Coming "from away", what makes MacPherson, Szumigalski, Ondaatje and Thompson Canadian poets? Born and raised elsewhere, garnering values, interests, experiences elsewhere, at what point does one become a Canadian poet-when attaining legal citizenship? Or is it putting down roots, participating in one's community, knowing where Wawa is? Is it more elusive still? Ondaatje and Thompson have each been hailed as a "potentially major writer" partly because their talent is a creative interstice of inheritances.
In the introduction to I Dream Myself into Being, James Polk argues that part of John Thompson's achievement was to bring a continental aesthetics-the poetic theory of European post-war surrealism "with its emphasis on the ideal image, which should contain wordless power and universal resonance"-to Canadian material (4). Perhaps, it also has to do with the way Thompson read the New Brunswick landscape-the wild and haunting Tantramar Marshes, the Fundy shore, the apple orchards, barns, the hackmatack- and infused it with myth.
In Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, Sam Solecki notes that Ondaatje's "characters, landscapes, stories and themes resist any taxonomies based on an overtly Canadian thematic" (7). Solecki's colleague at University of Toronto, J.E. Chamberlain, argues that Ondaatje's poetry is centred around the questions of tradition and the assumptions "the poet can or should make about his function as an agent of complex inheritances" (32). Ondaatje is in a curious position, Chamberlain states, "Canada offers Ondaatje a geography, but no inheritance; Sri Lanka offers him a family history, but no tradition, no way of passing things on; the English language offers him both inheritance and history, but no time and place" (41). This is descriptive of a colonial predicament, one that makes Ondaatje's poetry unexpected, unpredictable, and layered.
I consider four Canadian poets who began elsewhere but immigrated to Canada, where they found not only unique voices, but also highly influential styles; seminal poets who have enriched Canadian poetry immeasurably, in ways we are only beginning to explore.
Jay MacPherson (1931-
Jay MacPherson, born in 1931 in London, England, was sent to Newfoundland in 1940 as a "war guest". She later studied at Bishop Spencer College in St. John's and Glebe Collegiate in Ottawa. In 1951 she received a BA from Carleton College (now Carleton University), and then spent a year studying in London, at University College. Returning to Canada, she then completed a B.L.S. at McGill, followed by a move to Toronto where she took a MA in English literature at Victoria College, supervised by Northrop Frye. She then taught and completed a PhD at Victoria, under the supervision of both Frye and Milton Wilson, subsequently joining the Faculty.
Over the years, MacPherson found a number of kindred spirits in the Toronto milieu: Northrop Frye (to whom she dedicated The Boatman), Alan Crawley (who published her first poems), Robert Graves (who published her first collection), Margaret Atwood (whom she first taught at the U of T), Daryl Hine (with whom she shared her loved of classicism and myth), and James Reaney.
Lorraine Weir describes MacPherson as a "mythopoeic" poet-rooted in the teachings of Frye, the archetypes of Carl Jung, and the intensely conservative social vision of T.S. Eliot (Jay MacPherson & Her Works, 4). The poet is primarily interested in the relationship of literature to what she calls "authentic myth", "the ones that have some imaginative force behind them." The Boatman, which won the Governor General's Award in 1958, uses Christian topology; the boatman is Noah, but both Noah and the ark itself form an allegory for the artist and the artistic experience, the ark representing Jung's collective unconscious. Other work at the time included the revised Hymn Book of the Anglican and United Churches of Canada, and commissioned poems for John Beckwith's cantata, "Jonah". In vision, MacPherson is deeply Christian, a Protestant humanist. In technique, Weir places MacPherson beside Margaret Avison, P.K. Page, Phyllis Webb, but especially Anne Hébert-particularly in the use of the Gothic and macabre themes and devices.
We can see, in the following poem, that MacPherson's use of allusions is extensive:
Poor Child The child is mortal; but Poor Child Creeps through centuries of bone Untransient as the channelling worm Or water making sand of stone. Poor child, what have they done to you? Poor child the royal goosegirl combing Her hair in the filed; poor children too Achilles sulking, Odysseus returned, Philoctetes, Prufrock, and you, and you. Poor child, what have they done to do? Go further back: for these poor children Ruined from the womb, still yearn To swing in dark or water, wanting Not childhood's flowers but absolute return. Poor child, what have we done?
The world of Jay MacPherson is not inscribed in the Canadian landscape; it is not a mirror image of nature. Hers is the world of myth, peopled with the creatures of myth, religion and literature, used, as Frye claimed, not so much for religious purposes, as for poetic ones. However, her recurring themes involve the creation, fall, flood, redemption and the apocalypse. The Boatman describes a world where redemption is still possible; her later book, Welcoming Disaster, has the critics baffled. They cannot agree on its proper interpretation-is it a darker, more tragic vision or is the possibility of redemption there? W.J. Keith
(http://www.arts.uwo.ca/canpoetry/cpjrn/vol36/keith.htm) gives a balanced alternative to the two sides critics have tended to take thus far in MacPherson scholarship.
In The Bush Garden, Frye speaks of MacPherson's "timeless style", revealed in the following poem:
The Well A winter hanging over the dark well, My back turned to the sky, To see if in that blackness something stirs, Or glints, or winks an eye: Or, from the bottom looking up, I see Sky's white, my pupil head- Lying with all that's lost, with all that shines My winter with the dead: A well of truth, of images, of words. Low where Orion lies I watch the solstice pit become a stair, The constellations rise.
Jay MacPherson has published four collections of poetry and a book on classical mythology for children, Four Ages of Man (1962).
Selected Titles: The Boatman (1957) GG; Welcoming Disaster (1974)
Anne Szumigalski (1922-1999)
Anne Szumigalski was born Anne Davis, in London, England, and educated privately in Hampshire. She served with the Red Cross as an interpreter and welfare officer during World War II. In 1946, she married a retired Polish officer, Jan Szumigalski, immigrating to Canada, to Saskatoon, in 1951. She has since been deeply involved in the Saskatchewan writing community, helping found the Saskatchewan Writers Guild and the literary journal Grain, which she helped edit for nine years. She was involved with the dance collective, Saskatoon Moving, and taught at the Saskatchewan Summer School for the Arts (1967-77).
Szumigalski cites as her influences: the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, the poetry of William Blake, and contemporary visual artists. This latter influence is seen in her collection Voice, which collaborates with the Canadian artist, Marie Elyse St. George. Both artists are interested in the visionary quality of the imagination. As Szumigalski explains in her preface: "Both of us let our imaginations wander in the world of dreams, visions, and memory. Both of us are interested in symbols, images and myth."
The Word, the Voice, the Text is Szumigalski's memoir-the life of the writer. It is not told in linear prose, but in meditative musings, anecdotes, photos, and poetry. The text reveals Blake's pervasive influence-from her struggle with angels to her understanding of the relationship of time, eternity and infinity. In "Angels" the poet asks:
have you noticed how they roost in trees? not like birds their wings fold the other way
Her mother, "whose eyes are clouding/ gets up early to shoo them/ out of her pippin tree" thinks they are hens:
does not notice how they bow down low before her anger each lifting a cold and rosy hand from beneath the white feathers raising it in greeting blessing her and the air as they back away into the mist
Anne Szumigalski was a poet, translator, essayist, editor and playwright, collaborating on radio dramas. She received many awards including Saskatchewan poetry awards, Writers Choice awards, Saskatchewan Book Awards, a Lifetime Award for Excellence in the Arts, 1990, and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, 1989. Szumigalski received two nominations for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and received the award in 1995, for Voice. Selected Titles: On Glassy Wings, Poems New & Selected 1997, Voice, GG, 1995
John Thompson (1938-1976)
John Thompson has been likened to Dylan Thomas, Theodore Reothke and Billy the Kid-in that, his life is a confused body of facts open to exaggerated story telling. Thompson is one of those elusive, enigmatic characters of whom many tales are told, particularly here in the Atlantic Provinces. After hearing all the stories, one does not know what to believe, until, that is, one reads Peter Sanger's carefully researched and measured accounts of John Thompson's life and work. SeaRun (1986) is Sanger's analysis of Thompson's last collection of poems, Stilt Jack. It begins with a brief biography and then turns, by way of annotated notes, to the many allusions and devices Thompson employs in the 38 ghazals that constitute Stilt Jack. In the 1995 publication, John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations, Sanger delves deeply into Thompson's tragic life and collects unpublished poems, poems published in literary journals, and Thompson's translations to add to the two published collections: At the Edge of the Chopping There are No Secrets and Stilt Jack. Here, then, are some of the "facts" of Thompson's life as told by Peter Sanger-although he warns "the outline is tentative and subject to correction. Thompson could be autobiographically creative" (SeaRun 5).
Thompson was born on March 17, 1938, in Timperley Cheshire, England. In 1940 his father died of a heart attack. Hi mother gave him to a relative in Manchester and never returned for him. In time, she became a clerk, remarried, and emigrated to Australia. (In defence of his mother, one must remember that it was wartime, pre-welfare England, and that she was a poor textile mill hand who could not look after John, earn a living, and better herself). Still, these circumstances affected Thompson deeply. Thompson both admired his mother for her accomplishments and was bitterly resentful for his abandonment.
Thompson became a full boarder, first in Amberleigh Private School, then, in 1944, in Chatham's Hospital School, and in 1949 in the prodigious Manchester Grammar School, one of the top four grammar schools in the country. He entered as a "free scholar"-a student of high ability whose family could not afford to pay his way. Sanger points out that keeping up his grades in order to continue his education must have been a constant stress for Thompson.
At seventeen, Thompson entered the University of Sheffield, receiving an Honours Degree in Psychology. In the years between 1958 and 1960 he served two years of obligatory service in the British Army in the 1 Wireless Regiment of the British Army Intelligence Corps. Upon completion of his service, Thompson moved to the States and entered Michigan University in Psychology, but switched to Comparative Studies where he achieved his MA and PhD, studying with the Canadian poet and scholar, AJM Smith. During this time he married Meredith Marshall, and, in 1964, they had a daughter, Jenny. He claims that he started writing during this period. Perhaps due to Smith's influence, after receiving his Ph.D., Thompson applied in Canada and was offered appointments at the University of Calgary and at Mount Allison University.
He said he chose New Brunswick because, looking at the map, it appeared that it was mostly wilderness. Thompson loved the outdoors and the sports of climbing, fishing and hunting. The family moved to a rented farmhouse at Wood Point near the Fundy shore on the edge of the Tantramar Marshes, about fifteen kilometres from Sackville. This was a time of happiness for Thompson and his family. It was here that he wrote his first collection of poems, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets.
Our Arcs Touch If our arcs touch it must be as the taut snow setting steel: steel grass blade; death we won't speak of our folly, so cold, we can bury these bones: things rise, the warmth: so cold our arcs touch, it must be.
Thompson was revered by students and during the evenings and weekends, his home was open to visitors. However, there was another side to Thompson, "drunken and amatory" as he once described the ghazal form. He suffered psychological illness and chronic alcoholism, which drove him to theatrical, unpredictable and sometimes (bordering on) violent acts. These led to most of the stories about him, some true, some grossly exaggerated.
In 1969, he was told by the university administration that at the end of his four year probationary appointment, he would not be granted tenure. A letter stated that "there are...doubts about your suitability for this university." He was accused of neglecting his 1st and 2nd year classes in favour of his poetry class; for lack of interest and competence in English literature; for his apparent lack of interest in planning, developing and operating an effective program in English and the university in general; and for his lack of publications. His students and members of the English Department rallied in his defence, and finally, in November of 1971, his appointment with tenure was approved. But the tenure controversy took a toll. His marriage faltered; they moved to Jolicure, but the new house was in need of renovations, cold, isolated and barren, surrounded as it was by huge, flat, open hay and corn fields. It could not repair the problems at the heart of the marriage. In 1973, At the Edge of the Chopping was published by Anansi Press, and Thompson began Stilt Jack, which begins:
Now you have burned your books: you'll go with nothing but your blind, stupefied heart.
In December of that year Thompson travelled to Ottawa for a reading, then to Toronto to meet the staff of Anansi Press. At a small house party given by Shirley Mann Gibson, Thompson, drunk, and in James Polk's words "tense and surly, a much smaller, grimmer man than the woodsman-hero" they expected, "gave short shrift to our polite questions, and began to bark out insults into the embarrassed silence about mean publishers and a gutless Toronto literati that did not understand or value poetry" (1). This is one of the many stories that haunt the legacy of his work, but which also reveals the mental state and the alcoholism that hounded him. He returned to Sackville; Meredith and he separated; Thompson continued his descent into what his doctor described as physical, mental and emotional destitution.
The following summer, Thompson took a sabbatical with the help of grants from the Canada Council to Toronto, where he lived with Shirley Mann Gibson. Peter Sanger's introduction speaks eloquently of this relationship. For a while, the relationship stabilized him and he continued to work on Stilt Jack. Then, while he was in Toronto, his house at Jolicure burned to the ground, destroying everything Thompson had and valued: his sporting and climbing equipment, manuscripts, books, personal effects, photographs, letters, mementoes-what Sanger calls the last hold of a nearly anchorless man. The loss worsened his depressions, his periods of manic activity, and his drinking. In the fall of 1975, he returned to teach at Mount Allison. He continued to write Stilt Jack, fraught as it was with the trauma of his life. XXVIII is one of the central poems in Stilt Jack. It alludes to Thompson's central theme of the poetic quest:
I learn by going; there is the garden. Things I root up from the dirt I'm in love with. First things: lost. The milky sauce of last things a siren. Please, please be straight, strait, stone, arrow, north needle. I haven't got time for the pain, name your name the white whale, Stilt Jack, in her face, where I have to go.
The first and last lines of the ghazal make up a line of Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking," one of Thompson's favourites. Where the poet has to go, Sanger suggests, is into the center of spiritual equilibrium, poetic inspiration and human love.
In the fall of 1975, Thompson wrote his Last Will and Testimony. When Jenny visited him for Christmas, although the meeting was "joyful", he broke down and was hospitalized for three months. On his release, instead of abiding by the doctor's orders not to mix drugs and alcohol, he continued drinking steadily. He finished Stilt Jack in April. On April 24, he gave the manuscript to a friend and fellow poet, Douglas Lochhead. After returning home, the tenants in the apartment below heard muffled choking and cries. He was discovered comatose-and pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. James Polk describes the cause of death as "a brutal mix of barbiturates and liquor". As Sanger states, "the autopsy did not provide conclusive evidence that Thompson killed himself. Whether he did or not, he had obviously prepared himself for death, and, at the very least, put himself in death's way." As James Polk and others have noted, the completion of a major work is a dangerous time for a writer.
John Thomson's is a tragic story, retold poetically in Stilt Jack as he "fitted the thoughts, feelings, self-justifications, self-recriminations, regrets, angers, experiences of peace, happiness and frustration he had during the last three years of his life" (Sanger SeaRun 7). We are indebted to Peter Sanger's scholarship that we now have a body of work which encompasses the full range of Thompson's interests and talents, a biography that separates legend from reality, and annotated notes to help read the allusively complex Stilt Jack.
Selected Titles: John Thompson: Collected Poems & Translations Ed Peter Sanger (1995)
Michael Ondaatje (1943-
Michael Ondaatje is a poet, novelist, anthologist, editor, photographer and film maker. His most well known novel, The English Patient, which won both the Booker Prize (a first for a Canadian) and the Governor General's Award, and, adapted for screen, won nine academy awards in 1996. He adapted two other works for the stage, and since then The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (a mix of prose and poetry) has been staged in Toronto, Stratford and New York. His collections of poetry include: The Dainty Monster (1967), The Man with Seven Toes (1969), The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Rat Jelly (1973), There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning To Do (1979), Secular Love (1984) The Cinnamon Peeler (1992), and Handwriting (1998).
Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). After his parents' divorce, when he was eleven, he moved with his mother to London, England where he finished preparatory school at Dulwich College. He came to Canada at age nineteen and spent two years studying at Bishop's University. He received his BA from the University of Toronto and his Masters from Queens University. He had started writing when he moved to Canada and had three collections of poems published before he was thirty. During his early career, Ondaatje received the Ralph Gustafson Award, 1965; the Epstein Award, 1966; and the President's Medal from the University of Western Ontario in 1967.
He taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1967-1971, but was released because he refused to do a PhD, though he had published three books of poetry, a critical study on Leonard Cohen and produced a film on bp Nichol called "Sons of Captain Poetry"! Two days after he was fired, his newest collection The Collected Works of Billy the Kid won the Governor General's Award for poetry. Western's loss quickly became York's gain when he was appointed to the faculty at Glendon College. Ondaatje currently resides in Toronto with his wife, novelist/editor Linda Spalding.
In 1978, Ondaatje returned to Sri Lanka. He returned again in 1980. Running in the Family, a fictionalized autobiography of his grandparents and parents' lives in colonial Ceylon, was published in 1982. In 1979, he again won the Governor General's award for poetry, for There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning To Do.
Ondaatje's work asks the reader to regard society with a keen eye, to discover its limitations-particularly those imposed by perception-its repressions and its distortions. From his angle of vision, reality can appear surreal, absurd, mutable and ambiguous. His books resist classification; his novels and long poems blur distinctions. Lecker & David identify his obsessions as tensions between fixity and flux, the word and silence, the ability of the word and the camera to fix and capture experience. His obsessions take the form of spiders, webs, stars, fences and photographic frames (249). "White Dwarfs" begins with a fear of silence, no words, of "falling without words over and over" but ends "there are those burnt out stars/ who implode into silence/ after parading in the sky/ after such choreography what could they wish to speak of anyway?" Ondaatje's images can be exotic and erotic, with underlying danger, as in this image in "Elizabeth". "Then Daddy took me to the zoo/ he knew the man there/ they put a snake around my neck/ and it crawled down the front of my dress/ I felt its flicking tongue/ dripping onto me like a shower", an image foreshadowing the poem's violent end. He evokes all our senses in the first stanzas of The Cinnamon Peeler:
If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow. Your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you. The blind would stumble certain of whom they had approached though you might bathe under rain gutters, monsoon. Here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbour to your hair or the crease that cuts your back. This ankle. You will be known among strangers as the cinnamon peeler's wife...
Gary Geddes roots Ondaatje's work in post modernism, in the duality present in both his form and content: a tender domesticity on the one hand and an explosive portrayal of violence on the other. Ondaatje expresses the two impulses, Geddes argues, "that Roland Barthes identifies in The Pleasure of the Text as being at war in contemporary art: a safe, imitative edge, which treads ground that is familiar, and a subversive edge that is violent, unpredictable, and always moving towards that frontier where 'the death of language' is glimpsed" (542).
Biography The dog scatters her body in sleep, paws, finding no ground, whip at the air, the unseen eyeballs reel deep, within. And waking- crouches tacked to humility all day, children ride her, stretch, display the black purple lips pull hind legs to dance; unaware that she tore bulls apart, loosed heads of partridges, dreamt blood.
There is very little "Canadianism" in Ondaatje's work: its themes, locales, or subject matters. As the poet Tom Marshall points out, even when Canada is present, as in Ondaatje's early poems, often the mythic past is layered on a mundane Canadian present. But this does not lessen our enjoyment. As Ondaatje has said himself in another context, "the stories within the poems don't matter, the grand themes don't matter. The movement of the mind and language is what is important:" Sam Solecki is not alone in his admiration for Ondaatje's "brilliant tricks with the verbal knife: the wit, the unexpected shifts in tone, the evocative imagery and the brilliance of his metaphors" (Spider Blues 41).
Selected Titles: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, (1970) GG; There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning To Do (1979) GG
Copyright © Heather Pyrcz 2003. All rights reserved.