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The Mind
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.
- GenresPoetry
126 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
John Fitzgerald
4 books28 followersJohn FitzGerald is a poet, writer, editor, and lawyer in Los Angeles. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, he graduated from the University of West Los Angeles School of Law, where he was editor of the Law Review.
His first book, the novel in verse, Spring Water, was a Turning Point Books prize selection in 2005. Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point Books) was released in 2008. His most recent work, The Mind, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011. His fourth collection, Favorite Bedtime Stories, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2014.
He has contributed to the anthologies Poetry: Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it (Salmon Poetry 2009) and Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (Salmon Poetry 2011) as well as to many literary magazines.
John has worked as the Associate Book Editor for Cider Press Review. He has been featured poetry reader at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the West Hollywood Book Fair, on national radio, and at many literary venues throughout the country.
His first book, the novel in verse, Spring Water, was a Turning Point Books prize selection in 2005. Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point Books) was released in 2008. His most recent work, The Mind, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011. His fourth collection, Favorite Bedtime Stories, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2014.
He has contributed to the anthologies Poetry: Reading it, Writing it, Publishing it (Salmon Poetry 2009) and Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (Salmon Poetry 2011) as well as to many literary magazines.
John has worked as the Associate Book Editor for Cider Press Review. He has been featured poetry reader at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the West Hollywood Book Fair, on national radio, and at many literary venues throughout the country.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 31, 2014
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.
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.
April 11, 2017
“'THE MIND' BY JOHN FITZGERALD: A NEATLY-STRUCTURED MEDITATION ON THE LOSS…AND THE RECOVERY OF 'THE CENTER'” (On Art and Aesthetics, Tulika I. Bahadur)
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(read full review with illustrations on https://onartandaesthetics.com/2017/0...)
----
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.
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.
John FitzGerald is a dual citizen of Ireland and America. Other books by him are Favorite Bedtime Stories (Salmon Poetry, 2014), Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point, 2008) and Spring Water (Turning Point, 2005). He has contributed to many anthologies, among them Human and Inhuman Monstrous Poems (Everyman) and From the Four-Chambered Heart: In Tribute to Anais Nin (Sybaritic Press). His work can be found in several journals and magazines, including The Warwick Review, World Literature Today, Mad Hatters’ Review and The American Journal of Poetry.
----
(read full review with illustrations on https://onartandaesthetics.com/2017/0...)
----
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.
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.
John FitzGerald is a dual citizen of Ireland and America. Other books by him are Favorite Bedtime Stories (Salmon Poetry, 2014), Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point, 2008) and Spring Water (Turning Point, 2005). He has contributed to many anthologies, among them Human and Inhuman Monstrous Poems (Everyman) and From the Four-Chambered Heart: In Tribute to Anais Nin (Sybaritic Press). His work can be found in several journals and magazines, including The Warwick Review, World Literature Today, Mad Hatters’ Review and The American Journal of Poetry.
Read
May 18, 2014“Men at forty,” as Donald Justice wrote, learn to turn their backs, or close doors—“softly”— on youth and long-passed opportunities as part of their accommodation to a life of mortgages, the body’s increasing betrayals, and other failures of middle age. Perhaps the most painful of these stem from love and marriage, as well as the domestic life that sometimes confines men as inescapably as it does women, though the emotional content of poems that are mirror-images of Justice’s abound too—just pick up any journal and let your eyes fall on lines exulting in “parenthood at fifty.” (Or sixty.)
Not that my gender is innocent of producing lame, unmusical domestic anecdotes. I suspect that we see fewer such efforts in print because male and female editors laugh them off the table, whereas their response to The Male Mid-Life Crisis Poem, and the resultant period style, tends to be more respectful. Sir Stephen Spender has remarked that such periods have shrunk from twenty to five years—ten at most. I won’t bore you with the litany of “movements” that have occurred since the middle of the last century, but will only warn that the speed at which we are living often precludes reading anything but the newest, and our sense of history is disappearing.
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.
Not that my gender is innocent of producing lame, unmusical domestic anecdotes. I suspect that we see fewer such efforts in print because male and female editors laugh them off the table, whereas their response to The Male Mid-Life Crisis Poem, and the resultant period style, tends to be more respectful. Sir Stephen Spender has remarked that such periods have shrunk from twenty to five years—ten at most. I won’t bore you with the litany of “movements” that have occurred since the middle of the last century, but will only warn that the speed at which we are living often precludes reading anything but the newest, and our sense of history is disappearing.
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.
April 7, 2013
Wonderfully presented in its thought and pattern, on the edge and avant-garde writing that transforms your own perceptions of the self and how life is constantly changing and challenging the self to evolve, to imagine your life.
June 14, 2013
EDITORIAL 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.
- 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.
- Midwest Book Review
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews