This section could be called "the mentors." Many of the poets discussed are -- as well as editors, publishers, critics, and anthologists — generous talent scouts and nurturers of the work of young and new writers. In Canada, most poets are given to "multi-tasking". They are professors, critics, translators, anthologists, editors, CBC interviewers, workshop leaders, and festival organizers; their vocation is words. Those discussed below also represent other poets who have founded and maintained literary magazines and publishing houses in Canada, poets to whom we owe fine presses like Fiddlehead, Contact, Cormorant, Coach House, and Gaspereau, and literary magazines such as Alphabet and Tish, and to whom we also owe appreciation for dedicating their talents to the challenging task of criticism. They follow the pioneering footsteps of poet/critics such as Lorne Pierce, AJM Smith, Eli Mandel and Milton Wilson.
Fred Cogswell (1917- )
George Woodcock, in Literary History, describes Maritime poets who "were content to live in Fredericton or whatever other Atlantic community they chose, and to take the matter for their poetry from the region, to live poetically – as it were – off the land" (306, Vol. 3). Fred Cogswell is one poet who leaps to mind. Cogswell, teacher, editor, translator, was born in East Centreville, New Brunswick, on November 8, 1917. He was educated at the University of New Brunswick and Edinburgh University. Woodcock contends that Cogswell, "is concerned with the ways in which the setting and society of the Maritimes shape people and their fates; many of his poems are portraits, others are laconic comments on existence. There is the occasional myth and a good deal of reflection on the imprisoning effects of conventional thought" (306).
The LeafThink of that green and twisted leaf One autumn day caught in her hair When at the last to save herself She left you standing where you were Unfaded through the years it is And green in every curving vein When all your memories of bliss Have blurred and left your brain Take crayon, paper, draw it now As it still lives inside your head Then let me see. I want to know What last to live when love is fled
Cogswell was a founder and a prime mover of the distinguished press, Fiddlehead Books of New Brunswick. Fiddlehead initiated and nurtured the poetic careers of many maritime poets; it became a centre for Atlantic writers through both its press and literary magazine, The Fiddlehead. Like other small magazines and presses, in its early years (the 50’s), The Fiddlehead created "a literary ambiance…of a kind that had never existed in this country before" (Woodcock LH Vol. 3, 293). Cogswell edited the magazine from 1952 to 1966, when the magazine grew, helping to finance it as well as supporting many of the writers who were its contributors, from his own pocket. His response to submissions was personal, attentive, and detailed, the useful feedback from which especially new writers develop. He fostered correspondences that lasted many years with poets including Al Purdy, Dorothy Roberts, Alden Nowlan, and Joy Kogawa. The Fiddlehead remains one of Canada’s oldest and most respected literary magazines. Those involved with the press claim that Fred Cogswell played a role in this reputation and longevity that is difficult to overstate.
Cogswell contributions to Canadian Letters and his success as a poet have been recognized in the many awards and honours bestowed upon him. He is a life member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers Federation of New Brunswick, the Association of Canadian Publishers, and a recipient of The Order of Canada medal. In 1995, he was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence.
Selected Titles: Light Bird of Life: Selected Poems, 1974
James Reaney (1926- )
James Reaney was born on a farm in Easthope, near Stratford, Ontario, on September 1, 1926. His parents were active in writing and printing. He studied English literature with Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto. Subsequently, he published and edited the literary magazine Alphabet: The Iconography of the Imagination. His influence was felt not only through his teaching at the University of Manitoba (1949-1956) and then the University of Western Ontario, but also through his extensive literary criticism.
Reaney, a prolific and diverse writer, pens poetry, plays, and children’s literature. He has also co-authored three operas with Jon Beckwith. In 1951, he married the poet Colleen Thibaudeau. Together they live in London, Ontario, a landscape that he features in his writing. Reaney is best known for his dramatic trilogy, The Donnellys, about the ‘black Donnellys’ who were massacred in 1880. This is a "local story made convincingly universal because in it the texture of Biddulph Township is realized in amazing detail, and because it employs Reaney’s multi-layered technique so organically" (Lecker & David 160). In 1966, Reaney established a workshop in London for theatrical experiments. Since the sixties, Reaney has turned his attention to drama, consolidating his earlier poetry in a number of collections.
The Red Heart The only leaf upon its tree of blood, My red heart hangs heavily And will never fall loose, But grow so heavy After only a certain number of seasons (Sixty winters, and fifty-seven springs) that it will bring bough Tree and the fences of my bones Down to a grave in the forest Of my still upright fellows. So does the sun hang now From a branch of Time In this wild fall sunset. Who shall pick the sun From the tree of Eternity? Who shall thresh the ripe sun? What midwife shall deliver The capital sun’s great heir? It seems that no one can, And so the sun shall drag Gods, goddesses and parliament buildings, Time, Fate, gramophones and Man To a grey grave Where all shall be trampled Beneath the dancing feet of crowds Of other still-living suns and stars.
James Reaney has received many awards including three Governor General’s awards for poetry: The Red Heart (1949), A Suit of Nettles (1958), and Twelve Letters to a Small Town (1962), and one for drama: The Killdeer and Other Plays (1962). He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and The Order of Canada
Selected Titles: The Red Heart (GG) 1949; Poems 1972; Selected Longer Poems 1975
George Bowering (1935- )
Poet, fiction writer, playwright, critic, editor, teacher and radio performer, George Bowering was born in Penticton, B.C. in 1935. He was educated at Victoria College, University of B.C. and University of Western Ontario. He has taught at colleges in Canada, Rome and Berlin, and since 1972 has taught English literature at Simon Fraser University. From 1954-1957 he was a photographer with the Royal Canadian Air Force. From 1961-1969 he was editor of Tish, an experimental magazine out of U.B.C. Tish, influenced by the Black Mountain Poets, became the mouthpiece for a group of Vancouver poets that include Frank Davey, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, David Cull, and Lionel Kearns. Later, Bowering founded Imago and was a contributing editor to Open Letter. In the 1970’s, Bowering came into his own as a prolific anthologist, critic, lecturer, and poet. Laurie Ricou describes him as "perhaps the best representative of the consolidation of Canadian poetry during the 1970’s" (LH Vol. 4, 31).
"Summer Solstice" is a poem in nine parts. The sections interconnect through the Pacific images, the daily rituals, the narrator’s questions about the Earth’s and our slow death. The poem begins in the kitchen where he is feeding his baby, wondering about the present and the future of mountains, oceans, and human life. He suffers guilt for the world his daughter must enter, and for his own need to see in her hopefulness he does not find in himself.
VIII I am slowly dying, water evaporating from a saucer. I saw my daughter this morning, trying to walk, & it fell like a vial of melted lead into my heart, my heart so deep in my chest. She will have to do it now, we have presented her with a world whose spectres take shape before her eyes have fully focust, poor voyager! For joy she brings us every morning we exchange an accelerating series of shocks. We are together cannibals of her spirit, we feast to nurture our tired bodies, turning music to shit, a shock felt numbly here & radiating to collisions at the rim of space. You don’t believe me? See her eyes when she first awakes. A visible tyrant of light yanks their traces, demanding they stride apace.
Bowering is an advocate of the long poem and has 10 book-length poems including Sitting in Mexico (1965), George, Vancouver (1970) and Kerrisdale Elegies (1984).
In 1968 he won the Governor General’s Award for his poem suite, Rocky Mountain Foot and the Gangs of Kosmos. He is a self-described post-modernist. He has employed the image of a man watching television, also seeing his own reflection in the screen, to describe the condition of post-modernism, and self-reflective writing.
Selected Titles:Rocky Mountain Foot (GG) 1968; George Bowering Selected: Poems 1961-1992. (1993).
Gary Geddes (1940- )
Few would dispute George Woodcock’s claim that Gary Geddes is Canada’s best political poet. A teacher, critic, translator, anthologist and editor, Gary Geddes has influenced generations of "Can Lit" students. An award-winning poet, he has written work that is translated into five languages and featured on CBC and BBC radio.
In 1998, Dr. Geddes was appointed the second distinguished visiting professor of Canadian Culture of Western Washington University, where he engages in teaching, research and performances related to Canadian culture – including performances in art, music, literature, history, philosophy, ethnicity and communications. Prior to this appointment, Geddes taught at Concordia University, the BC Institute of Technology, and the University of Victoria, as well as being a visiting professor at the University of Alberta and Carleton University.
Born in Vancouver, June 9, 1940, Geddes studied at U.B.C. and Reading University in England, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He has travelled to many countries in search of political truths: Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Philippines, China, Israel, Palestine and Japan. His political poems have "a subtle psychological base". He explains this by reference to Yeats: "sometimes our public distress comes out as rhetoric, but our private distress comes out in poetry." Geddes is interested neither in political rhetoric that shouts down the oppressors nor the overly private utterance. In an interview with Don Precosky and Barry McKinnon, he describes his political goal as maintaining the rawness of terror, transmitting it without prettifying it. "You want the beauty to come from the psychological resolution or aesthetic resolution but there has to be a certain power in the imagery."
Much of Geddes’ poetry is spoken through a mask or persona, as in the long poem ‘Letter from the Master of Horse,’ which won the EJ Pratt medal and prize, or ‘The Terracotta Army’, which won the America’s Best Book Award, 1985. In an interview with Alan Twigg, Geddes explained: "The mask (or persona) helps me to find a voice. I seem to be able to get into the heads of my characters by using the first person more easily than I could talking about them in the third person" (Geddes 612).
However, Geddes also uses other points of view, such the powerful second person, as in "Human Rights Commission" where we can hardly bear the intensity of the images:
The small woman seated before you, describes her encounters with the military. In advance of the translation you hear the phrase 'Caravan of death.' She is not talking about a circus, her husband has not run away to a circus, though there was one in town the day you arrived, the real McCoy. Medieval etchings of the Dance of Death flicker in a dark recess of your brain. Do you really want to hear this? Yesterday you were curious, took notes copiously. Numbers, implements of torture, the general who travelled the provinces with his exterminators and a Chihuahua that sat on the back of the car seat licking his ear. October 23, the end of so much. Five months later she too is arrested, kept naked twenty days, a sack over her head. Kicks, blows, electricity, threats, against the children, pretence that her husband is still alive. You look again at this woman and wonder how much she is not telling you. A heated pipe. Rats driven into the vagina through a heated pipe. When the interview began, the portable radio was playing 'Moon Shadow' by Cat Stevens. A poster on the wall said, in Spanish: 'No one disappears into thin air.'
Despite his time in Montreal, Vancouver and other literary centres, Geddes has never been party to the different schools of poetic fashion. As an editor, he has remained aloof. In interview, he laments this, but it has kept his poetry authentic. Still, Geddes greatly added to the Montreal literary scene by founding the publishing houses Quadrant and Cormorant. In his active career in Canadian letters, Gary Geddes has also published poems, short stories, plays, criticism, anthologies, translation and non-fiction.
Selected Titles: Letter of the Master of Horse (1973); The Terracotta Army (1984); Light of Burning Towers: Poems New & Selected (1990)
Don McKay (1942- )
Poet, teacher, editor, and co-publisher of Brick Books, Don McKay is a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for poetry; in 1991 for Night field, and in 2000 for Another Gravity. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay studied at University of Saskatchewan, and in Wales. He taught at Western University and the University of New Brunswick as well as at the Banff Centre, the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has published nine books of poetry, essays, and most recently Vis à Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness, from Gaspereau Press.
It is difficult to find information on Don McKay. Alanna Bondar noted in Studies in Canadian Literature (Vol. 19.2, 1994), "his modesty prevents him from revealing himself as the person behind the poetry. He refrains from making any comments on his work, from giving interviews (including declining an offer from Books in Canada), and from actively reading critical reviews of his poetry. The merits of his work must rest solely on their own reception." McKay has faithful readers who appreciate his "intensely intelligent, whimsical, witty, and profound mind" (Rhea Tregebov), who readily agree that he writes with "thrilling precision," as a "poet who can touch us" (John Bemrose).
Bondar argues that Don McKay is understood "primarily as a ‘Canadianist’ whose interest in the redeeming qualities of the natural world suggests aspirations to Romantic ideals; McKay's work rewrites the Canadian landscape, paying particular attention to Canadian details." His poems are unlike Wordsworth’s, however, in their detailed and complex imagery. They are as engaged with the post-modern questions of poetic process as they are with the relationship of humanity and nature. Still, McKay’s poetry is rooted in the metaphor of nature.
The poems of Another Gravity are a fine balance of creative opposites: of concrete and abstract, idea and image, scientific fact and deep emotion. They play with the subtle field of poetic texture that we associate with postmodernism, without pretence or artifice. "Sometimes a Voice 1 & 2" both begin:
Sometimes a voice-have you heard this?- wants not to be a voice any longer
The first of these poems is an elegy, a lament, but an unemotional one, a description of the death of a friend who decided, unexpectedly and against all odds, to try, like Icarus, an impossible flight off a roof. He fails, falling not into the sea, but onto a concrete wharf. The poem does not attempt to reckon with this death, but purely to describe it, to stand as a witness to it. It is in the surprise of the friend’s decision that we are reminded of the fragility, the impermanence of life. Other observers, hammering on the roof, took his boast that he could jump from the roof to the lake just so much banter, just
ongoing argument to fray the tedium of work akin to filter vs. plain, stick shift vs. automatic, condoms vs. pulling out in time.
And are shocked when he disappears, "that after all that banter, he should be so silent."
Despite the power of the story, of the image, of the analogy, the poem rests in the last lines, as does Anne Sexton’s poem of Icarus:
Still later I think it makes sense his voice should sink back into breath and breath devote itself to taking in whatever air might have to say on that short flight between the roof and the rest of his natural life.
The turning from image to idea in these last lines is echoed in the second poem.
Another Gravity is divided into five sections. "Sometimes a Voice (1)" begins section one, "Sometimes a Voice (2)" begins section five. The second poem alludes to the death in the first poem through the repetition of the first lines:
Sometimes a voice-have you heard this?- wants not to be a voice any longer and this longing is the worst of longings. Nothing assuages.
This second poem is in a tradition of poetry about suicide, speaking with others like Phyllis Webb’s "To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide." The tradition is of unaffected, unemotional consideration. What McKay reveals is that nothing assuages.
Not for the curry comb of conversation not for the dog-eared broken satisfactions of the bluesÄ Not for the Mendelssohn choir constructing habitable spaces in the air, not for Yeats intoning "Song of the Old Mother" to an ancient microphone. It curls up in its cave and will not stir.
All that one hears at such a time is "the hush of invisible feathers as they urge the dark/ stroking it towards articulation." The amazing poems in Another Gravity in their seeming simplicity, in their surprising familiarity, quietly enter the heart and make a home there.
Don McKay was also awarded the National Magazine Award (1991) and the Canadian Author’s Association Literary Award for poetry in 1983.
Selected Titles: Another Gravity (GG) 2000, Night Field (GG) 1991
Mary di Michele (1949- )
Born in Italy, Maria Luisa di Michele emigrated to Toronto in 1955. She studied at the University of Toronto and the University of Windsor, where she worked with Joyce Carol Oates. Poet, freelance writer and editor, Di Michele edited the anthology Anything is Possible: a Selection of Eleven Woman Poets (1984), and has also worked as poetry editor for Toronto Life and Poetry Toronto and the Toronto Star. She held positions as writer-in-residence in Toronto, Regina, Banff, Montreal and Rome and gave writing workshops in Ontario and Alberta. Since 1990 she has been teaching creative writing in the English department at Concordia University.
Lecker & David note that many of di Michele’s poems explore her Italian heritage ("Maria Luisa, my father’s youngest sister/ went mad in her sleep/ she tried to kill the elder Chiarine/ with a knife, she cut her own throat/ in a hospital a week later/ and I’m named for her/ the consequences to be revealed by my stars"), her personal reading of history, and "her desire to resist certain elements, and embrace other elements, of the immigrant imagination" (266). Like Geddes’, di Michele’s images are striking, not hesitating in their unflinching look at life. "The Disgrace," after lines by Cesare Pavese: But there’s one disgrace we’ve never known:/ we’ve never been women, we’ve never been nobodies, begins:
A skinned rabbit sits in a bowl of blood. In the foetal position, it dreams its own death. I swell quietly by the warmth of the kitchen, like the yolk that is the hidden sun of the egg.
This is a complex poem about a child’s initiation into womanhood, the first day of her menses, filled with all the conflicting emotions and dark imaginings in this rite of passage.
"As in the Beginning" tells of her father’s accident with a factory belt where his fingers are severed and he can no longer work. Woven into the fabric of the particularity of the poem is a larger history:
give me my father's hands still brown and uncallused, beautiful hands that broke bread for us at table, hands as smooth as marble, and naked as morning, give me hands without a number tattooed at the wrist...
Di Michele’s poetry weaves the threads of personal lives through history effortlessly.
Her recent work includes Luminous Emergencies (1990), a collection that includes a group of poems inspired by a literary tour of Chile with Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier and Gary Geddes; a novel, Under My Skin (1994), which explores media, violence and identity; and Stranger in You: Selected Poems and New (1995). This later work experiments with the prose-poem form and with political subjects. Debriefing the Rose (1998,) with its conversations with dead poets, provides a sense of her literary roots.
Selected titles: Stranger in You: Selected Poems and New (1995)
Copyright (c) Heather Pyrcz 2001. All rights reserved.