Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process

EIGHT: The Uses of Depression: The Way Around Is Through

Eight the uses of depression the way around is through david budbill, mdiv 80 when i was a teenager, I was involved in music and theater. I played jazz trumpet pretty seriously and I was in a couple of high school plays. I didn’t get interested in writing poetry until I was a senior . The deeper, the more intense my interest in writing poetry grew, the deeper and more intense my periods of depression became also. By the time I was half way through college I was writing a lot of poetry and spending a lot of time lying on a cot in a depressive and paralytic daze down in the dark of a basement furnace room. Clearly, or so it seemed to me, poetry and depression were lovers doing some kind of macabre dance in and with my life, and I was, it appeared, helpless, no matter how much I resisted, to do anything about it. This was in the late 1950s. This pattern of bursts of creativity—making poems, stories, plays, essays—alternating with periods of paralytic depression was to be the way I lived my life for the next thirty years. I started calling “her” The Angel of Depression. letter to the angel of depression O, Angel of depression, I give myself to you. I give myself to you Angel of darkness, Angel of quiet pain, Angel of numbness, Angel of a stillness still as death, Angel of the eyes that stare, Angel of the breath that barely moves, Angel of dullness, I give myself to you. I give myself to you. I praise you. I pay homage to you. I attend to you. I do not turn my back on you. I make this prayer for you. I speak it openly in front of everyone. O, Angel of darkness, Angel of depression, dark Angel of life, I do not forget you. Therefore, now, I pray you, give me leave, release me, let me go. uncollected poem But my ablutions didn’t get me much absolution. For many years in my twenties, thirties, and forties, it sometimes seemed that I was going to lose this battle with depression. Sometimes I thought suicide was the only way out. i have always been and still am a rebellious, contrary sort of person and writer, always going against the mainstream, no matter what that mainstream is. flawed verse: after a poem by han shan Vinegar Bob, The Academic, laughs at my flawed verse and says, He writes short stories, then chops up the lines so he can pretend they’re poems. I say: What’s wrong with short stories? Vinegar Bob, The Academic, laughs at my flawed verse and says, He has no command of prosody. He just throws words down anywhere on the page. I say: Yeah, that’s right. I’ll throw ’em down anywhere I like. from Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse thirty-five years alone Thirty years alone at the foot of Judevine Mountain raising vegetables, cutting firewood, talking to the birds and making poems, hasn’t exactly made Judevine Mountain a household word in the poetry academy. Once a friend recommended him to the academy and they all cried, Who’s this Judevine Mountain guy? Another friend—who just happened to be there—said, Everybody in these parts knows who he is. the uses of depression 81 Why, he’s the most famous unknown poet for miles around. The only people around here who don’t know who he is, is you! Which, of course, proved to the academy that he didn’t exist at all. And therefore Judevine Mountain was set free to continue on his mountainside raising vegetables, cutting firewood, talking to the birds and making poems, which he is doing to this very day, in his non-existent sort of way. from While We’ve Still Got Feet In 1981, at the age of forty-one, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. The Establishment—with a capital T and a capital E—had opened its arms and welcomed me in. It was more than I could stand. Almost immediately I fell into a depression deeper and more profound than any I had ever experienced. I sat in a chair all day, day after day, and cried. when you were four and i was forty-one for my daughter, Nadine When you were four and I...