The poets addressed in this section had their start, for the most part, in the 1940's in the small literary journals that were then proliferating, like Preview and First Statement. They are quintessentially Canadian, writing from strong, physical and emotional centres: Purdy's Roblin Lake, Souster's Toronto, Mandel's Estevan. Physically, Margaret Avison writes from Ontario, but emotionally from religious conviction. Waddington moved around the country, but her centre, both physically and emotionally, is the self-what Gail Vanstone describes as "the celebration of the creative, intuitive passionate woman" (Canadian Woman Studies, Vol. 1, #3, Spring, 1979). Still, for Waddington, there is a sense of place; Gimli, on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, is "my most beloved place in all of Canada," and Winnipeg, where she was born, "stays in my mind like a poem and it rhythms linger in my blood like snow songs."
I believe all of these poets would agree with Waddington: "my bond with Canada is not so much through culture as through actual places. My love for the country is physical, biological. I believe that whatever creatures lie buried in it, and whatever spirits have hovered over it will eventually reveal themselves to the people who live in it" (Exile, Macleans, 1974).
Margaret Avison (1918-)
Avison was born in Galt (now Cambridge), Ontario, the daughter of a Methodist minister. She is one of three children. The family moved to the prairies, first Regina then Calgary. David Kent quotes her: " I was taught to read the Bible, to pray, to love, to enjoy" (ECW Series). In 1931 she moved to Toronto where she has remained. Avison was educated at Victoria College, University of Toronto where her teachers included E.J Pratt and Northrop Frye. She has worked as a librarian, secretary, research assistant, and file clerk, in insurance for Gage Publishers, and as a lecturer at U. of T. She taught servicemen, wrote book reviews, and was nursemaid to a family, a job that included a long trip through France.
In 1953 she met Cid Cormon, who introduced her to the work of the Black Mountain poets. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she travelled to Chicago where she put together her first collection of poems, Winter Sun (published in 1960), that won the Governor General's Award. In this period, Avison was also translating Hungarian poetry. In 1963, she attended a workshop in BC with the Black Mountain poets including Charles Olsen, Robert Creely and Denise Levertov, poets who deeply influenced her work.
But even more importantly, 1963 was the year of her religious awakening, the year that Avison made a sudden conversion back to Christianity. David Kent states, "She gave up everything in a radical act of faith". Two months of intensive writing followed during which she wrote most of The Dumbfounding (1966), her second volume of verse. She was working on her Ph.D., and teaching at Scarborough College, but gave it all up to join the Presbyterian Church Mission at Evangel Hall in downtown Toronto. She continued writing, and for a time, taught poetry to the patients of Queen Street Mental Hospital. In 1978 she published her third volume, sunblue, establishing her as a devotional poet in the tradition of John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerald Manly Hopkins.
Stouck describes Avison as "a rigorously intellectual poet" who "believes that a poem should defamiliarize the world for the reader, that it should present a world that s newly perceived rather than known according to familiar categories of perception" (MCA, 214). He sees her poems as "among the finest religious poems written in the 20th century" (231). Her themes, not surprisingly, include social injustice, poverty and political repression.
Avison is not always easy to read. David Kent (Margaret Avison and Her Works, 1989) along with C.D Mazoff (Waiting for the Son, 1989), help to decipher some of the more puzzling aspects of her poetry - how she involves the reader in the creative process with her use of suspension (for example, the fracturing of a word at the end of a sentence: resist/ing, or her use of parenthesis and caesuras), diction (for example, the use of compound epithets like 'bird-foot embroidered'), archaic words, neologisms like 'ensource' or 'swepth' or 'snow whinged,' her metaphysical complexity, and her use of unexpected questions to keep the reader off balance and alert.
And yet, there are many times when Avison recalls and embodies for her reader a timeless, universal moment, as in 'Lit Sky and Foundered Earth':
The nighthawk? no a gull far off, only affirms the quiet of this hour as do the children's cries in the near dark-still playing, guilty with freedom, after this sudden summer on a school day in October. Hearing them, you know how flushed their faces, how desperate for one last dare: they listen too for that voice from a lit window or doorway to beam them down and in.
Even here, there are layers of meaning. We can readily share the feelings of a child playing in the near dark, resisting going in, going to bed. However, the nighthawk sets the mood. A nighthawk is more dangerous than a gull; it is a bird of prey. It reveals the poet's deeper intention, as does the last line. Here there is a more melancholy meaning woven in, where the children of God 'desperate for one last dare' are reluctant to give up life, even though they 'listen too for that/voice from a lit window or doorway/to beam them down and in,' which suggests a grave.
In 1985 Avison was made an officer in the Order of Canada. She has won the Governor General's award for poetry twice. She published her most recent collection, Not Yet but Still in 1997.
Selected Titles: Winter Sun (GG), No Time (GG) Selected Poems (1991)
Al Purdy (1918 -2000)
My favourite discussion of Albert Purdy is Gary Geddes' introduction in the fourth edition of 20th Century Poetry and Politics. To my mind, it is just the right mixture of provocative boisterousness and poetic insight, much like Purdy himself. Geddes tell us that Purdy was a self-confessed neurotic kid, who quit school at 16, rode the rails, picked apples, served in the RCAF during the war (although he was busted from the rank of sergeant), and after the war started a short-lived taxi and bootlegging service. After his marriage, Purdy moved to Ameliasburg, Ontario on the shores of Roblin Lake where he built his own house. Near the end of his life, he divided his time between Roblin Lake, and Sydney, B.C. He served a long apprenticeship as a poet, breaking through with The Caribou Horses, which won the Governor General's Award in 1965.
But Geddes also tells us about Purdy's strengths as a poet. Purdy, he argues, is like Philip Larkin, "he has an unusual sensitivity to change, a time-consciousness; his imagination is attuned to the subtle ironies and nuances produced by juxtaposing past and present". So many of his best poems are historical meditations, "delicate renderings of vanishing moments from the past" like 'Lament for the Dorsets'. Purdy argues that poetry may begin with the ego, "Look at me, Mom, no hands" but comes down to trying to tell the truth - saying what you feel and think and what is important to you.
In some sense, there could not be two more diametrically opposed poets than Purdy and Avison. Where Avison is objective and subtle, Purdy is, well, not. He likes to be close and direct. Unlike Avison, Purdy hardily disapproved of the Black Mountain poets and their manifesto. He told Geddes in an interview that he could not understand why anyone would want to write poetry like that - what he called dull poetry "in which they make under-emphasis a virtue." But for all their differences, there are also striking similarities in the two poets; for example, their shared interest in the larger questions of space and time.
Like Robert Service, E.J. Pratt, and Dawn Fraser, Purdy was a popular, populist poet, a voice of the people. But he was also distinctive. Michael Ondaatje, poet and Purdy's close friend, states in his introduction to Beyond Remembering that there isn't a single parallel to Purdy in English literature. "He was this self-taught poet from up the road." Purdy's public readings in the 60's and early 70's were revelatory to a new generation of Canadian Literature students. He had a provocative, ironic, comedic voice. His audacity and his verve were amazing. "When I sat down to play the piano," tells, in mock epic form, of Purdy, as Achilles, trying to go to the bathroom in the bush:
He findeth a quiet glade among great stones squatteth forthwith and undoeth trousers Irrational Man by Wm Barrett in hand while the other dismisseth mosquitoes and beginneth the most natural of natural functions buttocks balanced above the boulders Then dogs Dogs DOGS all shapes and sizes all colours and religious persuasion a plague of dogs rushing in
The poem goes on to describe the hopelessness of the situation ("what would you do/in a case like this?/ Well I'll tell you/ NOT A DAMN THING"). His only distraction is provided by an "Eskimo kid" throwing stones ("STAND FIRM/ Oh avatar of Olympian excellence...and slingeth thy stones forever and ever/ thou veritable David). The poem ends with the ignoble thought "PS Next time I'm gonna take a gun".
Poems such as 'Lament for the Dorsets' or 'Wilderness Gothic' reveal another side of Purdy that is compassionate, often elegiac, and melancholic. He reminds us of the unrelenting passage of time, of what he would later call "the puzzle that is yourself and always changing...asking the same questions as in ages past".
Purdy published 33 books of poetry, plus a novel, an autobiography, and nine collections of essays and correspondence in his lifetime. He received many honours including the Order of Ontario, the Order of Canada, and two Governor General Awards. As I have noted elsewhere, his final collection, Beyond Remembering, is an extensive, rich collection of his best poems, written over the second half of the 20th century. It honours and celebrates his poetry and his passion for the writing life. The collection includes, he said, everything for which he wished to be remembered. Grounded in Roblin Lake, Purdy's Walden Pond, of a "boy fishing for sunfish in a river", the collection is a journey we take with him, a journey that reaches out to the extremes of the country: to Newfoundland, British Columbia, the high Arctic, and beyond. He traveled the world, writing of places and their histories as diverse as Mexico, Hiroshima, Castro's Cuba, and Lenin's Russia. As George Woodcock noted, Purdy is the history-conscious poet, the philosophizer on the human condition, the geographer of the imagination, and the high poet of comedy.
Purdy's time and space are not confined to the here and now. His final poem, "Her Gates Both East and West," leaps back millenniums and soars outward to the galaxy. A sympathetic, casual voice reaches for us from the wild terrain of his imagination:
The millennium really makes little difference except as a kind of unsubtle reminder of the puzzle that is yourself and always changing the country that you wandered like a stranger but stranger no longer yourself become undeniable to yourself wearing the lakes and rivers towns and cities a country that no man can comprehend Joseph's coat turned inside out now indistinguishable from your own innards --a country that no man may comprehend asking the same questions as ages past time measurable by the tick-tock of millenniums and if by chance we are not alone some traveller on another planet may catch a glimpse of us sometimes looking outward into the night sky
But for all his travels, Purdy is never far from home. In "A Man Without a Country" he observes of the wanderer:
He is beginning to know that the ruined gray cities of Europe and eastern lands and ingrown culture of the world mean nothing without a sense of place the knowledge of here which is the center of all things of being a boy fishing for sunfish in a river
Al Purdy died April 21, 2000, passing into the realm of legend. In his final, joyfully subversive essay (the very writing "makes me thirsty for a beer or two") Purdy reveals, "I was never really happier than when I was lying in a sleeping bag on an Arctic island, listening to those noisy ducks at the top of the world, and writing a poem."
Selected Titles: The Caribou Horses GG; The Collected Poems of Al Purdy GG; Beyond Remembering (2000)
Miriam Waddington (1917-)
Miriam Waddington was born in Winnipeg. Her parents were Jewish Russian immigrants, and this background is a source of great strength in her writing. She attended high school in Ottawa, and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1939. Following her graduation, she married Patrick Waddington and started special training in social work. During the forties and fifties she worked as a caseworker in child guidance clinics, hospitals, prisons, family and children's agencies in Toronto and Montreal, where she also taught at McGill. But for a time she gave it all up to raise her young children. Later, she taught Canadian Literature at York University in Toronto.
Waddington has published 13 books of poetry, a critical study of A.M. Klein, dozens of critical articles, reviews, short stories and translations of both prose and poetry from Yiddish and German. Her own work has been translated and published in the Soviet Union, Hungry, Japan, Romania, and South America and included in anthologies in Canada, Australia, England and the United States. Four Canadian visual artists have incorporated her poems into their work and Canadian and American composers have set about a dozen of her song poems to music. Some critics argue that Waddington is undervalued in Canadian culture. Clare MacCulloch has argued that "her poetry has made her one of the most important, if somewhat under-rated poetic voices of this century, her work spanning periods, influences, developments, trends, and innovations which are impressive and important considerations for our cultural historians. Through it all, Waddington sits, a calm center in a vortex of much hub-bub, the one person who deserves as Robert Fulford has observed, to be called 'the mother' in the contemporary literary family" (Books in Canada, Oct. 1976).
Waddington is adept at identifying our Canadian signature. Whereas some poets shy away from national description, Waddington has given us a number of nationalist poems including "What is a Canadian":
What is a Canadian anyway? A mountain, a maple leaf, a prairie, a Niagara Fall, a trail beside the Atlantic, a bilingualism, a scarred mosaic a yes-no somehow-or-other maybe- might-be should-be could-be glacial shield, grain elevator, empire daughter imperial order of man woman child or what?
In "Canadians" we are embodied in "geese, fish, Eskimo/faces, girl guide cookies, ink drawings, tree plantings, summer/storms, and winter/emanations".
Many of her collections deal with personal, emotional experience, creating an intensity and poignancy in her poems. As Rick Johnson points out in a review of Collected Works, her themes include love, motherhood, social issues primarily derived from her work as a social worker in Montreal, travel, being Canadian, being Jewish, and ageing. Waddington works against the male-dominated ideology that she describes as overvaluing fact and undervaluing feelings. In Mister Never, for example, she is the passionate woman looking directly at love and loneliness.
In an article for The Globe and Mail in 1979, Waddington values the 'impressionistic' quality of women writers and their innovative and original use of language and form. The women she admires - Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys - all share the ability to describe 'the motions of the inner soul of women'. This, too, has been her admirable achievement.
Selected Titles: Miriam Waddington: Collected Poems (1986)
Eli Mandel (1922-)
Eli Mandel is a poet, teacher, critic and editor, born and raised in Estevan, Saskatchewan. Ann Munton (L&D) states, "He grew up experiencing the harshness and deprivation of the Depression, being closely attuned to the wild, prairie land, and having a profound sense of his Jewish background' (147). He began his studies at the University of Saskatchewan, but was interrupted by the Second World War where he served in the Army medical corps. He received an M.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He taught in the English Departments at College Militaire Royal de Saint Jeans, York University, and the University of Alberta.
Mandel first published in Trio, a collection with two other poets, Gael Turnball and Phyllis Webb. His first solo book, Fuseli Poems, was published in 1960. Munroe Beattie argues of Mandel "among contemporary Canadian poets, none is more consummately the "maker" of poems," that his poetry is a rich combination and counterpoint of elements, "the personal and the mythic, the melodramatic and the commonplace, the actual and the fantastic" (LH, Vol. 2, 306,). In his first collection, for example, we encounter images from Fuseli's paintings such as "Girl combing her hair watched by a young man", but also Orpheus, Leda and the swan, Icarus and Theseus. These mythic characters are juxtaposed with contemporary, everyday images of modern humanity in places like Estevan, Saskatchewan. Beattie suggests that Mandel's impulse is to "re-interpret myth in contemporary terms-and, at the same time, to impart to contemporary subject-matter overtones of timeless universality" (305). We can see some of this at work in his poem "Notes from the Underground" which begins:
A woman built herself a cave and furnished it with torn machines and tree-shaped trunks and dictionaries Out of the town where she sprang to her cave of rusting texts and springs rushed fables of indifferent rape and children slain indifferently and daily blood
In recognizing this muse, in recognizing the destructive forces around us, in wanting something different, the poet is liberated, "would you believe how free I have become/ with lusting after her?" and through his own writing and revealing the horrors of indifference, he can release others, "Lie down beside the slough awhile/ and taste the bitter reeds/ Read in the water how a drowning man/ sings of a free green life".
Ann Munton (L&D 148) divides Mandel's poetry into two periods-early and late. The early poems echo the whole tradition of myth and literature. They are 'extravagant and obscure', often mythic, metaphysical and fantastic. They represent a private vision. The later poems, first arising out of the atrocities of the Second World War, are political, concerned with the dehumanization of language and art, and deal with concentration camps, all manner of inhumanity, repression, and torture, not only by the Nazis, but also more in recent atrocities in Vietnam and South America. These later poems, Munton argues, are sharper, more direct, with clearer images and more experimental forms.
Selected Titles: Fuseli Poems (1954) An Idiot Joy (1967) GG
Raymond Souster (1921-)
Raymond Souster was born in Toronto where he has remained except for a stint in the RCAF during the Second World War. In 1939, he joined the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce where he worked until his retirement in 1984. But like T.S. Eliot, Souster had another life in the arts. He helped to edit and publish literary magazines such as Direction, Contact and Combustion. He was closely associated with Louis Dudek and Irving Layton through Contact Press, an influential press in the post-war period. Souster was also involved in editing anthologies of Canadian verse, and he has written more than 20 volumes of poetry.
Souster is the poet of Toronto. He paints a complex portrait. His city poems reflect both the deeper, darker side of city life, its gestures of rage and defiance, but also its golden, vital afternoons, and evening charm. The magazines and press he was involved with, plus his own poems, reflect the modern style that was flourishing in this period. Munroe Beattie argues that Souster early found his voice and a form to express it, that "he recognized the contours of his own speaking voice and devised the cadences to reproduce them" (LH, Vol. 2, 291). Accordingly, his form has remained constant over the years. From William Carlos Williams he learned a sleek, austere imagistic style, and a focus on objects of the seen world: two dead robins, a woman in bath, a downtown corner newsstand. Yonge Street is often his subject, a street that during the 60's and 70's was a highly combustible combination of business, hippies, sex traders, and down-and-outers. It was a seedy side of Toronto and a mirror that middle class Canadians didn't especially like to see. Souster found in it both its despair and greater possibilities. "Yonge Street Saturday Night" begins, "this street is lonely, and a thousand lights/ in a thousand store windows/ wouldn't break her lips into a smile". Walking its length, Souster first watches the bums and lovers and drunks, then watches others like him "walking as if we were honestly going somewhere/walking as if there was really something to see" hoping to see "something perhaps that will make us smile/ with a strange new happiness/ a lost but recovered joy". This combination of despair and 'recovered joy' is characteristic of Souster's work.
Bruce Whitman suggests that in Souster's later work, "exact perception continues to coexist with a humane moral outlook" (L&D 141). He also suggests "World War II-has been a central concern in his work almost from the beginning. It represents for Souster all that is evil - his sphere of Blakean experience - against which is balanced a sphere of innocence inhabited by animals, baseball players and children" (142). We can see this concern at work in the lovely, lyrical poem 'Two Dead Robins'. Souster describes finding two baby robins dead in his driveway, "they'd either tried to fly from the nest above/ or the wind had blown them down". He can't bear to touch them with his hands, so he picks them up with his spade, buries them, thinking,
how many will die today, have much worse burial than these two my shovel mixes under?
Souster has had mixed reviews over the years-high praise for his short, lyric poetry, criticism of his lack of tension in the long poem; however, George Woodcock called Souster "our most naturally populist of all Canadian poets" (LH vol. 2 310), and Northrop Frye claimed, "the theme of social realism is at its most attractive, and least theoretical, in the poetry of Raymond Souster" (BG 230).
Selected Titles: Go to Sleep, World (1947), The Colour of the Times (1964) GG, Hanging in (1979)