From the foreword to Living in Storms, by David Wojahn:
No one likes to suffer from depression, and the enthralled sense of power and the sourceless joy that accompany the initial stages of mania are also difficult to bear, for they will sooner or later wear off, replaced by the dreariest forms of abjection. Happiness or sadness? Happiness versus sadness? It is of course more mysterious and complex that this, as the poets in this anthology know.
Such mysteries may be related in part to the chemical composition of the brain, as the poets in this anthology no doubt also understand—for this is the first anthology of poetry explicitly and exclusively to choose as its subject bipolar disorder. In recent years experts have come to see that this disorder, which is also termed manic-depression and is known in its milder form as cyclothymia, affects millions of Americans, and some say it strikes artists, writers, and composers with disproportionate frequency. The list of creative artists afflicted goes well beyond the familiar roll call of mad British poets represented by William Cowper, Christopher Smart, and John Clare (among others) or the tortured American middle generation poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Randall Jarrell.
The statistics are sobering, but statistics should not be confused with the Muse, even when the Muse asks us to sing the most melancholy blues. Poetry speaks from the conditions that produce it, but good poetry doesn't do merely that. This anthology is notable mainly for the striking and powerful poems it contains, which represent a wide range of responses to a particular adversity. Many of the poems of course focus on the self and its struggles with mania and depression, but others describe the impact of the disorderon friends and family members, while still others are homages to earlier artists, writers, and composers afflicted with mania and depression. Thom Schramm has chosen his selections well. The poets represented here are remarkably disinclined to confessional self-indulgence and self-pity; they confront their conditions with a harrowing lucidity, and sometimes with a self-mocking humor. The portraits of friends and relatives who suffer from mania and depression are empathic and sharply observed. The vexing emotional swings and extremities characteristic of manic-depression are shown to us in an almost comprehensive fashion. All the cycles, all the inexplicable euphorias, and all the self-nullifying despairs are here—but so are the brave and tentative recoveries from such states.
The accomplishment of these poems is that they express, with dignity and grace, what Coleridge in his "Dejection" ode called "the eddying of [the] living soul." And this is what poems are meant to do
—David Wojahn |
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