conversations on the long poem
This “dialogue” began
with the publication of Ken Norris’ essay “Louis Dudek & The Five Missions”
in the February issue of Periodicities.
Robert Hogg responded to the essay with a Facebook post, and the two poets were
off to the races.
Robert Hogg: It's always interesting to hear a poet tell how he or she became part of
the fabric of contemporary poetry in their country--or in this case, accepted
country. As Norris points out, he was expected to complete his grad studies in
the US where he was a citizen, but chose instead to move to Canada, and in
particular, to Montreal. As fate wd have it, he stayed in Montreal for his
doctoral work under Louis Dudek, wch in all likelihood was the best avenue to
shape his writing and his intellect. Then he spent a great deal of his life
teaching Cdn literature to American students in Orono ME. How strangely life
unfolds. Now he's back, mostly, in Canada where for decades he's participated
in our English language project. He quickly discerned 5 missions, wch coincided
with Dudek's as well, and set about to fulfill them. This utterly unassuming
short essay lays out the project, simply and coherently. No high falutin
theories that must be followed. Just dedication, commitment, good sense--and to
others, as a teacher, good will. Despite this seemingly tight circle of
endeavor, Norris has become fully at home in the wider world which he visits
frequently, and so brings home to his fellow North Americans a broad and
encompassing vision. Last time I cdn't find him he was swimming the South China
Sea!
RH: Posted a response on FB, and then shared with my addition.
Hope it suits you. I really like your piece. So damned unassuming. Much more so
than Dudek wd have been able to be, I aver! So you not only learned FROM him,
but DESPITE him. Nonetheless, yr piece is very respectful of the mentor he was
and remained for you. In current times, that is really nice to see and hear. A
lot of my own gang have somewhat renounced their 'allegiance' to our BM
mentors. I've refused to do this, despite the political backbiting that many of
us have experienced about colonization and so forth. The strongest of us were
never to be engulfed. I saw weaker American poets, like David Franks, become
unduly influenced by in his case Creeley's writing style. The issue is always
to be oneself, and yet be open to influence, and let it seep in, but not
overshadow. One can be unduly overcome by a love of Hopkins! I've seen that in
several poets' work, and had to watch out for it in my own! Maybe I shd have taken
time to say so, but the space is limited. But you've come a long way from any
direct formal influence from Louis.
Off and
on I've waffled around with the notion that there was something akin to a
belated Beat movement in Canada, and have wanted to sketch it out, query fellow
poets about this, and see whether there was indeed a kind of unrecognized
Bohemian Gang in the Sixties and possibly the Seventies. A bit has been written
about the Downtown Poets who harbored around the Arts School, and were separate
from TISH. This never has been fully fleshed out I don't think. While I was at
UBC, and a close friend from Abbotsford of Frank Davey, I had a very hard time
getting any of my poems into TISH (I did manage a few). But historically, I
guess, I'm viewed as a minor TISH poet. That's fine. But I was actually quite
disaffected with the standoffish nature of some of the poets, and lived a kind
of lifestyle atypical of a good clean student. Unlike my university
cohorts I was experimenting with drugs, and felt a strong affinity to several
of the other down and out poets like Bill Bissett, Freddy Douglas, Curt Lang,
Red Lane and Roy Kiyooka, as well as Judith Copithorne and Maxine Gadd. I
published in Blew Ointment, and in the US with Wild Dog. I was keenly interested
in prose, and fiction, and with Dave Cull started up the little magazine
exclusively for prose, called MOTION wch ran for six issues before it died.
TISH wd not accept any fiction, and so there too I felt locked out.
When I
look back now over those and subsequent years I realize I managed to straddle
that border between bohemian and sophisticate rather well, and ended up a well
healed and sober academic. But that down and out bohemian druggy remains an
undercurrent of my sensibility still, I suspect. And for about a decade,
determined who and what I thought I was, or might be. I had been a hoodlum type
in high school, and still sported a duck tail when I arrived in first year. I
drove a '48 Ford hot rod until I cdn't afford it any longer, and thought I was
pretty tough! Good thing too, since I wasn't really, and needed a cover! I
quickly transmogrified into a disaffected Beat and began experimenting with
drugs, writing angry poems, and living a dissolute life. I wasn't alone, and
have long wondered why we did not form a more cohesive group either in Vanc, or
later in TO and/or Montreal. Curious if you and or some of your cohort felt the
same.
Age comes
into this of course. I was born in 1942, and you some years later. bill bissett
was born before me, and Roy quite a few years before--1926. There were so
called Beats in Europe, and the 'Angry Young Men' in Britain. Were we
afraid to call ourselves something? Why did we not cohere?
Sincerely,
Bob
Ken Norris: Hi Bob,
and
thanks so much for the Facebook note and the long, thoughtful email.
The
Vehicule Poets gravitated towards the Beats. Endre Farkas loved Ginsberg's
poetry, and I loved Corso's. And Artie Gold was the druggy of druggies!! But
speed was his game. Like Neal Cassady.
We were
the Montreal disaffected, and that, somehow, made us a group. Most of the other
poets in Montreal hated us. Which brought us closer together. Endre and Artie
and I edited the Vehicule Press books for six years. And then Endre started The
Muses' Company, and I "helped" for fifteen years.
I think
you know that I fell in with Creeley in later life. My English department made
a deal with him that brought him to teach in Maine in the Fall semester for
three years. He built a course which wound up being team taught. He would teach
for a week, go back to Buffalo, and then come back at the end of the semester
and teach two weeks. Ben Friedlander would usually teach the middle of the
course.
What Bob
wanted me to explain to him was "why Irving's poetry got so lousy." I
tried to explain it to him two or three different ways, but he was never really
totally accepting of any of my theories. He just knew that Irving's poetry had been
great in the early fifties, and then something happened. He really LOVED
Irving's poetry from the early fifties, and he really couldn't stand what
became of it in the sixties onward.
Louis was
a huge influence. As was Artie Gold. And the funny thing is, they couldn't
stand one another, and thought of the other as being a bad influence upon me. They
were wrong, but they were both so protective of me. Artie worried that Louis
would turn me into a bloodless academic, and Louis worried that Artie would
turn me into a drug addict. They really couldn't see what was beautiful about
the other.
I have a
new book coming out in the Spring. I think you are going to find it
interesting. It is called Vishyun, and it is dedicated to bill bissett.
I tended
to pick and choose my American influences from the Allen anthology. And I sort
of picked one from every column. From the Black Mountain poets, Creeley. From
the New York School, O'Hara. From the Berkeley Renaissance, Spicer. From the
Beats, Corso. From the non-aligned West Coast, Kyger. Being younger, I think
that was easier to do.
And Artie
made it easy, being a HUGE fan of O'Hara and Spicer. He served them up to me on
a silver tray. Creeley was the first poet I had ever heard give a poetry
reading. The book he was reading from was Pieces, and the year was 1968.
I cobbled
together the Dudek essay from extracts in my literary memoir. I've
completed a first draft. It is about Montreal, 1975-85.
Best,
Ken
RH: Let me pick up on a few points
in your last email. You mention that a reading by Creeley made a large
impression on you, and that he was the first professional poet you heard read.
In my case the first poet was Robert Duncan whom Warren and Ellen Tallman
brought up from SF to Vancouver to read in the basement of their Kerrisdale
home. That was just after Christmas 1959, though it may have been in early
January 1960--that date gets confused by a lot of people writing about the
event. I can fairly closely pinpoint it b/c I was still in my last year of high
school in Langley BC where we'd moved the summer before from Abbotsford.
As mentioned, Frank and I had become friends in Abbotsford, in some measure b/c
he was keen to purchase the '48 Ford coupe I owned. It had blown a head gasket,
and I was attempting to repair it myself, but ran into trouble getting some of
the studs out wch had broken off. Weekends, Frank would visit me when home from
UBC to see if I'd finished the repair. My Dad, in a moment of unusual
generosity, meanwhile, bought me another '47 Ford sedan--mostly so I cd
shepherd my mother around town to do her shopping and spare him the
inconvenience. He never let either her or myself drive his cars! So I was less
in need of completing the repairs for this reason, and eventually Frank gave up
on me and got his dad to buy him another '47 Ford coupe, wch he had souped up
with a Lincoln Zephyr floor transmission, a bull nose, a lowered rear end, twin
carbs a fancy white paint job, and twin Hollywood mufflers--all extravagances I
couldn't afford. It was a beaut, and he raced around in it with great pleasure.
On those visits to my humble abode on Hillside Dr, and knowing my interest in
poetry, Frank wd ply me with small books of poems from City Lights,
specifically: Corso's Gasoline;
Ginsberg's Howl; and Duncan's Selected Poems. I was
enthralled by all three, and each in their turn had a deep influence on my
writing. But the upshot of these visits where he'd hoped to buy my car was that
a deeper friendship ensued. And by the time my family moved to a rural spot
outside Langley, Frank kept in touch. So when Duncan was brought up to read in
Vancouver, Frank contacted me and insisted that I come in to hear him read. I
suspect I demurred, but Frank would not take no as an answer. So on the day of
the reading he swooped by on his way back to Vancouver from Abbotsford and
either picked me up, or cajoled me into driving along with him in my own car,
and we attended the reading together. There were several people present for
this informal reading, certainly Gladys (Maria) Hindmarch, and likely some of
the people who became TISH poets thereafter. Duncan was irrepressibly on show,
and gave a stunning reading from his forthcoming volume, The Opening of
the Field. I've remarked on this a few times elsewhere, but it bears saying
again that I was quite blown away. I had no idea free verse could sound like
this, could be so melodious, rhythmical, and engaging to hear. Of course he
read his now famous "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,"
conducting it as he went along, and I felt like I was hearing my own permission
to enter the field of poetry, to find my own "place of first
permission." It was an exhilarating evening, and I went home a
changed person, utterly determined to become a poet.
That fall
I went off to UBC and had some contact with Frank and his fellow poets, but I
don't recall any formal poetry readings taking place. I believe in the winter
of 1961, possibly 1962, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was brought up to read, and he
filled the university auditorium. He gave a great reading, and we were all impressed.
But it was not one of those eureka moments for me. I detected an ease, a
facility, in his poetry that cautioned me against adopting a too easy, popular
style that seemed designed to elicit a known response from his listeners. In
February 1963 Warren brought Ed Dorn up to read from Pocatello ID where he was
then living and teaching. He read from The Newly Fallen and
from Hands Up, but also from the poems he was soon to publish
as Idaho Out and From Gloucester Out. Something in
Dorn's Western habit, I might almost say, opened avenues in me back to my own
childhood experiences on a ranch we'd owned briefly in the Cariboo of BC from
1951-1953.
I went
home after hearing him read to my small basement apartment on Balaclava, ground
up some little Heath & Heather insomnia pills which
included valerian, lupulin and lactuca virosa pulvis, smoked the mixture
in a small pipe I'd made, then wrote a first draft of what for me was a long
poem. I called it Ranch Days. And while it was youthful and
romantic, it had great meaning for me. I'm not sure if I tried to publish it in
TISH, but in any case I ended up submitting it to Wild Dog Magazine which
was being edited by Drew Wagnon in Pocatello somewhat under Dorn's aegis. It
was accepted and published in Feb 1964 when I was in my fourth year at UBC.
That was a liberating moment for me when I realized that I could publish my
poetry in a variety of venues. About the same time I published a couple of
poems in bill bissett's Blew OIntment poetry magazine.
Dorn's
lyrical poems from his first two volumes also influenced my writing. And by
this time of course like my colleagues at UBC I was devouring the poetry and
poetics of Don Allen's The New American Poetry. For most of us,
myself included, the poetry of Creeley, Duncan and Olson were paramount for a
time. Olson's "Essay on Projective Verse," which had been around
since 1950, was nonetheless completely new to all of us in 1960, and we
mined it for what it offered. Needless to say, it baffled us; but we found the
prose so exhilarating that we had to parse it through, and this we did in
countless sessions outside of classes. What spoke to us most was the
physicality of the prose itself; and after that, the insistence on the
physicality of language on the one hand and geography, place, or 'locus' as we
were wont to call it--so incessantly, in fact, that one faculty member, Jake
Zilber, referred to our preoccupation as 'locus-pocus'! Fair enough! We were
more full of our newly acquired ideas than we really knew how to properly
express. By the same token, Jake, an immigrant from NYC, failed to recognize
our need to find a way to come to terms with our sense of place with its
overwhelming natural landscape of mountains, sea, an emerging harbor city, and
all that went with the general ecology of place. Those of us who had grown up
in the interior and/or the Fraser Valley had that geography to make sense of,
to incorporate into our poems, to register as part of our life-experience. And
of course it took us a while to get past the rhetoric of invention, and state
the increasingly obvious in our poetry.
Bob
Creeley was hired to teach for a year in the fall of 1962 during which time, I
believe, he replaced Earle Birney and taught the 300 level Poetry course in the
Creative Writing Department. I was not eligible as yet to take the course, and
was enrolled in the opening 2nd year class which was offered by Zilber and
introduced students to a variety of genres. Bob had just published his
novel, The Island, with Scribner's, and I recall attending a
reading he gave from this book. His prose rhythms I recognized were almost
identical to those of his poetry, and while it was engaging rhythmically, it
also seemed forced and problematic to sustain. His prose style had a huge
effect on my colleague David Cull, and most of the stories he wrote for
MOTION which we put out shortly thereafter, were unquestionably Creeleyesque.
DH Lawrence was big in our minds at the time, and his insistence on the rhythms
of nature and sexuality permeated much of our work. We heard Creeley read his
poetry during this year as well, but I don't recall a specific instance before
the summer of '63, although I'm sure there were one or more informal occasions.
Over the years I heard him read many times. But I think I learned more from
reading his work on the page, how he broke lines, worked in particular with the
unrhymed quatrain, than by his actual articulation of the poems.
Next
episode: The Vancouver Poetry Conference of Summer,1963.
KN: In 1969, at SUNY Stony Brook, I
walked into Rose Zimbardo’s class and Rose Zimbardo was not there. In her place
was Robert Duncan. He taught the class and I didn’t
understand a thing he said. Later in life I related to O’Hara responding to a
letter he received from Duncan by saying, “Who does this guy think he is, the
Pope of Poetry?” Always been much more of a Spicer fan, and had a couple of
nice conversations with Robin Blaser when he came down to U. Maine to read with
Creeley.
I am
reading Stephen Morrissey’s new book about poetry and poetics, and in it
Stephen says that the most important poet for him as a young poet was Allen
Ginsberg. This surprised me, but that makes three Vehicule poets for whom
Ginsberg was a big deal: Stephen, Endre, and Tom. Artie never stated a favorite
Beat poet that I can remember. He was a big Spicer fan, and loved O’Hara and
Schuyler from the New York School.
Reading
Jack Kerouac taught me how to hitchhike, and I hitched across the USA a couple of
times in the summers of 1969 and 1970. Also hopped freight trains. Wouldn’t have
done any of that if I hadn’t read On The Road.
I liked
Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, but never took to the poetry. Creeley and
Levertov were more interesting to me.
Heard
Ferlinghetti read once at Concordia. Was not impressed.
At a
Creeley reading at U. Maine, after the reading was over, there was a Q & A.
One student asked Bob if he had one poem of his own that he particularly loved
and he said, “I love every poem I’ve ever written.” That made an impression
upon me.
I went
through a ten year period when I was writing Creeley poems. No one else would probably
recognize them as Creeley poems. It was just a way to proceed. The two biggest
influences on my poetry are probably Creeley and Neruda. Now that I’m old my
influences are probably undiscernible. I just sound like me now. But I’ve been referring
to Yeats a lot lately.
RH: The
Vancouver Poetry Conference is famous because for the first time in Canadian or
American history a number of senior American poets were invited to a university
campus to discuss the poetry and poetics they were practicing. The poets were
chosen by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley with some input from the Creative
Writing Department, which had hired Creeley for the 1962-1963 year to teach the
Poetry Course usually taught by Earle Birney who was on Sabbatical. There was
some jockeying about whom to bring. Irving Layton was considered, but for some
reason he either refused or was not invited. Instead, Margaret Avison, who’d
been featured in Cid Corman’s Origin
magazine, was brought in from Toronto. Was she the ‘token Canadian’? I don’t
know, but she stood her ground with a bunch of raucous American male poets, and
left a positive impression on myself. When I headed east a year later and stayed
with Victor Coleman briefly, I visited Margaret, as well as Raymond Souster,
who also might have made a fine colleague at the event.
But clearly, the impetus for the
Conference was to have several poets whose work had appeared three years before
in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry
which included several essays on poetics by the poets. The seminal essay for
most of us young poets at UBC at the time was Olson’s “Essay on Projective
Verse.” By 1963, myself, and most of my colleagues, had read and reread the
essay. We talked about Olson’s ideas among ourselves, with some of our profs,
and with Warren and Ellen Tallman. When Tallman recommended that Creeley fill
Birney’s one year vacancy, dozens of us already knew his work and his place in
the Black Mountain tradition of poetry. I may be wrong, but I think Creeley
felt we were more knowledgeable about his work than most American students had
been up to that time. And when the Conference convened, Olson and others were
equally surprised to see how thoughtfully we’d read their work before they
arrived in town.
We’d been prepared a few years earlier
in January of 1960 when the Tallmans brought Robert Duncan, by then the best
known poet from the San Francisco Renaissance, up to Vancouver to read at their
home. From that point, a momentum was set, and those of us who coalesced around
the Tallmans soon became intent on learning what it was that made Duncan,
Creeley and Olson so interesting. I’ve mentioned some of that before. But it
was the idea that they knew what they were doing with language, with sound,
with rhythm, and with what could be called a free verse metric. None of these three poets wrote alike, and yet they
adhered to some interesting ideas on composition by field. We were keen to
write, of course, but we wanted to study “method” not just ways to achieve
effect.
I suppose if Avison was the token
Canadian from the east, Ginsberg was there to represent the Beats according to
Don Allen’s structured anthology. But what proved interesting to all of us who
attended, was the homogeneity of approach by each of these writers. Ginsberg
proved lively, engaged, intellectually astute, and of course gave a great
reading to an enthusiastic audience. Those of us taking the program for credit
were assigned individual teachers. Ginsberg was stuck with me. I don’t recall
being able to produce much in those three weeks—most others likely didn’t
either. He was sympathetic to my need to work days, and after my bust on the
last day of classes, he signed my copy of his Kaddish “Protect yourself ! Allen Ginsberg Vancouver ’63.” On the
final day, or just thereafter, we all submitted a notebook we’d kept to our
individual instructor. I’m sure I got mine back, and I’ve looked for that
journal, hoping to find relevant notes for this discussion, but in vain.
Long before his arrival, Charles
Olson’s unusually large and imposing stature had been well known to us all.
When he did arrive on campus, I was there too, probably registering for the
program. In any case I was walking over to the Buchanan Building where the
English Department was housed, and this tall, rather scruffy giant asked me if
I knew where it was. It didn’t take me long to realize who he must be, and so I
introduced myself as one of those who’d be taking the program, and showed him
the way to the departmental office which I think was on the third floor. Olson
was 6 foot seven; I was all of five foot six with shoes on, and weighed about
120 lbs. We must have looked like an act from the circus. We became instant friends
despite a huge difference in age and abilities. Three weeks later he’d give the
first of two great readings from his yet to be published later Maximus Poems which would be called for a time, Maximus IV, V, VI, and then simply Maximus II when a third sequence
appeared. On the Wed night reading of Aug 14th Olson read from ms,
among other poems, “Maximus, from Dogtown – One,” and “Maximus at the Harbor,”
two poems which would completely change my idea of his poetry and poetics.
To this point, we all thought Olson a
poet of history and geography, deeply
rooted in the literal landscape of Gloucester and New England. Suddenly he was
a poet of Cosmos, of Mythography, and of some deeply personal but strangely
universal notions of Psyche, of the Self. For me, and I’m sure for most of my
fellow poets listening, this was a new prospect entirely from what we’d
discovered in his former Maximus poems, from what Dorn for example had
discerned in his early Migrant booklet, What
I See in the Maximus Poems. As I came to realize when I wrote my
dissertation on this new sequence, Olson had superimposed on the field map of
Gloucester and Cape Ann a completely new mapping of the soul, not just the
body. Dogtown was the mythical ‘other’ that Gloucester also stood for, a cosmos
only definable by looking inward as intently as he’d looked out. It was a
masterful reading, possibly the best Olson ever gave.
I looked forward intently to the
fulfillment of the event to come on the Friday evening two days hence. Alas,
that was the Friday I was arrested at noon lunching at the poets table in the
commons cafeteria, on spec as it turns out, for sitting across from the fellow
the RCMP had come to arrest, and whose apartment they’d already raided, Neri
Gadd. I was ‘clean’ but none of my colleagues imagined I would be, I guess, and
the two of us were taken to the campus police station and questioned
separately. Neri later told me that, under questioning, he’d admitted that he
may have given me a little pot at some time. He told me he thought that would
make them go easy on me. Conversely, the police now had reason to suspect I too
might be harboring drugs where I lived. And despite my protestations of
innocence, they took me to my apartment where we found my then partner, Carol,
sound asleep with her baby beside her. I had convinced myself that one of my
pals would have called and told her to clean up, but the thought did not occur
to anyone. I quietly handed them my small stash of pot and a plant growing on
the table. I insisted that Carol had nothing to do with drug taking and that
she should be left alone. Admirably, they agreed, and I was then whisked off to
the lockup on Main and Hastings, charged with possession of narcotics, a
criminal offence.
That evening while I languished in
jail, Olson’s reading took place to a rather nervous audience, but was again a
success. What deliberations were made, and who suggested the idea I don’t know.
But at around 11:00 PM Warren Tallman arrived at the jail and put up bail for
my release, using the Tallman house as collateral. I hadn’t informed my parents
out in rural Langley, knowing they would not take it well. So this was
completely unexpected. Warren drove me to my apartment where I rejoined a very
frightened partner and began making plans to move. We were in a pretty tony neighbourhood
on Point Grey Rd, and I did not imagine being welcome once the news was known.
With Neri and my busts, those who’d come from elsewhere and had any drug
involvement present or past fled the city as quickly as possible. Everyone
expected the police to be follow up with more arrests. In fact, the cops were
very happy with their successful raid. In short order the officer in charge
received a promotion and soon gained a reputation for being the chief narc of
Vancouver.
I came to the Vancouver Poetry Conference
because I was already there. In other words, I fell into it with genuine ease
and no effort on my part. I mention this because many others who came to learn,
and those who came to teach, had to make a major decision to travel to
Vancouver and invest time and money to attend. Precious few came from across
Canada: Victor Coleman wanted to come, but could not afford to. Bill Hawkins
and Roy MacSkimming drove out together from Ottawa in Roy’s highly unreliable
Morris Minor, which in fact did break down on their way back through Idaho, and
as grace would have it, they ran into Creeley who, perhaps, was en route to
Pocatello to visit Dorn, and generously paid for their car repairs. He wasn’t
wealthy, but he had some money; they didn’t; such were the times. So I met Bill
Hawkins that summer because he came out west, and we became life-long, though
not close, friends. When I came up to Ottawa in ’68 for my job interview at
Carleton, Bill and Sheila Hawkins put me up, and Bill took me along to Le Hibou
where Joni Mitchel was singing. Later she joined us at Bill’s party, and
because I had a car, I drove her to the Chateau Laurier where she was staying.
Others who came from afar included the
poets John Keyes and Carol Bergé from NYC who made their way separately to
Vancouver. Carol later offered me a place to stay briefly when I visited NYC a
year later. In the interim she wrote an account of the event which included her
notes on seminars attended, The Vancouver
Report, published by Ed Sanders’ Fuck You/ Press February 1964 in New York.
A good part of it was reprinted some time later in C.H. Gervais’ The Writing Life, 1976, which includes a
number of essays by the TISH poets and others. Bergé was fond of personalism in
her writing, and openly showed distaste for Duncan’s authoritarianism, and for
some of his acolytes. She was annoyed that members of the audience, herself in
particular, were not given equal status to those directing the seminars. She
felt slighted, perhaps overly, and this colors her report.
Other poets and interested people also
came up from the U.S. to attend. Karen Johnson flew in from Goddard College
where she was studying, and Rosemary Christoph came up from San Francisco; the
two met in Vancouver, and became life-long friends. Later, Karen and I would
meet up in the graduate program at the University of Buffalo, and together we’d travel to NYC to
visit Rosemary where she lived on the Lower East Side. Clark Coolidge came west
from Providence RI, and Michael Palmer came I believe from California, as did
Joanne Kyger. Denise Levertov attended in an unofficial capacity and brought
important insights to the discussions. There is a list of attendees somewhere,
and I’m sure I have it, but I cannot lay my hands on it just now.
The majority of attendees were students
and interested writers from Vancouver, most of whom were studying at UBC. Some
of us enrolled in the three week program for credit in the Creative Writing
Program there; it was offered as the senior level Poetry Course toward a major which
included four courses, and could be combined with, typically, an English
degree. David Cull, Daphne Marlatt (then Buckle) Jamie Reid, Peter Auxier and I
took that double major, and enrolled for the summer course. Most of the other
poets associated with TISH took Honours English degrees, and chose Creative
Writing classes only as electives. Some had taken Earle Birney’s year long
seminar in writing poetry. Bob Creeley, who’d been hired to teach at UBC for
the year leading up to the Summer Conference, also offered a full year poetry
course. I was not eligible to take it until
I’d completed my second year. As a result, I didn’t study under either
Birney or Creeley—either of which may have been a useful experience. Years
later Bob would supervise my doctoral thesis on Olson, but by that time I was
working remotely and teaching at Carleton U. When I later enrolled in the
graduate programme at UB, I studied with Olson for his last semester there.
Now, while I had the good fortune of
more or less falling into the program, I had the misfortune of being in need of
working every summer to pay next year’s tuition. When classes ended in May of
’63 I landed a job selling shoes at a somewhat seedy store on Granville north
of the Granville Bridge; it was called Agnew-Surpass, and the proprietor was
anything but sympathetic to my needing to attend as many daytime classes as
possible. If I remember, I worked for a dollar an hour, and made 10% commission
on the sale of any ‘spiffs’ as we called soiled or out of fashion women’s
shoes. He made it clear that if I missed more than a day here and there I’d be
fired, and I could not afford that. As a result, I would rush over to the
University after work and attend the evening readings as faithfully as
possible. At the time I was living with a previous girlfriend, Carol Case and
her baby daughter, who’d married a fellow who wound up in prison for robbery.
We were both at loose ends, and I asked her to move in with me that spring when
I rented a comfortable small flat on west Point Grey Road in Kitsilano.
So, my domestic life was complicated as
well, and I was somewhat torn in three directions. The three weeks were a
frantic time and went by in a blur of evening readings and parties at various
peoples homes, most memorably those at the flat belonging to Jamie and Carol
Reid on West Pender St—a pad frequented by many of the poets, and as we later
learned, also narcs from the RCMP who were taking note of our illicit activities.
I’ve commemorated that apartment in a poem called “Summer of Sixty-three – for Jamie & Carol Reid,” wch
appeared in from LAMENTATIONS, and the fateful summer overall in my long
poem, A Quiet Affair – Vancouver ’63
which, to my knowledge, is the only piece of writing to chronicle that summer.
Quite strangely, despite the many events and characters that abounded, no
fictional account has yet been written. Two of our crowd, Maxine Gadd’s brother
Neri, who was busted for pot along with myself, and the interesting film maker
and writer, Sam Perry, would commit suicide in part due to drug taking and
persecution by the police. Myself and two friends would come down with
hepatitis a year and a few months hence, and one of us, a registered nurse and
friend to a number of poets, Jeanne Choquette, would die from that particular
infection. My elegy for Jeanne, composed in Buffalo in January 1965, was only published
in The Café Review about a year ago. I’ll include it here since it somewhat
typifies the bohemian life many of us lived then.
Ode to Jeanne Choquette
O
Jeanne
how
perfectly we lay
naked not
together
you
with
Mike McLean
me
with Sharon it was
quite
a honeymoon night
on
Vine in Kits
as
I remember
all
high on pot you
me
and Mike also
high
on meth you
stole
from St Paul’s
Hospital
we
shot up
an
amp apiece
and
danced all night
as
they say two and
two
but never crossed
thighs
never flowed
directly
except the blood
we
shared
vicariously
fell
quietly
in
love but never said
what
was really on
our
minds and you
now
suddenly dead
from
hepatitis
silent
forever
in
sad Vancouver
a
terrible coast
away
me out of
hospital
but still
in
the throes of recovery
here
in Buffalo
campus
infirmary
and bound to live
when
all I want
is
to lie down
gently
in
the
garden of
your
mind my sweet
Ophelia
whose
petals are the sign I pick
at the edge of the pathway
and
scatter now
in
memory of
your
bright and shining
life
more love than
any
of us in
your
flashing
eyes
and
smile
Rob McTavish has done a fine job of
presenting some of the quality of life that transpired during the Conference
with his film, The Line Has Shattered –Vancouver’s
Landmark 1963 Poetry Conference (2013), available on DVD. Much of the
original footage was taken by Allen Ginsberg, and it includes shots of various
teachers and students entering or leaving class, and some in-class shots as
well. At least one gala party held at Dollarton Beach is captured where Carol
and I have cameos. After the film’s release McTavish arranged a reunion of
poets in Vancouver where a number of us convened to read and discuss our work
of the early Sixties and since. Many of us had not met up again in the decades
between, and it was fine to visit and also to address audiences and answer questions
about our venture together and since. Panels were organized, and our
conversations taped. Since then, much of this has been transcribed, but to my
knowledge, it has not seen print—a pity, since there is still a paucity of
information about the conference itself. This needs to be redressed, and soon.
KN: The Vancouver Poetry Conference has
always been quite legendary to me. Thanks, Bob, for this detailed account. When
it happened, in 1963, I was a child growing up in New York City.
Years later, when I had moved to
Canada, and was a young poet I started to hear about the Conference. Of the
main presenters, the only one I ever got to know personally was Robert Creeley.
Duncan taught a class I was attending, but I never interacted with him. Allen
Ginsberg contributed a poem to my magazine CrossCountry,
but I never had a conversation with him. I never met Margaret Avison. And Olson
was before my time.
In much later life I became friends
with Creeley, and with his literary executor, Ben Friedlander. Ben was a
colleague at U. Maine and Bob was too, in a way. He cut a deal with my
department where he came to teach classes for us in the Falls of, I believe,
2001, 2002, and 2003. I actually wrote a letter of recommendation for him when
he applied for the job at Brown. Many of our conversations were about Irving
Layton and Irving’s poetry.
I am a big fan of Margaret Avison’s
poetry. I taught her quite often at U. Maine.
When I was writing my book, The
Little Magazine In Canada 1925-80, “Projective Verse” was a big deal for
the TISH chapter. There wasn’t any way of explaining TISH poetry without
thoroughly investigating that essay.
I’ve mentioned Duncan teaching my drama
class, and Frank O’Hara’s response to that letter he received from Duncan. I
have never clicked with Duncan’s poetry. It just doesn’t speak to me.
I would say that that is pretty much
true of Olson’s poetry as well. There are things you are interested in, and
then there are things that just don’t interest you. Olson doesn’t much interest
me.
Ginsberg’s poetry interests me far
more. Howl is a masterpiece, probably the most consequential poem of the second
half of the twentieth century. It speaks to/with “The Waste Land” in a really interesting
dialogue. I saw Ginsberg read but once—at Columbia University in 1975. It was a
20th anniversary reading, and he read with Burroughs, Corso and
Orlovsky.
I recently told someone that Louis
Dudek was my dad and Robert Creeley was my hero. And they really didn’t like
one another. Interestingly, at least to me, is that I became friends with Creeley
after Louis had passed. And what Bob and I were talking about the most was
Irving. Bob really LOVED Irving’s poetry from the early fifties, and he was
really mystified about why, in his opinion, Irving’s poetry had gotten so
lousy, starting around in 1959. My own judgement wasn’t and isn’t quite as
harsh. I still see merit in some of Irving’s later work. Bob thought that it
had no merit, that Irving had completely shipwrecked as a poet. It was an
interesting perspective, and an interesting conversation.
This all sets me to wondering if you
were at the Long-Liners Conference at York in 1984? I wasn’t on a panel, but I
was there in the audience.
RH: Hi Ken: Yes, but
like you I was there as an audience member. I don't recall much about it.
Pretty sure I met Kroetsch there for the first time, and that his daughter was
up to TO for the occasion from the States. That was the only time he and I
met or were together anywhere, and we got along fine. He had become the rage in
the long poem industry by then. I've got a pic somewhere of Angela Bowering and
myself together wch was taken there, likely by George. I don't think I kept any
notes, and was not a player as I said above. No one in Canada ever thought that
what I was doing in poetry coincided with 'the long poem' to my knowledge. This
is a bit odd, because right after The Connexions came out in Berkeley in 1966 Ron Loewinsohn wrote a review of it
for Poetry Chicago along with a couple other authors, including Frank Davey
whom he gave rather a rough time for his D-Day and After. Here's
what he had to say about my book; I've highlighted his ref to the 'long
poem' (tho he does not refer to it as a genre):
In an omnibus review
in the Nov 1966 issue of Poetry Chicago, Ron Loewinsohn has this to say
about Robert Hogg’s The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez Press,
1966.
The Connexions is a rite of
passage—not the record of it, but the experience itself of Robert Hogg’s
entering into The Way which is Poetry. This long poem demonstrates that there’s
no question about Hogg’s having “promise”; at twenty-three he is a poet with
all the necessary equipment.
He begins with a
short statement:
Opal is magic is
stoneword
spoken
heard
--which is actually
at least two statements, one having “opal” as its subject, the other, “magic”.
This is exactly what Pound was driving at with his “Dichten: Condensare”. And
that’s just the beginning. On every page Hogg shows that same richness in
economy, that same loving care of the language, that same intense and
straightforward confrontation with all the complexities of his vision:
These are the elements: disease
or the desert a man knows
as winter, the white plague
becomes us, undercover of
the sun
that does not come
but attends us
It is our turn
to discover
what the sun has left us
What the body holds:
freshwater, salt, what is
beneath ice . . . the land
what is below land, where Earth
harbours old connexions
with the sun
The marvelous thing
is that he’s heard such a complexity of voices, themes, visions, and has at all
points apprehended “the connections” between them, so that the poem is so
solidly structured. The rite of passage he willingly undertakes takes him down
into the Duende Kingdom of magic / poetry / vision / history / memory /
dream—and there he makes real for us his landscape (“It is told / there is a
tide on the Great Lakes / The moon / heaves against ice, the sheets / buckle
against it . . . a body of water / seethes for the sun.”) Everywhere he
demonstrates a understanding of the immediate and the eternal aspects of that
literal world that impinges on him. And through his ordeal he emerges into a
possession of his vision, having merged with it, acknowledging those pervasive
connexions.
His only faults might
be that he at times sounds like a conglomerate Olson-Kelly-Duncan, and at times
his rhetoric seems to have at best a tenuous connection with the literal. But
where these faults obtrude they appear as occasional lapses from such a general
excellence.
And his ending, with
those lovely repeated puns on “mine”, shows that he’s too intelligent to fall
prey to the temptations of any “simple” resolution. His ending is such a beginning that
the pleasure of this book doesn’t seem to end at all:
The sun is mine
And the trees are mine
The light breeze is mine
And the birds that inhabit the air
are mine
Their voices upon the wind
are in my ear
. . . .
Ron Loewinsohn, from
“Some Uses of Landscape.” An omnibus review of three poets in Poetry Chicago
Vol 109, No. 2 Nov 1966, pp 124-126.
The
Connexions got
overlooked by almost everyone in Canada, though I did get a few good comments
from writers I knew well. Victor Coleman wrote a nice piece on it for the Canadian
Forum, but I think that was the extent of any critical response. Had it
been published by Souster's Contact Press, wch wd not have been unlikely, it
may have fared better. The Connexions, as will be seen if my Postcards,
from America comes out with CHAX Press this spring, where it will be
reprinted along with many other poems of the period and since, was the
essential matter of a longer series of poems written mostly in NYC and Buffalo,
with a few exceptions. I very carefully chose, for my first book, what I felt
were the strongest and most cohesive poems from that group. After the book came
out, I felt little inclination to publish many of the others, and let them sit
uncollected for many years. A lot of these were written for various women I'd
had attachments to, and being newly married, I did not see including them in Standing
Back when it came out in 1971. So, a quantity of these poems remained
in various stages of completion, several not even typed up, and many others
revised extensively. I came back to this hoard of material a couple of years
ago, and began the long process or revision and resuscitation. I was surprised
at how many were salvageable and would make good poems. Others, published in
periodicals and Souster's New Wave Canada, did not get collected
for the same reasons—too personal, too revealing.
Many
poems which were written in Vancouver during my four years there from the fall
of 1960 to October 1964 saw only periodical publication, or were also left
unpublished. Over the past few years, I worked my way through these drafts
also, and they are now collected in a ms called Not to Call it Chaos -
the Vancouver Poems. A central poem in this sequence is the recently
written A Quiet Affair - Vancouver '63 which came out as
a chapbook this spring from Trainwreck Press. It recapitulates my experiences
during the summer of '63 and presents the conditions as I experienced them
around the Vancouver Poetry Conference. But it ties in with a number of other
poems, most of which were written during that early period. The poems are
predominantly lyrical in structure, but again, taken as a whole, they represent
a kind of bildungsroman in a sequence of poems.
Themes
that will recur throughout my opus took root here: the attachment to place and
landscape; the ear for jazz rhythms and music generally, heard both in bistros
and on records; attention to love and the acts of love, some of which are the
most explicit in my overall work; and a surprisingly revealing experience with
drugs which would lead inevitably to The Connexions which was
occasioned by my coming down with hepatitis in NYC, but which I'd contracted
among needle-using friends in my last two years in Vancouver. There was good
reason to suppress these poems, since in short order I was seeking to go to
graduate school in the US, and not long after, having completed my groundwork
for the PhD in Buffalo, would be in search of a professorship. When I landed
the job at Carleton in Ottawa in the spring of 1968, my first book of poems was
a major feather in my cap when I came up for interviews. Had that book been
explicit about the conditions which occasioned it, I'd never have been
hired!
Over a
lifetime, I've also been composing a sequence called The Cariboo
Poems, the first two of which were written in Vancouver in 1962 and 1963,
'Ashes from Two Fires,' and a poem then simply called, 'Ranch Days'
subsequently published in Wild Dog Magazine in 1964. Today I have an
entire book of Cariboo poems, the most recent of wch will appear in Centipede Cha
Cha Cha this month or next. It actually records my earliest experience of
visiting The Flying U in the Cariboo in 1948 with my
father and older brother. It was written last April. So I never know, and never
have known, when that sequence would come to an end, or what part of it,
historically, I'd be writing next. For the most part, these poems have still
not been collected, and so only someone with an acute interest in what I was
writing and publishing sporadically would understand what is going on with
them as a sequence. Two of these poems were recently published as
chapbooks: Ranch Days – for Ed Dorn (as it is now
called) with an foreword by Lionel Kearns; and Ranch Days – the
McIntosh, with a foreword by Bruce Whiteman. The latter was written about
two years ago. 'Ashes from Two Fires,' never published in a periodical,
appeared in a chapbook this year from above/ground press called From
Each Forthcoming, a title which references the hopeful publication of
several books of poems now in circulation.
Touched
on, but not addressed directly, in the above discussion is my preoccupation over
many decades with ecology, and with my practice as an organic farmer, on the
land where I settled in 1973, five years after returning to Canada. While
living on a rented farm belonging to the NCC at the east end of Ottawa for two
years, my wife and I had begun serious gardening, and raising animals--goats
and chickens. We were desirous of having a farm of our own, and in the summer
of '73 discovered a property we quite fell in love with 35 miles south of
Ottawa. It was a long commute to Carleton, but there was little traffic on this
route south, and we were able to make a down payment, and move to this 150 acre
property where we've lived ever since. The farm had been in dairy and the
farmer had sprayed Atrazine on the field nearest the house for 10 years straight.
We were appalled and determined to go organic immediately, which we did. For a
few years we sold mostly hay, after which I turned to tilling the fields and
growing grain crops for resale. By the Eighties I'd realized you need to have a
value added product to survive in a niche market, and purchased and installed a
stone flour mill where I ground wheat, rye and buckwheat over the next three
decades and sold these into the organic market. To facilitate sales of flour, I
developed a full scale natural food distribution company called Mountain Path,
and ran this alongside the farming and milling enterprise until 2013 when we
faced financial difficulty and had to sell the business. Happily, we'd
incorporated and were able to keep the farm. In the years since I’ve rented out
the farm to locals willing to maintain its organic status. Now, in full
retirement, I oversee the farm operation, but focus entirely on my writing and
publishing career.
Needless
to say, while I seldom proselytize, my organic and ecological concerns permeate
much of my writing. This can be seen overtly in poems as far back as the Ranch
poems, and in aspects of The Connexions where I refer to the
relationship of the human body--my body--to the large bodies of earth, sea, and
sun. The following poem echoes my relationship to the natural landscape of BC
even though I was then living in Buffalo NY.
This
Much
is remembered
how the sea
or from this place
the bay
opened westward
stretched out to the sun
Or from the south
from this perspective
a man
the black ridge of the Coast Range
at his back
as his face is
toward the sun
and one with it
goes down
his spine
bent slightly westward
as the sea
bends out from land's edge
as the man
stands bent upon it
to receive
What
that "man" receives is both physical and spiritual, but the focus is
upon the symbiosis of a man to his ecological place. He is "one with
it" and "bent upon it / to receive." A similar attachment to
place and what it can provide in return for a kind of devotional stance can be
heard in the earlier "Ranch Days" where after a short Preface,
section one of the poem begins:
To begin with the Douglas fir
then holy in their grand height
whereunder I hardly pressed
the needles
red to green
beneath my shadow
There I smoked the goat’s beard
stringing in long black
shocks of unknown fungus
from the limbs above
made with my brother’s help
a clay bowl pipe from the alkali
flats rounding Soda Lake
would coil the hair
round my left hand’s
forefinger tamp
it into the bowl place
the cock sorrel stem
between my teeth strike
with my right hand
one of the large stove matches
kept open in their Eddy blue box
on the woodstove
warming oven light
the dread black hair
tasting paraffin
and the sickness of great trees
too often sawed and dragged
gutting the forest
by the loggers of Tin Cup Mill
To my
knowledge, not a single critic has discerned the combination that I discovered
in 1963 of a deep ecological attachment to the land, a keen, even avid insight
into what it might offer as spiritual transformation, the danger involved in so
intimate a relationship with nature's offerings in order to create a mystical
bond, and a sharp distaste for the loggers "gutting the forest" in
1952 or so which is the time of the poem. The fascination with "the
sickness of great trees" references the fact of the fungi, goat's beard,
growing naturally in them; the ill effects of logging on the timberland
overall; and the sickness I felt in ritually rolling up and smoking this fungus
in order to gain some deeper insight at age 10 or 11 with no cultural mentors
to make sense of the journey. Buried in this experience is the sickness I'd
more deeply experience after years of shooting drugs again, in order to
accomplish some transformation I did not fully understand. Little wonder that,
when I came to my senses years later on my own farm, I'd have a changed
perspective on how one hopes to relate to nature.
In
quoting from the above poem we can see again how elements of a long poem have
been at work in my overall opus. Little did I suspect when I wrote the above
that nearly sixty years later I'd express my love of, and responsibility for,
my surroundings, my attentiveness to landscape, in words such as the following
in 2016:
Spring 2016 – The Chestnut Forests of
North America
Now that earth
has about
dried up
dust blown
quite away what
to do with
two imaginary
chestnuts held
in hand in
mind
an arid
landscape is
there a possible
crevice along
my fence lines
I could
plant them
they grow
tall and
dance
again
in wind as
once they
flourished
over all this
land before
a foreign
virus 1900
wiped out
massive
stands
and if they do
how long
last how
long
the fencerows
I've maintained
against ‘progress’
hold against
greed
margins
acquired
1973
still in place
forty odd
years on . . . .
This
poem shows the author, who has now spent a lifetime tending the actual
fencerows of his farm, fantasizing about reintroducing Chestnut trees long
extinct in his area and most of north eastern US and Canada. He imagines that
what he can "hold" in mind he can hold "in hand" (echoes of
Creeley) and that the margins of his property echo the margins of his thought
and creativity, while these again reference the ever expanding margins of his
other preoccupation, the poem on the page. Margins acquired, dreams realized,
are so easily wiped out, and the objective the poet and farmer are faced with
is to hold out against destruction and decay as long as possible, knowing that
in the end, everything will eventually fail. It's a far different perspective
than the one held by a child of 10 or 11 years, but the seeds of that
thought--the imagination--were alive decades before.
Sincerely,
Bob
KN: My big contribution to the long
poem is, of course Report On The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century,
which is a long poem in 22 books. There is also the book-length serial poem, One
Night. Outside of Report, I probably work more in sequences than in serial
poems.
When
Long-Liners was held I was 33 years old, and I had probably written the first
four books of Report. I can’t remember if I was working with bpNichol on
The Better Part of Heaven—that was printed at the end of 1983, so that
book was probably already out when the conference was held.
I think I was still Writer-In-Residence at
McGill when Long-liners was happening. Anyway, I went down on my own dime,
wasn’t a presenter, was just an audience member.
But it seemed important to be there. In a certain way, as Eli Mandel asserted, the
whole goal of the conference was to get the long poem on the curriculum. But it
was also a real opportunity to hear what the practitioners of the long poem had
to say, because they all were there. Livesay and Dudek were there. Kroetsch and
Nichol and Bowering were there. It was at York, so Eli and Frank Davey were
there. It seemed like a big deal at
the time. For my generation, it was maybe the equivalent of the Vancouver
Poetry Conference, with a couple of substantial differences. First of all, It
was entirely Canadian. And it was the movement past Projective Verse, into the poetics of the long poem.
RH: Well, being as you musta been a child
prodigy, I don't get how you didn't make it from NYC to the Vancouver Conf. You
cdda rid on the coat tails of John Keyes or Carol Berge. AG was there of
course, but he'd come in from India and Japan. Any other NYers? Karen Johnson
who grew up in NY State near Buffalo came up from VT where she had been in
school at Goddard in Bennington. Two young poets fr Ottawa drove across country
to be there: Roy Macskimming and his pal Bill Hawkins—where we first met.
KN: Bob, I was twelve
years old in 1963. I was a kid living in New York City and watching President
Kennedy get shot. My idea of poetry at that point in time was the
tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells. I
thought Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry was really cool.
But
back to Long-Liners. I don’t remember if Kroetsch had completed his Field
Notes by then. Maybe not. I was deep into my reading of The Martyrology.
I think we were up to Book 6 by then. A lot of people think that, because I
studied with Dudek, he was the big influence on my writing of the long poem.
But the big influence really was bpNichol, and I followed him into writing a
multi-book long poem. Dudek never did that. He wrote four really interesting
long poems, but he didn’t try to yoke them together. They all stood on their
own. They’re all interesting (Continuation) to magnificent (Atlantis),
but he delivered them one by one by one by one. And he completed Continuation
a year before he died. Not too many people know that.
I
think Eli really had a point when he said that the primary motivation of that
conference was to get the long poem on the curriculum. It was taking place at
York, and the long poem needed the boost into the curriculum.
I
didn’t pay as much attention to Field Notes as I should have. It was the
other multi-book long poem that was in circulation while I was writing Report.
RH: Hi Ken: Yeah, I've
such a reluctant memory of the conference that I dug out the Open Letter
issue, wch happily I have, and began reading some of the articles most of wch
I'd listened to when we were all there. I wish I'd been more engaged, but I
wasn't, and that's that. I think I appear in two casual photos of that Open
Letter, rather accidently: one is on p 27 in the lecture hall where I appear to
be on the far left of the 2nd row, chin in hand; and the other, an outdoor
photo on p 31 where I’m wearing my tweed sports coat and carrying a tan rain
jacket (wch can be seen in the photo I'll include below) with a couple of cars
in the background. From left to right you can see Michael Ondaatje; myself;
Angela Bowering (?) on her knees facing away; an unidentified male with
long hair and beard facing her; bpNichol facing away; and Victor Coleman
looking on from the right. It would have been a good idea to include captions
in 1985 when this was printed! I cdn't prove in court that that is Angela
or bp, but I'd almost swear to it. Angela and I hung out a fair bit during
those few days, so it is almost certainly she and I in that group photo.
Somewhere I have a photo of the two of us at the conference. I'll try to dig it
out. Yup, found it. No doubt taken by George, b/c it's stamped on the back with
Beaver Kosmos and their Kerrisdale address. Ange is wearing her attendee
sticker. George must have mailed the photo to me after we all went home.
What
struck me as I was reading over the first several talks last night was just how
astute most of the speakers were. Pretty well every one of them were poets as
well as practicing academics. Mandel's opening talk is wide-sweeping enough to
include a short history of English criticism, and focused enough to bring the
topic of the long poem in Canadian writing to the fore. I remember it being
masterful, but it really manages a great deal in a short amount of time. His
essential thrust is to relocate the contemporary long poem within the scope of
Modernism, rather than seeing it as a sudden product of the late Sixties,
beginning with Webb and Ondaatje. He makes sure to include discussion of Europe and
Atlantis and Dudek's critical approach to the failure of Modernism
in America generally to put back together what had evidently come apart
with the advent of The Wasteland and The Cantos. I'm sure
many of us were very aware of how what we were writing, whether lyric or
otherwise, was within this larger framework. But to Mandel, the current
critical perspective of the Eighties was leaving that out, and especially,
earlier developments in the long poem in Canada.
In
the course of the papers given, and the responses from those in the audience,
much of this ground work, so to speak, gets filled in. Dorothy Livesay was
there, and spoke saliently about the nature of doing research for the
Documentary poem in the Thirties. There was discussion about how film,
originally American, but soon Canadian also, had pioneered the process of
documentary, and that poets had taken their clue from film, not from earlier
long poem experiments. Magdalene Redekop gave a thoughtful paper on the
complexities behind Pratt's attempt to retell the story of Brébeuf and His
Brethren. She pointed out how Pratt strove for objectivity by relying on
documented evidence from both the Jesuit Relations, and from Parkman's account
of Brébeuf. But as she points out, he could not escape the bias of his own
white, Christian upbringing, cd not become completely detached--tho that was
the implication from the assiduousness of his method. So part of the conference
was an attempt to show that the writer can never be free of his or her own
subjectivity. It is a ruse to imagine otherwise.
Mandel
concludes with the assertion that the project of writing per se had become the dominant interest in the contemporary
practitioners of the Long Poem. And as we see or hear in subsequent papers, a
concentration on writing, on language, on modalities of production, and on the
precarious place of the author in relation to his/her environment make up much
of the ensuing discussion. Miki points out in his talk how Daphne Marlatt,
altho a long resident of Vancouver and the lower mainland, while attached to
the landscape, nonetheless feels alien from the cultural roots of the Japanese
inhabitants of Steveston about whom she strives to write an encompassing poem.
Their history and predicament are not hers, but there are grounds, albeit
tidally affected grounds, where they can meet. The Fraser, the fish which make
up their livelihood, and the encroaching foreign investments into canneries,
are all shared experiences. And so Marlatt, characteristically, picks her way
very carefully into and through these interstices--more subject to subject,
than objective overseer to a people on view. It is treacherous trespassing, so
to speak, but it is done with love, consideration and care. And for Marlatt, as
for the other poets with whom she shares a calling, recognition of one's
limits, self awareness, and a reliance on language to lead one through become
the modus operandi. Miki did not mention that the project of Marlatt's Steveston wd involve
collaboration with a photographer who's approach to person and place wd also
seek to render an accurate portrait of both, while admitting the intrusion of
the camera.
Much
of the discussion also centered on the ongoing nature of the contemporary Long
Poem--the idea that in some way, it is what Mandel calls elsewhere, a 'life
sentence' with a nice pun intended. In other words, in the main, for bpNichol
in particular, but also for others, the Long Poem had become a life project. As
Mandel pointed out, humorously in question period, that is until the poet dies!
This turned out to be very much the case for bpNichol who died, far too young,
only too soon after the conference. But for others, it was less the case.
Undeniably, one of the greatest Long Poems of the period was Ondaatje's Billy
the Kid. And while the structure of this poem makes it historical and
anti-historical at the same time, it definitely did not prove to be an
ongoing poem. Likewise, Kroetsch, the master of delay and deferral, nonetheless
wrote individual poems which came to an end and were not continued, though they
wd later be collected in his Field Notes wch has the aura of
an ongoing sequence. Much more in keeping with the poem as a life sentence are
in fact Dudek's above mentioned long poems, bounded more by travelling and
returning home, than by anything like a conclusion. Circles don't lead
anywhere, but they don't pretend to, either. And, of course, these were
followed by his own attempt at a life-long composition, the appropriately
titled Continuation I and II, though it does not feel like a poem
that is forever opening up, but rather, closing down. Like the late Pound,
Dudek turns increasingly to aphoristic statement, pronouncements on the state
of civilization. Post-Modernists have become wary of such a tendency so sum up
what we are and where we have been, and seek rather to explore the unknown
territory wch in no small measure they find in the possibilities of language
itself to lead somewhere new. Mandel quotes Terry Eagleton asserting, "'the
advent of the concept of writing... is a challenge to the very idea of
structure: for a structure always presumes a centre, a fixed principle, a
hierarchy of meanings and a solid foundation, and it is just these notions
which the endless differing and deferring of writing throws into
question'" [Literary Theory, 1983, p 134]. Was Eagleton
reading Kroetsch?
If there is a coherence in the talks given by the poets who
attended this conference, it is summed up in the above quotation. The
centrality of writing does not originate with Eagleton, of
course, but long before in the explicit concentration on the practice by
Gertrude Stein, most predominantly, but also on the many writers of her time
and since who have shifted focus from idea to process. This has been the lifelong
work of many of the Black Mountain and SF Renaissance poets, as we all know.
And it is largely through them that the practice of writing per se, rather than
composing a story, a poem, etc. has taken root.
I remember once when I was still fairly young wondering what
the essential difference was between how Eliot wrote and how Williams broke
free of a certain methodology. In one of his essays, and it may be the one on
Hamlet where he speaks of the 'objective correlative,' Eliot talks about how a poet works
an idea up into a poem. Those may not be the exact words, but the
implication is accurate: to Eliot, a poem, however fragmented it many become in
its process, is essentially an idea worked up into something
better, more aesthetically adept, a finished work. Williams countered this
notion, tho not Eliot's statement, with his famous "no ideas but in
things," by wch we came to learn he meant, as Pound had earlier insisted,
you can't express ideas in the abstract in poetry, especially free verse poetry,
you need to find the concrete expression. How far this is, typically, from
finding what Eliot called that objective correlative will I
think bedevil the mind for generations.
But the corollary to Williams' notion, of course, is that one
finds out what it is one wants to say by immersing oneself in the act of
writing--precisely the reverse of what Eliot proposes. For a poet like Robert
Duncan, this involves a mystical trust in the body of language to be there for
the poet rather like body of water which will buoyantly keep him
afloat--language is the medium in wch the poet lives, and corresponds—not only
to others, but also through his own body to the world, phenomenologically, and
proprioceptively. To write, then, is to interact, on several levels. It is this
attention to the process that engages the poet in writing, the reader in
reading. Reading and writing when one is attentive is much the same thing, or
at least that is what the writer hopes for, that the reader will participate
equally, not passively imbibe.
Charles Bernstein—the one American poet and presenter at the
Long Liners Conf--and his fellow Language Poets, make much of this, but so did
their precursors. For a poet like Robin Blaser, the function of writing is to
enact a communion with the reader, but also to enter a new dimension wch the
poem makes possible. In general discourse we often think of language as
transparent, a mere medium for communication of ideas wch are uppermost in
mind. But for poets, it is the opacity of language wch offers a new way to
appreciate the act of communication. Just as abstract expressionist artists
rely on the non-representational fact of paint on the surface of a canvas to
convey a complex of meaning, so the contemporary poet depends on the facticity
of language and its many components, such as sound, breath, silence, pacing,
etc. to convey something more than a preconceived notion. Concrete poetry
provides an even more exact parallel to non-representational art. But we are
unlikely to find concrete poems or sound poems in the Long Poem category, not
at least until they are computer generated, for the author would not last long
in the process. But the Long Poem does partake of these materialities. In Wah’s
Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh, the
physicality of breath acquires a jazz-like place in the poem—breath is there to
be heard, felt, experienced—less perhaps than in some experimental sound poems,
but much more so than in most poems which are also influenced by or meant to
accompany, jazz. Wah’s poems are not just hearing jazz music, they are creating
a jazz poetry. Differently, but in a similar vein, his Pictograms from the Interior of BC utilize glyphs from the rock
paintings to elicit a response from the poet with as little ‘introduction’ or
‘interpretation’ as possible. The process is not to describe what is perceived, but rather to look inward and allow
what one recalls, or how one relates to the subject, do the speaking. At their
best, one feels the poems are equivalents to the pictographs opposite them on
the page. One poem in the sequence perhaps captures something of the jazz poems
of Breathin’ and the im-magic
response of the Pictograms. It is
useful to know and to remember that music and jazz are integral to Wah’s life
since he was playing an instrument in a band before he began writing poetry.
Maybe this poem is a good place to leave our open ended discussion of the open
ended Long Poem. To see the corresponding pictograph, turn to p 14 of his book
of poems or see below the poem here.
How does the jazz go?
Autumn moon a bit drunk
in the tree-tops with
Wind
(north) & Pacific
cloud banks
about 1959 not quite
jamming it but from here
triple high C and wetter
than a duck’s ass just
a sliver of a harvest
moon.
KN: At the time of the conference, I
was probably most struck by Dudek’s presentation, which in the Open Letter
issue is called “Beyond Autobiography.” In 1984, I think I was maybe three or
four books into my own long poem Report
On The Second Half Of The Twentieth Century. Hmm—maybe Book 5, The Better Part Of Heaven, was already
in print with Coach House Press. bpNichol was educating me in the Japanese
poetic diary when we were editing that book.
Bringing
the long poem into the academy (York University) was a way, as Eli Mandel
suggested, of getting the long poem onto the curriculum. Back then Canadian
long poems only had lives in being read by other poets and by being taught in
university courses.
Dudek’s
essay sought to emphasize the unprecedented freedom
the long poem was granting
to the poets of Canada. Atwood said somewhere that in Canada you can write anything
that you want because no one is paying any attention to what you write.
By 1984,
Bowering had written most of the long poems for which he is renowned. And I
believe that bpNichol was six books deep into The Martyrology. I don’t think that Robert Kroetsch had as yet
“completed” his Field Notes. Both of
those multi-book long poems were still in play.
As a poet
in a younger generation—I have always said that the poets of the sixties are my
older brothers and sisters—I was interested in seeing what work had been done, and
what kind of room had been left for me. I was always in the position of being a
second generation Postmodernist, which has its perks and its demerits.
I think
we all came away from that conference feeling like the reality of the Canadian long
poem had been established. There were so many long poems by 1984, and so many
long poem practitioners!
As for
myself, I still had seventeen books of Report
to write!
Ken
Norris
was born in New York City in 1951. He came to Canada in the early 1970s, to
escape Nixon-era America and to pursue his graduate education. He completed an
M.A. at Concordia University and a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature at McGill
University. He became a Canadian citizen in 1985. He is Professor Emeritus at
the University of Maine, where he taught Canadian Literature and Creative
Writing for thirty-three years. He currently resides in Toronto.
Robert
Hogg
was born in Edmonton, Alberta, grew up in the Cariboo and Fraser Valley in
British Columbia, and attended UBC during the early Sixties where he was
associated with the Vancouver TISH poets, co-edited MOTION - a prose
newsletter, and graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing. In
1964 he hitchhiked east to Toronto, then visited Buffalo NY where Charles Olson
was teaching. After spending a few months in NYC, Bob entered the graduate
program at the State University of NY at Buffalo, completed a PhD on Olson
under Robert Creeley, and took a job teaching American and Canadian Poetry at
Carleton University in Ottawa for the next 38 years. His books include: The
Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez, 1966; Standing Back, Toronto: Coach
House, 1972; Of Light, Toronto: Coach House, 1978; Heat Lightning,
Windsor: Black Moss, 1986; There Is No Falling, Toronto: ECW,1993; and
as editor, An English Canadian Poetics, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1,
Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. He recently published several chapbooks: from
LAMENTATIONS, Ottawa: above/ground, 2016; two Cariboo poems, Ranch Days
– The McIntosh from hawk/weed press in Kemptville, ON; Ranch Days—for Ed
Dorn from battleaxe press (Ottawa 2019); A Quiet Affair – Vancouver ’63
(Trainwreck, May 2021); and in August 2021 a chapbook titled From Each
Forthcoming (above/ground). In December 2021, a chapbook will be released
from Hogwallow Press, called The Red Menace, and another from Apt 9
Press in Ottawa, called Apothegms. In April 2019 Hogg edited a Canadian
Poetry issue of The Café Review in Portland, ME. His poems have appeared
in over seventy periodicals, most recently: Pamenar Online; Empty
Mirror; The Café Review; Dispatches; Arc; Some;
BlazeVox Online Journal, The Typescript, Caesura, Ottawater
16, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, Touch the Donkey and recent
issues of Periodicities, Bandoneon, and Taint Taint Taint.
In early July 2021 a Spoken Web podcast was presented by the UBC Kelowna Amp
Lab featuring Robert Hogg’s life and career; it can be heard here:https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/robert-hogg-the-widening-circle-of-return/?fbclid=IwAR33NVedL97y38qeWXrdsfgudBITBoPghg.
His ideas on writing have recently been collected as five responses to
questions from Thomas Whyte found here:
http://poetryminiinterviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Robert%20Hogg.
Books
currently in the works for publication include: Lamentations; The
Cariboo Poems; Postcards, from America; Amber Alert; Not
to Call It Chaos – The Vancouver Poems; Oh Yeah—More Poems. In
progress are The Offending Temple, and Ill Parodies – O, a selection
of satires on various Shibboleths and current affairs. Now retired, Hogg
continues to write at his organic farm in Mountain thirty-five miles south of
Ottawa.
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