“Malachai Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I
learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to
stilt, from father to child.”
W.B.
Yeats, “High Talk”
“Too many stories: yes, and
High talk: the exact curve of the thing.”
John
Thompson, Stilt Jack XXXVII
John Thompson’s second and final book, Stilt Jack, was published posthumously in 1978. He had died two years earlier in circumstances that suggest suicide but are not conclusive. That he was self-destructive is undeniable: often full of rage, frequently full of booze, possibly dominated by childhood trauma as an adult; an English prof beloved by certain of his students but turned down for tenure initially by the authorities at Mount Allison University for whom he had no respect, a lack that often showed in his behaviour. Academically clubbable he was not, and his personal unhappiness was evenly matched by ill fate or bad luck. His wife left him and took their daughter back to the United States, where he’d done his graduate work, and his house in the Tantramar burned down, with all his possessions, while he was away in Toronto on sabbatical leave. He loved his rifle—he even named it—but it was taken from him by the police, while his manuscripts and most everything else disappeared in the flames. His misfortunes would drive any sensitive man to drink, and he was already a serious drinker even before they occurred. His promise, in Stilt Jack XXII, not to scream when he died, is infinitely sad. “I’ve burned everything” he goes on to write. I suppose that if you have nothing left, then there is no fear involved in your own exit from the world. So why make an emotional scene? Infinitely sad, as I say.
Stilt Jack is one of the books of Canadian poetry from the 1970s that has had staying power. (It was included in two separate editions of Thompson’s Collected Poems, and later reissued by Anansi as a separate book in 2019 in its “A List” series of reprints, with an introduction by the poet Rob Winger.) Its poetry comes directly from the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” (Thompson calls it “your blind, stupefied heart” in the opening poem), yet is highly literary too—based on a formal model little used in English before Thompson adopted it (the ghazal), frequently allusive, and with a vocabulary that is by turns high-toned (“rodomontades, anabases”) and demotic (“how far down on whiskey row am I?”). Such a tessitura is not atypical in contemporary poetry and is perfectly aligned with Thompson’s own rangy voice: now hermetic, now crystalline; now despairing, now openly celebratory; now passionate about poetry, now completely unbeguiled by the Muse. He will quote Gerard Manley Hopkins twice—“The world is full of the grandeur [of God],”and express certainty about the Resurrection (“We’ll rise as one body./A wedge of geese”), while confessing that he “can’t talk to God.” Stilt Jack embodies a constant pendulum swing between nature and human contrivances, essentialized twice in the image of “a silver cross and a bear’s tooth,” or in the book’s final rhetorical claim: “I’m still here like the sky/and the stove.” These and other dualisms in the book are never reconciled or resolved. “Should it be passion or grief?” begins the final poem, in a question that remains unanswered because, well, it is both. In the end, all that Thompson can give readers--his “friends,” as he says--is “words.” Maybe words are all that any poet can give readers.
But of course that’s not really all. I imagine that every reader of Stilt Jack, even someone unfamiliar with Thompson’s life story, is left feeling the poet’s despair, since it is so unmistakable. He tries to temper it, even quoting in No. XVII the Psalmist’s comforting lines about “they that sow in teares: shall reap in joy” (Qui seminant in lacrimis in exultatione mettent). But his own joy is obviously intermittent and never ascendent. He is “looking for the darkest place,” and mostly finds it. The book is clearly divided into two halves, with the first part (Nos. I-XIX) ending in a mix of hopelessness (“oblivion”) and hope—a strangely punctuated group of three couplets is surrounded by the words “out of all this beauty something/…must come,” a line from Canto LXXXIV of Ezra Pound. The second half (Nos. XX-XXXVIII), which starts with the line “I begin again,” commences with one of the longest and most allusive of the ghazals. It contains references to Yeats, to Thomas Merton, and to C.S. Lewis, along with a complex couplet that seems to refer to the “Nunc dimittis,” the prayer uttered by Simeon after he held the baby Jesus, as told in the Gospel of St. Luke:
Now let us servants rise like Atlantis.
By lying down, I’ll wake, depart in peace.
Simeon had been told by God that he would not die until he had seen the Christ, so Thompson’s fragment of his prayer (“Lord now let your servant depart in peace”) is symbolic of death, even if he has inserted Atlantis into the mix. Of course Atlantis, too, disappeared from the world.
In his brief prefatory note, Thompson characterized the ghazal form as “drunken and amatory,” and did not mention its conventional mystical cast. In truth his ghazals are less about love and booze, though both are present at times, and more about God and death, another unresolved dualism—“contrasts,” Thompson calls them, to which he adds “dreams” and “astonishing leaps” as the linguistic heart of the ghazal form. For him, the grave is dark (in a phrase borrowed from a poem by Abraham Cowley: “Dark is the grave wherein my friend is laid”), yet he and “a woman” are “as safe as a toad in God’s pocket” (wonderful line!). He quotes a fragment of Psalm 121 (“I lift my eyes”) but finds no succour in the thought of God as the Psalmist does, only “my dreams, disasters, my own strange name.” (The latter is rather odd, since his name is about as commonplace as they come. Yet ghazals in old Persia were supposed to incorporate the poet’s name, so perhaps this is his indirect way of doing so in Stilt Jack.) Heaven, he writes in one ghazal, “goes on without us;” and in a later poem, thinking of Yeats’s “rook-delighting heaven,” he confesses that he has seen just “one crow.” Heaven, in other words, is largely empty and not meant for him.
He takes some spiritual comfort in poetry, as a poet should. Poetry is “sweet, comely song.” The poet is (minimally, but crucially) “a cinder never quite burned out,” and while he has a difficult time surrendering to God, he can “surrender to poetry, sleep/with the cinders of Apollo.” (Apollo is the Greek god of poetry, but his presence has always struck me as strange in the book, which has no other references to ancient mythology that I can recall.) Thompson does get angry with words—“words, goddammit, words,” he mutters in No. VIII; and while the many references to W.B. Yeats suggest a kind of hero worship for the Irish master, the opening line of No. IX records Thompson’s utter frustration with the anxiety of influence and maybe even with poetry itself. (Yeats’s name is repeated seven times.) Words become a safety device, something to tie onto as the mountaineer “belays” (his technical word) a rope around a rock or other outcropping. (At that point in No. XXXIV he intones the names of mountains not as a climber might, but for their evocative music. He does this elsewhere with the names of wildflowers and bushes.) By the end of Stilt Jack, Thompson is fed up with words in one way. Talk is “this folly of tongues,” and as for the Flaubertian search for “le mot juste” (the exact right word), Thompson rejects it as hopeless (“forget it”). Yet he leaves off with the line, “Friends: these words for you.”
Poets have admired and learned from Stilt Jack for many reasons. For one thing, it has profound technical subtleties. Just listen to the opening couplets of No. II:
In this place we might be happy; blue-
winged teal, blacks, bats, steam
from cows dreaming in frost.
Love, you ask too many questions.
Let’s agree: we are whole: the house
rises: we fight; this is love…
There is a lot of alliteration here, though it does not overwhelm the reader, and vowel rhyme too (teal/steam/dreaming/agree/we), which is equally unobtrusive but key to the poem’s music. Furthermore, as disconnected as the couplets and the poems often feel, one from the other—Thompson uses the descriptive phrase “an alien design”—over all the book is in fact quite closely thought out and designed. Images of light and dark predominate. The whiteness of the “great northern snowy owl” of No. 1 becomes “the deep lightning/of swans’ wings” of No. XXXIII, and the dark of sleep or sex in No. V (“I feel you rocking in the dark”) evolves to become the very innermost heart of things in No. XXXVI (“have I dared the dark centre?”). There are subtle cycles in the book: the wildflowers that “grow anyway” despite the poet ignoring his garden, the moon that keeps returning, repeated images of fire, fish, books, stars. And of course the ghazal form appealed to several poets who looked to Thompson (and Adrienne Rich perhaps) as a model. Phyllis Webb’s book Water & Light was by her own admission an excited response to Thompson’s book. She wrote her ghazals, she tells us in a brief preface, on “unlined file cards,” and her book of ghazals begins with this couplet:
I watch the pile of cards grow.
I semaphore for help (calling stone-dead
John Thompson).
Instead of setting her own name in the poem, as is conventional, she sets her predecessor’s, in a rather moving act of acknowledgement. Along with Webb, Lorna Crozier and Rob Winger have also published ghazals, and I feel sure that there are other poets too.
I forget when I acquired a copy of Stilt Jack, but it was the first edition of 1978. Like other books of poetry, it sat on my shelf silently until I needed it, much later, during a period when I too felt as though heaven was going on without me, that “I’m not good enough” (No. XXXI). At that time, the mid 20-teens, I was living in Iowa and working on my long poem in prose amid the chaos of a broken relationship. So my ghazals would be “invisible,” in the sense that they were not in conventional poetic form. Yet I wanted to adapt Thompson’s own adaptation of the ghazal’s rich accessibility to ruin, to pain, to grief, to abandonment—not just by the lover but by the Muse too. I took my epigraph from No. XXVII, a couplet about inspiration:
I wait for a word, or the moon, or
whatever,
an onion, a rhythm.
My fifteen “Invisible Ghazals,” included in a book I called Intimate Letters (2014), drunken and (in their way) amatory as they are, are painful for me to read now. So full of psychic writhing are they—like Thompson’s own—that, as poems should, they revive feelings in me that I am happier forgetting. For the first but not the last time in my work I too quoted the Psalmist, though unlike the Biblical poet and unlike John Thompson, I invoked only the first half of the line (“They that sow in teares”) and not the second (“shall reap in joy”). At least, thankfully, I went on to admit that I was asking for help from “New found friend, melodrama.” I wallowed, but I watched too.
Since those trying and unloved days, I have taught Stilt Jack several times in an Introduction to Poetry class, and by and large my students, all adults, have all come to admire the book as much as I do. Of course it remains painful to read, but its brutal honesty is more than rescued from self-pity by its brilliant technical accomplishments.
Friends, I believe I’ll burn first:
I’ll find you by compass: dead reckoning.
Sing no sad songs. A tree stands:
Lay a stone against it.
Bruce Whiteman is a poet, book reviewer, classical music writer, and cultural historian. His most recent collection is The Invisible World Is in Decline,Book IX (ECW Press, 2022). He is the co-author with Ken Norris of Reading Wide and Deep (Poets & Painters Press, 2022) and the editor of Best Canadian Essays 2021 (Biblioasis, 2021). His collection of essays and book reviews, Work To Be Done, will be published by Biblioasis in 2023. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.