Touched With That Crazy Poetic Fire

Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby in Touched With Fire - directed by Paul Dalio. Credit Roadside Attractions

Ah, those crazy poets. The New York Times review for a new film is headlined "'Touched With Fire,' a Love Story Between Two Bipolar Poets"

This is not a film review. I haven't seen the film. I did read the book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison some years ago because I was interested in seeing the links she found between manic-depression and creativity.

Art and madness have a history. But is the anguish and perhaps volatile intensity of the "artistic temperament" a characteristic of those who take that path, or a sign of a now-identifiable manic-depressive illness?

I have written before about the connections we make between creativity and mental illness, and also the ties to addictions.

The book is concerned with the biological foundations of the illness and examines it through the lives and works of artists including Lord Byron, Vincent Van Gogh, and Virginia Woolf.

The two poets love van Gogh's painting �The Starry Night� which they duplicate full wall-sized in their apartment. They consider van Gogh to be bipolar, and identify with that painting and its whirling euphoria that they also feel sometimes.

The film version (and film adaptations of non-fiction books are very different from those of fiction) also explores bipolar disorder (AKA manic depression) and creativity through the stories of Marco (Luke Kirby), a performance poet, and a quieter poet, Carla (Katie Holmes). They meet in a group-therapy session in a hospital.

The Times reviewer says that:

Together, they adopt a you-and-me-against-the-world attitude and embark on a mind trip fueled by Marco�s science-fiction-worthy interpretation of the mystical connections among things. They build an impenetrable fantasy of themselves as displaced otherworldly beings and parents-to-be of a yet unborn miracle child.

When people are in that manic phase of a bipolar cycle, they are euphoric and filled with promise and potential. This is when they are writing, composing or painting. They are on a natural high. This seems to be the focus of the film - and why not enjoy that high? It makes for a more enjoyable film than one about two poets in their depressive phase acting catatonic and suicidal.

It is tricky to have characters in a film that are poets, because then you need to have some of their poetry out there and deciding if a poet is really "a poet" is a subjective task. (The reviewer, Stephen Holden, feels their poetry is not very good.)

Dalio, the director, has written about his own struggles with bipolar disorder. And author Jamison plays a role in the film as the two poets visit her and she reassures them that staying on their medication won't destroy their creativity.

Several reviewers seem to feel the film is fair, though edging towards the view that the madness is okay because it feeds the creativity. Maybe poets all feel like they are a bit crazy - and perhaps some even enjoy and promote that image - but I think people in general think thay are a bit crazy in this label it and take a drug for it these days.

A review of Jamison's book in The New England Journal of Medicine (1993) notes that her "attention to the family trees of her subjects, showing how melancholia, irritability, insanity, and suicide affect many families yet leave in their wake immense contributions to our cultural heritage." Jamison sees a definite correlation, but "although mental illness is no prerequisite for creativity and at times may confer a definite disadvantage, both the manic and the depressive phases of bipolar illness may also offer something to augment the creative process."

Do we want the cure? She makes the point that although eradication of the genes responsible for the condition would prevent suffering and illness, it might also have a devastating effect on future creativity and genius.

Prompt: Directions Home

Years ago, I was interested to see a feature in The Saturday Review each issue that was called "Writer's Desk." The idea was simple. It showed a writer's actual desk and explained a bit about how they worked there. I always thought that I might gain some insight into writing or writers by knowing about the how and where of their writing. It is a questionable theory, but when I visit a writer's home I am still interested in seeing their writing space.

Thinking about Charles Bukowski's battered desk looking over the Los Angeles harbor or Raymond Carver staring out his Port Angeles, Washington window across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and thinking about going fishing, did give me a bit of a sense about their writing.

So, I looked at Emily Dickinson's home and Wallace Steven's house looking for clues. I walked through Walt Whitman's home in Camden, New Jersey looking for signs of his ecstatic poems, wandering spirit and curiosity.

I was interested to see that a poem by Juan Felipe Herrera, who was recently named Poet Laureate of the United States, was used during National Poetry Month as a writing prompt about home.


Juan Felipe Herrera reads �Five Directions to My House� as part of National Poetry Month 2014.
https://youtu.be/8UPjEcaCG5E

Five Directions to My House

1. Go back to the grain yellow hills where the broken speak of elegance
2. Walk up to the canvas door, the short bed stretched against the clouds
3. Beneath the earth, an ant writes with the grace of a governor
4. Blow, blow Red Tail Hawk, your hidden sleeve�your desert secrets
5. You are there, almost, without a name, without a body, go now
6. I said five, said five like a guitar says six.

Actually, I was more interested in the responses to his poem by students. Here are two of the poems written in response to Herrea's poem.

Six Ways to the Sky by Leyla, age 9

Turn around go to the end of the long bridge
Into the wave of clouds under the colorless arch
Under the heat of the center core.
Over the peregrine falcon flying fast as the race car
Out of the endless underwater cave
Around the wheel of fortune, around, around, around the wheel.
I said six, said six like a rainbow says seven.

Five Minutes to My House by Ilyssa, age 18


One,
the mountain cradles the rising sun as it leaves
a warm pink collection of colors in the air.
Bright, brutal sunlight turns the sky on
like an electrical switch and the sky becomes
alive.

Two,
the staccato of a wood pecker tapping on my roof
in the morning stirs me awake.

Three,
an endless stretch of rocks and dirt, harsh
to the eyes, a barren desolate land.

Four,
a dead bunny carcass lies on the newly
paved road, it ran towards the wheels of a
car. Now, it�s left behind a sore sight
for all except hungry lone scavengers.

Five,
time, time slips through the fingers like
yellow grains of sand left behind on a beach.
Even time moves slowly in this eternal home.

Your writing prompt is to write a poem that gives directions (in any format) to your house or any particular house - including the home of a poet - take a look at my earlier post about writer's homes.

Submissions to this prompt are due by September 6, 2015.

At Home With Poets and Writers

Does Robert Frost's Franconia, NH home fit his poetry?

The Saturday Review used to include a Writer's Desk page with a photo and brief piece about where a writer did their writing. Those writers included Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver. That led me to explore both in person and online the homes of other writers. Perhaps, looking at a writer's writing space gives some clues to what they wrote or how they wrote. Perhaps.

Take a peek at the homes of Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Paul Dunbar and Walt Whitman.

President Abraham Lincoln had written a poem about his home, which opens with this stanza

My childhood home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There�s pleasure in it too.

and ends with this:

I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I�m living in the tombs.

The boathouse in Wales where Dylan Thomas spent the last 4 years of his life.

Poets.org did a feature on the home in poetry in which they say the home can be a "mythic, imagined place, the location of childhood memories, or the brick-and-mortar remainder of a broken relationship. It can represent the proverbial 'room of one�s own,' the simple pleasures of eating and gardening, or hold the drudgery of chores."

Stanley Kunitz said in an interview that, �There was a cloud that hung over our house in Worcester, Massachusetts and it took me almost fifty years or more before I could face it in a poem [The Portrait].�

The "cloud" was formed by the deaths of his father who publicly committed suicide weeks before Kunitz�s birth, and the death of his stepfather and both of his sisters.

W.H. Auden wrote a collection, About the House in which the home becomes an extension of the self.

I suppose I must be quite at home in the world of poetry, because I got 9 out of 10 correct on The Guardian's quiz about poets' houses.Any guesses about what writers used these homes?

I used to believe that I could be a better and more productive writer if I had an isolated cabin in the woods in order to write. I suspect many of you have fantasized about having a place in the woods, a mountaintop or island retreat where we could go and find inspiration and peace.

There is no good evidence that those places actually do inspire writers or allow them to focus, and there are plenty of writers who work in cities and at home surrounded by distractions. 

If you are interested in this topic, you might enjoy reading The Writing Life: Writers On How They Think And Work, American Writers at Home and Writers' Houses.

We know that a writer�s genius does not come from the place where they do their writing. But I think that when writers find some kind of retreat or escape their homes for a place to write, that does tell you something about them, and that space may actually be the inspiration for their writing. I like knowing about a writer�s tools. Pad and paper, or fountain pen, legal pads, an old manual typewriter or a laptop computer? I like seeing where writers work.

John Updike at his desk - from Jill Krementz's The Writer's Desk

Poets and Madness

If you were an English major, you probably read more than most people about writers who had problems with alcohol, drugs or mental illness. In college, I started to think that those were things you had to do to be a writer. You had to suffer. It was Romantic with a capital R.

I still see articles about writers with titles like �Nine Famous Authors Who Did Stints in Mental Institutions�  and  5 Writers Who Suffered from Mental Illnesses & the Impact It Had on Their Art and Great American Writers and Their Cocktails.

This is not just anecdotal. Some early research in 1987 connected creativity with mental illness when researchers noticed a higher occurrence of bipolar disorder in study participants from the Iowa Writers Workshop than in a control group.

The question that formed was "Did they get crazy by trying to be writers, or did they become writers because they were crazy?"

A later study found that those is the arts are more likely to have mental illnesses than those in non-creative professions.

Ernest Hemingway is one of my favorites and he is a classic example of this type of writer. He had it all: depression, alcoholism, narcissistic personality, bipolar disorder, psychosis and finally suicide. Before the doctors and clinics, he �self-medicated� with booze. He liked risk-taking activities. He wrote as therapy, and when he couldn�t write anymore (largely because of the alcohol), he got electroshock treatments. For someone whose life was writing, not being able to write meant he had no reason to live.

Hemingway also had it in his genes and there is some science to it. In 2009, an article published by the Association for Psychological Science showed a definitive link between creativity and the neuregulin 1 gene, a gene that is also associated with psychosis.

Hemingway said �Write drunk. Edit sober� but also claimed he didn�t drink until after his morning writing sessions.

Of course, alcohol is a depressant.

A number of recent studies have looked at the neurological similarities of mental illness and the creative mind. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia appear to be focused within the frontal lobe of the brain and they typically manifest with rather peculiar connections that are similar to some types of connections that would be admired in poetry and other creative writing.

A 2002 study of 1,629 writers found that poets � and specifically female poets � were more likely than even non-fiction writers, playwrights and fiction writers to have some type of mental illness. This became known as �The Sylvia Plath Effect.�

Poet Sylvia Plath�s mental illness has been written about quite a bit. She wrote about it herself in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. She was clinically depressed for much of her life. She had electroshock therapy, attempted suicide, was admitted to a mental institution for six months, got more electric and insulin shock treatments and still the depression ended her life in suicide.

In the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen�s character, Alvy,  warns Annie that Sylvia Plath was an �interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.�

Is there a relationship between poetry and psychosis?

Another tragic female poet, Anne Sexton was in and out of mental institutions  for much of her life. Bipolar and suicidal. She started with poetry as therapy at the suggestion of her therapist. Her poetry is full of madness and pain and, like Plath, Sexton took her own life.


It seems like researchers have gotten caught up in those same stories that caught me in college and they are looking to connect genius and madness.

Any one of us might have been part of a study that included 294 poets (almost all �published� poets) in an anonymous online survey. These poets online scored above average on the �Unusual Experiences�, �Cognitive Disorganization� and �Impulsive Nonconformity� traits. The poets self-identified their work as �avant-garde� scored even higher on �Unusual Experiences.� 

Two of the poets reported schizophrenia, 15 reported bipolar disorder, 152 reported depression and 80 reported anxiety disorder. 

Does that sound about right for poets? Well, actually those percentages are not much higher than the general population.

Since these poets were all self-reporting, it�s possible that they had bought into the madness and writers archetype. Or did their �abnormal� psychology lead them to become writers?

Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water

John Keats by William Hilton � Public Domain

I was reading a a biography of John Keats and looking at some of his letters this past month and learned of a summer hike that Keats made. 

In the summer of 1818,  Keats went on a six-week walking tour through northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Keats and his friend Charles Brown set off in June and walked 600 miles before sailing back to London.

Keats was not an outdoorsman and had spent most of his life in London never having been out of southern England. He was 22 and had never seen a mountain.

They set off with very little in their knapsack � shirt, stockings, nightcap, towels, a brush and comb, snuff, and one book: a translation of Dante.

They started from Lancaster and headed for the Lake District. Keats� brother George and his wife Georgina accompanied them as far as Lancaster and then continued to Liverpool, there to emigrate to America.

This was not a poetry tour but John and Charles stopped at William Wordsworth�s home. Wordsworth was not at  home.

Keats did not write his first poem until age 18. He was encouraged by a literary circle of friends in London, though he worked at a hospital to make his living. Keats� first book, Poems, appeared in 1817 and after that, he devoted himself entirely to poetry.

Keats wrote that as the walk continued he found himself more moved by the people they met than by the landscape. He thought much of the mountains and moors seemed bleak.

He recorded that on June 29, they set off at 4 a.m. up the mountain Skiddaw. It offered a  to the Irish Sea and Scotland.

In the town of Ireby, that watched a performance of traditional dancing and Keats wrote: �I never felt so near the glory of patriotism, the glory of making, by any means, a country happier. This is what I like better than scenery.�

Keats was not pleased with the food on the trip either. In a letter, he writes: �We dined yesterday on dirty bacon dirtier eggs and dirtiest Potatoes with a slice of Salmon.� In Scotland, they seem to have survived on oatcakes and whiskey. He hated the oatcakes but enjoyed the whiskey.

Another poetry stop was to Alloway, the birthplace of the Robert Burns in Scotland. He was happier with this area. He said that the River Doon was �the sweetest river I ever saw� and he enjoyed a large pinch of snuff while standing on the Brig o� Doon, a bridge Burns wrote about in his poems.

Keats and Brown continued through Scotland and made a short trip into Northern Ireland averaging 10-20 miles a day. By August 2, they had made it to the top of Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in the British Isles.

Keats�s health had actually not been very good before the trip, but developed a bad cold at this point and was advised by a doctor to quit the walking tour. He headed back to London, but Brown continued and walked another 1,200 miles.

1818 was not a good year for John and his family. He had financial difficulties. His brother Tom was battling tuberculosis. George and his wife made a poor investment in America and was left penniless in Kentucky.

The one happy thing in his life was his fianc�e, Fanny Brawne.

1819 was a very productive year. By September, he had written a book�s worth of poems including �Ode on a Grecian Urn,� �Ode to a Nightingale,� �Hyperion,� �The Eve of St. Agnes,� �To Autumn,� and �La Belle Dame Sans Merci.�

�John Keats Tombstone in Rome� by Piero Montesacro � Wikimedia Commons

John developed tuberculosis (for which there would be no cure until the next century),  possibly from caring for his brother. Early in 1820, the disease worsened and he was advised to move to a warmer climate.

In September 1820, Keats left for Rome knowing he would probably never see Brawne again. After leaving he felt unable to write to her or read her letters.

Keats wrote his last letter to his walking partner Charles Brown on November 30, 1820: �Tis the most difficult thing in the world to me to write a letter. My stomach continues so bad, that I feel it worse on opening any book � yet I am much better than I was in Quarantine. Then I am afraid to encounter the proing and conning of any thing interesting to me in England. I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence�.

He died in Rome on February 23, 1821 and is buried there. He was only 25 years old.

He wanted a tombstone without name or date, only the words, �Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.� Charles Brown and another friend had the stone place but added a lyre with broken strings and this epitaph which lies some blame on critics who were harsh with Keats� poetry.

�This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821?

crossposted at Weekends in Paradelle

Prompt: First (Poetic) Love

Who is the first poet you fell in love with? In this video from The Poetry Foundation, Edward Hirsch, Evie Shockley, Jean Valentine, Juan Felipe Herrera, Katy Lederer, Marilyn Hacker, Pierre Joris and Rachel Levitsky talk about first poetry loves.

Several of the poets ask the interviewer if the question is meant literally or figuratively, or if the answer can be a poem rather than the poet. This inspired me use that first love of poetry as our prompt and inspiration.

Who is the poet that was your first love? This might be the love of a poem, but it might be a crush on the poet, either by way of a poem or just a photo on a book jacket or an encounter at a reading.

Emily, as she appears on "her" Twitter page

I had an adolescent crush on plain old Emily Dickinson because I felt sorry for her and imagined that if I had been there in Amherst that I might have been friends with her. I would have gotten her outside into nature and maybe we would have even dated.I also had a crush on glamorous Marilyn Monroe at that time because I also wanted to save her from the world.

In �Taking Off Emily Dickinson�s Clothes,� Billy Collins takes that idea to a playful extreme. His poem is an extended metaphor for reading a Dickinson poem. The undressing is also the uncovering of the poems. FOr example, taking off her "tippet made of tulle� is like opening her book.

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer�s dividing water,
and slip inside.

Emily's simple poems are "a more complicated matter" when you actually read them. They are not so easy.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

Emily's habit was to wear a white dress, although she rarely left her family home in Amherst. She was a recluse for the latter part of her life, hiding behind the door when there were visitors. It is assumed that she died a virgin. You can hear Billy Collins read this poem and some of Emily's poetry online and Collins says that "There are many speculations about her...Was she lesbian? Was she celibate? Did she have an affair?" All of that speculation inspired him to write the poem in which he wanted, in a playful way, to put the guessing to rest by undressing her and having sex.

Naomi Shihab Nye

The first time I heard a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye it was her reading "Making a Fist" at a Dodge Poetry Festival. I loved the poem and I had a bit of a crush on the poet too. I bought two of her books because I wanted to read them, but also because I wanted to go up to her and ask her to sign them and say something to her.

In another video, Naomi Shihab Nye talks about how poetry inspires us. She says, "I've carried, for perhaps 30 years, a very tattered piece of notebook paper that says: Philip Levine has described the muse as 'being the portion of the self that largely lives asleep. Being inspired is really being totally alive.' He says that such a state feels a 'little odd' and also 'delicious.' " She also carries with her William Stafford's poem, "The Sky."

Despite my Emily and Naomi crushes, the poem I carry in my wallet is "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats. That was one I fell in love with in high school and that I memorized and that reads even better to me as I grow old and gray and full of sleep myself.

For this month's writing prompt, we write about First (Poetic) Love. This can mean the first poem you recall loving or the first poet you loved (in any sense of the word).

Submission Deadline: Wednesday, July 31st