Anne Burke is a poet, editor and critic, who has published widely, in books, journals, literary magazines. She was Prairie Correspondent for Poetry Canada Review and is Chair of the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets.
Review of Oona River Poems, by Peter Christensen, (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2019) 112 pages paper.
Oona River is a community of several houses, a town hall, and a fish hatchery along the banks of the Oona River estuary on the eastern coast of Porcher Island, about twenty-five miles (forty kms.) south of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. The village of Oona River has long been a source of wooden boats for the coastal B.C. salmon. The Harbour Authority provides moorage for commercial fishing vessels, residents, and the traveling public. Oona River was originally settled by Scandinavian immigrants in the years before and after the First World War. Some of these poems were published in River of Memory, The Everlasting Columbia, An Eclectic Anthology, Leaf Press Leaflet, Poetry Magazine, Your Daily Poem, and Duke City Poems. Hence, the American spellings as "saviors", "plow", "endeavor".
The poet has explored wilderness areas of Alberta, B.C. and the Yukon and he lived in Oona River in the years he was writing this collection. Having worked at various times as a guide, ranch hand, and park ranger, he began his writing career at the University of Lethbridge, in 1975, with a Bachelor of Arts and Science in Creative Writing. While there, he started Alberta’s first poetry-only literary magazine, Canada Goose (from 1972 to 1976) with fellow writing student, Lorne Daniel. They edited Ride off any Horizon (NeWest Press, 1983) and Ride off any Horizon II (NeWest Press,1987).
Christensen published four books of poetry with Thistledown Press in Sasakatoon: Hail Storm (1977); Rig Talk (1981); To Die Ascending (1988); and Winter Range (200). His "best seller" of creative non-fiction stories Wilderness Tales-Adventures in the Backcountry was with B.C. Heritage House Publishing, in 2006 and 2009. Several chapbooks were published by small presses in Canada and USA.
His poems have been published in numerous anthologies, writing journals, and literary magazines in Canada, Denmark, and U.S.A. and he has performed many readings throughout Canada and the U.S.A. Peter collaborated with New Music Composer Robert Rosen, writing three librettos for the outdoor operas "Canyon Shadows" that were performed across Canada. “Hailstorm”, the title poem from his first book with Thistledown Press was arranged for voice and orchestra by Robert Rosen, performed internationally, and most recently was sung by Michelle Todd at Carnegie Hall in New York, 2017.
Christensen identifies himself as "67, poet, survivor, and witness". He performed this act "to arrange words so they cast light", when The Eastend Arts Council for the Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts afforded him a month-long residence at the Wallace Stegner House, where this collection was completed. Stegner (1909 – 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian. Probably best known for Wolf Willow : A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, he won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1972, and the U.S.A. National Book Award, in 1977.
Christensen is preoccupied with the genus locale (the spirit of the place). This element is transcendentalism, which distinguishes between nature appreciation and commercial environmentalism. Time has eaten us. For the poet, we face eating or being eaten, a social Darwinian concept, and expressed sexually. Throughout the poet is focused on our human affairs and natural condition. Thomas Merton, author of New Seeds of Contemplation, reveals a cosmic dance, we are in the midst of it and it is in the midst of us.
For a poet, this guidance provides a sense of purpose in sadness, absurdity, and despair. Christensen applauds "decency" as a constraint against self-elevation at the deliberate expense of others, especially when shown toward sales clerks, wait staff or, more distantly, manufacturing, textile and agricultural workers. (Cited from William Ram, in Weekly Hubris "An Admonition"). This maxim applies to "picking up a few/ readings now and then" while on the job work writing is about those who are employed with fishing, logging, and even writing poetry. "Me, drifting/ from job to job" ("Fishing Trips"), "The machine hovers offslope" ("Unemployed"), and "In the Shade of the Tractor's Wheel".
As Christensen asserts "There are many voices that speak through these poems" ("Introduction"). His style reminds me of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology with snippets of story, local colour, and distinctive characters. Masters narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near his home town of Lewistown, Illinois. While Masters relies on monologues, Christenson alternately writes with a third-person or omniscient point of view. Another regional comparison might be West Coast writing, such as the narrative Steveston by Daphne Marlatt.
A craft Trooper I takes centre stage in Part I "When the Tide Comes In" (from a Salvation Army hymn) and the collection begins with fishing ("A Surprising Sweet Taste"). Zen Buddhism informs the fishing industry, their work processed into product and contrasted with effete environmentalists. ("Top Predator"). Such useless words for infidelity ("Bitter Candy"). A Ford Fiesta frozen in time with boom boxes ("2nd Avenue Rupert") and drag-racing up and down Second and Third Avenues ("City of Rainbows").
Prince Rupert intended for "just pilgrims" and "aboriginals", Whitey (Cumshewa) does his own killing. The wind appears to make no sound ("Hearing Loss") but he counts his "new age" blessings. Hope for lost children ("Manlift"). Beneath the sea is debris, accountants or poets are the fishers. Derelict boats ("Foreshore"). An accidental suicide ("Shovelling Snow"), statistics ("Only Twelve"); he senses the local ("Evidence") a river represents the mind ("Somewhere in the Heavens"). The Skeena River threatens ("Storm Surges") A page-centred poem is on the occasion of Easter ("Los Hermanos De Oona River").
The Tshimshian Storm moves people and cargo ("Meeting the Big Boat"). A poet is shy about his writing gift ("Miracles"). This ecosystem ("The Long Tongue of the River") weathering ("Spring Rains"), the big draggers ("Fairview Harbour"); a few gillnetters portray debt and unpaid moorage, since appearances may be deceiving. Saints and prophets of deep ecology are wealthy, not pensionless or unsalaried ("Carbonistas"). How is it to live as a fish ("Fishers") among the "Recreationists". Risks are heightened ("The River Takes a Life"). There be dragons of a sort on Grenville Channel ("Monsters"). Old totems of the sea and land prevail ("Reconciliation"). A Hereditary Chief of the Tshimshian (not Indians) negotiates ("Collaborative Management Agreements"). A page- centred poem ("No Place for a Man in a Small Boat") displays the inland sea. A ghost revisits the scene of his humiliations ("Billy Bay") or else face exile to Japan, due to the Second World War Japanese Internment on the Coast.
The poet seeks Enlightenment in Part II "Unrescued" from Zen Buddhism, Leonard Cohen, and Thomas Transtomer The Blue House. He searches for it in a barbers' chair with esthetics and immigration stories ("Anglz Hair and Tanning Salon"). Beauty competes with philosophy ("Karen") in a page- centred poem, followed by gendered expectations about the virtue or value of "Bringing Up the Past" in a double row of narrative. She was not so perfect ("Cheesecake: For Dorothy") but her generosity became "beauty itself". "Cherry Blossoms" is an octave or ocet. His cynicism is unrelieved by his companion ("Gaia Hypothesis"). As the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities, Gaia is the ancestral mother of all life. "No Frills" and "President's Choice" compete for shoppers ("Canada Day: Lake Windermere") while tourism represents secularism, "even on national holidays".
"I was a pilgrim" is an acknowledgement by "a kind of holy man". ("Edenic Moments") The Viet Nam War raised protests from American poets, such as Alan Ginsberg, whose Howl I and II alludes to "listening to the Terror through the wall". ("Boulderado" is a tavern in Boulder, Colorado). Christensen reports: "Cowboyin' is something that you do because you can't not do it." There is a cowboy code, with ten principles. The act of walking was one that Saigyo, Basho, and Matsuo turned into poetry. Other participants were a Japanese Walking Poet and the Slender Complainer. Their spirits were broken and Canadian cowboys were deemed "uncool". Keith Wilson, a New Mexico poet, describes his writings as "Emotional Geography". Las Cruces was where the Wilsons resided
Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki was a Japanese author of books and essays on Buddhism. The underpinnings of Zen, Suzuki's Essays on Zen Buddhism, for "The Botanist Returns from Lhasa", deal with "overgrazed pastures" and petty squabbles between neighbours. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, proffers prayer and love: poor damn fish, some die for nothing. The poet regrets his anger, "Now that time has eaten us" ("Fishing Trips").
"Unemployed" is a page-centred poem focused on the workplace. In this instance, a logging mishap mars a possible friendship. "Unrescued" is an apt account of those people who live in the bear's belly and others who live outside of it. Although the animal's gender is confused "him/her" and "(s)he", and "his/her", the poem is a parable about wildness, freedom, an entire way of being. Thus, the bear died a slow death. In another poem "I Came Upon a Deer", the ritual butchering of game is methodical and righteous. "I Am Not a Buddhist" flies in the face of other confessions. "Journey" relies on Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, for a covenant about the human heart. His parents worked well together ("In the Shade of the Tractor's Wheel"). Ancestors become tropes (from Alice Walker, American novelist of The Color Purple) and herein refer to a brutal father ("a bear of a man") in "Not For the Dog" who puts down an innocent animal. Road gangs betray crimes of the heart ("Ordinary"). An apostrophe "O death/ still among us" ("My Father Who Art in Heaven"). One of us dies ("Temporary"). The kill was successful ("The Paradox of Drones"). Zen for the West, by William Barrett, informs the poem "Something Divine"; barbarism is real. That which is "other than god/ perhaps love". A youthful disappointment leads two grown men to bicker ("Blind") "fuck man/ you were always bind." When there is not cooking to do ("Cooking") there are many moods in a long-term relationship ("Opportunities"). A spat ("Winter") then sensory overload ("Sweet Cuisine"). Climax becomes a separate act ("What Mattered Most").
For the poet there must be world prairie, wind driven wheat grass, the Diamond Willow hills which kneel before the Livingstone. Diamond willow is a prized material for use in walking sticks. The Blackfoot recognized their location from Big Chief and the Crowsnest Mountain. This "Triangulation" now reveals how Age "is feeding on us". Nevertheless, we look for our location by means of "mountains, prairie, and the tailgate of the green truck". He contemplates the many uses (of "Trees") and invokes the worth of forests. A man's worth is measured, with Cohen's "halleluiah" ("Yvonne's Meadow"). Yvonne Christensen took the photographs for the front and back book cover. Light up the darkness ("Bonfire") with meteor showers. Although Zen has been said to emphasize self-understanding and enlightenment through many systems of philosophy, psychology, and ethics, Christensen makes this luminescent territory his own, with the particularities of place and time. As he says, "I set my poems among the accomplishments of truly great heroes." In return, he has achieved a timeless, translucent series of poems.
Anne Burke
Review of Women’s Writing in Canada, by Patricia Demers, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019) 342 pages paper indexed.
Susan Brown founded and directed Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC). The
source work for the project is a website
Demers is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. As a result, she examines not only writing for children, fiction writers and poets but also musicians, non-fiction writers, playwrights, and filmmakers. The widest breadth of selections appears in non-fiction.
This study surveys sixty-seven years. The appendix “Timeline” begins with the 1940s, World War II, and the Massey Commission (1949-51). Of the 1950s: National Library, in Ottawa, was founded in 1953, Tamarack Review in 1956, the Canada Council in 1957. Of the 1960s, the Berlin War went up in 1961, Expo 67, in Montreal, Neil Armstrong in 1969. Of the 1970s, the War Measures Act, in 1970, NeWest Press in 1976, and Playwrights Canada, 1979. In 2001 there are the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Donald Trump in 2017, and Canada celebrates our 150-year-anniversary of Confederation.
As stated in the “Introduction: Imag(in)ing the National Terrain from the Mid-Twentieth Century to the Sequicentennial”, the book has been divided into sections, a) “Approaching National Literature”, b) Women in the Linked Roles of Reading and Writing”, c) “The Commissions: From Massey to Truth and Reconciliation”, d) From Total Refusal and the Quiet Revolution to Cultural Accommodation”, e) New Images of Movement and Diversity”. This despite the assertion, “although this overview cannot hope to be entirely inclusive”(p. 99)
Of the prominent role of Vincent Massey as a patron of the arts and philanthropist, he was the first Canadian-born Governor General. He chaired the Commission which bears his name, appointed in 1949 by Louis St-Laurent. This is the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences (1949-1951) which examined Canada’s cultural needs.
Chapter one “Fiction” “Prospects at Mid-Century” begins with Mazo de la Roche (1870-1961), Evelyn Eaton (1902-83), Madge Macbeth (1878-1965), Irene Baird (1919-81), Gwethalyn Graham (1913-65), Elizabeth Smart (1913-86), and Winifred Bambrick (1892-1969).
Gabrielle Roy (1909-83), and Ethel Wilson (1888-1980) were “Wrestling with the Strictures of Marriage and Family”. So too,the poetic narratives of Anne Hébert (1916-2000) and, presumably, of her friend Mavis Gallant (1922-2014). The debut novel of Adele Wiseman (1928-92). The more so of “Revolutionary Talents and Experiments” of Sheila Watson (1909-98), Marie-Claire Blais (b. 1939), Margaret Laurence (1926-87), and Patricia Blondal (1926-59).
Jane Rule (1931-2007), Laurence, Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), Alice Munro (b. 1931) are all “Flowering Careers in the Sixties”. “Trajectories of Celebrity: Munro and Atwood” are singled out, as well as “The Tangle of Domesticity and Independence” for Audrey Thomas (b. 1935), Marian Engel (1933-85), Aritha van Herk (b. 1954), and Carol Shields (1935-2003).
In “Rhizomes of Sexuality, Nation, Race, and Ethnicity”, we discover: Albertan Janette Oke (b. 1935), Beatrice Culleton Mosionier (b. 1949), Eden Robinson (b. 1968); indigenous and transcultural, Joy Kogawa (b. 1935), Hiromi Goto (b. 1966), Kerri Sakomoto (b. 1960), Larissa Lai (b. 1967), and Daphne Marlatt (b. 1942).
Witness the family sagas from Jane Urquhart (b. 1949), Ann-Marie MacDonald (b. 1958), and Camilla Gibb (b. 1968). So many to consider: Marlene Nourbese Phili (b. 1947), Dionne Brand (b. 1953), and Shani Mootoo (b. 1957). Then, Mary Meigs (1917-2002), Nicole Brossard (b. 1943), Gail Scott (b. 1945). Also: Evelyn Lau (b. 1971), Catherine Hanrahan (b. 1969), and Heather O-Neill (b. 1973). As well as: Aislinn Hunter (b. 1969), Alix Hawley (b. 1975), Madeleine Thien (b. 1974). Of “Extensions in 2017” there are: Gurjinder Bastan (b. 1972), Heather O’Neil (b. 1973), Suzette Mayr (b. 1967); Alison MacLeod (b. 1964), Kathleen Winter (b. 1960), and Barbara Gowdy (b. 1950). This is convincing and persuasive. “In a vast array of narrative formats stressing voice or pastiche or fluid space, women’s fiction in Canada continues to explore the ways these elements connect with one another.” (p. 123)
Chapter Two "Film" focuses on original screenplays, adaptations of women’s writing in Canada, and documentaries. Chapter three "Poetry": discloses that like fiction writers, women poets were active before mid-century, often publishing in newspapers in the absence of literary periodicals.
For poetry, a logical critical beginning would have been with E.K. Brown and Northrop Frye in their “Letters in Canada”, University of Toronto Quarterly. Here is a mere sampling of their work: an autobiography of Edna Jaques (1891-1978), followed by Dorothy Livesay (1901-96), P.K. Page (1916-2010), and Miriam Waddington (1916-2010). All were “fired in the kiln of endurance”. The Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks were edited by Lorne Pierce. Preview, First Statement, and Northern Review were significant Canadian periodicals.
Page was afforded “Onlooker and Participant” status. Anne Wilkinson (1924-61), Elizabeth Brewster (1922-2012), Margaret Avison (1918-2007), and Jay Macpherson (1931-2012) are linked with “clearing the hurdles of sleep”. Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-87) and Margaret Atwood indicate “the slow striptease of our concepts”. Phyllis Webb (b. 1927), Pat Lowther 1935-75), Daphne Marlatt (b. 1942), and Nicole Brossard (b. 1943): are “the way any of us are tangled in the past”. Lola Lemire Tostevin (b. 1937), Dionne Brand (b. 1953), Louise Halfe (b. 1953), and Marilyn Dumont (b. 1955) are associated with “their fragile, fragile symmetries of gain and loss”
Lorna (Uher) Crozier (b. 1948), Erin Mouré (b. 1955), Jan Zwicky (b. 1955), Anne Carson (b. 1950), Anne Michaels (b. 1958) Stephanie Bolster (b. 1969), and Vivek Shraya (b. 1981) reveal that “the truth likes to hide/ out in the open”. Karen Solie (b. 1966) is “poetic hipster”.
Chapter four “Music” reports folk singers reclaiming traditions: Buffy Sainte-Marie (b. 1941), Edith Butler (b. 1942), Sylvia Tyson (b. 1940), Joni Mitchell (b. 1943), and Kate (1946-2010). "Adult Contemporary Styling" of: Sarah McLachlan (b. 1968), Chantal Kreviazuk (b. 1974), and Martha Wainwright (b. 1976).
Chapter five “Drama” describes Gwen Pharis Ringwood (1910-85) “Canadian Drama’s Foremother”, along with: Patricia Joudrey, Ann Henry, Beverly Simon: "Examining Emotions". Sharon Pollock (b. 1936) offers “Meaning through the making of theatre”. Pollock and Carol Bolt (1941-2000) are “Re-viewing History and Power”. Erika Ritter (b. 1948), Joanna Glass (1935-2006), Sally Clark (b. 1953), and Wendy Lill (b. 1950) are “Enacting Vulnerabilities”. Judith Thompson (b. 1954) and Ann-Marie MacDonald (b. 1958) are “Performing Marginalization and Shape Shifting”. Thompson appears “through the looking glass, darkly”. The plays of Lorena Gale (1958-2009), Djanet Sears (b. 1959), Shirely Cheechoo (b. 1952), Monique Mojica (b. 1954), Yvette Nolan (b. 1961), and Marie Clements (b. 1962) play on “Recording Documemories”. Joan MacLeod (b. 1975), Hannah Moscovitch (b. 1978), and Anna Chatterton (b. 1975) are “Exploring Impasses”.
Chapter Six “Writing for Children” is generally based on publishers, awards, and fiction about children and young adults, whether of other times and space or fantasy, and comprises illustrated narratives. Chapter Seven “Non-Fiction” focuses on memoirists and autobiographers, commentators on our world, advisers and observers.
In Conclusion: “Moreover, within and across genres, women writers’ questioning, disruptive, feminist practice continues to be the hallmark of their vast array of work.” (p. 261) before mid-century and ahead to the sesquicentennial; of equal importance is the second border, beyond 2017, the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a longstanding feature of women’s work is its appearance in many forms. This reference book, suitable as an introductory survey, contains a useful "Timeline"; it lists suggested avenues for further research in the "Works Cited: Primary Texts, Secondary Sources, and Credits.
Patricia Demers is a distinguished university professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta.
Anne Burke
Review of Reading Canadian Women's and Gender History, edited by Nancy Janovicek and Carmen Nielson (University of Toronto Press, 2019) 353 pp. paper. Indexed. Studies in Gender and History series editors Franca Iacovetta and Karen Dubinsky.
This field emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, albeit with "the problem" of liberal, Western, white middle class, Christian; the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 1973, the bilingual Canadian Committee on Women's History, in 1975, The United Nations Decade of Women (1976-85), the Canadian Women's Movement Archives, in 1982.
The inception of this book was the 2014 workshop in Ottawa ("Acknowledgements") or in 2015 (the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in Ottawa) whereby "Feminist Conversations" became unconventional historiographies. Analysis of the perceived differences between women's and men's experiences relied on gender binaries. Marxist feminism and post-structuralism shifted to feminist, queer, and trans studies.
The "origin stories" of suffragists were, in fact, predated by Black women activists, and followed by: "They're Still Women after All": The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood, by Ruth Roach Pierson, and the assertion of only "women-born-women". However, "trans-bodies were on the front lines.
So this pursuit of recovery history is both necessary and associated with community and politics, Indigenous oral tradition and francophone women. The breakthrough of intersectionality as multiple vectors of identity triumphs over patriarchy, in order to advance racial and gender equality, in academe, for all those marginalized by race, sexual and gender identity, and class. ("Introduction")
The style of the essay "A Conversation about Indigenous Women's History", by Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Susan M. Hill, is collaborative but reads rather like the interview format, and seeks to advance current scholarship. "Writing Black Canadian Women's History", by Karen Flynn and Funké Aladejebi, reports that Canada is not a raceless society. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the first woman to edit and publish a North American newsletter, was an important symbol in Black Canadian Women Studies, whether the African Disapora or Caribbean. These submerged stories need to be excavated through trans-national (inter-nation building) citizenship. Canada is not the Great White North. Memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, and oral history sources provide a window into women's lives. Afua Cooper reconstructed her subject's life. The use of fiction and historical documents resulted in Lawrence Hill's novel The Book of Negroes.
In "Québec Nationalism and the History of Women and Gender", by Denyse Baillargeon (in translation), argues that the forty-year portrait of modernist historiography is on the whole correct, despite not easily accommodating women's and gender history. Micheline Dumont was an important feminist voice. The pattern of comparing French-speaking Québec women with English-speaking Canadian women, and in Ontario, was simply misplaced. The period was marked as the 1960s "Quiet Revolution". The Québecois language, Catholic faith, and American orientation served to reinforce misogyny, amid 1970s nationalism; what matters is Québec history since the 1970s into the 1990s.
Katherine M.J. McKenna, in "Class, Race, and Gender Roles in Early British North America", begins her account with pioneer Susanna Moodie, when women's role was restricted. This pertains to the pre-Confederation period, from about 1780 to 1850, in Upper and Lower Canada. There were female slaves, some freed, from 1783 to 1816, who came from the United States and Jamaica. Masculinity was either "bush" or "gentry", some women were protesters when not confined to the house.
Beth A. Robertson, in "Performative (Ir)rationality: Rethinking Agency in Canadian Histories of Gender, Religion, Reason, and Beyond", begins with the niqab in Canada, a 2011 federal ban on the wearing of face coverings to take the oath of citizenship. See also: "Beyond Sisters or Strangers: Feminist Immigrant Women's History and Rewriting Canadian History", by Marlene Epp and Franca Iacovetta, which is also an essay on Canadian immigrant women's history. In 1986, an essay collection Looking into My Sister's Eyes: An Exploration in Women's History was published. A 2004 anthology Sisters or Strangers?: Immigrant. Ethic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History, was edited, in part, by Epp and Iacovetta, and subsequently expanded, in 2016. (Thus, "revisited").
Tarah Brookfield and Sarah Glassford, in "Home Fronts and Front Lines: A Gendered History of War and Peace", begins with the 1755 Acadian expulsion, as an example of how Canada has been shaped by war, despite the image of pacifism, peace activism, mediation, and peacekeeping. "Women and the World Wars" is a section which pertains to compilation of a suitable and relevant bibliography during the summer of 2014. There was resistance and resilience in Colonial wars and the post-1945 period. Women's vulnerability can be compared with Masculinity, War, and Peace.
Nancy Forestell, in "Historical Feminisms in Canada to 1940: Further Reflections on the So-Called First Wave", was part of the author's research for the second volume of Documenting First Wave Feminisms: Canada ‒ National and Transnational Contexts. She approaches "Diverse Feminisms?" with an adjacent photo of "Women in front of YWCA's Ontario House, ca. 1912", the middle-class Anglo-Celtic Protestant women in suffrage groups who represented mainstream imperialism and colonialism.
In "Never Done: Feminists Reinterpret Their Own History", Joan Sangster observes that feminists came to an understanding of racism, nationalism, class conflict, homophobia, and ableism. She has examined the historical evidence: the oral, textual, and visual sources of the 1970s. This period was marked by the youth movement, the baby boomers. Canadian feminism was expressed in popular feminist publications, such as newspapers, a graphic novel, and a popular book on the history of women's work. Sangster's aim is to disrupt the prevailing narrative.
Heather Stanley, in "Primal Urge/National Force: Sex, Sexuality, and National History", explores how children of feminist and LGTTBQ activist-scholar parents, who were social historians, published the field's first works in the 1980s. She focuses on the fur trade and (re)settlement era, the Victorians, the Second World War and postwar rebuilding age. The Victoriana Regina reflected Women as Mothers and Mothers as Citizens. The Second World War led to the Nuclear Family Rebuilding. In 1978, there was a Lesbian Defence Fund for mothers in danger of losing custody of their minor children. The Cold War threat was used to purge homosexual federal employees, gay men, with persecution and punishment.
In "Challenging Work: Feminist Scholarship on Women, Gender, and Work in Canadian History", Lisa Pasoli and Julia Smith approach an Understanding of the Complexity of Women's Labouring Lives. A one-day strike called attention to high-quality daycare and triggered research on the history of childcare labour. The Early Years were the 1970s and based on census data and other archival reports. In the 1990s, many reports focused on gender, discourse, and identity. Two examples are Joy Parr's The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880‒1950 and Pamela Sugiman's Labour's Dilemma: The Gender Politics of Auto Workers in Canada, 1937-1979. The present essayists conclude that both the private and the public spheres need to be considered more closely from women's own perspectives.
Shannon Stattner, Kristin Burnett, and Lori Chambers, in "Realizing Reproductive Justice in Canadian History", examine the spectrum of women's reproductive health experiences. An intersectional approach is important, drawing on a reproductive justice framework, first coined in 1994. SisterSong: Women of Colour Reproductive Health Collective was founded in 1997. The present essayists allude to Karen Flynn and Funké Aladejebi who discuss how "the writing of Black Canadian women's history is still in its recovery stages."
In the "Introduction" the editors explain why they asked how the authors planned to incorporate francophone and Québec literature. Many, but not all, engaged with Québec histiography. Those who did not were requested to provide an explanation in their essays. The attempt to bridge the disconnection between English-language and francophone authors is evident in the essay by Denyse Baillargeon (in translation) also available in French on UTP's website www.utorontopress.com. Sangster reviewed the French language newspaper Québecoise deboutee! (Montréal) initiated by the Front de Libérations des Femmes, in 1971. Nevertheless, Pasolli and Smith conclude: "Much work remains to be done. The integration of scholarship on Québec and English Canada (and by francophones and anglophones) remains an ongoing problem, as it does in Canadian history more broadly". And this, not withstanding, the $5-a-day universal daycare program in Québec and unique in Canada.
Anne Burke
Review of Honouring the Strength of Indian Women: Plays, Stories, Poetry, by Vera Manuel/Kulilu Pa#ki, Butterfly Woman, edited by Michelle Coupal, Deanna Reder, Joanne Arnott, and Emale A. Manuel (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019) 391 pp. paper First Voices, First Texts Series.
Vera Manuel (1948-2010) was an Ktunaxa-Secwepemc writer at the forefront of Residential School writing who did tremendous work as a dramatherapist and healer. Emalene A. Manuel (also Ktunaxa-Secwepemc) worked with her sister, Vera, in Storyteller Theatre. In 2018, she completed her Masters of Education at the University of British Columbia.
Vera Manuel lived in Vancouver, studying history, Indigenous culture, and writing at the University of British Columbia, and also writing at Langara Public College, where she apprenticed. She was a featured poet at World Poetry venues and on their radio program. In 2006, Manuel was awarded World Poetry Lifetime Achievement Recognition. She was an Artist-in-Residence for Aboriginal Media Lab and part of a "Strong Words" Conference in Vancouver, in 2008.
"Song of the Circle" was her first play and designed for the annual Union of B.C. Indian Chief's Conference in 1989. It is a story about abuse and healing, spiritual growth, though "We never told anyone" the secret. In part, she writes about St. Mary's Residential Boarding School, in Cranbrook, B.C. There was rampant sexual abuse, violence and isolation, all emblems of colonialism and genocide, missing aboriginal women.
Manuel manifested the idea of Story-Truth-Telling or "Akaminski" (the Krunaxa word for "telling the whole story"), so evident in "Strength of Indian Women", the only previously published play. The raw suffering came from Manuel's own family but prepared for the 1991 "Women in View" Festival Theatre, in Vancouver. It was first staged at the Firehall Theatre, on the downtown eastside, and performed by a cast of Indigenous women. The second annual Women's Memorial March was on Valentine's Day, in 1992. "Echoes of Our Mothers' Past", about how family violence affects generations, reveals: "I am a survivor" and "I am a spiritual warrior". "Every Warrior's Song" has characters who come to life and the final scene is about death.
This anthology contains four short stories, three of which were previously unpublished. "That Grey Building", a boarded-up old residential school looks like a prison, where many children died, but not before they saw too much. Mary grieves for her cousin who has died ("Theresa") at the hands of Sister Luke, the strange English words, the abuse. Children were sent home when dead or nearly dead and their families were helpless. In "The Letter" she was one of the first Indian children from the reserve to board at the white school, in order to learn how to be integrated. Her father decided against sending her to the Indian school, in Kamloops. It is his alcoholism which spurs family separation and her escape. The short story "The Abyss" was first published in Residential Schools: The Stolen Years, edited by Linda Jaine (Saskatoon: University Extension Press, Extension Division, University of Saskatchewan, 1933). This story was the origin of the play "Strength of Indian Women" and how the residential school system was destructive. Many lost childhoods and adulthoods were due to incest and sexual abuse. Manuel offers: "Thank you for giving me a place to let this story go."
The second section focuses on her poetry. Her sister Emalene A. Manuel favours two poems: "When My Sister & I Dance" for the reality Vera captured, and "When I first Came To Know Myself", an extension or parallel of the "Traditional Introduction to Self", by her sister Emalene Manuel (in the "Introduction"). Secrets emerge ("Woman Without A Tongue") whisper about childhood demons ("Ghosts & Predators"), of that "crazy life" ("L.A. Obsession Song") and disaffected lifestyle ("Addictions"). There are too many secrets ("Lies") and pain ("Life Abuse of Girls"). She harbours hope ("The Woman I Could Be"), despite "Fools", and pervasive "Loneliness". This is an intergenerational issue: "Abused Mothers, Wounded Fathers". Her father's suffering ("Hunger") a trigger: "That ugly, grey building" ("The Catholic Church"), sexual abuse ("Deadly Legacy"). This "Keeping Secrets" endures, until "Forgiveness", a learning curve. Self-esteem is celebrated in a centre-justified poem, ("The Girl Who Could Catch Fish With Her Hands") due to faith. The foster children are remembered, with a simple refrain ("Two Brothers"). Massacres breed helplessness ("La Güerra" is Spanish for war or slang for a blonde white-skinned person). The Canadian Japanese Powell Street Festival is a venue for a "Drunk Indian/Indian drunk", more evidence of social alienation ("Keepers in the Dark"). Parental cautionary tales abound ("Inheritance"). Qu'appelle Valley and secrets escape ("For the Child Who Knew"), despite the alarmum "Never Ever Tell". Settlers displaced her ancestors ("Ottawa") and "Brown-skinned people were enslaved" ("The Truth About Colonization"), since "history" only began in 1492, closely followed by resistance. In a poem, ironically, titled "Justice", she explores cultural oppression, forced assimilation, and genocide. In "Beric", she embraces words, letters, and light. The centre-justified "Christmas Inside of Me" extols the positive message of this Christian holy day. The sun makes love ("Spring Fever") with her and she poses as a bear. In "Megcenetkwe", she alludes to a tragic traffic accident. A father and his infant daughter "Megcenetkwe" passed on to the Spirit World. His wife and their other daughter miraculously survived. "Dying" is a long prose poem, in which "mountain climbing" is a trope or mantra, the angel appears in the sick room, with a prayer. The poetry aptly concludes, "There are no more thoughts of dying, only living a longer life and I accept that."
"Afterwords" contains black-and-white photographs of friends and family members, all of which serve to depict domestic scenes, as well as Catholic residential schools. Michelle Coupal, in "Narrative Acts of Truth and Reconciliation: Teaching the Healing Plays of Vera Manuel", applies her knowledge and experience to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada. Coupal advocates for the pedagogical use of Manuel's plays, written between the 1980s and 1990s. The losses of indigenous culture, language, and separation of family members were due to forced efforts at European assimilation. The coined term "dramatherapy" refers to a response to "decolonize theatre". The 2012 TRC document "They Came for the Children" evokes this intergenerational oppression. Coupal points out how one of the plays, Journey Through the Past to the Future, ends with the restoration of lost language and "Women's Warrior Song", to honour Indigenous women.
In "Every Warrior's Song", self-harm leads to self-healing. Coupal is an indigenous scholar, who draws on Elder knowledge through research for storytelling and encourages non-indigenous teachers to do the same. She recounts a theatre history of performances as well as an analysis of the photographs, which have become part of the record, such as the fictionalized St. Ignatius Residential School. This is in the short story "The Abyss", with the actual St. Eugene Residential School in the play Strength of Indian Women.
Deanna Reder, in "Embedded Teachings: Vera Manuel's Recovered Short Stories", regards Manuel's work as "path-breaking" because she was one of the first to find, in aboriginal trauma, a path of healing. She came from a prominent First Nations family, she and her siblings are high profile activists, educators, and cultural workers. Yet, as a family and a nation, they had suffered abuse by colonial institutions. Manuel was unable to complete her novel during her lifetime.
Joanne Arnott, in "Through Poetry a Community is Brought Together": Vera Manuel's Poetry, Poetry Activism, and Poetics", reviews the locations, oral tradition, and personal touches of her work. Manuel performed "The Catholic Church", one of her poems, at the launch of Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Saltspring Island, B.C.: Mother Tongue Press, 2008). Her artistic statement "Where Poetry Comes From" was first published in this anthology. She knew Maria Campbell, born in 1940, whom her father invited to teach in their community, in the 1970s, and served on a conference panel with Campbell, author of Halfbreed (1973) and Lee Maracle, born 1950. Arnott strives to associate Manuel's paper " Words that Move & Tell Truths" with other conference participants, as well as the legacy of Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), Chief Dan George (1899-1981), and George Clutesi (1905-1988). The Aboriginal Writers Collective West Coast was established. Manuel published in Salish Seas: An Anthology of Text + Image (Aboriginal Writers Collective). Arnott hosted Storytellersplayspace online, to which Manuel and other Indigenous women writers contributed. A blog, Versa Manuel Theatre, was initiated after her death.
The "Appendix" contains "Indians and Residential School: A Study of the Breakdown of a Culture", an essay by Manuel which she submitted for 404, a fourth-year history class. She was an undergraduate student, in 1987. Her list of "Works Cited" is wide ranging and impressive, and, more than a few, obviously wrought from her own family's demons. One of her sources is Marceline Paul, Kootenay Elder, Drug and Alcohol Councillor, Bonaparte Indian Band, 1987. Another was John Munro, Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, Indian Conditions: A Survey (Ottawa: Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1980) and others of the same ilk (Department of Indian Affairs, Annual Reports, 1885, 1895, 19000-01, 1902-03, [Duncan] Campbell Scott was quoted) and Millie Poplar, "Assimilation Through Education", Union of British Columbian Indian Chiefs to educate people on Master Tuition Agreement. These texts she made part of her creative vision and the journey on which First Nations peoples have embarked. The personal experiences, in "And Then We Prayed Again: Carrier Women, Colonialism, and Mission Schools" by Jo-Anne Fiske (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1981) could have inspired her to recount those of her own family members. She does allude to George Manuel, Shuswap leader and Elder, who had published with Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1974), Marceline Paul , Mary Mitchell, Kootenay Elder. How the missionaries and the government sought to evangelize and assimilate was framed by Celia Vayro, in "Invasion and Resistance Native Perspective of the Kamploops Indian Residential School" (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1968) must have been immediately relevant. So too, Margaret Whitehood, The Cariboo Mission: A History of the Oblates (Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1981).
This documented approach includes some excerpts from the "Department of Indian Affairs Sessional Paper on the Kootenay Industrial School in Cranbrook, B.C. 1900-1" is chilling. While Manuel's ancestry is Secwepemic and Ktunaxa, it was her Krunaxa mother Micheline Paul who attended St. Eugene residential school in Cranbrook, B.C. (and Mary Paul, Vera's grandmother, was Micheline's mother). No doubt she offers an original version of her "Traditional Introduction of Self" and she achieved a Master of Education thesis "Story-Truth-Telling", before her untimely death.
Joanne Arnott (Métis/Mixed Blood), writer, editor, and arts activist, received the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Literary Arts. Michelle Coupal (Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation) is Canada Research Chair in Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Literatures, and Associate Professor at the University of Regina. Deanna Reder (Métis), Associate Professor in First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, is a lead on "The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing in Northern North America up to 1992."
Anne Burke
Review of A Poet's Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet, by Stephen Morrissey (Victoria, B.C. Ekstasis Editions, 2019) 126 pp. paper.
The book is dedicated "For Carolyn, as always". In 1977, Carolyn Zonailo founded Caitlin Press, which she managed with Cathy Ford and Ingrid Klassen. The press was later sold and relocated. Zonailo and Ed Varney founded the Poem Factory (1991-2003) in Vancouver. The author's relationship with Zonailo, a poet, editor, publisher, and now wife began in 1989 with the publication of Family Album by Caitlin Press. Morrissey met her in 1991. He subsequently published The Beauty of Love, 1994, and The Carolyn Poems, 1995, with The Poem Factory; and married her. Zonailo lived in Montréal or divided her time living in Montréal and Vancouver.
Morrissey is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, The League of Canadian Poets, and the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal. He was born in Montréal, has published nine poetry books and seven chapbooks. In 1997, the Quebec government named an island in northern Quebec after a phrase from one of his poems "La Vingt-Septieme Lettre".
A Poet's Journey is a collection of some of the essays and reviews which Morrissey wrote and published from 1975 to 2018. One of his observations (in the "Preface") is that there are now more poets, prizes, and awards, as well as more creative writing courses. He regrets there are fewer serious reviews in newspapers and periodicals. Previous poets seemingly had a more important place and cultural relevance. Yet poetry endures.
Morrissey elaborates on the "Montréal Poetry Tradition" which is as much about writing and publishing poetry as it is about doing so in the English language in the province of Québec. Bill 101 not withstanding. Another filter for the lens of Anglophone Montréal is McGill University. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, The Montréal Poets introduced modernism in Canada. They were the "Initiators". The McGill Fortnightly Review featured A.J.M. Smith, Robert Finch, F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, John (Buffy) Glassco, and Abraham Klein. Ralph Gufstafson, Al Purdy, and Milton Acorn made their appearances, in or near Montréal.
In the 1940s, there were two rival groups on the Montréal scene signified by Preview and First Statement. At some point these merged into Northern Review, edited by John Sutherland. In the Early Forties and the Fifties "Resurgence" there were Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Louis Dudek, P.K. Page, and Phyllis Webb.
Morrissey reviewed a book CIV/n. A Literary Magazine of the 50s edited by Aileen Collins published in 1983 by Véhicule Press in Montréal. (The original review was published in Poetry Montréal, March 1984). The book reproduced all seven issues of a poetry magazine inspired by Ezra Pound's observation: "Civ/n is not a one man job". This comment referring to "civilization" was in a letter to Louis Dudek.
The book contains an Introduction by the magazine's editor; an essay "Recalling the 50s", by Irving Layton; photographs of Montréal poets; reproductions of letters from Charles Olson and Raymond Souster; an essay on "The Significance of Contact and CIV/n", by Ken Norris; and an "Index to CIV/n", by Michael Gnarowski. The latter was a publisher at Golden Dog Press, who continued to play a role in the cultural development of Canadian Poetry. (Not a poet himself, he was, for example, one of the founders of the League of Canadian Poets).
Raymond Souster's New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1966) launched sound poems, found poems, graffiti on the page, concrete poetry, as well as performance art, experiment á l'outrance. Other source material may be discovered in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967, 1968, 1970).
A Third Edition was published by McGill-Queen's Press in 2017. It contains additional materials and commentary, including "The Role of 'Little Magazines' in the Development of Poetry in English in Montreal", by Michael Gnarowski, a very useful personal account which was first published in Culture xxiv, No. 3 (September 1963).
Like Morrissey, he is a former student of Dudek at McGill. Gnarowski taught at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) in Montréal and writes about his varied experiences and the advent of "the Beats". He describes an unforgettable Allen Ginsberg poetry performance, and provides priceless anecdotes about many other Canadian and American poets of that time. According to Gnarowski, in "Introduction, Being a Personal essai in the Unwritten History of Modern Canadian Poetry",
The length to which poetry as a performance art could go brings to mind an Allen Ginsberg reading at Sir George Williams University. Ginsberg's entrance on the "stage" was preceded by what can only be described as "acolytes" in sort of saffron robes who first brought in smoking incense sticks an then walked up and own the aisles of the auditorium offering platters of cookies from which bourgeois types in the audience shrank, fearing they were being seduced with pot-laced goodies. It was a great reading.
Dudek (1918–2001) was a noted poet, publisher, and literary critic, whose career was spent at McGill University until he retired as Greenshields Professor in the Department of English. He was involved in avant garde publishing (with Raymond Souster and Irving Layton) producing Contact magazine (1952-54) and Contact Press (1952-66); he began Delta Press in 1957. Gnarowski, who founded yes: a magazine of prose and poetry (1956-70), is now professor emeritus of English at Carleton University. He was general editor of the Carleton Library Series and founding vice-president of Carleton University Press.
As a student, Morrissey participated in poetry readings at McGill and the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. He avows when the poetry reading series at Sir George Williams came to an end (and was then "rarely" at McGill) the readings series at Véhicule Art Galley served as a replacement. Morrissey edited and published fourteen issues of what is, a magazine of experimental poetry, from 1973 to 1975. By 1977, Artie Gold, Ken Norris, and Endre Farkas became the first poetry editors of Véhicule Press. (See: "Dudek et. al., A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Véhicule Poets. Montréal, Maker Press, 1981 cited by Morrissey).
Morrissey edited and published The Montreal Journal of Poetics, a magazine of literary criticism from 1978 to 1985. By then, the reading series at Véhicule Art Gallery became the most important poetry venue for English speaking poets in Montreal or poets who wanted a reading from outside the city. Véhicule Press was known for its original multimedia performances, collage texts, videopoems, literary magazines and books. "The Véhicule Poets Now and Then", in April 2018, was a nostalgic exhibition, with books, photos, and memorabilia.
According to Morrissey, his first poetry chapbook was Poems of a Period (1971) privately published in Montréal and first full-length poetry book The Trees of Unknowing, with an "Introduction" by Louis Dudek (1978), was published by Montréal's Véhicule Press. His chapbook The Divining Rod was published in Edmonton by Mark McCawley's Greensleeves Editions, founded in 1988 and operating to the present.
Empyreal Press in Montreal published all the volumes of The Shadow Trilogy: The Compass, in 1993, The Yoni Rocks, in 1995, and The Mystic Beast, in 1977. By 1983 Coach House Press, in Toronto, published Morrissey's second book of poems, Divisions. The submission was accepted for publication by bpNichol and edited by Frank Davey. Coracale Press, in Montréal, published his Girouard Avenue, in 2009 and The Coat Poems, in 2012. I have previously reviewed A Private Mythology (Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2014).
In 2000, Morrissey co-authored (with Zonailo as "Carolyn Joyce") a prose work: The Antiquarian Symbols: the 360 Degrees of the Zodiac, published by Coracle Press in Vancouver (http://www.aquariansymbols.com/ ). He published a 2012 chapbook with Coracle Press in Montréal and online: Darrell Morrissey: a forgotten Beaver Hall artist. "Coracle Press Chapbooks believes in the value of poetry, memoir, mythology, astrology and dreams".
Morrissey's "The Insecurity of Art: 5 Statements" was first published in Only Paper Today, Aspace Gallery, Toronto, May-June 1976. In his "Preface" he says "Visual or concrete poetry also interests me and I have included some examples of my experimental poetry." (More about this below).
Much as Dudek refuted experimental writing, Morrissey abashedly alludes to his own youthful interest in a "cut-up technique" whereby an original text is cut into pieces with a pair of scissors; then reassembled randomly, producing a new text. Nevertheless, the demarcations and transitions between an assembly of thoughts and ideas are technical indicators, representing a series of "pieces" in the prose style of much of "A Poet's Journey".
For Morrissey, "Poetry is the voice of the human soul"; "Good poetry does not moralise"; as for some of his dreams, when he wrote a long poem, "Divisions" it had deep emotional meaning in his life, family history and ancestors, as well as marriages, and a shamanic journey.
In "The Purpose of Experimental Poetry" published in Montréal Journal of Poetics (Montréal, Winter 1978-79) Morrissey indicates that such poetry is the "vehicle" for expressing originality, nonconformity, and changing times. One direction is playing with form and the other (which is preferable) is an organic movement of ideas, feelings, and images to reveal something new about life. Morrissey clearly seeks to refute the first and enforce the latter, with a generous sampling of his own concrete poetry.
In A Poet's Journey, there is a series of pattern poems, beginning with "Sea Earth Art", published in Anthol, Montreal, Issue 3, spring 1974; "Untitled Poem", published in Da Vinci, Montreal, No. 2, spring 1974; "Regard as Sacred" first published in Montreal Poems, spring/summer 1974. The poem "John Cage for an August Nite", was published in Anthol, Montreal, issue 3, spring 1974. Cage was Poet Laureate of the United States at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Morrissey cites Cage's A Year From Monday, New Lectures and Writing (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1967).
Other poems are: "amorphous space 1" published in West Coast Review, Reno, Nevada, vol. 4, no. 3, winter 1974; "amorphous space 2", published in West Coast Review, Reno, Nevada, vol. 4, no. 3, winter 1974; "Untitled Poem", published in Da Vinci, Montreal, no. 2, spring 1974; "Letting Go", published in Cyan Line, Montreal, fall 1975; and "Thot after Thot" published in The Poem Company, Vancouver, undated, phase 3, No. 1.
"The First Person in Literature" was the name of Dudek's graduate seminar, fall-winter semester from 1974 to 1975. It is also the title of a contribution by Morrissey, et. al, including Gnarowski, and published in Eternal Conversations, Remembering Louis Dudek, edited by Aileen Collins, Sonja Skarstedt, and Michael Gnarowski (Montreal: DC Books, 2003). Skarstedt helped Dudek publish his final books with Empyreal Press.
Although Louis Dudek contributed his own "Preface" to Continuation I, a multi-volume long poem, Morrissey offers "Reading Louis Dudek's Continuation: An Introduction to a Major Canadian Poem", which demonstrates Morrissey's admiration for his personal friend and former professor and, perhaps more importantly, offers a key to Dudek's use of epigrams or aphorisms.
The result reflects the conversational style and fragmentary long-form poem we have seen in Robert Kroetsch (as in the poet's avowed intent to write "my life-long poem"). Although Dudek rejected Cage's experimental work and presumably Cage's long poem "How to Improve the World (You'll Only Make It Worse)", Morrissey points to its resemblance to Dudek's own assemblage of statements. Indeed, "a mosaic of ideas, statements, and stories" (cited by Morrissey from Cage). The same has been said, more than once, by tired and true academics of Robert Kroetsch's non-traditional literary criticism.
Another exponent of aphorisms, albeit in prose, was Northrop Frye. He described Morrissey's second book of poems, Divisions in this manner: "I found extremely powerful, at once visionary and movingly personal." ("About the Author"). With praise, Dudek stated: "Aphorisms and epigrams are the corner-stones of literary art" (cited by Morrissey). The form and style of Morrissey's essay may truly be a cross-over from the poetical, since it is somewhat aphoristic or epigrammatic; written as a diary and memoir, containing journal-like entries and lined divisions (on the page). This inveterate practice serves to segment what is, virtually, a conversational stream of consciousness, that is very much autobiographical or memoiristic. The emphasis is on the people and events that the author has known or witnessed, and also from a private diary or journal but prepared for publication. (A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams, 1999).
Morrissey further states his belief that Continuation (in all its many parts) is" one of the great Canadian poems of the twentieth century" and, not surprisingly, the essay is dedicated to Dudek. There was a series of volumes, Continuation I and II were published by Véhicule Press, Montréal in 1981 and 1990. Continuation III was in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montréal, 1997). Dudek's last book The Surface of Time (Empyreal Press, Montréal, 2000) includes the "Finale" from Continuation III. Consequently, Morrissey followed up with more on "one of the most important poems in Canadian literature", with an essay, aptly titled "Continuing Continuation, On Louis Dudek", published in UrbanGraffitti, http://urbgraffitti.com / writing/continuing-continuation-on-louis-dudek-by-stephen-morrisey/ Edmonton, April 2013. This online magazine was founded and is operated by Edmonton poet and publisher Mark McCawley, whose declared intent is:
to publish transgressive, discursive, post-realist writing concerned with the struggles of hard-edged urban living, alternative lifestyles, deviant culture — and [to] present them in their most raw and unpretentious form.
Although Dudek abhorred bringing attention to himself with a self-revelatory autobiography, it has been acknowledged that Dudek's basic theme in poetry "is his whole life" (also observed by poet Ron Everson, in an interview cited by Morrissey). If the poet, or any artist, exposes his whole psyche, then each constructs a finished work. "It depends on the poet's intention: is the poet's voice an authentic expression of his psyche or is it ego-centric and self-promoting?" (Morrissey asks rhetorically).
As a reminder that the time of a poetry renaissance for Montréal poetry was in the 1970s, "Continuing Continuation, On Louis Dudek" was an essay dedicated to Richard Sommer and Keitha K. MacIntosh. Morrissey met them in the early 1970s at Sir George Williams. Indeed, "I first met Keitha in the fall of 1972 in Richard Sommer's creative writing class." ("Remembering Keitha MacIntosh") She was perhaps fifteen years Morrissey's senior, but they became friends and kept in touch. Correspondence between them, a total of 137 letters from 1975 to 1984, has been archived. She wrote and published a poem about him entitled "Stephen's Day".
In "Remembering Keitha MacIntosh" Morrissey recalls that he wrote a long poem remembering her. She edited and published Montréal Poems, a magazine in which Morrissey and others were published. Morrissey used to give readings to her class at Vanier College in the 1980s. Both Richard and she passed away in 2012.
This brings us to the title essay "A Poet's Journey: On Poetry And What It Means to be a Poet", first published in Poetry Quebec, Montréal, 2009. At the outset, Morrissey announces: "My life long journey is writing poetry". He embarks on a brief memoir, beginning with his birth in 1950 and writes about when he was fourteen years of age. Morrissey muses on "My test of poetry", asking rhetorically, "What is the nature of writing poetry?" He posits that "Inspired writing [from Spirit] seems to have no ego... and afterwards there is no ego-attachment". Since the age of eighteen, Morrissey embraced experimental poetry (when he composed his first long poem "Tumour City") until his mid-twenties, which may have been ignited by reading about Allen Ginsberg. Certainly, Ginsberg appeared in Morrissey's dreams.
That Road of Damascus moment and consequent glimpse into craft is a recurring incident in various versions of mentorship. However, Morrissey says "I have never censored my writing". Compare this with "Self-Censorship in Poetry" (published in Museletter, the League of Canadian Poets, Toronto, 1995) wherein we find: Censorship is not the same as self-censorship, "which is the denial of transformation, it is the denial of enlarging one's consciousness".
In "Preface" for Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978-1998 (The Muses' Company, Winnipeg, 1998) he writes about the traumatic death of his father, when he was only six years old and a dream when he was thirteen years old, which he interpreted later as "I had to write down the truth as I knew it". He soon wrote poems and kept a diary. Then, as previously mentioned, he read an article about Allen Ginsberg, in 1967, and the function of the poet.
When he reviews "Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing", Morrissey concludes "Overall, there are some good poems...but it is not a great book of poems" published in "Poetry Reviews" http://www.poetryreviews.ca (Toronto, spring 2006)
In The Pacific Rim: Reviews of Books, Victoria, spring 2006), Morrissey published "The Last Modernist: Eldon Grier in Canada", a review of Eldon Grier: Collected Poems, 1955-2000 (Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2001). Also a visual artist, Grier joins the canon of poets in presenting a Canadian vision that is unique and original", based on his "autobiography in poems" and he spent half his life in Montréal.
In "Conversations with Eight Poets", which was published in "Reviews", League of Canadian Poets, 2014, Morrissey reviewed Laurence Hutchman's In the Writers Words, Conversations with Eight Poets (Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2011) as a valuable addition to our knowledge of modernist Canadian poetry.
Scholars will find a valuable source of insight into these poets' work; recent criticism I've written on Louis Dudek's major long poem Continuation has been deepened by reading the interview with him. I can hear Dudek's voice—engaging and inquiring—in his discussion with Hutchman.
Morrissey reviewed "Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec", Languages of Our Land, Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec, Langues de Note Terre, Poems et Recits Autochyones du Quebec, edited by Susan Ouriou and translated by Christelle Morelli (Banff Centre, Banff, 2014). The review was published in The Malahat Review, 197, Victoria, (Winter 2016). As Morrissey wrote:
You will be surprised by these twelve writers from Quebec; they are all unique and talented voices. All of these authors write in French and for the most part they live either north of or in the Quebec City Region.
"In memoriam, Artie Gold: January 15, 1947—February 14, 2007" an inspired chapbook Remembering Artie Gold was published online at http://www.coraclepress.com /chapbooks/morrissey/ remembering-artie-gold.html, memoir. This essay was published in a limited edition of sixty copies as a chapbook for people attending the memorial for Artie Gold at The Word Bookstore in April 2009. (Montreal: Coracle Press, 2009). The store was an important meeting place for both local and visiting poets "where poets, writers, and literature were valued", according to Morrissey.
"In Memoriam: George Johnston, 1913-2004" was published in Stanza, the League of Canadian Poets, Toronto (Fall 2004). Morrissey first met him in 1981. Johnston was honoured by being made a Life member of the League of Canadian Poets, in 1989.
"R.M. [Richard Maurice] Bucke as Critic" was published in Montreal Journal of Poetics, Montreal, spring-summer, 1979 and "R.M. Bucke and the Spiritual Dimension" was published in CVII, Winnipeg, vol. 6, no. 1 & 2, winter 1982. According to Morrissey, Ginsberg would agree with Bucke's work in psychology which demonstrated that the evolution of the human mind was away from an egocentric self-consciousness to an oceanic and life affirming cosmic conscious state.
In Mexico, Morrissey encountered the art of the shaman in a trance vision. He wrote about the experience in 1984 and 1991. "It is what I intuited in the late 1960s when I began experimenting in my writing, when I attempted to write outside of the narrow linear and rational mind." He was absorbed in experiments. "A Statement: All Art is Vision" appears to be previously unpublished. "I was never very much a part of any poetry community as they rarely expressed my concerns in poetry".
In "Poetry and the Shadow", he addresses the reader (a potential poet) and then answers "why I began writing poetry" (that Montreal Star article about Allen Ginsberg, precisely on November 11, 1967, being the impetus). This paper was presented at the League of Canadian Poets' Annual General Meeting held in Toronto in 1996 as part of the panel, "The Poetics of Poetry as Shadow Work" and published in Museletter, the League of Canadian Poets, Toronto, 1996.
Morrissey's second book Divisions (1983) was his first serious explorations of the shadow. By 1996, he had published two volumes of "The Shadow Trilogy", "The Compass" in 1993 and The Yoni Rocks in 1995; the final volume, The Mystic Beast was in 1997. A French translation of The Mystic Beast was published by Les Editions Triptyque as la bête mystique in 2004.
Published in Poetry Quebec, Montreal, January 2010, "Whatever Else Poetry May Be" compares with its probable origins in “Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom” in Irving Layton, The Selected Poems: A Wild Peculiar Joy 1982. Morrissey recalls when he was young, but years later, "What I Believe is this: it [poetry] is a breaking of the silence that surrounds evil".
In "Poems are reports from Inner Space", Morrissey declares the poet's journey in Inner Space is the shaman's journey". "Towards an authentic voice in poetry: 5 statements" cites from A Glossary of Literary Terms (1999) by M.H. Abrams, a formal definition of "voice", the inner being, the psyche, the soul and is authentic, distinctive, individual voice in poetry. "Believe Nothing" contains more on Inner Space and nihilism and the essay was published in Made in Montreal, blog, July 2018. Morrissey concludes "I'll be glad when I've written my last poem and I can put this behind me". Indeed, "Writing poems is what I've done with my life". The essay was published in Made in Montreal, blog, March 2018.
There is an "Addendum" with works cited for some of the essays, "Reading Louis Dudek's Continuation: An Introduction to a Major Canadian Poem" and "Continuing Continuation, On Louis Dudek". Among them is a secondary source Louis Dudek, A Biographical Introduction to his Poetry (Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1983).
The Stephen Morrissey Papers, 1963-2014 are at Rare Books and Special Collections of the McLennan Library of McGill University. You can visit the author at www.stephenmorrissey.ca.
Anne Burke
Review of Climbing a Question, by Roger Nash (Thornhill, ON: Aeolus House, 2019) 97 pp. paper.
The epigraph is "Poems ask questions: can you see the world this way? They open up new possibilities for life." This is a recurrent Socratic method in a full-length collection of seventy-five poems, divided into four sections.
In the first section, "Autobiography of a Puddle", the first poem "Spanning a Life" utilizes rhyme (abb cdd efg hig klm nop qrs). As a child, the speaker's vision was altered, "Had I ever been there before?" More recently, "the word itself is congenitally blurred" ("Eye-glasses"). In "Autobiography of a Puddle", the metaphysical conceit gives voice and perspective to nature, "So much for ages of argument/ about the soul as the true self". Another viewpoint about "The Distances Between Us" pertains to an exchange between individuals who are at different points in the power hierarchy. Hence, the realization, "as angry / as only retribution can be". The poem is situated as anchored off Aden, South Yemen, 1958.
The poem "Echoes" uses repetition, personification, and onomatopoeia to describe how humans "are the footloose echoes for hills". Rock possesses "lips" and "shouts", even "bleats". Hills "speak" and must "mate". In another poem, a woman's insistent and incessant voice resembles "a butter knife that might turn into cleavers" ("Miss Jenkins, Landlady"). The poet attributes to her a three-fold knock on his door, "like a trinity". She was truly his "Fate". In Greek mythology, The Fates or "Moirai" are a group of three weaving goddesses who assign individual destinies to mortals at birth. Their names are Clotho (the "Spinner"), Lachesis (the "Alloter") and Atropos (the "Inflexible").
The poet experiences vertigo, after an encounter, and asks "The universe is dying?" This passion insinuates "orange lips as wet as vulva". Disrobing results in "when your dress pulled you back on". The second law of thermodynamics says that when energy changes from one form to another form, or matter moves freely, entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases. This is useful information when analyzing how "Lust Challenges" scientific theory. However, the poet demonstrates the proof of how differences in temperature, pressure, and density tend to even out horizontally, after a while. in "Love Told in Shadows", the would-be lover loses his shadow at noon with his beloved's gaze.
In "Blind Dog", time bends and sways, so that "years ago, years / after, years yet to come: / [are] all one indistinguishable age". The poet compares "I remember the dog" of his childhood with "Today, I must follow him". Each day "I trek through the black pupil at the centre". Repetition animates found poem elements ("Carousel #7, Toronto Airport"). The paradox of "Trying to Explain the Inexplicable" involves Euclidian geometry and dreams preoccupy a father. Children asked "Was that a blue dragon doing / somersaults underwater?" A mysterious witness of "The Top Drawer" awaits, but the poet inventories or catalogues the contents in the others. A series of questions emerges: "[Can] I hear dancing and singing?"; "A party I've forgotten I went to?"; "But are they harkings-back at all?"
His contemplation of "The Migration of Hats" arises due to his grief. Among his mother's keepsakes is a hat once worn by his father. The son dons the hat and his father's stories come to life. The migration of "trilbies" (signified by the hats) can keep the seasons in order. Now the poet's children have access too. "Hall-Table" contains the essence of his grandmother. "How else can the past see us?" "As If Conjuring" is an extended comparison, with twisted and entwined "yellow, red" array. After a stroke, no sounds came from his mother's lips. In return, the silence from her son's inaudible throat was accepted "as a good answer", since she already expected an appropriate response. "Clearbury Hill" is where his father's ashes were scattered. His father taught him "a trick is never a trick".
In the second section "Being Stuck for the Right Word", the poet muses "In the train station, pilgrims to Dachau look for...?" He explicates that their would-be descendants ought to be acknowledged, although they remain "The Unborn". Perhaps there are others "The yet to be born" and so we should shelter refugees. The poem notes how the tide coming in, then receding in a rush, scatters remains. Relatives were lost, never to be born, "but who knows" how they would look, "now, / yesterday or forever".
In "Suitcases" the "Not unpacked", "Never-taken" are associated with how what was done "gets stacked" with what might be, yet. The routine of throwing a ball, a child's game, inspires a question "What else/are never-ready but ever-ready suitcases for?" which also functions as the answer.
"The Old Bakery" depicts the remnants of an abandoned appliance, "the stalwart and enduring rusty iron/oven door". The locale invokes an ever- diminishing sense‒ and invites comparisons with‒ fewer returning birds, "smaller-breasted rondels", and girls with shorter hair. Plenty and lack have the same status and become interchangeable. Re: the dedication "for Rose at 95", "skint" is a variant of "skinned", past participle of "skin". Word origin and history for skint: adj. "broke, out of money," 1925, slang variant of "skinned", past participle of "skin".
There are "hinges of smoke", before a sniper takes out a child, who ironically survived a bombing. ("Knocking") A mid-swing of hope in the that poem is linked with "hope for change" in the next. The Buddhist Goddess of Mercy ("A Statue of Guanyin") serves for skulls with a lotus in bloom, "But is a fragile flower an answer to witnessing that?" The poet ultimately declares that "A fragile blossom is the firm answer we have." "Trying" and dying are counterpoised, with a pattern or palette of colours. "Beginning Again" heralds the Book of Genesis in the Bible, its pages may be "white or grey", the hills are black silhouettes. A bag lady's wet hair appears white, some grey. Las Vegas is another mirage of "both promised and unpromised lands".
For the poet, "Everything has a Limit", so he advises, "Donate your body to Sound Poetry". This surreal landscape depends on personification and juxtaposition. "In a mirror above the waterbed", in this poem, links with "the tall hall mirror" in the next poem. As a statue "RORRIM" is a mirror image ("mirror" spelt backwards) and "ziggurats" were the bases on which the White Temple was set. The purpose was to move the temple closer to the heavens and provide access from the ground via steps. As for "yoghourt", it is a variant spelling of "yogurt" that is common in British English.
The poet asks "Should we dig or not?" in "Rosie McBride, Water Diviner". He concludes "Margins of error are the width of truth". In this poem, her shadow falls (since water diviners always define themselves) as she embarked on her "shadowquest". In the next poem, even the shadows of window-washers are unemployed and the speaker cannot be deterred by mysteries asking "Who dunnit?" ("Portrait of a Solipsist") The poet was, tongue-in-cheek, attributing the poem as this "paper-thin, non-stick, / non-rhyming bandage"; suitable for an individual who claimed his ear bled, if he even heard poetry. Solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world (and other minds) cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind. The theme of egotistical self-absorption was also mentioned in "RORRIM", since through her eyes, "it" (meaning the mirror) took "selfies" of itself. Further, only the "selfies" met friends. "Not Everyone" works through negation but ends with "anyone" can be President.
"In Praise of Randomness" celebrates probability, as "the long familiarity of chance" encountering "What's random in this word goes on forever". The language of contraries, such as "neither started or stops", "rises again in a crash", "not going up or down", "expected unexpected" all help to convey a combination of simultaneity and serendipity.
A rear-view mirror and an unwritten ode conspire against the speaker, "no hand-signals" but "road-rage, word rage," and "rage-rage". The road resembles "its metrical double white lines" ("Late to Meet a Friend"). "Ode to a Key-Ring" alludes to a series of keys, since key-rings "are rosaries/for endlessly counting".
Shadows reappear in "Back-To-Fronts", after Hiroshima, and time moves in reverse, from a newborn to dreams of pregnancy. However, "it's only in palindromes" which are a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward; they may also be numerical.
"Gone Fishing" is the sign which appears in a window and signifies Come Back Later. Fishing is a symbol of hope, trust, and, when a trout leaps up, as "an exclamation-mark just for itself". Perhaps that is the answer to an unasked question. The poet avoids "heaving walls of words", no lawyers. Instead, in a forest, language "becomes more precise". Long-term lovers say what they mean and mean what they say.
The poet imagines a beach as "a vast human jigsaw" puzzle, before the sand reclaims it ("On the Beach"). The poem moves from "our final evolution" to "its next evolution", meaning the sand. Foreskin and vulva are sharing evolutions.
"A Goblet" reminds me of "Ode on a Grecian Earn" by Keats. This one is "Hand-made in Crete". A goblet's bowl was fired in a kiln, since the time of the Minotaur, whether gods and us, Ulysses, Stalin, or our best friends. For pottery, the future is destined to crack.
The Corigo River "still flows in my dreams" ("Conseuelo Tells Diego 's Fortune"). This is a clever retelling of the story of Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin arranged the flowers in Juan Diego's "tilma", or cloak, and opened his cloak before archbishop Zumárraga. Diego was a devout neophyte. The next poem is an answer to what is "A Good Story"? The poet chides the reader "Don't ask what does 'that' mean?" Indeed, "You can't climb the question at all." A legend is a key. Only the Sphinx knows the close of every story. Should romances have a moral? In fun, when the speaker ends his yarns, he reveals how he is asked "Are there any lions or magic wands/in your beard"; "Could it go down in a submarine?", and "Have you ever eaten ants?" He responds, "Yes to the above."
In the third section "Being Stuck for the Right Word", the first poem "Stutters" uses onomatopoeia to convey the theme and compares language with machine-gun's re-loadable "stutter", hence a sort of "eloquence". The poet draws on Newton's theory of gravity but retools it with objects holding in place, time suspended, and the recurrence of historical events. The poet defends his tears, in the final line of "Sneezes", an otherwise witty, bombastic poem; and can be compared with how he concludes the previous poem, "Eloquently nude enough for both of you" as a decision or declarative statement.
Due to Alzheimer's, an elderly gentleman has issues with completing his questions and problems with grammar, but substitutes punctuation ("hyphens,/ellipses and dashes") in an effort to communicate. This pattern extends to the description of his cat as "a long furry hyphen" and the coffin replaced by "a long oak dash/with brass handles". Of a man who was otherwise so careful with words, the poet concludes, in a visual manner, "He's around‒still‒with no full stop..." instead of the full stop "....". ("Requiem for a Row of Dots")
The theme in "Stutters" is revisited in "Being Stuck for the Right Word" wherein onomatopoeia and personification figure; dogs are like words, a parrot spoke in French. The poem suggests the inability to fuse visual with olfactory and gustatory sensory images. "A Dream of Falling in Love with Henry VIII's Last Wife (Catherine Parr)" portrays the lover's access to a lady in the medieval tower. A mask of self-esteem (in "A Dream" etc.) yields to "my self-esteem got pruned", by the "Gardener in the Park". This poem is associated with the Blitz and "the bomb-sights". Language and landscape are linked with a passenger pigeon, decoding patterns, Morse-code messages signalling. A winking face (in "Gardener" etc.) becomes a "squint" and "half-winks" in the Park, once the top-secret home of World War Two code-breakers. Hence, the series of: "inside", "inside that", "within", "within", "within". What is urgent and not translatable, ironically, appears perfect and precise.
The paradox of "An Aunt: Losing as Finding" pertains to multiple mouths, due, in part, to double vision, then x-ray. Shed skin resembles skin on skin. "Preemie" was thin, but grew up a scrapper. "Thistles" offers a Gaelic toast to "Good health", but draws blood. "First-Light" was timeless and waiting, for morning and the poet. "It's Pouring" late, thus hurrying. In effect, "you say 'yes / no' to my questions". In "From the Symbolist Post-Structural Critic to the Reader", every word is a betrayal. "He leaves without ordering". "Never-Ending Disagreement on The Appropriation of Voice (Extract)" contains questions about identity. "If" sets up a series of "conditionals" and references Rudyard Kipling's poem of that title.
"Shopping Cart" offers found elements from commercial signage. "The 21st Century" begins with "just don't do that anymore" and changes to "And since when" a question. "Corkscrewing" involves "word-spinning". "Man on a Park Bench" opines "And there's only one goddam bench". "Man in a Bar" drunkenly speculates "If you live in throw/houses, don't glass stones".
The poem "Jewish Cemetery, Wertheim" deals with an ancient cemetery consecrated on Schlossberg, in 1406, in the region of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Most of Wertheim's Jewish population fled Germany during Hitler's rise to power and those who did not were sent to Nazi Labour or extermination Camps. "Kristallnacht" or the "Night of Broken Glass", also called the "November Pogroms", was when a pogrom against Jews was carried out by Hitler's SA paramilitary and civilian forces. "SA" refers to the Sturmabteilung (“Assault Division”), by name "Storm Troopers" or "Brownshirts", German Sturmtruppen or Braunhemden, in the German Nazi Party, a paramilitary organization whose methods of violent intimidation played a key role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The night of November 9–10, 1938 was when German Nazis attacked Jewish persons and property. The image of prayer shawls is apt.
In the final section "A Cosmic In-Breath" (another philosophical observation) a first poem "Perch Lake Trail" pertains to fond memories of a hunting dog, which the poet imagines beside him. His sense of time "as when, how many/years ago, or even more" leads to a contemplation on "of long ago, / more long ago, always / walks along ago, / long / a-now" a sudden shift in his temporal experiences. "Drying Washing on the Clothes-Line Overnight", a haiku, is followed by "Pilgrimage to the Site of a Killing Field, Cambodia", with allusions to a killing tree, "invasive" and "like shots". In "Hurricane Season, 2017", survivors question a lost city of Atlantis, rising again. The poet uses a deft touch with personification in "On the Move". "Nothing to Say", a refrain, relies on negation for "silence: / the sound / of snails".
The poet feels unsafe, with guard horses, until he befriends a somewhat familiar companion from his dreams. He is able to bond with this animal ("To a Prairie Horse") who laughs, as only stallions can. Time passes, "like the prairie grasses, that grow and wither and burn and...grow" in Tawatinaw Valley, a hamlet in Alberta.
"The Bull" an unfamiliar beast challenged by foliage ("the gorse stomping its hooves") while hawthorns tear the poet's fingers "like horns". Its roar can only be observed as butterflies, yet he can hear "the deafening yellow of gorse". Ultimately, the animal is tamed by "grass-eating".
"Evening on the Farm" depicts stars as herds and shaggy long-haired. The moon resembles an udder, although the bull star predominates. The birds accompany evening words. These will paradoxically fill blank newspapers in the morning.
In "Bell-Ringing", the proper term for a bell-ringer is "campanology"; thus the poet associates a swarm with notes, bees "chime, despite the fact that such ringing usually comes from a set of bells in a tower ("A skinny church-spire"). The terms "Great Tom, Treble Bob, Plain Bob, Reverse Bob, Reverse Canterbury", and "carillon" all come from the vernacular of bell-ringing.
Similarly, in "A Pizzicato of Foxes", there is an allusion to plucking the strings of a violin or other stringed instrument with one's finger. Pianos possess faces, on which to fall flat, while rain applauds. Destinations of material objects are unknown; musical scores are uncharted; foot-pedals forget. A young fox acts as the performer, until tomorrow when this unusual music will be played in a lively and brisk manner. By comparison, "How Foxes Become Weather" depicts an almost invisible predator, with confusing, imperceptible tracks in the snow.
"Fall" plays with eastern standard time ("Fall forward and Spring Back"). "Plenty of Time" is deceptively ample, but for loons' cries, "where would we be?" ("My Village and I") In "A Cosmic In-Breath", the poet calls for a collective unconscious composed of sound and light. Pine trees are "like exclamation-marks", a simile. Sibilant assonance prepares us for "Will we ever make it out" without a satisfactory answer.
Nash is inaugural Poet Laureate of Sudbury and a past-President of the League of Canadian Poets. With poet Susan McMaster, whom he names "my very good friend in-poetry and life", and with Senator Grafstein, he worked to create the Parliamentary Canadian Poet Laureate position in Ottawa. He has published nineteen books of poetry, short fiction, and philosophy. He received the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the PEN / O. Henry Prize Story Award, twice for the Confederation Poets Award, and first prizes in poetry contests with PRISM international and The Fiddlehead. He was born during the blitz in England. He is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy (Environmental Ethics) at Laurentian University and a cantor.
Anne Burke
Review of Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry since 1960 , by J.A. Weingarten (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2019) 324 pp. cloth indexed.
The lyrical method uses testimony, oral history, and witness. The term “lyric historiography” means a creative study of the past that brings readers away from the distance inspired by the elite, academic history and closer to the historical and cultural experiences of people.
There were changes in both form and content within this genre over several decades. In order to study them, we are directed to: 1) accumulative lyrics (at their height during the 1960s and early 1970s) which emphasize a national or regional history; and 2) developmental or familial lyrics (gaining popularity since the late 1960s) which draw on genealogy, “post memory”. These are only two of many in the evolution of poetry about Canadian history.
A significant contribution (although there are others) is by Lois Parkinson Zamora, in The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A brief overview yields: Table of Contents, Part I “Anxiety of Origins, History as Idea in the Americas, For the Record: Novels, Newspapers, Narration; Ancestral Presences: Magical Romance/ Magical Realism". Further, Part II: “Intertextuality and Tradition, Synchronic Structures, Fragmentary Fictions, Clichés and Community; Comparative Conclusions: Baroque New Worlds, Notes, Index
Carl Klinck and Reginald E. Watters edited Canadian Anthology (Toronto Gage, 1974). Klinck was series editor for the McClelland and Stewart New Canadian Library series. Northrop Frye contributed “Conclusion to A Literary History of Canada” for The Literary History of Canada, edited by Klinck, first published by University of Toronto, in 1965, then reissued, revised, and enlarged in 1976. Volume I comprises Parts I to III of the original edition and covers the years from the beginning of Canadian Literature in English to about 1920. Volume III covers the period from 1960 to 1974. Volume IV was edited by W.H. New, published in 1990, and contained a section on “Poetry” by Laurie Ricou, who edited Twelve Prairie Poets (Ottawa: Oberon, 1976). As well, George Melnyk produced The Literary History of Alberta (University of Alberta Press, 1998-9).
The Collected Poems of E.J. Pratt, edited by Frye (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962) demonstrates an otherwise absence of documentary poets like Pratt, whose book-length works create an impersonal and epic narrative. The post-moderns George Bowering, Robert Kroetsch, and Michael Ondaatje are excluded. A mere sampling of the present study would be: Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Brewster, Joan Crate, Emma LaRocque, Florence McNeil, John Newlove, Al Purdy, and Andrew Suknaski.
Weingarten begins with Purdy, the poet-historian, in Chapters 1 and 2; Chapter 3 examines Newlove, Chapter 4: a range of regionalist poets centred on the nineteenth-century Métis uprisings, (Purdy, Newlove, Elizabeth Brewster, Mick Burrs, and Lorna Crozier. Chapter 5: Florence McNeil and Dale Zieroth. Chapter 6: Barry McKinnon, Chapter 7: Suknaski, Chapter 8: Atwood The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Chapter 9: Joan Crate’s (Métis) Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson (1989) and conclusion Louise Halfe (Cree)
In the years between 1960 and 1990– what I’m calling the ‘centennial era’— the very concept of a united Canadian identity became inconceivable. (“Introduction”, p. 5) To approach history personally was unusual in the 1970s and 1980s, but that method has, since the 1990s, gained greater legitimacy in academic circle, especially for historians since the centennial era. (p. 6) For example, Margaret Prang’s 1977 presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association. called attention to and paid close attention to Canadian Literature.
A survey approach is respectable, with 1) “Al Purdy’s Modern Scepticism”, since more than half of his entire corpus was published between 1965 and 1979. This coincides with “Modern Scepticism and the Reinvention of Content since 1960. The idea of history is philosophically sceptical and there are six guidelines proposed for such a perspective. There was a thorough attention paid to novels in Canadian criticism and that focus shifted to the genre of poetry.
In 2) “Developing a Lyric Historiography”, we come across The Lyric Mode and the Reinvention of Method. The critic adopts a chronological approach to the evolution of lyric historiography, from about 1960 to the contemporary era, and takes up as six central poets: Purdy, Newlove, McKinnon, Suknaski, Atwood, and Crate.
As for 3) “Lyric and Regionalism: Challenging Histories, Part 1”, I am not certain that most prairie criticism exhibits a preference for fiction over poetry, since Donald Stephen’s Writers of the Prairies (1973) hardly qualifies as a solid indicator. Dennis Cooley has contributed: “The Vernacular Muse in Prairie Poetry, “Documents in the Postmodern Long Prairie Poem”, and more.
I do agree with that some who have used the term “regional” as a derogatory term, for “shallow” or “landscape". Furthermore, publishers outside central Canada have traditionally been regarded as regionally “limited” as to authors, markets, and audience.
Weingarten attributes Purdy’s influence on prairie writers to the veritable explosion of historically conscious poetry after 1962, John Newlove, Lorna Crozier, Gary Hyland.
“I use ‘prairie region’ not simply for the purpose of identifying one
comprehensible space, but instead to acknowledge the multiple sites in which a
heterogeneous literary culture flourished after 1960; in this context, the term
denotes the geographical boundaries of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, the
provinces in which many of the poets I study rooted their poetry and/or
established themselves.” (p. 261, note 3)
The term “regionalist” may also be used positively, although some have rejected the term. Nevertheless, “regionalism itself is neither bad nor good” (note 3, p. 261)
In 4) The Méis Uprisings: Challenging Histories, Part 2”, Louis Riel is explained in relation to his popularity during the 1960s but I do not think the image of the “ubiquitous American cowboy” is adequate, because no John Wayne-like stereotypical cowboy was executed for treason.
In 5) “Inheriting the Past”, we come across Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, and Eli Mandel (who admired Irving Layton), and Florence MacNeil’s The Overlanders.
In 6) “The ‘Edge of the Photograph’: Developmental Long Poems”, the critic refers to Andrew Suknaski’s “Prairie Graveyard”, but Canadian poets have turned to both the narrative and lyrical forms.
In 7) “Sharing Authority”, we learn that many publications were supported by Multiculturalism Canada (1984). Consider Suknaski’s 1974 draft of Wood Mountain Poems and how he influenced Margaret Laurence (but Sinclair Ross, who also influenced Laurence, was a personal friend of Suknaski).
In 8) “Figurative Families and Feminism”, we come to Atwood ancestor Mary Webster, who survived execution. Figurative foremothers abound after 1960, such as MacNeil, Susan Swan to Anna Swan, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1985). Atwood and Laurence discussed the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful. Al Purdy reviewed Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a series of self-portraits, in 1971. Atwood wrote her early notes for Surfacing in 1965. Carol Shields was influenced by Atwood and wrote a critical study of Moodie, in 1977, and a novel Small Ceremonies (1976). Others were Timothy Findley, Donna Smyth, Beth Hopkins and Anne Joyce, as well as Peggy Sample. Atwood influenced Stephanie Bolster.
In 9) “Indigeneity and Performance: The Fictions of Nations”, we are told the various feminisms emerged as a response to the feminist movement of the 1960s, as well as the multiple political and cultural associations inherent in the term “womanism”. There were “intra-group” differences. After 1970, Canadian women became increasingly aware of women’s diversity. The critic says he uses the term “Mohawk” because it is the same term Johnson used to identify herself. Although “Mohawk” and “Iroquois” are being replaced. The Métis people understood identity as fluid and intersectional. Canadian colonial administrators thought within their own official binaries of “white” and “Indian”. The “appropriation” debates were ongoing since the 1980s. There was a relative dearth of Indigenous literature between 1900 and 1990. Johnson’s heritage was the European tradition and her British education. Aboriginals were unable to vote in Canadian federal elections without sacrificing their “Indian” status until 1960. Lee Maracle (Sto:lo) began her writing career by publishing her own books because no Canadian publisher would publish her at that time. Maracle called Johnson “the mother of Indigenous literature north of the 49th parallel.” Young “Indian” men were emasculated by working on school farms, since women were the owners of the land, a vanishing race myth. The Canadian government sought to determine identity.
According to 10) "The Future of History", this book has three goals: 1) to show that modern Canadian poets have contributed to the reinvention of history as a social discourse; 2) to prove their work has serious implications for conservative models of history; and 3) to demonstrate the ways in which this literary project has been born out of a web of influence.
There is much to be gleamed from an analysis of sources about the evolution of this critic's thinking. Weingarten’s “Modernist Poetry in Canada, 1920-1960” was published in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2015). Therein, he wrote about revisiting John Newlove’s “The Pride” for Studies in Canadian Literature, 28 (2013): 113-35. More to be uncovered as well as “Stories in the Poems”: Al Purdy and the Editing of Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems” for Canadian Poetry Studies, Documents, Reviews 71 (2013): 68-87.
In Chapter 3 "Lyric and Regionalism: Challenging Histories, Part 1", he advises the reader that he has taken a departure from the earlier approach (albeit “in a different form”) with some “rhetorical shifts” in the revision. “My original article put too little pressure on Newlove and did little to make him accountable for his problematic portrayals of Indigenous stories and people”.
Weingarten wrote the article in 2011, which was published in 2013, and since then “I have gained new theoretical and historical perspective.” By comparison, “I take a harder line with Newlove than I did, even as I stand by my basic argument that Newlove did, in ways poets before him had not, inspire a generation of regionalist poets.” The changes signal “my admission that my earlier publication did not go far enough in either acknowledging the shortcoming of “The Pride” or appreciating the arguments of scholars... to do the important work of drawing attention to problematic portrayals of Indigenous groups in Canadian poetry. (p. 260, note 1)
In 10) “The Future of History”, he argues that Indigenous people tend towards political essay, memoir, poetry, and sacred story. With reference to Louise Halfe’s poetry, however, McLeod has caused harm to others. The Espaniel family helped to create Grey Owl.
Among the "Works Cited" are personal interviews, “Preservation in Poetry: An Interview with Mick Burrs [a.k.a. Steven Michael Berzensky]”, Prairie Fire Online (2010) (link inactive). Archival Sources indicate original research about Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, John Newlove, Al Purdy, and Andrew Suknaski. Primary and Secondary Sources are duly cited at the end but also serve a latticework of ongoing self-referencing notes to form an archway and symmetry of cross pollination and inspiration.
To conclude, Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry since 1960 was a finalist for the 2019 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English Section). The Jury Chair wrote, "Sharing the Past demonstrates extremely thorough research, and Weingarten’s ability to weave together discussions of the numerous writers and their work creates a wonderfully engaging reading experience." Jeffrey Aaron Weingarten is a professor in the School of Language and Liberal Studies at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario.