When I was young, I remember seeing a play on television that has stayed with me to the present; in particular, there was one scene in the play that I have never forgotten. This scene was of an elderly man sitting in a rocking chair on a porch while inside the house, behind the man, a woman was being beaten or raped. The man knew what was going on and feigned deafness, feigned not knowing what was happening only feet away. In fact, and equally disturbing to me, he seemed to find some twisted satisfaction in what was happening. As a child I found this scene to be both frightening and upsetting. To allow another person to suffer when it is in one’s ability to help that person seemed to me a terrible deed. I was disturbed by this man’s behaviour, but what also shocked me, even as a child, is that when I thought about the play later, I realized that I could do as this man did: I knew that there was in me the capacity to allow something terrible to be committed against someone else and to do nothing about it.
Once, years ago, I wrote a poem in which the first line was “An honest word was never said,” about living in a home in which silence was the norm. I know what it is like living in a house where silence rules, where “an honest word is never said.” I know a dark side to life and that “evil,” or whatever word one chooses to use, can exist even in the comfortable homes of apparently good people. We all have a shadow archetype in our psychology and we ignore the consequences of this at the expense of our soul. As poets, we speak our own vision, our own narrative, in our own voice. Writing about the shadow is not something to be afraid of, but one must act with courage and strength. I have not written many political poems, but I have spent a lifetime as a witness to what I have observed in life.
What I believe is this: whatever else poetry may be, it is a breaking of the silence that surrounds evil. This silence perpetuates evil. I believe that all artists are moralists, that we live in a moral universe, and that art requires a moral response if it is to have meaning. I believe there is one constant that gives us our ability to make moral judgments: it is to be conscious human beings. As such, it is not beyond the ability of average people to understand psychological complexity; it is not beyond poets to articulate a vision of life that can help heal the divisions between people. Our silence in the presence of evil isolates us and denies us the fulfillment of the promise of life. The very nature of being a poet is to write our poems and to be creative and life affirming, to be a witness for our existence.
Stephen Morrissey is the author of eight books of poetry, including Girouard Avenue (fall 2009) and Mapping the Soul: New and Selected Poems (1998). He was one of the original members of the Vehicule Poets who helped bring contemporary and experimental poetry to a wider audience in Montreal in the 1970s-1980s.
