[In the review below, Clayre argues that these experimental poems do not reflect Jennings's skill or her voice.]

Miss Elizabeth Jennings, in The Mind has Mountains, takes the reader through an English mental hospital, after her attempted suicide. These poems keep close to a single consciousness, which we see re-establishing, in alien territory, the unassuming, observant kindness of its everyday life. The poems are compassionate. In certain lines we can hear Miss Jennings’ voice:

There should be peace for gentle ones,
not pain

But the versification in this volume is often limp, and produces shapeless effects which I do not think the author can want:

Because of all of this, it was a shock
to find that you
were really bad, depressed, withdrawn from me
more than I knew.

And her experiments in broken verse-forms at the end of the book do not seem to be exactly in her own voice—a voice that in visionary poems like “A Dream of Birth” has spoken with complete assurance, in a technique that seems to have grown out of a given rhythm of feeling, rather than out of the conscious decision to write in lines of ten syllables or of irregular patterns.

Also about madness, but from a very different point of view, is Mishaps Perhaps, a book of prose and verse-fragments by Carl Solomon. In the ’fifties Allen Ginsberg dedicated Howl to him. At the age of twenty-one, he went into a mental hospital and asked voluntarily for a lobotomy. By travelling without the suitcases of dignity, he has moved through territories not often mapped in this way—worlds of mental hospital jargon, bureaucratic language, and post-beat prose—maintaining always the gentle and ironic speech-rhythms that form the continuity of his work. Here he sees himself being interrogated by a “sane” society:

Do you love your mother? Your finger-nails show dirt. Your breath is bad. Do you like girls?

And I have lost my credentials. I liked a girl but she left me for another man. Was she of good character? I thought so in the beginning.

From hospital, he does not write as a patient waiting for cure, but as a stylist and chronic victim rejecting, in the name of the homosexual world and of his own lucidity, the psychiatrists who give him shock treatment:

I couldn't understand what they (who drove me into madhouses twice) thought. I have never yet seen an attractive psychiatrist.

And of the way of life that the world seems to require of him (“Relationships”):

          I am utterly unconcerned with the necessity
for producing offspring
And have no need for happiness which is the
primary obsession of our day.
Are you happy?
Being of Jewish descent and
consequently
Unhappy of visage
I have no need for such contentments
As produce the gleaming smile
And the sonorous voice.