Post modernism is generally agreed to have appeared in the latter part of the 20th century, and by the 1980's its influence was felt in Canadian Letters. Post modernism provides a wide umbrella under which cluster many literary sub groups: for instance, the language poets, post structuralists, and the new feminists. Feminism, however, is a large subgroup containing diverse perspectives and distinct generations.
The development of feminist poetry in Canada has been spearheaded by feminists who are both writers and literary theorists. In his useful Introduction to Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton argues that feminist literary theory "was and is an investigation of the ideological oppression of women held in place by a metaphysical illusion," that is, "by the material and psychic benefits which accrued to men from it; it was also held in place by a complex structure of fear, desire, aggression, masochism and anxiety which urgently needed to be examined" (150). He argues that "(f)or though the oppression of women is indeed a material reality, a matter of motherhood, domestic labour, job discrimination and unequal wages, it cannot be reduced to these factors; it is also a question of sexual ideology, of the ways men and women image themselves and each other in a male dominated society, of perceptions and behaviour which range from the brutally explicit to the deeply unconscious" (149).
Two of the traditional functions of literature are: to renew perception and to see or to know ourselves. Feminist literature wishes to renew our perception and to see ourselves clearly, crucially, and truthfully. Feminist literary theory, which Adrienne Rich describes as 'an awakening consciousness', explores critical questions: what are the traditional images of 'woman'; who creates the images of 'woman', in whose interests and to what end; how can we recreate the image of 'woman' so as to 'tell the truth'; and how do we get access to those deeply unconscious perceptions and images? These were some of the initial questions raised and explored, questions which led to the exposure and parodying of patriarchal structures damaging to women. Feminist poets such as Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard are currently involved in new projects in which they explore, create, and invent language and form to express a feminist experience and perception.
The poets in this section are a representative cross-section of Canadian feminist poets. They are the inheritors of Violette Leduc's "écriture feminine" (woman-centered writing); like Leduc, they are scripting their own odyssey.
Pat Lowther (1935-1975)
When one thinks of feminist poets in Canada, the first poet to leap to mind is Pat Lowther. But Lowther was neither a feminist theorist, nor steeped in "ecriture feminine"; rather, she was a poet whose carefully crafted work was a testimony to love and commitment. Tragically, we think of Pat Lowther as a feminist poet partly because her death embodies women's nightmares-she was murdered by her second husband in the full stride of her writing life.
Pat Lowther was born in 1935 and raised in North Vancouver. Her first published poem appeared in the Vancouver Sun when she was merely ten years old. Her first collection, This Difficult Flowing, appeared in 1968, followed by The Age of the Bird in 1972. This was a long poem of political intent, an unbound portfolio in a signed limited edition. During the1970s her visibility increased: her poems were anthologized, she received a Canada Council grant, and she was elected Co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets. In 1974 Milk Stone was published, and in 1975 Oxford University Press accepted Stone Diary for publication.
In September 1975, Lowther disappeared, and three weeks later her body was found in Furry Creek near Squamish, BC. Her second husband was convicted of her murder. Their marriage had been complicated by poverty, unhappiness, and his destructive behaviour. Hilda Thomas in, The Dictionary of Canadian Biographies, states that Pat Lowther's death "robbed Canadian poetry of one of its most vital and visionary poets."
In 1996, Polestar published Time Capsule, a new collection that Lowther was working on at the time of her death, and entitled by her. The collection includes new poems and also poems selected by her children and Lorraine Vernon, poet and friend, from her papers and journals. The preface to the collection states that "Pat Lowther's concerns remained constant: love and the physical body, children and motherhood, nature and human nature, an intense political commitment, and an acute awareness of violence and injustice" (13).
Her poems often weave together two strands, a realistic perception of injustice, violence, and the deadening effects of poverty, with a visionary perception of hope, love and commitment. They touch us in elemental ways, as in the conclusion to her poem "Riding Past":
In the houses people are cooking food and scolding children the ones home from work are hanging their coats up telephones are ringing behind the yellow windows Come, open the doors yellow rectangles and steam of meat and potatoes Stand on the front steps stare at the sky and wave Look, we're riding past Venus
"Random Interviews" is divided into three parts: fear, pain and desire. In the first part she catalogues hers fears: "the fear is my own/hands beating/like moths...the fear is of you/patiently elsewhere growing/a blood shape/of all my wishes"; the second part investigates pain: " i am tired of lives/unwinding like a roll /of bloody bandage/i shall roll up/the sky, pinch the sun"; the third part describes her desires:
what i want is to be aware of the spaces between stars, to breathe continuously the sources of sky, a veined sail moving, my love never setting foot to the dark anvil of earth
Lowther's poetry was also infused with neo-surrealism, and in particular the idea of poet-as-shaman. As Ricou argues, it is the darker side of surrealism "where something neurotic intersects with something religious...(c)onsistent with the shamanistic metaphor, her stones breathe, her mountains talk, and her slugs make love" (LH 17).
They're not snobs, these mountains, they don't speak Rosicrucian, they sputter with billygoat-bearded creeks bumsliding down to splat in the sea they talk with the casual tongues of water rising in trees (Coast Range)
In the latter part of A Stone Diary, the metaphor shifts to urban settings and "a more sensational violence-the surreal element is particularly noticeable in the constantly startling use of a diction associated with electricity" (LH 17).
In 1980, in memory of her tragic loss, the League of Canadian Poets created the Pat Lowther Award, an annual prize, named in her honour, for the best book of poems published that year by a Canadian woman.
Selected Titles: Time Capsule (1996), Stone Diary (1977)
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
I'm going to try to look at Atwood from a purely poetic point of view. Not an easy task. Atwood is one of Canada's most internationally known writers, more for her fiction and non-fiction than for her poetry. She is a professor, critic, editor, anthologist and novelist and writer. But she was known first as a poet. In the late 1960's, she emerged as a new voice for feminist writing in Canada. The majority of her poetry collections were published between 1966 and1984, and included The Circle Game, which won the Governor General's Award for poetry, Animals in that Country, Procedures from Underground, Journals of Suzanna Moodie, Power Politics, You Are Happy, Interlunar, and then a number of collections, entitled Selected Poems, published in 1976, 1987, 1990 and 1998. Her most recent collection, Morning in the Burned House, was published in 1996.
Atwood was born in Ottawa and spent most of her childhood in the wilds of Northern Quebec where her father worked as an entomologist. She graduated from Victoria College, Toronto University in 1961, and from Radcliffe College, Harvard in 1962. She received a D. Lit. from Trent University in1973 and a LL.D from Queens' University in 1974. As David & Lecker point out, she was one of the first generation of poets who learned how to write poetry within an already well-established body of Canadian poetry (230).
If one wished to consider just one collection, Power Politics, published in 1971, would be representative of her feminist perspective. It contains one of her most often quoted poems, the opening poem, which unequivocally sets the tone for the collection:
you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
It stands out, not only for its shock value, but also as representative of Atwood's writing, her literary moves and devices. Atwood was schooled in surrealism and neo-surrealism. Like Suzanna Moodie, her craft employs bizarre juxtapositions, and a defamiliarizing, a technique honed by the surrealists. She likes to shake the ground on which you stand. The opening stanza above is comfortable, Victorian, modest in its hook & eye allusion, a gentle simile for an intimate look at love; the second stanza shocks you from that comfort zone and into the surrealist moment, in this case, the hook of the male gaze. This poem uses two contrasting couplets. Its effect depends upon a surprising ironic shift in meaning from the gentle, cooperative hook and eye of a traditional piece of clothing to the politically charged fish hook/ open eye. Even in this tiny poem, we see Atwood's favored devices and themes at work as Atwood uses the short lined, conversational, ironic form loved by many postmodern poets and readers.
Atwood has been a voice for her generation. Her bizarre juxtapositions and collisions, her leaps in the logic of perception such as those found in The Journals of Suzanna Moodie, the gothic motifs that flourish in her poetry as well as her fiction, her dark humour, irony, parody, and love of duplicity are all instantly recognizable as Atwoodian. Personally, I think that the poetry collection that is the most fully realized, that illustrates Atwood's craft as a poet is The Journals of Suzanna Moodie. This subject allows the full play of Atwood's intellect, her ability dramatically to shift the perception of her reader to the best advantage. She is able to step into Moodie's skin for an haunting reenactment that is not only historically enlightening, but which also speaks to us in the 21st century, of our own dislocation, alienation, and environmental fears:
I am the old woman sitting across from you on the bus, her shoulders drawn up like a shawl; out of her eyes come secret hatpins, destroying the walls, ceiling Turn, look down: there is no city; this is the centre of a forest Your place is empty
Atwood developed from the Modernist tradition of Elliot and from a reflective, lyric tradition she has made her own by 'upping the anti' of the reflective, lyric poem, demanding more of it. She shares with her contemporaries a concern for language, its power and conventions and she shares with other feminists the desire to disrupt and re-invent structures, when "writing" becomes "righting".
In the service of Canadian poetry, Atwood has edited The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, 1982. She was President of the Writers' Union of Canada, President of International P.E.N. Canadian Centre, and a professor at a number of Canadian universities. There are excellent books, criticisms, and web sites dedicated to Atwood. She has won a host of prizes, honours and awards, becoming a tour de force in Canadian Letters.
Selected Poetry Titles: Circle Game (GG), Journals of Suzanna Moodie (1970), Power Politics (1973)
Daphne Marlatt (b. 1942)
"...since we do half the dying, we ought to do half the living..."
One could have placed Daphne Marlatt in either of two earlier sections of this guide, in "Opening the Field" or "I'm a Stranger Here Myself." She was born in Australia and spent her childhood in Malaysia. She arrived in Vancouver in 1951 and entered UBC in 1960, just in time to become involved with the West Coast Tish poets. She studied with Warren Tallman, Robert Creely, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Like Fred Wah, she was attentive to language and problems of narrative; like others in the Tish group, she became increasingly interested in poetic prose. However, her primary interest is with feminist poetics. Lecker & David claim "her work emphasizes sexual difference in writing, and insists on the gender specific nature of consciousness within a patriarchal culture" (241).
In 1964, Marlatt moved to Bloomington, Indiana to pursue graduate studies in Comparative Literature, translating and analyzing the French poet Francis Ponge's "Le parti pris des choses." Ponge, like Olson, was attentive to language, to its roots, to, among other things, its polyvalent nature. Martlatt also began her long love affair with etymology with this work. Indiana was followed by a move to California, back to Vancouver, to Wisconsin, and then, in 1970, a final return trip to Vancouver. Doug Barbour states that "despite a number of moves to other locales over the years, and a number of writings set in "exotic" places such as Mexico, Penang, and England, not to mention other parts of Canada, Vancouver has remained the creative "ground' of her writing, to which she always returns" (Canadian Writers and their Works V8, 189).
At first, only the West Coast poets and critics seemed really to understand what Marlatt was doing. The East either described her as 'difficult' or ignored her. Deeply ensconced in Olson's projective verse, in composition by field, her work appears disjunctive, associative, and image driven. "From Somewhere" (1981) begins:
From somewhere down hill trumpet notes rise on the rustling air, up, in the scale of a story. river rushes out to view, out of the corner of my eye, not ever leaving. proceeding is how we go onward in the increasing movement of this current's push, off, push away from limits (instant definition of a riverbank), move meant or implied...
The poem moves in the next stanzas through images of a wasp on her typewriter to crows to the spider spinning to the sound of a trumpet-and ends, "messengers who beat upstream against the rest. you particular, you moving/by. I catch a glint, a flash of, the impossible re-run, as you/slip by." However disjunctive, in the open field of play we can see her attentiveness to language, watch the dance of the intellect, and delight in what the poem is doing moment by moment. In Barbour's article, Marlatt is quoted as saying, "I love that phrase, the body of language. And I'm trying to realize its full sensory nature as much as possible. We live in the world. That's my basic assumption. I don't want to get out of this world. I want to learn everything I can about what it is to live in this world, to be mortal, which I take to be in the body" (CW V8 196).
Marlatt has increasingly become involved in feminist poetics, working with Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik and other Quebec and French feminist theorists. Barbour claims this is a natural development of Martlatt's earlier poetics and not, as was the case with Adrienne Rich, a traumatic change of poetics. She writes from what Williamson calls an intersection of the poetic tradition coming from Pound & HD to Olsen and from the "écriture feminine" poetics of the French, including the Québecoise feminist theorists. It is an intriguing intersection of imagism, objectivism and subjectivism-as we see in this stanza from "Houseless":
i'm afraid, you say, out in the wintry air, the watery sun welling close behind your shoulders, i am following the already known symmetry of your body, its radiant bow-woman arched over me, integrity straight as an arrow. blind with joy I say oh no, thinking, how could i fear with you?
Marlatt's writing has developed with her interest in language, feminism, and the knowledge that "you cannot change the world. You can change consciousness. And language is intimately tied up with consciousness" (Open Letter, Spring 1979). Her diverse experiments are a fascinating testament not only to the power of language and the importance of etymology, but also her belief in proprioception-attending to the body and its messages in the process of writing. In From Here to There, Frank Davey argues that in both her novels, Ana Historic, Taken, and her poetry/ poetic prose like How Hug a Stone, Salvage, The Vancouver Poem, and Zócalo (a Mexican travel book that crosses borders of narrative, poetry and autobiography), Marlatt's style requires a "minute and painstaking examination of the processes of perception and of the moment-to-moment contents of consciousness."
Marlatt's texts are often a fusion of life-writing, literary analysis, narrative and poetry. She extends and blurs the boundaries of genres, claiming "I have a feeling that both of them (poetry & prose) have nothing to do with the way they look on the page, but with the way the language moves" (Open Letter, Spring 1979). Some of her work has been collaborative: Two Women in a Birth covers a ten year period of collaboration with her partner Betsy Warland and includes their long (distance) poems Touch to My Tongue and open is broken; and Double Negative, written together while traveling in a train across Australia. Stevenson is a moving collaboration with the photographer Robert Minden, a musing or meditation on a small fishing village at the mouth of the Fraser River which Gary Geddes describes as:
the berth, and birthing place of boats, Finns, float-houses, barbers, Japanese, canneries, Indians, net-lofts, a place of intersection between what is native and foreign, between past and present, earth and water, river and ocean, the idea and the actual. The poem-sequence, a series of meditations on place, history, the flotsam of physical and human reality, is not just a marriage of documentary material, descriptive detail, and personal impressions, but, like Wright Morris's The Home Place, a hymn and testimonial to the passing of a way of life (585).
Daphne Marlatt is a poet, novelist, theorist, editor, and university instructor who continues to collaborate on the editoral collective of Tessera, to speak at conferences, and to give readings all over North America. She has been writer in residence at universities, including the University of Alberta and the University of Western Ontario. This Tremor Love, her newest book of love poems, was short listed for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award. Marlatt has made a significant contribution to Canadian Letters, making (a) difference.
Selected Titles: Narrative in the Feminine by Daphne Marlatt and Nicole Brossard (2000); Net Works: Selected Writings (1980); Salvage (1991); This Tremor Love (2002).
Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989)
There is a diversity of projects of Canadian feminist writers and theorists currently under way, not the least of which is what Rosemary Sullivan calls a "homage to memory." The work of anthologists, such as Wanda Campbell (Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets), Rosemary Sullivan (Poetry by Canadian Women), Jeanette Lynes (Atlantic Women Poets), Andrea Pinto Lebowitz (Living in Harmony: Nature Writing by Women in Canada) and Connie Fife, The Colour of Resistance: A Contemporary Collection of Writing by Aboriginal Women are significant contributions to an inclusive contemporary Canadian Letters, and to the restoration of early women poets in our history. Without these anthologies, many fine women poets would be lost, poets like Bronwen Wallace, whose work you do not find in many mainstream anthologies or history pages.
Bronwen Wallace was born in 1945 in Kingston, Ontario, and educated at Queens University. After receiving her MA, she moved to Windsor where she founded a women's bookstore and started working with women's groups. In the 1970s, she returned to Kingston, continued to work with women's groups, and began to teach creative writing and Women Studies. She died of cancer in 1989.
Wallace did not publish her first book until the age of 35. The Bronwen Wallace Memorial Prize, funded by friends of the poet and the Writers Trust of Canada, is an annual prize given to a young, promising poet or fiction writer who is under the age of 35, unpublished, and just beginning their writing life. In the short ten year period when she published, Wallace contributed five collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, a correspondence with Erin Moure (Two Women Talking), and a book of essays, Arguments with the World (edited and published, after her death, by Joanne Page, in 1992). She also collaborated with Chris Whynot on two films: All you Have to Do (1981) and That's Why I'm Talking (1989).
Her collections are a testimony to her social activism, involving her commitment to women's rights, civil rights, and social policy. A primary focus of Wallace's work centered on violence against women and children:
I wish I could show you what a man's anger makes of a woman's face, or measure the days it takes for her to emerge from a map of bruises the colour of death.
It is through her reader's engagement of the issue of violence that Wallace believed change could occur. In collections such as Common Magic and The Stubborn Particulars of Grace, Wallace provokes in her readers the will to re-new the issues closest to the hearts of women.
The opening poem in Common Magic, 'The Town Where I Grew Up,' describes the prejudice of the town, the separation of two classes, the "them and us." Most of the people "liked things tidy, kept their yards/ fenced and their noses clean./ After that the things that mattered most were last names/ and being Protestant." Whereas, North of town, "up there/ people shooed the chickens/off the table when the pastor came./...Crops withered overnight, ramshackle/barns hid two-headed cattle and young/girls bore their father's children."
What went on up there was a story in a foreign language. Pieces of it drifted into town, like scraps of paper, catching on the neat white fences in the shaded streets.
The poem's narrator used to believe there was an imaginary border dividing the two places, like foreign countries. But the poem concludes with the narrator's realization that:
Now I think it's merely a matter of emphasis like the Globe and Mail and the National Inquirer. They're both the same, really; they both line words like bars across the page, making you want to squeeze between them into the white where you think the truth is.
Wallace's poetry mines the reality of ordinary lives, telling their stories, reaching down into the inner dimensions of these lives, exposing their hopes, their loneliness, their despair. She received a number of awards including the Pat Lowther Award and Du Maurier Award for Poetry.
Selected Titles: Common Magic (1985), The Stubborn Particulars of Grace (1987)
Nicole Brossard (b. 1943)
Many Canadian feminist poets who were experimenting with a newly invented language, form, and subject matter, first found a place to publish in the literary journal Tessera. The original collective editorial board included Barbara Godard, Daphne Martlatt, Susan Knutson, Louise Cotnoir, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott. The journal created a space that respected and highlighted difference, and increased the visibility of feminist writing. It is still a force in Canadian Letters, published now by Women's Press. The journal offers dialogue between French and English women writers and among women across Canada on feminist literary criticism. Many of the issues, hotly debated by the editorial team over the years, are reflected in Nicole Brossard's work: "translation as a practice and an intellectual paradigm for border writing, gender and genre, narration especially the question of the subject and the dominant symbolic order" (11 Godard).
Nicole Brossard was born in Montreal in 1943 and educated at the Université de Montréal. An internationally known poet, novelist, and essayist, she is considered one of Quebec's most significant writers. She has won the Governor General's Award for poetry twice. A prolific writer since 1965, she has written over twenty books, many translated into English including the poetry collections Dream Mechanics (1974), Lovhers (in 1986 by Barbara Godard), and Installations (in 2000 by Erin Mouré & Robert Majzels). She was editor of the innovative review, La barre de jour (The Day's Helm), and the avant-garde bilingual collection of poetry, les stratégies du reel (The Story So Far).
In A History of Canadian Literature (2001), W.H. New, discussing the new feminists, states:
...these writers seek to touch rather than explore; they resist the controlling, imperial implications of the related images of mapping/exploration/penetration. The neologistic systems of hyphenation, parenthesis and fracture that recurs in the vocabulary of feminist criticism-'de-sire','re-vision', 'herstory', 'lo(u)nging' 'gyn-ecolgy', or (in French) 'misandrie' - further emphasize the gendered restrictions build into conventional terminology. They do so in part by revealing the overlay in the semiotic condition of language and the interpretative process of reading. Especially in the work of Nicole Brossard, these critical and creative principles come together in metatextual narrative (268).
We can see in Brossard's work how the task of rediscovering the lost voices of women poets in Canadian history is also a linguistic project of creating a space wherein we can hear female voices, a language with which they might freely speak. Brossard's work has been involved in exposing the gender assumptions inherent in the French language (as in the distinction between le and la and the practice of gender agreement); she employs paradoxical puns or she removes "the silent e in words like laboratoir, to mark the absence of the feminine in the activities carried out there", critical, linguistic methods of "resisting the erasure of woman in the systems of language" (New 268).
It is not easy to engage Brossard's work without critical help. Barbara Godard has written an introduction to Lovhers which allows the reader to enter this discourse with a better understanding of its qualities. She places the book in the context of Brossard's oeuvre, discussing how "her work blurs the boundaries between fiction and theory, subverting the fictions patriarchal discourse has spun about women's lives by working with the 're(her)alities' of women's lives that lie outside the codes of fiction"(8). She discusses the feminist values of doubleness, paradox, interdependence and multiplicity in Brossard's work. She states, "Brossard's protagonist aims to enter the world of letters, to wrestle control over her 'cortex', her 'body/text' and to escape the contingency of matter imposed upon her by reproduction" (8). In the final poem in the Lovhers sequence from 'My Continent' we find a moment of subsequent rapture:
my continent, i mean to talk about the radical effect of light in broad daylight today, i've held you close loved by every civilization, every texture, every geometry and ember, delirious, as it is written: and my body is enraptured
The work Brossard has contributed to Canadian literature and has accordingly been recognized in a number of outstanding awards: the Governor General's Award (1974, 1984), the Harbourfront Festival Prize, Le Grand Prix de Poesie de la Foundation les Forges in 1989 and 1999, the Prix Athanase-David for lifetime literary achievement, and, in 1994, appointment to l'Academie des letters du Quebec.
Selected Titles: Double Impression: Poémes et textes 1967-1984 (collected poems), Lovhers, Installations, Musée de l'os et de l'eau.
Copyright © Heather Pyrcz 2003. All rights reserved.