Almost all the Survivors

“Almost all the survivors [of concentration camps], verbally or in their written memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment. . . . They had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to.” These are the words of Primo Levi in his preface to The Drowned and the Saved (1988); his motive in writing that marvelous book was to set down an inescapable truth in the words of a witness and survivor. I remembered them while reading Poets on Prozac, for the mad also fear they will not be believed or listened to. And aren’t their fears often borne out? In common forms of therapy, a therapist may not be permitted in theory to respond in any way to the patient’s description of his or her torments, but simply sits and listens—a wounding and even vitiating form of disbelief. Often, very often, a psychiatrist will scribble a prescription before asking why the self-harm or why the attempt at suicide, and sometimes won’t bother to ask at all, since apparently the words of these mistaken people, these liars (the mad), may seem to the doctor less important than those of normal people.

And what of the inescapable truth of what the witnesses to madness and its survivors have experienced? The sixteen essays that make up this book are not quantifiable evidence of such truth, of course, and they amount to little more than case histories; their value as evidence comes from the poets who wrote them. I don’t know that poets necessarily tell the truth about themselves; Plato of course said poets were liars, and wanted them banished from his Republic. What we can be sure of is that they will make good cases for themselves, which is something different from the case for each a doctor might present. In poetry, after all, our human freedom finds its supreme expression. So will these poets say what it’s like to be mad and what sort of poetry comes out of their condition? Is madness the divine engine of great poetry, as inconsistent Plato proposes in the Phaedrus, or is that hokum? And what about modern drugs that can ease the burden of madness but often turn a madman into a zombie: Do they kill poetry too? Do they make poetry boring? Or, mirabile dictu, do they bring poems into being?

Listen to Gwyneth Lewis: her account is the first in the book, as well as the best written and the most clear, honest, and convincing one. She thanks Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Joseph Brodsky as instructors for helping her “pick a way of truth telling in words that would allow me to sidestep my own dishonesties. I consider myself fortunate to have a craft and an artistic tradition that show me how best to embark on such difficult discoveries and allow me to travel in the company of other poets. While we are using language, we are never speaking alone.” She has struggled to come clean; she’s not smothering us with words; she dismisses the solipsism present in less hardworking writers and the narcissism in the bad poems that dot the book. Jack Coulehan is another person who writes clearly and honestly of his experiences, especially about the transformations that can occur in common life along with the sudden understanding that occurs through the labor of making a poem. He’s also witty, thank God. And so is Thomas Krampf, a seriously ill schizophrenic who jumped out of a fourth-floor window and lived to tell how it was and how he writes now. And so too is Andrew Hudgins, like many of the contributors to this book, a writer who endears himself to the reader as one ashamed of his rotten, obsessive, selfish behavior and the tics that went with it until, lo...