With these poets we move through the transitional period of the 1980's, when many of the century's preoccupations are captured in binary opposition. Barry Cameron, describing Frank Davey's work, lists a set of these, asserting that they privilege "process over stasis, the open over closed, fragmentation over wholeness, discontinuity over coherence, temporality over spatiality, speech over silence, region over centre, "West" over "East", international over national, individual over corporate man, postmodernism over humanism, self as subject...over self as object, and proprioception (Charles Olsen's term for when bodily perception is central) over perception" (LH4 122).
The transitional quality of the 1980's was represented in Frank Davey's attack on prior cultural criticism, in Surviving the Paraphrase. Davey deplores the emphasis on theme that dominated Canadian criticism to the mid 1970's. He argued that the focus on theme was really a method of escaping evaluation, and "did no more than paraphrase the national literature in terms of international themes" (LH4 117). Davey proposed alternative critical practices such as literary histories of technique, linguistic, regional, and generic studies, and phenomenological criticism, ideas that surfaced again in his more recent book, Canadian Literary Power. Not everyone agreed with him, of course, but he began a significant debate in Canadian letters, the influence of which is still felt.
Kroetsch, Davey and Wah are significant contributors of this new thrust in Canadian literary criticism. The three poets are also identified by their dedication to the long poem.
Robert Kroetsch (b. 1927)
Robert Kroetsch was born in Heisler, Alberta in 1927. He received his BA from the University of Alberta, briefly attended McGill, taking a course in the development of English prose from Hugh MacLennan, and received his PhD from the University of Toronto. He taught at the State University of New York in Binghamton, where he also co-edited boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature. In 1975 he returned to Canada to teach English Literature at the University of Manitoba. He held numerous other jobs including those as an editor, a civilian education and information specialist for the U.S. army in Goose Bay, Labrador, and in the North on the Mackenzie riverboats, an experience he uses in his first novel, But We are Exiles. Kroetsch currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Kroetsch is perhaps best described as a citizen of the world and a student of location. In The Lovely Treachery of Words, his book of essays, he states that he is "grateful in a literal way to the places of learning where I tried to talk some of these essays," and he lists: "Binghamton, Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Banff, New York, Toronto, Edinburgh, Trier, Lahti (Finland), Lincoln (Nebraska), Calgary, Montreal, Brisbane, a campus in Vermont and a second one in Virginia, a beach hotel in Sicily, a museum in Singapore, Leeds, Reading, a variety of stone buildings in London, more than one place in New Hampshire, a canal street (I believe it was) in Utrecht, an art gallery in Berlin, a medieval street in modern Strasbourg, Beijing, and, enduringly, Rome" (ix). In this acknowledgement, Kroetsch paints us a revealing self-portrait.
Kroetsch writes poetry, fiction and criticism. He is better recognized for his fiction since winning a Governor General's Award for The Studhorse Man. His criticism is collected in a book of essays, The Lovely Treachery of Words, in which he examines the postmodern issues of silence, eroticism and violence in a wide breath of Canadian writers. He also treats the long poem and themes such as the Canadian writer and the American literary tradition. In poetry, he primarily engages the long poem, or in Dorothy Livesay's term, the documentary poem. Kroetsch has had numerous collections published, including: The Stone Hammer Poems (1975), The Ledger (1975), The Seed Catalogue (1977), The Completed Field Notes: the Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch (1981), Advice to My Friends; A Continuing Poem (1985) and Excerpts from the Real World: A Prose Poem in Ten Parts (1986). As Sharon Thesen points out, his long poems belong to the prose tradition in poetry, where "their tendency to a narrative sense of the passage of time drives them by and into history beyond the capacities and preoccupations of the lyric" (The New Long Poem Anthology, 14). On one level his poetry is autobiographically drawn, often beginning with attention to an object, like the family farm ledger, or the more sacred ancient native stone hammer unearthed on his grandfather's farm. These objects become emblematic of Kroetsch's vision, signifying beyond their experiential source.
The Seed Catalogue is a composite of questions, of excerpts from a seed catalogue, found facts, memories and lists; a poem extending from his childhood in Heisler to the present. My favorite stanza is:
I don't give a damn if I do die do die do die do die do die Do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do Die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die do die
I read this as a lovely little homage to bp Nichol. Like The Ledger, The Seed Catalogue is sometimes double-sided, often double voiced—a dualism of construction and deconstruction. The poem is structured by a series of questions: how to grow a garden, a gardener, a lover, a poet, a shared past, or a prairie town. But even in this sequence, there is a force of discontinuity at work, creating tension, requiring the reader, New argues, "to participate in the process of assembling meaning (290). The final section of How do you grow a poet ends:
10 After the bombs/blossoms Poet, teach us After the city/falls to love our dying After the rider/falls (the horse West is a winter place standing still) the palimpsest of prairie under the quick erasure of snow, invites a flight
It is difficult to choose an excerpt from a long poem as so much depends on what has come before. We can, however, find here the poet's wit and inventiveness in form.
In his fiction, Kroetsch is a post-modern, parodic storyteller. In both fiction and long poetry, he is on a quest, a source quest, but not for identity, the authentic self. Rather, he seeks "a belief in the chosen fiction as the fullest and most free imaginative act" (Thomas 3). Kroetsch claims—"we haven't got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real" (Creation 63). David & Lecker argue that Kroetsch is "committed to a plurality of selves which enter his poetry initially through the multiple discourses of document and memory, then by his speaking through personae, and finally by the languages of the (many times) doubled self" (166). 'Mile Zero' is a good example of his will to invent and recreate, and an interesting place to begin to understand his rejection of the "I" as a coherent, unified construct.
Robert Kroetsch is a fine Canadian poet, novelist, and scholar, one who has kept us thinking about the elemental questions of writing, pushing boundaries, opening the field.
Selected Titles: Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems Of Robert Kroetsch (1989), A Likely Story: The Writing Life. (1995), The Lovely Treachery of Words (1989).
Frank Davey (b.1940)
Frank Davey was born in 1940 and in the 1960's studied at UBC. Here he came in contact with a group of academically oriented poets who acknowledged the influence of the Black Mountain poets, especially Charles Olsen, Robert Creely and Robert Duncan, and, in particular, Olsen's theory of "projective verse". They began a movement, what they called the movement, captured and recorded in the little magazine, Tish. One of Davey's early hallmarks is his editorship of Tish, which Keith describes as "a youthful, brash, experimental Canadian beach-head for the "projectivist movement," published intermittently from 1961-1969 (114).
As with many movements, the Tishites were reacting against tradition, in this case, formalism and the elitist aspects of modernism. Keith states, "rejecting the bias of traditional humanism in shaping what was observed according to the dictates of the reasoning mind, the Tishites submitted to the destructive element, embraced chaos, invited the natural wind to blow through them" (114). They worked in what Olsen referred to as the "OPEN" or "COMPOSITION BY FIELD" (he liked capital letters) and saw form as "nothing more than an extension of content". Olsen insisted that the poem must be "a high energy construct and, at all points, a high energy discharge." The poet achieves this by keeping perceptions flowing one after the other; as Olsen states "keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen" (Geddes 3rd ed, 598). Olsen was insistent on attending to the breath, even more than Pound's insistence on using the musical phrase rather than the metronome, the closed, meterical feet, to determine the line. Olsen insisted that the breath was connected to the heart and both led to the line. The poetic line should depend upon the breath for its form.
There are few modern poets unaffected by this credo. However, like Imagism, Tishism was a short-lived movement that caught the attention of the mainstream. As Keith notes, poets of the Tish movement alerted Canadian readers to alternative poetic approaches (114). New adds, "what Tish further emphasized was that significant literary change did not have to originate in the now traditional centres of Eastern Canada" (224). This was no small feat!
Davey received his PhD from Southern California, later teaching at York and Western, and was writer-in-Residence at Sir George Williams University. He sat as a member of the editorial board at Coach House Press and founded and edited Open Letter. Stephen Scobie, in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, describes Open Letter as "a magazine that has consistently been the most interesting and provocative forum for theoretical and critical explorations of contemporary and experimental writing."
Davey is currently the Carl F.Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario, the first to hold the chair. He is also the editor of Talonbooks New Canadian Criticism Series, which includes his book on Atwood, and others on Findley, Bowering, bp Nichol, and Ondaatje. Davey has always been involved with the question of authority, of who gets to write, publish, be read, and criticized; and who determines interpretation, who "the centre" is. At a time in his life when he is most at the centre, both physically and metaphorically, Davey has written Canadian Literary Power. It is a continuation of his quest, inviting us to examine "how a culture may be led to perceive its internal relations - as hierarchy, network, centre-margin, isolated regions, separate populations - and what constituency or alliance of constituencies will be perceived to have priority within the power structure of received perception." However, the irony of raising this question from a position of power is not lost.
As this entry attests, Davey is best known for criticism. But what about his poetry? Davey's best-known long poem is "The Clallam". By his own description, in Reading Canadian Reading, Davey explains the process of the documentary poem as a search for truth, one that is typically other than objective. He states, "it selects from among available facts, it constructs and argues a point of view" (128). Does this still sound like criticism to you? Me too; but then, what makes it a poem? Laurie Ricou, in Literary History of Canada, suggests that Davey is more interested in narrative and in politics than poetics. The poem's truth lies in its sparseness, simplicity, and authenticity, in its "anti-poetic" curses. "The Clallam" is about a ship that sinks in 1904, on a short run between Port Townsend, Washington, and Victoria, because the captain refused to send out a distress signal for his storm-battered ship, and rescuers in Victoria refused to set out until they got the signal. Like Pratt's poem about the Titanic, this is a story of hubris. The poem's form is that of a journal.
A poet's life is not just writing and criticism. Davey's How Linda Died reveals yet another side of the life of a poet. This journal/memoir is an intimate, unflinching look at the death of his wife due to inoperable brain tumor. The book not only reveals the loving yet tragic details of his wife's life, but also their life together, their family, their enthusiasm for showing their Great Dane, Seizer: the everyday experiences that make up a life, lost when tragedy strikes.
Frank Davey is a long standing poet, critic, anthologist, editor, and teacher who has added immeasurably to Canadian letters.
Selected Titles: The Clallam, or, Old Glory in Juan de Fuca (1973), Selected Poems: The Arches. Ed. bpNichol. (1980), Bridge Force (1965), Five Readings of Olson's "Maximus" (1970), Earle Birney (1971), The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem (1983), Surviving the Paraphrase: 11 Essays on Canadian Literature (1983); Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Canadian Literary Power: Essays on Anglophone-Canadian Literary Conflict (1994).
Fred Wah (b. 1939)
Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. After WWII his family moved to Trail BC, and then, in 1948, to Nelson BC. He grew up there on the shores of the Kootenay. He studied music and English literature at UBC where he co-edited Tish magazine. He was a graduate student in language and literature at University of New Mexico, and later in Buffalo, New York. Subsequently Wah taught, initially at Selkirk College and then at David Thompson University Centre in South Slocan B.C., where he was the founding co-coordinator of the writing program. Wah has been poet, teacher, and editor. He edited Sum, Further Studies, Niagara Frontier Review, and Scree, and is managing editor of the electronic journal Swift Current. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary, and is a contributing editor to Open Letter.
Wah's poetics arise, in part, from his Chinese-Canadian and Scandinavian heritages. He often composes bio-texts, in which the poet captures both his genealogy and the present moment in the flow/flux of the poem. We find this matrix in both his long poems and prose lyrics.
Laurie Ricou claims that the prose lyric is "the overwhelming dominant convention of contemporary poetry" (LH8V4). The prose lyric is described by Stanley Plumly as "the intersection of the flexibility of the free verse rhythm with the strategy of storytelling...a form corrupt enough to speak flat out in sentences yet pure enough to sustain the intensity, if not the integrity of the line" (LH8V4). It's not a form, when employed lazily, that Ricou admires—it poses too many dangers, too many problems: a lack of selectivity, a blurring of significance between experiences, a general lack of an active speaker, among others. Since the naturalness of conversation, she argues, implies no prosody, no literary allusion, no figurative language, the prose lyric demands extraordinary skill with repetition, lining, abbreviation and punctuation. "Merely using contractions to suggest conversation or restricting the line to two or three or four syllables will not, on its own, make poetry" (8). Here! Hear!
Ricou points to Wah's poetry as an exemplar in which his commitment to careful attention and clear communication invests his prose lyric "with novelty and the energy of lives being lived" (8) as illustrated in this excerpt from his collection Tree:
I'm no tree except the part of me as roots now new spring up among the willows on the roadside shoots of alder, cherry, maple runners, buds grow at the sky from clay and gravel daily now, each day a fraction of the snow melts up the bank those green plum eyes seep out.
We find this same commitment in his long poems. Ricou discusses Wah's use of the process poem, what she describes as the phenomenological long poem "which attempts to present, somehow, the process of the mind—and the body—as they are, moment by moment, implicated with language, articulating themselves and creating the text" (LH29V4). Wah's uses the process poem for genealogy. Sections of Waiting for Saskatchewan mix poetry and prose "as it mixed the sound of his own voice and a 'haiku sensibility' to rethink his own Chinese and Scandinavian heritage and his memories of his father" (Ricou 33). So too does this excerpt from Breathin' my Name with a Sigh:
Are origins magnetic lines across an ocean migrations of generic spume or holes, dark mysteries within which I carry further into the World through blood and blue-eyed progeny father's fathers clan name Wah from Canton east across the bridges still or could it all be lateral craving hinted in the bioplasmic cloud of simple other organism as close as out under the apple tree?
In a poetic statement for Sharon Thesen's The New Long Poem Anthology, Wah discusses his poem "Dendrite Map: Father/Mother Haibun" which Thesen states charts "a complex of stories that precede and inform (his) own" (15). (In this terrific title 'dendrite' is drawn from the Greek meaning "tree", used in physiology to mean the branching process of a nerve cell that conducts impulses toward the cell body.) Wah claims that there are advantages to employing the long poem: the form allows him "to investigate the possibilities of a context, formally, and further to extend inquiry into contiguous aspects of the context" (contiguous meaning nearness, adjacent); the long poem also "offers more of that democratic dialogy...that is, the insistence of sub-, supra-, and alter-texts is much more likely given size" (where "dialogy" means the dialogue between texts, what Robert Scholes refers to as "intertextuality", the way texts are related to and dependent upon other texts); and, finally, "the advantage of the long poem is the continuing biotext it affords—long poem, long life" (Thesen 373).
Fred Wah's list of credits is impressive. Along with the many journals he has edited and co-edited, he has published 17 books of poetry (one, Waiting for Saskatchewan, winning the Governor General's Award in 1985), a biofiction, Diamond Grill, about growing up in a small town Chinese-Canadian cage (which won the Howard O'Hagan Award for short fiction), and criticism of Canadian and American literature. Since the 1960's Wah has engaged in rigorous, experimental discussion, pushing the boundaries of the poetic line, the prose poem and biotexts—he, as well, opening the field.
Selected Titles: Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980); Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985), GG
Copyright © Heather Pyrcz 2003. All rights reserved.