Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 24, Section One: The Poet as Poor Woman by Dave Jaffe

     The Poet as Poor Woman: The Life of Gwendolyn McEwen by Dave Jaffe: Section One


    On the Sunday night, November 29th, 1987, Gwendolyn McEwen went to bed in her small Toronto apartment. She never got up again. By the next morning she was dead. It was the last chapter in this 46 year-old poet's life. McEwen had been a poor person nearly all of her time on earth. Her death in her small apartment merely confirmed it.
   "Poetry addresses the heart, the wound, the dead," writes John Berger. "Everything which has its being within the realm of our intersubjectivities." Gwendolyn McEwen often wrote about the heart
and its wounds. McEwen was born in Canada to a couple from Great Britain. Yet she never really felt at home in Canada.
    Her parents were part of the problem. Her mother, Elsie Mitchell was one of nine children born into a poor family in London. She had many nervous breakdowns and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals in the Toronto area. McEwen's father, Alick McEwen, came from Scotland. He had a strong artistic side and worked at jobs in Canada that sometimes needed scientific knowledge. Yet in his later life, he started drinking, and soon became a full-scale alcoholic.
     McEwen's early life was a nightmare as was that of her elder sister's Carol. Yet she did escape into fantasy and other forms of release from the world. She was only 18 in 1960 when she wrote her first novel called 'Julian the Magician'. Already in 1958 she  had her first poem published in the intellectual monthly 'The Canadian Forum'.
     To write 'Julian', McEwen studied Hebrew, ancient Biblical texts and books on magic. She went to Israel where she found a divided land. Yet she visited there many places that had been part of ancient history. A few years later, she went to Egypt. Yet her days there convinced her to come home quickly. Egypt was too threatening for this small woman.
    McEwen dropped out of high school just before she was on the point of graduating. She never went to university either. Though at one time she enrolled in a university but never took any courses there. While her friend and fellow poet Margaret Atwood passed exams, got university degrees and wrote many famous and best selling novels, McEwen in the 1970's started to descend into alcoholism. Here she was following a path her father had trod.
     She had many lovers and married twice. Some of her men came from southern Europe or the Middle East. She became obsessed with the figure of T.E. Lawrence, the famous 'Lawrence of Arabia' and wrote poems about him. Lawrence too had sometimes led a life of fantasy and had never felt at home in England. He too died young. And one of McEwen's later lovers, Antony even looked like Lawrence.   (To Be Continued).