Icons Among Us: Room 222
It is the most famous classroom of all. Or was it?
By Caleb Daniloff B.U.Today)
Legend has it that in the same room, Robert Lowell taught aspiring poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and George Starbuck, all of whom went on to become pivotal figures in modern American poetry.
When I was in college, I had a terrific crush on the poet Anne Sexton, dead 20 years at the time. I was smitten by her confessional verse, the recordings of her voice inflating those tortured words.
Sexton’s mythology had me on my knees. The iconic photo of her sitting on a ledge in a swirl-patterned shoulderless dress, eyes raised skyward, legs twisted impossibly around one another, cigarette dangling from her fingers. Her story of morphing from suburban housewife to Pulitzer Prize winner to asleep forever in the front seat of her car; the drunkenness, hospitalizations, affairs, family abuse, suicide, all throttled my imagination. When I found out that my aunt had been pals with Sexton in high school, I devoured the inscriptions in her yearbook.
I moved on; she stayed fixed in time. But like a one-time high school flame friending me on Facebook, we reconnected a few weeks ago. At 236 Bay State Road, second floor, Room 222.
Room 222, or the Robert Lowell Seminar Room, is the central classroom for BU’s venerable Creative Writing Program. All graduate and advanced undergraduate writing classes are held here. Legend has it that Lowell (below), considered the father of confessional poetry, taught Sexton in this small room, along with Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck, in what is considered poetry’s most famous class.
“There was a period when many people would have said Lowell was the major poet of the post–World War II era,” says Bonnie Costello, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English. “He had a major impact on the poets who came through Room 222. Sexton, Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, Starbuck — they had a lot in common. They all had breakdowns, were all in treatment. Most of them had children. It’s hard to know whether these people came to Lowell’s class because they recognized themselves in his work or it was coincidence.”
I met Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English and three-time U.S. poet laureate, in Room 222 to ask what the space “with a little glimpse of the Charles” means to him. Through the window, ivy thickens the walls of Hillel House across the road. Wooden desks creaked beneath us as if the doors of time were opening. I ran my hand over the worn surface and wondered if Sexton ever sat at this desk, scribbled nascent lines, cigarette in the other hand.
“Of all of the classrooms I’ve taught in — Harvard, Berkeley, University of Chicago, Stanford — this is my favorite,” Pinsky says. “The legend of Lowell teaching Plath, Sexton, and Starbuck is only part of it. I like the echoes. But I now have my own memories of all the students I’ve taught in this room over 16 years. And I like knowing that my colleagues Louise Glück, Leslie Epstein, Ha Jin, Rosanna Warren are using this room, too. I like knowing it’s ours.”
A few years ago, thanks to a generous graduate, Room 222 got a makeover: new windows, ceiling, recessed lighting, refinished floors, a blackboard (or greenboard). Another alum donated a Persian rug.
One of Pinsky’s former students, Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), now a CAS lecturer, head of the Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture Series, and herself a fine poet, remembers dull brown carpeting, a dropped ceiling, harsh lighting, and drafty windows. But it was the room’s feeling that was significant, she says.
“It felt intimate, and also serious, in part because I had the sense that it was historically charged,” Dietz says. “When you sit in a place where you think Plath and Lowell might have been, you just hope that through some kind of osmosis you might grow a little bit as a poet and become worthy of having sat in the room.”
Today, Dietz sees her own students starry-eyed and open to possibility. She points out that Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, and Plath (above), author of The Bell Jar and posthumous recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer for poetry, were unknown students writers at the time, just like they are, just like she was. Sexton was a troubled stay-at-home mom dabbling in poetry at her therapist’s suggestion, while Plath was just auditing.
“BU is such a big school, to come here and be treated like artists, to be poets for a long afternoon once a week, is special,” Dietz says. “To feel like they’re allowed entry into this space where it’s only writers who come in, only writers who meet and talk about their work, is exciting. It’s not like their other classes. It’s warm and the radiator clunks. It’s cozy. You watch the ivy change on Hillel House as it goes from red to bare.”
In the early ’90s, the room’s legend was further juiced, this time on the fiction side. The program produced future Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97), National Book Award winner Ha Jin (GRS’92), and acclaimed writers Peter Ho Davies (GRS’92) and Daphne Kalotay (GRS’93). Sue Miller (GRS’80) and Arthur Golden (GRS’88) helped pave the way in the previous decade. Poetry wasn't slouching, either, churning out Carl Phillips (GRS'93) and Erin Belieu (GRS'95), among others. Heavyweight guest lecturers have held forth over the years, too: John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Norman Mailer, Amos Oz. Room 222 has taken on the quality of an organic museum, a vessel for the collective literary imagination.
But doubt has been cast on the facts of the creation myth. So I phoned longtime department administrator Harriet Lane (DGE’55, CAS’57, GRS’61), who retired last year after a 50-year tenure and had been enrolled in the program in the 1950s. Her late husband took classes with Lowell. Lane says other departments occupied the second floor when Lowell taught at BU, and that like other English professors, he was assigned random, generic classrooms in the CAS building.
“At that time, the English department was only on the fourth floor of the brownstone on Bay State Road,” Lane says. “In fact, in one of his poems, Lowell refers to a room in which he taught as a ‘shoebox.’”
Lane says she later found and installed the 15 desks still in Room 222 when the Creative Writing Program moved to the second floor, some time after the mythical heyday.
I felt deflated, but as Dietz says, what matters is that these future titans of poetry met together on campus, not where they sat. I perked up when Lane described Sexton, who later taught at BU, as “charming and articulate” and said that “her students thought very highly of her.”
Pinsky and Dietz think it’s possible the room was informally commandeered. “I’d bet Lowell did teach a class here,” Pinsky says. “It might have been some weird outrider that this was consigned as a space.”
Starbuck went onto to become director of the program, and his one-time colleague and successor Leslie Epstein supports 222’s pedigree. “This was the room,” he says. “That’s what George told me, and as far I know, it’s the truth.” Then again, Epstein points out, more often than not the class met at the Ritz Lounge over drinks, parking their cars in the “loading zone,” as Starbuck, who died in 1996, used to joke.
Regardless, the whiff of mystery feels appropriate. Art is about reconciling perception and reality, illuminating the truth rather than defining it. The lessons taught in 222 apply to itself.
While Epstein appreciates the room’s persona, students are here for the business of writing, so he strives to put their awe on the shelves along with the literary journals.
“It’s impossible to teach with a sense of awe,” he says. “I expose my prejudices, my likes and dislikes, my flaws, because the whole year is dedicated to noticing flaws. I don’t want to build up a sense of awe about the room. You’re not supposed to eat in there — we eat in there. Not supposed to drink in there — we drink in there. I used to make my students do push-ups. It’s a place where we violate rules. You can’t be a writer if you don’t violate rules, be a little subversive.”
In that spirit, I tattoo in my mind the image of a bright-eyed Sexton in Room 222, back-and-forthing with a disheveled Lowell, a cloud of smoke in the air, Plath jealously looking on.
I choose to believe.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Poets die young....
He died from a love of poetry
Marc Abrahams The Guardian, Tuesday 18 March 2008
Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that's not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It's a simple fact.
Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His 2003 study, The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch.
He writes that: "The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies."
Before dissecting the body of evidence about poets, Kaufman visits that much larger corpus of published research about writers in general. A 1975 study found that poets tended to die younger than fiction writers. A 1995 study found that "poets died younger than fiction writers, non-fiction writers, and people in the theatre". A 1997 study "found that Japanese writers were more likely to die young than other eminent Japanese". And so on.
Kaufman also mentions, in passing, that a 1985 study by a researcher named Koski "found that some Finnish writers used alcohol to stimulate writing".
Kaufman's own research covers an expanse of time as well as geography - North American authors born as early as 1612, Chinese writers with birthdays as early as 1852, Turkish writers born after 1343, and eastern European writers whose birthdates range back as far as the year 390. In their ranks are, or rather were, fiction writers, poets, playwrights and non-fiction writers.
Kaufman used a statistical tool called Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference test "to determine which differences were significant in each culture, by gender, and overall".
The numbers tell the story. A poet's life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist's life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.
Kaufman's study ends, as do the lives of many poets, on a sad note. He writes: "The fact that a Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton may die young does not necessarily mean an introduction to poetry class should carry a warning that poems may be hazardous to one's health. Yet this study may reinforce the idea of poets being surrounded by an aura of doom, even compared with others who may pick up a pen and paper for other purposes. It is hoped that the data presented here will help poets and mental-health professionals find ways to lessen what appears to be a sometimes negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and mental health."
· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Marc Abrahams The Guardian, Tuesday 18 March 2008
Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that's not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It's a simple fact.
Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His 2003 study, The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch.
He writes that: "The image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies."
Before dissecting the body of evidence about poets, Kaufman visits that much larger corpus of published research about writers in general. A 1975 study found that poets tended to die younger than fiction writers. A 1995 study found that "poets died younger than fiction writers, non-fiction writers, and people in the theatre". A 1997 study "found that Japanese writers were more likely to die young than other eminent Japanese". And so on.
Kaufman also mentions, in passing, that a 1985 study by a researcher named Koski "found that some Finnish writers used alcohol to stimulate writing".
Kaufman's own research covers an expanse of time as well as geography - North American authors born as early as 1612, Chinese writers with birthdays as early as 1852, Turkish writers born after 1343, and eastern European writers whose birthdates range back as far as the year 390. In their ranks are, or rather were, fiction writers, poets, playwrights and non-fiction writers.
Kaufman used a statistical tool called Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference test "to determine which differences were significant in each culture, by gender, and overall".
The numbers tell the story. A poet's life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist's life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.
Kaufman's study ends, as do the lives of many poets, on a sad note. He writes: "The fact that a Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton may die young does not necessarily mean an introduction to poetry class should carry a warning that poems may be hazardous to one's health. Yet this study may reinforce the idea of poets being surrounded by an aura of doom, even compared with others who may pick up a pen and paper for other purposes. It is hoped that the data presented here will help poets and mental-health professionals find ways to lessen what appears to be a sometimes negative impact of writing poetry on mortality and mental health."
· Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Bios of the McLean Poets
A Brief Biography of the Life of Anne Sexton
Anne Gray Harvey was born November 9, 1928 in Weston, Mass. to Mary Gray Staples Harvey and Ralph Churchill Harvey. The youngest of three sisters, Anne was the baby of the family, always craving attention and loving to be held. Growing up, Anne saw her eldest sister, Jane, become Daddy's girl, while her other sister Blanche, became reknown as the smart one of the three, loving to read and the only one to go to college. Her parents moving to Wellesley, Mass., Anne attended public schools from the time she was 6 until she was 17. At the age of 17, her parents sent her off to Rogers Hall, a preparatory school for girls, in Lowell, Mass.; hoping to 'cure' her of her wild nature and shape her into a proper woman. It was here that Anne first began to write poetry, which was published in the school yearbook. Yet shortly after beginning the call she had, her mother, who had come from a family of writers, accused Anne of plagiarism, disbelieving that her daughter could posess the talent to write such lovely poetry. Continuing on with the refinement of her womanhood, Anne attended the Garland School in Boston, a finishing school for women. It was here that she met and eloped with Alfred Muller Sexton II, whom everbody called Kayo. Kayo and Anne moved to Hamilton, New York, where Kayo was attending Colgate, University. Unable to afford making a living and supporting a wife, Kayo decided that they should move back to Massachusetts. Upon moving back, Anne enrolled in a modeling class at the Hart Agency, completing the course and going on to model for the agency for a short period of time. Meanwhile, Kayo had joined the naval reserve and had been shipped out on the USS Boxer to Korea. In 1952, Kayo came home for a year after the Boxer received war damage. It was during this time that Anne and Kayo conceived their first child. In July 1953, shortly after Kayo had been shipped out again, Anne gave birth to Linda Gray Sexton. Later that year Kayo was discharged and he returned home where he and Anne purchased a home in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, not far from either of their parents.
In 1954, Anne began struggling with recurring depression and began seeking counseling. During the time of her counseling she and Kayo gave birth to their second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, whom they nicknamed Joy. Beginning in 1956, Annes mental condition worstened, leading up to her first psychiatric hospitalization and her first suicide attempt. In December of that year, under the guidance of her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin, she resumed writing poetry. Finding therapeutic value in her writing, she enrolled in John Holme's poetry workshop, where she met Maxine Kumin. Yet falling, once again into a deep depression, Anne attempted suicide again in May, 1957. Again hospitalized, she continued to write poetry and in August received a scholarship to Antioch Writers' Conference, where she met W. D. Snodgrass. In 1958, Anne enrolled in Robert Lowell's graduate writing seminar at Boston University, where she met Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck. In 1959, she was awarded the Audience Poetry Prize. With this award Anne began work to publish the first of her books of poetry entitled To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The publisment of this book spurred Anne to keep writing and led to national recognition of her work. Following her first book, Anne published her second book,in 1962, entitled All My Pretty Ones. Following the release of this work, Anne continued her success by working on four children's books with her longtime friend Maxine Kumin. During the span of August 22 to October 27, 1963, Anne toured Europe on a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Despite enjoying the trip, Anne returned a month early due to an emotional disturbance. Nineteen sixty-four proved to be an interesting year in Anne's clinical life as her longtime psychiatrist moved his practice to Philadelphia, and she began seeing a new psychiatrist who started Anne on the drug, Thorazine, to control her on going depression and hospitalizatizations. In 1965, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. Following this award she published her Pulitzer-prize winning book entitled Live or Die, in 1966. Continuing writing and teaching English literature at Wayland, Mass. High School, in June 1968 Anne was awarded honorary Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard becoming the first woman ever to join the 187-year-old chapter. Beginning in 1969, Anne published her book entitled Love Poems, following this book she continued work on her play Mercy Street until the fall where she began teaching a poetry seminar at Boston University. The success of her seminar led to her appointment as a lecturer at Boston University,in 1970 and her eventual award of full professorship, in 1972.
Despite her success as a writer, poet, and playwright, Anne's personal life took a sudden plunge in 1973, where she was hospitalized three times and received a divorce from her husband during the course of the year. Surviving much of the following year, Anne managed to bring her final works to a conclusion with the publishment of The Death Notebooks, a completed final editing of The Awful Rowing Toward God, and a tentative arrangement of poems in 45 Mercy Street. The conclusiveness of the works seemed to Anne to be a proper stopping point. Following her last poetry reading at Goucher College in Maryland on October 3, 1974, Anne returned home to commit suicide in her garage on October 4, 1974 by way of carbon monoxide poisoning. The tragic end she brought to her life was the result of several years of battling depression and dissatisfaction with her place in life. Despite this truth, she carved a place in the minds and hearts of the American literary world forever.
In recent days, the release of Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton's life has caused controversy in the circles of certain groups of psychiatrists and moralists. The controversy centers around Middlebrook's decision to include within her biography, excerpts from tapes recorded during Anne's therapy sessions. The tapes were released to Middlebrook under the strict permission of Anne's daughter, Linda Gray Sexton who authorized Middlebrook to utilize all resources that she had to construct a thourough biography of Anne's life. Though the controversy is real to many, the question of doctor-patient confidentiality has done little to hurt the success of the biography in the eyes of the general public.
(University of Texas Website)
Robert Lowell
Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included the poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. He was at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Massachusetts, before attending Harvard College for two years and transferring to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom.[2] He converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism,[3] which influenced his first two books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946). By the end of the forties, he left the Catholic Church. In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Lowell taught in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. In 1949, he was involved in Yaddo's share of the Red Scare when he attempted unsuccessfully to oust Yaddo's director Elizabeth Ames who was being questioned by the FBI for her alleged involvement with writer Agnes Smedley, who was being accused of spying for the Soviet Union.[4] During the 1960s he was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the US involvement in Vietnam. His participation in the October 1967 peace march in Washington, DC, and his subsequent arrest are described in the early sections of Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.
Lowell suffered with alcoholism and manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his life. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In 1970 he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author Lady Caroline Blackwood. He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City on his way to see Hardwick. He is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.
Lowell's collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005, leading to a renewed interest in his work.
( Wikipedia)
photo: Rollie McKenna
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.
In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy."
Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.
In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.
After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.
Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.
(Poets.Org)
Anne Gray Harvey was born November 9, 1928 in Weston, Mass. to Mary Gray Staples Harvey and Ralph Churchill Harvey. The youngest of three sisters, Anne was the baby of the family, always craving attention and loving to be held. Growing up, Anne saw her eldest sister, Jane, become Daddy's girl, while her other sister Blanche, became reknown as the smart one of the three, loving to read and the only one to go to college. Her parents moving to Wellesley, Mass., Anne attended public schools from the time she was 6 until she was 17. At the age of 17, her parents sent her off to Rogers Hall, a preparatory school for girls, in Lowell, Mass.; hoping to 'cure' her of her wild nature and shape her into a proper woman. It was here that Anne first began to write poetry, which was published in the school yearbook. Yet shortly after beginning the call she had, her mother, who had come from a family of writers, accused Anne of plagiarism, disbelieving that her daughter could posess the talent to write such lovely poetry. Continuing on with the refinement of her womanhood, Anne attended the Garland School in Boston, a finishing school for women. It was here that she met and eloped with Alfred Muller Sexton II, whom everbody called Kayo. Kayo and Anne moved to Hamilton, New York, where Kayo was attending Colgate, University. Unable to afford making a living and supporting a wife, Kayo decided that they should move back to Massachusetts. Upon moving back, Anne enrolled in a modeling class at the Hart Agency, completing the course and going on to model for the agency for a short period of time. Meanwhile, Kayo had joined the naval reserve and had been shipped out on the USS Boxer to Korea. In 1952, Kayo came home for a year after the Boxer received war damage. It was during this time that Anne and Kayo conceived their first child. In July 1953, shortly after Kayo had been shipped out again, Anne gave birth to Linda Gray Sexton. Later that year Kayo was discharged and he returned home where he and Anne purchased a home in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, not far from either of their parents.
In 1954, Anne began struggling with recurring depression and began seeking counseling. During the time of her counseling she and Kayo gave birth to their second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, whom they nicknamed Joy. Beginning in 1956, Annes mental condition worstened, leading up to her first psychiatric hospitalization and her first suicide attempt. In December of that year, under the guidance of her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin, she resumed writing poetry. Finding therapeutic value in her writing, she enrolled in John Holme's poetry workshop, where she met Maxine Kumin. Yet falling, once again into a deep depression, Anne attempted suicide again in May, 1957. Again hospitalized, she continued to write poetry and in August received a scholarship to Antioch Writers' Conference, where she met W. D. Snodgrass. In 1958, Anne enrolled in Robert Lowell's graduate writing seminar at Boston University, where she met Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck. In 1959, she was awarded the Audience Poetry Prize. With this award Anne began work to publish the first of her books of poetry entitled To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The publisment of this book spurred Anne to keep writing and led to national recognition of her work. Following her first book, Anne published her second book,in 1962, entitled All My Pretty Ones. Following the release of this work, Anne continued her success by working on four children's books with her longtime friend Maxine Kumin. During the span of August 22 to October 27, 1963, Anne toured Europe on a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Despite enjoying the trip, Anne returned a month early due to an emotional disturbance. Nineteen sixty-four proved to be an interesting year in Anne's clinical life as her longtime psychiatrist moved his practice to Philadelphia, and she began seeing a new psychiatrist who started Anne on the drug, Thorazine, to control her on going depression and hospitalizatizations. In 1965, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. Following this award she published her Pulitzer-prize winning book entitled Live or Die, in 1966. Continuing writing and teaching English literature at Wayland, Mass. High School, in June 1968 Anne was awarded honorary Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard becoming the first woman ever to join the 187-year-old chapter. Beginning in 1969, Anne published her book entitled Love Poems, following this book she continued work on her play Mercy Street until the fall where she began teaching a poetry seminar at Boston University. The success of her seminar led to her appointment as a lecturer at Boston University,in 1970 and her eventual award of full professorship, in 1972.
Despite her success as a writer, poet, and playwright, Anne's personal life took a sudden plunge in 1973, where she was hospitalized three times and received a divorce from her husband during the course of the year. Surviving much of the following year, Anne managed to bring her final works to a conclusion with the publishment of The Death Notebooks, a completed final editing of The Awful Rowing Toward God, and a tentative arrangement of poems in 45 Mercy Street. The conclusiveness of the works seemed to Anne to be a proper stopping point. Following her last poetry reading at Goucher College in Maryland on October 3, 1974, Anne returned home to commit suicide in her garage on October 4, 1974 by way of carbon monoxide poisoning. The tragic end she brought to her life was the result of several years of battling depression and dissatisfaction with her place in life. Despite this truth, she carved a place in the minds and hearts of the American literary world forever.
In recent days, the release of Diane Wood Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton's life has caused controversy in the circles of certain groups of psychiatrists and moralists. The controversy centers around Middlebrook's decision to include within her biography, excerpts from tapes recorded during Anne's therapy sessions. The tapes were released to Middlebrook under the strict permission of Anne's daughter, Linda Gray Sexton who authorized Middlebrook to utilize all resources that she had to construct a thourough biography of Anne's life. Though the controversy is real to many, the question of doctor-patient confidentiality has done little to hurt the success of the biography in the eyes of the general public.
(University of Texas Website)
Robert Lowell
Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included the poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. He was at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Massachusetts, before attending Harvard College for two years and transferring to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom.[2] He converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism,[3] which influenced his first two books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946). By the end of the forties, he left the Catholic Church. In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Lowell taught in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. In 1949, he was involved in Yaddo's share of the Red Scare when he attempted unsuccessfully to oust Yaddo's director Elizabeth Ames who was being questioned by the FBI for her alleged involvement with writer Agnes Smedley, who was being accused of spying for the Soviet Union.[4] During the 1960s he was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the US involvement in Vietnam. His participation in the October 1967 peace march in Washington, DC, and his subsequent arrest are described in the early sections of Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.
Lowell suffered with alcoholism and manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his life. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In 1970 he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author Lady Caroline Blackwood. He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City on his way to see Hardwick. He is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.
Lowell's collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005, leading to a renewed interest in his work.
( Wikipedia)
photo: Rollie McKenna
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.
In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy."
Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.
In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.
After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.
Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.
In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.
In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.
Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.
(Poets.Org)
Monday, November 23, 2009
The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell
The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell
June 18, 2003 (Atlantic Magazine)
One day, discussing the reviews of his late work [with the poetry critic Helen Vendler], Lowell lamented, "Why don't they ever say what I'd like them to say?"
"What's that?" Vendler asked.
"That I'm heartbreaking," he said.
—Peter Davison, "The Poetry of Heartbreak" (July/August Atlantic)
R obert Lowell was one of the twentieth century's most esteemed American poets. As a manic depressive who experienced alternating bouts of depression and mania, he was also one of its most tormented.
Twenty-five years after his death, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has issued a comprehensive collection of Lowell's poetry (selected by the poets Frank Bidart and David Gewanter), inspiring a renewal of interest in both his life and his work. In "The Poetry of Heartbreak" (July/August Atlantic), Peter Davison reviews this collection and situates his extensive body of work within the context of his chaotic life.
By the time Lowell died at age sixty, he had been married and separated three times, had renounced his Protestant roots for what turned out to be a temporary obsession with Catholicism, and had spent much of his adult life in and out of mental hospitals. During his manic spells, he was overtaken by surges of larger-than-life emotion that ended up reflected in his poetry. As Davison describes it,
Ambition, religious passion, poetic genius, and dementia throbbed together in verses that gave off a powerful music, enthralling to some readers but puzzling to others.
His early poems tended to employ elevated diction to address grand themes, frequently tied in with references to his own aristocratic family and its Boston Brahmin milieu. But at midlife, Lowell grew tired of the elaborate, archaic style he was known for, and abandoned it in favor of a more raw and personal approach—using colloquial language, he described the trauma of his inner experience. His 1959 collection, Life Studies, dealt intimately with his madness, his difficult relationships with his family, and his time spent in mental hospitals.
A decade later, Lowell left his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, moved to England with his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, and began churning out countless poems in yet a new style—the unrhymed sonnett. Before long, however, his third marriage faltered, and his spiral of mania and depression, along with a pattern of excessive drinking, started taking a physical toll. In 1977 Lowell died in the backseat of a New York taxicab on his way from the airport to his second wife's apartment. Davison quotes Blair Clark, a longtime friend of Lowell's:
I thought there were … two dynamos within him, spinning in opposite directions and tearing him apart, and that these forces would kill him at last. No one, strong as he was, could stand that for long.
To young poets who considered Lowell a revered mentor, his madness seemed an integral component of the example he was setting for them. In "The Mad Poets Society" (July/August 2001), Alex Beam described how Lowell's periodic hospitalizations at the renowned McLean mental hospital in suburban Massachusetts helped lend cachet to the hospital as an aristocratic, literary place, and influenced two of his talented but unstable students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to exploit their own psychological turmoil for literary material.
Lowell's own psychosis was at times extreme:
He would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses, or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life. He once delivered a gibbering lecture lauding Adolf Hitler. Some stereotypes are true: there are people in mental institutions who want to assume the power of Napoleon, or of Jesus Christ, and at times Robert Lowell was one of them.
But while institutionalized he also continued to write poetry and correspond with colleagues, including several fellow poets such as Theodore Roethke and Ezra Pound, who also suffered from mental illness. Inspired by Lowell's evocative poetry about his experiences at McLean, Plath went on to write the best-selling novel The Bell Jar, based on her own experiences there, and Sexton went on to teach a writing seminar at McLean for its patients, and eventually became a patient there herself. "I must admire your skill," Sexton wrote in a 1959 poem addressing Lowell. "You are so gracefully insane."
In "Madness in the New Poetry," written in the mid-sixties, Peter Davison commented on the appeal that madness was then coming to have among the poetic set. "Madness," he wrote, "can be construed—and is by some poets—as the regular and inescapable concomitant of the reach beyond reality; and sanity is construed as the dullness of those who refrain from reaching." He assessed the efforts of a number of then-current poets—including Lowell, John Berryman, Alan Dugan, William Meredith, and Theodore Roethke—whose work was in some way touched by madness. He was less than enthusiastic about Lowell's recent efforts; the despairing form that Lowell's madness had lately taken, he argued, seemed to be sapping the vitality of his work.
Over and over the agonizing tunes are played: helplessness, desperation, impotence, the lapse of the present from the promise of the past, flawed vision, the malign dissociation of the self from the senses. They are played so brilliantly that the reader finds himself forgetting that life and poetry have major keys as well as minor, victories as well as defeats. But … Lowell's keys are minor only. The note of triumph is never struck.
Despite such criticism, Davison asserted two years later, in "The Difficulties of Being Major" (October 1967), that Lowell, along with James Dickey, might be one of only two contemporary poets worthy of the title "major poet." He cited a set of qualifications for such an honor that had recently been proposed by the poet W. H. Auden:
1. He must write a lot.
2. His poems must show a wide range in subject matter and treatment.
3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.
4. He must be a master of verse technique.
5. In the case of all poets we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work, but [the major poet's] process of maturing continues until he dies....
He then surveyed Lowell's work up to that time, emphasizing the superiority and distinctiveness of his prolific output and his evolution through a series of different approaches and styles. He reiterated his earlier criticism, however, that Lowell's recent work was lackluster compared with the main body of his writing. Of Lowell's 1967 collection, Near the Ocean, Davison wrote,
The new poems reveal more clearly than his past work the tug-of-war between the impulse to personal poetry on the one hand, and the Imperial Style on the other. Alas, the Emperor has won out ….
Lowell has written better.
But Lowell had by no means exhausted his resources. Following Near the Ocean he went on to write five more books of poems—one of which, The Dolphin, won him a second Pulitzer prize (he had been awarded the first in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine for Lord Weary's Castle). In "The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell" (January 1975), the eminent poetry critic Helen Vendler reviewed History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin—three poetry collections that Lowell had published simultaneously in 1973. Vendler suggested that what was perhaps most notable about the poems in these new collections was their expansiveness, in that they included everything from historical events (both famous and obscure) to wide-ranging literary allusions to the most intimate details of his family life. Given the "comprehension of its atlas, historical and geographical," she suggested, this new poetry represented "the whole litter and debris and detritus of a mind absorptive for fifty years." In her view, he had tapped a rich new vein:
The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct … but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell's votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.
Finally, in "Lord Weary" (July 1982), James Atlas recalled his own brush with Lowell as an awestruck Harvard student in the late sixties. By then Lowell had become a legendary figure, and to Atlas, a young Midwestern boy craving culture and exposure to literary greatness, Lowell had assumed an almost godlike status. Atlas described his initial impression of Lowell, at the beginning of a poetry seminar with him:
Our first glimpse of the famous is often disappointing; they seem diminished, ordinary. Lowell seemed, if anything, larger; he was taller than I had expected, and his corolla of whitening curls trailed back from his broad, marbled forehead.
Atlas and his classmates hung eagerly on every word Lowell uttered, despite the fact that, having been in and out of mental hospitals for years, dosed with lithium, and ravaged by alcohol, he often seemed somewhat addled. He made peculiar associations, became lost in thought, or spoke familiarly about long-dead literary figures "the way other people gossip about their friends … as if they were colleagues and contemporaries." Atlas and other literarily inclined students competed desperately for Lowell's attention, seeking him out during his office hours and tallying up the minutes Lowell devoted to their poems during class. It even became a mark of distinction to be present during one of Lowell's infamous breakdowns:
I had never witnessed one of these breakdowns, but I had heard about them in grim detail: Lowell showing up at William Alfred's house and declaring that he was the Virgin Mary; Lowell talking for two hours straight in class, revising a student's poem in the style of Milton, Tennyson, or Frost; Lowell wandering around Harvard Square without a coat in the middle of January, shivering, wild-eyed, incoherent. In the seminar room on the top floor of Holyoke Center, we waited nervously—perhaps even expectantly, given the status accorded anyone who had been present at one of these celebrated episodes—for it to happen before our eyes.
Why, Atlas asked himself in a more reflective moment, were he and his classmates so eager for attention from this troubled poet? The answer, he decided, was that, to them, Lowell represented literary history incarnate. "The one question that tormented everyone else had been decided for him: he had made it into the pantheon of great American poets. His work would last."
June 18, 2003 (Atlantic Magazine)
One day, discussing the reviews of his late work [with the poetry critic Helen Vendler], Lowell lamented, "Why don't they ever say what I'd like them to say?"
"What's that?" Vendler asked.
"That I'm heartbreaking," he said.
—Peter Davison, "The Poetry of Heartbreak" (July/August Atlantic)
R obert Lowell was one of the twentieth century's most esteemed American poets. As a manic depressive who experienced alternating bouts of depression and mania, he was also one of its most tormented.
Twenty-five years after his death, Farrar, Straus & Giroux has issued a comprehensive collection of Lowell's poetry (selected by the poets Frank Bidart and David Gewanter), inspiring a renewal of interest in both his life and his work. In "The Poetry of Heartbreak" (July/August Atlantic), Peter Davison reviews this collection and situates his extensive body of work within the context of his chaotic life.
By the time Lowell died at age sixty, he had been married and separated three times, had renounced his Protestant roots for what turned out to be a temporary obsession with Catholicism, and had spent much of his adult life in and out of mental hospitals. During his manic spells, he was overtaken by surges of larger-than-life emotion that ended up reflected in his poetry. As Davison describes it,
Ambition, religious passion, poetic genius, and dementia throbbed together in verses that gave off a powerful music, enthralling to some readers but puzzling to others.
His early poems tended to employ elevated diction to address grand themes, frequently tied in with references to his own aristocratic family and its Boston Brahmin milieu. But at midlife, Lowell grew tired of the elaborate, archaic style he was known for, and abandoned it in favor of a more raw and personal approach—using colloquial language, he described the trauma of his inner experience. His 1959 collection, Life Studies, dealt intimately with his madness, his difficult relationships with his family, and his time spent in mental hospitals.
A decade later, Lowell left his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, moved to England with his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, and began churning out countless poems in yet a new style—the unrhymed sonnett. Before long, however, his third marriage faltered, and his spiral of mania and depression, along with a pattern of excessive drinking, started taking a physical toll. In 1977 Lowell died in the backseat of a New York taxicab on his way from the airport to his second wife's apartment. Davison quotes Blair Clark, a longtime friend of Lowell's:
I thought there were … two dynamos within him, spinning in opposite directions and tearing him apart, and that these forces would kill him at last. No one, strong as he was, could stand that for long.
To young poets who considered Lowell a revered mentor, his madness seemed an integral component of the example he was setting for them. In "The Mad Poets Society" (July/August 2001), Alex Beam described how Lowell's periodic hospitalizations at the renowned McLean mental hospital in suburban Massachusetts helped lend cachet to the hospital as an aristocratic, literary place, and influenced two of his talented but unstable students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to exploit their own psychological turmoil for literary material.
Lowell's own psychosis was at times extreme:
He would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses, or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life. He once delivered a gibbering lecture lauding Adolf Hitler. Some stereotypes are true: there are people in mental institutions who want to assume the power of Napoleon, or of Jesus Christ, and at times Robert Lowell was one of them.
But while institutionalized he also continued to write poetry and correspond with colleagues, including several fellow poets such as Theodore Roethke and Ezra Pound, who also suffered from mental illness. Inspired by Lowell's evocative poetry about his experiences at McLean, Plath went on to write the best-selling novel The Bell Jar, based on her own experiences there, and Sexton went on to teach a writing seminar at McLean for its patients, and eventually became a patient there herself. "I must admire your skill," Sexton wrote in a 1959 poem addressing Lowell. "You are so gracefully insane."
In "Madness in the New Poetry," written in the mid-sixties, Peter Davison commented on the appeal that madness was then coming to have among the poetic set. "Madness," he wrote, "can be construed—and is by some poets—as the regular and inescapable concomitant of the reach beyond reality; and sanity is construed as the dullness of those who refrain from reaching." He assessed the efforts of a number of then-current poets—including Lowell, John Berryman, Alan Dugan, William Meredith, and Theodore Roethke—whose work was in some way touched by madness. He was less than enthusiastic about Lowell's recent efforts; the despairing form that Lowell's madness had lately taken, he argued, seemed to be sapping the vitality of his work.
Over and over the agonizing tunes are played: helplessness, desperation, impotence, the lapse of the present from the promise of the past, flawed vision, the malign dissociation of the self from the senses. They are played so brilliantly that the reader finds himself forgetting that life and poetry have major keys as well as minor, victories as well as defeats. But … Lowell's keys are minor only. The note of triumph is never struck.
Despite such criticism, Davison asserted two years later, in "The Difficulties of Being Major" (October 1967), that Lowell, along with James Dickey, might be one of only two contemporary poets worthy of the title "major poet." He cited a set of qualifications for such an honor that had recently been proposed by the poet W. H. Auden:
1. He must write a lot.
2. His poems must show a wide range in subject matter and treatment.
3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.
4. He must be a master of verse technique.
5. In the case of all poets we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work, but [the major poet's] process of maturing continues until he dies....
He then surveyed Lowell's work up to that time, emphasizing the superiority and distinctiveness of his prolific output and his evolution through a series of different approaches and styles. He reiterated his earlier criticism, however, that Lowell's recent work was lackluster compared with the main body of his writing. Of Lowell's 1967 collection, Near the Ocean, Davison wrote,
The new poems reveal more clearly than his past work the tug-of-war between the impulse to personal poetry on the one hand, and the Imperial Style on the other. Alas, the Emperor has won out ….
Lowell has written better.
But Lowell had by no means exhausted his resources. Following Near the Ocean he went on to write five more books of poems—one of which, The Dolphin, won him a second Pulitzer prize (he had been awarded the first in 1946 at the age of twenty-nine for Lord Weary's Castle). In "The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell" (January 1975), the eminent poetry critic Helen Vendler reviewed History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin—three poetry collections that Lowell had published simultaneously in 1973. Vendler suggested that what was perhaps most notable about the poems in these new collections was their expansiveness, in that they included everything from historical events (both famous and obscure) to wide-ranging literary allusions to the most intimate details of his family life. Given the "comprehension of its atlas, historical and geographical," she suggested, this new poetry represented "the whole litter and debris and detritus of a mind absorptive for fifty years." In her view, he had tapped a rich new vein:
The subjects of these poems will eventually become extinct … but the indelible mark of their impression on a single sensibility will remain, in Lowell's votive sculpture, bronzed to imperishability.
Finally, in "Lord Weary" (July 1982), James Atlas recalled his own brush with Lowell as an awestruck Harvard student in the late sixties. By then Lowell had become a legendary figure, and to Atlas, a young Midwestern boy craving culture and exposure to literary greatness, Lowell had assumed an almost godlike status. Atlas described his initial impression of Lowell, at the beginning of a poetry seminar with him:
Our first glimpse of the famous is often disappointing; they seem diminished, ordinary. Lowell seemed, if anything, larger; he was taller than I had expected, and his corolla of whitening curls trailed back from his broad, marbled forehead.
Atlas and his classmates hung eagerly on every word Lowell uttered, despite the fact that, having been in and out of mental hospitals for years, dosed with lithium, and ravaged by alcohol, he often seemed somewhat addled. He made peculiar associations, became lost in thought, or spoke familiarly about long-dead literary figures "the way other people gossip about their friends … as if they were colleagues and contemporaries." Atlas and other literarily inclined students competed desperately for Lowell's attention, seeking him out during his office hours and tallying up the minutes Lowell devoted to their poems during class. It even became a mark of distinction to be present during one of Lowell's infamous breakdowns:
I had never witnessed one of these breakdowns, but I had heard about them in grim detail: Lowell showing up at William Alfred's house and declaring that he was the Virgin Mary; Lowell talking for two hours straight in class, revising a student's poem in the style of Milton, Tennyson, or Frost; Lowell wandering around Harvard Square without a coat in the middle of January, shivering, wild-eyed, incoherent. In the seminar room on the top floor of Holyoke Center, we waited nervously—perhaps even expectantly, given the status accorded anyone who had been present at one of these celebrated episodes—for it to happen before our eyes.
Why, Atlas asked himself in a more reflective moment, were he and his classmates so eager for attention from this troubled poet? The answer, he decided, was that, to them, Lowell represented literary history incarnate. "The one question that tormented everyone else had been decided for him: he had made it into the pantheon of great American poets. His work would last."
Poetic Healing: As the hospital and its clients have changed, counselor Douglas Holder adds another dimension. The Boston Globe
THE BOSTON GLOBE: (Living Arts: Feb. 8, 2000.)
Poetic Healing: As the hospital and its clients have changed, counselor Douglas Holder adds another dimension.
By Michael Kenney (Globe Staff)
SOMERVILLE—In the fourth collection of poetry of poetry Douglas Holder has published at his Ibbetson Street Press here, he includes a poem of his own, titled: “ A Simple Nod.”
I saw him in Harvard Square,
happily walking with a friend.
As we passed each other
we exchanged a simple, understated
nod.
Our silence was a friendly conspiracy
a reminder of where he once was
and where he was
now.
The where is never stated—although two words, “the ward,” a few lines further on provide a hint. Holder, 44, is a mental health counselor, and for the past six years he has been conducting poetry workshops at McLean Hospital for its patients.
“ I’d been working there 17 years, and I’d had my poetry published in small journals,” he says. I wanted to add another dimension to my job and help a few folks out.”
While Holder would not think of ranking himself with Anne Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, he does invoke the legendary poetry workshops she conducted at McLean in the late 1960s. Sexton, a patient at the Belmont hospital in 1973, committed suicide in October 1974.
Nor does Holder claim that the hospital today resemble the institution of those years. “It’s not like the old McLean,” he says, “with patrician types sitting around drinking tea from bone china.” That was the McLean of Harvard fullbacks, Porcellian Club members, and “ Mayflower screwballs.” That was the McLean that Robert Lowell, a frequent patient there in the 1960’s, memorialized in his poem “Waking in the Blue,” and that writer Susanna Kaysen, a patient in 1967, recalls in her best-selling memoir “Girl Interrupted,” now a major motion picture.
Today, Holder says, the members of his poetry groups are more likely to be the homeless “ coming in with a bit of doggerel.”
He runs two workshops, one on Thursday afternoons for patients in the hospital’s open-ward program, which meets in a converted Victorian mansion, and other Friday evenings for patients on two locked wards where Holder works. Neither is open to an outside visitor.
But whether in the mansion or in the more institutional setting of the locked ward, Holder says, “ I try to sort of have a coffeehouse atmosphere. We’ll have a round of applause when some reads a poem.”
Of course it doesn’t always work out as planned.
Holder remembers reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at his very first workshop.
“I was pretty enthusiastic then, and a bit naïve,” he says. I thought they’d like it. I saw the poem—with its lament about the “best minds of his generation lost to madness”—as a haunting cry that would be a catalyst for discussion.”
And he says with some self-deprecation, “ I thought they’d think of me as, “ Hey, this guy knows where I am coming from.”
Instead , “they were angry and one of them walked out,” he says. “And one of them told me: “Why do I have to hear this? I live with it.”
Another time, Holder says, a young woman became hysterical and ran out when he read a poem of his own about a kosher butcher in Brookline.
“It turned out the young woman had a painful experience in her life, which she associated with chickens, and she couldn’t take it,” Holder says. “ I had a lot of explaining to do with the clinical staff.”
“You never know,” he adds, “when you might hit a vein.”
The problem is compounded, Holder says, by the fact that today’s hospital stays tend to be shorter—a week or two instead of several months. “You don’t always know what to expect,” he says.
It also means that the workshops aren’t quite they were in Sexton’s day.
“I get in their face about it,” Holder says. “ I’ll go around to the rooms in my wards and ask: “Are you coming to the poetry group tonight?’
“And sometimes, I’ll have a doctor or another staff person tell me that so-and-so is a well-known writer, so I’ll make a special effort to get them to come.”
A number of poems written by patients in these workshops have been published—usually anonymously in the now defunct Boston Poet and other small poetry magazines. But not in his own magazine, which shares the name of his small press, Holder says, because that would violate hospital policy.
Because he believes that poetry can play a healing role, Holder started Ibbetson Street Press, out of house in Somerville—naming it after the street where he lives with his wife, Dianne Robitaille, a poet and geriatric nurse.
Holder, who got a master’s degree in literature from Harvard’s extension school while working at McLean, has been publishing his poetry in small magazines and especially Spare Change, the monthly journal for the homeless. “I write a lot about homelessness and mental health problems.”
Starting a small press to publish local poets, Holder says, was “ a way to get connected.”
The most recent issue—38 pages on 81/2 by 11 paper with a paper cover, bound with black slip plastic binder—sells for $4 and contains 40 poems; an interview with Ed Galing, an elderly small press poet; and several reviews.
Among the poets are a number of first-time writers and others described as “mainstays” of Holder’s press. There are also two professors of literature—John Hildebidle, who teaches at MIT, and Robert K. Johnson, who teaches at Suffolk University—as well as Don DiVecchio, the poetry editor of Spare Change.
Ibbetson Street Press has also published a number of chapbooks, and old English term for a small collection of poems or ballads, most recently: Poems From 42nd Street” by Rufus Goodwin, a poet and journalist who lives in Boston; and a collection called “ Poems for the Poet, the Working Man and the Downtrodden,” by A.D. Winans, who published a small poetry magazine in San Francisco.
“What distinguishes our journal,” says Holder, “is that it contains poems that anyone can read.” They deal “with everyday life. There’s not a lot of arcane words or funny verse patterns.” Anyone, he adds,” can get something out of them.”
The following is a poem written by an anonymous participant in one of Douglas Holder’s poetry workshops at McLean Hospital:
When The Hunter Arrived.
When the hunter arrived
at the place
where it was unfamiliar
he became the prey
stalked by everything
ever unleashed
by the conspiracy of creation.
to the edge he cantered
idols toppling by his sides
until at last
those that were against him
trusted his insight into their
essential nature
Finally pushing a hole through
God’s left eye
past what had separately
designed the limitless war
streaming beyond infinity.
Poetic Healing: As the hospital and its clients have changed, counselor Douglas Holder adds another dimension.
By Michael Kenney (Globe Staff)
SOMERVILLE—In the fourth collection of poetry of poetry Douglas Holder has published at his Ibbetson Street Press here, he includes a poem of his own, titled: “ A Simple Nod.”
I saw him in Harvard Square,
happily walking with a friend.
As we passed each other
we exchanged a simple, understated
nod.
Our silence was a friendly conspiracy
a reminder of where he once was
and where he was
now.
The where is never stated—although two words, “the ward,” a few lines further on provide a hint. Holder, 44, is a mental health counselor, and for the past six years he has been conducting poetry workshops at McLean Hospital for its patients.
“ I’d been working there 17 years, and I’d had my poetry published in small journals,” he says. I wanted to add another dimension to my job and help a few folks out.”
While Holder would not think of ranking himself with Anne Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, he does invoke the legendary poetry workshops she conducted at McLean in the late 1960s. Sexton, a patient at the Belmont hospital in 1973, committed suicide in October 1974.
Nor does Holder claim that the hospital today resemble the institution of those years. “It’s not like the old McLean,” he says, “with patrician types sitting around drinking tea from bone china.” That was the McLean of Harvard fullbacks, Porcellian Club members, and “ Mayflower screwballs.” That was the McLean that Robert Lowell, a frequent patient there in the 1960’s, memorialized in his poem “Waking in the Blue,” and that writer Susanna Kaysen, a patient in 1967, recalls in her best-selling memoir “Girl Interrupted,” now a major motion picture.
Today, Holder says, the members of his poetry groups are more likely to be the homeless “ coming in with a bit of doggerel.”
He runs two workshops, one on Thursday afternoons for patients in the hospital’s open-ward program, which meets in a converted Victorian mansion, and other Friday evenings for patients on two locked wards where Holder works. Neither is open to an outside visitor.
But whether in the mansion or in the more institutional setting of the locked ward, Holder says, “ I try to sort of have a coffeehouse atmosphere. We’ll have a round of applause when some reads a poem.”
Of course it doesn’t always work out as planned.
Holder remembers reading Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at his very first workshop.
“I was pretty enthusiastic then, and a bit naïve,” he says. I thought they’d like it. I saw the poem—with its lament about the “best minds of his generation lost to madness”—as a haunting cry that would be a catalyst for discussion.”
And he says with some self-deprecation, “ I thought they’d think of me as, “ Hey, this guy knows where I am coming from.”
Instead , “they were angry and one of them walked out,” he says. “And one of them told me: “Why do I have to hear this? I live with it.”
Another time, Holder says, a young woman became hysterical and ran out when he read a poem of his own about a kosher butcher in Brookline.
“It turned out the young woman had a painful experience in her life, which she associated with chickens, and she couldn’t take it,” Holder says. “ I had a lot of explaining to do with the clinical staff.”
“You never know,” he adds, “when you might hit a vein.”
The problem is compounded, Holder says, by the fact that today’s hospital stays tend to be shorter—a week or two instead of several months. “You don’t always know what to expect,” he says.
It also means that the workshops aren’t quite they were in Sexton’s day.
“I get in their face about it,” Holder says. “ I’ll go around to the rooms in my wards and ask: “Are you coming to the poetry group tonight?’
“And sometimes, I’ll have a doctor or another staff person tell me that so-and-so is a well-known writer, so I’ll make a special effort to get them to come.”
A number of poems written by patients in these workshops have been published—usually anonymously in the now defunct Boston Poet and other small poetry magazines. But not in his own magazine, which shares the name of his small press, Holder says, because that would violate hospital policy.
Because he believes that poetry can play a healing role, Holder started Ibbetson Street Press, out of house in Somerville—naming it after the street where he lives with his wife, Dianne Robitaille, a poet and geriatric nurse.
Holder, who got a master’s degree in literature from Harvard’s extension school while working at McLean, has been publishing his poetry in small magazines and especially Spare Change, the monthly journal for the homeless. “I write a lot about homelessness and mental health problems.”
Starting a small press to publish local poets, Holder says, was “ a way to get connected.”
The most recent issue—38 pages on 81/2 by 11 paper with a paper cover, bound with black slip plastic binder—sells for $4 and contains 40 poems; an interview with Ed Galing, an elderly small press poet; and several reviews.
Among the poets are a number of first-time writers and others described as “mainstays” of Holder’s press. There are also two professors of literature—John Hildebidle, who teaches at MIT, and Robert K. Johnson, who teaches at Suffolk University—as well as Don DiVecchio, the poetry editor of Spare Change.
Ibbetson Street Press has also published a number of chapbooks, and old English term for a small collection of poems or ballads, most recently: Poems From 42nd Street” by Rufus Goodwin, a poet and journalist who lives in Boston; and a collection called “ Poems for the Poet, the Working Man and the Downtrodden,” by A.D. Winans, who published a small poetry magazine in San Francisco.
“What distinguishes our journal,” says Holder, “is that it contains poems that anyone can read.” They deal “with everyday life. There’s not a lot of arcane words or funny verse patterns.” Anyone, he adds,” can get something out of them.”
The following is a poem written by an anonymous participant in one of Douglas Holder’s poetry workshops at McLean Hospital:
When The Hunter Arrived.
When the hunter arrived
at the place
where it was unfamiliar
he became the prey
stalked by everything
ever unleashed
by the conspiracy of creation.
to the edge he cantered
idols toppling by his sides
until at last
those that were against him
trusted his insight into their
essential nature
Finally pushing a hole through
God’s left eye
past what had separately
designed the limitless war
streaming beyond infinity.
Manic Depression and Creativity
Many poets such as the "McLean Poets" suffered from Manic Depression. Here is an interesting article linking creativity and mental illness...
Bipolar Disorder and the Creative Genius
HimaBindu K Krishna
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a psychopathology that affects approximately 1% of the population. (1) Unlike unipolar disorder, also known as major affective disorder or depression, bipolar disorder is characterized by vacillating between periods of elation (either mania or hypomania) and depression. (1, 2) Bipolar disorder is also not an illness that remedies itself over time; people affected with manic depression are manic-depressives for their entire lives. (2, 3) For this reason, researchers have been struggling to, first, more quickly diagnose the onset of bipolar disorder in a patient and, second, to more effectively treat it. (4) As more and more studies have been performed on this disease, the peculiar occurrence between extreme creativity and manic depression have been uncovered, leaving scientists to deal with yet another puzzling aspect of the psychopathology. (5)
Patients with bipolar disorder swing between major depressive, mixed, hypomanic, and manic episodes. (1-9) A major depressive episode is when the patient has either a depressed mood or a loss of interest/pleasure in normal activities for a minimum of two weeks. Specifically, the patient should have (mostly): depressed mood for most of the day, nearly every day; diminished interest or pleasure in activities; weight loss or gain (a difference of 5% either way in the period of a month); insomnia or hypersomnia; psychomotor agitation or retardation; fatigue or loss of energy; diminished ability to think or concentrate; feelings of worthlessness; recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation or attempt. It is important to note that, except for the last symptom, all of these symptoms must be present nearly every day. (2, 7) In addition to major depressive episodes, patients with manic depression also feel periods of hypomania. A hypomanic episode must be a period of at least four days, during which the affected person feels elevated or irritated--a marked difference from the depressed period. (2, 7) The symptoms are: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talkative than usual, flight of ideas or racing thoughts, distractibility, psychomotor agitation or an increase in goal-directed activity, excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that may have negative consequences. (2, 7) This change in mood is observable by others and medications, substance abuse, or another medical condition does not cause the symptoms. (7)
In contrast to hypomania is mania, which is a more extreme case of hypomania. A manic episode is a period of an elevated or irritable mood for at least one week. (2, 7) The symptoms must cause problems in daily functioning and cannot be caused by a medical condition or drugs. (7) Manic symptoms are: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talkative than usual, flight of ideas or racing thoughts, attention easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant items, increase in goal-directed activity or psychomotor agitation, and excessive involvement in pleasurable activities which may have negative consequences. (2, 7) Lastly, bipolar disorder patients may also go through mixed episodes, which are periods when the patient meets the criteria for both a manic episode and a major depressive episode every day for at least one week. (2,7)
Due to the different mood phases, which the patient may experience, the DSM-IV (diagnostic manual of American Psychologists) has categorized two different types of bipolar disorder, I and II.
Bipolar I is characterized as any one of the following variations:
1. The patient having a manic episode without precedence of a depressive episode
2. Most recently in a hypomanic episode with at least one previous manic or mixed episode
3. Most recently in a manic episode with at least one previous major depressive episode, manic episode, or mixed episode
4. Most recently a mixed episode with at least one previous major depressive episode, manic episode, or mixed episode. (7)
Subsequently, Bipolar II is characterized as the presence or history of one or more major depressive episodes and at least one hypomanic episode, without a precedence of a manic or mixed episode. (7, 1) One of the problems with diagnosing bipolar disorder is that the symptoms may not be incredibly noticeable until the disease has progressed to a dangerous point. (4) The disorder is such that a manic phase may only last a few hours at a time. (4) That is, the episode can proceed as a few hours of mania every day for at least one week. The affected person may not mind the mania or may be in denial of the disease, and since it only lasts a few hours, no one else may even notice. (4) By the time people actually begin to notice the manic-depressive cycle (or just the mania) it has already reached a point where the patient is barely able to function normally. (4) In addition, many clinicians have difficulty first differentiating between bipolar I and bipolar II. Since the types of patients, lengths of episodes, and age of onset are very similar, the only diagnostic tool is the difference between mania and hypomania. Since the symptoms are basically the same, except for the understanding that mania is one step more severe than hypomania, many clinicians fluctuate between the two subsets before diagnosing the patient. (4) Studies are still being conducted to more accurately and quickly distinguish bipolar I patients from bipolar II patients.
Researchers are still questioning the cause of manic depression. The most popular theory is that the disorder is caused by an imbalance of norepinephrine and serotonin. (1) During manic periods there are unusually high levels of norepinephrine and serotonin while, during depressed periods, there are unusually low levels. (1) The biological explanation is also supported by strong genetic inheritance. Many twin studies have been performed which have shown a predominance of bipolar disorder among monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins, with a greater chance of inheritance in monozygotic twins. Other studies have shown that bipolar patients often have a family history of both bipolar and unipolar disorder. (2) In addition to these studies, the fact that the most common method of treatment for bipolar disorder is medication testifies to the validity of the biological theory of causation.
Treatment for manic depression consists of mood stabilizers, medications that balance the manic and depressive states experienced by patients with bipolar disorder. (6) The most common treatment, or the first medication attempted, is Lithium. Lithium increases the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake, this causes its counterbalancing effects of mania and depression. (6, 8) Research shows that Lithium alters NA transport and may interfere with ion exchange and nerve conduction. (8) Another effect of Lithium is its ability to inhibit second-messenger systems. These systems regulate cell cycling and circadian rhythms. Cell cycling and circadian rhythms, in turn, dictate the frequency and duration of the manic-depressive moods. (6, 9) However, many patients do not respond to Lithium. Some say that this is due to the drug, while others maintain that it is due to lack of consistency in taking the drug. (6) It has been shown that Lithium in not effective for all types of bipolar disorder, so other medications have been produced to help Lithium resistant individuals. (6, 8)
Anticonvulsants are the second attempted medications to alleviate the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Valproate (VPA) and Carbamazepine (CBZ) are the two most commonly prescribed. VPA has the same efficacy as Lithium for decreasing mania as well as acting faster, which is important to some patients. (6) However, the exact mechanism of action is still unclear. Research indicates that VPA may be involved with gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). VPA may either enhance GABA receptor activity and/or inhibit its metabolism. (6) CBZ has similar effects as VPA. That is, CBZ is also an anticonvulsant that alleviates the symptoms of mania, and possibly depression. Unlike VPA, more is known on the mechanism of CBZ. CBZ has been associated with neurotransmitter and ion-channel systems. (6) It binds to voltage-sensitive sodium channels, decreasing the sodium influx. It promotes potassium conductance and may block dopamine receptor-mediated currents. (6) Medication seems to be the best treatment to date for bipolar disorder. Psychotherapy is also helpful, particularly cognitive-behavioral therapy, which focuses on readjusting patient's perceptions of life. (2, 3) However, patients still experience symptoms to one degree or another.
Though this psychopathology is not for one to wish, one interesting association with bipolar disorder is the creativity of those afflicted. (2, 3, 5, 7) This is not the normal creativity experienced by the above-average people (on the scale of creativity). This creativity is the creative genius, which is so rare, yet an inordinate percentage of the well-known creative people were/are afflicted with manic depression. (2, 3) Among the lengthy list are: (writers) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath; (poets) William Blake, Sara Teasdale, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson; (composers) Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky. (10) Psychiatrists, realizing a connection greater than coincidence, have performed studies all over the world in an attempt to establish a link between bipolar disorder and creativity. (5) In the 1970s, Nancy C. Andreasen of the University of Iowa examined 30 creative writers and found 80% had experienced at least one episode of major depression, hypomania, or mania. (5) A few years later Kay Redfield Jamison studied 47 British writers, painters, and sculptors from the Royal Academy. She found that 38% had been treated for bipolar disorder. In particular, half of the poets (the largest group with manic depression) had needed medication or hospitalization. (5) Researchers at Harvard University set up a study to assess the degree of original thinking to perform creative tasks. They were going to rate creativity in a sample of manic-depressive patients. Their results showed that manic-depressives have a greater percentage of creativity than the controls. (5) There have been biographical studies of earlier generations of artists and writers which show that they have 18 times the rate of suicide (as compared to the general population), 8-10 times the rate of unipolar depression, and 10-20 times the rate of bipolar depression. (5) The additive results of these studies provide ample evidence that there is a link between bipolar disorder and creative genius. The question now is not whether or not there exists a connection between the two, but why it exists.
One common feature in mania or hypomania is the increase in unusually creative thinking and productivity. (2, 3, 5, 7) The manic factor contributes to an increased frequency and fluency of thoughts due to the cognitive difference between normalcy and mania. (2, 5) Manic people often speak and think in rhyme or alliteration more than non-manic people. (2, 5) In addition, the lifestyles of manic-depressives in their manic phase is comparable to those of creative people. Both groups function on very little sleep, restless attitudes, and they both exhibit depth and emotion beyond the norm. (2, 5) Biologically speaking, the manic state is physically alert. That is, it can respond quickly and intellectually with a range of changes (i.e. emotional, perceptual, behavioral). (5) The manic perception of life is one without bounds. This allows for creativity because the person feels capable of anything. It is as if the walls, which inhibit the general population, do not exist in manic people, allowing them to become creative geniuses. They understand a part of art, music, and literature which normal people do not attempt. The manic state is in sharp contrast to the depressive phase of bipolar patients. In their depressed phase, patients only see gloom and boundaries. They feel helpless, and out of this helplessness comes the creativity. (5) The only way bipolar patients can survive their depressed phases, oftentimes, is to unleash their despondency through some creative work. (5, 3)
Since the states of mania and depression are so different, the adjustment between the two ends up being chaotic. Looking at some works of literature or music, it can be noticed which phase the creator was in at the time of composition. In works by Sylvia Plath, for example, the readers may take notice of the sharp contrast among chapters. Some chapters she is full of hope and life, while other chapters read loneliness and desolation. Another example can be found in Tchaikovsky's music; there is a great variation among his compositions concerning their tone, tempo, rhythm, etc. In fact, some say that most actual compositions result from this in-between period because this is the only time when the patient can physically deliver something worthwhile. (3) Because the phases are so chaotic, the ideas float during the manic and depressive states, but the final, developed products are formed during the patients' "normal" phases.
However, the problem with bipolar disorder in present time is that drug treatment often vanquishes the creativity in the patient. (5) In earlier days when drug therapy was not implemented, the creativity would be free. Yet, through the attempt for affected people to cope with day to day living, their creativity must be sacrificed. It is remarkable how these "afflicted" persons exude extraordinary creativity. Therapists and researchers are on the constant search to provide treatment for the debilitating symptoms. In the case of bipolar disorder, the world benefits from the mood swings endured by a large percentage of these patients. Though their ability to function properly is of utmost concern, since the cycling between manic and depressive phases is so traumatic and energy depleting, the unusual existence of creativity of such caliber in these people is something to conserve. As more effective drug treatment is being sought after, hopefully there will be medication that will permit the creative genius of the patients and allow them to function in society as well.
Bipolar Disorder and the Creative Genius
HimaBindu K Krishna
Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a psychopathology that affects approximately 1% of the population. (1) Unlike unipolar disorder, also known as major affective disorder or depression, bipolar disorder is characterized by vacillating between periods of elation (either mania or hypomania) and depression. (1, 2) Bipolar disorder is also not an illness that remedies itself over time; people affected with manic depression are manic-depressives for their entire lives. (2, 3) For this reason, researchers have been struggling to, first, more quickly diagnose the onset of bipolar disorder in a patient and, second, to more effectively treat it. (4) As more and more studies have been performed on this disease, the peculiar occurrence between extreme creativity and manic depression have been uncovered, leaving scientists to deal with yet another puzzling aspect of the psychopathology. (5)
Patients with bipolar disorder swing between major depressive, mixed, hypomanic, and manic episodes. (1-9) A major depressive episode is when the patient has either a depressed mood or a loss of interest/pleasure in normal activities for a minimum of two weeks. Specifically, the patient should have (mostly): depressed mood for most of the day, nearly every day; diminished interest or pleasure in activities; weight loss or gain (a difference of 5% either way in the period of a month); insomnia or hypersomnia; psychomotor agitation or retardation; fatigue or loss of energy; diminished ability to think or concentrate; feelings of worthlessness; recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation or attempt. It is important to note that, except for the last symptom, all of these symptoms must be present nearly every day. (2, 7) In addition to major depressive episodes, patients with manic depression also feel periods of hypomania. A hypomanic episode must be a period of at least four days, during which the affected person feels elevated or irritated--a marked difference from the depressed period. (2, 7) The symptoms are: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talkative than usual, flight of ideas or racing thoughts, distractibility, psychomotor agitation or an increase in goal-directed activity, excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that may have negative consequences. (2, 7) This change in mood is observable by others and medications, substance abuse, or another medical condition does not cause the symptoms. (7)
In contrast to hypomania is mania, which is a more extreme case of hypomania. A manic episode is a period of an elevated or irritable mood for at least one week. (2, 7) The symptoms must cause problems in daily functioning and cannot be caused by a medical condition or drugs. (7) Manic symptoms are: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talkative than usual, flight of ideas or racing thoughts, attention easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant items, increase in goal-directed activity or psychomotor agitation, and excessive involvement in pleasurable activities which may have negative consequences. (2, 7) Lastly, bipolar disorder patients may also go through mixed episodes, which are periods when the patient meets the criteria for both a manic episode and a major depressive episode every day for at least one week. (2,7)
Due to the different mood phases, which the patient may experience, the DSM-IV (diagnostic manual of American Psychologists) has categorized two different types of bipolar disorder, I and II.
Bipolar I is characterized as any one of the following variations:
1. The patient having a manic episode without precedence of a depressive episode
2. Most recently in a hypomanic episode with at least one previous manic or mixed episode
3. Most recently in a manic episode with at least one previous major depressive episode, manic episode, or mixed episode
4. Most recently a mixed episode with at least one previous major depressive episode, manic episode, or mixed episode. (7)
Subsequently, Bipolar II is characterized as the presence or history of one or more major depressive episodes and at least one hypomanic episode, without a precedence of a manic or mixed episode. (7, 1) One of the problems with diagnosing bipolar disorder is that the symptoms may not be incredibly noticeable until the disease has progressed to a dangerous point. (4) The disorder is such that a manic phase may only last a few hours at a time. (4) That is, the episode can proceed as a few hours of mania every day for at least one week. The affected person may not mind the mania or may be in denial of the disease, and since it only lasts a few hours, no one else may even notice. (4) By the time people actually begin to notice the manic-depressive cycle (or just the mania) it has already reached a point where the patient is barely able to function normally. (4) In addition, many clinicians have difficulty first differentiating between bipolar I and bipolar II. Since the types of patients, lengths of episodes, and age of onset are very similar, the only diagnostic tool is the difference between mania and hypomania. Since the symptoms are basically the same, except for the understanding that mania is one step more severe than hypomania, many clinicians fluctuate between the two subsets before diagnosing the patient. (4) Studies are still being conducted to more accurately and quickly distinguish bipolar I patients from bipolar II patients.
Researchers are still questioning the cause of manic depression. The most popular theory is that the disorder is caused by an imbalance of norepinephrine and serotonin. (1) During manic periods there are unusually high levels of norepinephrine and serotonin while, during depressed periods, there are unusually low levels. (1) The biological explanation is also supported by strong genetic inheritance. Many twin studies have been performed which have shown a predominance of bipolar disorder among monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins, with a greater chance of inheritance in monozygotic twins. Other studies have shown that bipolar patients often have a family history of both bipolar and unipolar disorder. (2) In addition to these studies, the fact that the most common method of treatment for bipolar disorder is medication testifies to the validity of the biological theory of causation.
Treatment for manic depression consists of mood stabilizers, medications that balance the manic and depressive states experienced by patients with bipolar disorder. (6) The most common treatment, or the first medication attempted, is Lithium. Lithium increases the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake, this causes its counterbalancing effects of mania and depression. (6, 8) Research shows that Lithium alters NA transport and may interfere with ion exchange and nerve conduction. (8) Another effect of Lithium is its ability to inhibit second-messenger systems. These systems regulate cell cycling and circadian rhythms. Cell cycling and circadian rhythms, in turn, dictate the frequency and duration of the manic-depressive moods. (6, 9) However, many patients do not respond to Lithium. Some say that this is due to the drug, while others maintain that it is due to lack of consistency in taking the drug. (6) It has been shown that Lithium in not effective for all types of bipolar disorder, so other medications have been produced to help Lithium resistant individuals. (6, 8)
Anticonvulsants are the second attempted medications to alleviate the symptoms of bipolar disorder. Valproate (VPA) and Carbamazepine (CBZ) are the two most commonly prescribed. VPA has the same efficacy as Lithium for decreasing mania as well as acting faster, which is important to some patients. (6) However, the exact mechanism of action is still unclear. Research indicates that VPA may be involved with gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). VPA may either enhance GABA receptor activity and/or inhibit its metabolism. (6) CBZ has similar effects as VPA. That is, CBZ is also an anticonvulsant that alleviates the symptoms of mania, and possibly depression. Unlike VPA, more is known on the mechanism of CBZ. CBZ has been associated with neurotransmitter and ion-channel systems. (6) It binds to voltage-sensitive sodium channels, decreasing the sodium influx. It promotes potassium conductance and may block dopamine receptor-mediated currents. (6) Medication seems to be the best treatment to date for bipolar disorder. Psychotherapy is also helpful, particularly cognitive-behavioral therapy, which focuses on readjusting patient's perceptions of life. (2, 3) However, patients still experience symptoms to one degree or another.
Though this psychopathology is not for one to wish, one interesting association with bipolar disorder is the creativity of those afflicted. (2, 3, 5, 7) This is not the normal creativity experienced by the above-average people (on the scale of creativity). This creativity is the creative genius, which is so rare, yet an inordinate percentage of the well-known creative people were/are afflicted with manic depression. (2, 3) Among the lengthy list are: (writers) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath; (poets) William Blake, Sara Teasdale, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson; (composers) Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky. (10) Psychiatrists, realizing a connection greater than coincidence, have performed studies all over the world in an attempt to establish a link between bipolar disorder and creativity. (5) In the 1970s, Nancy C. Andreasen of the University of Iowa examined 30 creative writers and found 80% had experienced at least one episode of major depression, hypomania, or mania. (5) A few years later Kay Redfield Jamison studied 47 British writers, painters, and sculptors from the Royal Academy. She found that 38% had been treated for bipolar disorder. In particular, half of the poets (the largest group with manic depression) had needed medication or hospitalization. (5) Researchers at Harvard University set up a study to assess the degree of original thinking to perform creative tasks. They were going to rate creativity in a sample of manic-depressive patients. Their results showed that manic-depressives have a greater percentage of creativity than the controls. (5) There have been biographical studies of earlier generations of artists and writers which show that they have 18 times the rate of suicide (as compared to the general population), 8-10 times the rate of unipolar depression, and 10-20 times the rate of bipolar depression. (5) The additive results of these studies provide ample evidence that there is a link between bipolar disorder and creative genius. The question now is not whether or not there exists a connection between the two, but why it exists.
One common feature in mania or hypomania is the increase in unusually creative thinking and productivity. (2, 3, 5, 7) The manic factor contributes to an increased frequency and fluency of thoughts due to the cognitive difference between normalcy and mania. (2, 5) Manic people often speak and think in rhyme or alliteration more than non-manic people. (2, 5) In addition, the lifestyles of manic-depressives in their manic phase is comparable to those of creative people. Both groups function on very little sleep, restless attitudes, and they both exhibit depth and emotion beyond the norm. (2, 5) Biologically speaking, the manic state is physically alert. That is, it can respond quickly and intellectually with a range of changes (i.e. emotional, perceptual, behavioral). (5) The manic perception of life is one without bounds. This allows for creativity because the person feels capable of anything. It is as if the walls, which inhibit the general population, do not exist in manic people, allowing them to become creative geniuses. They understand a part of art, music, and literature which normal people do not attempt. The manic state is in sharp contrast to the depressive phase of bipolar patients. In their depressed phase, patients only see gloom and boundaries. They feel helpless, and out of this helplessness comes the creativity. (5) The only way bipolar patients can survive their depressed phases, oftentimes, is to unleash their despondency through some creative work. (5, 3)
Since the states of mania and depression are so different, the adjustment between the two ends up being chaotic. Looking at some works of literature or music, it can be noticed which phase the creator was in at the time of composition. In works by Sylvia Plath, for example, the readers may take notice of the sharp contrast among chapters. Some chapters she is full of hope and life, while other chapters read loneliness and desolation. Another example can be found in Tchaikovsky's music; there is a great variation among his compositions concerning their tone, tempo, rhythm, etc. In fact, some say that most actual compositions result from this in-between period because this is the only time when the patient can physically deliver something worthwhile. (3) Because the phases are so chaotic, the ideas float during the manic and depressive states, but the final, developed products are formed during the patients' "normal" phases.
However, the problem with bipolar disorder in present time is that drug treatment often vanquishes the creativity in the patient. (5) In earlier days when drug therapy was not implemented, the creativity would be free. Yet, through the attempt for affected people to cope with day to day living, their creativity must be sacrificed. It is remarkable how these "afflicted" persons exude extraordinary creativity. Therapists and researchers are on the constant search to provide treatment for the debilitating symptoms. In the case of bipolar disorder, the world benefits from the mood swings endured by a large percentage of these patients. Though their ability to function properly is of utmost concern, since the cycling between manic and depressive phases is so traumatic and energy depleting, the unusual existence of creativity of such caliber in these people is something to conserve. As more effective drug treatment is being sought after, hopefully there will be medication that will permit the creative genius of the patients and allow them to function in society as well.
Mad Poets
...I feel like a periwinkle
Left too high on the beach
By the tide...
What flood was it
That brought me here?
Eleanor Morris "Easter Sunday" ( Excerpted from Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam )
Anne Sexton was first hospitalized at the Westwood Lodge at the age of 28. She was the patient of Dr. Orne. She met a very talented and creative musician also a patient of the doctor. She found this fellow "very crazy" poet talked "language" or poetry just like her. She found that she was sort of reborn, and her place, her niche was with poets. Orne encouraged her, and lavished praise on her seminal work...so she kept on writing.
Now at the time, this was in the 50's, McLean was known as a place that mad writers would spend time at. So it sort of had a cache attached to it. And as Alex Beam points out in "Gracefully Insane" Sexton had the qualifications. She had two suicde attempts by age 30, extended stays at other local institutions. Her collection "To Bedlam and Back" speaks to her madness.
Sexton was very competitive. She knew that both Lowell and Plath were at McLean. She figured that a "residency" there would be a straw in her poetic hat. Like Plath she came from a tony suburb of Boston, and both had looks, charm, and were in all the right magazines. As Beam pointed out,in some way they knew that mental illness can inspire great poetry.
Beam points out that after Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University Sexton and Plath met over a number of drinks, and even discussed killing themselves. Sexton said of Plath: "She told the story of her first suicide in loving detail."
There may have been some jealousy on Sexton's part when she did away with herself. She wrote:
"Thief
how did you...crawl done alone,
into the death
I wanted so badly
and for so long..."
Lowell first checked into McLean when he was 41 years old in 1958. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet--at the top of his game. But he was plagued by mental illness. But Lowell was a florid manic depressive. As Beam points out:
"he would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life."
"Waking in the Blue" was in his famous collection "Life Studies." Being in the confessional mode, the family took strong objection to it. A few weeks after "Life Studies" was published Lowell was admitted to McLean. "Waking..." was full of references to the aristocracy he grew up in. "Mayflower Screwballs," "Thoroughbred Mental Cases"
Here is an account of Bowditch Hall from Beam's book
* Material taken from Alex Beam's "Gracefully Insane..."
Left too high on the beach
By the tide...
What flood was it
That brought me here?
Eleanor Morris "Easter Sunday" ( Excerpted from Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam )
Anne Sexton was first hospitalized at the Westwood Lodge at the age of 28. She was the patient of Dr. Orne. She met a very talented and creative musician also a patient of the doctor. She found this fellow "very crazy" poet talked "language" or poetry just like her. She found that she was sort of reborn, and her place, her niche was with poets. Orne encouraged her, and lavished praise on her seminal work...so she kept on writing.
Now at the time, this was in the 50's, McLean was known as a place that mad writers would spend time at. So it sort of had a cache attached to it. And as Alex Beam points out in "Gracefully Insane" Sexton had the qualifications. She had two suicde attempts by age 30, extended stays at other local institutions. Her collection "To Bedlam and Back" speaks to her madness.
Sexton was very competitive. She knew that both Lowell and Plath were at McLean. She figured that a "residency" there would be a straw in her poetic hat. Like Plath she came from a tony suburb of Boston, and both had looks, charm, and were in all the right magazines. As Beam pointed out,in some way they knew that mental illness can inspire great poetry.
Beam points out that after Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University Sexton and Plath met over a number of drinks, and even discussed killing themselves. Sexton said of Plath: "She told the story of her first suicide in loving detail."
There may have been some jealousy on Sexton's part when she did away with herself. She wrote:
"Thief
how did you...crawl done alone,
into the death
I wanted so badly
and for so long..."
Lowell first checked into McLean when he was 41 years old in 1958. He was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet--at the top of his game. But he was plagued by mental illness. But Lowell was a florid manic depressive. As Beam points out:
"he would shower his closest friends with bitter, mocking curses or proclaim undying love to an airline stewardess and insist on leaving the plane with her to start a new life."
"Waking in the Blue" was in his famous collection "Life Studies." Being in the confessional mode, the family took strong objection to it. A few weeks after "Life Studies" was published Lowell was admitted to McLean. "Waking..." was full of references to the aristocracy he grew up in. "Mayflower Screwballs," "Thoroughbred Mental Cases"
Here is an account of Bowditch Hall from Beam's book
* Material taken from Alex Beam's "Gracefully Insane..."
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Poet Bob Clawson talks about Anne Sexton at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat
Poet Bob Clawson talks about Anne Sexton at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat
Bob Clawson: Sharing his experience with poet Anne Sexton at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat.
Doug Holder
On May 19 at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat in Littleton, Mass. poet, writer, journalist, educator Bob Clawson talked with a group of literature lovers about his friendship with the acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, the late Anne Sexton. Clawson showered his audience with his fascinating anecdotes and experiences with Sexton, who wrote “To Bedlam and Part Way Back,” among other critically acclaimed poetry collections.
Clawson explained that he was teaching English at Weston High School in Weston, Mass. in 1963. He had students read the works of contemporary poets to stoke the interest of his young charges. While reading Sexton’s poem “Menstruation at 40” in the faculty room, the gym teacher asked Clawson if he was a fan of Sexton. When he answered in the affirmative; the teacher said he was a friend of the poet and he would introduce him to her.
It seems that Sexton lived in Weston, and she eventually invited Clawson for a visit. Clawson described Sexton as being not what he expected for a lady poet of the time. She was certainly not dowdy and was adorned in a shocking pink dress. Eventually Sexton read at Weston High School and was a great hit. They needed a large auditorium to handle the crowd the second time around.
Sexton campaigned to be Poet-In-Residence at Weston High, but it seems the headmaster felt she shamelessly flirted with him and told Clawson, “We can’t have this here!’
Clawson was reluctant to talk of Sexton’s mental illness that eventually lead to her suicide. Clawson recalled: “She wasn’t really diagnosed. She told me she heard voices.. Her husband, a wool merchant, was said to have beaten her, which couldn’t help matters.” According to Clawson, Sexton would sometimes call him around midnight and want him come to her house stating “I’m desperate.”
For such an accomplished poet it is surprising that she never finished college. Clawson said she eloped during junior college and never went back. She was self-educated and widely read. Clawson said he was always under the impression he was speaking with a highly intelligent and knowledgeable person.
Sexton had eclectic tastes, and could not be placed in one particular school of poetry. She respected Allen Ginsberg, and was not a snob about who she admired. And although she had no formal higher education, she was welcomed with open arms by the academy according to Clawson.
Later, Clawson, Sexton, and a couple of musicians put together a “chamber rock” group to put Sexton’s poems to music. The group's name: “Anne Sexton and Her kind.” Her poems were adapted to the demands of musical composition. Sexton read while the musicians complimented her with accomplished guitar and bass accompaniment.”
The group had many gigs from the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., Jordan Hall in Boston, to venues throughout the country.
Sexton found the concerts extremely draining, and could only do a limited amount. But from the musical tapes that Clawson brought in, it was evident that she was an accomplished performer with a beautiful and haunting voice, not to mention breathtaking poetry.
Doug Holder
Bob Clawson: Sharing his experience with poet Anne Sexton at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat.
Doug Holder
On May 19 at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat in Littleton, Mass. poet, writer, journalist, educator Bob Clawson talked with a group of literature lovers about his friendship with the acclaimed, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, the late Anne Sexton. Clawson showered his audience with his fascinating anecdotes and experiences with Sexton, who wrote “To Bedlam and Part Way Back,” among other critically acclaimed poetry collections.
Clawson explained that he was teaching English at Weston High School in Weston, Mass. in 1963. He had students read the works of contemporary poets to stoke the interest of his young charges. While reading Sexton’s poem “Menstruation at 40” in the faculty room, the gym teacher asked Clawson if he was a fan of Sexton. When he answered in the affirmative; the teacher said he was a friend of the poet and he would introduce him to her.
It seems that Sexton lived in Weston, and she eventually invited Clawson for a visit. Clawson described Sexton as being not what he expected for a lady poet of the time. She was certainly not dowdy and was adorned in a shocking pink dress. Eventually Sexton read at Weston High School and was a great hit. They needed a large auditorium to handle the crowd the second time around.
Sexton campaigned to be Poet-In-Residence at Weston High, but it seems the headmaster felt she shamelessly flirted with him and told Clawson, “We can’t have this here!’
Clawson was reluctant to talk of Sexton’s mental illness that eventually lead to her suicide. Clawson recalled: “She wasn’t really diagnosed. She told me she heard voices.. Her husband, a wool merchant, was said to have beaten her, which couldn’t help matters.” According to Clawson, Sexton would sometimes call him around midnight and want him come to her house stating “I’m desperate.”
For such an accomplished poet it is surprising that she never finished college. Clawson said she eloped during junior college and never went back. She was self-educated and widely read. Clawson said he was always under the impression he was speaking with a highly intelligent and knowledgeable person.
Sexton had eclectic tastes, and could not be placed in one particular school of poetry. She respected Allen Ginsberg, and was not a snob about who she admired. And although she had no formal higher education, she was welcomed with open arms by the academy according to Clawson.
Later, Clawson, Sexton, and a couple of musicians put together a “chamber rock” group to put Sexton’s poems to music. The group's name: “Anne Sexton and Her kind.” Her poems were adapted to the demands of musical composition. Sexton read while the musicians complimented her with accomplished guitar and bass accompaniment.”
The group had many gigs from the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., Jordan Hall in Boston, to venues throughout the country.
Sexton found the concerts extremely draining, and could only do a limited amount. But from the musical tapes that Clawson brought in, it was evident that she was an accomplished performer with a beautiful and haunting voice, not to mention breathtaking poetry.
Doug Holder
Literature and the Arts in the Transitional Living Center at McLean Hospital
Literature and the Arts in the Transitional Living Center at McLean Hospital
Literature and the Arts in the Transitional Living Center at McLean Hospital
By Doug Holder
Some years ago Alex Beam, The Boston Globe columnist came to my then home on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass., to interview me about the role of poets and poetry at McLean Hospital. Beam was doing research on his book about the history of McLean: Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital.
McLean Hospital has a rich literary past and has been declared a national literary landmark. Poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and others had “residencies” at the hospital. Anne Sexton ran her famed poetry groups here and was briefly hospitalized at McLean shortly before her death by suicide. I had the privilege to interview Lois Ames, the social worker for Sylvia Plath and Sexton, and the author of the introduction to Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar” that was set on these grounds.
For 20 years I worked on the inpatient units of McLean Hospital as a mental health worker. And since I am a poet, I made of point of running poetry groups for patients who resided on the units. I worked with an eclectic group of clients on several units. I helped them with their poems, conducted informal readings and even publishing some of their work in the now defunct literary journal “The Boston Poet.”
When I took a new position at the Transitional Living Center at Waverly House at McLean I hoped to continue the literary tradition that I established, and that was inherent at the hospital. The Transitional Living Care Center at McLean, according to its website, is a “… private pay program designed for men and women, age 18, and older, who are involved in psychiatric treatment and require a staff supported setting. For many persons with psychiatric illness, brief hospital stays alone are not sufficient to full recovery and return to normal living. The Transitional Living Center provides a setting for comprehensive treatment, and support of family members by providing the intensive assistance that recovering patients require.”
Shortly after I was hired by Robin Weiss, the program director, Richard Wilhelm, a friend of mine and the arts editor for my small literary press “Ibbetson Street” came aboard. Richard is an artist and a poet, and another staff member at that time Jennifer Matthews was a vocalist and a poet, so it was like a writer’s retreat on the campus of the hospital.
On the inpatient unit you more or less had a captive audience. The patients had to have privileges to leave the unit, so a poetry group in the evening could be a welcomed change from the usual didactic groups in the day. At Waverly House it is vastly different. The house is loosely structured, and the clients for the most part can come and go as they please. I focused my efforts on clients who expressed strong interests in the arts and literature. Some clients who studied writing in college brought whole collections of their poetry to the house. Often Richard and I would sit down with folks and workshop their poems and some even saw their work appear in my literary column in The Somerville News.
Other clients expressed interest in literary journalism, and in this regard I was able to help as well. For many years I have been the arts/editor for The Somerville News, and I have frequently gotten internships for students, friends, etc… I can remember one client, a law school dropout, who seemed to have lost direction. He got an internship at the paper, secured a paid editorship, and then went on to the Boston Herald organization. Another client got her first clippings at the paper, which made her professional journalist father beam with pride.
I have also hooked up clients with literary internships, with magazines like “the new renaissance,” as well as other publications. One client was studying for his PhD in Psychology but also had a strong interest in mystery and science fiction writing. I introduced him to the world of little magazines and online publishing and he racked up an impressive number of publication credits in a short time. We even appeared in the same online journal: his story, my poem.
I also have an affiliation with a local art gallery in Cambridge, “The Out of the Blue Art Gallery.” A number of clients have held volunteer jobs there, helping with publicity, with sales, and other duties .One recent client volunteered at the gallery and made a connection with an organizer at a local film festival. She wound up getting valuable experience writing press releases for the festival.
I find that patients that are involved in the arts have a greater sense of self-esteem, and it helps them get involved with the community, the larger world, hopefully realizing the mission statement of our program, namely transitioning clients back into the community for a fruitful and productive life.
* This program closed July, 2009.
Literature and the Arts in the Transitional Living Center at McLean Hospital
By Doug Holder
Some years ago Alex Beam, The Boston Globe columnist came to my then home on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass., to interview me about the role of poets and poetry at McLean Hospital. Beam was doing research on his book about the history of McLean: Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital.
McLean Hospital has a rich literary past and has been declared a national literary landmark. Poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and others had “residencies” at the hospital. Anne Sexton ran her famed poetry groups here and was briefly hospitalized at McLean shortly before her death by suicide. I had the privilege to interview Lois Ames, the social worker for Sylvia Plath and Sexton, and the author of the introduction to Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar” that was set on these grounds.
For 20 years I worked on the inpatient units of McLean Hospital as a mental health worker. And since I am a poet, I made of point of running poetry groups for patients who resided on the units. I worked with an eclectic group of clients on several units. I helped them with their poems, conducted informal readings and even publishing some of their work in the now defunct literary journal “The Boston Poet.”
When I took a new position at the Transitional Living Center at Waverly House at McLean I hoped to continue the literary tradition that I established, and that was inherent at the hospital. The Transitional Living Care Center at McLean, according to its website, is a “… private pay program designed for men and women, age 18, and older, who are involved in psychiatric treatment and require a staff supported setting. For many persons with psychiatric illness, brief hospital stays alone are not sufficient to full recovery and return to normal living. The Transitional Living Center provides a setting for comprehensive treatment, and support of family members by providing the intensive assistance that recovering patients require.”
Shortly after I was hired by Robin Weiss, the program director, Richard Wilhelm, a friend of mine and the arts editor for my small literary press “Ibbetson Street” came aboard. Richard is an artist and a poet, and another staff member at that time Jennifer Matthews was a vocalist and a poet, so it was like a writer’s retreat on the campus of the hospital.
On the inpatient unit you more or less had a captive audience. The patients had to have privileges to leave the unit, so a poetry group in the evening could be a welcomed change from the usual didactic groups in the day. At Waverly House it is vastly different. The house is loosely structured, and the clients for the most part can come and go as they please. I focused my efforts on clients who expressed strong interests in the arts and literature. Some clients who studied writing in college brought whole collections of their poetry to the house. Often Richard and I would sit down with folks and workshop their poems and some even saw their work appear in my literary column in The Somerville News.
Other clients expressed interest in literary journalism, and in this regard I was able to help as well. For many years I have been the arts/editor for The Somerville News, and I have frequently gotten internships for students, friends, etc… I can remember one client, a law school dropout, who seemed to have lost direction. He got an internship at the paper, secured a paid editorship, and then went on to the Boston Herald organization. Another client got her first clippings at the paper, which made her professional journalist father beam with pride.
I have also hooked up clients with literary internships, with magazines like “the new renaissance,” as well as other publications. One client was studying for his PhD in Psychology but also had a strong interest in mystery and science fiction writing. I introduced him to the world of little magazines and online publishing and he racked up an impressive number of publication credits in a short time. We even appeared in the same online journal: his story, my poem.
I also have an affiliation with a local art gallery in Cambridge, “The Out of the Blue Art Gallery.” A number of clients have held volunteer jobs there, helping with publicity, with sales, and other duties .One recent client volunteered at the gallery and made a connection with an organizer at a local film festival. She wound up getting valuable experience writing press releases for the festival.
I find that patients that are involved in the arts have a greater sense of self-esteem, and it helps them get involved with the community, the larger world, hopefully realizing the mission statement of our program, namely transitioning clients back into the community for a fruitful and productive life.
* This program closed July, 2009.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Poems from"...The Back Bay to the Back Ward..."
Cigarette on Psychiatric Ward
“Can I have a light?”
What was that sudden spark in her eyes?
that flame
from cloudy, dormant pupils,
when I lit her cigarette?
The sudden driving ambition
to inhale,
the sunken chest’s almost boastful expansion.
The smoke filling the yawning cavity.
A woman of substance...
until she exhaled.
©1998, Douglas Holder
On the Ward: An Old Harvard Man
And there you were
dumbfounded, walking the ward--
after spraying John Harvard’s statue
a crimson red
The Japanese tourist
snapping your picture
as if you were part of the attraction.
Carted away from the scene
a yearly performance
by a fifty-year-old
sweating
in a soiled tweed jacket
smiling sheepishly
with the rotting stumps of teeth
an omen of your insides.
Still
demanding an explanation
for your expulsion
from these, effete ivied walls
waiting to register in the Spring
as your skin literally
crawls.
---Doug Holder
Lost Girl on the Psychiatric Ward
Standing in the middle of the ward
a thin scrim of sweat
glistens on her nascent mustache
apologizing to the thin air
her hands on her hips--
disgust for the phantoms.
She is on guard
for the vulpine machinations
of the silent, incessant voices
chattering in her cortex
a murderous Greek Chorus
slapping at the hollows
of her skull.
Grabbing A Young Attendant
Did she think she could grab him,
pull the flushed cheeks to her breasts
run her hands through his tight golden curls
and demand the time back/
We had to pry her from him
she luxuriated in his unadulterated scent
the firm, confident shake
of a straight, unbeaten body.
What did she have left but to scream
above the muffle of medication
for a refund of years.
To be dragged away,
from what she remembers was once in reach,
for him to smile
in boyish incomprehension.
“Can I have a light?”
What was that sudden spark in her eyes?
that flame
from cloudy, dormant pupils,
when I lit her cigarette?
The sudden driving ambition
to inhale,
the sunken chest’s almost boastful expansion.
The smoke filling the yawning cavity.
A woman of substance...
until she exhaled.
©1998, Douglas Holder
On the Ward: An Old Harvard Man
And there you were
dumbfounded, walking the ward--
after spraying John Harvard’s statue
a crimson red
The Japanese tourist
snapping your picture
as if you were part of the attraction.
Carted away from the scene
a yearly performance
by a fifty-year-old
sweating
in a soiled tweed jacket
smiling sheepishly
with the rotting stumps of teeth
an omen of your insides.
Still
demanding an explanation
for your expulsion
from these, effete ivied walls
waiting to register in the Spring
as your skin literally
crawls.
---Doug Holder
Lost Girl on the Psychiatric Ward
Standing in the middle of the ward
a thin scrim of sweat
glistens on her nascent mustache
apologizing to the thin air
her hands on her hips--
disgust for the phantoms.
She is on guard
for the vulpine machinations
of the silent, incessant voices
chattering in her cortex
a murderous Greek Chorus
slapping at the hollows
of her skull.
Grabbing A Young Attendant
Did she think she could grab him,
pull the flushed cheeks to her breasts
run her hands through his tight golden curls
and demand the time back/
We had to pry her from him
she luxuriated in his unadulterated scent
the firm, confident shake
of a straight, unbeaten body.
What did she have left but to scream
above the muffle of medication
for a refund of years.
To be dragged away,
from what she remembers was once in reach,
for him to smile
in boyish incomprehension.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Poems From Plath, Lowell, and Sexton
Mad Girl's Love Song
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
By Candlelight
Author: poem of Sylvia Plath
This is winter, this is night, small love --
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate.
I hold you on my arm.
It is very late.
The dull bells tongue the hour.
The mirror floats us at one candle power.
This is the fluid in which we meet each other,
This haloey radiance that seems to breathe
And lets our shadows wither
Only to blow
Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.
One match scratch makes you real.
At first the candle will not bloom at all --
It snuffs its bud
To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.
I hold my breath until you creak to life,
Balled hedgehog,
Small and cross. The yellow knife
Grows tall. You clutch your bars.
My singing makes you roar.
I rock you like a boat
Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor,
While the brass man
Kneels, back bent, as best he can
Hefting his white pillar with the light
That keeps the sky at bay,
The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight!
He is yours, the little brassy Atlas --
Poor heirloom, all you have,
At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs,
No child, no wife.
Five balls! Five bright brass balls!
To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.
You, Doctor Martin
You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk
of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk
in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break
tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore.
Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.
What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall
like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.
Suicide Note by Anne Sexton
"You speak to me of narcissism but I reply that it is
a matter of my life" - Artaud
"At this time let me somehow bequeath all the leftovers
to my daughters and their daughters" - Anonymous
Better,
despite the worms talking to
the mare's hoof in the field;
better,
despite the season of young girls
dropping their blood;
better somehow
to drop myself quickly
into an old room.
Better (someone said)
not to be born
and far better
not to be born twice
at thirteen
where the boardinghouse,
each year a bedroom,
caught fire.
Dear friend,
I will have to sink with hundreds of others
on a dumbwaiter into hell.
I will be a light thing.
I will enter death
like someone's lost optical lens.
Life is half enlarged.
The fish and owls are fierce today.
Life tilts backward and forward.
Even the wasps cannot find my eyes.
Yes,
eyes that were immediate once.
Eyes that have been truly awake,
eyes that told the whole story—
poor dumb animals.
Eyes that were pierced,
little nail heads,
light blue gunshots.
And once with
a mouth like a cup,
clay colored or blood colored,
open like the breakwater
for the lost ocean
and open like the noose
for the first head.
Once upon a time
my hunger was for Jesus.
O my hunger! My hunger!
Before he grew old
he rode calmly into Jerusalem
in search of death.
This time
I certainly
do not ask for understanding
and yet I hope everyone else
will turn their heads when an unrehearsed fish jumps
on the surface of Echo Lake;
when moonlight,
its bass note turned up loud,
hurts some building in Boston,
when the truly beautiful lie together.
I think of this, surely,
and would think of it far longer
if I were not… if I were not
at that old fire.
I could admit
that I am only a coward
crying me me me
and not mention the little gnats, the moths,
forced by circumstance
to suck on the electric bulb.
But surely you know that everyone has a death,
his own death,
waiting for him.
So I will go now
without old age or disease,
wildly but accurately,
knowing my best route,
carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years,
never asking, “Where are we going?”
We were riding (if I'd only known)
to this.
Dear friend,
please do not think
that I visualize guitars playing
or my father arching his bone.
I do not even expect my mother's mouth.
I know that I have died before—
once in November, once in June.
How strange to choose June again,
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies.
Of course guitars will not play!
The snakes will certainly not notice.
New York City will not mind.
At night the bats will beat on the trees,
knowing it all,
seeing what they sensed all day
Anna Who Was Mad
Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.
Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take.
Give me a report on the condition of my soul.
Give me a complete statement of my actions.
Hand me a jack-in-the-pulpit and let me listen in.
Put me in the stirrups and bring a tour group through.
Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy.
Did I make you go insane?
Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?
Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist
who dragged you out like a gold cart?
Did I make you go insane?
From the grave write me, Anna!
You are nothing but ashes but nevertheless
pick up
the Parker Pen I gave you.
Write me.
Write
Said the Poet to the Analyst
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget who one words is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
somethhing I might have said...
but did not.
Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I worth with my best, for instances,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.
Man and Wife
by Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
by Robert Lowell
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
--Schopenhauer
"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."
Home After Three Months Away
by Robert Lowell
Gone now the baby's nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze--
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.
Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair--
they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child's play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush. . . .
Dearest I cannot loiter hre
in lather like a polar bear.
Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; no 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.
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
By Candlelight
Author: poem of Sylvia Plath
This is winter, this is night, small love --
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate.
I hold you on my arm.
It is very late.
The dull bells tongue the hour.
The mirror floats us at one candle power.
This is the fluid in which we meet each other,
This haloey radiance that seems to breathe
And lets our shadows wither
Only to blow
Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.
One match scratch makes you real.
At first the candle will not bloom at all --
It snuffs its bud
To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.
I hold my breath until you creak to life,
Balled hedgehog,
Small and cross. The yellow knife
Grows tall. You clutch your bars.
My singing makes you roar.
I rock you like a boat
Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor,
While the brass man
Kneels, back bent, as best he can
Hefting his white pillar with the light
That keeps the sky at bay,
The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight!
He is yours, the little brassy Atlas --
Poor heirloom, all you have,
At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs,
No child, no wife.
Five balls! Five bright brass balls!
To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.
You, Doctor Martin
You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk
of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk
in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break
tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore.
Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.
What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall
like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.
Suicide Note by Anne Sexton
"You speak to me of narcissism but I reply that it is
a matter of my life" - Artaud
"At this time let me somehow bequeath all the leftovers
to my daughters and their daughters" - Anonymous
Better,
despite the worms talking to
the mare's hoof in the field;
better,
despite the season of young girls
dropping their blood;
better somehow
to drop myself quickly
into an old room.
Better (someone said)
not to be born
and far better
not to be born twice
at thirteen
where the boardinghouse,
each year a bedroom,
caught fire.
Dear friend,
I will have to sink with hundreds of others
on a dumbwaiter into hell.
I will be a light thing.
I will enter death
like someone's lost optical lens.
Life is half enlarged.
The fish and owls are fierce today.
Life tilts backward and forward.
Even the wasps cannot find my eyes.
Yes,
eyes that were immediate once.
Eyes that have been truly awake,
eyes that told the whole story—
poor dumb animals.
Eyes that were pierced,
little nail heads,
light blue gunshots.
And once with
a mouth like a cup,
clay colored or blood colored,
open like the breakwater
for the lost ocean
and open like the noose
for the first head.
Once upon a time
my hunger was for Jesus.
O my hunger! My hunger!
Before he grew old
he rode calmly into Jerusalem
in search of death.
This time
I certainly
do not ask for understanding
and yet I hope everyone else
will turn their heads when an unrehearsed fish jumps
on the surface of Echo Lake;
when moonlight,
its bass note turned up loud,
hurts some building in Boston,
when the truly beautiful lie together.
I think of this, surely,
and would think of it far longer
if I were not… if I were not
at that old fire.
I could admit
that I am only a coward
crying me me me
and not mention the little gnats, the moths,
forced by circumstance
to suck on the electric bulb.
But surely you know that everyone has a death,
his own death,
waiting for him.
So I will go now
without old age or disease,
wildly but accurately,
knowing my best route,
carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years,
never asking, “Where are we going?”
We were riding (if I'd only known)
to this.
Dear friend,
please do not think
that I visualize guitars playing
or my father arching his bone.
I do not even expect my mother's mouth.
I know that I have died before—
once in November, once in June.
How strange to choose June again,
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies.
Of course guitars will not play!
The snakes will certainly not notice.
New York City will not mind.
At night the bats will beat on the trees,
knowing it all,
seeing what they sensed all day
Anna Who Was Mad
Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.
Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take.
Give me a report on the condition of my soul.
Give me a complete statement of my actions.
Hand me a jack-in-the-pulpit and let me listen in.
Put me in the stirrups and bring a tour group through.
Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy.
Did I make you go insane?
Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?
Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist
who dragged you out like a gold cart?
Did I make you go insane?
From the grave write me, Anna!
You are nothing but ashes but nevertheless
pick up
the Parker Pen I gave you.
Write me.
Write
Said the Poet to the Analyst
My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget who one words is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
somethhing I might have said...
but did not.
Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I worth with my best, for instances,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.
Man and Wife
by Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.
Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.
"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"
by Robert Lowell
"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
--Schopenhauer
"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."
Home After Three Months Away
by Robert Lowell
Gone now the baby's nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze--
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.
Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair--
they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child's play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush. . . .
Dearest I cannot loiter hre
in lather like a polar bear.
Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen; no 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.
Monday, November 16, 2009
McLean Hospital: Poetry on the Psychiatric Ward
McLean Hospital: Poetry on the Psychiatric Ward
by Doug Holder
(From: Poetry.About.Com)
In the winter the view from McLean Hospital can be quite beautiful. From its perch on top of a hill over the sedate town of Belmont, Massachusetts, the alluring sparkle of the city lights of Boston creates a brilliant panorama stretching across the horizon. One would not ordinarily look for such a scene at a psychiatric hospital. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that on these grounds poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton found comfort and even inspiration. Here they were safe from the manic highs and lows, the tumult, and the stresses of the city only five miles away.
Times have changed since that august group of poets paced the halls at McLean Hospital. The population of the hospital is dramatically different now than in Anne Sexton’s and Lowell’s time. Lowell describes the patrician atmosphere at the hospital in his poem “Waking In The Blue”:
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties
once a Harvard all-American fullback
if such were possible!
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties...
A kingly granite profile in crimson golf-cap
worn all day, all night
he thinks only of his figure
of slimming on sherbert and ginger-ale
more cut off from words than a seal.
Lowell’s piece describes life at Mclean more than 40 years ago. It’s very different on the wards of the hospital now: we have the homeless, Medicare clients, along with students and the occasional VIP.
On one unit where I worked, a unit with acutely ill patients, a poetry group thrived on Friday evenings. For 10 years I worked with patients in poetry groups--a sometimes frustrating but often rewarding effort. In the first group I ran, I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I thought this haunting cry of a poem would act as a stimulant for discussion. Unfortunately, the patients did not want to hear Ginsberg’s lament about the “best minds of his generation lost to madness.” I remember one patient telling me bluntly, “Why do I have to hear this? I live it.”
There were other mishaps in the early days of the group. Once I read a poem that concerned chickens. A young woman suddenly became hysterical and ran from the group in a fit of tears. The rest of the patients in the group followed her in support. It seems that the girl associated fowl with a particurally painful episode in her life. Needless to say, I had some explaining to do to my supervisor.
I also remember more hopeful reactions to the poems I read. A clinically depressed Harvard grad student thanked me for a particular passage from a poem, because it shed light on his situation and gave him a degree of hope. An almost mute patient suddenly began to wax eloquent after I read a stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland.” One thing is certain: the right poem at the right time can certainly evoke strong reactions and can even act as a balm in a time of great stress.
The poems I read in these groups were always quite accessible. I am an avid reader and contributor to the small press, so I used little magazines like Ibbetson Street, Poesy, Spare Change News and others to good effect. I encouraged patients to bring in their favorite poems, or ones they wrote themselves. I encouraged all members of the group to be supportive and positive toward each other’s work. Over the years I developed a community of patient poets at McLean.
For the last year or so I have worked in a different setting and different capacity at the hospital. I don’t run a formal poetry group currently, but I still take patients to readings at Out of The Blue Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts when time permits. And still, when I walk around the grounds of McLean I am often greeted by former poetry group members, “Hey Doug, when’s the next poetry group?”
~Doug Holder
by Doug Holder
(From: Poetry.About.Com)
In the winter the view from McLean Hospital can be quite beautiful. From its perch on top of a hill over the sedate town of Belmont, Massachusetts, the alluring sparkle of the city lights of Boston creates a brilliant panorama stretching across the horizon. One would not ordinarily look for such a scene at a psychiatric hospital. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that on these grounds poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton found comfort and even inspiration. Here they were safe from the manic highs and lows, the tumult, and the stresses of the city only five miles away.
Times have changed since that august group of poets paced the halls at McLean Hospital. The population of the hospital is dramatically different now than in Anne Sexton’s and Lowell’s time. Lowell describes the patrician atmosphere at the hospital in his poem “Waking In The Blue”:
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties
once a Harvard all-American fullback
if such were possible!
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties...
A kingly granite profile in crimson golf-cap
worn all day, all night
he thinks only of his figure
of slimming on sherbert and ginger-ale
more cut off from words than a seal.
Lowell’s piece describes life at Mclean more than 40 years ago. It’s very different on the wards of the hospital now: we have the homeless, Medicare clients, along with students and the occasional VIP.
On one unit where I worked, a unit with acutely ill patients, a poetry group thrived on Friday evenings. For 10 years I worked with patients in poetry groups--a sometimes frustrating but often rewarding effort. In the first group I ran, I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” I thought this haunting cry of a poem would act as a stimulant for discussion. Unfortunately, the patients did not want to hear Ginsberg’s lament about the “best minds of his generation lost to madness.” I remember one patient telling me bluntly, “Why do I have to hear this? I live it.”
There were other mishaps in the early days of the group. Once I read a poem that concerned chickens. A young woman suddenly became hysterical and ran from the group in a fit of tears. The rest of the patients in the group followed her in support. It seems that the girl associated fowl with a particurally painful episode in her life. Needless to say, I had some explaining to do to my supervisor.
I also remember more hopeful reactions to the poems I read. A clinically depressed Harvard grad student thanked me for a particular passage from a poem, because it shed light on his situation and gave him a degree of hope. An almost mute patient suddenly began to wax eloquent after I read a stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland.” One thing is certain: the right poem at the right time can certainly evoke strong reactions and can even act as a balm in a time of great stress.
The poems I read in these groups were always quite accessible. I am an avid reader and contributor to the small press, so I used little magazines like Ibbetson Street, Poesy, Spare Change News and others to good effect. I encouraged patients to bring in their favorite poems, or ones they wrote themselves. I encouraged all members of the group to be supportive and positive toward each other’s work. Over the years I developed a community of patient poets at McLean.
For the last year or so I have worked in a different setting and different capacity at the hospital. I don’t run a formal poetry group currently, but I still take patients to readings at Out of The Blue Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts when time permits. And still, when I walk around the grounds of McLean I am often greeted by former poetry group members, “Hey Doug, when’s the next poetry group?”
~Doug Holder
McLean History
* This material gleaned from Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane"
McLean Hospital was founded in Charlestown, Mass. in 1811. That section was later incorporated into my hometown of Somerville, Mass. It was called the "Asylum for the Insane". It was founded by a group of prominent Bostonians who were concerned about the homeless mentally ill. The early benefactor was a man named John McLean. In 1895 it moved to Waverly Oaks Hill in Belmont, Mass. Fredrick Law Olmsted advised the powers-that-be about this site. Ironically he was later hospitalized at McLean and passed away there. I worked at the cottage he was hospitalized at for the past seven years.
The poet Robert Lowell coined the term "Mayflower Screwballs." But of course it has a long Brahmin lineage. When McLean was in Charlestown, Mass it housed two brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of Emerson's brothers was retarded and was in and out of the hospital. Edward Bliss Emerson suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized there. He started out with promise--graduating second in his class at Harvard. He was described as being sometimes "gay" and sometimes "tortured". His mood swings would be indictive of Manic Depression Disorder. He would fly in fits and throw all his clothes out of his room for instance.
William James, ther father of American psychology, is believed to have stayed at McLean. Some doctors told Alex Beam that they saw him on the patient record list. There is still a lot of controversy around this--speculation, etc.../
McLean Hospital was founded in Charlestown, Mass. in 1811. That section was later incorporated into my hometown of Somerville, Mass. It was called the "Asylum for the Insane". It was founded by a group of prominent Bostonians who were concerned about the homeless mentally ill. The early benefactor was a man named John McLean. In 1895 it moved to Waverly Oaks Hill in Belmont, Mass. Fredrick Law Olmsted advised the powers-that-be about this site. Ironically he was later hospitalized at McLean and passed away there. I worked at the cottage he was hospitalized at for the past seven years.
The poet Robert Lowell coined the term "Mayflower Screwballs." But of course it has a long Brahmin lineage. When McLean was in Charlestown, Mass it housed two brothers of Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of Emerson's brothers was retarded and was in and out of the hospital. Edward Bliss Emerson suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized there. He started out with promise--graduating second in his class at Harvard. He was described as being sometimes "gay" and sometimes "tortured". His mood swings would be indictive of Manic Depression Disorder. He would fly in fits and throw all his clothes out of his room for instance.
William James, ther father of American psychology, is believed to have stayed at McLean. Some doctors told Alex Beam that they saw him on the patient record list. There is still a lot of controversy around this--speculation, etc.../
Friday, November 13, 2009
Interview with Lois Ames: Social Worker to Anne Sexton and Slyvia Plath
by Doug Holder
Friday, November 13, 2009
Not rated by the Author.
Interview by Doug Holder
Lois Ames: Confidante to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.”
Recently I was privileged to hear Lois Ames speak at the “Wilderness House Literary Retreat,” in Littleton, Mass. Lois Ames is a poet, biographer and psychotherapist. She was a confidante of the poet Anne Sexton, and has published many essays on both Sexton and Sylvia Plath including: “A Biographical Note,” in Plath’s “Bell Jar,” She also was the editor of “Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters.’ I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”
Doug Holder: Is it a natural fit for “confessional” poets like Sexton and
Plath to have a trained social worker , and a literary historian, as a
confidante?
Lois Ames: I don’t think it is usual. I don’t think that’s why I was their
friend or confidante. I knew Sylvia from high school and Smith College. Anne I once met in high school, but I didn’t know her till much later. I was then a trained social worker, but I don’t think that’s why we became friends.
Anne certainly asked me to go to McLean Hospital when she first started
teaching poetry there. She wanted someone trained to help her when she reviewed the patient poems. She didn’t want to hurt these fragile patients’ feelings. She wanted me to monitor what she said. She turned out to be superb.
Doug Holder: You wrote the biographical note for the “Bell Jar.” Did you
ever want to do a complete biography of Plath and Sexton?
Lois Ames: I did. The book “Anne Sexton: Self-Portrait in Letters.” was my idea. It was done partly to get an understanding about what material was there. She had appointed me her official biographer. But it was also to help her children to understand aspects of their mother’s life they weren’t aware of. I thought if I was there for them we could go through the letters, and this would be very helpful.
I was the first one to be asked to do the biography of Sylvia Plath. I had
a contract with the family. Harper and Row was my publisher. It became
increasingly difficult for me to do this, as other biographers have found
out. And I finally decided for the sake of my own sanity and my family; that
it was better to pay back the advance to Harper’s. I always felt it was a
wise decision.
Doug Holder: Did Plath have any interest in teaching poetry at McLean
Hospital, like Sexton?
Lois Ames: Oh, no, I don’t think so. Sylvia was a junior in college when she was at McLean. In those days she wasn’t trained to do anything like that.
She went to England after she graduated Smith. There was no reason for her to even think of doing that. That was not Sylvia’s interest. Anne loved teaching. Sylvia found teaching very difficult. She taught one year at Smith College and felt that it drained her. I assume going to England with Ted Hughes and leaving Smith, was a wonderful opportunity for her.
Doug Holder: Anne was not formally educated beyond high school. If say, she was educated in the Liberal Arts at Harvard, would she be a different poet?
Lois Ames: She was very interested in form when she first started and she studied it very diligently. When she was in Robert Lowell’s workshop she studied it as well. She read a great deal. She tried to make up for the great gaps in her education. Her teachers in public school gave up on her very early. They told her parents that she was hopeless. She was sent to the “Garland School,” a finishing school for girls at the time. She said she learned to make perfect white sauce there, but that was it. But she was writing poetry when she was there and it was published in a magazine the school put out.
Doug Holder: Have you had any clients since Sexton and Plath who have
reached literary heights?
Lois Ames: I knew a lot of the people in the workshop Anne ran. I am sworn to confidentiality however. But a lot of people, who came out of the
workshop, have been or are published poets. They do very well in the poetry world.
Doug Holder: Is your own poetry influence by either poet?
Lois Ames: Anne certainly taught me a lot about reading. She taught me to get as many critiques as possible. Have I ever tried to follow the style of either of them? No. And no one has ever accused me of that.
Doug Holder: Do you think if Plath didn’t have this dramatic background of suicide, Smith, and marriage to Ted Hughes, etc...and was a working-stiff from Waltham, would she be as celebrated as she is today?
Lois Ames: I am wondering where Plath will stand in a hundred years. Ted Hughes was very good at marketing Plath. He kept her reputation growing by the astute publication of her work. I think the fact that she and Ted Hughes had a passionate romance, were from a tumultuous family, and the fact that Sylvia killed herself, all lead to the mystique. It contributes to her present fame. Some of Plath’s poems were superb and she knew a lot about poetic form.
Doug Holder: Where will Sexton’s work stand in a hundred years?
Lois Ames: I think it will fare well. I think Sexton was more daring than
Plath. The problem is that people don’t read Sexton today. I don’t think she is promoted. She hasn’t been marketed the way Plath is today.
Doug Holder: The poet Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, has been much maligned.Both Plath and his other wife committed suicide. It has been said he drove Plath to suicide through his infidelity, etc... What’s your take?
Lois Ames: Ted had a lover during their marriage that he later had a child with. This was the source of Sylvia’s rage. Later she killed herself the same way Sylvia did. I felt extreme sympathy for Ted. There is nothing more rage full to do to other people than to kill yourself. I don’t think other people are responsible for other people’s suicides. With the medications we have now maybe Sylvia and Ann could have been saved.
Doug Holder: Did the limitations on women coming of age in the 50’s play a role in these untimely deaths?
Lois Ames: Each of us was a warrior trying to find herself. Every
achievement was huge. To get out from under the dish washing, the daycare, and to create anything took enormous courage, and strength. I am sure it took its toll.
Doug Holder: Did Sexton and Plath’s mental illness contribute positively to their poetry?
Lois Ames: Each wrote in spite of their illness. It took enormous courage to do this.
Doug Holder
by Doug Holder
Friday, November 13, 2009
Not rated by the Author.
Interview by Doug Holder
Lois Ames: Confidante to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.”
Recently I was privileged to hear Lois Ames speak at the “Wilderness House Literary Retreat,” in Littleton, Mass. Lois Ames is a poet, biographer and psychotherapist. She was a confidante of the poet Anne Sexton, and has published many essays on both Sexton and Sylvia Plath including: “A Biographical Note,” in Plath’s “Bell Jar,” She also was the editor of “Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters.’ I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”
Doug Holder: Is it a natural fit for “confessional” poets like Sexton and
Plath to have a trained social worker , and a literary historian, as a
confidante?
Lois Ames: I don’t think it is usual. I don’t think that’s why I was their
friend or confidante. I knew Sylvia from high school and Smith College. Anne I once met in high school, but I didn’t know her till much later. I was then a trained social worker, but I don’t think that’s why we became friends.
Anne certainly asked me to go to McLean Hospital when she first started
teaching poetry there. She wanted someone trained to help her when she reviewed the patient poems. She didn’t want to hurt these fragile patients’ feelings. She wanted me to monitor what she said. She turned out to be superb.
Doug Holder: You wrote the biographical note for the “Bell Jar.” Did you
ever want to do a complete biography of Plath and Sexton?
Lois Ames: I did. The book “Anne Sexton: Self-Portrait in Letters.” was my idea. It was done partly to get an understanding about what material was there. She had appointed me her official biographer. But it was also to help her children to understand aspects of their mother’s life they weren’t aware of. I thought if I was there for them we could go through the letters, and this would be very helpful.
I was the first one to be asked to do the biography of Sylvia Plath. I had
a contract with the family. Harper and Row was my publisher. It became
increasingly difficult for me to do this, as other biographers have found
out. And I finally decided for the sake of my own sanity and my family; that
it was better to pay back the advance to Harper’s. I always felt it was a
wise decision.
Doug Holder: Did Plath have any interest in teaching poetry at McLean
Hospital, like Sexton?
Lois Ames: Oh, no, I don’t think so. Sylvia was a junior in college when she was at McLean. In those days she wasn’t trained to do anything like that.
She went to England after she graduated Smith. There was no reason for her to even think of doing that. That was not Sylvia’s interest. Anne loved teaching. Sylvia found teaching very difficult. She taught one year at Smith College and felt that it drained her. I assume going to England with Ted Hughes and leaving Smith, was a wonderful opportunity for her.
Doug Holder: Anne was not formally educated beyond high school. If say, she was educated in the Liberal Arts at Harvard, would she be a different poet?
Lois Ames: She was very interested in form when she first started and she studied it very diligently. When she was in Robert Lowell’s workshop she studied it as well. She read a great deal. She tried to make up for the great gaps in her education. Her teachers in public school gave up on her very early. They told her parents that she was hopeless. She was sent to the “Garland School,” a finishing school for girls at the time. She said she learned to make perfect white sauce there, but that was it. But she was writing poetry when she was there and it was published in a magazine the school put out.
Doug Holder: Have you had any clients since Sexton and Plath who have
reached literary heights?
Lois Ames: I knew a lot of the people in the workshop Anne ran. I am sworn to confidentiality however. But a lot of people, who came out of the
workshop, have been or are published poets. They do very well in the poetry world.
Doug Holder: Is your own poetry influence by either poet?
Lois Ames: Anne certainly taught me a lot about reading. She taught me to get as many critiques as possible. Have I ever tried to follow the style of either of them? No. And no one has ever accused me of that.
Doug Holder: Do you think if Plath didn’t have this dramatic background of suicide, Smith, and marriage to Ted Hughes, etc...and was a working-stiff from Waltham, would she be as celebrated as she is today?
Lois Ames: I am wondering where Plath will stand in a hundred years. Ted Hughes was very good at marketing Plath. He kept her reputation growing by the astute publication of her work. I think the fact that she and Ted Hughes had a passionate romance, were from a tumultuous family, and the fact that Sylvia killed herself, all lead to the mystique. It contributes to her present fame. Some of Plath’s poems were superb and she knew a lot about poetic form.
Doug Holder: Where will Sexton’s work stand in a hundred years?
Lois Ames: I think it will fare well. I think Sexton was more daring than
Plath. The problem is that people don’t read Sexton today. I don’t think she is promoted. She hasn’t been marketed the way Plath is today.
Doug Holder: The poet Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, has been much maligned.Both Plath and his other wife committed suicide. It has been said he drove Plath to suicide through his infidelity, etc... What’s your take?
Lois Ames: Ted had a lover during their marriage that he later had a child with. This was the source of Sylvia’s rage. Later she killed herself the same way Sylvia did. I felt extreme sympathy for Ted. There is nothing more rage full to do to other people than to kill yourself. I don’t think other people are responsible for other people’s suicides. With the medications we have now maybe Sylvia and Ann could have been saved.
Doug Holder: Did the limitations on women coming of age in the 50’s play a role in these untimely deaths?
Lois Ames: Each of us was a warrior trying to find herself. Every
achievement was huge. To get out from under the dish washing, the daycare, and to create anything took enormous courage, and strength. I am sure it took its toll.
Doug Holder: Did Sexton and Plath’s mental illness contribute positively to their poetry?
Lois Ames: Each wrote in spite of their illness. It took enormous courage to do this.
Doug Holder
From 1982 to 2009. My history.
I started working at McLean Hospital in 1982 This was before a lot of the land was sold off in the 1990's. The grounds were sprawling, and beautifully conceived by none other than Fredrick Law Olmstead. I worked on a locked, high security ward, that housed psychotic patients who required close supervision...in the parlance they were a threat to themselves and others. I wrote a poem about my first night there that was included in a booklet of poems that was published by a small press in 1998: "Poems of Boston and Just Beyond:From the Back Bay to the Back Ward." (Alpha Beat Press.) It concerned a patient's delusion about me--quite a shock to this nascent mental health worker:
First Night on the Psychiatric Ward
The night seemed perfectly cast
stormy, thunder and rain
the patient was biblical
long hair and a beard
with his staff at his command.
He put a paternal hand on me
and called me his "finest creation"
What could I do
but thank him?
He smiled
with divine
patronization
undoubtedly I was a much valued acolyte.
Then suddenly
a flash from the storm lit the building
in a momentary spectral glow
a clap of thunder howled down the locked ward.
He looked at me like a proud teacher
patting me on the back
" Good work kid, good work."
At the time I was coming off a bender of reading concerning the Beat poets: Kerouac,Ginsberg, etc... and there was a patient on that locked ward who had a written correspondence with Ginsberg--which I thought was great. I heard from the start that Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and others had "residencies at the asylum." I was intrigued by the poetry groups Sexton lead as well. In 1984 the dye- was- cast. I transferred out of the night shift, and took a day/evening position on Bowditch Hall--the very hall Lowell was housed on. There I saw a framed and signed copy of Lowell's poem "Waking in the Blue"--the famous poem he wrote about his time on Bowditch:
Waking in the Blue
by Robert Lowell
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")
What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale--
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;
the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"
Porcellian '29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig--
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
** "....In 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud's paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void." (From This Day in Literature.com)*****
For some reason this sparked me to start my first poetry group on the ward. At a later point I submitted Lowell's "Waking in the Blue" to Robert Pinsky's "Americans' Favorite Poems" anthology, with my introduction to the poem. To my delight I was included in the anthology.
I originally did the poetry group on the ward I worked on, but later on I moved them to other settings in the hospital. There was an article I did for a now defunct magazine "The Boston Poet" about poetry on the wards.
Some years ago Beam was informed that I was running poetry groups on the ward. He called to ask me for an interview for an article he was writing about the "mad poets" at McLean for the magazine DoubleTake. The magazine was based in Somerville for a short while before it folded. He interviewed me at my home on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass. It was evident that he was in the seminal stages of his research. Later I was surprised to get a call from a fact checker from the Atlantic magazine, in which another article about McLean by Beam was to appear.
In 2000 I started a poetry group on Bowditch Hall. Later I started to run groups on two seperate wards, and expanded to Appleton House,a sort of community residence for long term patients. In 2002 I moved to Waverly House, and my poetry groups ended, although I did set up clients for literary and journalistic internships at "the new renaissance magazine," and "The Somerville News."
Over the years ex-patients to returning patients, to folks I see out in the street stop to talk about the groups. Some have published poetry since leaving the ward, one fellow I run into now and then is working on his English degree, one I lost touch with applied for a poetry program at Stanford. But whatever they took for the experience, I hoped the groups made them feel a little less like "patients" and a little more like poets.
First Night on the Psychiatric Ward
The night seemed perfectly cast
stormy, thunder and rain
the patient was biblical
long hair and a beard
with his staff at his command.
He put a paternal hand on me
and called me his "finest creation"
What could I do
but thank him?
He smiled
with divine
patronization
undoubtedly I was a much valued acolyte.
Then suddenly
a flash from the storm lit the building
in a momentary spectral glow
a clap of thunder howled down the locked ward.
He looked at me like a proud teacher
patting me on the back
" Good work kid, good work."
At the time I was coming off a bender of reading concerning the Beat poets: Kerouac,Ginsberg, etc... and there was a patient on that locked ward who had a written correspondence with Ginsberg--which I thought was great. I heard from the start that Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and others had "residencies at the asylum." I was intrigued by the poetry groups Sexton lead as well. In 1984 the dye- was- cast. I transferred out of the night shift, and took a day/evening position on Bowditch Hall--the very hall Lowell was housed on. There I saw a framed and signed copy of Lowell's poem "Waking in the Blue"--the famous poem he wrote about his time on Bowditch:
Waking in the Blue
by Robert Lowell
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")
What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale--
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;
the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"
Porcellian '29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig--
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
** "....In 1977 the poet Robert Lowell died at the age of sixty in the back seat of a New York City taxi. He had hailed the cab at JFK airport and was heading up to West 67th Street, returning to his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. He had just flown back from a disastrous trip to Ireland, where he had gone to explain to his present wife, the Anglo-Irish Lady Caroline Blackwood -- like Hardwick a writer, as well as heiress to the Guinness Stout fortune -- why their marriage was over. The meeting at Blackwood's estate outside Dublin had of course ended badly, with Blackwood storming out with her three children -- the son she had had with Lowell and two daughters from two former marriages, one to the painter, Lucien Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud), one to the composer, Israel Citcowitz. At the end, Lowell still clutched in his stiffening arms one of Lucien Freud's paintings of the young Blackwood, staring out from the canvas into the void." (From This Day in Literature.com)*****
For some reason this sparked me to start my first poetry group on the ward. At a later point I submitted Lowell's "Waking in the Blue" to Robert Pinsky's "Americans' Favorite Poems" anthology, with my introduction to the poem. To my delight I was included in the anthology.
I originally did the poetry group on the ward I worked on, but later on I moved them to other settings in the hospital. There was an article I did for a now defunct magazine "The Boston Poet" about poetry on the wards.
Some years ago Beam was informed that I was running poetry groups on the ward. He called to ask me for an interview for an article he was writing about the "mad poets" at McLean for the magazine DoubleTake. The magazine was based in Somerville for a short while before it folded. He interviewed me at my home on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass. It was evident that he was in the seminal stages of his research. Later I was surprised to get a call from a fact checker from the Atlantic magazine, in which another article about McLean by Beam was to appear.
In 2000 I started a poetry group on Bowditch Hall. Later I started to run groups on two seperate wards, and expanded to Appleton House,a sort of community residence for long term patients. In 2002 I moved to Waverly House, and my poetry groups ended, although I did set up clients for literary and journalistic internships at "the new renaissance magazine," and "The Somerville News."
Over the years ex-patients to returning patients, to folks I see out in the street stop to talk about the groups. Some have published poetry since leaving the ward, one fellow I run into now and then is working on his English degree, one I lost touch with applied for a poetry program at Stanford. But whatever they took for the experience, I hoped the groups made them feel a little less like "patients" and a little more like poets.
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