Intersections of Madness and Poetry
Some select passages of my favourite poems
Good morning dear readers! Thanks to all of you for joining me at a time in Edmonton where it could be easily justified to stay in bed. To put it simply good readers, I wake up and write day after day, year after year because I have a deep, strong affection for poetry. I get long-winded, I lapse into stanzas, I lose myself in poetry. I have been so very blessed to have been offered a temporary job teaching poetry in hospitals, but more on that when everything is assured. I wanted to quote a couple of poems that truly have inspired me to do what I do. Just small parts of them.
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
“And you my father there on the sad height!
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears I pray!
Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, Rage against the dying of the light”
I love this poem so much. I recited it to my dad in his final days on the planet. I read it live to a crowd in a park once and then sat with a man who had lost his father and watched him begin to weep as he told me of his father’s passing. I have aimed (and failed) to achieve such poetic perfection in my own words. What I can’t believe is when I tell friends or co-workers about my passion for poetry and they respond, “Oh, I’m just not that much of a poetry person.” I would bet dollars to nickels that this person has at least ten songs in their head that just send their happiness hormones shooting like stars, and that in their lives they have barely even tried to write any poems.
Here, let me quote another one:
Once upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore
Suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping
Rapping at my chamber door, only this and nothing more.”
This is from “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. Poe is one of the first poets I encountered in my teen years who wrote with such incredible rhyme, rhythm and structure that simply left me in awe. And one of the coolest things is there have been some rethinking of this poem that makes it so much easier to understand each word, each nuance the author intended. Check this out:
One of the amazing things about this poem, in some of the same ways that Don Quioxte by Cervantes was, this poem is about madness. I find it interesting how little people knew about madness in earlier times, how they attribute it to such things as getting lost in novels of knights, maidens and castles, or in grief as “The Raven” explores. But I do feel it is incredibly brave to write such brilliant words about something so many of us fear to face up to.
There are so many others. But I haven’t really explained yet why I feel the way I do about poetry. Part of it has to do with my younger days when I first moved into an apartment without any roommates. I would scour the libraries, the book stores. I would look for any chance to be exposed to more poetry. I ended up with favourites like Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton. It was a bit daunting at first to want to be a poet, the only places I knew of to get poems published were vanity presses. Send in your poem and we can guarantee to publish it if you buy a poetry collection from us for $75 USD. There were many, many scams like this. But I kept at it. This is one reason why I feel young people who want to be writers should get formal post-secondary education because in such a short time compared to how long it took for me, you learn to be wary of such grifters.
Well, I know most of you didn’t really sign up for a poetry class, but I did want to quote what I can remember of the next poem, which is the 23rd Psalm from the book of Psalms in the bible. Here goes:
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want
He makes me lie down in green pastures
He leads me beside the still waters
He restores my soul
He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his names sake
Yea though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear no evil. For thou art with me.
Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me
you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies
you anoint my head with oil. My cup runneth over
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
All this is so beautiful, powerful. David, the sheep herder who wrote this was no weak willed or lily-livered flowery poet. He was a brave warrior who had a deep love for his God. He would make up and sing songs while he was tending sheep and things like this brought him from being just a humble worker bee to King of Israel. Sorry if anyone gets triggered or doesn’t enjoy parts of the bible. There was a time in my youth when I didn’t believe in it at all but my mom sowed a seed in me, telling me the bible was an unequalled piece of literature. I had another friend, Jason Andrews, who I used to argue with a lot who convinced me that before I judge it, I had to read the bible, which I did, and it caused me to change and to grow as a person.