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F. Scott Fitzgerald, living through his “crack-up,” his alcoholism, and his wife's psychosis, wrote, “It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world, they will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.” Written before the era of psychopharmacology, Fitzgerald's words may still resonate with those of us psycho-analytically trained to know when people are “wide open.” Within the interpersonal dome surrounding doctor and patient, nothing can be so effective as proper timing combined with the “lightest touch.”
The poets collected in this volume by Berlin, a psychiatrist who submits poetry to a psychiatric newsletter from his Berkshire, Massachusetts home, relate their lives and their sufferings. As it happens, I am working with a poet in analytic therapy and have been learning about the world of contemporary poetry. Books are published by independent small publishers, who print only a few hundred volumes at a time. Readers appear to be fellow poets or followers of a favorite poet. While the Internet provides a community of blogs and online postings, it does nothing to suppress internecine warfare, cynicism, sarcasm, and morbid competition. Some poets are recognized by Foundations, and at times a MacArthur Fellowship. Others labor in obscurity. It is difficult being a poet.
Wordsworth described the process of writing poetry as “recollection in tranquility,” but none of the poets in this volume wrote in tranquility. Their works resemble charts and case histories of bipolar disorder, mania,