Poetry Folio: Mental Health Poems

Background: Poets are renowned for penning poems that document or allude to mental health issues, as in well-known poems by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane and James Wright. More recently in Australia, poets such as David Stavanger, Anna Jacobson and Joel Deane have explored mental illness in their respective poems, attempting to document, explore and understand personal experiences, and contemporary triggers, through poetic language. Glyn Maxwell says that ‘Poetry is creaturely. What survives in it echoes corporeal phenomena: the heartbeat and the pulse, the footstep and the breath’ (88). This folio of poems, in continuing my creative and scholarly research into the field of ‘nonfiction poetry’, explores how one might use the corporeal echoes of poetry in order to embody/represent an internal, inarticulable psychological experience. Contribution: Each poem in this folio explores how depression and anxiety manifest certain behaviours, and further, how poetry might more authentically communicate these experiences to a reader—less as a documented account and more as fragmented, irreducible, emotional and physical encounter. The poems employ nuances of poetic language—enjambment, space, metaphor, repetition, suggestiveness etc.—developing the possibilities of the “autobiographical” or “mental illness” poem by experimenting with how poetic devices and form might impart lived experience in new ways. Significance: These three separate works were published in highly respected Australian publications and venues Australian Poetry Journal, Red Room Poetry online and Spineless Wonders. ‘Demon’ was commissioned and selected by world-renowned poet and scholar John Kinsella. One of the poems (Transitional) was commissioned as a result of my being shortlisted for the 2019 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. The poem was then selected for re-publication in Australian Poetry Anthology 2020.