Notes towards an egoless poetry 9: Mental Illness & Poetry

First, let me be clear that, while I am sympathetic to the subject of people with mental illnesses writing poetry as an effective form of therapy, I am not sympathetic to bad poetry, no matter who wrote it, or why.

Second, I am unsympathetic in the extreme to the stereotype of the "mad artist," the unbalanced creative individual, the crazy poet, and the entire constellation of related stereotypes. While there are sound and true archetypes underlying some aspects of these stereotypes, the stereotypes themselves are offensive to artists who do suffer from mental illness: because stereotypes are easily-repeated signs and masks that prevent us from seeing the truth of a person's experience. Stereotypes are cheap and easy categorizations that substitute for genuine engagement.

Third, there remains a great deal of taboo and stereotype surrounding the subject of mental illness. It is perhaps something we prefer to discuss by stereotyping it, because that makes it safe, and Other: I could never be like that crazy person over there! In fact, however, it is often a matter of degree. What we judge as insane is often just an extreme version of a state of mind with which we ourselves may have had personal experience. The taboo is around admitting that we are not so very different from the "insane" Other, so we don't want to talk about it, for fear of being contaminated, and sucked down into madness ourselves. Taboo is about purity and danger, ultimately. We fear that, in fact, we are vulnerable to contamination by the madness of others.

Arnold Mindell has done extensive work, in his process-oriented psychology, with clients who would be labeled insane, ignored by most traditional therapies, and rejected by the group in general. In his book City Shadows, Mindell describes how process-oriented therapy does not see people as a priori sick, but as individuals experiencing those extreme states with which all of us are familiar, to some degree. City shadows are, in the Jungian sense, the shadows of large groups: the repressed and unrealized unconscious of the group, rather than just the individual. Some "mentally ill" people openly live and act out these city shadows, usually unconsciously, for the sake of the group: they take on the group's dark side, and act it out. Then, the group rejects the person, and projects their fears and anxieties onto them.

So, having laid some ground rules on our position about what mental illness is and is not, the question comes forward:  Can one write poetry about mental illness without it falling into the trap of therapy-poetry or journal-poetry or confessional lyric?

I think that, yes, it is extremely difficult to write from personal suffering without it becoming a confessional lyric or therapy-poem or journal-poem. I think is difficult to achieve such a poetry, and yes, rather difficult to discuss, because of the minefields of personal, emotional involvement with the issue. (I don't think political correctness helps us here; I think PC mostly reinforces the taboo about discussing it.) I've been personally attacked, once or twice, for daring to address the issue, so I wade into the discussion with intense interest and not a little wariness.

I think there's a real and important use of writing (poetry, etc.) as a tool for personal growth and personal healing. I write that way a lot of the time. I think a great deal of therapeutic benefit can be gained from all forms of artistic self-expression. Sometimes a good venting or ranting, in a poem, essay, story, or piece of music, is very healthy.

But I also think there's an important distinction between journal-writing and finished poetry.

There needs to be a distance, no matter what that distance consists of, between event and evocation. Perhaps the distance consists of artfulness; perhaps it consists of memory, as Wordworth suggested. While one might always wish to honor the healing-process behind the (therapeutic) writing, how might one also point out, as a critical poet, that the poem produced might, well, be a failed poem? Therein lies the minefield. This is one of those areas where poets are often unable to accept criticisms of their poems, because they are too close to the writing; justifiably, perhaps, they care too much. But that does tend to shoot down any possibility of critiquing the poem, as a poem, separate from any personal therapeutic aspects.

The act of writing a personal therapy poem, for myself, can be very satisfying, and can be a bit of writing I come back to later to see if I have changed since I last went to that place. I do re-read back in my old journals, albeit not very often; occasionally you do discover something that could be re-made into a poem; an old dream; a passing moment, observed. But I also recognize, as a critical poet looking back over his own work, that a lot of what I wrote in the heat of anger, despair, and depression, just isn't very good as poetry, so I tend to not inflict it on anyone. I neither present it nor publish it, at least not without considerable revision. It can stay in the journal, where it began and where it belongs.

I am also aware that there is a distinction, I believe a very important one, between what we label as "mental illness" and what might be in truth personal, spiritual crisis. Essential reading here is Stan and Cristina Grof's pioneering work on how spiritual emergence can become spiritual emergency.

I myself have experienced spiritual emergency and the dark night of the soul, at various times in my life, and have been acquainted with numerous participants in the systematized support of the former. I have written about my experiences in numerous poems and journals; but I tend to write poetry archetypally and obliquely, because I dislike the tawdry melodrama of most confessional lyric poetry. I would rather not wallow in it, even though I realize that I have just outed myself about it; rather than collapse into it and be consumed, I prefer to seek to use it as fuel for art-making. This is one way to find that necessary distance; I'm sure there are others.

I am well aware that there is overlap between clinical depression and the dark night, that they are very easy to confuse and misinterpret from an outside vantage, and that they do sometimes appear together. Andrew Solomon has written extensively about depression and acedia, the "noonday demon."

Are either depression or the dark night the "cause" of the other's "symptoms"? That's very tricky ground to negotiate; most therapy systems I've encountered, however, don't even ask the question. Except for some of the transpersonal psychologists, and some rare Jungian artist-therapists such as Janet O. Dallett, questions of spiritual emergence in the context of mental illness are usually overlooked in favor of cheaper and quicker forms of therapy, such as antidepressant medications. The difficulty I have here is when the tools of medical psychopharmacology are used to (mis)treat those individuals who are suffering spiritual crises, rather than medical crises. While it may be very hard at times to discern between the two, I think that discernment is essential for the patient achieving wholeness and integration; Mindell and others would likely agree.

In terms of poetry and mental illness, I wonder at times if, as Wilfred Owen said a century ago, the poetry is in the pity. I don't believe Owen meant any sort of easy, sentimental connotation to his use of the word "pity." I believe he meant compassion: pity in its deeper, more spiritual sense.

So, can a valid poetry appear from within mental illness? Certainly.

Has it, though? I think that remains an open question.

As I have stated before, as a poet I feel that the poetry of the "self" needs to be gotten away from, after having had its day in the spotlight since the early Romantics minted the ideal of "self-expression." We have had a great deal of confessional lyric, and we have gone so far with it, that some of it has fallen into mere solipsism: the "you can't feel my pain" school of browbeating poetry, for one. Not to mention hordes of teenage women imitating Sylvia Plath, and the distaff hordes of teenage men imitating Artur Rimbaud.

At this stage of the poetry game, I believe that writing from the self-expression/confessional stance does much harm to the fabric of community, in the ethical, psychological, social, and even political realms. One reason I choose to write as much as I do in haiku, haibun, and their related forms, is that these forms traditionally lend themselves to transcending and effacing the "self," the personality-ego. There are simply too many poems being written nowadays that are too wrapped up in the self.

I would welcome a poetry that discusses, and represents and depicts, mental illness as well as some of the prose texts mentioned above are able to do. So far, though, most such poetry still tends to be therapy-poetry, and journal-poetry. I would welcome something genuinely authentic and healing, on an archetypal and universal level, rather than on a merely personal, ego-aware level. I'm still waiting.