The Poem as Diagnosis

I've been following Gary Sullivan's translation work of German poet Ernst Herbeck for a while now. Herbeck was a schizophrenic who in his early 20's, while working in a munitions factory, began complaining of various animals and other people taking over his body. He was institutionalized for good in the mid 1940's. At the request of his psychiatrist Leo Navratil, he began writing poems in 1960. From then until his death in 1991 he pumped out around 1,200 poems mostly short pieces, many with color or animal titles (obviously prompted by Navratil).

While the story may have a tinge of that Daniel Johnston-esque celebration of mental illness (complete with that misguided notion of "purity" or "honesty" one reads into such disorders), the poems themselves are hard to ignore. Take his poem "The Panther":

The Panther

The pole reached the panther leaps
The leaping panther
They leap on me
The panther is beautiful
When the panther leaps
The panther has a beautiful pelt.
The panther has beautiful eyes.
as beautiful as the tiger.
The panther is great. The greatest animal
The panther makes great leaps.

(Translated by Gary Sullivan.)

* * *

Der Panther

Der Pol erreicht der Panther springt
Der springende Panther
Die auf mich springen
Der Panther ist schön
Wenn der Panther springt
Der Panther hat ein schönes Fell.
Der Panther hat schöne Augen.
schönere Augen als der Tiger.
Der Panther ist groß. Das größte Tier
Der Panther macht große Sprünge.

* * *

This was the first of Herbeck's poems that I read, and I liked it immediately for its simplicity and its sense of playfulness. The poem stuck in my head for days, and I began to think of it as a sort of ars poetica, a way of approaching the page. It served as both an enactment and a metaphor (substitue "panther" with "poem"). This is, of course, reading into the piece, though ultimately I've found that for Herbeck's poems, this idea of leaping, of being leapt upon is somewhat vital to his aesthetic. Perhaps this is lent weight by the phrasing of his symptoms "the feeling of animals or other people invading his body".

This contextualization, however unfair, makes the poems themselves appear symptomatic of the way in which he engaged with the world of objects and others, as well as with language. And I don't think this is necessarily of disservice to the poems. The fact that Hannah Weiner "saw" words lends her jarring rants a sense of bombardment that can be read as an approximation of her daily experience. The poems are confessional in the best way possible: They convey a singular experience without groveling for emotional weight, or striving for transcendence.

The poems of Frank O'Hara, Hannah Weiner, and Ernst Herbeck could, with this reading, be thrown into the same category, for all three seem to me to be exemplary of a sort of diagnosable writing that comes from both their engagement with the world and their writing processes. O'Hara while not mentally ill conveyed a temperament, a taste, and a penchant for frivolity that is entirely singular, embodies his mental engagement with the people and objects around him. The offhand manner in which he wrote, and addresses ironically in "Personism: A Manifesto" is central to the way in which his personality is rendered in the poems.

Interestingly, Herbeck wrote only when directed to. It is unclear to me whether or not the poems were important to him, or whether this poetry-as-therapy (an idea practically lampooned in MFA pedagogy) was helpful to him. Perhaps it was an extension of his psychological examination. There are hints as to the relationship between Herbeck and Navratil in some of the "Psychiatrist" poems:

The Psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist is the care of the
Patient.
The psychiatrist thanks and thinks about
the patient.
The psychiatrist thinks and protects the
words of the patient.

Translated by Gary Sullivan.

* * *

Der Psychiater.

Der Psychiater ist der Sorge des
Patienten.
Der Psychiater dankt und denkt über
den Patienten.
Der Psychiater denkt and schützt die
Worte des Patienten.

I find the last two lines of this poem fascinating. That the psychiatrist is a protector implies that Herbeck had an attachment to his work: The poems were objects in need of protection. But it is also intriguing that "the psychiatrist thinks [...] the words of the patient."