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The Mind / John Fitzgerald

The Mind

By: John Fitzgerald

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The Mind is JOHN FITZGERALD’s third poetry collection and continues and expands on his insight into the myriad aspects of human emotion. The poems are philosophical; emotions are set against the ‘objective’ consciousness of the mind. The result is a deep exploration of what it means to be human.  ...
ISBN 978-1-907056-60-4
Pub Date Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Cover Image Portrait of the Poet, by Don Bachardy
Page Count 126
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The Mind is JOHN FITZGERALD’s third poetry collection and continues and expands on his insight into the myriad aspects of human emotion. The poems are philosophical; emotions are set against the ‘objective’ consciousness of the mind. The result is a deep exploration of what it means to be human. 

John Fitzgerald

JOHN FITZGERALD is a poet, writer, editor, and attorney in Los Angeles. A dual citizen of the U.S. and Ireland, he attended the University of West Los Angeles School of Law, where he was editor of the Law Review. 

The recipient of the 2022 Naji Naaman Literary Prize, he is the author of four books, more recently Favorite Bedtime Stories (Salmon Poetry), Finalist for the Julie Suk Book Award, and The Mind (Salmon Poetry) semifinalist for the Alice James Book Award.

Other works include Primate, a novel & screenplay, and the non-fiction For All I Know

He has contributed to many anthologies, notably Days of Clear Light (Salmon Poetry); Human and Inhuman Monstrous Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series); Pratik: Celebrating Baudelaire 200 Years; Even the Daybreak: 35 Years of Salmon Poetry; The Plume Anthology of Poetry 5; Pratik: The Ghosts of Paradise - Special Los Angeles Issue; Rubicon: Words and Art inspired by Oscar Wilde; From the Four-Chambered Heart: In Tribute to Anais Nin; Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (Salmon Poetry); and Poetry: Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it (Salmon Poetry). 

Other publications include World Literature Today, The Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, December Magazine, The Warwick Review, The Los Angeles Review, Plume, From the Fishouse, Askew Poetry, Barnwood Mag, and The American Journal of Poetry.


Twelve

Fear begins as larva.
Compare that to desire,
which is born just a smaller version of what it always will be.

Fear transforms into other things, desires just get bigger.
Some like to point out that the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly.
Maggots become flies, but who pretends to notice?

Fears can become both flies and butterflies, given a choice.
Fear predicts the future. 
That is how it knows where it is now. 


Thirteen

Fear has a face that disappears whenever I look into it.
Removed from the center of the world,
I am afraid, and that is the point.

Fear is a hole between two places. 
Some might call it a door.
I have three fears that look like worms in a jar:

The first is writhing, gasping for breath but still alive,
the second is just there, without knowing why,
and the third is nothing to write about.


Copyright © John Fitzgerald 2011
Review: The Mind reviewed by Tulika Bahadur for On Art and Aesthetics - April 3, 2017

THE MIND” BY JOHN FITZGERALD: A NEATLY-STRUCTURED MEDITATION ON THE LOSS…AND THE RECOVERY OF “THE CENTER”

At the heart of John FitzGerald’s third poetry collection The Mind (2011, Salmon Poetry) is the seemingly important yet forever elusive concept called “The Center”. What is this center? It is never directly defined, just that the effects of its proximity, and lack thereof, to human consciousness are given expression through unforgettable imagery – biological, geometrical. Also legal, which makes sense, for the poet happens to be an attorney (for the disabled, in Los Angeles).

The Center, the reader gets an impression, is some kind of metaphysical place. A location of wholeness, of clarity. Separation from it is pain. We do not know what the Center is composed of, but mid-way through The Mind, the poet drops a particularly illuminating line on its role and its function in our lives – “from the center,” writes he, “we attribute value”.

On a structural level, the book is a circle. It commences with departure/disorientation (“Removed from the Center”) and concludes with arrival/reorientation (“Regaining the Center”). The journey in between is broken into nine deeply philosophical sections: “Fear”, “Time”, “Beauty and Truth”, “Death”, “I”, “Prophesy”, “Rules”, “Choice” and “A Mind like the Wind”.

As he begins this work, the poet finds himself alone, in darkness. He wants to understand “the mind”. Face it. Through it, find a way ahead. But the mind is too complex, too large, too stunning. FitzGerald writes:

Removed from the center, I begin again, / where someone in the crowd might be, / those absolute strangers, in whose lives I am.
 
I can only look into the mind for five more seconds. / The true mind, the one of thinking, is far too bright to see directly. / I have to veil it to contain it.
 
I have to trick myself into believing I even can contain it. / The way someone drowning swallows the ocean, / I can take no more than a glass of river, and the rest consumes me.
 
“I can only look into the mind for five more seconds. / The true mind, the one of thinking, is far too bright to see directly. / I have to veil it to contain it.” 
 
Removed from the center, the poet is afraid. He soon talks of the demise of his father and his uncle. He dwells upon the taste and the smell and the shape of fear. Fear is like dust, thinks FitzGerald. And fear is unlike desire. Desire starts small and gets bigger and bigger, remaining the same version all along. But fear is unpredictable. It can transform itself, turn into success or failure:

Fear begins as larva. / Compare that to desire, / which is born just a smaller version of what it always will be.
 
Fear transforms into other things, desires just get bigger. / Some like to point out that the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. / Maggots become flies,but who pretends to notice?
 
Fears can become both flies and butterflies, given a choice. / Fear predicts the future. / That is how it knows where it is now.
 
FitzGerald continues to concentrate on different phenomena: Time, Beauty, Truth, Death. On time, he makes a most interesting observation: “The mind is door after door after door, / Time is keeper of the keys.” Time, in a way, helps the self handle the mysterious enormity of the mind. Time unravels moments, keeps things from happening all at once. Time, the passing of which we like to indicate through rhythmic mechanistic ticking, fundamentally remains “as silent as ellipses”.

After a while, the human sense of identity – the “I” – emerges like a divinity in the book. What is it? Who is it? For the poet, “I” is at once the generative and intelligent deity and the privileged Adam in paradise, who must engage in taxonomy (Genesis 2:19-20) – “I is the Creator. Or at least, the giver of names.” But this semi-human semi-divine “I” feels weak and threatened. It has a fluctuating constitution. It has no proper territory – “It recognizes other gods before it, to be sure. / If I’m not in the center, then where am I?” The poet tries hard to chart and calculate his character but his doubts and confusions regarding himself and reality hardly fade away:

Where would I go if I were a word? / I’ve been seeking landmarks to pinpoint my position. / There is no other reason to even bother to observe.
 
I draw an azimuth from four corners, / I try triangulation too. Here, where spaces / and lines intersect, is exactly where I should be.
 
Yet such measurements only serve to prove / that the mind doesn’t seem to exist. / And where would that leave this version of reality?
 
Reflections on “Rules” and “Choice” follow – thoughts on what could be and must be done in life (“dreaming”, “writing”), thoughts on the various possibilities available to the human self (“being”, “willing”). The poet, through these musings, starts to “regain the center”. He is pushed to, he confesses, a rather “anticlimactic end”. Nothing new here. He has just found what he had lost. What’s the difference? What’s the whole point then? According to him, the advantage of a newer, sharper vision. He writes:

Regaining the center is anticlimactic, like finding the end of a rope. / A complication of untangling. / Lost remains the only way to find.
 
But no need to search for a known location. / Simply go back the way you came. / Except on return the path looks different.
It is difficult to sufficiently capture the profundity of The Mind in a single write-up. It is a challenging psychological read with sharp insights that lovers of serious literature will love and learn from. The project is rendered all the more meaningful and beautiful with the poet’s honest descriptions of his life’s great events…of his grief, his vulnerability.



Review: The Mind reviewed by Diann Blakely for Smartish Pace

… If John FitzGerald’s earlier work shows Berryman’s influence, he comes strongly into his own with The Mind. Like Galassi’s third collection, its has its own tomb-like depths and angelic heights. The book indicates FitzGerald’s early in saturation in Rilke, one of whose New Poems [1907] is titled “The Cathedral,” and has a flight and plummet not dissimilar to “Leaving a Dove.”

FitzGerald’s sensibility is riven not only between the here and the not-here, the concrete and the abstract, but also ancestry. While his name draws the very map of Ireland, Italy once again enters into the equation, as do, so to speak, numbers: these, not titles, which are given only to the book’s eleven sections, identify The Mind’s poems, which gradually reveal, sometimes litanically, the age of his father and his grandfather at death, his own terrifying experience with a collapsed lung, and even rules. In “Sixty,” he writes, they are “dreams,” and “like everything, [grow].”

    What? Did you think the rules never changed?
    Well, I might bend them before your eyes.

    Rules are something I can get into.
    Collections of words are my forte.
    Some might come up again a little later.

    But for now, by choice, I still abide.
    Choice is also easily numbered.
    The two choices here are delete or revise.


FitzGerald is far too intelligent not to know that “forte,” a term from fencing, is pronounced with a silent “e”: there is much silence in The Mind—note the white space between the tercets—and  as for “forte,” think of where the angels came to visit Rilke. Duino Tower was originally a “fortification,” of course,  yet what FitzGerald longs for are the angelic visitations that wrested the famous “Elegies” from the former poet and might beat back into unconsciousness the demonic fears that “manifest in body.”

My favorite two poems in the book are the duo of endings: both offer hope chastened by experience. “Eighty-eight” and “Eighty-nine” limn the the possibility of new beginnings, which yes, is intertwined with terror in Rilke’s angels—”inasmuch as hell survives, we grow attached to other people”—but by this point, we know that FitzGerald’s salvation has been found in earthly form, and if part of that “form” is human, the other art is poetry of the highest—and bravest—order:

    Eighty-Nine

    Regaining the center is anticlimactic, like finding the end of a rope.
    A complication of untangling.
    Lost remain the only way to find. 

    But no need to search for a known location.
    Simply go back the way you came.
    Except on return the path looks different.

    So, run off and start your own religion,
    wherein mindsong can make a tree sigh just in passing.
    Let us question each verse till it shows us.

About the Reviewer: Diann Blakely is the author of three books of poetry as well as an editor, essayist, and reviewer. She taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, Watkins Arts Institute, and also served as the first poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. A Robert Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf, she was a Dakin Williams Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Blakely has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Best American Poetry 2003 and Pushcart Prize Anthologies XIX and XX. Diann Blakely passed away in 2014.



Review: The Mind reviewed by Amelie Frank at The Lit Pub (January 2015)

If I were still working with John FitzGerald (in the interest of full disclosure, we worked together at Red Hen Press), I would nudge him and say of his book THE MIND, "Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."

My sense of John is that he has been aware of himself for a long time, but not in a solipsistic or narcissistic way at all. He is a keen observer, a consumer of origins, fine distinctions, continua, grand schemes, and minute details. He likely began observing and contemplating information from the moment he experienced the glare of light in the delivery room, and he has never stopped. 

Interestingly, while THE MIND is about the remarkable way John thinks, it speaks to the larger questions of how we all think, how we came to be sapient in the first place, and how we develop as thinking souls in space and time. Keeping the language of his prose-like tercets basic, unadorned, and free-flowing, he accomplishes poetry of significance and elemental beauty. Left brain contemplation of structure and systems aligns itself with right brain wonder and whimsy, but neither hemisphere dominates in the work, so the reader can only expect the unexpected. And the rewards are great: poems of curiosity, orientation with the universe, sorrow, finding center, and surprising hilarity. (Only John can make the idea of rocks funny.)

If I were teaching from John's book, I would encourage poetry students to examine his masterful skill with personification. I would encourage philosophy students to wrestle with his experiences of phenomena. I would ask psychology and neuro-biology candidates to experience the brain from inside-out. I would ask physics students to explore how we process space and time in an era when such concepts are continually challenged and updated. I would ask divinity students to consider creation from the point of view of the created. THE MIND weighs so many approaches to thinking and being that you won't devour it in one or two sittings. Read it as you would the Book of Genesis, or Hawking, or an introduction to meditation. You will not think the same way ever again after reading it.



Review: The Mind reviewed in Midwest Book Review

"This collection of poems reflects on the events in our lives that take place even while we are reaching for light in a dark world. Always out of reach, like listening to the wind, but missing the point, we stumble on. Thoughtful and leaving readers thinking, The Mind is an excellent collection and very highly recommended." 



Review: The Mind reviewed in by Marie Lecrivain for Al-Khemia

"John FitzGerald's new collection, The Mind, is one poet's journey through his internal cosmos. In The Mind, the poet wanders through the realms of life, beauty, truth, death, The Self, and possibility (or, prophecy), but... to what end? Fitzgerald's The Mind is a 21st Century companion to Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, but one endowed with an immediate, vibrant accessibility; a Hero's Journey not soon to be forgotten."  




Review: The Mind reviewed by John Starbuck on Goodreads:

The Mind is JOHN FITZGERALD’s third poetry collection and continues and expands on his insight into the myriad aspects of human emotion. The poems are philosophical; emotions are set against the ‘objective’ consciousness of the mind. The result is a deep exploration of what it means to be human.



Interview: John Fitzgerald interviewed by Marie Lecrivain for Al-Khemia Poetica:

     John Fitzgerald's new collection, The Mind (copyright 2011 Salmon Poetry), is one poet's journey through his internal cosmos. In The Mind, the poet wanders through the realms of life, beauty, truth, death, The Self, and possibility (or, prophecy), but... to what end? FitzGerald's, The Mind is a 21 Century companion to Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, but one endowed with an immediate, vibrant accessibility; a Hero's Journey not soon to be forgotten.

     FitzGerald, an attorney who fights for the rights of the disabled, took some time to answer questions regarding the inception, as well as literary process that went into his latest collection of work.

     Q: Please explain the what events led you to form the concept behind The Mind?

     A: A couple ideas collided. My father died unexpectedly at forty-two, while I was in Europe. It was ten days after his burial I first learned of his death. My own forty-second birthday was approaching, and I reached it. I felt it worthy of some memorialization. I had been working a long time on a piece that didn’t pan out, wherein I catalogued aspects of the mind, as if descended from one another genealogically. Those efforts transformed into this.

     Q: Your use of the article “The,” in the title is telling. Are you referring to the “universal” mind, as in shared global consciousness, or to your “own” mind, by removing yourself from The Center and placing yourself in the role of observer. Why/why not?

     A: I’m working on a non-fiction book, in which I answer that question like this: There was a time before language. Suppose you are a hunter, with nothing but your wits and a spear you made yourself. You don’t just wander aimlessly, hoping some piglet impales itself. You track. That’s what hunting is. Reading signs. And those signs speak much as any words. I may never have seen the particular creature I’m after, but it came through the brush here, scraped its fur against this branch, put its right front foot just here as it drank from the stream. I have no doubt it is an antelope, a heavy male. It marked its territory there, a sign for other antelope to read. But I speak antelope. It nibbled from those shoots then took off in that direction. This story told itself in my head. Earth spoke it directly to me in a voice no other can here. Once we have words to describe this process, that internalized voice of Earth is ‘The Mind.’

    
     Q: The first stanza, in poem “Three,” caught my attention:

     The mind could be a very long poem.
     It could pick up where you left off, so many years ago,
     before you became law abiding.”

     This could infer that the poet is an outlaw. Based on that, as an attorney, how do your reconcile your dual roles of lawmaker and poet?

      A: My forthcoming book of poetry addresses that question directly, with a ‘fictional’ poem about the conflict between an attorney and his inner poet. Actually, I think the selected lines not merely infer, but directly states the opposite: that I am not an outlaw now, but may once have been. I understand how disappointing this can be. My first poems were published before I began law school in 1993. Once law school began, I had to give up writing poetry.

     Completion of law school left quite a vacuum. I wrote four poetry books between 1998 and 2004, of which The Mind was the first. When they were done I adopted the notion I would not write more until I published these, so applied myself to that. The fourth book I wrote, SpringWater, was the first published in 2005. The third, TellingTime by the Shadows was published in 2008. The first, this one, was published in 2011. And the second book I wrote will be published by Salmon in 2014. I became an attorney to learn how far law could be stretched before breaking. Knowledge of law allows one to exist at its limits. Law school changes a person, makes one foreseer of liabilities. With these four books all published, I was freed to go back to writing again, and am now working on non-fiction.

     Q: There are many references to your own mortality, and the death of family (father, uncle), in your collection, particularly to the ages where both these men both passed on. Would you say that gaining a greater awareness of your own mortality is a gift, or a detriment, to your poetry, and, is it something that you will continue to foster? Why/why not?

     A: The men in the line I find myself die relatively young. The aforementioned uncle set a record reaching sixty. I would say I am acutely aware of the limitations. It makes me feel as if I never have enough time, or things are not getting accomplished quickly enough. Still, I consider it advantageous. There’s something intrinsically rewarding in fascination, at least for me. I love to be fascinated, and spend time making myself that way.

     Q: The Mind reads like a philosophical treatise, with you, as The Poet, hypothesizing/researching/and possibly concluding where He stands in the universal order of things. Did/did you not you intend for your book to be so?

     A: Absolutely. By the time I wrote The Mind, my father was dead longer than I knew him. His death was so unexpected. I have both his birth certificate and death certificates, as if they prove he ever even existed. Cause of death was retropharyngeal abscess dissecting into mediastinum with bilateral serofibrinopurlent empyema. His body produced its own poison, and he choked of unpronounceable words. Turns out that is just an infection, and had he gone to a doctor, might even be here now. The awareness became even more acute when, at age 42, I found myself in a hospital bed breathing through tubes, and I realized then how surprisingly death can come upon you.

     Q: The Mind contains nine lines per poem, all the poem titles numbered “One” through “Eighty-nine.” Why such specific structure?

     A: When I began, I did not expect to write such a long poem. That aspect just evolved. I set out only to write nine lines, and it grew from there. When I first finished parts one through ten, I considered it done, but couldn’t get that format out of my head, so just kept at it. Originally it had 111 parts, but was scaled down to this, with remnants found in Telling Time, which indeed takes its title from a line in The Mind. I find that establishing artificial rules for the poem provides a sort of frame into which a picture must be forced to fit. In Spring Water, for example, every poem is 32 lines, 4 parts of 8 lines each, with no line longer than 65 characters. In the mind, I wanted each tercet to stand alone, and each part to stand alone as they form a comprehensive whole. So when you’re reaching that ninth line you know you’re time is running short and you’d better get to the point.

     Q: Now that The Mind, is a published collection of poetry, what kind of feedback are you receiving from your readers?

     A: The Mind was completed in 2002. I have been reading it at venues since, so it’s been known to many for a long time before publication in print. It has an oral tradition. The feedback has been overwhelming. Everybody loves it.

     Q: As a poet with dual citizenship, where do you find your true inspiration, in the Irish poetry tradition, or in the American? Why/why not?

     A: I do not think I am inspired. There is a thing that makes me write and that is the need to record what seems to cross through my awareness. I am an avid note taker. Day to day life tends to become so routine, it’s rare to think something new and original. But I set that goal for myself, and have note pads everywhere, in my car and every room of my house. It’s not so much inspiration as a conscious effort to notice a good line when it occurs.

     Q: According to your bio, you have several literary projects: Primate, a novel and screenplay; The People of the Net, a work of poetic literary non-fiction;  and the poetry collection The Charter of Effects, currently in progress. Which one can we expect next to come to fruition?

     A: Well, Charter is scheduled for publication by Salmon Poetry in 2014. Most likely, that will be next, though it may have a different title. Primate is out there floating around. The other works continue to progress. I find that works I once thought complete tend to be absorbed by more recent writings until they’re basically sucked into a black hole and no longer exist in their former incarnation. So People of the Net no longer exists, it is part of something else now. All will be published at some point, it’s just a matter of making them known to the right people. 

article content © 2012 marie lecrivain

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