eye." The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, "the mirror with nothing reflected in it." This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.

My cat curled up on my desk is a breathing cinnimon roll. Woops! Looks like I have trouble seeing too!

(Click on the picture above, and you'll really SEE her. Her name is Misha. She is what is known as a torby -- a blend of tortoise shell and tabby.)

Neglectorinoitis (zat spelt rite?)

I have to thank C.Dale Young for pointing out this article in the Globe and Mail on the upcoming GG's & the glut of poetry books and prizes and the like. It includes this quote:

"I can't see any reason to publish because there's more people out there writing it than reading it. . . . We have so much information that we don't want and don't need in this world and writers have to take a measure of that, I think. If you don't have anything new to say, don't say it."

As I said in my reply to his post, after writing my lengthy essay in Rock Salt Plum review on the "Can Poetry Matter" question, I for one feel quite cured -- at last -- of the old neglectorinoitis that afflicts so many poets (including, of course, myself once upon a time.) Now it seems so much crock. Write for the joy of it -- of doing the best at what you do best. Take pleasure in sharing with those worthy few. Let the world catch up if it will.

Bipolar buddies

Jamison in the chapter on Artists in Manic Depressive Illness (1990) writes that of 36 American poets in the most recent Oxford Anthology of the time, more than a fifth exhibit well-documented histories of manic depressive illness severe enough to have warranted at least one hospitalization: namely, Hart Crane, Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath. Of these five committed suicide.

Among the romantics, of course, we need only think of Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clare.

In the 18 century, the so-called "Age of Reason", we have Christopher Smart, William Collins, William Cowper, Robert Fergusson, Thomas Chatterton, and William Blake, to name a few likely candidates.

Of course accounts are purely anecdotal about these fellas, plus of course their literary traces. These do provide quite strong indications, however...

Are poets more likely than others to have bipolar affective disorders, as they are called? Assuming a general population rate of 1 to 2 percent, well, it's a question that scarcely needs to be asked. And its almost a tautology to show, as Jamison does, that poets as a group are more likely live out (and die out of) these conditions than biographers or research scientists.

Doppelgangers

CBC Arts website today featured the work of Montreal photographer François Brunelle, whose project has been to find and photograph pairs of people who look like (or almost like) identical twins but have no blood relation. Fascinating.

Linguistic affective flattening

Attributions once made to the gods or the muses (Gerard Manley Hopkin’s “sweet fire the sire of the muse,” Emerson’s “all poetry is first written in the heavens”) have been transformed into the 20th century’s rather more prosaic constructions of “primary process,” “prelogical thought”, and “bisociative thinking.”
-- Manic Depressive Illness, p. 337

This process of toning down -- a kind of linguistic affective flattening -- has become so pervasive as to be preemptive. It certainly doesn't make the world easier for poets, not to mention receptivity to poetry. There is an enrichment in the shift of point of view, in the addition of terms. We have more at our disposal. But we are losing direct and easy access to whole ranges of emotion. More and more of our verbiage has become simply disposable, like newspapers: to be scanned on the way to the garbage can.

Inspiration's pathogens...

Extreme mood swings, when removed from the sphere of poets and historians and placed in the more modern, analytical clinics of psychologists and psychiatrists, loose their association, however tumultuous, with growth, sensuality, creativity and other positive attributes, becoming instead representations of psychopathology. This is, in many ways, understandable. Clinicians are called on to treat symptoms, not to mystify them, and clinical objectivity is essential to avoid the risks of overlooking or minimizing the patient’s pain and suicide potential. For these and many other reasons, a psychopathological approach to mood disorders has resulted in a psychiatric literature generally slighting the positive aspects of affective illness, especially manic-depressive illness and its variants.

Frederick Kay Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, Manic Depressive Illness, Oxford University Press, 1990.
p. 332

Lowell via Jamison

The first Jamison book I read was not her An Unquiet Mind, but the textbook she co-wrote with a colleague (Frederick Gay Godwin), named simply Manic Depressive Illness. An enormous tome that amasses pretty well all the significant data on the condition gathered up to the date of its publication (1990), at least 4/5ths of it I could only give a quick skim, as it consisted of dry summaries of clinical studies whose results are, of course, significantly out of date. What I did find fascinating were the testimonies of patients (some of them -- anonymous at the time-- actually revealed later to be those of Jamison herself, and incorporated into Unquiet Mind) as well as the chapter on the bipolar condition in the arts (later fleshed out in Touched by Fire.)

Robert Lowell was cited quite frequently. Indeed it impressed me how valuable a contribution his eloquent testimony has made to an understanding of the condition.

I have been out of my excitement for over a month, I think, now, and am in good spirits, though I don’t feel any rush of eloquence to talk about the past. It’s like recovering from some physical injury, such as a broken leg or jaundice, yet there’s no disclaiming these outbursts – they are part of my character – me at moments… the whole business was sincere enough, but a stupid pathological mirage, a magical orange grove in a nightmare. I feel like a son of a bitch.
(Lowell, cited in I Hamilton, 1982, p. 218)*

Lowell, born into an old-line Boston family, where “Lowells talk only to Cabots and Cabots talk only to God,”, wrote poignantly on his fall from “pedigreed tulip to weed” in his painful recovery. Perhaps now I'll look over much of his later poetry -- which I previously felt represented a dissolution of his talent -- with a renewed appreciation.

Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends to our coffin’s length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; now no one need
distinguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year’s snowballing enervation.
I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

*NB, you'll have to look in Manic Depressive Illness to find this bibliographical reference.

People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist's daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can see in my mind's rather peculiar eye an extraordinary shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but ravishing colors laid out across miles of circling rings; and the almost imperceptible, somehow surprisingly pallid, moons of this Catherine wheel of a planet. I remember singing Fly Me to the Moon as I swept past those of Saturn, and thinking myself terribly funny. I saw and experienced that which had been only in dreams, or fitful fragments of aspiration.

Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word real. But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on a elegiac beauty, and I don't see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away...

-- Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

Kay Redfield Jamison

Because of my partner's recent plight (she is much better now -- but still rather fragile... as is to be expected), I have been seeing councellors and attending seminars at AMI Quebec (The Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the advocacy group for the mentally ill and their families), and besides, reading voraciously literature dealing with bipolar disorder (a term I never liked, for its misleading blandness. Sounds more like something that came from the freezer -- or something wrong with the planet Earth.). In the process I discovered a major author: Kay Redfield Jamison. Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and co-author of Manic Depressive Illness (Oxford University Press, 1990), a standard medical text, she is not only one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive illness, but has experienced it firsthand. Her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, is firey, passionate, beautifully written, candid and wise -- one of my best reads all year. She has also written Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, and recently a book on suicide. A manic-impressive, one might say. But rather than go on with bookjacket superlatives (yes, I admit, I glanced over the book jacket to pluck out some of those adjectives from Washington Post, New York Times, et al. review quotes), I'll quote from some of her writing myself.

Riddled

Major cleanup today. We got rid of an extra bed, moved furniture around. (That one piece gone, how much easier the living space to piece together!) As I was cleaning, I made these up. Pls. excuse my sense of humour:

What did the broom say to the vacuum cleaner?
You suck.
What did the vacuum cleaner say to the broom?
You make sweeping statements.

Some Recent Google Searches That Reached This Blog

salamander woodwork
griffin woodwork
Ideas for Making Christian Woodworks
saddam rogue chimpanzee
used rhino tricycles
Chrysanthemums pink monkey
feather floating in air
quotes on ancient bricks
digital arts Tampa
British jokes on liquor brawls
huts in the of ride montreal-winnipeg
lyrics sometimes it's easy to fly out a window
poems with the word iodine in it
benoit balls for vagina exercises

Local Scene: Birthday de Poesie/Noches

I just got home from a most delightful birthday party/poetry reading at Fushsia, a tiny epicerie (which translates roughly as delicatessen) on Duluth, just off St-Laurent, that specializes in food prepared with edible flowers. The story goes that when the owner of the shop, a remarkable woman who goes by the name of Binky, asked her boyfriend, Stephane, what he wanted for his birthday, he thought for a moment and said -- poetry. Something, he said, with poetry in it -- a book, whatever. Apparently he doesn't ordinarily read poetry or have much knowledge of the art, but it so happens that when he was in Trois Rivieres one day, he walked into a cafe which had been taken over as one of the venues of Festival International de la Poesie de Trois Rivieres. And who should be on the stage but Raoul Duguay, who although closing on 70 is still one of the most spellbinding poets/performers on the Quebec literary scene. And Stephane was spellbound, and remained impressed. So Binky organized a surprise poetry reading for him as a birthday present, with free food and sangria for all. She told a number of friends and customers to come in this particular night and read a favourite poem or three as part of her birthday gift. What an inspired idea! I was contacted through a writer friend of hers. The nice thing was that as it turned out none of the other readers or listeners there regarded themselves as poets, but simply enjoyed reading and enjoyed poems. This in itself was highly refreshing. Their tastes, as might be expected, tended towards the canonical: poems they read included Frost's The Road Less Chosen, Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Kipling's If, Blake's Infinity in a Grain of Sand (whatever that poem is called -- if anything), a passage from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, some rather poetic quotes from the Zen master Dogen and selections in French by the early surrealist Autremonte (?), Margarite Duras and others. I contributed most of the contemporary work -- Li-Young Lee's From Blossoms, Ilya Kaminsky's Author's Prayer, Ruth Altman's Seventeen Things I Touched Today, some poems/translations of Francisco Santos, + a couple of my own more accessible and entertaining poems. These were met with keen interest and real appreciation -- Stephane took down book titles, etc. Everyone truly enjoyed themselves and proclaimed that this kind of event should be held again. So maybe Fushsia will blossom as Montreal's most intimate poetry venue. Who knows?


Last Wednesday's Las Noches de Poesia was another intimate affair. It was a rather more typical poetry soiree -- poets expressing themselves for each other + a few friends and significant others. I enjoyed all the the poets, their sensibilities and even a number of their poems. Emerson Xavier de Silva turned out to be a particularly dramatic reader. I put on my own little variety show -- poems, translations and a couple of songs.