I don’t know whether this is a good book or not. I know only how good it was for me.

I have suffered from depression—not just despondency but real depression—only once in my life and that (thank God!) for only a few months. Unconsciously, I think I sensed the condition coming on. I think that, unconsciously, I may have communicated this to a former student. Immediately, she recommended this book; in fact, I think she express-mailed me a copy. She had studied with the author in her master’s program in creative writing. I tried reading the book, but the words weren’t coming through: I skipped around in the text, I omitted whole passages, I forgot what I had already read. Shortly, I had slipped deeper into clinical depression, but of course I refused to admit it to myself. Somehow adrenalin took me through a day’s work, albeit half-heartedly, but on the way home, in five o’clock traffic, I found myself weeping without knowing why, missing a turn and heading off into the sunset before I realized I was off track.

The book was Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr (U of Georgia P, 2002). Somehow some of its words penetrated to the depths of my mind, to the self that had given itself over to disarray. Almost immediately, I resolved to write a poem each day: no matter how I felt, no matter how meaningless to anyone else the poems might be. Before bedtime each day I would pen a few lines. I began on January 16. The depression had cleared up by April, but I continued with my resolution: a poem every day for 365 days. When the next January 16 approached, I actually experienced something like separation anxiety. I think I may have written as many as four or five poems on that day. Now, I don’t want to make any false claims for poetry writing; Zoloft was probably what did the trick. The depression apparently had been brought on as a side effect from other medication I was taking. As soon as I brought myself to tell my physician what I was experiencing, he understood and took immediate, effective steps. But I shall always believe that, though “a poem a day” did not keep the doctor away, it kept me going until the doctor was summoned.

When I go back to the book now (which I find myself reluctant to do for some reason), I find it rather simple, its advice to writers maybe somewhat conventional, its psychology not unlike pop-psychology in best-sellers, its prose sometimes repetitious and undistinguished. What stands out are the poems the author uses as examples and models, his succinct comments on these poems, and his unerring confidence in the value of the personal lyric. I suspect it was these three elements in conjunction with one another, especially the third, as well as my own previous devotion to writing that spoke to me when I could not speak for myself.

Orr delivers his message clearly and concisely from his introduction on:

“Human culture ‘invented’ or evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals [writers and their readers] survive the existential crises . . . . This survival begins when we ‘translate’ our crisis into language—where we give it symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it.”

How does this work? First, it distances us from the emotional crisis, giving it an objective form. Second, it orders the disorderly, in giving it poetic form and linguistic shape. Orr speaks from personal experience. When he was twelve years old he was responsible for a hunting accident that resulted in the death of his brother. Of course, he was “horrified and traumatized” by the event. For four years he lived with no hope at all, thinking of himself as Cain in the book of Genesis. Then, a librarian, teaching a small honors English class, introduced him to poetry writing. His first poem was a simple escapist fantasy, but “it liberated the enormous energy of my despair and oppression as nothing before had ever done. [He] felt simultaneously revealed to [himself] and freed of [his] self by the images and actions of the poem.”

Orr’s “spectrum of disclosure” proceeds out of silence (shame, fear or guilt) to the blurted disclosure of speech, to personal writing as in a diary or journal to shaped narrative or memoir, and finally all the way to poetry. Once again he explains the place of poetry in this mode of healing:

“. . . the autobiographical material of the personal lyric has undergone the extreme and complex linguistic and imaginative patterning that is the hallmark of all poetries. The patterning necessitates, among other things, careful attention to accurate and economical word choice, to the expressive possibilities of rhythm, to the dramatic unfolding of story, and to the descriptive vividness and symbolic power of details.”

His chief ingredients: diction, rhythms, story, and details. The chief qualities he identifies as “poetic”: economy, expressiveness, drama, and imagery (or symbolism). By story, or drama, I think he means not a plotted narrative but a narrative moment, what James Joyce called an epiphanic moment. The conflict and most of the events are implicit and undeveloped, only the moment of insight.

However, looking back on my first experience with Orr’s book, I now think it was his chapter called “The Powers of Poetry” that stimulated my subconscious most forcefully. The subheadings speak for themselves: saying the unsayable: the power of story; expressing the inexpressible: the power of symbol; and (perhaps most important of all) bearing the unbearable: the power of incantation. For what I wrote out of my depths would probably better be characterized as incantation than poetry. “Out of the plethora of the heart, the mouth speaketh.”

At the depth of my depression, on February 18, I wrote such an incantation. Curiously, I subtitled it “as survival,” obviously borrowing from Orr though unintentionally. The poem goes on and on, somewhat mindlessly. It begins,

February 18

as survival

I know this Ogre.
Faceless, nameless,
shapeless, shameless
though It may be,
I know this Ogre.
It grows and grows.
As I drive north on 13th St.,
the Ogre descends on me,
and grows and grows.

Now when I read Orr’s book, it is the second half that speaks to me more profoundly. Called “Trauma and Transformation,” it is a close, personal reading of several romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke. He prefaces these readings with an historical headnote:

“Until the mid-eighteenth century, most lyric poets either emerged from or worked for the Overculture, expressing and dramatizing the values and attitude of the ruling elites. But in the mid-eighteenth century, as the Overculture began to change rapidly and chaotically, a number of poets ‘switched sides’ and began to speak from other points of view besides that of the ruling classes.”

Blake, for example, immortalized chimney sweeps, soldiers, orphans, young prostitutes, the urban oppressed in general. Through “transformative lyrics” these poets “became poet heroes by disclosing visionary possibilities that went far beyond their own private situations . . . .” You can almost match the poets he reads with the epithets he attaches to them: the ardor of the pursuer, the habit of dazzle, the haunted corridors, the horrors of war, the dangerous path. Orr concludes by recommending not only the writing of personal, or transformative, lyrics but the collecting of poems that speak to and for us in our version of the Native American “medicine pouch.” A good idea, one that I join him in recommending.

But in times of pressure, disappointment, or grief, I still revert to a poem a day: “as survival.”