A benign psychosis?

Cilla McQueen

doi:10.9791/ajpanz.2005.04

Cilla McQueen

DOI: https://doi.org/10.9791/ajpanz.2005.04

Abstract

Recently I read in the poetry annual Fulcrum the poet Fred d'Aguiar's notes on his work with a poet/ patient whose ability to articulate the anguish of her inner world was not sufficient to prevent her suicide. He describes this unhappy outcome as"not a failure of her self, or her artistic abilities, but a failure of utterance itself when deployed in difficult psychological terrain?? writing herself back to health held a limited purchase for her and her troubled psyche." He concludes with regret that "had she lived, she would have continued to write and perhaps written some lasting poems, but not a line of it would have mended her mind."

Author Biography

Cilla McQueen

As recorded in 2005.

Cilia McQueen was educated in Dunedin at Columba College and Otago University. Three of her books have won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry. In 1985 and 1986 she held the Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University and in 1992 a Queen Elizabeth Arts Council Scholarship in Letters. Travel awards include a Fulbright Visiting Writer's Fellowship to Stanford University in 1985, an Australia-New Zealand Writers' Exchange Fellowship in 1987 and a Goethe lnstitut Scholarship to Berlin in 1988. In 1999 she was Artist in Residence at the Southland Art Foundation. Markings (2000) and Soundings (2002) contain her drawings of the landscape around Bluff, where she now lives. Her most recent collection is Firepenny (2005). All published by University of Otago Press, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, NZ.