Burning Bright

The critical element of  my PhD research  focused on the American poet, Frank Bidart – in particular  ‘Madness through Poetry: Voice, Auto/biography, Sources and Survival in the poetry of Frank Bidart.’ My study concentrates on his famous dramatic monologue poems – Herbert White, Ellen West and The War of Vaslav Nijinsky.

The creative element included poems that reflect on subjectivity and madness through the life and biography of Nellie Bly and the work of  David Rosenhan.

My reasons for choosing Bly as a subject are various: she invented herself through writing, through journalism, at a time in America when there were few women journalists; she practiced an early form of investigative journalism (more sensationalist than investigative). This is nowhere better shown than her first ‘scoop’ Ten Days in a Madhouse which documents her stay in the asylum (following her presentation as an insane woman) on New York’s Blackwell island. Her purpose in part was to test the expertise of those charged with the care of Blackwell’s inhabitants. Her concerns were always to learn from those experiencing the phenomenon she was investigating whether incarceration, factory work, world travel or the conditions of Mexico. Nellie Bly also interests me as she tells stories yet few documents exist relating to her biography other than her journalism – so she offers a rich source of imaginative possibilities both through voice and the ‘pre’-modern moment in which she found her fame. She also offers a strong subject through which experiment with poetry, and experiment with prose and form seems appropriate in reflecting on narrative, story, autobiography and poetics.

Some poems are inspired by the work of the famous psychologist, the late David Rosenhan. The Rosenhan study, sometimes known as the Thud experiment, On Being Sane in Insane Places was published in Science in 1973. Rosenhan worked with a  number of colleagues who all presented with the same symptoms at a range of psychiatric institutions – and were all admitted. Once inside they behaved normally but were nevertheless all treated as psychiatric patients.

In Oct 2013 I started as a part-time PhD student at Liverpool University researching the uses of poetry in mental health services (through my own practice as a poet-in-residence in a large NHS Trust). I also considered arts-in-health practice as well as literary studies relevant to poetry and madness.

                                                                              Frank Bidart