They say that Canada has more poets per capita than any other country in the world. I don’t know if this is true. But it could well be true, and if it is, it speaks eloquently of Canada as a fine place to speak one’s mind and heart. I do know that the number of members of the League of Canadian Poets has steadily increased over recent decades. Accordingly, the task of selecting poets to this Digital History has proven formidable. Using the admittedly arbitrary WWII cut off date still left too many talented Canadian poets not mentioned within these pages—leaving other poets to represent them. Representation, of course, is not the same recognition or presence, and for this limitation I hope I will be forgiven.
With the League’s permission and patience, I hope, over time, to make additions. However, for now, I would like to complete this first rendering of A Digital History of Canadian Poetry with a look at D.G. Jones and Elizabeth Brewster, two poets representative of the many fine Canadian poets (such as Robert Gibbs, Glen Sorestad, Elizabeth Gourlay, M. Travis Lane, Joseph Sherman to mention a few) who have been honoured with a lifetime membership into the League of Canadian Poets, and then to conclude with a final word about the League itself.
D.G. Jones 1929-
Poet, professor, critic, editor, translator
Douglas Gordon Jones was born in Bancroft, Ontario on New Years Day in 1929. In 1952, he graduated from McGill in Honours English. In 1954, he received an MA from Queens, where his thesis examined Ezra Pound’s Cantos. He taught in numerous colleges: in 1954 at the Royal Military College in Kingston; from1955-1961 at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph; from 1961-62 at Bishop’s in Lennoxville, Quebec; and then from 1963-1994 at l’Université de Sherbrooke where he studied the francophone poets of Quebec and co-founded the literary review Ellipse: Writers in Translation with Sheila Fischman. He is retired, but currently remains editorial advisor and translator for Ellipse. In the ECW Press publication: D.G. Jones and His Works, E.D. Blodgett reveals that Jones’ hobbies—gardening and painting—influence his poetry cognitively, metaphorically, often ironically, as in ‘dilemmas’ from Under the Thunder:
iv
I want the bitten world and not
the garden of enduring flowers
invisible, angelic gardeners
I want the metal’s shine
the slippery phallus twisting round
its round, stemmed eye
the smell of oil
the eaten edges of things, old knives, the old
blue boat, the salty
body streaming hair
the mouth agape
the gasping
smiles
it is some mixed thing we care about
not this or that
but gardens weatheringJones was first published in Contact, the literary magazine founded by Raymond Souster and Louis Dudeck, who noticed Jones when he won a number of creative writing awards while still at McGill. Although in the 1970s George Woodcock asserted that Jones was “one of the least placeable and also one of the best of contemporary Canadian poets,” we can discern a trail of influences from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and the Black Mountain Poets to—in Canada—Archibald Lampman whom he studied intensively, Northrop Frye, Frank Davey and John Sutherland. George Bowering aligns him with Margaret Avison, D.C. Scott, Charles G.D. Roberts, F.R. Scott, AJM Smith and E.J. Pratt (Blodgett ECW 4).
In his early career, Jones, as critic and professor, was steeped in the Canadian tradition. Like Atwood, he struggled with the ‘garrison mentality’ discerned by Frye and others. This sensibility, George Woodcock argues in Northern Spring, began at the birth of Canadian literature; he states, “for many years Canadian writers were enslaved by the pioneer mentality, which seeks to recreate in a hostile wilderness the institutions and cultural patterns of the lost homeland” (10). Even after Sir G.D Roberts, Lampman and others brought Canadian literature ‘home’ the poet’s response to the wildness of the landscape, Frye and Woodcock argue, remained hostile, as further expressed in Atwood’s critical work Survival. Jones, on the other hand, expressed the desire to escape what Bowering called ‘the mind forged prison’—to let the wilderness in. In this way, he was in the vanguard to throw off the garrison mentality for a neo-romanticism which Blodgett describes as “a Taoist meditation on language, love, and art”. This motif is developed in his critical work on Canadian Literature, Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970).
For the critics, Jones’ has been hard to categorize. Perhaps it is due, in part, to the shifting perspective expressed in Susan Glickman’s critical work on nature writing The Picturesque and the Sublime: a poetics of the Canadian landscape (1998) in which she rejects Frye’s critical stance and argues that coming from an English and European tradition, the early immigrants expected the wilderness to be mysterious, sublime, even terrifying, and when they saw it and expressed it this way, it was not a negative or hostile response. Jones is bilingual, writing out the Eastern townships’ North Hatley or as Ed Blodgett describes in the preface to A Throw of Particles, “archetypically ‘the country north of Belleville’—but to say ‘North Hatley’ is already to evoke an archaeology, a settling that awaits its first words; as Anne Hebert would say, ‘á l’âge des premiers jours du monde’ in a country still to be found and named.”
Blodgett agrees with Phyllis Webb who asserts in a book review that “the overall achievement of Jones’ The Sun is Axeman results in a distinctive voice, a poetry of lovely assonances, syllabic grace, of insights glancing from a landscape ‘in which the birds or trees/Find all their palpable relations with the earth’ (Canadian Literature) as witnessed in this poem:
Death of a Hornet The September sky expands bearing in its blue, noetic field the perfect candour of the drifting clouds the midday air is warm as was the wind that whitened summer’s fields or as the air that breathed, in late July among the cedars on a crooked, sandy road so extensive is the clarity of this world the bones of animals are luminous and dry perceived as clearly as the sharpest stone the light x-rays each insect, leaf, and flower no darkness falls, no shadows gull the eye and yet a yellow hornet, armed and abroad in the crystal world is rocked by some dark sting—and strange beneath the black and gold the rhythm of an unknown pain unfolds, and like a flaw within the brilliant diamond of the day, he staggers dancing to the fatal jazz, indoors
Jones’ awards include:
· Governor General's Award for Under the Thunder the Flowers Light Up the Earth(1993)
· Governor General's Award for Translation (1993)
· A.J.M. Smith Award for Poetry (1977)
· QSPELL: A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (1989, 1995)
Suggested titles: A Throw of Particles: new and selected poetry (1983), Floating Garden (1995)
Elizabeth Brewster (1922-
Poet, author, professor, founding member of Fiddlehead
Elizabeth Brewster was born in Chipman, New Brunswick. She received a BA from the University of New Brunswick, an MA from Radcliff, a Bachelor of Library Science from Toronto and a PhD from Indiana. She began publishing poetry in the 40s and was described by Desmond Pacey in his revised (1961) Creative Writing in Canada as belonging to “the school of regionalist verse which finds its focus in The Fiddlehead, a magazine of verse (and latterly also of prose) at the University of New Brunswick since 1945”. He argues that unlike their more urban counterparts, this Fredericton group was determined “to make poetry out of immediate experience” of rural or small town life. Although Pacey’s book is difficult to read in our time as it is skewed by a male centrism, and though Pacey has difficulty addressing the expression of women without resorting to stereotypes, it nevertheless gives us an impression of how poets were viewed and received in their day. Pacey admires Brewster’s skill “at introspective lyrics in which she examines her own feeling and fantasies”. He argues that she has “two manners: one a tight, elliptical style in which everything is compressed into the smallest possible compass, and another more diffuse, meditative style in which the effect is of conversational ease and casualness” (249). And indeed, through the decades critics have admired her work for its artistry and skill. Barbara Meyers, in a review of Jacob’s Dream (2002), states “Brewster’s plain-speaking is elevated by her art—clear diction and syntax, graceful sonnets and well-hewn free verse.”
In 1972, Brewster moved to Saskatchewan as a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, where she is now a Professor Emeritus. In 1982, the year she turned 80, she converted to Judaism. Although always interested in philosophical subjects, in her later work Brewster’s main themes express profound meditations on life, death, aging, and creation, questions that she explores with wit, intelligence and exceptional control. Her biblical references are used thoughtfully and surprisingly as in this skilfully wrought poem from Garden of Sculpture(1998):
“Naming: A Gloss” “By naming them he made them. They were there Before he came But they were not the same” --P.K. Page, “Cook’s Mountains”
What god or poet first created earth, the sea and all the creatures in its depths? Who brought the sun and moon to birth? Who manufactured rain and hail and snow? Who made the north wind blow? It was hermaphroditic Adam before he lost his rib—the primal poet, man-woman, holy spirit, who made earth, water, air and flame: by naming them he made them. Before he spoke they were a nameless mass, mere jarring atoms of primordial stuff. He said the Word that ordered them, smoothed out the rough. Her tongue licked mountains into icy peaks topped with cold air. Her syllables were forests of trees, letters were blades of grass. Butterflies, bats, the snake so debonair— they were there. Before Adam had seen it, colour was not. It was his camera eye That made the rainbow, traced constellations in the sky. His eye and ear made rhyme. The music of the spheres was his creation. Nothing could chime before he came. “Now we must make a god,” said Adam-Eve. “A golden calf, perhaps?” We must believe in something other than ourselves.” So they invented sacrifice and shame. Separate now, they stitched themselves new clothes. Their orchard tree-house seemed too small and old. They made new seasons, and Fall came, but they were not the same.
Oberon is currently publishing a complete edition of all 19 of Elizabeth Brewster’s books of poetry. Volume one deals with the early poetry from the 1950s to 1970s.
Her many awards include:
Order of Canada
Lifetime Award for Excellence in the Arts 1995
E.J. Pratt Award for Poetry
Lifetime member of the League of Canadian Poets
Suggested titles: Jacob’s Dream (2002), Collected poems of Elizabeth Brewster 1, Oberon (2008) (Volume one is now available with more volumes to follow).
A final word about the League of Canadian Poets:
The League of Canadian Poets was founded in 1966 during an inspired meeting of Toronto and Montreal poets who wished to advance poetry in Canada and to promote the interests of Canadian poets. It was a bold, seminal idea, one that took hold and flourished. Today the League is Canada’s most effective instrument for bringing together poets and their audiences. As a non-profit organization it nurtures a professional poetic community, reaching out to audiences in schools, libraries, art galleries, and universities; it encourages publication, performance and recognition of Canadian poetry at home and abroad; it seeks to educate, and to facilitate the teaching of Canadian poetry at all levels of education.
The League has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 40+ years until today, 2008, when it encompasses about 600 poets, governed by an executive committee and several standing committees, all serving the interests of poets (from rights and freedoms, membership, feminist caucus, to copyright). It employs an effective staff, produces a newsletter, runs numerous programs including two major touring programs, offers several awards including those for an annual poetry contest for youth, and holds an annual general meeting (AGM), where new and ongoing members read and celebrate poetry and the poetic life. It facilitates international exhibits; it funds readings across the country, especially during National Poetry Month (April) with its W(r)ites of Spring when poetry’s vital place in Canadian culture is renewed; it lobbies governments and speaks out for poets on issues such as freedom of expression, the Public Lending Right, and CanCopy. And it has lobbied successfully for our own Canadian poet laureate. It leapt into the 21st century with an expansive website: www.poets.ca that includes an extensive site for young poets and their teachers (this one).
I first heard of the League in 1970 from Stephen Scobie in his University of Alberta poetry class, and, although I’m a fairly new member, I’ve always understood the League to be the lifeline of Canadian poetry. The writing life can be an isolating existence, but with the League, one is never really alone. For a poet, there is nothing quite like sitting in a room full of poets—it’s like sitting in a room full of wizards or mages—a powerful place of belonging, of renewal, of wild energy. This is what the League gives to Canadian poets so they can return joyously to their audiences. For those of you who are budding young poets we look forward to the day that we can read and hear your contributions to Canada’s other national dream.
Heather Pyrcz
Wolfville, N.S., 2008