As part of my health crisis in 2009, I developed ICU
psychosis in which I endured horrifying delusions. Horrifying because of the
presence of evil characters and ghosts; I had no way of escaping from them, and
I couldn’t differentiate them from reality. These delusions later made me think
about those who have to suffer through such all the time, who deal with mental
health issues as part of their daily routines.
About a year before my health crisis, I encountered
a homeless woman one day. She was speaking aloud and lugging a shopping cart
behind her, wearing layers and layers of clothes. From what I could overhear
from her words, she seemed to be spouting prophesy. For some reason, she
intrigued me. I never saw her again, but I kept thinking about her. In my mind, I named her Ursula.
When I looked up the name Ursula, I found out about Saint Ursula, a woman from the third or
fourth century. Variations on the saint’s story exist. In one version, she is
travelling by ship with eleven thousand virgins to meet her groom, a Pagan. The
ship is attacked and the women, including Ursula, are beheaded by the
Huns. I was inspired to write a long
poem entitled “Ursula,” the first part of which was published by Pooka Press as
a broadside & the whole poem self-published as a limited edition chapbook
of 26 copies. through my micro-press, AngelHousePress.
Last year, I had the idea to write a sequel entitled
“Saint Ursula’s Commonplace Book” because I didn’t feel like I was finished
exploring the character and her relationship to the saint. I began learning
more about the saint and reading up on delusions, visions and the sacred. In
July, I received funding from the City of Ottawa to work on the manuscript.
I wished to incorporate the type of visions and
hallucinations the modern-day Ursula has into the manuscript. While a vision is
a spiritual awakening that comes from a state of dream or trance, hallucinations
are more general. Ursula’s visions and hallucinations take the form of dreams,
nightmares and the presence of ghosts, angels and what she perceives as
memories of the murder of Saint Ursula/her own death.
When treating the life of a woman who was canonized,
I’ve had to consider religion and the sacred in the writing of the manuscript.
In dealing with a character who has delusions and confuses them with reality,
I’ve had to think about my own delusions when I was hospitalized in 2009. I
wanted to deal with this confusion between nightmare and reality, the presence
of ghosts, a supernatural phenomenon that seems completely real to the haunted.
I wondered about the presence of supernatural
phenomena, such as ghosts, angels, demons, and the presence of death in the
work of other contemporary Canadian poets.
I decided to take a look at the works of other
Canadian poets to see how the supernatural was dealt with since I’d rarely come
across poems of that nature in my reading of contemporary poetry.
Folk tales, fables, legends, mythology, creation
stories, tall tales, versions of the truth, dreams and nightmares are rich
sources for poetry. My preconceived notion was that I wouldn’t find a lot of
such elements in contemporary Canadian poetry. I had a general impression,
based on my readings, that much of the content in our poetry is mined from
lives lived, memories, moments observed…in other words, reality and
experiences. Or in some cases, extrapolation from historical figures (see
Carolyn Smart’s “Hooked”or invented fictional characters (see Dennis Cooley’s”
the Bentleys” or Natalie Zina Walshots, “Doomed”).
Jason Christie has pointed out to me that poetry is
catalogued as non-fiction in public libraries. Yet not all poetry is
non-fiction. Or it can often be a hybrid of fact and fiction, the personal and
the imagined. His own poetry collection, “i-Robot Poetry,” would fit into
science/speculative fiction, and another Western Canadian poet Jill Hartman’s
“A Painted Elephant,” falls into the realm of the fantastic.
Anne Carson blurs genres between poetry and other
forms, including theatre. She often retells and revises myths and translates
classic Greek and Latin stories.
Twentieth century poet, Gwendolyn MacEwen also
included myth, magic and enchantment in her writing.
In the last century also the French Canadian poet
Emile Nelligan wrote of angels. Perhaps he wasn’t the only francophone poet to
write of angels…
The only journal I discovered with a supernatural
focus was Goblin Fruit. Goblin Fruit is a contemporary quarterly journal that treats
mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a
fantastical way. http://www.goblinfruit.net. In reference to that well-known fantasy poem
of Christina Rossetti’s, “Goblin Market” (1862).
I read through the Best Canadian Poetry (BCP) series
of anthologies published by Tight Rope Books. In these books, Tight Rope
publishes poetry culled from a selection of that year’s literary magazines,
both on line and in print, with different Canadian poets acting as editors each
year.
I went through the first three (because they were
the ones I could get from the Main Branch of the Ottawa Public Library).
I found that these other worldly characters and
elements of the supernatural occur in three basic ways:
1. On the periphery, as mere mentions;
2. Figuratively;
3. Deliberately ambiguous.
Take for example, Jeffrey Donaldson’s poem, “Museum”
published in the 2008 BCP. Exhibits from the Royal Ontario Museum in glass
cases with aboriginal masks are described as descending “like messengers from
the real world above,” but the rendering here seems figurative rather than
literal. A former professor/mentor is evoked, but we are not told if he is
still living or a ghost; although there are references to ghosts throughout the
poem.
Or Méira Cook in “A Walker in the City”: “when all
the angels have been let out of their cages.” (BPC 2008).
Jason Heroux uses his reversal technique to make it
seem like nature is performing actions, at least figuratively: “A small forest
walking through us” & “We can feel the lost forest inside us closing its
eyes” (Lost Forest, BPC 2008).
In Keith Maillard’s “July” an evil dog is “the devil
running” (BPC 2008).
Joy Russell in “On King George’s Crowing” talks
about “how air moves vampires through bone.” (BPC 2008).
In the 2009 edition of Best Canadian Poetry, Margaret
Atwood evokes Bluebeard’s Castle in her poem “Ice Palace”: “Where/is the
fearful beast who runs the show/and longs for kisses?”
In “Space Is A Temporal Concept,” Jan Conn mentions
the goddess Diana, the Aztec calendar, a Wide-Eared Clown and Lord Death, but
Diana is a marble statue, the clown and Death are costumes. “our loved ones
join us, my father included, and all the emotional debris of a lifetime hovers
overhead in a vast vertical column…” (BPC 2009)
Death is treated as sacred and holy in Don
Domanski’s “Bite Down Little Whisper.” There’s something ethereal and magical
about the whole poem, which deals with pain. Much of the vocabulary is
spiritual: “dharma of bruised lips, talismans, the ghosts of our fallen hair,
microorganisms written as sacred text.” (BPC 2009)
In “Six Times,” Tyler Enfield writes about a dead
loved one who is moping on the grave, “sitting cross-legged in the dirt.” (BPC
2009)
Some supernatural or magical phenomena are recounted
as dreams, such as in Connie Fife in “New World Poem”: “I dreamt I had goat
hooves, hollow horns, coarse hair,/and scaled the face of a rock slide.” (BPC 2009)
Adam Getty’s poem, “Pender Harbour,” also relies on
the dream to render a magic phenomenon, this time of a crone slowly bleeding
out her child as an analogy for the way humans treat the earth. (BPC 2009)
Matt Rader’s “The Ocean Voyager,” doesn’t contain
references to anything magic or supernatural and yet its rendering feels
magical and epic with its majestic descriptions, such as” to hell/with
illness-stitched wool, English pain/Balled in musket shot, delicate otter
shells//Pile like money in the hold.” […] “and since then I have
flown/Lightning wracked seas in the fissured west, Known what men thought
they’ve known.” (BPC 2009)
In Kildare Dobbs’ poem “It” (BPC 2010), an
unexplained presence enters a room. “you are safe now/but just you wait, it is
never far away/and it can be here whenever it chooses.”
Don Domanski evokes dreams and the afterlife in “Gloria
Mundi.” (BPC 2010).
In “The Trees Have Loved Us All Along” Sonnet L’Abbé
applies human senses to trees, including the sense of smell. (BPC 2010).
In “Rupert’s Land,” Tim Lilburn refers to “the guy
who invented the guitar, a turtle-in-a-/handbag kind of daemon” &
references Hermes. (BPC 2010)
In “Cullen in Old Age,” P.K. Page writes about a
ninety-year-old man whose dreams conjure up clowns and dancing dogs, who hears
the Guardian Angel. He “had a vision of heaven./Total immersion. Where? He
couldn’t tell./A flotation tank, perhaps, a void, a vast/container for single
souls that gathered together/and merged in a giant soul that encircled the
world/where everything came out even./ (BPC 2010)
In Marilyn Gear Pulling’s entertaining poem, “Billy
Collins Interviewed on Stage at Chautauqua,” the speaker sees that Collins has
wings and flies from the stage. (BPC 2010).
In “Postscript” Karen Solie thinks about the life of
mathematician Carl Gauss and ties it to the land, existence and past existence.
There is something magical in her descriptions. “Has the devil any servant on
earth so perfect/as the stranger?”
David Zieroth’s poem “How Brave” is about how the
non-believer faces death. There’s a mention of cherubs, but they are church
cherubs.
There are so many sub-genres of poetry including
fantasy, sci-fi, horror, weird, etc, but the predominant type of poetry found
in Canada’s official verse culture in the form of mainstream literary magazines, prizes and anthologies
is realism with a soupçon of the supernatural. It’s not always
straight-forward. Many of the poems I read included whismy and flights of
fancy, but these flights were more inclined toward the possible than the
impossible or the supernatural.
If I had time and inclination, I would also go
through various contemporary Canadian poetry anthologies to count angels,
devils and ghosts; however, the initial survey I’ve conducted here has helped
me figure out how to tackle the supernatural qualities of my manuscript, so I’ll
leave it to you, dear reader, to conduct further inquiries…
Articles consulted for this note:
Speculative Poetry: A Symposium by Mike Allen, Alan
DeNiro, Theodora Goss, and Matthew Cheney (ed.)
Magic Realism in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism
