Mark wrote....
>There are also the very rare cases of writers who manage to produce
>coherent and interesting work while psychotic. John Wieners, who is
>undoubtedly psychotic, has produced his best work when the psychosis was
>either under control or in a mild state.



Daniele Medici, my dear friend who died suicide last August (we recently
celebrated in Salerno his life and poetry)wrote incessantly under the urge
of severe psychosis, while being always capable to keep control over his
use of language and choice of style. In the last 15 years of his tormented
life, he suffered from severe shifting in what you call internal weather,
in terms of his level of instability and feeling of self-rejection. Yet he
was a man of great creativity, full of hopes to get better, always making
attempts at communication (he was so eager at being with others that almost
exposed himself to other people's cruelty ore indifference) , and one
cannot at all describe his literary achievements as a sign of the outcome
of a language pathology, since he was in the first place a poet, then a
sick person.

Daniele Medici wrote his last poem the night he killed himself and left it
on course on the table for people to find and keep it as his epitaph.

As for the notion of internal weathers , people all suffer from its
changes. Some more than the others, but they indeed the guarantee that one
possesses a soul, rather than being a "machinery" to produce coherent
functional meaning in the publish sphere.

Daniele Medici became a follower of the Reichian theory. When 10 years ago
I found out about this new interest of his - mainly because he started a
sort of stubborn proselitism - (he passed from being under the care of a
professional Freudian psychoanalyst to a kind of self-applied reichian
cooping strategy) I spoke to all the other friends about the risks of it,
but Daniele would not give up his conviction that the reichian therapy
would have helped him in being creative even in his sick state of mind.

In spite of psychotic state, his system of language was not unstable and
did define in detail the possibilities of his character. His language did
not fail Daniele. Society did, as well as his bio-chemical internal balance
and organization. Even when he spoke about death, his voice was never
funereal, but resourceful and ingenious.


Daniele had a degree in sociology and was in constant touch with the most
recent and sustained study in the psychoanalytic field,
nevertheless......all this did not warrant any protection to him. The poems
that Daniele wrote in the final stage of his life will be soon published.
He published altogether 4 collections (the comparison with my history of
publication - only two, up to now - shows that psychosis did not prevent
him to be artistically more successful of a mentally stable and very
rational person like me, who tends to produce poems like one produces
pieces of an engine (that's why I called my collection Macchina).


Erminia Passannanti