“I would write the age; what could be simpler?”
Ken Norris, “Tenor II,” Book 14 of Report
“coherence
is a pleasure
that
may never be allowed you”
Ken Norris, Fragments from the Lost Book of Mu, Book 17 of Report
Introduction
Ken Norris’s Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century is a long poem in twenty-two books—seven physical books, comprising something like 800 pages—written over the twenty-five-year period that ended (as the century did) in the year 2000, and published between 1977 and 2005. Parts of it were reviewed sporadically as they appeared in print, and Louis Dudek, in an essay included in his book Paradise: Essays on Myth, Art, & Reality, made an attempt to confront roughly the first half of the poem.[1] But as far as I know, no critic has yet written about the completed poem, though it has been available now for most of twenty years. I am not sure why this is the case. Report is a major work of Canadian poetry that deserves to be widely read and written about, yet it is not even mentioned in major critical volumes that focus on the Canadian long poem, books such as the so-called “Long-liners” conference issue of Open Letter, or Smaro Kamboureli’s On the Edge of Genre, or the anthology Border Flights, from 1985, 1992, and 1998 respectively, years when Norris’ poem was admittedly still a work in progress.
In this essay I can do little more than sketch the landscape of Report: attempt to place it in the tradition of the Canadian and American long poem, enumerate some recurring themes, comment on the overall form of the poem, and address its technical resources. Report is huge, diverse, many-voiced, and rich. It is highly allusive; sometimes focussed and sometimes deliberately incoherent; at times unfashionable in its diction but also lyrically high and fine; addressed to History with a capital H but also challenging in its intimacies. Begun with no “master plan in mind” and no desire to be “stylistically consistent,”[2] the poem ranges over vast tracts of history and geography, as well as personal experience and literary texts, while speaking now objectively, now lyrically, with accents from many poets, including Wordsworth, Eliot, Pound, Artie Gold, bp Nichol, and a host of others. Report picks up self-confessedly where Eliot‘s “The Waste Land” left off. In the beginning, Norris saw it as a report on the half of the century that came after Eliot’s half, and his plan, inchoate in many ways, was nevertheless always to finish when the century came to an end, as indeed he did: Book 22 is dated January 5-7, 2000. (In a comment that echoes something once said by de Kooning about paintings, Norris writes in Book 17: “long poems are abandoned,/never finished.”[3] And yet, he did.) Eliot’s presence diminishes in the later books of Report, while Ezra Pound’s becomes more pronounced as Norris, knowing that Pound wanted the later sections of The Cantos to parallel Dante’s ascent to Paradise, struggles with such an idea, now obsessed with it—he did, after all, title one book of his long poem The Better Part of Heaven—now resigned never to achieve it:
No
Taishan,
No
Paradise,
The
better part of heaven
For
a short while,
But
no Paradise[4]
He may have found a sort of temporary
paradise in the south seas, where The Better Part of Heaven was composed,
yet Report ends not in Paradise but in the day-to-day world of the poet
as fool. Heaven may range overhead, but the poet still has his feet planted
firmly on the earth: “you won’t find Paradise in these works and days,” he
says, alluding to Hesiod’s didactic poem.[5] Report
is therefore not, to use D.M.R. Bentley’s term, “teleological,” a word he
applies not only to Paradise Lost but also to Oliver Goldsmith’s The
Rising Village and to “[m]uch of Pratt.” Report would seem by
contrast to fall into Bentley’s contrasting tradition, one he does not
characterize with a single word but describes as manifesting “this openness,
this bagginess and so on, where the writer does not necessarily wish to
control, does not wish to bring everything into…”[6] The
ellipsis is Bentley’s own, but we can imagine that the sentence might finish
with the words “a single structure” or “a predetermined whole.” Certainly
Norris did not write his long poem with a fully sketched-out structure. Rather,
in Reinhold Kramer’s words, the completed Report “arrives at an
unmappable form;” like other “short long”[7] poems
instanced by Kramer—The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and The
Journals of Susanna Moodie for example—it “[resists] structure, [undoes]
epic, and [adapts] to the transitory and the local rather than to traditional
aesthetic systems.”[8]
Report concludes in a paradoxical place where “nought” equals
“fruition.”[9]
-1-
Norris’s
Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century has its roots in the
long poem tradition in American literature, which in turns looks back to the extensive
series of epic poems that begins with The Iliad and The Odyssey
and runs through Antiquity to Dante and Milton. With Wordsworth, whose The
Prelude in its earliest two-part version is a major force in Report,
the epic poem metamorphoses into the long poem by virtue of its ceasing to be
primarily about history or myth and its turn to private experience. Wordsworth
is very explicit about this. The subtitle of his poem is “Growth of a Poet’s
Mind; An Autobiographical Poem.” Such a characterization could never have been
made of the epic poem, which, as Pound once said, is basically “a poem
containing history.” Of course it is much more than that, since epics tend to
be poems about the founding of nations and the establishment of national myths
as well. The Aeneid and Pharsalia made this objective explicit,
and even the Christian epics of Dante and Milton were at least partially about exploring
and securing the Christian roots of European society. Wordsworth turned these
conventions on their head, and Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass began life
as a collection of personal poems but grew into a Wordsworthian autobiography
of a poet’s mind, solidified the change. Leaves first appeared in 1855,
only five years after The Prelude in its long version was published.
Pound and Eliot were not fond of Whitman, but it’s clear that “The Waste Land” and The Cantos owe a debt to their forebear. Whitman was an American poet in a self-confessed, straightforward way. Eliot and Pound were American poets in a much more complex sense. Both of them became expatriates and both of them looked Janus-like to the Old and the New Worlds for their tradition and were somewhat suspicious in the bargain of Whitman’s uncomplicated patriotism on the one hand and his uninhibited emotionalism on the other. Yet there is no doubting the personal psychopathology that produced “The Waste Land,” and most of the parts of Pound’s long poem that feel closest to our hearts are surely the sections that are obviously personal, that move us emotionally. These are not just famous bits like the passage from Canto LXXIV in which Pound calls himself “a man on whom the sun has gone down,” and continues:
the
ewe, he said had such a pretty look in her eyes;
and
the nymph of the Hagoromo came to me,
as
a corona of angels
one
day were clouds banked on Taishan
or in glory of sunset
and tovarish blessed without aim
wept
in the rainditch at evening[10]
but also moving lines like those that begin Canto 1, a translation of the opening of Book 11 of The Odyssey, or most of Canto XXXVI, in which Pound translates Guido Calvancanti’s “Canzone d’Amore.” Thus the inheritance of Wordsworth, the transmutation of the traditional epic poem into a kind of vast lyric, is everywhere in evidence in Eliot’s and Pound’s long poems.
And so on to Zukofsky (A), Williams (Paterson), Olson (The Maximus Poems) and others; and also through Pound to Canada and Louis Dudek, who began writing long poems in the 1950s and published a series of them over the remaining decades of his career, from Europe (1954) to Continuation (1980, 1991, and later). Dudek was Norris’s mentor and dissertation supervisor at McGill University, and there is no denying his influence on the younger poet’s decision to start a long poem in the mid-1970s. In an afterword to The Better Part of Heaven, Norris sketched a vignette in which he was visiting Dudek in his McGill office, and the older poet essentially gave him an order:
We were talking about poetry, and Louis was delivering a medium length monologue on how the poets of today have no social conscience, and I remember him gesturing out the window and saying something like “There’s the world. Why don’t you write about it?”[11]
As a figure, Dudek appears surprisingly
seldom in Report. In one of the prose sections of Book 2, Norris tells
of having “dreamed last night that I was Louis Dudek’s adopted son,” and then
goes on to admit how disappointed he was in the dream to receive a moving
postcard that nevertheless was coldly signed “Cordially, Louis Dudek.”[12] Dudek
is mentioned or alluded to twice in Book 20, once in connection with the Pound
quotation that gave the title to Dudek’s little magazine CIV/n (“Civilization is not a one-man job”), and
later when Norris notes that
Louis taught me to follow the
mind,
bp taught me to follow the
emotion[13]
But while there is a good deal of musing on the nature of the long poem in the remainder of Book 22 and indeed thereafter as well, Dudek as a presence disappears from Report, though Pound remains important (“Steal a few lines from Pound/and head straight for the sublime”).[14] Dudek’s influence on the formal structure of the poem remains strong throughout its entirety, however, really only submerging when Norris focuses on his passional life, as he does, for example, in Books 18 and 19.
In the wake of Dudek’s turn to the long poem in the 1950s and 1960s, many younger Canadian poets, and not just Norris, took up the form, as American poets did under the influence of Pound and Williams. bp Nichol, whose influence on Report is profound, began The Martyrology in the early 1970s, and other poets followed suit. Coach House Press published The Long Poem Anthology in 1979, edited by Michael Ondaatje, with contributions from nine poets. The poems included in that important book were certainly “long,” but only the section from The Martyrology represented a continuing or even life-long project. Sharon Thesen edited the revision of the anthology as The New Long Poem Anthology, first in 1992 and then in a revised edition in 2001. The latter contains twenty-five poems by as many poets, although once again none of the poems is “long” in the sense that The Cantos or The Martyrology is long. The New Long Poem Anthology did not include excerpts from Norris’s Report which, coincidentally, he had just brought to a close with Book 22. Life-long poems sometimes finish without a formal ending when the poet dies, as The Cantos and The Martyrology did; and sometimes they are concluded before the poet’s death, as A and The Maximus Poems were. With Report, Norris had no architectonic vision in mind from the outset—not the number of books, and certainly not their content, which tended to follow the poet’s personal life as one book succeeded another. As the end of the century approached and then arrived, Book 22 became the end-point, two books shy of the classical Homeric ideal but now tied, as it turned out, to the number of cards in the major arcana of the Tarot deck.[15]
Pound’s dictum that an epic poem is a poem containing history cast a long shadow. Subsequent long poems, including Paterson, Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger, and Robert Duncan’s Passages, as well as Dudek’s long poems and others, all contain “history” in various ways, from actual documents incorporated into the text, to historical personages being “activated” in the poetry, to meditations on “what history teaches,” to borrow a phrase from Gertrude Stein. When Report begins, it appears to reflect this convention. Book 1 is in many ways a kind of overture. It engages with themes that will appear later in the poem, sometimes again and again throughout the twenty-two books. After an epigraph from Blake’s Songs of Experience that focuses on the harshness of the contemporary world (“Babes reduced to misery,/Fed with cold and usurous hand”),[16] and a short lyric poem that can be read as a modern parallel to Blake’s dystopian vision (missiles stand waiting in silos, love and beauty are dead or dying, etc.), Report begins in earnest by evoking Norris’s birth in 1951. Wordsworth is not invoked here, but the Wordsworthian impulse is obvious: this long poem will not be a conventional epic. Yet what follows—short prose passages and lyric poems interspersed with newspaper reports quoted verbatim from various sources—demonstrates that the poem will also pay heed to the larger world of human events and politics:
It is impossible to keep politics
Out of the poem.
Too often we hang back at the borders
Where our silence means assent.[17]
Ezra Pound makes an early appearance in Report in a story that Norris tells about Pound’s first meal after being released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in 1958. (It was chicken chow mein.)[18] Norris suggests in this passage that history is not what gets into textbooks, but the “residue in the bottom of a Chinese tea cup.”[19] But in fact Norris will constantly make sorties back and forth between history in the grand sense and history in the more intimate sense of personal experience. This pendulum swing is at work already in Book 1. At one moment “the missiles are aimed and armed,” and at the next the poet is in his study in Montreal, “self-involved.” In another passage further on, Norris tells us that the mental image of the death camps made him want to flee Germany during a tourist visit (“the dark cellar of the century”), while immediately following that passage, he remembers a woman whom “everyone admitted ...even the women, “made them think about sex.”[20] At this early point in the poem, Norris’s way of connecting these two cardinal points of history—world history and intimate history—is to suggest that
To write about myself
Is to write about the age.
This poem is not lost;
It is finding itself in me.
I am writing it
The same way
These fifty years
Are writing me.
Writing about himself is what he then did. The early books of Report immediately turn very personal. History has almost no presence in Books 2, 3, and 4 of the poem, apart from a reference to the Holocaust in Acts of the Imagination (Book 3). “The need to articulate in speech/my passing days”[21] seems to be the driving force of these books; and while everything that he narrates is naturally occurring during the “second half of the twentieth century,” the emphasis is on the individual consciousness: imagination, suffering, the making of art out of feelings, and the need to “let the small precious flame of the heart/be seen,” to quote the final line of Book 4 (Clouds: A Sequence of Days). As one book succeeds another, Norris continues to explore his life and peregrinations, including more than one extended trip to the south Pacific.
The larger world begins to return to Report in Book 14, called Tenor, which Norris wrote in the late 1980s. The book consists of just three rather formal poems, almost odes, in ten-syllable lines modeled on the line used by Wordsworth in The Prelude, which also furnishes an epigraph. Norris begins in wonderment that he could compose the lyric contents of earlier books of Report and in hope to raise his “quiet voice/above the din of the crowd, the static/of the age.”[22] This may suggest little more than a sense of competitiveness with other poets, with the media, with the entertainment industry; but soon enough we are back into the bloody nature of the half-century that the poem always promised to be about:
How
can anyone talk effectively
about
a century of corpses, slain
with
planned malice and cold calculation
by
those once dreamed to be their true brothers?
This
age is a graveyard, filled in quickly
by
efficient killing: bullets, gas, rain.
Knowing
this, who can feign joy? And who can,
without
being in blind complicity,
raise
up their voice to speak?[23]
The horrors alluded to here—wars and death camps and (perhaps) bombings—are immediately juxtaposed to the presence of a daughter, whose talk raises the poet’s spirits (“She gladdens my heart with her questioning”),[24] though he recognizes the difficult reconciliation required to balance innocence with the terrible truths of human history:
I
try to reconcile a world of joy
with
a history of blood and murder.
Do
I live in two worlds, or am I but
visiting
the bright lost world of the child?[25]
That question leads to memories of Norris’s childhood, and to a momentary escape from the fallen world’s impositions. The second poem in Book 14 refers to “this broken/enterprise”—the long poem, one assumes—but also to “the ruined world,” though specifics are not denominated. The third and final poem in Tenor embodies one of the long poem’s few unalloyed mystical moments of identification with “eternity,” the first word of the poem. Norris gets beyond “the fading intimations/of a fixed immortality”[26] and writes about the sheer beauty of the world—“such radiance,” as he says, “our only moment.” He watches the light fading near a beach in Nassau, hears the crickets chirring, and smells the perfume on the evening breeze. Making an allusion to Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he ends by emphasizing the absence of God—“No one is singing/beyond the fading genius of the sea”—beneath “the sweet canopy of heaven.”[27] It is not until Book 17 that Norris will propose that “the first half” of Report was “but the birth of the ego,” and that in the second half he “must learn/to let it die,”[28] but already here in Book 14, that change is beginning to be effected.
While Book 15, The Concertos, returns vividly to private experience (“And when we are dust/what will they say of the marriage we made?”), in Book 16, Notes for Reconstructing Babylon, history returns with a vengeance. This text, by far the longest book in Report, apart from two books that were published as physically separate volumes,[29] is highly allusive and complex in its orderings. Babylon represents not only the historical civilization and present-day Iraq, but also a symbol for the poet’s uncertainties, both mental and verbal:
Babylon is what I call my confusion,
and I would seek to order it
it is an old warfare
waged upon the invisible
but the notes denote a music
that is almost there[30]
More than once Norris puns on the name Babylon (“poets…/inarticulate at first, almost babbling,” “just the river/babbling on,” “how Pound did babble on”), and seems to understand it as the nexus where one civilization dies and another of uncertain nature is born. Babylon is “a world in collapse” and “broken ruins.” His poem has turned into “jottings, notes,” even as the languages of the world have become “blathering, talking nonsense//building a Tower of Babel/out of meaningless speech.”[31] The ruins of Babylon become a metaphor, then, for Report as a long poem, as though Norris has already abandoned any hope of making everything cohere—Pound’s admission in Canto 116:
Though my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.[32]
For Norris, ending Book 16 with a reference to Shelley (“I have wandered in an antique land”), his aspirations for the poem, like Babylon itself, appear to be at an end:
Babylon
deconstructed and reconstructed
the dream of a poem, of an empire
over[33]
But of course history does not end there, nor does Report. Book 17 also concerns an ancient civilization, though in this case it is a fictional one, the so-called lost continent of Mu, whose destruction in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was theorized to have seeded the ancient societies of both the Egyptians and the Maya according to Augustus Le Plongeon. He was an amateur archaeologist and photographer, trained by no less a person than William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography. Mu has been long discredited by scholars, but Norris uses it to explore related words such as muthos, the Greek word that gives us the word myth, as well as English words like mutability, moon, music, and especially Muse. One can even hear it behind an expression like “the musty Museum of art,” as it also carries forward to the title of Book 18, The Book of Broken Moonlight. But in Fragments from the Lost Book of Mu (Book 17), Norris meditates on “the lost continent of the Pacific” as a metaphor for several themes of his long poem: desire (“a broken highway/I have travelled all my life”), the nature of poetry (“the lung wage,” quoting bp Nichol), and self-actualization. His text is “mutating” (another “mu” word) because “every time I look at Mu it changes,” and coherence “is a pleasure/that may never be allowed you,” as he tells himself. He can find only fragments and shards in a text that is itself as fragmentary and as allusive as “The Waste Land,” which here is called “that epic of distress.” Writers as various as Pound, Yeats, Olson, Irving Layton, Zukofsky, and bp Nichol appear briefly, not in the sort of welter that concludes Eliot’s poem, but as companions along the way in Norris’s “world of ghosts.” Fragments From the Lost Book of Mu adds to the perception, begun in Notes for Reconstructing Babylon, that the long poem cannot be more than a series of fragments, that history is not teleological, that—to use Dante’s terms—life may go from Hell to Purgatory, but will never ascend to Paradise. The closest to Paradise that Norris gets is through “gratified desire,” a phrase that appears more than once in Book 17 and elsewhere.[34]
At the end of Book 17 we hear about a “baby” who “moos like a cow,/everyday music.”[35] This almost certainly refers to the birth of Norris’s second child, and so returns us (via another “mu” word) to the world of what he calls “everyday music.” Books 18 (The Book of Broken Moonlight) and 19 (Boulevard Saint Laurent), in recognition of the poet’s realization that it is impossible to make the century or history cohere, return to very private experience; and in fact, from here to the long poem’s conclusion, Norris essentially lets go of any ambition he may have harboured for making sense of his own time. Book 20 is crucial to this recognition. Entitled Judgement, Or The Wordsworth Project, the text sketches out a history of the long poem that begins with the earliest version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude and concludes, unselfconsciously, with Report:
It started in 1799 (with the two-part Prelude)
and I’ll end it in 1999
two hundred years of personal testimony
driven on through Whitman
and his song of the American self
the displacements of
The Waste Land
the “grab-bag” of The Cantos
the self at the centre of art
the egotistical sublime[36]
That last phrase is Keats’s, of course, from the famous letter of 1818 in which he characterized Wordsworth’s special genius. The two-hundred-year period of the long poem’s ascendency is described by Norris as “the whole Wordsworthian adventure,”[37] yet it is an age that he wants to “bury.” He is keenly aware that his own long poem is approaching its end (“how could I not be counting?”)[38] and concludes that history is no longer its driving force (“History is a thug”) and that “the world needs to be abandoned/for a spiritual practice.”[39] He tries to separate his long poem from Ezra Pound and The Cantos, referring, for example, to The Pisan Cantos as “the poison cantos,” and dissociating himself from Pound’s spiritual struggle (“I am tired of enormous tragedies”).[40] The “Judgement” of the title is partly a reference to the Tarot cards—card no. 20 is Judgement—but is also more literally a summation of Norris’s exploration of the long poem and his acceptance of its failure to address poetry’s larger exigencies. In Book 21, Blizzard of the World, he expresses a compulsion to “complete and undo/what Wordsworth so unwisely began.”[41] This “undoing” arises from his new certainty that the long poem, being after all just poetry, is not equal to the vastness of history; but also that his project had become “a destination and a process.”[42] The long poem is no longer in his control, if it ever was. It has become, in a funny reference to the singer Prince, “The Long Poem Formerly Known As Report.” History is gone, and rarely referred to again in the remaining books. As he says in the closing lines of the entire poem, “I am returned/to a purity that resides outside History”, and
The Muse of History swoons,
Falls into a faint
The planets, stars and moons
Reflected in her sequined glasses[43]
-2-
With so long and rich a tradition of writing the long poem behind him, Norris is able to make full use of technical and formal conventions in creating his own contribution to the genre. Some of Report’s most significant themes are sounded in Book 1—politics (“silence means assent”), autobiography, erotic love, God’s presence in or absence from the world, the natural world, the local (“Dante’s Inferno is selling/At Cheap Thrills for 49¢”), even travel, in his recollections of a trip to France and Germany--but so too are its extensive formal resources explored. Book 1 uses collage, lyric poetry, prose, and documents cited from the press. Such narrative as exists in the book tends to be written in prose. (Norris’s revisions to Book 2 will also recast poetic lines as prose.) There are literary quotations and literary allusions—to T.S. Eliot, naturally, but also to Yeats, Pound, and Malcolm Lowry (“One of my heroes”), all writers of the first half of the twentieth century, the point from which Norris’s long poem is launched.
There is a great deal of conventional lyric poetry in the early books of Report. An example would be a short poem like “Fever,” from Islands (Book7):
I
wake up
from
an afternoon nap;
it
is evening,
the
air cooling down,
the
fire of a passion cooling,
a
fever gone, fever broken.
I
can sail away now,
leave
her here forever.[44]
This is composed in the style of the poetry collected by Norris in many volumes of short poems that he has published over the years: short lines of verse expressing observations or personal experiences. He seldom uses traditional rhetorical devices, and the old-fashioned repertoire of poetic techniques—rhyme, metre, consonance, assonance, etc.—sparingly. This is the approach to the poem that English-speaking poets inherited from William Carlos Williams. It is not too distant from prose—more condensed, perhaps—and yet as a style it cannot be especially characterizable as narrative, as telling a story. Norris once wrote that “[f]undamentally, I reject the supposed importance of narrative…there appears to be something fake and illusive about narrative.”[45] While there is a good deal of writing in prose in the early books of Report, it almost entirely disappears after Book 9, which consists of a diary in poetry followed by prose commentaries (“My red-haired lover’s going back to her husband”).[46] With Book 10, Norris first starts to use a poetic style that, with exceptions, will come to dominate Report, a style closer to the Dudek of Atlantis than to Eliot or Pound or Williams. Here is an example, from Book 10 (The Wheel):
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee”
the
wisdom of Job
in
the aftermath of ruin
our
small trials at sea
our
sea changes
all
night long
sleeping
on the hard floor
out
the window
stars
were tossed to heaven
then
fell to earth again
as
we cut a humble path
wanting
only to pass quietly between the rising waves[47]
Typical here are the quotation (from The Book of Job, cited by Melville on the final page of Moby Dick), the poetic line that follows the phrase, the somewhat fragmentary structure, and the stanzas of from one to three lines. There will be exceptions to this style in books to come, such as the six-line stanzas and neo-surrealism of Radar Interference and the ode-like structure and higher rhetorical style of The Concertos. But all of the final volume, comprising Books 16-22, excepting Book 19 perhaps, employs it and refines it. An excerpt from Book 21 (Blizzard of the World) shows its typical qualities as Report moves towards its conclusion:
I
slammed Issa up against Orwell
and
the world barely shuddered
I reprised
the argument
in
the captain’s tower
And
the calypso girls barely laughed
yes,
Abraham, it’s true:
the
poet has no place in this world
where
capital accumulates
and
the sublime disintegrates
and
all they keep on selling us
is
brave new world[48]
This brief passage is full of allusions—to George Orwell, to Bob Dylan, to A.M. Klein, and to Aldous Huxley-- but the citations are beautifully integrated into Norris’s own lines. Punctuation is light; stanza breaks and line endings mostly stand in for conventional commas and periods. This represents Norris’s typical vernacular as Report heads towards its end. Dudek described the style as “unadorned, intent only on true speaking,”[49] and that observation, made when he had read only the first half of Report, is borne out and becomes even truer as the poem concludes.
-3-
For all its complexity and depth of literary, historical, and geographical reference, Report settles eventually into a distinct style and tone of voice. Collage and prose disappear and the poem as a whole takes a meditative turn. Yet the question that many readers will be left with despite the breadth of the poem’s scope is, whether Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century constitutes, in fact, a report on the second half of the twentieth century. No one should expect any poet to be a reporter in the conventional sense. Norris has his sources and does field work—reading and travel, in large part--but the resulting “report” is at heart a poem, not a book of reportage like, say, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, much less a critical study, howsoever personal, like In the American Grain. Right from the start, Norris’s declared aim was not so much to sum up the culture and history of the fifty-year period subsumed in his title—as though such a project were even possible—but rather, as he wrote in Book 1, “To collect evidence. Of God’s absence from the world./Of man’s inhumanity to man.”[50] He qualifies that word “absence” and makes it clear that he is not positing that God does not exist. God has, rather, “been on vacation/For the last 300 years.”
One day he got tired of listening
To the umpteenth boring confession
And lit out for the other end of the universe.
I still worship him from afar.[51]
Not only is his age—that chosen half century—bereft of God. At various points in the poem it is said to be “bereft of art,” to be “an age of liars,” and to be “a graveyard.”[52] Yet the long poem is forever at work in positing a nexus between the age and the self. Norris’s personal life is on display throughout Report, often in a straightforward way. He takes off twice for the South Pacific, for example, and the long poem follows him there through two long books (Books 5 and 7). He has a short love affair and the poem follows him through it as well (Book 19). But if the poet is trying to achieve some kind of transcendence, and if that effort is one of the most central aspirations of the poem, the goal is not simply to “speak his truth” and thereby to characterize the age through his individual experience of it. For just as Dante uses himself as the pilgrim in his Divine Comedy, led by poetry (Virgil) through Hell and Purgatory and by love (Beatrice) to Paradise, Norris too is on a quest in Report.
That quest is “to get beyond suffering,” as he writes in Book 3, and that state will be achieved only if he can get beyond erotic need. “My life’s work: to kill desire,” he proposes in Book 5. It is not a straight and narrow road, as he goes on to describes it. “Gratified desire” is characterized as a version of paradise, by comparison with “the hell of commerce” (Book 14), and as a goal rather than a chimera (Book 17), despite his recognition in that same book that “Desire is a broken highway/I have travelled all my life.” Of course a broken highway does not signify any need to resist so much as it represents mainly an impediment to be overcome. As late as Book 19, the poet unreservedly abandons any determination to “kill desire” for the unrestrained indulgence in a love affair so intense that it is likened to the crucifixion of Christ:
I’ll walk you home at 4 a.m., anticipating
pleasure,
and your current boyfriend will be there, going
crazy
and throwing your mattress at the wall, while I
sleep soundly
in another room. We’ll each withhold too much, give
too much,
we’ll each lose our balance, falling to the floor
or to the bed.
We’ll each drive the nails in, each cry anguished
tears
at the entryway to the tomb, and marvel when the
stone that’s tolled away
reveals our love has arisen, or vanished.[53]
“Why were we crucified into sex?” asked D.H. Lawrence in a line from the poem “Tortoise Shout” that Norris borrows as an epigraph for Book 19—a question that Book 19 in effect answers: for intensity of pleasure. Lawrence had gone on in the poem to elaborate on the question: “Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,/As we began,/As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?,” reminding us of the Platonic theory of the division of the sexes—that we were once a bisexual whole that was unfortunately divided, leaving every person to wander the world looking for his or her other half, seeking perfection. Lawrence’s male tortoise “[screams] in Pentecost, receiving the ghost” as he has sex with the female; the lovers in Book 19 likewise wander off “with fire in our eyes and ghosts in our minds.”[54] The language in both poems is intensely religious and specifically Christian. The poet feels “like Jesus having found my Judas, Adam having met his Eve.”[55] As they walk through downtown Montreal, the lovers pass the Eve cinema, an old porn theatre, reinforcing the sense that perhaps all new lovers have, that they are the first real lovers in human history: “there are no other nights but the one we are moving through.”[56] The final image of Book 19 is of the crucifixion, of the lovers returning to the woman’s apartment, “on our way to the cross.”[57]
Boulevard Saint Laurent reads like the record of a final indulgence in carnality before Report tries to turn insistently back onto the path of transcendence—“the solitary path,” Norris calls it--because “ultimately/the world needs to be abandoned/for a spiritual practice.”[58] Those are the almost penultimate lines of Book 20, apart from eight repetitions of the line “leading us on,” and those insistent repetitions suggest that the way forward will not be easy. They portend that we are “led on” not into the light or towards paradise, but into some new diversion from the pilgrimage. That diversion, in Book 20, is “the blizzard of the world, nuncle,”[59] a landscape drawn from Shakespeare’s King Lear (hence the vocative “nuncle”) where the poet finds himself at sixes and sevens, drawn now to art, now to women, and now to the fantasy of becoming a pirate or of quietly slipping into a harem for six months. This book is full of literary references: to the Shakespeare play, but to many other poets as well (Williams, Pound, Auden, Klein, Leonard Cohen et al.). It is as though part of Norris’s way forward in the poem and in his life comprises an accounting of his predecessors in poetry. As part of his admission that Report will not end in some grand spiritual evolution or religious ecstasy, he avows that history, or the world, “has crushed me,” and that he “lack[s] the skill/to seal [the poem],”
either
and all ways
I
have to disappoint
anyone
who came here
looking
for an answer[60]
Book 21 finishes at the end of December, 1999, with the end of the twentieth century. It feels like it ends in failure (“it’s the end of the world/as we’ve known it”), even as the entire world is celebrating—not just a typical New Year’s Eve, but a New Millennium’s Eve, as it were. But there is still one further book of Report to come, Book 22 (Book of the Fool), composed during the first week of the year 2000. It functions as a kind of coda in the Beethovenian sense—not just a brief wrap-up of themes, but a place to sound new elements as well. Here the poet is revealed as The Fool of the Tarot cards, perched on the edge of a cliff with a barking dog at his feet, not so much in danger of falling but rather situated in an ideal place for a prospect over what has occurred during the last twenty-five years and the last twenty-one books. He is not going to follow in John Berryman’s steps, “leaping from his bridge,” because, as he puts it, “I buried my time/in order to be free of it,” and in so doing has discovered “a purity that resides outside History.”[61] History with a capital H makes one last appearance in Report, as Clio, “the Muse of History swoons,/falls into a faint,” and then is gone as a force. References to Moby-Dick and to The Tempest accompany the Fool—the poet—as he steps off-stage and into--well, not History but the new century, perhaps with a profound sigh of relief.
Bibliographical Note
Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century consists of twenty-two poetic books, published in physical books (and one magazine) as follows:
[Book 1 as] Report on the Second
Half of the Twentieth Century. Montreal and New York: CrossCountry Press,
1977. This text was revised for inclusion in Books 1-4 (see below).
[Book 2 as] The Book of Fall. Montreal: Maker Press, 1979. Revised for inclusion in Books 1-4 (see below).
[Book 3 as] “Acts of the Imagination.” CrossCountry
16 (1983), pp. 33-51.
Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 1-4. Montreal: Guernica, 1988. Book 1, First Report. Book 2, The Book of Fall, Book 3, Acts of the Imagination, Book 4, Clouds: A Sequence of Days.
[Book 5 as] The Better Part of
Heaven. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984.
[Book 6 as] The Book of False Return. Montreal: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Libraries, 1994. 150 numbered and signed copies.
[Book 7 as] Islands. Kingston:
Quarry Press, 1986.
Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 8-11. Dorion: The Muses’ Company, 1992. Book 8, The Book of Return, Book 9, 1984: A Year in My Life, Book 10, The Wheel, Book 11, Radar Interference.
Report on the
Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 12-15. Winnipeg: The Muses’ Company,
2000. Book 12, The Book of Fire, Book 13, Island Stars, Book 14, Tenor,
Book 15, The Concertos.
Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 16-22. Winnipeg: The Muses’ Company, 2005. Book 16, Notes for Reconstructing Babylon, Book 17, Fragments From the Lost Book of Mu, Book 18, The Book of Broken Moonlight, Book 19, Boulevard Saint Laurent, Book 20, Judgement, Or The Wordsworth Project, Book 21, Blizzard of the World, Book 22, Book of the Fool.
[1] Louis Dudek, “Ken Norris in the Twentieth Century,” in Paradise: Essays on Myth, Art, & Reality (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1992), pp. 33-48.
[2] Ken Norris, “Preface” to Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 1-4 (Montreal: Guernica, 1988), p. 8.
[3] Ken Norris, Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 16-22 (Winnipeg: The Muses’ Company, 2005), p. 114.
[4] Ken Norris, Ibid., p. 215.
[5] Ken Norris, Judgement, or The Wordsworth Project, Book 20 of Report, in op. cit., p. 182.
[6] D.M.R. Bentley, discussing Smaro Kamboureli’s paper, “Locality as Writing: A Preface to the “Preface” of Out of Place,” Open Letter, 6th Series, nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1985), p. 278. (The “Long-liners” Conference Issue).
[7] “Short long” is Stephen Scobie’s coinage in his essay on Bronwen Wallace, “The Voices of Elegy: or, Hurtin’ Songs for Bronwen Wallace, in Border Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem, ed. Frank M. Tierney and Angela Robbeson (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998), p. [151].
[8] Reinhold Kramer, “The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem as System: Friesen, Atwood, Kroetsch, Arnason, McFadden,” in Border Flights, p. 102.
[9] Ken Norris, “Book of the Fool,” Book 22 of Report, in Op. cit., p. 229.
[10] Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXIV,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 430.
[11] Ken Norris, “Writing My Report,” in The Better Part of Heaven (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984), p. 132.
[12] Ken Norris, The Book of Fall, in Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 1-4 (Montreal: Guernica, 1988), p. 29.
[13] Ken Norris, Book 20 of Report, in op. cit., p. 166.
[14] Ibid, p. 182.
[15] In an undated essay published on the Vehicule Poets website, Norris, after mentioning the “twenty-two greater trumps in the Tarot pack,” and suggesting that “collectively, they would tell the story of the Fool’s journey,” then says: “This was as much as I had. This was as much as I ever had, in terms of overarching structure.” Ken Norris, “Writing a Long Poem for a Very Long Time,” www.vehiculepoets.com/td-writingalongpoem.
[16] William Blake, “Holy Thursday,” from Songs of Experience. The entire poem is quoted as the epigraph.
[17] Ken Norris, Book 1 of Report, in op. cit, p. 18.
[18] The story is confirmed by A. David Moody in Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & His Work. Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 432.
[19] Ken Norris, Book 1 of Report, in op. cit., p. 20.
[20] Ken Norris, Ibid., pp. 21, 22, and 23.
[21] Ken Norris, Book 2 of Report (The Book of Fall), in ibid., p. 31.
[22] Ken Norris, Book 14 of Report (The Tenors), in Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Books 12-15 (Winnipeg: The Muses’ Company, 2000), p. 69.
[23] Ken Norris, ibid.
[24] Ken Norris, ibid.
[25] Ken Norris, ibid, p. 70.
[26] Ken Norris, ibid., p. 74.
[27] Ken Norris, ibid.
[28] Ken Norris, Book 17 of Report (Fragments from the Lost Book of Mu), in ibid., p. 95.
[29] The Better Part of Heaven (Book 5, 1984) and Islands (Book 7, 1986).
[30] Ken Norris, Book 16 of Report (Notes on Reconstructing Babylon), in op. cit., p. 65.
[31] Ken Norris, ibid., pp. 41, 66, 72, 51, 73, and 51.
[32] Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 796.
[33] Ken Norris, Book 17 of Report, in op. cit., p. 86.
[34] The various citations in this paragraph all come from Book 17, pp. 110, 96, 107, 108, and 91.
[35] Ken Norris, ibid., p. 114.
[36] Ken Norris, Book 20 of Report (Judgement, Or The Wordsworth Project), in op. cit., p. 152.
[37] Ibid., p. 159.
[38] Ibid., p. 165.
[39] Ibid., pp. 183 and 194.
[40] The reference here is to the opening line of The Pisan Cantos: “The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders.” Ezra Pound, The Cantos, p. 425.
[41] Ken Norris, Book 21 of Report (Blizzard of the World), in op. cit., p. 201.
[42] Ken Norris, Book 20 in Ibid., p. 189.
[43] Ken Norris, Book 22 of Report (Book of the Fool), in op. cit., p. 234.
[44] Ken Norris, Islands (Kingston: Quarry Press, 1986), p. 59
[45] Ken Norris, “Writing a Long Poem for a Very Long Time.”
[46] Ken Norris, Book 9 of Report as 1984: A Year of My Life, in op. cit., p. 39.
[47] Ken Norris, Book 10 of Report as The Wheel, in op. cit., p. 71.
[48] Ken Norris, Book 21 of Report (Blizzard of the World), in op. cit., p. 202.
[49] Louis Dudek, op. cit., p. 40.
[50] Ken Norris, Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, Book 1, in op. cit., p. 16.
[51] Ibid., p. 17.
[52] Ken Norris, Report, Book 8, p. 17; Book 9, p. 27; Book 14, p. 69.
[53] Ken Norris, Book 19 of Report, as Boulevard Saint Laurent, in op. cit., p. 130.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid., p. 126.
[56] Ibid., p. 130.
[57] Ibid., p. 131.
[58] Ken Norris, Report, Book 20, in op. cit., pp. 161 and 193.
[59] Ken Norris, Report, Book 21 as Blizzard of the World, in op. cit., p. 197.
[60] Ibid., p. 219.
[61] Ken Norris, Report, Book 22 (Book of the Fool), p. 234.
