A couple of class visits this week, the first in ENGL 1000 at the University of New Brunswick for a virtual reading and gloss on two poems from Meniscus (Biblioasis, 2009). My thanks to Fawn Parker for asking, and I’ll paste the brief address (minus the poems) below. The other is at the Trent campus in Oshawa with Concetta Principe’s ENGL A105 for a talk on Saving (Great Plains Publications, 2023).

TW: suicidality, though if you’ve got this book in hand, you already know that

Poems are, quite frankly, better than diagnoses. They might offer diagnoses – one of the tasks of writers is to diagnose the culture, just as one of the tasks of readers is to read symptomatically, to diagnose the gaps, silences, and oppressions embedded within the world-view of the writer.

But I digress. One benefit of poems is to describe the things which are, a term I first encountered from Alden Nowlan and his book of the same title, but which I later learned was actually taken from the King James Bible. Again, I digress. That is its own interesting story that offers its own diagnosis. Perhaps one last digression: I’m currently writing a book about the ontology of poetry itself, simply how to be as a poet, from my own positionality as mad and autistic heterosexual man. Quite ironically, it seems to me know, I write of how to be.

And yet – once upon a time, I had no idea how to be. I wanted to die, so passionately; and the feeling has never completely left, though I have learned how to be with that feeling. I didn’t know how to make it another minute, let alone hour or day. I had a clear choice offered to me: take this, or die.

I simplify a little. It was more like, “Try this batch of probably ineffectual drugs that will give you side effects and maybe we’ll hit on one or two or three that help and prevent you from acting impulsively when mixed-manic, wanting to die.” I also simplify in the sense that I wasn’t able to process choices as choices at the time I’m invoking here. I’m not quite sure how I made the choice to live, to have faith and take the tablets in their sequence and many kinds, but make the choice I did, for I am here now, and if any of you out there understand what I mean – those that have come close, either by intent or act – then I offer you the purest respect and cherish the desire to live within you.

Poems point in many directions and once, cunning ambiguity being their methodology. I hate to flatten poems into a didactic message, and so offer this prefatory history to you as context and not explanation. To conclude on a medical point: though there are many drugs to treat bipolar disorder now, the flagship drug remains lithium despite its many drawbacks to the kidney and thyroid gland, as well as its potential to induce both acute and chronic toxicity. From the perspective of biomedicine, bipolar patients can be divided into two categories, lithium responders and non-responders.

But what is the poetic response to a family history of wreckage, of addiction and major mental illness, of abuse and rural loneliness? How might a person articulate the results of an entire alternative way of being, of madness, of perceptual and conceptual difference being exorcised, flattened into a planar surface?

(reading follows — “Lithium” and “There is no cure”)