Poetry and Psychohistory

Review of Merle Molofsky, Ladder of Words (Sleepy Hollow, NY: Poets Union Press, 2011) ISBN 978-1-257-99780-0, 158 pages, $15.00; Mad, Crazy Love: Love Poems and Mad Songs (Sleepy Hollow, NY: Poets Union Press, 2011), ISBN 970-0-557-75404-5, 81 pages, $10.00.

In this brief review essay, I explore multiple ways in which poetry and psychohistory intersect. I suggest that writing and reading poetry might be added to psychohistorical research methods. I write as a psychohistorian, psychoanalytic anthropologist, and poet. I draw upon and recommend two recent highly emotionally engaging books of poetry by Merle Molofsky to illustrate these relationships. Merle Molofsky is a poet, playwright, editor, and psychoanalyst in New York City.

First it must be asked: Of what “use(s)” is good poetry to the psychohistorian—or to anyone for that matter? How does good poetry “work”? Good poetry increases our access to our own inner life, and in turn, both to our experience of our life in the world, and to the inner world of others. In Evening Light (1983), Stephan Hermlin writes, “Poetry’s real ‘benefit,’ provided that anyone wanted to use this absurd term, [lies] in its unmistakable ability to give new names to what is seemingly familiar, in its rejuvenating function, in its conjuring up what has been forgotten” (p. 98).

Good poetry crystallizes experience into the smallest possible utterance. Good poetry renews the old, turns cliché into fresh perception. Good poetry turns our attention to what we might have not even noticed. Good poetry opens what we thought was closed. Good poetry shakes us out of complacency. Like good ethnography, it makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Good

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poetry reminds you of what you didn’t know you knew. Good poetry gives us access to our own unconscious and to that of the writer. Or, to invert the metaphor in Molofsky’s term, good poetry takes us to the top-most rung of the “ladder of words” and beyond, to insight, feelings, transcendence, wisdom, and fruition we had not imagined possible at the foot of the ladder. In her two books, Molofsky’s poetry gives us all of these things.

I would now like to turn to three possible intersections of poetry and psychohistory. To begin with, perhaps most obviously, there is the psychohistory of poetry (and of all the arts), in which poetry is studied and analyzed for the themes, fantasies, wishes, defenses, hopes, dreads, and meanings it embodies and evokes of a historical era or culture. The work of the late Rudolph Binion on “traumatic reliving” in history exemplifies this approach.

Here, a poem, play, novel, piece of music, painting, movie, etc., is explored by a psychohistorian in terms of what light it can shed on the individual artist whose life and work in turn embody a historical era or culture. The poem or other artwork thus becomes the vessel of a people. Utilizing tools of scholarship together with countertransference, a psychohistorian studies a poem much as he or she would approach any other text or document. With respect to Molofsky’s two recent books, one could mine them psychodynamically for what they might illuminate about the eroticism of our age, the experience of the human body and of relationships, and our fantasies and feelings about the Vietnam War.

Second, perhaps more problematic, is the poetry of psychohistory. As I envision it, here writing poetry would become one more tool of the complex methodology of a psychohistorian. Just as Sigmund Freud wrote of the unconscious of the psychoanalyst as a sense organ with which to explore the unconscious of the patient/ analysand, in the hands of a psychohistorian, poetry would become a sense organ with which to explore a historical era, group, or culture. Bridging the literary and the scholarly, sociologist Laurel Richardson has very convincingly used her own poetry as part of her ethnographic writing, the goal of which is to offer the reader access to the lived experience of the person or group.

This addition to ethnographic writing would offer what an-

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thropologist Clifford Geertz called the “native’s point of view” as refracted and experienced through the unconscious and imagination of the ethnographer, the result being a poem (Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28, #1, 1974, pp. 26-45). Intersubjectivity would be a tool of greater understanding of the person, group, or era being studied. Taken further, the psychohistorian or anthropologist’s poetry could be used as a tool of explanation, of theory-building, as well as of description, evocation, and interpretation. I have employed this approach as an applied clinical anthropologist in two recent books: Insight and Imagination: A Study of Knowing and Not-Knowing in Organizational Life (2007) and In the Shadow of Asclepius: Poems from American Medicine (2011).

I hasten to add that the psychohistorian or ethnographer’s poetry must be deeply felt and inspired, not contrived. This is no mechanical exercise. A poem might arise as the psychohistorian is studying some subject. In addition to linear narrative coming to mind, perhaps a poem would also come to mind, as evoked by the act of studying the subject. In terms of understanding how this occurs, the act of studying, say, a historical era would evoke some unconscious/conscious fantasy or image. The writer would follow this fantasy or image rather than dismiss it as a diversion or unwelcome intrusion, and this “following” would lead to a poem that is incorporated into the data and the analysis. Even as I write this, it still sounds terribly mechanistic, while in life it is spontaneous and welcomed.

I would like to suggest a third form this relationship between poetry and psychohistory might take. This could be called poetry-as-preparation or poetry-as-exercise. Just as a pianist might play a lot of Czerny or Bartók or Hanon piano exercises as preparation for practicing/performing a sonata or concerto, likewise—to follow this metaphor—a psychohistorian might immerse himself or herself in reading poetry as a way of accessing and engaging the unconscious in the study of some psychohistorical subject or period.

The two recent books of poetry by Molofsky would, for my taste, make for wonderful preparation for a psychohistorian who is studying American culture today, the past 60 years of American life, or the sense of place in New York City or in one’s own body.

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As I read these often raw, emotionally demanding poems, I found my imagination as well as my intellect engaged in fathoming the times, places, relationships, and feelings Molofsky writes about. Here, poetry exercise as an instrument provides a tool (awkward as the word might be) for delving more deeply into the subject of psychohistorical scholarship.

To return to Molofsky’s two books, it seems to me that, as riveting poetry, they “perform” all three of these “functions” for the psychohistorian. Stated differently, they can be read in all three ways. In Molofsky’s hands, personal and social dream and nightmare are given voice. She forces the reader to be engaged with her life—and one’s own. The mood of her poems ranges widely from tender to violent. Her poetry is often voluptuous; she conjures experience from which there is no escape. Her social conscience is keen, even brutal. I could taste, smell, and touch the worlds she evokes. In her account of human life, stench is not far from perfume. Nature, human nature, and human bodies are not prettified or romanticized.

Many of her lines are stingingly memorable: e.g., “We all have sheltered, we all have known, / in secret wounded places, dread” (Ladder, p. 29). In a poem on the experience of the American welfare system, Molofsky writes: “What happens here is not a dream. / If you wake up screaming you will be subdued. / You have volunteered to stand chained into lines. / Orders are orders. You are expected / to be this or that, to obey. / You are expected to acknowledge that you are in the way. All signs point the way out. / You are given numbers; numbers / are taken away” (Ladder, p. 47). In a poem called “Journey,” she gives feelings their body: “As if with fingertips and tongue, / those keenest skins, those eyes / of touch, as if with probe / or grope or snaking journeys / against all textures of stasis / and of change; as if we could / know, at this once, what it is / we are given to feel” (Mad, Crazy Love, p. 67).

For the reader who wants to feast upon good contemporary poetry, I recommend these two books. For the psychohistorian, they provide additional rich fare.

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