Shaking the dead geranium
Beyond Bedlam: poems written out of mental distress, edited by Ken Smith and Matthew Sweeney [Anvil £7.95]
With this anthology another taboo, perhaps the final one, falls. Anthologies of work by other traditionally marginalised groups women, blacks, gays - are now well established. This is the first mainstream anthology of poetry by people who have suffered mental Illness, a group far larger than blacks or gays but hitherto virtually unmentionable. To be mentally ill has been a matter of shame for the sufferer and of fear for other people. ft strikes so directly at the personality, transforming someone we know into someone other, that those who are mentally ill usually hide it if they can and, if recovered, deny it.
Until now. Beyond Bedlam celebrates the 750th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Bethlem Hospital and its proceeds go to mental health charities. The therapeutic power of writing poetry is noted by the psychiatrists who conceived and introduce the book and by the editors who mention their own “brushes with mental instability”, something that would have been unimaginable not long ago. The editors go on to refer to the potentially transforming power of madness when describing the anthology’s structure:
“rather than settling on a random or alphabetical order, we shaped our selected text as an implicit narrative: beginning with the fear of madness, its foreshadowing, its sudden or its slow coming on, the long throes of it, the dealing with it afterwards, perhaps long afterwards - the living with it. For those who visit that wild country and return, normality can never be the same again.”
This structure works very well, giving the whole book a satisfying and indeed moving shape.
The anthology is original not only in subject matter and structure, but also in range. More than half the poems are by writers previously unpublished (at least in book form), chosen from over 5000 poems submitted to the editors. These are set in the context of poems by contemporary published poets and by poets of the past. As the editors put it, “This strategy provided continuity and a context in which to set unknown contemporaries in suffering.”
The strategy is brilliant in concept but less so in execution. The poets of the past are particularly weak. Smart, Clare and Beddoes rightly appear. Blake is represented by two nondescript fragments as if the editors couldn’t quite bring themselves to accept that Blake’s work shows not the slightest sign of mental distress beyond justified rage at injustice. Other grapplers with recurrent depression, like Herbert and Hopkins, do not appear.
For non-English writers, there are dull pieces by Hölderlin and Pessoa and a prose Raving by Rimbaud, but none of Baudelaire’s Spleen poems which, in Lowell’s versions, have a kind of raw aching grandeur.
There is a good range of Americans: Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Berryman, Roethke, Ginsberg; but no Nemerov who, with poems like Redeployment and Brainstorm, is one of the subtlest explorers of mental distress. It is reading the Americans that doubts set in. Eliot is represented by a socially mocking prose poem, Hysteria, rather than by any of the poems of depression and breakdown from Rhapsody on a Windy Night where
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium
to The Hollow Men. Pound has a stoical Canto fragment, nothing of the breaking terror when he faced trial and execution for treason in the cages at Pisa. Plath has two quiet poems, of fear (Apprehensions) and of hope (I am vertical), but none of the poems that express mental distress directly: Daddy, Lady Lazarus, An Appearance, Mary’s Song or fifty others. And so on.
Gradually the paradoxical truth dawns: this book of poems written out of mental distress contains no poems of extreme emotion. The poems are often the products of great suffering, but do not usually express it directly. There is no rending or self-rending savagery, no scarcely controllable terror, no utter confusion (except In Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Riddym Ravings where it is distanced by Caribbean demotic), nothing suicidal. One realises that the book is published on behalf of a National Health trust and has been supervised by psychiatrists dedicated to the relief of suffering. It will be bought by many recovering or still suffering from mental illness and should not be the cause of further distress. Understandably, the book’s emphasis is on cure or at least coping, not surrender.
Within this restraint, Beyond Bedlam contains many fine poems where the poet has suffered mental distress and survived to tell the tale with some composure. Of the dozen living published poets, Selima Hill gives four moving accounts of obsession; Kit Wright writes amusingly as a patient about the social aspects of mental institutions; and there are powerful poems by Paul Durcan and Sean O’Brien. My favourite is Ian Duhig’s Clare’s Jig #43 which is placed next to John Clarets I am, yet what I am none cares or knows and loses nothing by the comparison.
With the poems by unpublished poets, the range that the editors have found and included is startling. There are poems showing literary awareness, like Peter Pegnall’s Broken Eggs which is also the angriest poem in the book:
Blake was mad. Clare was mad. Plath was mad. I’m
O.K. at the moment. I don’t think crows
slouch like scavenging border guards. That God’s
abandoned the game. That, stripped of reason,
we see. If only you’d glimpsed those poor sods
rocking themselves to some dark place who knows
where, dribble gunging their lips, stiff with crime
and refusal, you’d know what fucking treason
spills from intellectuals, hungry to hang
like limpets on those quaking souls who sang
without hope.
The assured references, movement and rhymes are striking and all the more moving when, in the latter part of the poem, they collapse:
no blazing ladders into the clouds,
no field mice scarcely twitching the long grass,
no small bright wound can put you together,
put you together, put you together
again.
The same kind of control appears in the extended ice symbolism of Pascale Petit’s Eisriesenwelt and Frozen Falls and in Harry Smart’s poems, especially Träume II with its recurring nightmare of sudden violent death:
knowing God, going beyond the impenetrable
and, more to the point, returning to testify.
Shot, hanged, butchered, guillotined and unbelieved.
This captures the second agony - that of being unable to communicate the first. More often, there are accounts of suffering, such as those by Denise Jones, Jill Bamber, Mary Guckian, Jo Pestel and John Horder, where the story is moving but the rendering does not do it justice. An exception is Ifigenija Simonovic’s I used to be a girl which builds up a devastating account of the experience of child abuse.
Finally there are the utterly unclassifiable poems: fragments like Christine Doherty’s Wrote at Drop-In Centre:
Pleased to meet you
My name is Jesus
I can fly and do miracles
and Chris Rawlinson’s Sunday Morning in Putney:
Five mushrooms clustered in a tufted dell,
The tintinnabulations of a single lacquered bell,
An ochre mist subsides; Laetitia is not well.
and longer poems like Martin Sonenberg’s Nightnurse, Scott Verner’s meditations on 18th century plaster heads, Susan Gaukroger’s A Common Cause and V G Lee’s Smile which celebrates, humorously and ambiguously, the return to a kind of normality:
I smile. My first smile of the year -
the size and shine of a partial eclipse.
Without the experience of mental distress, poems like all of these could not have been written. We are richer for having access to them and the Bethlem Royal is to be thanked for making them available to us.
Page(s) 34-38
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