Breathing Earth (Literary and Cultural Theory, 58) 9783631842584, 9783631845899, 9783631845905, 9783631845912, 3631842589

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Breathing Earth

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 58

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

Breathing Earth The Polyphonic Lyric of Robert Bringhurst

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress

ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-84258-4 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-84589-9 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-84590-5 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-84591-2 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b17974 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2021 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Contents Introduction Mimicking the Polyphonic Texture of Being

7



I The Peripatetic Humanist and the Vocation of Poetry

7



II Cartography of a Work in Progress

12



III An Archaeology of Human Knowledge

18



IV Lyric Philosophy, or Poetry as a Form of Knowing

22



V Polyphony and the Democracy of Inter-​Being



VI A Discursive-​Material Plexus Teeming with Life VII Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue

26 31 38

1  Facing the Sky, Be Vast, Blue & Quiet

43



43

I A Poem in Search of Its Perfect Form



II Capturing Earth’s Polyphonic Poesy



III Water Music and Being

58



IV The Solid Form of Language

63



V Poetry, or a Whole out of Wholes

71



VI Breathing to the Rhythm of Being

77

46

2  Toads and Deep, Geological Time

87



87

I A Piece of Wood, an Ancestral Toad



II The Silent, Inspiring Presence of a Toad



III A Lesson in Toad Anatomy

96



IV Life and Death

99



V The Ecology of Perception



VI A World Perfused with Signs VII From the Depths of Precambrian Time

92

102 106 109

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Contents

VIII  Meaning Takes Precedence IX  Feet, Dreams, Rocks X  The Path through the Nonhuman XI The Persistence of Poetry, the Destruction of the Biosphere

3  Breathing through the Feet   I  The Human Voice in a Garden of Colour   II  Listening to the Heartbeat of the Earth

112 114 117 119

123 123 128

  III  The Lessons of Pagan Thinking

144

  IV  The Path of the Dao, or a Life in Accord with Nature

151

  V  The Stars on the Page, the Words in the Sky

4  Just a Breath Away from Darkness

154

163

  I  A Plurilingual Polyphonic Palimpsest

163

  II  Ovid’s Myth on Callisto and Arcturus

168

  III  A Blind Cree Mythteller on Bear Woman

175

  IV  Lycaon Taking Revenge

185

  V  Blood Like Sap from a Poplar

188

  VI  Elements of a Vibrant Universe

194

Conclusion The Mind Is the World: Lyric and Ethics in the Age of the Anthropocene   I  Poetry, Thinking, Singing

203 203

  II  An Embodied, Enworlded Mind

208

  III  Anthropocene Lyric and the Wild

214

  IV  Everywhere Being Is Dancing

219

Works Cited

223

Introduction Mimicking the Polyphonic Texture of Being While we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. —​Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 156.   Metaphor is a species of understanding, a form of seeing-​ as:  it has, we might say, flex. We see, simultaneously, similarities and dissimilarities. —​Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor (2008), L4.

I The Peripatetic Humanist and the Vocation of Poetry About 2,500 years ago, a handful of resonant words was uttered in ancient Greece for the first time: πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει (Sophocles 340). In English they read thus: “Strangeness is frequent enough, but nothing /​ is ever as strange as a man is” (Bringhurst, Selected Poems 52). They are lifted from what is possibly the most important chorus (lines 332–​375) in Antigone, a tragedy composed by Sophocles in the 5th century BCE, first performed in 442 or 441 BCE. The chorus in question is a seminal text, as it is one of the earliest and most probing meditations on human nature. Sophocles thinks deeply about reality and realises that man is the strangest thing on earth. The translation into English is by Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst, and the words quoted were part of a one-​stanza poem entitled “Strophe from Sophocles,” included in Cadastre (1973) and later on expanded into a longer poem called “Of the Snaring of Birds,” which is the eleventh composition in the Presocratics sequence “The Old in Their Knowing.”1 It was dedicated to Martin Heidegger, a philosopher central to Bringhurst’s thinking and singing, who had produced a perceptive analysis of Sophocles’ chorus in his Introduction to Metaphysics, where he claimed that “man is to deinotaton, the strangest of the strange” (149). 1 “The Old in Their Knowing” sequence was originally published in The Beauty of the Weapons in 1982, later revised in The Calling in 1995, published in book form as The Old in Their Knowing in 2005, and collected in Selected Poems in 2009.

8

Introduction

As Bringhurst suggests, “[w]‌hen you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears” (“Poetry and Thinking” 143). In his chorus, Sophocles is speaking poetry –​which nevertheless preexists Antigone, the chorus and its audience –​ and now, 25 centuries later, it gets in our ears. Sophocles’ words appear to encapsulate the central preoccupation of Bringhurst’s entire work, not because it is anthropocentric, but rather because it situates homo sapiens within the vitality of a breathing cosmos and interrogates how we as a species relate to the more-​than-​human world. Contrary to classicists’ interpretation of the Antigone chorus as a hymn of “praise to human ingenuity and accomplishment, encomiums to anthropological dominion” (McNeilly 57), Bringhurst’s translation uncovers an ecological dimension to the ancient text and becomes “a critique of the violence of anthropocentrism rather than praise of human t­ echnocracy” (McNeilly 58). Confronted with “the all-​too-​human potential to exert reduction and atrocious dominion over the world in the face of recalcitrant cultural and ontological differences” (McNeilly 54), Bringhurst’s emphasis is on “human estrangement not only from each other but, more significantly for him, from earth, the god or goddess whom we have too often taken for granted as a font of infinitely renewable resources” (McNeilly 58). Restoring the deep, ecological bond with a world of which we are inevitably participant on account of our very earthly constitution is central to Bringhurst’s work of a lifetime. Hence, he gently invites readers to breathe through their feet, which is to say to pay attention to “the patterned resonance” (Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor L7) implicit in the world. An erudite man, a widely-​travelled scholar and a cosmopolitan citizen of the world, Robert Bringhurst (b. 1946, Los Angeles) is a true Renaissance man, a humanist genuinely interested in all things human and nonhuman. However, unlike Renaissance humanists, Bringhurst does not conceive of human beings as the measure of all things. He embraces a non-​anthropocentric (or biocentric) view of the world where there is enough room for both human and nonhuman beings, such is the largesse of his mind and his heart, as well as the breadth of his curiosity. That he is a humanist partly accounts for the fact that he is also a polymath and the author of a very prolific work as a poet, philosopher, linguist, translator, typographer, and cultural historian. His entire ­literary output comprises a wide range of poems, translations and essays in such diverse fields as the oral literatures and visual arts of the First Nations of North America; poetry and philosophy, language and meaning, ecological linguistics and translation theory; music, painting and art in general; and reading, writing,

The Peripatetic Humanist and the Vocation of Poetry

9

letterforms, script systems, typography and book design. It is no wonder that Bringhurst’s work has garnered innumerable honours. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada (as of 2013), a former Guggenheim Fellow, and the holder of two honorary doctorates. On the Canadian scene, Bringhurst belongs among a group of poet-​ philosophers –​Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, Dennis Lee, and Tim Lilburn –​concerned with exploring a new form of poetry that is in love with philosophy and the more-​than-​human world. On a different level, Bringhurst is one of the last heirs to High Modernist poetry as represented by such authors as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, as well as a poet with clear Romantic affiliations, including the Transcendentalists R. W. Emerson and H. D. Thoreau. For all of them, poetry was a form of knowing and resonating with the world, and also an art form that demanded a deep sense of vocation for the pursuit of truth, beauty and integrity. On yet another level, Bringhurst belongs among the best representatives of world poetry, composed in very diverse human languages over time, and so he is part of a tradition that places Homer next to Herakleitos, Parmenides, Empedokles, Sophocles, Pindar, Saraha, Dogen, Hakuin, François Villon, Leopardi, Ghandl, Skaay, Valéry, Rilke, Federico García Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. This is universal poetry, one capable of going beyond spatio-​temporal constraints to talk to readers from different cultures and thought-​worlds. A place in tradition is not easily won, though. Bringhurst found his voice through hard intellectual labour, listening closely to the great minds of the past, from a wide range of cultures and languages, “by surrounding himself with sacred texts; by leaning on, and apprenticing himself to, the voices of other human beings from different times and places” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 19). In this respect, Bringhurst’s voracious appetite for ideas prompts him to invoke in his poems a wide spectrum of literary traditions and philosophical systems in an attempt to build a portable vademecum. Tradition is thus the living nutriment upon which his own work is based. “A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest” (The Sacred Wood 125), claimed Eliot in words that Bringhurst surely embraces. Given his “abiding love for the archaic world” (Higgins, “Salvage” 65), the poet-​thinker finds sustaining nourishment in the intellectual legacy left us by our ancestors, both Western and Eastern, regardless of whether they speak such classical languages as Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, Latin or Haida, or such modern languages as German, Italian, French or Spanish, for he is also a life-​long, tireless student of human languages. In fact, “his poems have always measured themselves against, listened to, and spoken with or through the dead” (Higgins, “Salvage” 76), which accounts for the astonishing cultural syncretism we find in Bringhurst’s work

10

Introduction

from beginning to end. If reality is one, then human knowledge is one too, and there is no point in dividing it up into artificially-​contrived compartments or disciplines. In Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities (1998), one of his seminal essays on the oral literatures of North America, Bringhurst speaks in fact of the unity of the humanities. In his view, learning is the true vocation of humankind, and so wonder and curiosity –​the true mothers of art, philosophy and science –​are the best possible answer in the face of the awe-​inspiring intricacy and unbroken unity of the world. Guided by the simple faith that “everything is related to everything else –​and that every one is related to every one else, and that every species is related to every other” (Bringhurst, “Poetry and Thinking” 157), sensuously immersed in the more-​than-​human world, Bringhurst listens to what-​is and comes up with poems and essays that are his personal gift to his fellow human beings. “I think it is not the world’s task to entertain us, but ours to take an interest in the world” (“Poetry and Thinking” 158), Bringhurst maintains, and so his omnivorous intelligence renders the world into an inexhaustible place of wonder rich in complex fascinations for him and for his readers. His intensely penetrating mind has led him to think deeply about reality, to embrace a “distinctive, erudite, cross-​cultural poetics” (Higgins, “Salvage” 62)  and to produce an ­ambitious body of work over the last 50  years. Possibly the most fascinating paradox at the heart of his work resides in the fact that he is a consummate typographer, a lover of letterforms and books as true art objects, and yet he thinks of the poems that constitute his living repertory as being more the product of oral composition than of writing. In other words, his interest in the material, solid form of language does not prevent him from embracing a poetics of listening in which he claims the privileged position of speech over the written word. Books are only caches where poems –​made of mouthfuls of live air –​are temporarily stored for a while, in search of their perfect material incarnation. This, in turn, partly accounts for his own composition habits:  his poems and essays form a work in progress of gigantic proportions that is revisited and refined over the years, as real writing involves a lot of revision. From beginning to end, Bringhurst’s work of a lifetime testifies to a precious coherence, consistency and unity, since his “diverse vocations” are all “facets of a single project” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 5). The poems and essays spanning a long and wide-​ranging career constitute an organic whole that displays a pattern of recurrent thematic concerns grown into full bloom over time. Because of his “concern with wholeness” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 5)  and his awareness of the unity and interconnectedness of reality, Bringhurst is ultimately interested in essences, the immutable beneath the

The Peripatetic Humanist and the Vocation of Poetry

11

changeable, not in appearances. πάντα ῥεῖ, said sharp-​minded Herakleitos about 2,500 years ago: everything is in a state of perpetual metamorphosis and only change remains the same. In his poems, Bringhurst is after the logos, the clarity and elemental truth beneath the cosmos embraced by the Presocratics and the Oriental Buddhist monk-​scholars. From his ancestors he learnt the ­discipline of looking at what is to be seen and to find the miracle of expression in (non)human bodies and things. His metaphysics is physics incarnate. He pays ­attention to the sensory immediacy of what-​is and clings to the facts only to transmute them into durable truths in the form of poems qua inexhaustible artefacts. Bringhurst’s poems demand that we listen, that we see and, above all, that we abandon ourselves to his search for a totality where time and space are unified into an undivided whole. His search after such a totality of time and space finds its verbal incarnation in language marked by crystal-​clear transparency. As Jan Zwicky puts it, “[i]‌n lyric’s idea of the world, language would be light” (Lyric Philosophy L230). Clarity means claritas or sharpness of mind, love of conceptual and linguistic accuracy, and Bringhurst’s love of intellectual precision finds a natural counterpart in his love of a language that dreams of transparency. As a result, there is an inevitable sense of fluency, a sense of perceptual and epistemological accuracy in his thinking and singing. Hence, the words of his poems have the quality or texture of crystal. In this respect, an early piece entitled “Poem About Crystal” captures the best definition of his poems: Look at it, stare into the crystal because it will tell you, not the future, no, but the quality of crystal, clarity’s nature, teach you the stricture of uncut, utterly uncluttered light. (Selected Poems 20)

Bringhurst’s poems are born of his encounter with the creatures populating the more-​than-​human world. “Sun, moon, mountains and rivers,” he says, “are the writing of being, the literature of what-​is. Long before our species was born, the books had been written. The library was here before we were. We live in it” (“Poetry and Thinking” 143). He is indeed an avid outdoorsman and spends much time in the company of loons, moss and lichen, stones and clouds, trees and streams. Transcending the abyss separating the perceiving subject from the perceived world, he comes back from the woods with a handful of live poems firmly rooted in the vibrant matter of the universe. What is more, over the years he has

12

Introduction

developed a new and larger sense of what language is for and has learned to use it to make poems that embody statements of lasting value concerning the nature of reality. For him, language is not simply a vehicle for personal interaction or self-​expression, but rather a sharpened tool of knowledge that allows us to grasp the essence of things. Yet the poet is well aware of the ultimate unknowability of the universe, which defies and eludes the penetrating gaze of speech. Though he makes words sing with clarity, he is not oblivious to the constraints of language to understand what-​is for good.

II  Cartography of a Work in Progress A map outlining the essential topography of Bringhurst’s oeuvre can be drawn with accuracy. The 1970s witnessed the publication of his early books of poems –​ The Shipwright’s Log (1972) and Cadastre (1973) –​and the emergence of the poet as territorial recorder, namely the image of the poet coming to terms with and responding to reality with a maximum of intensity, “recording the fluid work of (the/​a) mind” (Higgins, “Salvage” 67) deeply immersed in the sensuous world, since “[t]‌he mind is a sensory organ like the eye” (Bringhurst, “The Philosophy of Poetry” 101). The world interests the poet much more than self-​expression or the petty egotism of the self, because in his view “[o]ur minds, our brains, our hearts are grown out of the world […]. The world is us, and we are little replicas and pieces of the world. How could the world be anything other than as interesting as possible to us?” (“Poetry and Thinking” 158). An early broadside entitled Pythagoras (1974), followed by the publication of the chapbook Eight Objects (1975), marked the beginning of his complex sequence on the thinking and singing of the Presocratics, who have held endless fascinations for Bringhurst ever since. 1975 was something of an annus mirabilis in his career indeed. A book rich in geological imagery, Bergschrund (1975) collected the most significant poems published in earlier books, chapbooks, broadsides and literary magazines. Rejecting the culturally inherited, Cartesian gap assumed to exist “between the perceiving human subject and the perceived natural object” (Higgins, “Salvage” 74), Bringhurst refuses “the exalting limitation of mind to only divine or human beings” (74) and acknowledges nature as a vast c­ onsciousness, as a “living agent with its own shared languages” (75), as well as “the embodied receptivity” (81) of humans’ inquisitive mind. Hence his emphasis on “the sheer materiality of breathing” (80), which is expressive of homo sapiens’ participation in what David Abram memorably calls “a Commonwealth of Breath” (“Afterword” 313). In words reminiscent of Eliot’s disavowal of poetry as self-​expression, Bringhurst argues that “[c]omposing a poem is a way of leaving the self behind and getting

Cartography of a Work in Progress

13

involved in something larger” (“Poetry and Thinking” 145). If anything, Bringhurst’s poetry is ostensibly marked by impersonality or “the absence of the lyric ego” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 28). After Bergschrund, with his adoption of the dramatic monologue from the Modernists, the poet “disappears behind the mask of one particular historical or mythological figure after another” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 28), behind a vast repertoire of poetic personas that dispels the conventional lyric self. Bergschrund was thus followed by two accomplished dramatic monologues, Jacob Singing (1977) and The Stonecutter’s Horses (1979), which concern the meditations of two old men, the biblical Jacob and the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarca, preparing to die. Throughout the 1970s, alongside biblical pieces that dwell on episodes and stories lifted largely from the Pentateuch stand poems inspired by Greek or Mesoamerican mythologies, as well as translations or versions of poems ­originally composed in classical Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Nahuatl and Italian by such authors as Sophocles, Vidyakara, Imr al-​Qais, a Nahuatl princess who lived in the 15th century, and Giacomo Leopardi. What all these early poems composed in the 1970s appear to have in common is Bringhurst’s “refusal to centre poetic attention in the omnivorous ego” (Higgins, “Salvage” 67), his polylingual cross-​cultural erudition, and a deep sense that his poetry is part of an ongoing collective enterprise started in the very cradle of humanity. As he observes, “[p]‌oetry, like science, is a way of finding out –​by trying to state perceptively and clearly  –​what exists and what is going on” (“Poetry and Thinking” 144). Tradition has left nothing en route and serious poets committed to their calling cannot but go back in time and revisit the ancestors and past masters to see what lessons they can learn from them. Not surprisingly, Bringhurst’s interest in prosody and in the technical part inherent in the craft of poetry, which the poet must master as a test of the sincerity of his commitment to this art, is evidence of Pound’s influence upon the young poet in search of a voice of his own. In fact, he followed Pound’s advice to study prosodic systems to learn the essentials of poetic technique. From the very outset of his career, Bringhurst’s deep interest in rhythm “to infuse his entire body of work” (Wood, “Anatomy” 102)  led him to master and cultivate rhythmic craftsmanship, evident in “the patterns of sound and thought” (106) structuring his poems that seek to emulate the poetry of being. In view of “the rhythmic and multi-​vocal nature of the living universe” (115), Bringhurst thinks of poetry as “a kind of knowing achieved by a harmonious participation in the musical cosmos” (102) and of verse rhythm as “inherently tied to human physiology, and thus a constituent of the rhythmic physiology of the earth and all its creatures” (103).

14

Introduction

The 1980s marked the beginning of a life-​long passion with the oral literatures and visual arts of the native peoples of North America, especially the Haida, who lived in Haida Gwaii (present-​day Queen Charlotte Islands), off the coast of British Columbia. The new decade also witnessed the deepening of an ecological awareness that is pervasive in Bringhurst’s poems till the present, in tune with a non-​anthropocentric conception of reality that views humans as one more thread of the living cosmos. Fostered by his friendship and collaboration with the well-​ known Haida artist Bill Reid –​with whom he produced the collection of stories The Ravel Steals the Light (1984) and The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii (1991), and whose writings he edited as Solitary Raven (2000; 2nd ed., 2009)  –​, the fascination that the First Nations hold for Bringhurst finds a remarkable echo in Tzuhalem’s Mountain (1982), a sonata in three movements that dwells on the experience of a Salish Coast Indian called Tzuhalem who lived with his many wives and children in a mountain named after him in the 19th ­century. It was immediately followed by The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1970–​1982 (1982), which collects the living repertory of Bringhurst’s poems up to then and adds some more new poems. Tending the Fire (1985) is a long narrative poem rich in mythical echoes that recounts a creation-​myth where Old Woman, a character with telluric connotations associated with Mother Earth, gives humans their attributes thanks to the intercession of Dog. On the other hand, The Blue Roofs of Japan (1986) represented the beginning of Bringhurst’s investigation into uncharted territory, namely polyphonic poems for several voices. Set in Japan, this five-​part poem shows Bringhurst experimenting with typographical design to convey the way two voices are intertwined to produce a unified message rich in subtle nuances, musicality and profundity of thought. In his first polyphonic poem, the poet meditates on being and music, the constituent elements of the universe, the origins of writing in the Neolithic, rhythm and prosody as an outgrowth from the earth itself, and the nature of poetry and literary immortality. Interestingly enough, Bringhurst’s experimentation with polyphonic poetry cannot be dissociated from “his growing knowledge of and interest in the art and culture of the Haida fostered by his working relationship with Bill Reid” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 8), who became something of a father figure and mentor to the poet ever since the early 1980s. The fundamental principle of Haida formline art is that “more than one creature can occupy the same space at the same time” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 8), which helped Bringhurst to better grasp the intricate architectural design and noetic prosody of Haida poets Ghandl’s and Skaay’s mythtales, as well as to compose his own polyphonic poems. His essential insight was that polyphony unveils patterns that are not readily visible to the naked ear, which is expressive of the epiphany that “multiplicity is the

Cartography of a Work in Progress

15

central fact of life” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 8). The deeply moral (and democratic) dimension to Bringhurst’s polyphony is evident in his remark that “when two voices intertwine, the space they occupy gets larger, and the mind gets larger with it” (“Licking” 3–​4). 1986 also saw the publication of another important book in Bringhurst’s literary career, Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. It opens with The Book of Silences, another sequence of poems that was a work in progress for a long time, where he explores the thinking and singing of Oriental sages, most of them Buddhist monks and scholars who lived in India, China or Japan centuries ago. As in the case of the 12 poems on the Presocratic philosophers that make up The Old in Their Knowing, the short dramatic impersonations that constitute this sequence are elegantly crafted examples of lyric philosophy or philosophical poetry  –​a poetry rich in gnomic or oracular language that is sensitive to ontological form and seeks to capture the ultimate essence of reality. Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music also includes another important sequence titled The Lyell Island Variations, which represents an exercise in intertextuality whereby Bringhurst revisits masterworks from other literary traditions by such diverse poets as Pindar, Michelangelo, Rilke, Valéry and Neruda to produce variations on poems that are central to world poetry. The book incorporates another version of The Blue Roofs of Japan and two powerful prose statements where the author discusses his own poetics:  the essay “Breathing Through the Feet:  An Autobiographical Meditation” and the interview “Vietnamese New Year in the Polish Friendship Centre.” In addition, Conversations with a Toad (1987), a livre d’artiste designed and illustrated by Lucie Lambert, shows Bringhurst further investigating the possibilities of polyphonic poetry. The ten-​ part poem features characters ­meditating on the plurality of being, the alarming extinction of plant and animal species, and the overexploitation of the earth’s resources by dominant capitalist societies. The 1980s were also prolific years for Bringhurst in the realm of prose writing concerning art, typography and the First Nations, as he edited Visions: Contemporary Art in Canada (1983), he wrote the collection of Haida stories The Raven Steals the Light (1984), Ocean/​Paper/​Stone (1984) and Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters: A Feuilleton in Honour of John Dreyfus (1986), and he edited and contributed portions of text to Part of the Land, Part of the Water: A History of the Yukon Indians (1987). The 1990s were years of indefatigable work on the part of Bringhurst, whose “polyphonic experiments continued to evolve symbiotically alongside his immersion in Haida art and literature” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 37). In 1995 he published The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–​1995, his second selected poems, which replaced The Beauty of the Weapons and collected the most

16

Introduction

ambitious poems he had composed to date, including a new polyphonic work entitled New World Suite No. 3. A long poem for three voices in four movements which enacts a powerful meditation on being, time, history, ecology, myth, and the New World, the Suite denounces the overexploitation of the earth by technologically advanced capitalist societies that give pre-​eminence to money, comfort and power over such elemental values as compassion, grace, ­generosity, and intelligence. In 1995, Bringhurst also published Elements, a moving meditation on the classical elements (earth, water, air and fire) making up the world in language of gnomic texture, illustrated with drawings by Ulf Nilsen. However, the 1990s were largely devoted to typography and to the Haida’s world. He started contributing a number of well-​written essays to the prestigious San Francisco magazine Fine Print, then he edited Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design (1991) and, in 1992, he published The Elements of Typographic Style, now in its fourth edition (2nd ed. 1996; 3rd ed. 2004; 4th ed. 2012), an authoritative guide on typography and style praised by prestigious calligrapher and type designer Hermann Zapf with these words on the back cover: “I wish to see this book become the Typographers’ Bible.” In 1997, Bringhurst published Boats Is Saintlier Than Captains:  Thirteen Ways of Looking at Morality, Language, and Design in a beautifully designed edition, and in 1999, with Warren Chappell, A Short History of the Printed Word. In his essay “Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities,” Bringhurst claimed that there were “a hundred major North American literatures still waiting for recognition” (64), that “[t]‌he subject  of classical Native American literature was nothing more and nothing less than the nature of the world” (78) and that it was “a literature concerned with fundamental questions” (78). He was determined to unearth one of those major oral literatures. In this respect, 1999 was the publication year of A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, the first volume of his monumental trilogy Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers. Two volumes of translations would follow: Nine Visits to the Mythworld. Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas (2000) and Being in Being. The Collected Works of a Master Haida Mythteller. Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay (2001), which, in Margaret Atwood’s view, uncovered “an American Iliad” (188), providing access to what Bringhurst deems classical North American literature, on a par with the great oral epics of other cultures. Thus, the poet-​translator conceived of his twenty-​ year project as “a humanist endeavour” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 36) and believed that the texts of the oral literatures he discovered in archives and rare book collections “might nourish a revival, or more appropriately a renaissance, of North American culture itself ” (37). At any rate, by producing accomplished

Cartography of a Work in Progress

17

translations of Ghandl’s and Skaay’s mythtales in English, he gave classical Haida literature the wider circulation it merits. In the 2000s, Bringhurst produced new ambitious work. Ursa Major (2003; 2009, 2nd revised edition) is a polyphonic polyglot poem that draws on a wide range of sources to recreate the story of the Great Bear constellation, told by multiple voices speaking in several languages  –​classical Greek, Latin, Cree and English. Such works in progress as the Oriental sages and the Presocratics sequences found their definitive textual incarnation in the beautifully designed editions of The Book of Silences (2001) and The Old in Their Knowing (2005). In 2003, Bringhurst published Parmenides. The Fragments, a translation of the Greek philosopher’s extant fragments in a rare edition by Peter Koch, who had already printed Herakleitos (1990), by Guy Davenport, to wide critical acclaim. Shortly afterwards, Bringhurst published the companion volume Carving the Elements: A Companion to the Fragments of Parmenides (2004). 2005 was also another annus mirabilis in Bringhurst’s career, as his New World Suite No. 3 found at last what is possibly its best typographical incarnation in a special limited edition published by the Center for Book Arts in New York. In 2009, Gaspereau Press published his Selected Poems in a beautifully produced edition comprising the best poems of his living repertory, replacing his two previous 1982 and 1995 selected poems. As for his prose writings, he wrote Prosodies of Meaning (2004), on the noetic prosody of the mythtales of oral literatures; The Solid Form of Language (2004), a thoughtful meditation on meaning and typography; Wild Language (2006), a book-​length essay on language as an outgrowth from nature; the chapbook Why There Are Pages and Why They Must Turn (2008); and The Surface of Meaning (2008), on book design in Canada. In addition, he collected his best essays in two landmark volumes, The Tree of Meaning:  Thirteen Talks (2006) and Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking (2007), where he gathered his lectures and writings on meaning, language, philosophy, ecology, polyphony, translation, painting, and the oral literatures of the First Nations. In 2009, he also contributed a foreword to François Mandeville’s This Is What They Say, translated from Chipewyan by Ron Scollon. In the 2010s, Bringhurst composed new books of poems, most of them livres d’artiste in special limited editions where he kept on exploring being in a form of lyric deeply imbued with philosophical thinking: Stopping By: A Poem in Three Parts (2012), a probing meditation on forests with etchings by Caroline Saltzwedel; Hard High-​Country Poems (2015), a translation of a selection of Michelangelo’s poems accompanied by a drypoint engraving by Joseph Goldyne; and Going Down Singing. A Poem in Nine Parts (2017), with ten burnished aquatints by Joseph Goldyne, on the protean nature of waterfalls and being. As for prose, he

18

Introduction

published What Is Reading For? (2011), he edited Kay Amert’s The Scythe and the Rabbit: Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in Renaissance Paris (2012), he wrote Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface (2016), and, more recently, with his wife, Canadian poet-​philosopher and musician Jan Zwicky, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis (2018), three essays on the destruction of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. Presently, he is immersed in an ambitious work in progress, Voices in the Land, “an encyclopedia of the oral literatures and major authors of Native North America, a mammoth effort that he has been compiling, in bits and pieces, ever since he began sleuthing around in archives and rare book collections” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 44). The massiveness of Bringhurst’s oeuvre testifies to an untiring, deep sense of vocation and commitment to poetry as a form of knowing and, ultimately, as an attribute of reality itself. It is also undisputable evidence of his intellectual generosity and his desire to share his precious findings with others.

III An Archaeology of Human Knowledge Tradition is the juice of the past and the lifeblood of poetry, as Eliot affirmed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), one of the central prose pieces in the history of 20th-​century Literary Criticism and one that seems to have had an immense impact on Bringhurst’s conception of poetry as a collective enterprise. Bringhurst writes indeed with the whole burden of tradition not on his shoulders, but rather in his bones. To him it is of the essence to go back in time and search for the best that has already been masterfully accomplished by the ancestors of different literary and philosophical traditions. Like Eliot or Pound before him, he is in search after great poetry capable of transcending spatio-​temporal boundaries. He invokes a captivating simultaneity of texts composed in different languages by our ancestors and he weaves them with great dexterity into the living fabric of his poetry. Words weigh thousands of tons in his poems, partly because they are the treasure-​house of echoes and voices from the past, they are replete with resonances coming from afar, and they are rich in insights that help us navigate what-​is. Consult the ancestors:  this seems to be the self-​imposed discipline that Bringhurst embraces as one of the fundamental tenets of his own poetics. He spends much time not just outdoors, in the open air, listening for whatever lessons birds, mountains, trees or stones may have to teach him, but also in the library, in the company of an aristocracy of thought he deems invaluable, in the hope of mastering both ecological and verbal literacy. His aim is to rescue the essence of the ancestors’ thinking and singing, and to preserve it in poems of lasting value. His poems are therefore a portable vademecum rich in

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references, allusions and echoes that hint at the continuity of humanity and the unbroken unity of knowledge. Humans have not changed that much after all, as we still share our forebears’ concerns. If humanity is one, then knowledge is also one, and preserving the intellectual legacy of the human species is possibly one of the main passions driving the development of human societies. Knowledge is how the human species passes its cultural genes down to subsequent generations and perpetuates itself into the deep future. Tradition holds thus inexhaustible fascinations for Bringhurst. In his view, “no fragment of humanity can hope to comprehend itself except through reference to all others” (“What Is Found in Translation” 86). He looks at the entire literary history of humanity and he learns that a good command of the language is not enough if he is to produce great poems. He needs to know not only the words, but also the technical part associated with the craftsmanship of poetry, as well as the ideas, thoughts, insights and emotions worth preserving. This entails reading the masterworks of his ancestors. But his personal canon is not confined to a Eurocentric or Western tradition alone. His unquenchable thirst for ideas compels him to explore precious works from a wide range of traditions. Bringhurst has thus travelled in space all around the world, both literally and figuratively, in search of sustaining lifeblood for his poems, and he has also travelled backwards in time, to produce pieces of map and pieces of music that testify to the deeply rich and protean nature of human thought. One of the elemental lessons he has come back with after such far-​flung journeying is that the Presocratic poet-​philosophers who lived and thought in the 6th century BCE, the Oriental sages and Buddhist monk-​scholars living in India, China and Japan over the centuries, and the mythtellers of the native oral literatures of North America (the Haida among them) share “an archaic sense of integrity” (Bringhurst, “Breathing” 109), a kind of intellectual honesty and love of the world that are still moving and worth emulating. What these sages, poets and thinkers from such diverse cultural backgrounds had in common was “an awareness of the radiant interconnectedness of all life, an animistic ecology in which “the stones still sing and the light is still alive”” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 19). Embracing the grandeur of what-​is, they did not choose to dominate the world or exercise control over other species. Rather, they fell in love with the cosmos, out of curiosity and wonder, and tried to account for what makes the living earth such a fascinating place. Aware of the interconnectedness of all things, animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, they did not even try to keep “poetry, philosophy, physics, biology, ethics and even theology” apart from each other, for they were “all one pursuit” (Bringhurst, “Breathing” 109). To their inquisitive minds, everything was related to everything else, and humans

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Introduction

were not the centre of the breathing cosmos, much less the measure of what-​is. In a more-​than-​human world, they felt, humans belong among a grander scheme where the mesh of living things is governed by a logos that humans might unveil and grasp if they just pay attention. As Zwicky puts it, “‘Eco’ from οἶκος, house. Ecology as the λόγος of home. The passion of the Presocratics is the passion for integrity in our understanding of humans-​ in-​ the-​ world” (“Bringhurst’s Presocratics” 115). The old in their knowing were thus a navigational compass for Bringhurst to “figure out what all this is” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 19) and so, to this date, “his mission continues to be to help their wisdom endure for the benefit of the entire human family” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 44). One of the uses of poetry, the poet claims, is “to sing thought back into being, to personify it, state it, locate it, to clear the haze” (“Vietnamese New Year” 113). As Wood and Dickinson put it, At the heart of Bringhurst’s mission is the drive to access modes of consciousness not shaped by the industrial world but evolving from cultures outside it, beyond it, and prior to it, in which the essential principle of reciprocity between the human and the rest of the natural world is maintained by myth, philosophy, and literature. Bringhurst has relentlessly sought a poetics of wholeness and a pragmatics of transcendence, reaching for the “archaic sense of integrity” he conceives as belonging to the philosopher-​poets of ancient Greece, Taoist and Buddhist Asia, and pre-​colonial North America. (“Introduction” 5)

It is obvious that the Western world has no monopoly on poetry or philosophy. Pound’s profound influence can be felt in Bringhurst’s “efforts to inhabit the voices and minds of other human beings” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 28), since he shares with the Modernist master the conviction that “literature might serve as “the guide and lamp of civilization” that could rejuvenate Western culture” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 29). The spectrum of sources on which Bringhurst draws in composing his own palimpsestic work is vast. Thus, in the Orient and in other traditions, he finds nourishment for his thinking and inspiration for his poems. Breathing through the feet is what Herakleitos, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedokles, Nagarjuna, Saraha, Dogen and Hakuin knew how to do best of all. In the Pentateuch, Bringhurst finds inspiration in the stories of Genesis  –​the Universal Flood, Moses leading his people to the Promised Land after a 40-​year wandering in the desert, Jacob singing of mountains, stones and his own life. In ancient Greece, Pindar and Sophocles give him tattered fragments of wisdom and remnants of visions that still talk to readers 2,500 years later. In pre-​Islamic poetry, Bringhurst finds the fascinating figure of Imr al-​Qais. In Renaissance Italy, he encounters Francesco Petrarca, the first European scholar, thinking about the meaning of life and death while he composes his last will and testament. Linguist

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John Swanton’s phonetic transcriptions of classical Haida poems dictated by Ghandl and Skaay in the winter of 1900–​1901 uncover a mythic world of epic proportions on a par with Homer’s foundational poems in the Western world that Bringhurst renders into English after painstakingly learning the language on his own. In the 20th century, Rilke, Valéry, Char, Heidegger, García Lorca and Neruda teach him to look at the world from a fresh standpoint and through the lens of different linguistic ecosystems. Furthermore, the singing of frogs and birds as well as musicians as various as Josquin, Haydn, Bach, Stravinsky and Gould teach him much about structure and how to compose poems for multiple voices. Finally, contemporary biologists, anthropologists and scientists, whom he conceives as the true poets of this century, uncover a world of possibilities to Bringhurst’s omnivorous mind in his investigation of what-​is. A thorough archaeology of human knowledge:  this is what Bringhurst’s entire intellectual project is all about, a massive soloist enterprise for a single human being. An Ursprache of utter simplicity, moving musicality and crystal-​clear transparency might allow him to capture the essence of what-​is in spite of the mutability of the world of fleeting phenomena. The whole enterprise might be doomed to failure from the very outset, owing to the gap separating the human consciousness from the materiality of the world, until the thought dawns that homo sapiens is part and parcel of a material-​semiotic whole that comprises bodily natures, animate and inanimate creatures, human and nonhuman beings, all of them partaking of a universal substratum of vibrant, agentic and communicative matter. In his ecological conceptualisation of tradition, the legacy we have inherited from our ancestors is a gigantic tree whose roots (and origins) are firmly embedded in the living soil where it finds the minerals and water it needs to thrive. If the roots themselves stand for tradition, then to be original one has to go back to origins, to the elemental roots that keep the tree standing erect despite the passage of time and the exposure to the elements. And the boughs and leaves stand not just for human lives (unique, irreplaceable, invaluable in themselves), but also for the languages humans have devised over time to give voice to their innermost, unperishable preoccupations: life, time, love, nature, death. In Bringhurst’s view, tradition is about “returning poetry to its ancient roots as a mode of thinking unconcerned with inherited boundaries” (Higgins, “Salvage” 65). Tradition does not consist of fossil words (half dead or half alive), but of handfuls and mouthfuls of live air. That is the reason why speech always takes precedence over writing in Bringhurst’s conception of the genesis of poems, more the product of oral composition than of writing itself. Writing offers but a temporary cache for poems, which are born out of the poet’s elemental encounter with the natural world. They are born in his breathing feet walking the irregular

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Introduction

asymmetry of the earth and in his sensitive, non-​damaging hands, touching the trees and stones around him. At some point, poems come out of his mouth; at some other point, his hands respond to the whole experience by recording the intensity of a fleeting moment in the form of a written poem that seeks to emulate the rhythms and patterned resonance found in nature. Body, mind and speech constitute, in fact, a potent triad at the very heart of Bringhurst’s work: if the mind and the body respond to reality with the maximum of intensity, because the self is an embodied mind, sensuously immersed in the world, then it might be possible to make speech convey profound insights into the nature of things. Trying to capture fleeting moments of beauty and truth in poems is by no means an easy task. In Bringhurst’s view, the test for his own poems is that if they deserve to be called poems at all, they should be able to stand next to trees, mountains or birds as one more manifestation of the poetry that is implicit in what-​is. Therefore, the self-​exacting poet is eager to learn about the music of poetry and the very design of poetry books as art objects from as many different teachers as possible. Ultimately, it is the more-​than-​human world –​with its nonhuman dwellers –​and the library –​a human-​made place –​that offer him countless opportunities to gain nutriment and inspiration for his own poems.

IV Lyric Philosophy, or Poetry as a Form of Knowing Learning is the true vocation of all human beings, says Bringhurst, for whom being faithful to one’s humanity means to want to know the truth about reality. Humankind has spent centuries on end tirelessly asking the same fundamental questions, out of a deep compulsion to know and make things cohere. Humans love order, harmony, rhythm, proportion, and pattern; they rightly despise chaos. Culture itself is how the species transmits itself from the past to the future. In other words, it is the orderly arrangement of the epistemological conquests accomplished by humanity over time, the precious legacy handed down from one generation to another, and the constellation of invaluable insights gained into the essence of reality. Epistemology and ontology cannot and should not be taken apart in any way, as the final object of knowledge is the nature of being. Poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, art in general, philosophy and science are efficient tools not just for self-​expression, but, most importantly, ways of touching the ineffable that we find firmly embedded in reality. Knowing reality requires that we pay attention to the world in the first place. In this regard, Bringhurst observes:  “Poetry is what I  start to hear when I  concede the world’s ability to manage and to understand itself. It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention” (“Poetry

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and Thinking” 145). Attention is therefore the essential prerequisite for knowing to happen and for poems to bloom. That poetry is a form of paying attention to reality is out of the question: the poet would not invest time into trying to find a verbal embodiment for the insights he gains into what-​is unless he felt that they are worthy of being captured and preserved in well-​wrought artifacts for the benefit of other humans and posterity. Reading a poem, one expects to find not just a record of a personal experience by an acute sensibility or sharp mind, but also a droplet of truth about what it means to be human and to be alive in a more-​than-​human world which remains a vibrant mystery to us. Thus, we keep on turning to poetry in search of enlightenment, knowledge, catharsis, and a sense of communion with other (non)human beings who breathed, felt, knew and responded to the world in ways not dissimilar from our own. To Bringhurst’s mind, poetry is the purest form of knowing, and much more than that: it is an attribute or aspect of reality. When one gives up all hope of controlling or possessing the world, the real thinking which poetry is comes to happen. As he points out, attention and humility are in order, for poetry is “something that the world will teach us to speak, if we allow the world to do so” (“Poetry and Thinking” 154). Everywhere being is dancing and the knowing implicit in poetry is a form of dancing to the tune of being. In the poet’s view, “not only is poetry a dance to the rhythms of being and thought, but also a kind of music in its own right” (Wood, “Anatomy” 103). But poetry is only one among different forms of paying attention to what-​is. Like philosophy or science, which are “other forms of attention” (Bringhurst, “Breathing” 107), poetry stems from wonder and curiosity in the face of the vastness of reality –​that is, it is another way of responding and speaking to the world. In all his prose statements accompanying his major poetry books as well as in his seminal essays (“Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known” and “Poetry and Thinking”), Bringhurst has meditated on the nature of poetry, being and knowing with great lucidity. There is indeed a precious coherence to his poetics and his ideas about the nature of poetry from beginning to end. If we look at the etymology of the words “poetry,” “poem” and “poet,” we learn that all three are Greek-​origin words coming from the verb ποιέω, which means “to make.” Thus, poetry (ποίησις, “making”), poem (ποίημα, “something made”) and poet (ποιητής, “maker”) take for granted that poetry is a form of handiwork, of making. But making and doing are not the sole prerogative of homo sapiens, as they are “activities we share with all the other animals and plants and with plenty of other things besides. The wind on the water makes waves, the interaction of the earth and sun and moon makes tides” (Bringhurst, “Poetry and Thinking” 140), which is an explicit acknowledgment of the vitality implicit in a world made of agentic matter.

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Introduction

In an early essay like “Breathing Through the Feet,” Bringhurst writes: “Poetry has nothing essential to do with language. Language just happens to be the traditional means –​but hardly the only available means –​by which poetry is touched, in which it is temporarily captured” (106). Of course, poetry precedes language and even human beings. Poetry always takes precedence, as it “has been here a lot longer –​as long, I suppose, as things have been thinking and dreaming themselves” (Bringhurst, “Poetry and Thinking” 140). As if to reinforce this conceptualisation of poetry as an attribute of reality, Bringhurst writes: “Poets make things. […] But they don’t make poetry, or they don’t make it from nothing. Poetry is present to begin with; […] and poets answer it if they can. The poem is the trace of the poet’s joining in knowing” (“Everywhere Being Is Dancing” 18). He argues that poetry and thinking are truly inseparable gestures of the human mind or, to honour accuracy, aspects of a cosmic consciousness or mind that manifests itself in all (non)human creatures and (in)animate entities populating the universe. As he puts it, “poetry is thinking, real thinking. And real thinking is poetry” (“Poetry and Thinking” 139). He adds: Herakleitos says something that might help us get this clear: ξυνόν ἔστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν: “All things think and are linked together by thinking.” Parmenides answers him in verse: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἔστιν τε καὶ εἶναι: “To be and to have meaning are the same.” These are concise definitions of poetry and brief explanations of how it has come to exist. Poetry is not man-​made; it is not pretty words; it is not something hybridized by humans on the farm of human language. Poetry is a quality or aspect of existence. It is the thinking of things. (“Poetry and Thinking” 139)

Poetry has nothing quintessentially to do with words:  it is not pretty words arranged beautifully to form aural (memorable) patterns that might be appealing to the human ear. Words are only the bricks, “the poem’s linguistic flesh and acoustic skin, but not its essence or its skeleton” (“Everywhere Being Is Dancing” 27). Poetry is an aspect of reality, it is in the very texture of the world, it is an attribute of what-​is. It is hard to learn this elemental lesson, particularly for lovers of words, who have always been taught to think of poems in terms of constellations of words dexterously arranged, forced to express the inexpressible, the unspoken and the unspeakable. Poetry remains a way of making language speak that for which there is no other way of speaking. It is the pristine and privileged use of words, human speech par excellence, devoid of accessory or superfluous ornament, and charged with tons of meaning. The all-​important shift that takes place in Bringhurst’s conceptualisation of poetry is that not only is it a form of knowing reality, a way of touching the ultimate beauty and truth inherent in the world, but also an attribute of what-​is.

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Poetry is what-​is thinking to the full, while poems are “the tips of the icebergs afloat on the ocean of poetry” (Bringhurst, “Poetry and Thinking” 140). Poetry is then larger and vaster; poems are just tentative approximations to the poetry of the real. Words are only our favourite way of capturing this hard-​to-​capture quality of things. But the fact is that poetry is the language the whole world is written in: reality is thinking mountains, trees, stones, rivers, birds, humans. Those are the letters or characters the language of what-​is is written in, or the sounds (or phonemes) the language of what-​is is spoken in. As Brian Bartlett points out in his introduction to Tim Lilburn’s Thinking and Singing (2002), Bringhurst’s definition of poetry might ultimately be “rooted in what Northrop Frye considered the most pervasive metaphor in Western culture:  nature as book, scripture, riddle” (“Introduction” 9). Frye, for his part, was echoing Herder’s notion of Earth’s Poesy, the one embraced by Romanticism in the Old and New World, and anticipating a premise central to Biosemiotics:  what-​is means, being is meaning, which material ecocriticism, upon the semiotisation of matter, has interpreted as a site of narrativity. As for the real use of a poem in this world, Bringhurst observes: “Its one and only use in this world is to honor the gods, the dead, and other nonhumans and humans –​to honor being, in other words –​and maybe to honor nonbeing as well –​by allowing others to join in that knowing” (“Everywhere Being Is Dancing” 18). As he expresses it somewhere else, borrowing Simone Weil’s words, ““[t]‌heir function is to testify, after the fashion of blossoming apple trees and stars.” When words do what blossoming apple trees do, and what stars do, poetry is what you read or hear” (“Poetry and Thinking” 144). Thus, it is ultimately the more-​than-​human world that poems are to be measured against. In “Vietnamese New Year in the Polish Friendship Centre,” the interview included in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, Bringhurst writes that he wants his own poems to resemble those of the Presocratics, the Oriental sages and the Haida mythtellers. He wants to compose poems that are “concerned with a larger, less egoistic sphere” (113), and he wants them to be “not about human beings exclusively, but about the world, and about the painful business of loving and living with the world” (“Breathing” 109–​110). Paying attention is the proper and endless work of the embodied mind: The arts and the sciences are in their origin one pursuit. Biology, physics, mathematics, the painting of paintings, the telling of myths, metaphysical reasoning –​all these are ways of listening to and speaking with the world. They are aspects of intelligence. What else is poetry for? […] Science, like art, is founded on wonder. Light is the precondition of vision –​and what is light but the radiance of what is? Poetry and the sciences are linked inextricably right there. (“Vietnamese New Year” 111)

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Introduction

What Bringhurst admires most about the Presocratics, the Oriental sages and the mythtellers of the native oral literatures of North America is their sharp minds and luminous sensibility: their concern with fundamental questions and the nature of the world; their conviction that reality is one and so knowledge is one; their assumption that poetry, philosophy and science are one and the same pursuit, founded on wonder; and their moral, spiritual and intellectual integrity. Their minds were paradigmatically lyric, philosophical and ecological minds. This is why Bringhurst wants his own poems to resemble the fragments of wisdom left us by our ancestors. Although they have been preserved in tatters and pieces, they speak of a wholeness that is rare or almost unknown in rapacious industrial societies. Where we speak of money and jobs, these ancient poet-​philosophers, artist-​scientists or monk-​scholars speak of truth, beauty, intelligence, wisdom, compassion, and virtue instead. In short, Bringhurst wants his poems to speak of the human and nonhuman realms alike, and he wants his poems to breathe through the feet, to keep in touch with the real world.

V Polyphony and the Democracy of Inter-​Being Bringhurst expounded the essentials of his concept of literary polyphony mainly in two important essays:  “Singing with the Frogs:  The Theory and Practice of Literary Polyphony” (1998) and “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue,” the afterword to his 2005 edition of New World Suite No. 3. In Bringhurst’s view, “the world is a polyphonic place” (“Singing” 37), which is to say that humans inhabit a many-​voiced earth where all beings have communicative capacities and seek to contribute something to the vast ocean of meaning. “Polyphony isn’t a literary or musical technique,” he argues, but “a complex property of reality, which any work of art can emphasize or minimize, emulate or answer, acknowledge or ignore” (“Singing” 57). The single-​minded intuition of coherence that Bringhurst senses in the world as a polyphonic place is the driving force behind his poetry for multiple voices. Dennis Lee describes “the nature of this coherence” in perceptive terms:

(1) It is first of all sonic, auditory. (2) It’s composed of independent skeins of sound. (3) These aural lines are simultaneous; they overlap, creating a braided, richly-​ layered soundscape. In the classic musical sense (or something akin to it), they create polyphony. (4)  The sonic ecosystem resonates with a larger symbiotic order in what-​ is. (“Braided Skeins” 148)

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After stumbling upon the recognition of plurality as a fact of reality, what Bringhurst did next was to reconceive poetry as we know it and to create a new medium (i.e., polyphonic oral poetry), says Lee: “The first step was to recognize that the medium he needed to work in was not print, but sound –​poetry spoken aloud. The next was to compose words for two or more speakers” (“Braided Skeins” 149). However, Bringhurst is a self-​exacting typographer and has made “a series of attempts to translate the polyphonic poems from the medium of sound to that of print” (“Braided Skeins” 152), producing beautiful art objects in the process. Since “unity of being […] needs to consist in difference per se” (McNeilly 56–​57), Bringhurst favours and cultivates in his polyphonic poems “an inclusive plurality: not e pluribus unum […] but e pluribus plus –​one not from but as many” (McNeilly 56). He elaborates on this idea: “A homophonic universe seems as likely as a forest with only one tree, one species of grass, one bird, one beast  –​and just as self-​sustaining as a fishbowl with one fish” (“Everywhere Being Is Dancing” 24). At any rate, there is something profoundly democratic about the notion that being is inherently plural and the way literary polyphony seeks to capture the multivocal texture of reality. As Wood observes, “polyphonic form creates space, expands the mind, and becomes more than the sum of its parts by demonstrating the principle of non-​hierarchical plurality” (“Anatomy” 116). It also makes visible or audible patterns in a pulsating cosmos that are not straightaway discernible to the naked eye or ear  –​patterns that go unnoticed most of the time. Thus, polyphony reveals itself to be “a form of ontological appreciation,” sensitive to the “patterned resonance in the world” (Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor L7). If the cosmos is an interwoven material-​semiotic plexus, and if communication is a universal compulsion shared by all living and non-​living things, then it makes sense to affirm that homo sapiens has no monopoly on meaning or language in a broad sense of the word. Bringhurst himself speaks of the tree of meaning, which is an eloquent metaphor to signify that every single thing in this world has the capacity for speech and that all beings (human and nonhuman, animate or inanimate) partake of meaning in the gigantic book of the universe. But there is much more to this simple metaphor, for it is a vortex of simultaneous layers of meaning: it points to the fact that words are an outgrowth from reality –​that words bloom into existence out of the earth, as if they were grass, flowers or tree leaves. Heidegger, for whom language is the house of being, says die Sprache spricht, which is to say that language speaks through humans’ lips. Not only do we speak a language, but also language speaks us. Bringhurst says die Welt spricht, or Alles spricht, or even die ganze Realität spricht instead. This is a most interesting shift, as he transcends the anthropocentric idea that meaning belongs

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Introduction

to homo sapiens and that language is something quintessentially human. In his biocentric or ecocentric view of the world, every single thing means or partakes of the inexhaustible feast of meaning. The tree of meaning has grown innumerable branches, which are the human languages spoken by humankind over time, but it has also grown the voices in which nonhuman beings and entities speak to each other and to us. As Bringhurst puts it in his book-​length meditation What Is Reading For? (2011), in a vibrant world of inherently communicative entities there is much reading and writing going on, “there are millions of creatures writing meaning on the air and in the earth, crying and calling and gesturing, making trails and leaving tracks” (18). Our current reading habits stem from a long “apprenticeship in paying ecological attention” (Bringhurst, “Reading What Is” 195; our emphasis), because, as the poet argues, “[r]‌eading comes first. The reading of tracks and weather signs is a fundamental mammalian occupation, practised before primates started walking on their hind legs, much less using hands to write” (The Solid Form 14). Polyphony is thus a fact of reality, an aspect of a breathing cosmos. To embrace this multivocal plurality of life –​to admit that the world speaks to us in manifold languages  –​is to acknowledge the plurality of being or, in other words, the polyphonic texture of being. Bringhurst spends much time in the outdoor library of the woods, listening for the elemental lessons the teeming forms of life of subtle ecosystems growing around trees have to teach him. One of those lessons is that the world does not need humans’ protection, but our attention and respect instead. It is in the woods that the poet –​breathing through the feet and following in the steps of ancestors like the Buddhist wandering monks or Thoreau, who also valued the virtues of silence and contemplation away from the bustle of life –​attains his most profound insights into the nature of reality and poetry. The forest is a polyphonic place that teaches him that we live in a vast world where there are voices other than human ones. It teaches Bringhurst something which is even more elementary: the sacredness at the root of what-​is. The world is plural and every single being in it is unique, precious and worthy of consideration, which is the beating heart of his ecological awareness. Bringhurst’s intimation of the undivided wholeness of what-​is is expressive of his view that everything is elegantly connected to everything else along a boundless continuum of existence. What is more, the earth is the only home we humans have and share with nonhumans –​a vulnerable and fragile ecology of vast dimensions that needs our attention, protection and respect. But this ecocentric ethics is also the basis or cornerstone of his polyphonic poems, which stem directly from natural polyphony, i.e., from his awareness that there is a

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sense of democratic multiplicity inherent in what-​is that poetry should seek to emulate. As Bringhurst puts it, Polyphony in the strict musical sense is an invention, just as optical perspective is in painting, but like many inventions (or like all) it is really a formalization and humanization of something uninvented. It’s an indoor version of something found outdoors, in the nonhuman world. That original and natural polyphony is something we take part in whether we’re conscious of it or not. […] Polyphony is the sound of the coexistence of species, which is what every ecology, global or local is all about. It is the music of separate but simultaneous voices in which every voice contributes but no voice is in charge. (“Licking” 8)

If polyphony is an inescapable attribute of reality, it follows that “polyphonic art is a kind of audible counterpart to the symbiotic interrelations of […] creatures who enlarge each other’s lives by following agendas of their own” (“Licking” 8–​9). Poetic polyphony thus arises directly from natural polyphony, from singing with the frogs, the birds and the myriad teeming forms found in nature. In Bringhurst’s own words, a polyphonic poem is “a cohabitation of voices,” a poem that “enacts and embodies plurality and space as well as timelessness and unity. A  poem in which what-​is cannot forget its multiplicity” (“Singing” 36). Over the last four decades, Bringhurst has been learning how to tackle polyphony through words, and he has learnt much not just from other poets from different traditions and thought-​worlds, but also from painters and musicians, especially from polyphonic composers like Haydn, Shostakovich or Bach, from Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy, and, most significant to him, from the world of birds, frogs and insects he listens to in the woods. The whole of Bringhurst’s poetic output can be seen as enacting a shift from homophonic to polyphonic compositions. Ever since around 1986, the inspiring multitude of voices he finds in the wilderness he threads into the living fabric of his own poems, which are a tribute to the human voice and speech, to meaning at large, and also a tribute to what-​is. The Blue Roofs of Japan, Conversations with a Toad, New World Suite No. 3 and Ursa Major constitute the polyphonic constellation of poems in Bringhurst’s corpus, as well as true typographic challenges to a man concerned with the solid form of language. Though The Blue Roofs marks something of a turning point in Bringhurst’s literary career, it is not an isolated work within the wider context of his evolving oeuvre. The spirit of Bringhurst’s oral polyphony can be seen stemming from such early dramatic monologues as Deuteronomy (1974), Jacob Singing (1977) and The Stonecutter’s Horses (1979), as well as from the sonata in three movements entitled Tzuhalem’s Mountain (1982). The origins of his literary polyphony could be traced even

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Introduction

further back in time to a long meditative poem titled “Hachadura” (1975), described as a chaconne for solo intelligence. It is also reminiscent of the “dramatic impersonations” of the Oriental sages and philosophers in the sequence “The Book of Silences,” which were composed during the same period. In another respect, The Blue Roofs of Japan anticipates subsequent polyphonic poems, which would evolve into forms of increasing complexity. At any rate, “[p]‌oems live in the voice, not in the eyes  –​with whatever intonations, emendations, repetitions, or deletions are chosen by the one who sets them free” (12), writes the poet in the preface to The Calling. If Bringhurst conceives of his own poems as being the fruits of oral composition more than of writing, and if he is such an exacting self-​editor, then it is only natural that the next step should be to think that not only do poems live in the voice, off the page, as works perpetually in the making, polishing themselves over time, but in the many voices woven into the living mesh of the more-​than-​human world. The music of the Earth and polyphonic music are thus a genuine model for the kind of polyphony he is after. Being is plural and polyphonic, he says, and so it cannot dwell in a monolithic, homophonic poetry, at least not exclusively. Only by weaving many voices into the sonic fabric of a poem, is it possible to emulate and capture the plurality of being he senses in the world. All of Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems are a sustained meditation on being, time and poetry, as well as lyrical and philosophical variations on what stays the same in spite of the passage of time. Most importantly, they direct readers’ attention to selfish human gain in the Anthropocene and to how the way we dwell in and with the Earth proves fatal to the biosphere. In this respect, his polyphonic poems put a finger on “the hubris which drives colonial expansion and technological consumption of the natural world” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 17). What the different voices speaking simultaneously at times in these poems say exceeds the sum of the parts. Even if they have got their separate agendas, they do contribute to a more complex message. Bringhurst pays thoughtful attention to the world and finds out that being is polyphonic. What is more, we do not own what we know, and what we know is plural, democratic, fluid, the miracle of life perpetually in the making. In his poems for several voices, the invisible and almost intangible stuff called human language solidifies into beautifully designed poetry books printed in several colours. The superimposition of voices is an invitation for readers to relish the inexhaustible beauty of the world, to pay attention to what is in front of them and try to make sense of it. His polyphonic poems are poems where readers can get lost in, works where the plurality of voices mimics the plurality of voices heard in the world. They are inexhaustible works of art that

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one can learn to love and treasure as statements of lasting value on the nature of being and on the place homo sapiens occupies in the larger scheme of things. In short, Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems dream of the possibility of standing next to the beauty of the more-​than-​human world, from which they ultimately stem, to honour the harmony, intricacy and vulnerability of a breathing Earth.

VI A Discursive-​Material Plexus Teeming with Life The practice of ecocriticism amounts to interrogating literary texts as a form of cultural critique overtly marked by a deep sense of engagement, commitment and denunciation of practices that are damaging or destructive to the more-​ than-​human world. To Lawrence Buell, ecocriticism is the “study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (The Environmental Imagination 430; our emphasis). Likewise, in her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty also pointed in the same direction, as she claimed that “human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it” (xix) and that “literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system in which energy, matter, and ideas interact” (xix), anticipating a basic premise of material ecocriticism. Drawing on key insights and concepts developed by Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Andrew Pickering and other theorists of the new materialisms, material ecocriticism has coalesced as a new non-​anthropocentric paradigm ever since the material turn took place in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. The core insights of this new paradigm can be best summarised around a constellation of key concepts and terminology coined by these thinkers in seminal monographs and articles published over the last years. One of the main characteristics of the new materialisms is “the movement from epistemology to ontology” (Hekman, The Material of Knowledge 68). Epistemology is “about representation, and representation is necessarily about dichotomies. Representation gives us two choices: knowledge is either objective or subjective. As long as we remain within the purview of epistemology, this dichotomy is inescapable” (69); ontology, by contrast, is about paying attention to the sheer, vibrant, agentive physicality of things in the world. These dichotomies are overcome in Karen Barad’s agential realism, where she proposes the concept of onto-​epistemology in relation to how the self and material reality are mutually engaged through material-​discursive intra-​actions. Barad’s reflections on quantum

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physics and theory of agential-​realist ontology in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) led her to posit the notion of “intra-​action,” which “replaces the old idea that objects, observers, and observations are discrete and separate entities with the new idea that these phenomena are always entangled, mutually constitutive, and coevolving” (Glotfelty, “Corporeal Fieldwork” 223). The term “intra-​action” refers thus to the vitality of the world and the dynamic interconnectedness of an undivided universe envisioned by quantum physics where the “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Meeting the Universe 33; emphasis in the original) is an ongoing process of shared becoming. In this emergent ontology there are no preexisting relations, but rather intra-​acting agencies coming into being through a relational process and generating the exuberance of the world’s phenomena. At any rate, matter is intrinsically dynamic and alive. Barad claims the following: Eros, desire, life forces run through everything… […] Matter itself is not a substratum or a medium for the flow of desire. […] [F]‌eeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness. Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. (“Interview” 59)

Building on Barad’s insights, Jane Bennett’s intellectual mission in Vibrant Matter (2010) was to “theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality” and to make visible the “material vitality” (xiii, 55)  of all nonhuman forces. By “vitality” Bennett means that (nonhuman) bodies or things have the capacity “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii), for matter is not “raw, brute, or inert” or “passive stuff ” (vii). She argues that “[t]‌his habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) is a “partition of the sensible”” (vii) which does not hold true any more. In the light of the “nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (Vibrant Matter ix), Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter” discards the idea that matter is dead and advocates its agentic powers instead, by which she means that matter is not passive or simply acted upon, but has the capacity to play a role in the fabric of the universe within the framework of a distributive agency. In this context, agency means that “non-​human natures (sentient beings, animals, and matter in its organic forms) are considered to be agentic in the sense that all have powerful effects and in a way interact with their environment in differing degrees” (Adamson, “Source of Life” 267). The philosopher observes that a view of the nonhuman world as inert or inanimate matter “feeds human hubris and our earth-​ destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (Vibrant Matter ix), which partly accounts for the alarming environmental degradation witnessed in the Anthropocene. Most importantly, Bennett claims that “all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network

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of relationships” (13). By painting “a positive ontology of vibrant matter” and dissipating “the onto-​theological binaries of life/​matter, human/​animal, will/​ determination, and organic/​inorganic” (x), the aim of her entire philosophical project is none other than to “promote greener forms of human culture and more attentive encounters between people-​materialities and thing-​materialities” (x). In other words, by dispelling a hierarchy of being, Bennett seeks to instil in people “a more ecological sensibility” so that they begin “to experience the relationship between persons and other materialities more horizontally” (10). Stacy Alaimo’s conceptualisation of “trans-​corporeality” in her essay “Trans-​ Corporeal Feminisms” (2008) and in her book Bodily Natures (2010) entails “a recognition not just that everything is interconnected but that humans are the very stuff of the material, emergent world,” since “the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial” (Bodily Natures 20). Alaimo dispels thus the illusion that the body is separate from the environment and underscores the inevitable interconnection between bodily natures (both human and nonhuman), mind and the living mesh of things, whilst making visible “the transits of substances and discursive practices within and across bodies” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 4). Trans-​corporeality, obviously, “denies the human subject the sovereign, central position” (Alaimo, Bodily Natures 16) it has traditionally o ­ ccupied in Western thought and challenges our onto-​epistemological conventions about how we know and interact with the world. This notion emphasises “the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider ­material world,” as well as a sense of “the human as perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” (Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins” 187). There is no such thing as a “[b]‌ounded human subject,” since “the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial” (“Oceanic Origins” 187). In this regard, in pondering the “‘contact zone’ between human corporeality and more-​ than-​human nature” (Trans-Corporeal Feminisms” 238), Alaimo insists on the porous borders between bodies and the environment, which brings to the fore how, in a world of material beings, “the human is always intermeshed with the more-​than-​human world” (238) and “the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’ ” (238). This train of thought reveals the porosity of our bodies and subjectivities in the face of the flow of substances around us, as well as the permeability “between our flesh and the flesh of the world” (Tuana 188). Pickering’s metaphor of the “mangle” highlights this overall “picture of entanglement, enmeshment, and onto-​epistemological-​ethical unity by replacing the old view of [anthropocentric] binaries (matter and meaning)”

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Introduction

which ignore the hybridity, eel-​slipperiness and elemental vibrancy implicit in the nonhuman “with the new “thick of things” view,” which is expressive of “a densely layered reality” (Glotfelty, “Corporeal Fieldwork” 223). Likewise, in The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton insists on the “radical openness” of our selves to the more-​than-​human world and asserts that “[t]he ecological thought imagines interconnectedness, which I call the mesh” (15). At any rate, the implications of positing the notions of agentic matter and trans-​corporeality are deep, since this line of thinking challenges homo sapiens’ self-​appointed onto-​epistemological pre-​eminence, as well as some of the modern world’s fundamental assumptions, including not only “its normative sense of the human and its belief about human agency, but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and interact with nature” (Coole and Frost 4). In this regard, Kate Rigby argues that the root problem resides in “that modern Euro-​Western onto-​epistemology that infamously sunders nature from culture and construes the nonhuman world primarily as an object of knowledge, economic exploitation, or aesthetic appreciation, but rarely as agentic, communicative, and ethically considerable” (“Spirits” 283). The world is populated by feeling, sensitive material bodies intra-​acting with each other all the time. To redefine our relationships with the world around us is tantamount to rethinking who and what humans are within a framework of environmental ethics and politics. In Rosi Braidotti’s view, this redefinition of our very nature entails “a shift away from anthropocentrism, in favor of a new emphasis on the mutual interdependence of material, biocultural, and symbolic forces in the making of social and political practices” (“The Politics” 203–​204). To put it in Rigby’s own words, what is needed is an “onto-​epistemology of vibrant matter, material-​discursive enmeshment, biosemiotics, and intra-​active knowing and becoming” (“Spirits” 283). A  huge dose of humility is in order. Recognising our material embeddedness in a vast mesh of intra-​acting agencies –​ accepting that we are all interconnected, as current scientific evidence from quantum physics demonstrates apropos how our bodies relate and intra-​act with the material world –​is a most salutary practice. It teaches us humility and compels us to rethink the ethical implications of the way we relate to the more-​than-​human world. In Barad’s view, “ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part” (Meeting the Universe 384), which will inspire a greater sense of the extent to which we are all inextricably related to each other in the more-​than-​human world. In other words, ethics is not about “right response to a radically exterior/​ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationships of becoming of which we are a part” (Meeting the Universe 393). An “ethics of more-​than-​human “mattering”” (Rigby, “Spirits” 284) that acknowledges humankind’s kinship ties with a breathing cosmos –​home to nonhuman others and

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vibrant entities –​is therefore a matter of the utmost urgency, particularly in the midst of the environmental crisis humankind is facing in the Anthropocene. For their part, building upon the insights of the thinkers mentioned above, material ecocritics Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann have replaced the idea of inert materiality with a conceptualisation of matter as “a site of narrativity, storied matter, a corporeal palimpsest in which stories are inscribed” (Iovino, “Introduction” 451). Incidentally, it was Iovino that first introduced the concept of narrative agency in her 2013 essay “Toxic Epiphanies.” In Iovino and Oppermann’s view, not only is matter vibrant and agentive, but also communicative: “matter itself becomes a text where dynamics of “diffuse” agency and nonlinear causality are inscribed and produced” owing to “matter’s ‘narrative’ power of creating configurations and substances, which enter with human lives into a field of co-​emerging interactions” (“Material Ecocriticism” 79–​80). The project of material ecocriticism aims at a mode of re-​enchantment, at making visible the vibrant complexity of a world teeming with “unexpected life and astonishing textualities” (Cohen, “Foreword” x). As David Ray Griffin explains, the disenchantment of nature entailed “the denial to nature of all subjectivity, all experience, all feeling” (2), which resulted in the commodification of nature as a pure exterior to the self and in an affirmation of human exceptionalism. However, all matter is “storied matter” and “the world’s material phenomena are knots in a vast network of agencies which can be “read” and interpreted as forming narratives, stories” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 1) where human and nonhuman are inextricably linked to each other. Far from being a pure exterior or shell, the world we inhabit is alive with “intermingling agencies and forces that persist and change over eons,” entangled in “a constant process of shared becoming” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 1). The intention of material ecocriticism is thus “to re-​enchant reality, claiming that all material entities, even atoms and subatomic particles have some degree of sentient experience and that all living things have agency of their own” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism” 78). This “material “mesh” of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 1–​2) betrays the interrelation between discourse and matter and constitutes the object of study of material ecocriticism, which examines “matter both in texts and as a text” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 2) without falling into patterns of thinking based on anthropocentric dichotomies of transcendental humanist thought such as culture vs. nature, human vs. nonhuman life, mind vs. matter, language vs. reality. As a result, this approach to the study of material-​semiotic reality transcends “the chasm between the human and the nonhuman world in terms of agency” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction”

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Introduction

2)  and acknowledges that the material world (encompassing nonhuman life-​ forms and inanimate matter) is agentic and capable of conveying meaning as part of “a hybrid, vibrant, and living world” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 3). This involves, in short, the semiotisation of matter and the acknowledgment of the pulsating force at the heart of things. The concept of agency is central to the whole intellectual project of material ecocriticism. As Iovino and Oppermann put it, agency is not the sole prerogative of human beings and is not to be “exclusively associated with human intentionality” (“Introduction” 3). Rather, it is “a pervasive and inbuilt property of matter” and so “reality emerges as an intertwined flux of material and discursive forces, rather than as [a]‌complex of hierarchically organized individual players” (“Introduction” 3). This entails embracing the much more generous relational ontology implicit in Bennett’s “theory of distributive agency,” according to which the “root or cause of an effect” (Vibrant Matter 31)  is not ultimately exclusively human, but rather “a material-​ semiotic network of human and nonhuman agents incessantly generating the world’s embodiments and events” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 3). Nonhuman is here an umbrella term that comprises a confederation of agencies, i.e., sentient human and nonhuman animals, all other life-​forms, and seemingly inert matter or agents ranging from blizzards to metals, power plants to information networks. All of them act together and take part in a global conversation between human and nonhuman beings that are inextricably and indissolubly enmeshed, entangled, fused together in a gigantic material-​semiotic whole. The world’s phenomena are all in perpetual relation to each other and life is an embodied process of understanding that engages all beings, “from the humblest forms of single-​ cell life upwards” (Wheeler, “The Biosemiotic Turn” 279). As Barad contends, “[m]attering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (Meeting the Universe 3), matter and meaning are inseparable, and the world’s “phenomena result from the intra-​actions of material and discursive practices and agencies, which coemerge at once (hence intra-​ and not interaction), constituting the world “in its ongoing becoming”” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 4). In other words, “the porosity of biosphere and semiosphere” is expressive of the fact that “meaning and matter are inextricably entangled, constituting life’s narratives and life itself ” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 5) and that the world is a “web teeming with meanings” (Wheeler, “The Biosemiotic Turn” 270). Nature and culture stop being asunder and become a hybrid called “natureculture,” to use Donna Haraway’s term as deployed in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species Meet (2008). Likewise, Tuana urges the recognition of “the materiality of the social and the agency of the natural” (210).

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Acknowledging the textuality of matter is one of the fundamental premises of material ecocriticism. However, it is important to note that reading matter as a site of narrativity is a “heuristic strategy” or “dis-​anthropocentric stratagem” employed by material ecocriticism with a view to “reducing the distance between the human and the nonhuman” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 8). In this regard, the core impulse beneath material ecocriticism is, to borrow a phrase from Cohen, to “apprehend the environment dis-​anthropocentrically” (“Ecology’s Rainbow” xxvi) in order to unearth the similarities and symmetries between humans and nonhumans. In Bennett’s compelling argument: A touch of anthropomorphism […] can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up parallels between material forms in “nature” and those in “culture”, anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphism. (Vibrant Matter 99)

Meeting the universe halfway, trying to apprehend a world from which we cannot be disentangled, as we are “a part of that nature that we seek to understand” (Barad, Meeting the Universe 67), homo sapiens comes up with forms of literature and other cultural creations that are, upon closer scrutiny, the fruits of “material-​ discursive encounters” and of “the intra-​action of human creativity and the narrative agency of matter” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 8). The world is thus “a “dense network” of agencies” (Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism” 22)  and the human self is situated in “this dance of matter and meanings” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 9), where “[k]‌nowing is a matter of intra-​acting” (Barad, Meeting the Universe 149). Put simply, humans are not “outside observers of the world. Neither are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-​activity” (Barad, Meeting the Universe 184). At any rate, the fundamental tenets of material ecocriticism that will guide the critical analysis of Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems in this monograph are the following: [A]‌distributive vision of agency, the emergent nature of the world’s phenomena, the awareness that we inhabit a dimension crisscrossed by vibrant forces that hybridize human and nonhuman matters, and finally the persuasion that matter and meaning constitute the fabric of our storied world. (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 5)

Interestingly enough, as Greta Gaard suggests, some of the core premises of the new materialisms and material ecocriticism have striking philosophical and spiritual affinities with Buddhist concepts of impermanence, no-​self and dependent

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Introduction

origination. As she observes, those uninterested in spirituality can access the idea of no-​self through Alaimo’s notion of “trans-​corporeality” and Barad’s reflections on the “intra-​actions” of the human and nonhuman. What is more, “Buddhism’s dependent origination is also articulated through Nancy Tuana’s exploration of “viscous porosity,” Andrew Pickering’s definition of the “mangle,” and the new materialist focus on the entanglements of matter and meaning” (Gaard 291). Thus, “the “entanglement” of living and nonliving matters, or of bodily natures, may find its precedent and complement in Buddhism’s concept of dependent origination, the understanding that no one thing exists apart from another” (Gaard 292). This amounts to an enhanced awareness of inter-​being, i.e., of the fact that everything is connected to everything else along a continuum of existence, an insight John Muir expressed in memorable words in my First Summer in the Sierra (1911): “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” (35).

VII Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue Given the sheer massiveness of Bringhurst’s oeuvre, “the paucity of critical writing” (Wood and Dickinson, “Introduction” 4) on his work is surprising, to say the least. However, Listening for the Heartbeat of Being:  The Arts of Robert Bringhurst (2015), a volume edited by Brent Wood and Mark Dickinson that collects contributions by literary scholars and other professionals, does justice to the multifaceted vocations of a humanist. The main subject matter of this monograph is Bringhurst’s poetical works, because even if he is a polymath, his most elemental vocation is poetry. His interest in poetic experimentalism led him to shift from composing homophonic to polyphonic poems and hence this book focuses on the evolution of the four multi-​voiced poems Bringhurst produced between 1986 and 2003 –​The Blue Roofs of Japan, Conversations with a Toad, New World Suite No. 3 and Ursa Major –​as technically accomplished exemplars of oral polyphony and ecopoetry. Though labels as various as “green poetry” (Gifford, 1995), “environmental poetry” (Scigaj, 1999), “ecological poetry” (Gilcrest, 2002), “ecopoetry” (Scigaj, 1999; Bryson, 2002 and 2005)  and “Anthropocene lyric” (Bristow, 2015) have been used over the last 25 years, the term “ecopoetry” is the most widely used nowadays by ecocritics.2 In this regard, J. Scott Bryson has offered the most comprehensive definition of ecopoetry to date. A  timely imaginative response to the unprecedented environmental crisis we are witnessing in today’s 2

Gifford employs the term green poetry to refer to “those recent nature poems which engage directly with environmental issues” (3), whereas Scigaj draws a distinction between ecopoetry, which “persistently stresses human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of

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world, he argues, ecopoetry is marked by three main features: “an ecological and biocentric perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world; a deep humility with regard to our relationships with human and nonhuman nature; and an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality,” leading to “condemnation of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe” (Bryson, The West Side 2). A monograph on Bringhurst’s innovative polyphonic ecopoems is in order to make them visible to a readership awaiting to discover him outside Canada. In Dennis Lee’s opinion, “their originality falls outside the bounds of experimental orthodoxy –​which means that a major poetic innovation has remained all but invisible, hidden in plain view” even if “the landscape of poetry has been altered in a fundamental way” (“Braided Skeins” 147, 153). More specifically, Bringhurst’s groundbreaking polyphonic poetry will be analysed in this volume largely through the theoretical lens of biosemiotics, ecophilosophy and material ecocriticism (the core conceptual tools of which have been briefly outlined in the previous section), as all four poetical works, in seeking to emulate the plurality and polyphonic structure of the world, “direct our sensory, linguistic and imaginative attention toward a material vitality” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 19) that is pervasive in the cosmos. Engaged with “foundational questions concerning ontology and ecology” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 30), Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems show him listening to the vibrancy of matter, to the entanglements of (non)human and (in) animate actants in a world that is an interwoven unity, and responding to the intrinsic polyphonic texture of what-​is by composing poems that are oral at their roots. It is the creativity and flux inherent in thing-​power that he captures through the medium of sound, as betrayed by this reflection in “Singing with the Frogs”: What city dwellers frequently call ‘silence’ is the ebb and flow of birdsong and the calls of hawks and ravens, marmots, pikas, deer mice, singing voles, the drone of gnats and bees and bee flies, and the sounds of wind and rain and running water. The world is a polyphonic place. (37)

As McNeilly observes, the aim of Bringhurst’s poetry is “to produce a “lyric ecology”” (52). If Bringhurst conceives of poetry as “the musical density of cyclic feedback systems” (37), and environmental poetry, which “reveres nature and often focuses on particular environmental issues, but without the ecopoet’s particular concentration on nature as an interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (37). Gilcrest uses the term “ecological poetry” in contradistinction to romantic poetry or contemporary nature poetry and ascribes to it a critique of the current environmental crisis, “an ecocentric ethic of interconnectedness, reciprocity, and, in some instances, radical egalitarianism” and “an appeal to revolutionary transformations” (24) in the light of the insights of ecological science.

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being” (Pieces of Map 10), “an enmeshment of the ontological richness of the given world and its human witnessing, our attentive listening to its singing” (McNeilly 52), then it is no wonder that the poetic project of a whole lifetime should consist in “attend[ing] as closely and as fully as his language can to the cadences and textures of that “density of being,” that enmeshment” (McNeilly 52) through a poetics of listening and disclosure. It is a poetics of disclosure not without reason, because “the polyphonic experience is, among other things, an opening unto presence” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 36), a singing of being into visible audibility. Though Bringhurst’s poems “draw toward ontic ­abstraction” and “a broadly philosophical poetic” (McNeilly 52), his metaphysics is ultimately physics incarnate, as his poems are ultimately born of his encounter with earthly vibrant matter and minute particulars which are transmuted into epiphanic, oracular disclosure concerning foundational questions such as being, time, space, history, speech, the ultimate unknowability of what-​is. The term lyric ecology brings together lyric or poetry as an attribute of reality, and ecology, which couples οἶκος (Greek for home) and λόγος (ordering principle beneath the cosmos), “a speaking towards home” (McNeilly 52), by which Bringhurst means “a network of territorial and natural relationships” and also “the co-​ presence of an attentive human mind within the tangle and flow of the non-​ human” (McNeilly 52; our emphasis). The perceiving mind is inseparable from the perceived world of which it is a part, since it is an embodied, enworlded mind intra-​acting with the mind of the world –​i.e., a larger consciousness implicit in the things and creatures populating the more-​than-​human world. Each of the four chapters in this book offers a close listening to each of Bringhurst’s poems for multiple voices and seeks to shed light on his polyphonic mode of composition. Thus, ­chapter 1, “Facing the Sky, Be Vast, Blue & Quiet,” is a reading of vibrant matter in The Blue Roofs of Japan, where Bringhurst is shown capturing Earth’s polyphonic poesy, recording soundscapes of a more-​than-​ human world, and essaying a jazz duet or a score for two interpenetrating voices for the first time in his literary career. Though it may seem relatively simple, The Blue Roofs of Japan was “a momentous step” (Lee, “Braided Skeins” 149) whereby the poet ventured into unknown territory and “typographical terra incognita” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 39)  for the first time. A  duet in five parts, “[t]‌he first part is a morning song, a greeting to the “rich disordered earth.” The sections that follow explore the world through the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. The piece lasts about ten minutes” (Lee, “Braided Skeins” 149) when performed by two voices. In Lee’s view, the poem tackles themes that are ­central to Bringhurst’s poetic oeuvre:  “the sanctity of planet earth; the Neolithic fall from hunting and gathering into organised agriculture; the dual predation and

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necessity of art, which should be composed for the gods” (“Braided Skeins” 150). It closes with an invitation for the reader-​hearer to become one with the more-​than-​human world, i.e., to be in and of an earth where we live sensuously immersed in a vast network of material-​semiotic relationships. Chapter 2, “Toads and Deep, Geological Time,” focuses on Conversations with a Toad, a powerful meditation on humans’ relation with the nonhuman which brings together polyphony and an increasing ecological awareness in a long poetical sequence consisting of ten sections. The elementary lesson the toad teaches homo sapiens is that nature preexists and outlives us, and that it does not need our protection, but our respect instead. It draws our attention not only to the fact that the massive extinction of species and the environmental crisis of our age are “a consequence of human neglect and malfeasance” (McNeilly 56), but also to the lesson of humility the toad has embodied ever since the Precambrian Era, living in harmony with its surrounding ecosystem without exerting dominion over it. Most importantly, the toad prompts homo sapiens to transcend the Cartesian divide between self and no-​self, mind and world, for both are inextricably linked to each other as part of a breathing cosmos, a “Commonwealth of Breath” where the mind is a model of the world with all its dwellers and life forms. Chapter  3, “Breathing Through the Feet,” deals with New World Suite No.  3, a complex poem that explores being, time, history, poetry, and ecology in four movement for three voices, and “tells the story of the retreat of the civilizations of North American antiquity and the dispersal of their resident myth-​creatures before the deluge of European explorers and settlers” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 39). The pristine land that newcomers encountered was “the staging ground for the victory of the Western spirit” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 39). Asserting their dominion and ownership over the whole continent, the early colonisers turned the New World into a “construction site of pit mines, logging slash, urban sprawl, and the “acres of radioactive glass” at the Alamogordo nuclear-​test site” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 39), causing much havoc and destruction in the process. The New World stands metonymically for the whole world, and so the theme of Bringhurst’s polyphonic masterpiece is “our catastrophic assault on earth, in the Americas and around the globe –​“all the desanctified places.” Performing time is about fifteen minutes” (“Braided Skeins” 150), writes Lee, who also highlights “the virtuosity with which Bringhurst can orchestrate this spoken chamber music” (150). In short, by tessellating pieces of map and pieces of music, New World Suite No. 3 relies on cultural syncretism and prosodic experimentation to make visible the piecemeal destruction homo sapiens is wreaking on the biosphere as the home life has built for itself, whilst instilling in humankind a sense that it is possible to dwell on earth with duty and responsibility.

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Chapter 4, “Just a Breath Away from Darkness,” explores the Babel-​like dramatic poem Ursa Major inspired by the Greco-​Roman myth of the Great Bear. A polyglot and polyphonic piece for several voices, Ursa Major weaves Greek, Latin and Cree sources into a unique poem of mythical resonances that builds on the structural conceit that “whole ontologies can pass through one another, occasionally overlapping, exchanging motifs” (Dickinson, “Robert Bringhurst” 43). A beautifully intricate poem, it was performed as a choreographed piece of drama by the New Dance Horizons company in Saskatchewan in March 2002. It retells two myths of the bear constellation using Ovid’s account of Callisto’s story as preserved in Book II of his Metamorphoses and a Cree story, as told by the blind, illiterate mythteller Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw to Leonard Bloomfield on a Saskatchewan reserve in the summer of 1925. Composed in several languages that collaborate to tell the universal myth of Ursa Major as embodied in the story of Callisto and of the Bear Woman, Ursa Major juxtaposes different literary traditions to create a magnificent tapestry that is a pleasure to read. Likewise, it is a deeply subversive poem that gestures towards the danger of a single story by uncovering and juxtaposing different versions of the same myth beneath the shining bits of the Great Bear up there in the night sky. The volume closes with a conclusion titled “The Mind Is the World: Lyric and Ethics in the Age of the Anthropocene,” which gathers all the threads and insights at the core of the ecocritical reading of Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems in all four preceding chapters. It highlights three conceptual nodes: poetry as thinking and singing, as a form of knowing, and as an aspect of reality; the self as an embodied and enworlded mind situated in the matrix of an entangled, breathing earth; and the ethical dimension implicit in ecopoetry or Anthropocene lyric as a form of educating citizens’ sensibility to dwell on earth with a sense of duty. Anthropocene lyric, or environmentally-​sensitive poetry, is not just a way of responding to the conundrums poets are faced with in an age of climate crisis, but also a tool for ethical fashioning that acts in the first place on our imagination to prompt us to rethink the way we relate to the more-​than-​human world. Ecopoetry makes it possible for humanity to envision alternative ways of dwelling on earth with a modicum of grace and responsibility. Physics, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics are inextricably linked in Bringhurst’s poetry, since, out of a tremendous sense of curiosity and love of what-​is, the poet-​philosopher unearths isomorphisms that gesture towards the deep entanglements of mind and world, spirit and matter, body and mind and speech, the human and the nonhuman, as part of a breathing earth.

1 Facing the Sky, Be Vast, Blue & Quiet I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth. —​Walt Whitman, “A Song of Rolling Earth,” Leaves of Grass (1855), p. 187.   We are a part of that nature that we seek to understand. —​Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), p. 67.

I A Poem in Search of Its Perfect Form Form exists to honour content. This is the fundamental typographical premise Bringhurst embraces in composing his poems for multiple voices. Being such a self-​exacting typographer, sensitive to the luminous details implicit in printed words, it is no wonder that The Blue Roofs of Japan should have been a work in progress for a long time. In fact, interpellated by a poem meant to be performed by two interpenetrating voices, Bringhurst spent 24 years looking for its right incarnation in the human voice and on the page. The editorial history of the poem  –​with various textual incarnations over time  –​testifies to its complex evolution. The Blue Roofs of Japan was first published in Lines Review (Edinburgh) in January 1986. It included “Program Notes” dated Vancouver Harbour, July 1985, and was dedicated to American novelist Audrey Thomas, with whom Bringhurst had shared a two-​week reading and lecture tour in Japan in the spring of 1985. It was her voice that sparked the poem into existence, as the dedication in subsequent editions makes clear: “for Audrey Thomas, in whose voice it all began.”3 In this first appearance, the text does not look like a polyphonic poem, as there is no interpenetration of the two (male and female) voices, or, at any rate, the typographical incarnation of the poem does not succeed in conveying a sense of synchronic performance. The poem and the “Program Notes” were further revised in The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Score for Interpenetrating Voices, published 3 Bringhurst gives a detailed account of the genesis of the poem in the afterword to New World Suite No. 3: “Twenty years ago, more or less, I was travelling by train in Honshu with the novelist Audrey Thomas. Audrey, looking out the window at the blue roofs, said, “If you lived in a house with such a blue roof, you’d wake up happy every morning.” Over the next few days, in the back of my head, these became the opening words of a poem. […] It was jumping back and forth between Audrey’s voice, in which it had begun, and mine, in which I thought it might continue. […] So the poem passed its problem on to me, in the form of a text I didn’t know how to print or perform” (“Licking” 3).

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in book form in special limited editions by Barbarian Press and William Hoffer respectively in 1986. Later on, it was collected in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986), with the two voices superimposed, printed in black and blue ink. With the subtitle changed to A Duet for Interpenetrating Voices, the poem and the program notes were further revised in The Calling (1995), where the male voice is in roman and the female voice is in indented italics, and in Selected Poems (2009), where the text is printed in black and blue ink, on facing pages that the reader is expected to read simultaneously, in what Bringhurst deems a “legible and affordable” (Selected Poems 265) form at last. In all editions, the choice of font colour is deliberate, as “blue ink creates an association between the voices, the blue roofs, the sky, and water” (McLeod 159). Though the original 1985 “Program Notes” fulfilled a twofold purpose by insisting on the polyphonic nature of the poem and by shedding light on some oddities and Japanese references, later versions of the same shifted the emphasis toward instructions on at least two ways of approaching the poem’s performance –​either silently, by reading the words on the page aloud in one’s mind, or through the recitation in a performance, which requires two voices for actually speaking the poem aloud. The challenge for the poet-​typographer and his editors was there from the outset:  for the first time in his literary career, Bringhurst was venturing into new terrain and composing a poem for simultaneous voices. Polyphonic poetics posed the typographical challenge of how to graphically represent the superimposition of two voices speaking at the same time to produce a unitary Gestalt of sound and sense. Though puzzling at first, the poem was also an aesthetically rewarding and intellectually challenging experience for readers, and it anticipated subsequent polyphonic poems of increasing complexity. Beauty has always been an attribute of Bringhurst’s publications. Thus, The Blue Roofs of Japan is a paradigmatic example of the book as an elegant human-​ made artifact,4 and it was awarded the 1986 Literary Prize for Poetry of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This poem in five parts was meant as a score for a “jazz duet,” but there was no room in it for improvisation at all. The lessons Bringhurst had learnt from natural polyphony and polyphonic music were present throughout. The poet produced a number of prose statements 4 In a review of the book, William Bright claims that The Blue Roofs of Japan is a typographical achievement:  “[T]‌he design of the book […] is effective in very straightforward ways. The Japanese calligraphic version of the title, stamped in blind on the cover as well as printed in black on the title page, combines with the oriental folding and binding to support the geographical localization of the text” (127).

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where he put forward his ideas concerning literary polyphony. Thus, the Program Notes preceding the poem in each textual incarnation, his essay “Singing with the Frogs” (and Jan Zwicky’s and Sean Kane’s responses to it), “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue” (the afterword to New World Suite No. 3), Dennis Lee’s different conception of polyphony as enacting meditation, and the Trent Colloquium on polyphony held in 1996, of which Robyn Sarah’s testimony has been preserved in print, constitute a probing meditation that illuminates the nature of Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems. From the very beginning, Bringhurst is concerned to use the term “polyphony” with as much intellectual accuracy as possible. He had the literary precedents of Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting, who searched for a verbal analogue for the fugue, but ended up composing homophonic poems instead. In Bringhurst’s view, the starting point for literary polyphony is to be found in the polyphony of the more-​t han-​human world. In accordance with the biosemiotic insight of a universe “perfused with signs, meanings, and purposes which are material and which evolve” (Wheeler, “The Biosemiotic Turn” 279), Bringhurst is convinced that homo sapiens has no monopoly on language or meaning. As Timo Maran suggests, “sign processes take place not only in human culture but also everywhere in nature. […] Meaning is the organising principle of nature” (455, 461). Humans live in a many-​voiced world were human languages are placed side by side with the languages of the nonhuman. In turn, David Abram, for whom language is a property of animate earth and not the sole prerogative of homo sapiens, all things and beings have “the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings” (Becoming Animal 172). Literary polyphony is thus a way of emulating or replicating natural polyphony. Singing with frogs, Bringhurst composes polyphonic poems which are a gathering of beings speaking simultaneously to produce a multilayered message rich in environmental awareness. Though each voice has its separate agenda, none cancels what the other has to say, and the result is much more enriching, closer to the multivocal vibrancy of a world where “bodies are living texts that recount naturalcultural stories” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 6). Most critical essays and reviews devoted to The Blue Roofs of Japan fail to do full justice to the depth and complexity of a poem characterised by an intense lyricism, clarity of language, and profundity of thought. They restrict themselves to a description of the book qua art object or polyphonic poem, but do not say much apropos its overall architecture, semantic density and the way motifs unfold through the interweaving of singing and thinking enacted by the two

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voices. A polyphonic poem is an extraordinary genus of lyric, as Zwicky writes in “Being, Polyphony, Lyric:  An Open Letter to Robert Bringhurst,” her lucid response to “Singing with the Frogs.” The Blue Roofs of Japan is not merely a poem for two voices speaking contrapuntal texts, for the totality of the work of art transcends the simple sum of the parts, and something with the texture of transcendence is being communicated to the reader. The poem is a meditation on vibrant matter and the four classical elements (water, earth, air, fire) the world is made of; on poetry as a form of knowing being; on the need to reawaken to our bond with the world by letting our body resonate with the flesh of the earth; on breath, speech and the origins of writing; and on the logos governing the order and beauty implicit in the world. It closes with a calm, optimistic invitation for the reader to become one with a breathing cosmos where everything falls exactly into place.

II  Capturing Earth’s Polyphonic Poesy It was in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) that ecophilosopher David Abram first used the term “more-​than-​human” as a way to transcend the nature-​culture divide, insisting that “the human world should be considered a subset of the more-​than-​human world, as the subset of a material collective that contains, yet exceeds, all our human designs” (Iovino and Oppermann, “Introduction” 16). In The Anthropocene Lyric (2015), Tom Bristow employs “more-​than-​human” as “a general term reminding us that the non-​human world (on which humans are absolutely dependent) has agencies of its own” (126) and offers “a focal alternative to the prevailing human/​non-​human perspective in bio (life) and geo (earth); it celebrates the ‘livingness’ of the world, in which life is technologically molten” (6). In turn, quantum physicist David Bohm warns against the pitfalls of a fragmentary perception of reality and insists that “both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality” (9), for reality is an unbroken wholeness, intent as humans might be on dividing what is really indivisible. Bohm’s insight substantiates Barad’s intuition that “[w]‌e are a part of that nature that we seek to understand” (Meeting the Universe 67). All of these thinkers gesture towards the interconnectedness of a living world and the dissolution of the Cartesian mind vs. matter dichotomy. In this regard, an ethics of relationality that affirms our deep kinship with the more-​than-​human world and binds us to all living creatures and non-​organic matter is at work in The Blue Roofs of Japan. Confronted with “the universe as a vast system of experiencing individuals” and with the vitality of matter as being “affective, and signaling” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 6, 117), Bringhurst responds

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to this overwhelming sense of interconnectedness with a meditative poem that somehow mimics the vibrancy it seeks to capture through the medium of words. An epiphany happens when the poetic persona comes to the realisation that homo sapiens belongs in this larger mesh of things, where trees, water, gardens, roofs and sky partake of the same other-​than-​human vitality. The very ontology of these discrete elements that are discernible in the vast web of existence “emerges through relationality” (Kirby 76), through human and nonhuman entanglements that betray the indistinguishability between observer and observed, between body and environment, between perceiving mind and perceived world. Bennett’s intuition is that “the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds” (Vibrant Matter 116), which echoes Barad’s insight that humans are “part of the world in its differential becoming” (Meeting the Universe 185). However, what-​is always takes precedence: “nature does not require human literary skills to write its complexity into comprehensible format” (Kirby 87). Even poets qua human scribes are part of the vast material-​semiotic web of the universe. They respond to the universe the best way they can, trying to capture the vitality inside and around them through poems, and Bringhurst is no exception to this. The Blue Roofs of Japan is one such transcription of the unpartitionable sensible world. As Iovino observes, “[t]‌he true dimension of matter is not a static being, but a generative becoming. Its all-​encompassing generativity justifies the etymological bond between the Latin words ‘mater’ (‘mother’) and ‘materia’ (‘matter’)” (“Stories from the Thick” 453). Matter is not passive, inert or dead, but vibrant, dynamic and agentive. What is more, in Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis and embodied cognition, the distinction between mind and matter does not hold true any more and “every act of knowing brings forth a world” (The Tree 26). In a world of co-​agentive substances and energy fields, it is through the intra-​actions of the particularities of a certain embodied mind and the world at large that are implicated in an act of shared becoming that both perceiver and perceived come into being anew. Though the poem started to take shape in Bringhurst’s mind while he was still in Japan, The Blue Roofs of Japan is an act of remembrance. In Catriona Mortimer-​Sandilands’ view, the act of remembering transcends the remembering subject and “involves a recognition of a relationship between the body/​mind and the external world that is not only determined by internal forces” (274). In composing his poem, Bringhurst is intra-​acting with “the written page and the storied landscape” as “warehouses of memory” (274) external to –​and yet co-​extensive with –​his embodied mind. The Blue Roofs of Japan consists of five untitled sections for two voices, where readers get to perceive the world through the lens of a penetrating, enworlded mind responding to the flesh of the earth with the maximum of attention and

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intensity. In what follows, and for the sake of clarity, we analyse all five sections separately. The longest section, and the one where the two voices coincide much oftener, part I provides the geographical and imaginative setting for the whole poem. A close listening to part I must take into account the two superimposed texts, their actual interaction at relevant points in the unfolding of ideas and emotions in the overall architectural design of the poem, and their distinct contribution to the cumulative building of meaning. These are the opening lines of the poem:             In a house  with In a house with such a blue             such a blue  roof roof, she said with red             you’d wake up cheerful hair, you’d wake up cheerful            every morning. every morning. (Selected Poems 176–​177)

Upon closer inspection, it turns out that section I  consists of eight distinct movements. The lines just quoted above give evidence of the mood or tone of much of what follows. With a remarkable linguistic economy, in just a couple of minimalist brush strokes, the poet manages to convey the sense that we are plunged in the middle of the Far East. Optimism, tranquillity and a meditative vein –​these are the states of mind that make themselves discernible in these lines. In addition, the attitude towards the genius loci is one of exultant celebration. The quiet beauty of the place is evoked by means of the reference to the blue roofs that give Bringhurst’s poem its title. That one should wake up every morning in such a place, replete with blue roofs that mimic the blue sky, is a good reason to wake up cheerful to the beauty awaiting one outside. And outside in this particular context refers to the Earth in its entirety, breathing endlessly alive –​to the vitality and dynamism intrinsic to an interconnected world. The opening stanza gives us the two superimposed voices from the start; both say almost the same words, but their timbre and texture should provide some kind of contrast in their oral performance. The indented italics were initially intended to be uttered by a female voice, which is the one that seems to steer the flow of the poem; the non-​indented words in roman type were meant to be uttered by a male voice, which follows. However, in the 2009 untitled headnote preceding the poem in Selected Poems, Bringhurst informs us that it does not have necessarily to be the case, for he has come to the realisation that these roles can be reversed, that both voices can be either male or female, provided they function smoothly when sounding simultaneously:

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The Blue Roofs of Japan is a poem for two voices –​in principle little different from a sonata for cello and piano, except that here the instruments speak; they don’t quite sing. The full text of the poem is printed on both the righthand and lefthand pages of the book, but since the two voices frequently overlap, the two parts are not always legible on any one page. The lefthand pages give prominence to one voice, the righthand pages to the other. Facing pages should be read not in sequence but together. […] There isn’t, and in my view mustn’t be, a metronome. The only thing the readers have to pace themselves against is one another. (175)

From Bringhurst’s words we gather that there are two possible ways to approach this poem. Either you read it silently as it stands frozen on paper, keeping an eye on both pages at the same time, or you speak it aloud with a friend’s help. In a meditation on voice, poetry and polyphony, poet Robyn Sarah, who also has a musical training, dwells on the challenge of actually reading two superimposed texts at the same time. First, she wonders whether there is such thing “as a verbal or poetic equivalent to polyphony in music” and then the realisation dawns on her that One can in various ways (spatially and/​ or using different typefaces) visually approximate the effect of two “voices” or “texts” meant to be read simultaneously rather than consecutively… […] Inevitably they [such experiments] must be constructed, contrived…. […] [I]‌t is not really possible to read and grasp two lines simultaneously: one is aware that one is only approximating the act –​reading them consecutively and trying to imagine them superimposed. It is a rather strenuous mental exercise… (206, 209)

Bringhurst’s intimation is that “the printed text should be as fine as it can be, but it should never be the final incarnation” (“Licking” 16), which confirms our hunch that silent reading is a form of precarious experience. The experience of silently reading a polyphonic poem is no impossible task, but it certainly falls short of the real thing, which is listening to its actual performance by two voices speaking the texts aloud simultaneously. The sonic materiality of the human voice has a beauty about it that is lost on the silent page, where words are but a pale shadow of their acoustic realisation. By contrast, listening to a polyphonic poem, come truly alive in the performers’ voices, is a much more rewarding experience, an intellectual and aesthetic challenge for those readers who care to listen and remain open to the unexpected gifts of poetry. As pointed out above, the opening lines of Blue Roofs set the tone for the rest of the poem. Once the setting has been evoked, the poetic voices move on to a detailed description of what it is one wakes up every morning to in this quiet place. At least seven more distinct parts or movements are identifiable in section I. One of the most important recurrent motifs at the core of the poem

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is that of water, the arché or primordial element of the cosmos according to Thales of Miletos, one of the pre-​Socratic poet-​philosophers Bringhurst pays due attention to in The Old in Their Knowing (2005). In a house with such a blue roof, one wakes up first of all to the singing of water, or to singing water. After all, the fundamental insight of biosemiotics is that “all life  –​from the cell all the way up to us –​is characterized by communication, or semiosis” (Wheeler, “The Biosemiotic Turn” 270), or, to put it differently, that “all things have the capacity for speech –​all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings” (Abram, Becoming Animal 172). Thus, in the second movement of section I, readers are directly plunged into an elemental world of pleasing sounds, and subtly invited to embrace what could be called “a poetics of hearing”  –​i.e., a respectful attitude towards reality as it is, which entails opening one’s mind and senses to the polyphonic texture implicit in the more-​ than-​human world. This is what Rigby, following Herder’s insight, compellingly calls “Earth’s Poesy”:5 in nature there are signs needing no verbal tradition, for matter, far from being passive stuff, is a site of narrativity, which is one of the fundamental insights of material ecocriticism. Sensuously immersed in the vibrant world, the poetic persona listens “[t]o the talking mirror /​of water. To the broken panes /​of water, laid in the earth like leaded glass” (Selected Poems 176), and partakes of a wider conversation. The two metaphors woven into these lines underscore the fact that water speaks as part of an animate earth and convey a wealth of meaning: “the talking mirror /​of water” (176) is possibly a reference to the untroubled surface of a lake, where water is capable of a speech of its own while reflecting the world of appearances as a faithful polished mirror, whereas “the broken panes /​of water” (176) evoke the protean, creative existence water leads in the form of lakes, rivers and oceans on the vast surface of the earth. The core environmental epiphany in section I  is found exactly at the very heart of the composition. A cup of tea encompasses the earth in its entirety; like the earth itself, a cup of tea contains water too. Resemblances go even further than that, since the shape of the cup is reminiscent of the curved contours of the earth. Hence, the simple gesture of holding a cup of tea in one’s hands is tantamount to holding the earth in one’s hands as well. A cup of tea contains traces of earth and water, and the act of drinking becomes expressive of Alaimo’s notion of trans-​corporeality: the environment is within bodily natures and the 5

As Rigby claims, “[i]‌f, as ancient tradition has it, human speech first took the form of song, then, Herder […] speculates, this must have comprised a ‘concerto,’ composed out of the diverse vocalizations of other creatures… […] The human poesy of words is thought to have enjoyed its first flowering as a mode of participation in the polyphonic song of the Earth” (“Earth’s Poesy” 54).

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membrane separating self from not-​self is simply porous or permeable. Whereas sight clearly predominates in the first movement and hearing in the second one, now touch is of paramount importance. All the senses must be involved in one way or another in this sensuous immersion of an embodied mind in the world –​ in this active intra-​action between the perceiving self and the vibrancy of matter in its manifold manifestations. In fact, the equation cup  =  Earth is the most eloquent metaphor at the heart of this third movement of The Blue Roofs of Japan, even if it is punctuated by two other fundamental dichotomies: order vs. disorder and empty vs. full hands. The hands, like the cup of tea, may be full or empty, and remain a powerful symbol, the expression of humans’ humility and generosity. That hands are empty means that they are ready to receive the gifts the earth gives them; that hands are full means that they are ready to offer whatever they may hold to the earth. Most importantly, the earth is “the cup containing everything” (Selected Poems 176). That such a simple and humble item as a tea cup should contain the whole world is no small poetic miracle or precious insight. As Maturana and Varela rightly observe, “the human grasp of the world is essentially aesthetic” and “art, and especially art in language, remains the best place of our hopes of self-​understanding” (Autopoiesis 276). In Bringhurst’s words: To hold in the hands like a cup of tea, always full and always empty,             always empty, always  full –​ the earthy asymmetry of the world. To the rich, disordered earth,             and to the order of the  earth. to the sound of mountain water, to the boundless             To the boundless –​ truth of the ground.             not infinite, boundless –​             truth of the ground. To the world with its welcome imperfections. (Selected Poems 176–177)

In a contrapuntal way, the female voice utters the opposite words of the ones uttered by the male voice. Where he speaks of hands holding “the earthy ­asymmetry of the world,” “the rich, disordered earth” and “the world with its welcome imperfections” (176), she sings of “the order of the earth” (177). Interestingly enough, both voices converge into a realisation that breathing through one’s own body awakens the totality of the embodied self to “the

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boundless /​truth of the ground” (176–​177). The earth is then a place of order and disorder. While order is closely related to Apollonian reason and a rationalistic mode of thinking that hides violence  –​“Violence hides in fastidious order” (176–​177) –​, disorder sides with the beautiful imperfections, irregularities and asymmetries of the world, or, in other words, with a Dionysian spontaneous life force. What the poet is after is a truth of a polyphonic and lyric nature, one that embraces the plurality of being and has room in it for the myriad creatures dwelling on earth, each singing and contributing their own song to a boundless singing and a wider conversation. This is the truth of a breathing Earth, one that is truly alive, not a commodity or portfolio of resources to be exploited to satisfy human needs. Upon closer inspection, in the lexical realm, the poet moves from the world, down to the earth and to the ground, thus conveying a stronger sense of the physical immediacy of vibrant matter. In fact, he speaks of “the boundless truth of the ground” (176–​177), which is a reminder that gravity will not forget, that one needs to keep one’s feet firmly planted upon the ground and keep an eye on the real, which is endowed with agentic powers. In The Blue Roofs of Japan readers are constantly reminded that they are in the midst of a non-​Western setting. The references to the “blue roofs” and the “cup of tea” of the first and third movements respectively provide significant clues about the exact geographical setting of the poem. In the fourth through eighth movements, readers are immersed in Japan as perceived by the poetic persona’s sensibility. Bringhurst’s imagistic verse lines resemble the cadences and minimalism of haiku:  “the river /​fish are running; at Gifu the leashed /​ cormorants dive” (Selected Poems 178). The fourth movement evokes thus the time of the year, the actual temporal framework: it is June (it was in the spring of 1985 that Bringhurst and Audrey Thomas spent two weeks in Japan) in a Japanese city called Gifu, and the more-​than-​human world is alive with fish and birds. The moon, “choking on its own light” (178), is reminiscent of much classical Japanese and Chinese poetry, where it figures prominently as part of a landscape seemingly untainted by human presence. Water is a pervasive, protean element in The Blue Roofs of Japan. Thus, in the fifth movement it comes up again to the polished surface of the poem in the form of a river. Language sings and musicality is to be heard in the alliteration of lines like these: “To the water that walks over stones /​through the long wooden town /​ like a roshi on wide wooden slippers” (Selected Poems 178–179; our emphasis). As the poet himself makes clear in the “Program Notes” of the Lines Review version, a roshi is a Zen priest and the title means simply “old teacher” (69). The image in this simile is captivating: water walks elegantly on stone as it flows through the city, in much the same way a roshi walks on wooden shoes conveying his deep

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reverence for the wooden town and the ground he treads upon. The repetition of /​w/​conveys the sound of flowing water in evocative ways. In this respect, it might be illuminating to remember Robyn Sarah’s train of thought on the kind of polyphony that is implicit in any well-​wrought poem, where, she claims, the interplay of sound and sense is already a form of polyphony in itself. It is not ­certainly polyphony in Bringhurst’s strict usage of the term (for he is exploring the possibilities of a close literary analogue to musical polyphony), but it does make sense to wonder whether this is not an essential form of achieving some kind of polyphony as a precondition for real polyphony. In Sarah’s words, If we accept that poetry, as an art, is based on a balance of sound and sense, […] this interplay between words as soundscape and words as signifiers is an enormously complex kind of resonance in itself, and may be as close to musical polyphony as we can get in poetry, short of embarking on the kind of aural/​oral experimentation that Bringhurst has undertaken [in his polyphonic poems]. (212)6

To turn to water, it is not just a primordial element in the material constitution of the earth, but it also brings together places far apart. The river flowing in what we presume to be Gifu takes us to “the Chinese grid /​of the city, not twisting but turning /​as sharp as a section-​line road /​through the Saskatchewan prairie” (Selected Poems 178–179) in Canada. Water is the universal matter that brings all places on Earth together, since it is the fluid running through its veins. The geographical references are possibly meant as points of comparison in the ­metaphor and simile the poet employs to evoke the irregular flowing of the river, which is one of those “welcome imperfections” of the world announced earlier in the section. The picture of Japan is brought to a full circle with the references to the Sleeping Dragon Garden, the shakuhachi, the trees native to the land, and the Emperor in the following three movements. In the 1986  “Program Notes” accompanying the poem, Bringhurst provides helpful clues for readers to understand the oddities in these verse lines. First, the Sleeping Dragon 6 In a letter, dated 20 October 1996, addressed to Sarah in response to the essay on poetry and polyphony she sent to the participants in the colloquium on polyphony held at Trent University, Dennis Lee writes that he agrees with the principle of “sound-​and-​sense being the matrix of polyphony” (Sarah 216), but he holds a different view of polyphony: “Lots of other kinds of poetic excellence are possible; but enacting a meditation is not –​unless & until the poem finds a way to claim, embody, incarnate, each stage on its meditative quest by moving through an (unprogrammed) vocal trajectory. […] That central intuition –​that voice embodies, polyphony enacts –​is what gives point to everything else I say. […] [Bringhurst] wanted to reserve the term “polyphony” for work in which two or more independent voices are counterpointed” (Sarah 215–​216). And Sarah adds: “Perhaps Bringhurst is right to want to reserve the term “polyphony” for the strict musical sense of simultaneously heard, separate voices” (218).

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Garden is a slight mistranslation of Ryoanji (the “Peaceful Dragon Temple”) in Kyoto, which is “the most famous karesansui meditation garden in Japan” (69). “Karesansui,” Bringhurst explains, “means “withered hills and water.” The garden consists of rocks and raked gravel, not of what we call as a general rule living things” (69). Japanese gardens have nothing to do with prototypical Western gardens, where flowers and trees are ubiquitous. The garden7 the poet alludes to is made simply of water and stone, so that we are back in an elemental world where the speech of things reigns supreme. Solitude, the silence of stones and the murmur of water are all one requires for a proper meditation:  “the wordless speech of water /​broached in the silence of the stone” (Selected Poems 178), sings the poet. Bringhurst succeeds in making audible the choreography of beings comprising the garden. Water keeps on speaking, even if in “wordless speech,” while stones remain mute and yet contribute to the music water makes as it touches them in its flowing. Once again, the female voice keeps echoing the key words uttered by the male voice: “to the water, to the stone” (Selected Poems 179). Stone is not synonymous with rock, though. As Canadian poet Don McKay explains in his prose meditation “Between Rock and Stone. A Geopoetic Alphabet,” “a stone is a rock that’s been put to use” or, in other words, “rock is as old as the earth is; stone is as old as humanity” (59). Stone is domesticated rock and betrays human presence, whilst rock gestures towards deep, geological time. The Blue Roofs of Japan knows that we humans qua sensuous bodies are always part of our material surrounding and engaging with agentic matter, that there is no clear-​cut boundary between our perceiving bodies and the rest of the biosphere, that homo sapiens is not the sole possessor of mind and thinking, and that we should get into mindful conversation with all the life around and about us in its manifold manifestations. Thus, in the seventh movement readers are sensuously immersed in a meaning-​bearing universe of sound, amid a breathing earth which is singing a song of clarity and beauty:

7 In Writing North, Anne Tayler contributed two short prose pieces, “Largo” and “The Garden,” offering a portrait of Bringhurst. The garden in question is one the poet built in the late 1980s and early 1990s in front of his cabin on Bowen Island. This is an excerpt from the second piece: “He is making for himself a low maintenance Japanese garden. […] Of all, Japanese gardens are the most demanding. The spirit laid out demands the care of the hands that shaped it. And to begin, the gardener must rip off the skin of the earth, and throw it far away, then give the garden a new underskin. Only then can the surface flesh of the garden go down. Otherwise, the garden invites the invasion of other spirits, grass, sorrel, and other herbs. […] Even twenty years after the ripping of the old skin, the gardener will be tending the new flesh” (159–​160).

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To the spoken shakuhachi, its calligraphy of sound. To the trees –​ karamatsu, gingko, sugi, bamboo –​              to the speaking to the  trees; who speak for themselves; to the Emperor’s              karamatsu bound and housebroken pines.              gingko sugi bamboo –​               (Selected Poems 178–179)

The world speaks. These lines suggest not only that we humans are enworlded –​ i.e., our flesh is part of the flesh of the earth –​, “surrounded by vibrant “other-​ than-​human” sounds in the auditory realm in the same manner that we exist within the visual and energetic spectrum of light’s energy” (Sullivan 81), but also that there are stories and meanings that are materially carved onto the bodily natures (both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate) populating Earth. Every corporeal entity is “of and in the world” (Tuana 198), radically open to the world as a complex mesh of singular and yet inextricably linked entities. Here is the shakuhachi, “an endblown bamboo flute” (69)8 typical of Japan, singing, and also the vernacular trees singing in a language of their own. In a most subtle manner, the calligraphy of sound of the bamboo flute anticipates the lyrical essay on the origins of writing of section III of The Blue Roofs of Japan. The word “­calligraphy” has rich resonances about it in the context of Japanese culture, where it is a centuries-​old complex art form. “Karamatsu, literally “Chinese pine,” is really the Japanese larch, Larix leptolepis, and sugi is the Japanese redwood, Cryptomeria japonica” (69), explains the poet in the 1986  “Program Notes.” Gingko is a Chinese tree with yellow flowers, and bamboo is well-​known. As the title of Bringhurst’s essay “Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known” suggests, what we witness in the penultimate movement of section I of The Blue Roofs of Japan is being singing and dancing: water, stone, the shakuhachi, and such diverse trees as karamatsu, gingko, sugi and bamboo are each singing their own song as part of the soundscapes of Earth’s Poesy. The female voice repeats their names as if they were sacred, savouring their very texture on her tongue, while the poet himself joins this harmonious song with his own, i.e., the poem 8 In the notes, Bringhurst adds something else about this bamboo flute: “It is one of the principal instruments of hogaku, traditional Japanese music (as distinguished from yogaku, “sea music” –​ i.e., music of foreign origin)” (69). But this extra piece of information makes sense only when we get to section V of The Blue Roofs of Japan.

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The Blue Roofs of Japan itself, which is a celebration of the singing of the Earth. What Bringhurst does is listening to and capturing the audible vibrancy of the Earth through words, for trees are singing creatures which pluck the strings of their leaves to produce other-​than-​human music. Bringhurst’s love of the woods is worth remembering in this particular context, in which trees growing in Japan are such an essential part of the texture of section I of The Blue Roofs of Japan. Trees figure prominently in his work, and so it is no accident that one of his two prose collections is titled The Tree of Meaning. In the essay “The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World,” he speaks with awesome reverence of a particular species of pine trees which are thought to be the oldest beings on earth. A scientist identifies one such bristlecone pine he deems to be the oldest of them all and cuts it to count its rings and write a scientific report about it. The whole enterprise is demented; the loss is irreparable: Two thousand kilometers south of the country of the poet Skaay, in the Ruby Mountains, in the country of the Paiute, now part of the state of Nevada, there are pines of the species Pinus aristata, bristlecone pines. These trees live longer than any other creatures on the earth. The oldest individuals  –​not much taller than I am –​are 5,000 years of age or more. A few years ago, a person who called himself a scientist found in these mountains a pine that might, he thought, be the oldest of all. He cut it down to count its rings. He killed what may indeed have been the oldest living being in the world, to convert it into a statistic. Then he published his report, without the least apology, in a scientific journal. This is not science. It is one more thoughtless manifestation of the conquest, one more step in reducing the world to human terms. (The Persistence of Poetry” 47)

This self-​proclaimed scientist belongs among those who think that the world belongs to them, and not that they fit in the larger mesh of living things. This is, Bringhurst says, a millennial war that is still being waged. As he observes in the same essay, “[i]‌t is the war between the pagans, who know they are surrounded and outnumbered by the gods, and all the devotees of the number one  –​one empire, one history, one market, or one God  –​and who nowadays insist on the preeminence of everyone for himself: the smallest number one of all” (41). The Blue Roofs of Japan celebrates that humans belong among all other living creatures and entities of the earth. In urging us to listen to our oikos and respect what-​is, the poem is accomplishing something much grander:  ethics and aesthetics are cooperating together here to instil in readers the sense that it is possible and ­necessary to live responsibly on Earth.

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The closing lines of section I are puzzling at first, but make perfect sense upon closer inspection. Here is a reference to the Emperor, the symbol of the order of society and the embodiment of power on earth in Japan, who owns nothing –​ not his carp or wood ducks, pretty as they are, since “the natural world, as represented by the Emperor’s carp and wood ducks, cannot be owned” (McLeod 164). It turns out that his roof, unlike the ordinary houses of the people, is not blue, but “dark brown” (Selected Poems 179). At any rate, colour perception is one more instance of the way self and not-​self are deeply linked to each other through the commonwealth of air and light, or, in other words, expressive of our inextricable engagement with nature’s vibrant materiality and of “the porosity of our subjective selves and bodies” (Sullivan 82). As Schrödinger argues in Mind and Matter, “all our knowledge about the world around us […] rests entirely on immediate sense perception” (153), and perception is the mother of human knowledge, which is always corporeal, sensuous, utterly carnal. Likewise, Abram observes that “[t]‌he simple act of perception is experienced as an interchange between oneself and that which one perceives –​as a meeting, a participation, a communion between beings” (Becoming Animal, 268). After all, “sensory perception is the environmental engagement of every organism at its most basic” and “a concrete form of our ‘transcorporeality’” (Sullivan 81, 84). In her discussion of polyphony in poetry, Robyn Sarah claims that she is interested in a kind of poetry that fuses form and content into an organic Gestalt, as it were. Reading The Blue Roofs of Japan, one can feel there is a sort of inevitability about the words used by the poet in his search for le mot juste –​the right sound and the right meaning. In a poem Sarah wants “some unexpected, subtle, serendipitous aptness of structure and soundscape that is mysteriously one with the ideas and images –​some fusion of form and content. […] I want density. And at the same time, I want something that levitates” (218–​219). This is exactly what Bringhurst is doing in section I of The Blue Roofs of Japan, where he offers a balance of music and sense, the sound enacting the meaning that the words seek to convey. There is profundity of thought and yet there is a kind of levity that makes this an enduring poem, not just for what it says, but also for the way in which it conveys homo sapiens’ embeddedness in the vitality of matter. The primordial lesson to be gained from reading this poem can be best summarised in Bringhurst’s own words: I have been listening to the world for barely half a century. I do not have the wisdom even of a young tree of an ordinary kind. Nevertheless, I have been listening –​with eyes, ears, mind, feet, fingertips –​and what I hear is poetry.

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Facing the Sky, Be Vast, Blue & Quiet What does this poetry say? It says that what-​is is: that the real is real, and that it is alive. It speaks the grammar of being. It sings the polyphonic structure of meaning itself. (The Persistence of Poetry” 43)

This is to say that poetry is an attribute of reality and that semiosis is an inbuilt property of all matter, which is vibrant, “articulate, communicative, and in a very real sense –​intentional” (Kirby 82). Sensitive to the radical liveliness of the world, Bringhurst is profoundly aware that all things, both animate and inanimate, making up the vibrant world are “bearers of meaning within a shared universe of discourse and matter” (Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism” 30). In a storied world, all creatures “tell their story in 10,000 languages throughout the planet” (Swimme 56) and part of Bringhurst’s poetic agenda is to capture what they have to say of value to anyone who might care to listen. In Abram’s view, if the whole universe is a story, then human beings, “along with the other animals, plants, and landforms –​are all characters” (Becoming Animal 270). Section I of The Blue Roofs discloses thus an anthropodiscentred ecological vision of reality and emphasises the vitality of storied matter or matter as text, which is one of the central tenets of material ecocriticism. Trees, roofs, water, a tea cup, gardens and sky: what they all have in common is that they are part of a compound of eloquent or expressive bodyminds –​in Wheeler’s sense of “whole creatures embodied in an environment which also is really a part of us” (The Whole Creature 18) –​in a vast living world of creative and shared becoming.

III Water Music and Being A relatively short poem, section II of The Blue Roofs of Japan is a probing meditation on breath, being and singing, and also a metapoetic piece about the nature of poetry. Tightly-​woven though it is, this section unfolds through three easily identifiable movements. “This music is all about water” (Selected Poems 180), sings the male voice in the opening words of the poem. “This music” is an audacious reference to The Blue Roofs of Japan itself, and also a reference to the music of being –​which is plural and polyphonic –​that the poem is urging readers to listen to with open ears. This particular poem and the music of being are one and the same thing, which constitutes a powerful statement (or ars poetica) on the kind of poetry Bringhurst is after. As he explains in the prefatory note to “The Book of Silences” in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music, he wants a “poetry of knowledge and thought, not of opinion –​and not of belief, which is merely dead thought, severed from the thinking. Poetry is the musical density of being, but sometimes it is silent, and sometimes that silence is musically

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still” (10). It is also a poetry firmly grounded in the sheer materiality of reality, in the bare essentials of what-​is. While the male voice says “This music is all about water” (Selected Poems 180) in the opening line, the female voice says “This music is water, this water is music” (181) exactly at the same time, thus emphasising the potent equation that is the beating heart of The Blue Roofs of Japan. The implications are complex and far-​reaching. That music is water means that it is necessary sustenance for all human and nonhuman beings, and also that it is changeable, fluid, ever-​flowing. Water is capable of speech and singing is not the sole possession of humans, but rather an in-​built property of existence that is to be heard everywhere if we just listen with our whole body. In tune with the premise of material ecocriticism that the world is a discursive-​ semiotic whole rich in intra-​active beings, Bringhurst appears to be lending a poetic voice to the entangled, unbroken totality of more-​than-​human life. Thus, water is the earth singing, ceaselessly affirming its vitality and protean nature, and it is also part of Earth’s Poesy, where it coexists with human and nonhuman creatures. Bringhurst puts it in compelling terms:  “Poetry is the language of being: the breath, the voice, the song, the speech of being. It does not need us. We are the ones in need of it. If we haven’t learned to hear it, we will also never speak it” (“The Persistence of Poetry” 44). Poetry precedes poems, as it is an inbuilt property of matter, which is creative and finds manifold ways to express itself, and poems just happen to be the way poets capture it the best way they can through the medium of words. Needless to say, listening is the prerequisite for poems to come into being as lucky transcripts of what-​is. To return to the fundamental music-​water equation at the core of section II of The Blue Roofs of Japan again, there is another important aspect that should not be overlooked. From the very first line, both voices are deeply enmeshed in the living fabric of the poem, speaking simultaneously and underlying the importance of the equation being formulated through those words. If music is interpreted as poetry and water as earth, metonymically as it were, then the ­fusion of the poetry Bringhurst is after with the world he celebrates in his poems is crystal-​clear. His metaphysics is physics, and so his poems are rooted in the overall orchestration of being he can hear everywhere on earth. This fusion is also materially enacted and sonically conveyed by the actual merging of the speaking voices in this section. In sharp contrast to section I, where the female voice somehow echoed what the male voice said with almost identical words, the deep entanglement of the two voices from the start of section II is completely new. Meaning and matter are actually enmeshed; “there are no boundaries between human semiotic processes and the very material world itself ” (Oppermann,

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“From Ecological Postmodernism” 28). In section II, it is the male voice that steers and the female voice that superimposes its words on the ones uttered by the other voice at certain strategic points. The semantic coalescence of the two texts is a technical accomplishment: each text makes sense on its own as an ­independent entity, while at the same time both texts merge into an integrated unity of meaning. A recurrent motif in Bringhurst’s poetry, breath enters the scene in the second movement of section II. The poet embraces the conviction that all good writing is oral at its root and that poems come truly alive in the voice. Poems are thus handled by the voice, which is made of breath, which is air coming out of our lungs. In a perceptive passage in the essay “The Vocation of Being, the Text of the Whole,” Bringhurst dwells on the notion that voice has an anatomy of its own in compelling words: The voice has an anatomy, like the arm, the heart, the foot. The voice is made of breath. A sentence or a paragraph that pays no attention to the reach and rhythm of the voice is uncomfortable or painful, like a shoe that doesn’t fit the human foot or a glove on the wrong hand. But a sentence that does fit the anatomy of voice and breath will touch, through them, some other rhythms of the body: those of the heart and hands and feet, and of the memory and mind. The limbs –​the arms and legs –​in Greek, are μέλοι [méloi]. That is the root of the word melody in English. (47)

Breath is universal. It binds inner and outer worlds, the human and the nonhuman that are part of a vast breathing cosmos. Breath is also inextricably linked to the consciousness, mind, spirit or soul of individual entities and of the world at large. “‘Mind’ and ‘ideas’ are not properties of humans alone, but are immanent in all living things,” says Wheeler (“The Biosemiotic Turn” 272), a notion that is also endorsed by Abram. In tune with this tenet of biosemiotics, examining the mind-​body problem, “the puzzle of how a purely immaterial mind, or consciousness, interacts with (or is generated by) a thoroughly material body” (“Afterword” 304), Abram claims that the “age-​old assumption that mind is a uniquely human property, an utterly intangible substance that resides somewhere “inside” each of us” (302) is problematic and a form of hubris that has wrought havoc and destruction upon ecosystems. A new conception of mind, “a medium in which we are corporeally situated” (303), and a bit of humility are in order, he claims. Consciousness is not “the special possession of our species,” but rather “a property of the breathing biosphere” and, as a result, we humans are “carnally immersed in an awareness that is not, properly speaking, ours, but is rather the earth’s” (303). Pondering the elemental kinship that brings all living things together and “the steady gift of our breath” (302), Abram speaks of “the

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Commonwealth of Breath” to refer to this undivided whole: a vast consciousness or “the sentience of the unseen but nonetheless palpable element in which we participate with the whole of our breathing bodies” (305).9 This element is materially embodied in “the sun-​infused air,” which is “our common medium, a broad intelligence that we share with the other animals and the plants and the forested mountains, yet each of us engages it with the particularities of our own flesh” (305). Omnipresent air is thus what binds the human and nonhuman together in a breathing cosmos or symposium of the whole; it is the “element held most Holy by our oral ancestors, the unseen flux long assumed to be the very source of all awareness, wind-​mind of the world: the Commonwealth of Breath” (311). In sum, “invisible air, wind, and breath” are inextricably linked to each other and constitute “the unseen medium that moves between and binds all visible things” (314). Likewise, in Bringhurst’s conception of poetry, human beings are not alone in breathing, as the earth is a gigantic breathing organism. Air breathing is what binds us together in our shared existence in the biosphere. In strongly parallelistic verse lines, the poet brings the point home. Breath pools and pours through the holes in the voice, through the joints in the body, the stem of bamboo, through the discontinuities in the skeleton, knots in the plank at the annual branching, nodes of nonbeing (Selected Poems 180)

Enjambment is crucial in this excerpt, as some sense units flow nonstop into the following line with perfect naturalness, and repetition through parallelism brings about an incantatory rhythmical effect. The reader is back in familiar ­territory: this is the geography of the human body (of bone, muscle, blood, vein, and voice), which is deeply enmeshed in the flesh of the wild. The novelty lies in that the human body is now fused with the bodies of trees (notice the references to “bamboo” and the “knots in the plank”) and with non-​living creatures, which 9

Dwelling on the connection between air, breath, mind, soul and spirit, Abram invites readers “to ponder for a moment the etymology of the common English words “spirit” (from Latin spiritus: a breath, or a gust of wind) and “psyche” (from the ancient Greek verb psychein: to breathe or to blow, as a wind). Consider the Latin word for the soul, anima (from the older Greek anemos, meaning wind), from whence derive such terms as “animal” (an ensouled being) and “unanimous” (being of one mind). […] Such etymologies […] suggest that the common notion of mind as an entirely immaterial and nonsensuous dimension has been derived, by a gradual process of abstraction, from our ancestrally felt sense of the invisible but nonetheless tangible medium in which we found ourselves materially immersed and participant” (“Afterword” 314).

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is what “nodes of nonbeing” probably refer to, though they might as well refer to the interstices of nonbeing in living beings. In other words, breath is descending through the bodies of every single being on earth, so that every single thing is truly alive and enfolded by the same universal fluid. In the closing lines of this poem comes a sort of afterthought. It is not the breath that is descending upon all creatures that is the song; it is “the silences /​between breathing” (Selected Poems 180) that are the song. “The rest /​is mere singing” (180). This is the final revelation readers have been waiting for, even if it was already announced by the music-​water equation at the beginning of section II. At this point, both voices converge into the final message:  “the singing” (181) are the last words uttered by the female voice alone, as if echoing the “mere singing” (181) uttered by the male voice. A  closer look at the words said by the female voice from beginning to end reveals something of essence: In the unbroken muscle of water, the wholeness of bone, is the sudden completeness of being, the singing (Selected Poems 181)

The poetic voice claims that music is water and water is music; it reminds us of the hollow bamboo, which is possibly meant as a reference to the s­ hakuhachi, or endblown bamboo flute mentioned in section I; it relates water to the human body by giving it muscle and bone; and it comes to the realisation that in the muscle of the water and the wholeness of bone is “the sudden completeness of being, the singing” (181). Being and singing are brought together at last, by the two voices, in the closing of the poem. Everywhere being is dancing and singing, and knowing is known. This music is water, and water is the music Bringhurst listens to for composing his own poems. In Bringhurst’s aesthetics of mindful listening, he responds to earth speaking and joins the singing of being by composing poems that are sensitive to the vitality of matter. Like sound, silence is also crucial, as it is an essential element in the vibrant texture of what-​is. In Zwicky’s compelling formulation, “being is the marriage of music and silence” and “an ecology” (“Being, Polyphony” 182). In her response to Bringhurst’s essay “Singing with the Frogs,” with regard to being’s multiplicity and “the primacy of aural experience for ontological insight,” the philosopher writes: We are, anything is, when it listens and sings, not when it looks and says. And it listens and sings when it joins the chorus, […] paying attention to how that

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expression might pleasingly fit with-​&-​against what it’s hearing. Ecologies are elastic, reactive; they are metaphorically spatial; they are coherent. That is: they are lyric structures… […] I think it’s important for philosophers to re-​learn to think lyrically: they will never recapture the ability to perceive the world if they don’t. (“Being, Polyphony” 182)

In “Canadian Primal,” Dickinson dwells on the common ground trodden by five poets, namely Lee, McKay, Lilburn, Zwicky and Bringhurst, all of whom appear in Lilburn’s anthologies Poetry and Knowing (1995) and Thinking and Singing (2002), which somehow introduce them as a group. Dickinson explains that Bringhurst belongs among a group of other four poets that conceive of poetry as a form of accessing a more organic form of truth. Most of them were present at the colloquium on polyphony held at Trent University in 1996, and though they are no recognisable poetic school, with an identifiable programme, they constitute Bringhurst’s literary generation. Dickinson ponders their ­intellectual affinities and concludes that they are poet-​thinkers who feel at home when composing poetry as a tool to think and grasp reality. Thinking and singing, they have “stumbled onto a way of writing that can be said to think poetically through a dance of ideas, images, sounds, and feelings that enact connectedness,” he maintains. “Each, according to critic Stan Dragland, “would say that their thinking is purest when it takes the form of poetry”” (“Canadian Primal” 62). In their view, there is no point in drawing a clear-​cut boundary between thinking and singing, even if Western thought has been intent on keeping them separate for centuries. Thinking has traditionally been associated “with such legitimate, muscular vocations as mathematics and scientific investigation” (63), whereas singing “has been shackled to all that is considered secondary to the ascent of the rational mind:  values, emotions, ethics, beliefs” (63). That these poet-​thinkers have tried to dispel the boundary between both gestures of the human intelligence and imagination is no minor undertaking. Poetry might be a most effective epistemological tool for both thinking and singing the world, for shedding light on areas that remain in the dark. This is the collective enterprise that scientists, philosophers and poets share in their determination to unveil new forms of truth, as French philosopher Alain Baidou claims in his Manifesto for Philosophy (1999).

IV The Solid Form of Language Whereas section II of The Blue Roofs of Japan is concerned with breath and speech, section III dwells on the origins of writing, “the oral culture of hunter-​ gatherer societies” (McLeod 166), and the singing that poetry is in Bringhurst’s

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view. It comes as no surprise that this should be the natural progression from one section to another, for speech comes before writing. That is: speech existed long before the human voice came to be represented by symbols called letters. Bringhurst has attempted a similar undertaking in his book-​length essay The Solid Form of Language (2004), a brief history of writing and script systems where he contends that meaning, reading or writing are not an exclusively human property. As Abram observes, “[a]‌ll things have the power of speech” (Becoming Animal 269). From an ecocentric view, human language is just one more thread in an undivided material-​semiotic plexus where every single entity, living and non-​living, partakes of meaning. In this regard, Bringhurst is aware that the world is a book in a state of permanent flux and, most importantly, that it embodies a wider conversation where human language is intertwined with other nonhuman tongues and the speech of things. The Solid Form of Language opens with these reflections on the nature of meaning and ecological literacy: Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough. Now drop two or three words in at once. Interference patterns form, reinforcing one another here and canceling each other there. To catch the meaning of the words is not to catch the ripples that they cause; it is to catch the interaction of those ripples. This is what it means to listen; this is what it means to read. It is incredibly complex, yet humans do it every day… […] Language is what speaks us as well as what we speak. Through our neurons, genes and gestures, shared assumptions and personal quirks, we are spoken by and speak many languages each day, interacting with ourselves, with one another, other species, and the objects –​natural and man-​made –​that populate our world. (9–​10)

There are many different ways of being alive and conveying meaning to others. Aware that language, broadly conceived, is intrinsic to the living mesh of things and that all things are endowed with the capacity for meaningful speech, Bringhurst explores the way homo sapiens has no monopoly on meaning –​or reading and writing, for that matter. Thus, plants and animals also have their own way of leaving palpable signs on the earth: singing birds on tree boughs or animal tracks on the ground are only instances of nonhuman speech. Whereas languages are complex living organisms, “naturally evolved wild systems” (Snyder, “Language” 127), and a natural outgrowth from the human body and mind, “[a]‌ script in itself is not a language; it is a system of representation, sufficient to catch some (but never all) of a language in its net” (Bringhurst, The Solid Form 12). Scripts are invented abstract systems that reduce languages to a manageable ­repertoire of symbols with which to convey meanings to others and yet do not fully capture languages. Like languages, humans, plants and animals, scripts are

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also grouped under different categories or species, and are prone to change, evolution or extinction with the passage of time. However, as Horace observed about twenty centuries ago, littera scripta manet. The written letter seeks to stand the test of time and oftentimes it succeeds in fulfilling its vocation to persist. Section III of The Blue Roofs of Japan is a two-​part essay in miniature on the origin and purpose of writing. The first part concerns the birth of writing at the time of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, which brought about a shift from hunter-​gatherer societies to ones where farmers and herders prevailed. The domestication of plants and animals was parallel in time to the ­domestication of language through writing, an ambitious technology that would allow humankind to pass its epistemological conquests on to subsequent generations. Whereas the starting point in section II is the equation music is water, in section III Bringhurst ponders the luminous insight that writing is planting, and then he builds on the implications of this simple and yet captivating metaphor:  “Writing is born in the lands of wet-​farming. /​The field prefigures the table and page. /​The garden prefigures the table and page” (Selected Poems 182). Hence, with great linguistic economy, these lines encapsulate a succinct account of the origins of writing as the solid form of language. That it is “born in the lands of wet-​farming” is an apt reminder that writing was born in the late Neolithic, at a time when the Agricultural Revolution created the necessary preconditions –​highly complex levels of political and social organisation  –​for the birth of writing as a form of sophisticated technology in the service of the management of the earth’s resources. In that historical context, the fields and gardens cultivated by those early farmers were the physical incarnation of two basic tools related to writing and literacy, that is, the table and the page. The thought occurs that the r­ esemblance is essentially of a geometrical nature, as both the field and the page are square-​or rectangle-​shaped figures that impose order upon plants and letters. Isomorphisms are obvious, as the rows of plants resemble the neat arrangement of letters and words on the page. What is striking about Bringhurst’s statement, though, is that writing is born out of the ground itself, it is a natural secretion emerging from the vibrant matter of “the lands of wet-​farming” (Selected Poems 182). In other words, the act of writing on a page is not dissimilar from that of planting plants in a field or a garden, which is expressive of Bringhurst’s organic or telluric view of writing and of language. The female voice suggests yet another possibility when asking “Is a woman’s body the garden?” (Selected Poems 183), a question rich in powerful resonances when juxtaposed with the female creative force associated with the earth’s fertility in ancient myths. “Writing descends” (183), like “breath or water descends” in section II, says the female voice, enhancing the echoes of intertextuality and resonances that occur within and across all five sections of

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The Blue Roofs of Japan. In addition, the field or the garden is the opposite of the wild, in much the same way farmers and herders are the opposite of gatherers and hunters. Order intervenes and asserts itself. But speech always precedes writing and script in Bringhurst’s thinking: Human language, for its own sake, has no need of being written so long as it is spoken. Languages can and do attain at least as much sophistication, and as great a pitch of eloquence, in oral cultures as in cultures rich in printed books. And for ninety-​five per cent of their time on earth, members of the species Homo sapiens evidently felt no need for the managerial control over language that a writing system permits. (The Solid Form  12–​13)

Thus viewed, it may seem that writing brought about only a deadening effect on humankind’s sensibility and on their way of intra-​acting with the world, which is obviously not the case. Writing entailed a domestication of language, inasmuch as it reduced its manifold nuances to a manageable repertoire of symbols with a view to codifying and recording the eel-​slippery nature of meaning, flowing from all directions in the material-​semiotic plexus of the world. Though writing was born to serve the pragmatic purposes of an agrarian society in need of ­setting things in order through the durable record writing provided, at some point literary writing emerged as a solitary craft endowed with a subversive spirit that had nothing to do with the original managerial purposes of writing. Literacy creates the isolated self that writes in solitude, often “on the margins of highly organized and centralized societies” (The Solid Form 14). Bringhurst adds: Literature –​meaning storytelling and poetry –​involves the use of language more for purposes of discovery than for purposes of control. It is a part of language itself:  present, like language, in every human community. There are no natural languages without stories, just as there are none without sentences. Yet literature is not the cause of writing. Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little to do with social and economic control. (The Solid Form 15)

In his essay in response to Bringhurst’s “Singing with the Frogs,” Sean Kane reflects on polyphony, on humanity’s management of the earth’s resources, as well as on the profound implications of the domestication of nature through writing in the late Neolithic. In Kane’s view, in hunter-​gatherer civilisations “reality is plural and at minimum two” (“Polyphonic” 186). Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, before homo sapiens became “the measurer of all things” (186) –​a view Kane thinks clearly stems from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle –​, the world was a naturally polyphonic and plural place, “the place of the Gift” (186), a sacred space for the interaction between the human and the divine. However,

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the domestication that agriculture and writing entailed “sponsored the idea that the natural world was something to be managed by man the farmer according to inventories of hoarding, scheduling and control” (186) and seemed to have a deadening effect on humans’ way of relating to the world. Turning back to Bringhurst’s poem, writing is born of the domestication of water, because water is used to make the fields fertile and produce good crops. Water is then the primordial element out of which everything comes, including a human-​made thing like writing, called techné by the ancient Greeks. The atoms of writing are letters and their mothers are “rain and the sea” (Selected Poems 182–183), sing both the male and female voices. Bringhurst resorts to mythical thinking to account for the birth of writing:  vertically-​flowing rain falls down into the horizontally still sea and out of their union emerge the letters of the alphabet as a result. This is tantamount to saying that water is also the mother of letters, for rain and the sea are ultimately made of water. Any typographer would define the word letter in altogether different terms. In Frederic Goudy’s technical definition of ‘letters’ in Chapter I, “What Letters Are,” of his book The Alphabet, “[a]‌letter is a symbol, with a definite shape & significance, indicating a single sound or combination of sounds, and providing a means, through grouping, for the visible expression of words –​that is, of thoughts” (9).10 What about the human hand beneath writing? “The mind of the scribe /​moves like a long-​legged waterbird, /​stoops like a rice-​farmer, steps like a crane” (Selected Poems 182), writes Bringhurst. Calligraphy (i.e., the art of stylised or elegant handwriting or lettering with pen or brush and ink) has always been highly revered in the Far East, as it involves the correct formation of characters, the ordering of the various parts, and the harmony of proportions. Calligraphy is a mindful activity, since the scribe works not just with his mind but also with his hand, which holds the brush or the pen to make thoughts elegantly visible on the page. The scribe serves his vocation with the methodical concentration with which farmers plant their rows of rice on the page of the field and with the same elegance with which birds walk and leave tracks on the ground. As Bringhurst writes in The Elements of Typographical Style, “[w]riting begins with the making of footprints, the leaving of signs. Like speaking, it is a perfectly natural act which humans have carried to complex extremes” (18). The world is thus full of isomorphisms that attest to the ­interconnectedness of what-​is and the entanglement between nature and culture. 10 Chappell and Bringhurst define the concept in these terms:  “The symbols that compose an alphabet are phonograms. This means they stand for speech sounds, not for objects or ideas” (A Short History 22). And Bringhurst observes: “Writing is abstract. […] In Eric Gill’s famous phrase, “letters are things, not pictures of things”” (The Solid Form 16).

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Speech is the natural state of human languages. Languages are natural organisms that survive in a healthy state as long as they are spoken by humans. When there are no humans left to speak them, they have nowhere to go and disappear. They do not need writing, which is a form of human technology that thrives in evolved societies for pragmatic, managerial and control purposes, as pointed out above. “Like other creatures, humans are heavily self-​absorbed. We frequently pretend (or self-​righteously insist) that language belongs to humans alone” (The Solid Form 10), claims Bringhurst. We tend to think that it is language that keeps us apart from the rest of creation, but this is only an anthropocentric and grossly simplified view of the matter. Bringhurst has spent a lifetime studying language as something much larger than this: “language is actually part of the fibre of which life itself is spun” (The Solid Form 10),11 he says. In the Foreword to The Calling, Bringhurst admits that he would like to learn “all the words and grammars in the world” (11). If he works with words  –​with mouthfuls of live air and handfuls of frozen symbols –​, then it is only natural that his desire should be to explore language in its manifold manifestations. Despite his conviction that speech takes precedence over writing, that oral literatures are as rich and inspiring as the literatures of literate cultures, Bringhurst is also an untiring student of languages, a skillful translator from a number of modern and classical languages, and an expert typographer who has spent a whole lifetime among spoken and written words. As he explains in the Foreword to The Elements of Typographic Style, Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy –​the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand –​and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise. (11)

In the second part of section III, Bringhurst articulates a powerful statement on both the nature of poetry and on his own poetics in two movements. In the first one, the poetic voice evokes not without a tinge of nostalgia the way things went with hunters-​and-​gatherers civilisations, when there was room only for speech and there was no such thing as writing to domesticate both water and language. Humans led a nomadic existence, always on the move, and so they could take with them only light luggage  –​air in their lungs for live speech which did not need to be recorded on stone, bamboo, papyrus or paper. With

11 In terms reminiscent of Heidegger’s intimation that die Sprache spricht, Bringhurst says: “We are able to think about language at all only because a license to do so is chemically written into our genes. The languages we are spoken in are those for which we speak” (The Solid Form 10–​11).

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the ­construction of permanent dwellings, there was an urgent need to set things in order and writing proved a most useful tool in the domestication of the earth. In the way plants and animals were already treated, farming and ranching had already prefigured this domestication. Hands are dangerous in a way feet are not, says Bringhurst in his essay “Wild Language,” since they make tools that may prove dangerous in our interaction with the earth. One needs only to breathe through their feet to realise that “we don’t own what we know” (“Wild Language” 270), in Don McKay’s compelling words. With writing taking control over the state of affairs, the Agricultural Revolution marked the beginning of the millennial war between those who think they have a right to exploit the earth’s resources because the world belongs to them and those who think that they belong in the world. Greedy humankind would know of no limits in its management of what the earth had to offer for its comfortable sustenance and survival. However, hunters and gatherers still breathed through their feet; they did not rewrite or erase the earth under their hands to better suit their needs: When you next see the hunters, say to the hunters: O say can you see            Can you  see? how the earth is rewritten            Can you see how the earth  is  re-​ under our hands             written? until it says nothing?    (Selected Poems 182–183)

This constellation of words resonates even more evocatively when placed side by side with one of the two linguistic thresholds with which Bringhurst prefaces The Elements of Typographic Style. The words are lifted from Kimura Kyūo’s Kenjutsu Fushigi Hen [On the Mysteries of Swordmanship], a work composed in 1768: —​ Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs –​but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by ­following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.

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Facing the Sky, Be Vast, Blue & Quiet —​ But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being? —​ Yes.  (8)

The interaction between the ripples formed by the words of both Bringhurst’s poem and Kimura Kyūo’s quote is enlightening, to say the least. Both texts converge into nothingness. Language is not an end in itself, observes the Japanese sage, but a protective film that may help humans access the essence of things, the beating heart of what-​is. It is woven with signs, but signs are just a replacement of the real. When all signs and symbols are left behind, the self enters the realm of pure being, the utter nothingness of being. Silence is preferable to language then; we only need to listen to the world with open eyes and ears. The nothing Bringhurst’s poem tackles is of a very different nature, though. That “the earth is being rewritten /​under our hands /​until it says nothing” (Selected Poems 182) is clear evidence that the present course of a capitalist civilisation intent on profit-​making is simply self-​suicidal. The earth is being silenced, deprived of its own voice, owing to our selfish, preposterous conviction that it belongs to homo sapiens, and so the poet is implicitly asking humans to rethink the way we relate to the more-​than-​human world, which we are part of, not apart from. In the second movement, the herders are acknowledged as having provided humans with the metres of poetry, but humans seem to have forgotten them. Then, the speaking voices encourage the person they are addressing to ask the hunters to teach us humans the same old song again: “Say to the hunters: The herders /​have taught us the meters, but we /​have forgotten” (Selected Poems 182–183). These words lay themselves as a bridge between section III  –​a powerful statement on Bringhurst’s poetics –​and section IV of The Blue Roofs of Japan –​a meditation on the poet’s role in human societies. The message is emphasised through a simple device, namely repetition by the way of alliteration and parallelism. The song the speaking voice is asking to be taught is, first, “as subtle as speaking” (182), that is, a poetry characterised by the spontaneity of speech, more the product of orality than of written composition, and, second, “as lean and changeable as the world” (182)  –​i.e., a poetry born out of the living world, protean and fluid, marked by simplicity and clarity. This is the new song Bringhurst wants to learn to sing and the one he sings in The Blue Roofs of Japan. Once again, the poem turns self-​reflexive and metapoetic. The more-​than-​human world is the ultimate source both of writing and poetry –​the only source of inspiration is what-​is –​, or maybe the world itself is poetry and everywhere being is singing and dancing to the rhythms of the rain and the sea. The female voice reinforces here and there throughout the poem what the male

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voice says by echoing his words. At this point, it insists on the fact that water (rain and the sea) are not only the mothers of letters, but also “the mothers of rhythms” (183), which is to acknowledge that the rhythm of poetry is based on the rhythms of the natural world. Poetry is also a tool to think with. Dickinson explores the way the group of five poets included in Lilburn’s anthology Thinking and Singing “use poetry to think” and are actually propounding a sort of “speculative mode of thought” (“Canadian Primal” 63) in their poetry, while heavily relying on the power of metaphor to unearth isomorphisms in the world. To these poets, metaphor is of the essence in their writing. Owing to “the binding properties of metaphor” and “the resonances of words” (63), figurative language points to words as being multilayered repositories of complex meaning and a mode of understanding the world. Metaphor also points to the interconnectedness of reality as a continuum which is emulated by the musical arrangement of words on the page. In their attempt to replicate the motions and subtleties of a changing earth, “the poet-​ thinker needs to build what Robert Bringhurst calls ‘kayaks’ of thought to keep up with it; some ‘lithe, open, agile, portable structures,’ not bulky ‘steamships and apartment blocks of belief ’ ” (“Canadian Primal” 63). “Kayaks of thought” to move with the earth in its constant flux –​this is the kind of poetry Bringhurst is after, one that is supple, rigorous, elegant, transparent, and polyphonic. In this regard, Bringhurst claims that verse is rooted in human physiology and he celebrates the connection between the rhythms of poetry, the rhythms of the body and the rhythms of the earth: “Linguistic rhythms are rooted in physiological rhythms –​ in muscle, blood, and breath –​which are rooted in the air and in the ground. They answer to the rhythms of the world we inhabit:  night and day, darkness and moonlight, summer and winter” (“Everywhere Being Is Dancing” 28). This amounts to acknowledging that the rhythms of language and poetry ultimately stem from the more-​than-​human world, that the body is a replica of the world in miniature, and that the mind is an extension of the flesh of the world. As Bringhurst observes in words reminiscent of Abram’s ecophilosophy, we are “so deeply enmeshed in the fabric of nature that all separation is an illusion” (“Wild Language” 266).

V Poetry, or a Whole out of Wholes Section IV of The Blue Roofs of Japan deals with the nature of the artist’s role in human societies and, in passing, the nature of poetry, in three distinct parts. The female voice punctuates what the male voice says at five clearly identifiable points throughout the poem, by repeating echo-​like words already uttered by

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the other voice. The first part concerns the artist’s function in society, the second deals with the nature of poetry, and the third tackles the issue of poetic immortality and the right audience for an artist’s work. Nihil novum sub sole –​ these are not new questions. For centuries, the questions What is poetry? and What is a poet? have been asked time and again by poets and literary theorists alike. But there are no simple answers to these perennial questions. Most of the time, the emphasis is laid on poetry as the art of dexterously arranging words so as to produce memorable messages that tackle fundamental questions and seek to survive the passage of time. It seems that great poetry comes into being with a strong vocation of persistence; poems want to be durable, inexhaustible artifacts. This concept of poetry rests firmly on the Indo-​European root of the words poet, poem and poetry, whose etymology suggests that poetry is a craftsmanship and that a poem is something made out of words. In one of his essays, Bringhurst has paid attention to the etymology of all three words in languages other than those of the Indo-​European family, and has found out interesting things: The Greek verb ποιέω means to make or to do. The noun of agent descended from this verb, ποιητής [poiētēs], means a maker or doer. In the Greek of Aristotle or Plato, it is used to mean poet: someone who makes things out of words. […] The Arabic word for poetry […] means to know, to realize, to intuit; or to sense, to feel, to perceive. A poet […] is not a maker but a perceiver: one whose eye or heart or mind is sharp. The Hebrew term for poetry […] means to sing. […] [S]‌o a poet in Hebrew is […] a singer, not a knower. Anglo-​Saxon in this respect is closer to Arabic. There a poet is a scop, which means a sentry or a seer… (“The Silence” 305)

The poet is someone who makes things out of words, but he is also a perceiver, a knower and a singer, as evinced by the etymology of the word in various languages. Poetry is also a form of knowing, a way to come to terms with the real in search of insights into what-​is. Yet Bringhurst embraces a concept of poetry characterised by a most generous ecological largesse and a biosemiotic impulse. Poetry, he says, is “a property of reality itself ” (“The Silence” 309) and has nothing quintessentially to do with words. Rather, poetry is part of the living mesh of things, of which language itself forms part, and so humans have no monopoly on poetry either: If poetry is in fact a human invention, or a social construct, or a linguistic epiphenomenon only found in certain ritualized or aberrant and unpractical types of human speech, then poetry can tell us nothing much about […] life and death, and probably nothing much about anything else of serious interest. And if poetry were that, I’d be ashamed and disappointed to be known as a poet and ashamed to have spent my adult life exploring the ways in which poetry works. (“The Silence” 303)

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In 1957 or 1958, quite by accident, Bringhurst comes across La deshumanización del arte (1925), a classic work by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, where he finds the following definition of poetry: “La poesía es hoy el álgebra superior de las metáforas: “Poetry today is the higher algebra of metaphor”” (“The Silence” 307). These words stay with him into his adult life as an ambitious and all-​encompassing definition of poetry. Bringhurst’s poetry is rich in metaphors, which become in his hands a potent tool for gaining access to a universe teeming with isomorphisms  –​for shedding light on apparently unconnected realms of reality. Metaphor in poetry is not a way of blurring distinctions between things, but rather a way of highlighting the deep interconnectedness of reality, while emphasising the uniqueness of each single thing at the same time. In his view, what-​is is a continuum and distinctions between things and categories are differences we make through language, as Ortega y Gasset would put it.12 Canadian poet-​philosopher Jan Zwicky has devoted a book-​length essay to the epistemological power implicit in metaphors entitled Wisdom & Metaphor, from which Bringhurst quotes at several points in his essay “The Silence That Is Not Poetry –​and The Silence That Is”: [A metaphor] asserts the identity “x is y” in a way that clarifies the vivid singularity of x as well as y. It clarifies what Ortega could call their ensimismamiento, or in-​itself-​ness. The term that Jan would use is “thisness.” “Thisness,” she says, “is the experience of a distinct thing in such a way that the resonant structure of the world sounds through it.” (310)

With great intellectual alertness, Zwicky also says that “[a]‌metaphor is an explicit refusal of the idea that the distinctness of things is their most fundamental ontological characteristic” (“The Silence” 310). Things are connected to one another in most subtle ways and it is the mission of poetry and philosophy to uncover the deeper connections that bind all things together. Hence the aesthetic-​epistemological power intrinsic to metaphor, its capacity to uncover or reveal ontological isomorphisms: a metaphor is an attempt “to tell the truth, to get at the shapes of what-​is. A good metaphor is the expression of a homology, an isomorphism, between the way two things gesture,” writes Zwicky (Wisdom & Metaphor L9). 12 “[E]‌l mundo, tal y como él se nos ofrece, no está compuesto de “cosas” radicalmente separadas y francamente distintas. […] Lo primero que el hombre ha hecho en su enfronte intelectual con el mundo es clasificar los fenómenos, dividir lo que ante sí halla, en clases. A cada una de estas clases se atribuye un signo de su voz, y esto es el lenguaje. […] No sólo hablamos en una lengua determinada, sino que pensamos deslizándonos intelectualmente por carriles preestablecidos a los cuales nos adscribe nuestro destino verbal” (“Miseria” 446–​447).

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The first part of section IV of The Blue Roofs of Japan dwells on the artist’s mundane ambitions –​“a house in the country, a house /​in the town, an apartment in history” (Selected Poems 184). The poetic voice wonders where these ambitions might have possibly sprung from, for it does not make much sense to devote one’s attention, time and energy to achieving such futile goals. In “Breathing Through the Feet: An Autobiographical Meditation,” an early essay collected in Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (1986), Bringhurst summarises the stupid goals of an insatiable society in just three words, “money and jobs,” instead of “piety, grace, understanding, wisdom, intelligence, truth, beauty, virtue, compassion” (109). For a poet who is after a poetry of knowledge and thought, not of opinion, it is nonsense to pursue the comfortable ease of a house in the country and in the town, or even an apartment in history, which is meant as a reference to poetic immortality. Time and again, Bringhurst has insisted on one simple fact: if a poet handles words through his voice, hands and mind, then he should start by paying attention to his ancestors’ achievements. As proof of his seriousness and commitment to his vocation, a poet should learn from the best that has been accomplished by the masters of different traditions and try to produce, if he can, valuable works of art to make them stand next to the masterworks of the past. In “Fruits of the Excavation…,” Pete McMartin gives an interesting account of an interview with the poet. In illuminating words, Bringhurst dwells on the idea that poetry, like science, is a way of investigating the deep nature of the universe. This is what he admires most about the Presocratics, who were poets, philosophers and scientists all in one in their approach to what-​is. Thus, the integrity of Bringhurst’s calling has a seriousness about it with which money or jobs cannot interfere at all: “If I believe, as I do, that poetry should be a way of investigating the scientific and tangible aspects of the universe, then poetry should be very much like the publication of scientific research papers, which usually never reach an audience of more than 200 or 300.” […] Bringhurst’s poems are infused with the tangible and scientific  –​biology, mathematics, physics, geology –​and in that he feels close to the Greek poets. “I’m a student of the pre-​Socratic philosophers because they understood that science and poetry are one thing. Those guys understood that their business was to understand the world.” (“Fruits” A5)

The second part of section IV tackles the nature of “hard” poetry that holds a true fascination for Bringhurst. Echoes from section II of The Blue Roofs of Japan are heard in these verse lines, where the music-​water equation is invoked again. The kind of poetry Bringhurst is interested in learning to make is one made of water and music –​a poetry whose only source of inspiration is the tangible and

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real, and a poetry capable of truly singing the song of the earth. An elemental poetry like this emerges from a breathing cosmos, and so the words are the earth and the music is the rhythm of water. The fruit of this poetry is a song “as subtle as speaking” and “as lean and changeable as the world” (Selected Poems 182), as the closing lines of section III suggest. Like a subterranean current, water emerges and comes up to the surface as a crucial recurring motif in most of the five sections that make up The Blue Roofs of Japan. What is more, the words “this music /​is all about water” are also meant as a self-​reflexive reference to Bringhurst’s poem: Listen: this music is all about water. The words             This music  too are the earth, and the music             this music  too is water. (Selected Poems 184–185)

The closing movement of section IV interrogates the role of the artist, literary immortality and the question of the right audience for an artist’s work. To begin with, an artist is “anyone /​who remembers” (Selected Poems 184). What artists remember is tradition –​i.e., the best achievements by the masters of the past, which they try to improve upon. It is against their ancestors that artists have to measure themselves. But an artist could also be anyone who remembers the old song of the hunters-​and-​gatherers’ civilisations, for which the earth was still a sacred, plural and polyphonic space to which due reverence, admiration and gratitude were paid in exchange for what it gave humans for their comfort and survival. Whichever the case, Dickinson describes Bringhurst’s vocation as consisting in salvaging “ancient forms of wisdom” that are still relevant in our ferocious consumer society, obsessed with “money and jobs” (“In the Wake” 12). The poet is much more interested in taking with him the invaluable insights into reality gained by ancestors from all times and traditions, particularly from pre-​literate, non-​industrial societies. In this context, the poet is he who listens to what the world has to teach him and then tries to produce a kind of poetry as subtle and changeable as the more-​than-​human world. Ever since Bringhurst started composing poems, his life’s work has consisted in “packing out as much ‘salvageable wisdom’ from ancient and indigenous, Western and Eastern traditions as he could carry, preserving it for a future far away from the ‘central insanities’ of technological civilisation” (Dickinson, “In the Wake” 12). And which is the right audience for the artist’s achievements? The answer is simple and straightforward: the artist performs for the gods. “The others” (Selected

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Poems 184) mentioned in the poem are all negative references and happen to be there quite by accident. All of them are absolutely dispensable: “eavesdroppers” are not really able to listen to the earth singing, they just overhear reality singing; “boob-​squeezers” are not capable of a sensible appraisal of the serious artist’s work; “thieves” are those who steal without acknowledging their sources; and “voyeurs” simply happen to be there looking shamelessly at what the serious artist is trying to accomplish conscientiously, with all the presence of mind he is capable of. In producing his art for the gods as the ultimate audience, the artist is looking beyond short-​term ephemeral success and into the realm of immortality, sanctioned by posterity. The requirements that great serious art has to meet are those of excellence and universality. By writing a species of poetry capable of reaching into the deep future, the poet is talking to coming generations, while at the same time he is reaching beyond the human realm. Gods are immutable, unchangeable entities populating a sphere unaffected by the ordinary passage of time. Great immortal poetry gets to be spoken by the gods themselves, in whose tongues there are “no dates and no names” (184), as if valuable poetry simply were absorbed into an indistinguishable canon of immortal works, a simultaneous constellation akin to the one Eliot envisioned in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919).13 This is tantamount to achieving a form of immortality. In Bringhurst’s words, The tongues of the gods include no dates and no names. This is the logos.             THIS             is the logos.  (Selected Poems 184–185)

The artist’s role is thus to listen to reality and to remember what he has listened to so as to make his own works of art, which inevitably participate in being and seek to unveil the essence of reality. The closing lines of section IV speak of the λόγος (logos), which “recalls the poem’s previous references to order: the order of societies in which the poet moves and the order of the poem that shapes his reflections” (McLeod 168). Logos is the Greek word for “word,” “reason” or “plan.” In Greek philosophy it meant the reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and 13 Eliot writes: “The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new” (“Tradition” 15).

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giving it form and meaning. The Greek word κόσμος means, in fact, “order.” The idea of logos in Greek thought harks back at least to the 6th-​century-​BCE pre-​ Socratic philosopher Herakleitos, who discerned in the cosmic process a logos analogous to the reasoning power in humans. And what does the philosophical concept of λόγος have to do with being and poetry? Bringhurst’s poetry aims to reach beyond the tangible and into the essence of things, i.e., into the λόγος or ordering principle beneath the universe. In this context, one is inevitably reminded of the poet’s definition of polyphony and of Zwicky’s response to “Singing with the Frogs”: You say […] a polyphonic poem is “[a]‌poem that … enacts and embodies plurality and space as well as (or instead of) timelessness and unity.” I don’t think the parenthetical “or instead of ” should be there. What allows anything to be genuinely polyphonic, in my view, is –​as you say –​the conversion of time to space; to the extent that the conversion is successful, the piece exists as a synchronic unity, even though it perforce elapses in time as it comes to be. (“Being” 181)

“This is the logos”:  the final words uttered by both the male and female voice in section IV point to a realm beyond the tangible which is possibly only reachable through polyphonic poetry like the one The Blue Roofs of Japan enacts through the interpenetration of two voices in search of a core of irreducible meaning. Far from contradicting each other, both voices complement what each has to say and enhance the semantic density of the poem’s statements about the world. The world Bringhurst envisions is simple and crystal-​clear as water, and that water is incorporated into the texture of his poem. This is possibly the ultimate elegance the poet is looking for when making well-​wrought poems that bring Pound’s melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia together.

VI Breathing to the Rhythm of Being With section V of The Blue Roofs of Japan readers are back to the polyphonic complexity and the interpenetration of voices found in the opening piece of the poem. Ringing with philosophical echoes in its celebration of the unity of the cosmos, section V is an invitation for the reader to become one with the world. The cosmos reveals itself to be a continuum of distinct and yet connected entities made out of the four elements (i.e., earth, water, air, fire) identified by the sharp minds of attentive perceivers, knowers and singers from different literary and philosophical traditions. Again, metaphor plays a decisive role in conveying what non-​figurative language would fall short of conveying. Thus, by disclosing potent equations beneath the world’s phenomena, the poet uncovers subtle

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connections binding all things together into a vibrant whole, and he also reaches beyond the realm of the human to speak for an audience of immortal, immutable gods. All textual threads and lexical nodes scattered in the previous sections of the poem are now woven into a compelling vortex of meaning: water and music, earth and the sky, mountains and the sea, song and singing, and the logos are all constellated into a picture of calm and stasis which celebrates “how things inhabit flux” (McKay, Deactivated 103), or the endless motion and change of what-​is, in five simple movements which are analysed in detail in what follows. The closing piece of The Blue Roofs of Japan draws the circle begun in the opening piece into completion: whereas section I sings of the birth of a new day with the sunrise in the early morning, section V evokes the unfolding of the afternoon gesturing towards the coming night. Two equations are celebrated in the simple, transparent language of parallelism: All afternoon, the slow celebration of these             This music is  water, two equations: earth plus water plus fire             this laughter is  fire. gives earth that holds water; water plus fire plus leaf             Water plus  fire gives a bowl full of tea.             plus leaf  (Selected Poems 186–187)

The two equations are simple enough: (1) the combination of earth, water and fire brings about the Earth, which holds water by the way of rivers, seas and oceans; and (2) the combination of water, fire and leaf brings about a bowl full of tea. At any rate, the underlying equation is anticipated in section I  of The Blue Roofs of Japan, where the earth is described as “the cup containing everything” (Selected Poems 176). What the earth and the bowl full of tea have in common is water, the primordial element found in all things in this world. The equations are celebrated in slow motion, as it were, for the tea ceremony in Japan is a ritual that takes time and teaches the need for humility and attention during the process of making and serving tea. The moment of metamorphosis is unique, as water and tea leaves are transmuted into a warm liquid through the magical intervention of fire. Witnessing this metamorphosis brings to the poet’s mind the sudden revelation that the earth is a gigantic bowl of tea, in permanent flux. That a simple, humble object like a bowl of tea is capable of conjuring up such powerful resonances is a poetic miracle and evidence of what Bennett calls

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“thing-​power” (Vibrant Matter 2) and Morton terms “epiphany”: “A thing is an epiphany –​a givenness whose given is irreducible, like suddenly coming across a forest clearing” (“Liminal Space” 278). The tea ceremony –​and the metamorphosis it entails –​has the texture of transcendence: “In an epiphany, agency is on the side of the thing, by which is meant the nonhuman side… […] [A]‌n epiphany comes from the beyond, from the not-​me: it is precisely something I do not impose” (“Liminal Space” 273), claims Morton. While the male voice dwells on the two equations, the female voice speaks its own words full of undeniable wisdom: “This music is water, /​this laughter is fire” (Selected Poems 187). These words are a reminder of what has been affirmed time and again throughout the whole poem  –​i.e., poetry is one more thread of the polyphonic, protean plurality of being –​, and they also anticipate the message in the closing lines of section V, where “music is water” and “fire is laughter” in a four-​point constellation of equations. On the other hand, the female voice also opens a new window onto one of the two equations celebrated here: water plus fire plus leaf does not only give a bowl full of tea, it also “recentres the air” (Selected Poems 187). All of a sudden, the fourth element missing (air) enters the scene. That the combination of the basic ingredients out of which tea is made “recentres the air” is possibly expressive of the interconnectedness of all things and, at the same time, points forwards to the evocation of the logos in the second movement of the composition: “A gesture, a form within matter /​recentres the air” (Selected Poems 186). The logos is that unseen or invisible principle governing the order implicit in the universe; it is more like a gesture or a form within matter than anything else. There is possibly no better way of trying to capture its essence other than through metaphors like these two. The emphasis is then placed on ties, even though the male and female voices do not utter their evocative words simultaneously: Water and earth: what ties us together holds us apart.             What holds us  apart             is what ties us together. (Selected Poems 186–187)

That the two voices are not interpenetrated at this exact point in the poem is no random choice. The male voice utters its gnomic words and then it is the female voice’s turn to utter exactly the same words in reversed order. Whereas the male voice’s final words evoke the notion of reality as a set of things marked by separation or distinctness, the female voice’s final words gesture towards reality as a continuum or entanglement. Water and earth are identified as being elements that tie us together while holding us apart at the same time. If they

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tie us together, it is because they are basic elements out of which everything is made –​a universal substratum beneath vibrant matter. If they hold us apart, it is because they also embody the geographical distances of continents and oceans that keep us apart because of the sheer immensity of space. What does space have to do with water or earth? Time and space are also basic elements or threads woven into the living mesh of things. Throughout history, humans have made their best to try to understand exactly what they are and have produced measurement instruments to account for their elusive nature. Like time, space is also inescapable and real. Space could be said to be even more real than time, for all (non)human beings move in or through space, which has got a sort of tangible texture. By contrast, time is of a more eel-​slippery nature and moves through us, in much the same way language speaks through our breath and lips à la Heidegger. That earth and water keep us apart might also suggest that the exact combination of these elements in the bodies of what-​is results in distinct intra-​ acting (living and non-​living) beings on Earth that come to be through a process of shared becoming. The proportions of water and earth vary considerably from one mountain, say, to a tree or a river. Their very physical constitution or texture keeps them distinct or apart along the boundless (not infinite) continuum that reality is. At the heart of this second movement, essentially concerned with the logos, is an enigmatic reference:  “Earthsong and seasong, they say:  /​the native and foreign” (Selected Poems 186). The meaning becomes clear when these lines are placed against the 1986 “Program Notes” accompanying the Lines Review version of the poem: “The shakuhachi is an endblown bamboo flute. It is one of the principal instruments of hogaku, traditional Japanese music (as distinguished from yogaku, “sea music” –​i.e., music of foreign origin)” (69). The enigmatic references to earthsong and seasong are now crystal-​clear: the earthsong refers to traditional Japanese music (i.e., one stemming from the living soil or genius loci of the place), whereas seasong refers to foreign music (i.e., music coming from beyond the sea). Let us not forget that Japan is an island full of mountains and separated from the Asian mainland by water. This interpretation does not exhaust the rich resonances earthsong and seasong treasure within themselves, though. They are reminders that the earth and the sea are the ultimate source of inspiration for the kind of poetry Bringhurst is after, that the earth taught humans its metres when it started being cultivated in the Neolithic by the first farmers, and that the sea, with the regular motion of its waves, had also much to teach us about the rhythms of poetry. Once again, the old song that the earth and the sea teach us is “as subtle as speaking” and “as lean and changeable as the world” (Selected Poems 182). Ties are not forgotten at all in the third movement of section V, which is closely linked to the second one. “What ties us to time and the world /​beside us is fire”

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(Selected Poems 186), says the male voice. In the female voice’s rendering, it reads like this: “What ties us to time and the world /​beside us is INSIDE us” (187). The word fire uttered by the male voice coincides in time with the word INSIDE uttered by the female voice. Like water and earth, fire is another fundamental constituent element of reality. The Presocratics knew it about 25 centuries ago. Time is also invoked here, as time and space are the essential matrices inside which all human experience unfolds. Fire is revealed as the element that ties us (i.e., human and nonhuman beings) to the world and to time as well. In this context, it is also possible to interpret “fire” as a symbol for the driving force beneath all things, pushing them to be what they are supposed to be and fulfil their primordial vocation. Fire is the living sparkle propelling us forwards in this unending process of becoming or perpetual metamorphosis which life is, whilst it also pushes us forward to cultivate our authentic being, in Heideggerian terms. A purifying element, fire is also linked to notions of humility, calling and gratitude –​the reverence we ought to show in the face of universal being. At any rate, what is genuinely new in this third movement of section V of The Blue Roofs of Japan is encapsulated in just a handful of resonant lines: The mountains are younger than birds. The sea when we lived in the sea was made of fresh water. No man is not one of these islands. (Selected Poems 186)

This is a history of the world in just a few seconds –​in the time it takes the male voice to sing these words aloud, while the female voice remains dumb and attentive to what it says. The four key words constellated into this illuminating fragment are mountains, birds, sea and man, all of which evoke the four elements which the ancients identified as being constitutive of what-​is. Mountains are made of earth and fire sometimes (as in volcanoes); birds are creatures of air; the sea is the embodiment of wild water; and the human being is a combination of all four elements, an island or sphere closed on the outside, and yet “always connected to his surrounding ecology” (McLeod 170). Upon closer inspection, this might be a brief account of the geological-​biological history of Japan as well:  birds existed before the mountains emerged to the surface of land through seismic movements; the sea was the main source of sustenance for people’s survival in traditional societies; and homo sapiens is conceived as sprouting from the living ground of the islands that make up Japan. This interpretation makes sense when these words are set against the incantatory ones that the female voice has been intoning for a while so as to punctuate the message: Not counting, nor naming. Naming, not counting.

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Facing the Sky, Be Vast, Blue & Quiet Counting, not naming. Naming and counting. (Selected Poems 187; italics in the original)

These words are not superimposed on the male voice’s, but uttered in isolation by the female voice instead. They look like variations on the same theme and an exemplification of what could be called a combinatory logic where a set of words occur in a number of different combinations that, upon closer examination, turn out to be no random arrangement at all. If we posit that a = counting and b = naming, this is the overall resulting pattern: (1) not a, nor b; (2) b, not a; (3) a, not b; and (4) a and b. The ethical-​environmental implications are profound and worth analysing: (1) Not counting, nor naming. This is a celebration of utter silence as the best attitude possible in the face of reality. At a pre-​verbal stage in the history of humankind, there was no need for speech or writing either. There was no need to count possessions and no need to name the things humans found in their surrounding world either. There was only room for amazement at the awe-​inspiring presence and mystery of the universe. (2) Naming, not counting. This is a celebration of language as a means of naming and uncovering things in a vibrant universe. Language is a word that we use in selfishly human terms here despite Bringhurst’s intimation that there are forms of language (mathematical or gestural language, for instance) which are non-​verbal, as well as forms of language that are not the prerogative of humans. Communication is a universal right and compulsion shared by all beings, but we cannot avoid thinking in human terms. In this respect, in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916), Walter Benjamin propounded three kinds of language: first, divine language, which is the demiurgus’ word –​that of God in the biblical Book of Genesis, where naming14 things is tantamount to creating them ex nihilo; second, Adamic language or language in a state of purity, i.e., words that cannot create things, but are still close to the things they name and can unveil their true essence; and third, post-​Adamic language, or language fallen from its pristine state, in which words no longer unveil the true essence of things and float as if aimlessly amid the realm of appearances. 14 Benjamin writes: “Man is the namer; by this we recognize that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence, he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he get beyond himself and attain knowledge of them –​in the name. God’s creation is completed when things receive their names from man, from whom in name language alone speaks” (65).

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(3) Counting, not naming. This is a celebration of arithmetic as a management and control tool. With the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic, the human being becomes the measurer of all things and the earth becomes a portfolio of resources to be managed and exploited as if humankind had an inalienable right to them. The domestication of the earth’s resources by means of farming and ranching ran parallel to the domestication of language through writing. The earth ceased to be perceived as a sacred place where the human and the divine coexisted as part of a breathing cosmos. Benefit became the last goal: the highest priority was counting one’s own benefits derived from generous Earth, even if this entailed the overexploitation and deterioration of oikos, our only home. Thus, naming is not important any more; what matters is counting. (4) Naming and counting. As McLeod suggests, “the significance of naming and counting […] rests upon the power of language to shape and order our understanding of the world” (171). “Naming and counting” is a celebration of the reconciliation of giving things their right names to uncover their essence, on the one hand, and of counting things to set some kind of order upon the vitality of the world in all its multiform strangeness. Naming is a way of knowing things, whereas counting bespeaks humans’ obsession with owning, with the management of properties and earth’s resources, which we take to be ours by right. Naming vs. counting, or knowing vs. owning. To borrow once again McKay’s words, “we don’t own what we know,” which is a form of saying that we need to embrace gratitude and respect for everything the earth gives us. The fourth and fifth movements of section V are intensely lyrical. In the fourth movement, water and earth are celebrated in simple language: “Water is wordless. Earth /​is information. Earth is words. /​This too is the logos” (Selected Poems 188), which echoes these words from one of Bringhurst’s essays: “The earth itself is a living body, and a kind of brain. It is living information, like cortex and the genes” (“Breathing” 102). The book of the world is written not in ink, but in water and earth instead, but water has no words, utters no recognisably human sounds and resists anthropomorphisation. Earth, by contrast, is words and so it can be decoded and interpreted by the inquisitive gaze of human beings. Beneath Bringhurst’s words is Herakleitos’ intuition that πάντα ῥεῖ: everything changes and flows all the time. The fluidity of reality is something the old pre-​Socratic philosopher took for granted many centuries ago.15 Feet are the link uniting the 15 To Herakleitos, fire is the essential material uniting all things and forms the material principle of an orderly universe, the logos through which all things are interrelated and all natural events

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human body to the flesh of the earth, and so treading on the ground is tantamount to deciphering the characters written on the surface of the earth, which is information. Feet are not as dangerous as hands are, or so tells us Bringhurst again: “A journey on foot /​cannot be repeated, just as a story /​cannot be recited, only retold” (Selected Poems 188). Journeys on foot cannot be repeated in exactly the same conditions, for the feet and the earth change from one minute to the next. The same applies to oral literatures and stories: every single performance or retelling of a story is unique and irreplaceable. Stories, like feet or the earth, are also subject to constant change, which is part of their charm and complexity. As Zwicky claims in Lyric Philosophy, “[t]‌o be open to the world is to experience presence. […] What lyric perception is not conditioned by is the human ego” (L223). The closing fifth movement is a quiet celebration of the four elements and an invitation for the self to dispel the illusion that subject and object, perceived and perceived, human beings and the environment are separated by an abyss. The four-​point constellation of equations is as follows: water-​music, fire-​laughter, earth-​darkness, sky-​quiet/​wide/​blue. What all four equations underline is the idea of communion of the self with the world, as well as the interconnectedness of everything in reality. The basis of all four equations is the four basic elements out of which reality is made  –​water, earth, air, fire. The second term in each pair of binaries is always a noun, except for the sky, which is qualified by three adjectives. What the final lesson comes down to is that humankind needs to re-​ learn the essentials of an attitude of reverence, gratitude and humility towards what-​is: Facing the water, be music. Be still facing fire.             Be laughter! Be laughter.             One. Two.  Three. Facing the earth, be darkness.             Four.  Five. Facing the sky, be quiet, wide, and blue. (Selected Poems 188–189)

occur. The underlying connection between opposites is a significant manifestation of this logos: he asserted that the world exists as a coherent system in which a change in one direction is ultimately balanced by a corresponding change in another. Between all things there is a hidden connection, which is tantamount to positing the persistence of unity despite change, illustrated by Herakleitos’ famous analogy of life to a river. All things are thus in constant flux, regardless of how they appear to the senses.

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These lines show the poetic persona’s exhortation for the reader to resonate with the vitality of the world at large, for humans to let their sensuous bodies sympathetically correspond to the poses of water, fire, earth and sky. “I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth” (187), writes Whitman in “A Song of Rolling Earth.” Thus, there is at play in Bringhurst’s lines “a natural physics of sympathetic bodies” (Bennett, “Of Material Sympathies” 249), a sense that bodies respond to each other sympathetically on account of their common material substratum. For Bennett, sympathy “names a material agency, a power of bodies human and nonhuman, a mode of impersonal connection, attachment, and care that proceeds from below subjectivity into subjectivity” (250). In this regard, The Blue Roofs of Japan as a whole offers a luminous instantiation of ontopoetics  –​i.e., “meaningful communicative exchanges between self and world and world and self, in which we are afforded a glimpse of the inner, psychoactive dimension […] inherent in materiality” (Rigby, “Spirits” 285), whilst the vibrant entities of the world un-​conceal themselves to the human gaze, even if only partially, for nothing can be known completely by inquisitive humans. This act of sensuous encounter or carnal knowledge is expressive of a shared becoming of perceiver and perceived, an ontology of relational becoming, or a dynamic of mutual arising, “in which particular entities and patterns emerge and unfold only in and through their changing relations with others” (Rigby, “Spirits” 286). Bringhurst expresses it in eloquent words in Learning to Die: An old Chinese term for nature or the wild is zíràn […], which means “just like itself ” or “that’s the way it is.” There is a passage in the Dào Dé Jing, the classic of Lâo Zi, that says […]: “Humans align themselves with the earth; earth aligns itself with the sky; the sky aligns itself with the Tao, the Tao aligns itself with nature” –​or “the Tao aligns itself with the wild,” or “the Tao aligns itself with being what it is.” (16–​17)

In Canto LXXXI, one of the central Pisan Cantos, Pound sang: “Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down /​Learn of the green world what can be thy place /​In scaled invention or true artistry” (520), proclaiming the earth as the ultimate source of harmony, grace and wisdom. In fact, a closer look at the etymology of the word “human” reveals the deep connection between humankind and the earth. ““Human” comes from the Latin “hūmānus,” which comes from “homō,” which is related to “humus,” which means “earth.” Thus, “human” means “earthly being”” (Klein 749), a being of the earth. It comes as no surprise that, in the midst of industrial societies, humans should strive to align themselves with the earth and to recover a sense of kinship with the nonhuman world. In this regard, The Blue Roofs of Japan, Bringhurst’s first polyphonic experiment, is a serene invitation for us humans to acknowledge and resonate with the vibrancy inherent

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in the commonwealth of beings dwelling on earth. What is more, it is a wise invitation for us to breathe through our entire body and align ourselves with the unpremeditated grace of the elements and the breathing cosmos as a whole, since we are in and of this earth.

2 Toads and Deep, Geological Time History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. —​Michel Serres, The Parasite (1955), p. 24.   The simple act of perception is experienced as an interchange between oneself and that which one perceives –​as a meeting, a participation, a communion between beings. For each thing that we sense is assumed to be sensitive in its own right, able to feel and respond to the beings around it, and to us. —​David Abram, Becoming Animal (2010), p. 268.

I A Piece of Wood, an Ancestral Toad In “Storied Matter,” the foreword to Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s Material Ecocriticism, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asks: “Might toads possess a unique materiality, an agency, and even an inscrutability that demand that their story not be merely human, not be familiar, not be a text written without their participation?” (ix). This is exactly what Bringhurst embarks upon in Conversations with a Toad (1987), his second polyphonic work: he makes an ancestral toad participant in the telling of its evolutionary story, which is inseparable from the earth’s and homo sapiens’ stories of co-​evolution. Originally available in a limited-​edition livre d’artiste by Lucie Lambert, it was then made more accessible in The Calling and Selected Poems, which gave the poem the circulation it merits. A  long meditative poem in ten parts which explores a fundamental question  –​i.e., what it means to be alive in a world where the human and the nonhuman are inextricably fused in the living mesh of things –​, the text remains a challenge for the reader, who must pay attention to the ripples and resonances of words as the poem unfolds in space and in time. The profundity of Bringhurst’s thought is conveyed through a language marked by seeming artlessness and musicality, and further enhanced by a suite of 11 images made by Lucie Lambert that present the toad as if in a state of metamorphosis, evolving from the realism of the first drawings towards calligraphic brushes that convey the idea of a toad with great economy and elegance.

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An art object in the making for a long time, the editorial history of the poem reveals that Conversations with a Toad has known different written incarnations over time with its corresponding textual variants. Though three sections of the poem were published as an anticipation of the entire work in Border Crossings in March 1987, the poem went through three different stages:16 the 1987 Lucie Lambert edition, the 1987 Descant version, and The Calling (1995) and Selected Poems (2009) versions, which are almost identical. The actual incorporation of three voices takes place only at the third stage, since the toad’s voice was taken for granted in the first two incarnations of the poem, where the amphibian is the silent addressee of homo sapiens’ musings. In The Calling, two voices are present in sections I and IX of the poem; one of them is in roman and the other is in indented italics, expected to speak at the same time. The typographical design in Selected Poems is much more agreeable to the eye, with one voice printed in black ink and the other in blue ink, but there is one more voice which has not been printed on the page. As Bringhurst explains in a short note preceding the poem, Conversations with a Toad is a polyphonic poem for three voices: homo sapiens (black ink), homo narrans (blue ink) and bufo boreas (silent throughout). The overall architecture of Conversations with a Toad is clearly discernible. Whereas section I is conceived as a prologue addressed to humans spoken by homo sapiens and homo narrans, sections II through X are addressed directly to the toad, which may or may not listen. This is not the man or the toad’s concern, for the important thing is that the meditation be spoken aloud for the rest of humankind to listen to the ancestral lessons the toad has to teach through its dumb presence. When compared to The Blue Roofs of Japan, it becomes evident that Conversations with a Toad is a poem marked by an enhanced awareness of ecological calamity brought about by the practices of the dominant capitalist culture in the Anthropocene. The 10-​part sequence 16 (1) “Conversations with a Toad: Excerpts from a Work in Progress” was published in Border Crossings (Winnipeg) 6.2 (March 1987): 32. Three sections (III, V and VI) of what the author terms a work in progress are published here for the first time. Sections III and VI are revised and section V reprinted in the Lucie Lambert edition published in July 1987. (2) Conversations with a Toad. Vancouver, BC and Shawinigan, Québec: Éditions Lucie Lambert, 1987. Accordion-​fold codex in cloth-​covered boards published in an edition consisting of 55 numbered copies, including the eleven deluxe copies, numbered 1–​11, all signed by author and artist. The poem in ten numbered sections is accompanied by eleven woodcuts by Masato Arikushi, from drawings by Lucie Lambert. (3) “Conversations with a Toad” was again revised from the Lucie Lambert edition and published in a different version in Descant (Toronto) 59 (Winter 1987 [published 1988]): 7–​14. (4) “Conversations with a Toad” was further revised from the Lucie Lambert edition in The Calling (1995) and then it was reprinted with minor textual variants in Selected Poems (2009), from which we quote in this chapter.

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is, thus, a probing meditation on being and ecology, on time and space, on geological and biological evolution, and on the way humans relate to the nonhuman and the world at large. Relearning gratitude and how to breathe through one’s feet –​i.e., paying attention and due respect to a commonwealth of agentic beings  –​is part of the primordial lesson that homo sapiens and homo narrans are trying to deliver through the presence of the silent bufo boreas to all those willing to listen. At this point, it might be relevant to consider how this polyphonic poem came into being as an art object, as well as how Lucie Lambert’s illustrations and the poet’s words enhance one another. Quebec-​born Lucie Lambert is an artist who has been making livres d’artiste since the 1970s. The fruit of a joint-​ project in which several talented artists were involved, Conversations with a Toad was the fifth artbook in her artistic career. All her previous works were written in French, so Conversations with a Toad was her first English publication, which certainly expanded her audience. Since the onset of her artistic life, Lambert was determined to present her work in book form to ensure unity and integration, as she felt that a “bound” collection would show a “rhythm of development… a sequence that ties together time and space” (Zilm n.p.). Prototypically, she works on the prints and book design in the first place and then she tries to look for the right text “by talented writers to complement, enhance and expand the artist’s vision” (n.p.). Lambert’s work is not static, though. Two major influences on the evolution of her work are the art of Chinese and Arabic calligraphy, which she studied during a three-​year stay in Paris in the early 1980s, and the Haida sculpture of the Northwest Coast of British Columbia, to which she was introduced shortly afterwards, in 1983–​84, by Haida artist Bill Reid  –​a friend and influential man in Bringhurst’s life too. From a technical point of view, her print-​making evolved from her earliest drawings on transparencies, printed on silkscreen, through etchings to woodcuts. In terms of forms of expression and themes, her work also evolved “from a type of abstract landscape […] to a bestiary touched by both Japanese and West-​Coast Indian art”17 (Duquette 23), which is evident in the illustrations accompanying Bringhurst’s poem. Conversations with a Toad is dedicated to Reid, the personal link that united Bringhurst and Lambert in the early 1980s. Bringhurst had already experience in artistic joint-​projects. In 1984, he wrote The Raven Steals the Light, a collection of

17 Duquette’s essay “Écrire l’Image” is translated into English by Hugh Hazelton under the title “Writing Images,” pp. 22–​28, from which quotes are lifted.

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myths inspired by the trickster figure of Haida mythology, masterfully illustrated by Reid. That was just the beginning of a long, fruitful friendship:  The Black Canoe, an essay on the homonymous masterwork by the Haida sculptor, was published in 1992, and Solitary Raven, Reid’s collected writings accompanied by an introduction and extensive notes by Bringhurst, was published in 2001 and 2009.18 But, to turn to the genesis of Conversations with a Toad, the book was catalysed into existence by Reid, a decisive influence on Lambert’s and Bringhurst’s work at a crucial moment in their lives: Lambert came to Vancouver to work in 1983 and, partly because of his [Reid’s] influence, was inspired to create the toad images and to work in three dimensional images. […] Bringhurst was working with Reid on The Raven when the two began to discuss the collaboration that led to Conversations. (Zilm n.p.)

Lambert’s relation with toads began in 1983, working with the Haida artist in his studio for nine months. Reid gave her a piece of wood and asked her “to carve a toad, to find the toad in that piece of wood” (Stainsby G3). That was the true inception point of her artistic project. Officially presented to the world at the Butler Gallery (Vancouver) in June 1987, Conversations with a Toad folds out, accordion-​style, for a panoramic view, with the illustrations and the text of Bringhurst’s poem on facing pages. The technical description is provided in full by the colophon in the Lucie Lambert edition: The eleven images were drawn in ink by Lucie Lambert, then cut in wood and printed on kizuki hosho by Masato Arikushi in the Sawai Atelier, Vancouver. Thirty-​ three blocks and forty-​three impressions were required to produce the eleven prints. The typographical design is by Crispin Elsted, who handset Robert Bringhurst’s text in Jan van Krimpen’s Romulus roman and sloped roman. The text was printed on kizuki hosho by Jan Elsted, using an 1850 Super Royal Albion handpress, at Barbarian Press, Mission, British Columbia. The binding was designed and executed by Pierre Ouvrard at Saint-​Paul de l’Ile-​ aux-​Noix, Quebec. There are fifty-​five numbered copies, each signed by the author and the artist. Numbers 1 to 11 comprise a deluxe edition, printed on hankusa and accompanied

18 Given his passion for typography and beautifully-​made books, Bringhurst has collaborated with a number of artists to produce special editions over the years: Elements (1996), a poem with illustrations by Ulf Nilsen printed by Russell Maret at Kubooa Press; the book of translations Parmenides. The Fragments (2003), in collaboration with Peter Koch and other typographers, illustrators and printers; the ambitious polyphonic work New World Suite No. 3 (2005); Stopping By (2012), with etchings by Caroline Saltzwedel; Hard High-​Country Poems (2015), with a drypoint engraving by Joseph Goldyne; and Going Down Singing (2017), with ten burnished aquatints by Goldyne too.

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by one of the original drawings; the upper cover of this deluxe state is decorated with an inset sculpture cast in sterling silver. (n.p.)

The book was published to wide critical acclaim as “a rare and exciting combination of book-​ as-​ art and art-​ as-​ book” (Zilm n.p.), but it was an expensive19 limited edition, which dramatically restricted access to the work just to the initiated. What remains an artistic accomplishment is the juxtaposition, or rather fusion, of Lambert’s images and Bringhurst’s words: “The 11 images form a related sequence, ranging from a ‘realistic’ toad through increasingly abstract images to a final form that seems to represent a freed toad spirit. These are complemented by the ‘conversations’ of poet Bringhurst” (Zilm n.p.). The interplay of both discourses  –​visual and verbal  –​gives a new dimension to the work as it unfolds: “The two discourses in effect merge into one, like a piece for two voices in which each intonation melts transparently into the other in artistic interplay, each in turn taking up the melodic line that unfolds effortlessly in perfectly harmonized evolution” (Duquette 22). Duquette dwells on the way the drawings evolve from stark realism towards an abstract stylisation that is ultimately inspired by Lambert’s love and practice of calligraphy: the toad drawn with almost photographic precision in the first pages evolves into a few calligraphic brush strokes that give the idea of a toad. By contrast, Bringhurst’s text seems to adhere to the hard facts of the real all the time, even when travelling back in space and deep time to the biological and geological origins of the earth. In Zilm’s words, “[w]‌hile Lambert’s images seem concerned with materialization of spirits as she moves from near realism to potentially abstract, Bringhurst evokes spiritualization of matter” (n.p.). Likewise, Duquette points out, Conversations… contains eleven engravings based on ink drawings. […] There is a clear evolution from the first to the last plates: from the frog, which is immediately recognizable in its basic forms, to the abstract mark that offers the idea of the frog, almost as a calligraphic design. This process of stylization moves toward an extreme simplification of design, leading back to origins, to the abstract beginning of the world even before the appearance of the first batrachians, that emblematic figure that arises from the depths of time. The ten poems […] suggest a chapter of natural history underlain by philosophical reflections on knowledge and the human spirit; on life, death, and destiny; on space and the duration of time. Finally, these texts are testimony to a very detailed attention to life in all its forms. (26)

19 “Eleven deluxe copies, with a silver miniature sculpture on the cover, top quality paper, and an original drawing cost $2,000. Forty-​four copies without the deluxe accoutrements cost $1,000” (Stainsby G3).

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“A very detailed attention to life in all its forms” is palpable in Conversations with a Toad, a poem concerned with making visible the anthropogenic damage inflicted upon the earth at a time of climate crisis. As an accomplished polyphonic ecopoem, it testifies to the capacity of lyric philosophy and philosophical poetry to draw readers’ attention to deep thinking on time and space, on meaning and speech, on the mind as a replica of the world, on the persistence of beauty and being despite the destruction of the biosphere, and on the alarming decimation of nonhuman species in the Anthropocene.

II  The Silent, Inspiring Presence of a Toad According to Iovino and Oppermann, “every living creature, from humans to fungi, tells evolutionary stories of coexistence, interdependence, adaptation and hybridization, extinctions and survivals” (“Introduction” 7). Seen with the eyes of a biosemiotician and a material ecocritic, biological life reveals itself to be made of stories. Bringhurst’s Conversations with a Toad is a polyphonic experiment that tells one such story from the depths of geological time. The poem opens with a prologue spoken by two interpenetrating voices: one by homo sapiens (in italics in this chapter) and another by homo narrans (in roman type). Though the toad is a silent presence throughout the whole poem, it is already palpable in the background from the start as an eloquent counterpoint to both human voices. Intended as a prologue spoken by humans and addressed to other humans, section I  consists of three stanzas, the first of which focuses on the legends that have inspired homo sapiens for the sustained meditation on being and ecology presented in sections II to X. The opening lines of section I offer a web of verbal threads that anticipate the depth of thinking that comes into full bloom in subsequent sections: Not for the toad, no, but for us,          In this poem a man talks as a prologue only: two          to a toad. The toad may listen legends. One. That a three-​legged          or he may not. That, perhaps, crow with vermilion feathers          is not the man’s concern. nests in the sun; in the restless          I suppose it is not the toad’s concern moon, a rabbit, a willow tree, a toad.          either. I am convinced, though, Two. Near water, a rock. Where a toad

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         that the silences of the toad had been sitting, an old woman sits.          are the most important –​ I mean She is deaf, dumb and blind. But she hears          the most meaningful –​parts of the poem, through the soles of her feet, speaks          filling the dark shells from under her skirt, and sees          of the man’s ears and the spaces through the holes in the palms of her hands.          between his sentences, (Selected Poems 193)

In written poems and stories, a prologue serves the purpose of giving the readership an interpretive compass for what comes next in a literary work. Two different and yet related legends are juxtaposed in the lines quoted. In the former, a vermilion-​feathered and three-​legged crow is said to nest in the sun, whereas the moon is thought to be the dwelling place of a rabbit, a willow and a toad. This is the sort of mythical account of the coexistence of the sun and the moon up in the sky that one might expect to find in ancient oral cultures, no matter whether on European, Asian or American soil. In the latter, there are two fundamental ingredients –​water and a rock –​and, all of a sudden, an old woman is sitting exactly where a toad had been before, which suggests the kind of metamorphosis present in a myriad of legends worldwide. In any case, the old woman is no ordinary woman: she is deaf, dumb and blind, but she seems to be alert to everything that is going on around her, and to respond to the world with a maximum of intensity that bespeaks ecological attention and sensuous immersion in the flesh of the earth. It is no wonder that she hears “through the soles of her feet,” speaks “from under her skirt” and sees “through the holes in the palms of her hands” (Selected Poems 193). Possibly she is not exactly human, but a goddess or a shaman. Whichever the case, the images that have been constellated in these two legends already evoke tattered visions of wisdom from the oral literatures of the First Nations of North America, and more specifically from the rich cultures of the Northwest Coast, which Bringhurst started studying in the early 1980s. It follows that Conversations with a Toad is rich in subtle allusions to the world of the native people of the land where the poet had found spiritual ancestors and a home for himself. In fact, the raven and the toad are recurrent totemic animals among the Haida and the Tsimshian, and so they figure prominently in their myths and visual art.

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In the second and third movements of poem I, light is shed on the possible sources of what the speaking voice calls “these images” (Selected Poems 193). The speaking homo sapiens has learnt and rescued these remnants of strange visions from a number of ancestors: “among the Tsimshian and the immigrants –​Celts and Chinese” (Selected Poems 193–194). The relevance of the clues implicit in these words should not be overlooked. Natives of the Northwest Coast, the Tsimshian traditionally lived on the mainland and islands around the Skeena and Nass rivers and Milbanke Sound in what is now British Columbia and in Alaska. Their economy was based on fishing (though they also hunted animals in winter), and their social organisation was based on clans and lineages, with each extended family being an autonomous or independent social entity. In this particular context, the Tsimshian are intended to metonymically stand for all the native cultures of North America, whereas the others were all immigrants who settled in their land afterwards. It also seems that the speaking homo sapiens (evoking Bringhurst’s own peripatetic biography) has travelled ­extensively around the world and learnt stories and legends like the ones evoked in the first movement. What all these myth-​making people share is an elemental kind of knowledge: they do not know “anything anymore except whatever it is /​that everybody knows, and how /​to keep silent” (Selected Poems 194). As the poet claims, it was not their aspiration to “run the world or tame it,” of which their oral literatures give sufficient evidence:  “[t]‌heir stories tell us that they understood that the land has a mind of its own, that the wild is in control of itself and has room within it for humans but does not need and cannot tolerate human domination” (“The Mind of the Wild” 8–​9). In Bringhurst’s view, silence and attention are of the essence if we are to experience what it means to be alive in a more-​than-​human world, but people living in industrial societies no longer know how to keep silent and listen to the world through the soles of their feet. What the Tsimshian, the Celts and the Chinese have in common is that they “carry their other knowledge /​shrivelled into undeciphered images, /​symbols, souvenirs” (Selected Poems 194). The gradation of these words is no random choice. This “other knowledge” is the wisdom of their elders in pre-​literate, pre-​ industrial societies, where knowledge of the world (preserved largely in the form of myths) was not scientific in the modern sense of the term, but not inaccurate either. To Bringhurst, a myth is “a theorem about the nature of reality, expressed not in algebraic symbols or inanimate abstractions but in animate narrative form” (Spellberg n.p.). Arranged into coherent constellations called “mythology,” myths embodied a complex view of the world where there was still room for gods and for a conception of humans’ relations with the nonhuman characterised by respect and gratitude. Those myths or images are undeciphered

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to today’s humanity’s eyes because we no longer understand the code to interpret them. In dominant capitalist societies, they have become symbols or stylised simplifications of what used to be a complex mythical ecosystem, or, even worse, exotic souvenirs for the occasional tourist. At first, the speaking homo sapiens intends to speak to other human beings, but then he changes his mind and decides to address the silent toad instead –​a much better interlocutor for the true stories of his meditations. The “silences of the toad […] /​[are] the most meaningful parts of the poem” (193), as they punctuate what homo sapiens says throughout this sustained meditation in ten parts, filling the dark shells of the man’s ears and spaces between his sentences, filling his syllables, filling the wrinkled, stretched and invisible skins of his words, filling his eyes wherever he looks and his lungs whenever he breathes. (Selected Poems 193)

Conversations with a Toad tells a story of deep, geological time that resists the pitfalls of anthropomorphisation. Without the toad’s presence, homo sapiens would not know how to deliver an all-​important lesson on the shared existence of all beings on earth from the premise of a radical ecocentrism. In the context of an ecological ontology, humans are “no longer alone as transcendent Minds locked in decaying bodies on an Earth where we don’t belong, and separate from the myriad creatures around us” (Westling 36), but rather one of manifold kindred species. In other words, humans exist among other bodily natures, deeply enmeshed in a vast network of trans-​corporeally intra-​acting entities. Thus, the silences of the toad make man’s speaking possible. It is as though the toad were speaking through the lips of homo sapiens, pervading every single corner of his whole body (ears, eyes and lungs) and his language with a fresh look upon the more-​than-​human world, illuminating his senses and mind to utter the words he says. Words themselves are conceptualised as being living organisms, covered with wrinkled, invisible skins that are strongly reminiscent of the “undeciphered images” (Selected Poems 194) which myths have become in industrial societies. In the remaining sections of the poem, the lessons the toad is to deliver to humankind through its dumb presence are expressed in lyrical language that sings with clarity and precision. Those elementary lessons are a forceful reminder that matter is “not merely a passive substratum, but a meaning-​bearing field of agency” (Wheeler, “Natural Play” 70)  and also a celebration of the oneness of all life, human and nonhuman.

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III A Lesson in Toad Anatomy The core tenet of biosemiotics is that “all life, not just human life and culture, is semiotic and interpretive” (Wheeler, “Natural Play” 69), which is to say that “all nature and all culture are […] capable of bearing meaning” (78). Nature is thus not meaningless or random, but, quite on the contrary, a gigantic work of meaning-​making and purposes from which human meaning-​making and purposes have evolved. In this regard, Wheeler affirms that “life is relationship” and “relationship (information, semiosis) is carried by matter but is not reducible to it” (69). Matter is “a meaning-​bearing field of agency” (69), not a passive, inert substratum. In Charles Sanders Peirce’s wider conception of a non-​ anthropocentric “cosmic, evolutionary and open-​ ended, developmental semiosis” (Wheeler, “Natural Play” 71), the universe of matter is “perfused with signs” (Peirce 394). It follows that homo sapiens has no monopoly on meaning, for “human language is just the most recent evolutionary part of a vast global web of semiosis encompassing all livings things –​from the smallest cell to the most complex multicellular organism” (Wheeler, “Natural Play” 71). In short, both human and nonhuman beings share a richly communicative biosphere. In a world of vibrant matter, the toad’s body is one such meaning-​bearing vessel or sign too. In the second poem of Conversations with a Toad, the speaking homo sapiens is looking at the world as territorial recorder, transcribing every single detail of the toad’s body (or bodily sign) in three symmetrical stanzas. The toad proves untranslatable into human speech in the end, though, and the resulting depiction is much more complex than a lesson in anatomy in miniature. Whereas the first stanza is a description of the toad’s body, its vital attitude to the world is at the geometrical centre of the poem, and its biological evolution throughout time is subtly evoked in the third stanza. The first stanza reads as follows: So few bones, toad, you must know how to count them and give them away. You can swallow your own skin, and pluck dinner, still living, out of the air without lifting a hand. And you let in the weather, taking your temperature from the world. (Selected Poems 194)

Three aspects of the toad’s anatomy are highlighted in succession:  its bones, its tongue and its skin. The austerity of the toad is to be found in its own skeleton, which is almost non-​existent because it has very few bones. The speaking voice emphasises the fact that the toad is ready to give them away generously when the little animal is to get rid of its body and return to the primordial matter all bodily natures ultimately

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come from. For hunting and feeding purposes, the toad uses a sticky tongue to catch the little insects or animals on which it feeds for its sustenance. There is an efficient elegance about the toad’s hunting method, since it has only to unfold its tongue to catch its prey still alive in mid-​air. And, lastly, its rough skin is porous and adapts the amphibian’s bodily temperature to that of the environment, which is expressive of a total communion with the ecosystem where it has its dwelling place. If we look up the word “toad” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this is what we learn about this most curious of animals: Toad, any squat, rough-​skinned, tailless amphibian of the order Anura, and especially a member of the family Bufonidae. The true toads (Bufo), with more than 300 species, are found worldwide except in Australia, Madagascar, polar regions, and Polynesia, though Bufo marinus has been introduced into Australia and some South Pacific islands. […] True toads, of which the American toad (Bufo americanus) and the European toad (B. bufo) are representative, are stout-​ bodied with short legs that limit them to the characteristic walking or hopping gait. Their size ranges from about 2 to 25 cm […]. The thick, dry, often warty skin on the back is generally mottled brown. Poison-​secreting glands are located on the back and in the warts but are most concentrated in two prominent raised areas behind the eyes, the parotid glands. The poison, which is secreted when the toad is molested, irritates the eyes and mucous membranes of many, though not all, predators. […] True toads are mainly terrestrial and nocturnal. They frequently remain in fairly small areas, feeding on whatever insects or small animals they can catch with their sticky tongues. Most remain in their burrows in winter and during drought. They breed in water and may migrate 1.5 km (1 mile) or more to a suitable breeding pond. The eggs […] are laid in two long jelly tubes. The tadpoles hatch in a few days and transform into adults in one to three months.20

When Bringhurst’s poem is placed next to this encyclopedia entry, it becomes evident that his is an accurate poetic rendering of the scientific discourse on toads. Toads are austere amphibians: they live in a small territory, feed on little animals they catch with their sticky tongues, have no physical beauty about them (their warty, dry, brown-​mottled skin does not make them agreeable to look at), and spend their terrestrial and nocturnal life in solitude. This asceticism is already a lesson per se. As Bringhurst observes, “the wild is not only rich and complex but at the same time economical and lean” (“The Mind of the Wild” 14). Toads do not ask much of the world; they need little to lead a decent life in communion with their surroundings. Porous beings as they are, toads breathe through their whole bodies, which remain alert to the changes in temperature in 20 See entry on ‘toad’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 28, pp. 16630–​16631.

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their environment, and, unlike humans, they hunt only to ensure their survival, not to impose their dominion over the ecosystems they are a part of. This attitude of moral asceticism and serene austerity is explored in the second stanza, which opens with a reflection on the toad’s hunting method. In its quiet contemplation, this “toothless carnivore, unarmed hunter” (Selected Poems 195) is ready to give itself over to the earth generously, and not to exert any violence upon the environment where it dwells. Speaking, eating, thinking, reading and writing are recognisably human activities, but the toad seems to undo all of them with its attitude of non-​interference with the world. The toad would rather be spoken than speak itself; it uneats “bits of the world  –​or the whole world” (195) that humans mindlessly devour; and it “unthinks what others have thought, /​unreads what is read, unwrites what is written” (195), undoing whatever interpretations others (i.e., humans) have imposed upon the world over time, thus obscuring its crystal-​clear meaning with abstractions. In its unmediated relation with the vitality of the world, the toad gestures towards the possibility of learning to listen to being with open ears, and underscores that the theories deployed to make sense of the world are constructs of the human mind. If the toad could be said to dwell somewhere else apart from its shrinking territory, then it would live in a pre-​literate society, where there is no need for writing or reading, where speech is what really matters, and where silence is p ­ referable to speech. The closing stanza looks for similarities between toads and humans, even if the only similarities found are of a morphological nature. Like humans, toads have no tail but stout limbs, as suggested by the enumeration in “elbows and pelvis and fingers /​and toes” (Selected Poems 195). Their mouth is angular just to meet the needs of a toothless carnivore, and they have renounced “the hug of the water” (195) to live on earth, because they are mainly terrestrial (and ­nocturnal) animals. In celebrating “the abstemious, /​pontifical kiss of the air” (195), the speaking homo sapiens gestures to the fact that humans and toads alike are land and air creatures, and that we are part of a continuum of life. In the small compass of just one stanza, the whole biological evolution of both toads and humans is evoked with great linguistic economy. Time is also fluid:  we move in space and in time, but time moves through us too. Time is cancelled; centuries and millennia are nothing when being, no matter whether human or nonhuman, is considered sub specie aeternitatis through a completely different prism –​one that looks at the commonwealth of being as undivided, unbroken, in perpetual metamorphosis.

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IV Life and Death “Polyphony is the sound of the coexistence of species, which is what every ecology, global or local, is all about” (“Licking” 8), writes Bringhurst. Poem II of Conversations with a Toad concerns the toad as microcosm, the inner ­geography of its body, as well as its projection outwards into the world as it hunts to ensure its survival. Poem III, by contrast, explores the natural world where the amphibian lives –​a world populated by a huge diversity of nonhuman creatures –​in three stanzas. The first stanza is a celebratory catalogue of the birds that share the toad’s terrestrial and airy universe; the second stanza is a probing ­meditation on beauty and truth as embodied in the natural world; and the third one interrogates humans’ relation to the nonhuman world. The poem thus places the toad within a larger context and dwells on the way it fits in a world where eating and being eaten are morally acceptable actions that guarantee animals’ survival and the equilibrium of ecosystems. Paying ecological attention to the world and breathing through the feet: this is what the speaking homo sapiens does in the first stanza, looking at the world as if for the first time, as if he were present at the day of creation, and recording what he sees in a seemingly dispassionate manner. Apart from their being birds and their attempt at trying to fulfil their vocations qua birds, what the owl, the raven, the dippers, the ruffed grouse, the heron and the kingfisher mentioned in the first stanza have in common is a deep sense of belonging in the oikos where they dwell. As the voice of homo sapiens claims afterwards, in poem VI, it is good news that “no one can list /​what exists in the world” (Selected Poems 198) and so it is an impossible mission to record all existing bird species in a definitive catalogue. There is a moving naturalness and admirable spontaneity in everything birds do, regardless of any moral connotations. Being an avid outdoorsman and a lover of birds, it is no wonder Bringhurst’s poetry is also rich in birds. He draws on musical analogies to convey the sheer exuberance of the presence of singing birds as various as the ones celebrated in the first stanza. There is ­symmetry and there is harmony in the way they fly and in the way they speak their own language, for theirs is also a polyphonic singing. What the opening stanza presents is an attempt at echolocation on the part of the poet whereby he gives voice to the rich variety of being as it manifests itself in birds, which are one with the world surrounding them. Thus, their voices mimic nature and become enmeshed within a cosmic polyphony: the ubiquitous raven of the First Nations has “voices like musselshell, wellwater, wood” (Selected Poems 195) (notice the alliteration around the /​l/​and /​w/​sounds), whereas dippers have “voices like water on water” (195). Often their silent flight evokes musical notes: “the heron

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flying in whole notes” (195) and “the kingfisher crossing in dotted eighths /​ and in quarters” (195). If there is any dissonance at all, it is metamorphosed into a beauty of sorts. The singing and flying of birds are thus expressive of the non-​stop flux of things inherent in a sensuous cosmos. Like Herakleitos’ river, these creatures of the earth and the air change and yet remain the same in their unstoppable quietude. The second stanza is of a more meditative nature. Beneath the words spoken by homo sapiens there are subtle reminiscences of John Keats’ well-​known words “truth is beauty, beauty is truth” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” However paradoxical it may sound, beauty inspires awe and terror at the same time. Humans love the harmony implicit in beauty for its own sake; much of what we would call aesthetic experience is largely based on this perception of symmetry and elegance inherent in particular objects. But, in this specific context, beauty is seen not just as a source of sensuous pleasure and delight, but rather as a means of accessing a final form of truth: Their beauty bites into the truth. One way to fail to be is to be merely pretty. But that beauty: it feeds on you; we feed on it… (Selected Poems 195)

Three lines and a half suffice to convey such a thought-​provoking density of meaning that the poem becomes overwhelming at this semantic hinge located exactly at the heart of the composition. That birds offer glimpses of the truth through their simple un-​concealment before humans’ eyes is a possible interpretation. “Their beauty bites into the truth” (195), as if to suggest that theirs is just an incursion into unknown territory that does not exhaust truth completely, since there are other ways to touch the truth. Birds might be beautiful creatures owing to the seduction of their flight and singing, but toads are not beautiful animals, if one just thinks of their warty, rough skin, their poisonous glands, and their sticky fatal tongue. However, homo sapiens is prompt to remind readers that “one way to fail is to be merely /​pretty” (notice the calculated enjambment here). Put succinctly, the toad might not be the epitome of beauty in the natural world, as birds might be, but they do not fail to be, for they are ascetic creatures living in communion with the world that gives them their home. Whichever the case, universal beauty (“that beauty”) feeds on all living creatures that make up the world and we (human and nonhuman beings) feed on it on our turn. No better eulogy could possibly be addressed to reality other than to affirm that there is an unacknowledged beauty implicit in the breathing universe, to which all creatures make a tiny contribution.

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Then, the second stanza unfolds towards a moment of revelation. We might feed on beauty, but the toad needs to feed on actual moths if it is to survive at all. The moth that is the toad’s dinner is described in words of intense lyricism: “Nerves spring from his forehead like fernfronds, /​like feathers” (Selected Poems 196). What happens to the moth eaten by the toad is but a natural process within the larger scheme or cycle of the natural world, where eating and being eaten are spontaneous gestures made by humans and nonhumans to ensure their survival. Thus, by eating the moth, the toad is actually participating in a larger process of perpetual metamorphosis, whereby the moth’s meat is absorbed into the toad’s bodily matter. This is eating as trans-​corporeality, as a form of immortality, or as a way of perpetuating the moth’s existence under a different guise. In a world of eating creatures that will be eaten sooner or later, no one dies for good, as everyone is changing into something else all the time, being born into one more resurrection. Therefore, these words disclose an elemental lesson that the toad teaches the speaking homo sapiens through its dumb presence:      … He too is transformed. This is the last life, toad. Those who eat will be eaten. That is the one resurrection. (Selected Poems 196)

In “The Silence That Is Not Poetry –​and The Silence That Is,” Bringhurst thinks about this natural phenomenon in depth. Encountering the body of a dead deer on the road prompts him to muse on the sacredness of life, on the kind of immortality achieved by the young deer that has been run over and then eaten by birds, and on the meaning of life and death: In terms of meat, there is not much to a young fawn, but the eagles had opened her up, and the ravens had joined them. I reminded myself that being buried bit by bit in the guts of birds is at least as good as going into a hole in the ground, and that fueling an eagle’s flight or the voice of a raven is as fine a resurrection as anyone, human or deer, could hope for. […] What I thought about all the rest of the day, and the day after that, was […] the barriers of law and of social convention which assign the lives of human beings a theoretically infinite value while they treat the lives of wild creatures as theoretically zilch. (“The Silence” 300; our emphasis)

In the closing stanza, the speaking homo sapiens dwells on the territorial imperative that prompts humans to take dominion over the world and overexploit the earth’s resources: We who kill not to eat but to mark our domain –​to build and breed, in place

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The implicit dichotomy is that between killing other animals for survival (which is what the toad does) and killing other animals to affirm one’s superiority over the rest of creation (which is what humans do). To this, another binary must be added, that between human-​made and nature-​made things. The population of heaven has been reduced as a result of this aggressive assault on nature on the part of humankind, since countless animal and plant species have died because of how we relate to the nonhuman. This is the reason why Bringhurst, upon encountering the corpse of the young deer, has no option left but to meditate on the “gulf of self-​regard […] erected between ourselves and everyone else,” including all animals, all nonhuman beings that populate the earth. If life is sacred, how is it possible to pretend that “the value of the deer’s life is zero and that of a human life is infinite?” (“The Silence” 302). Or, as he puts it elsewhere: Death is the price of life. It is a fair price, evidently, and if so, we should charge it when we must and pay it in our turn without complaint. But a society happy to kill a billion birds or a hundred thousand cattle in the vague hope of saving a single unspecified human life, or to mow down a whole forest to make one day’s worth of newsprint, or to sterilize a river in exchange for some ounces of gold, is a society that, I suspect, has lost its sense of what life and death are for: a society that has lost its admiration and its gratitude for life and death alike. (“The Silence” 302)

V The Ecology of Perception A philosophical interlude in the ten-​part sequence, section IV of Conversations with a Toad is a jewel-​like lyric poem on the nature of the human mind. Bringhurst has always been concerned with exploring the epistemological mystery intrinsic to the mind approaching the raw data of the world’s phenomena. Sensory perception is evidence of humans’ bodily participation in the more-​ than-​ human world at its most basic. Knowledge of the world is thus always carnal or embodied, as it begins with an act of paying attention and sensuous immersion in the world. As material ecocritic Serenella Iovino puts it, Knowledge –​human and nonhuman informational interchange with the world –​is a form of porosity. […] To say that knowledge is “embodied” means that the world acts together with bodies, becoming sedimented in and filtered through cognitive processes. […] [E]‌mbodied knowledge is rooted in the mutual porosity of bodies and world […], materializes the porous exchange of inside and outside, the progressive becoming-​together of bodies and the world, their intra-​action. (“Bodies of Naples” 102–​103)

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Epistemology is one of the fundamental issues that philosophy has grappled with from the very cradle of Western or Eastern thought. In much the same way humans as a species are genetically programmed to speak natural languages, we are genetically programmed to ask ourselves questions such as What is reality? What is the mind? How do we come to terms with the universe? How do we know anything at all? Are senses reliable? Where is truth to be found? Indeed, the whole history of science, philosophy and poetry is nothing more than a series of attempts at touching the truth in tackling these fundamental questions. It is no wonder that Bringhurst’s poems are presided by a consciousness coming to terms with reality and trying to make sense of it. A philosophical interlude in two symmetrical stanzas of six verse lines each, poem IV of Conversations with a Toad is concerned with exploring the role of the mind in humans’ confrontation with and interpretation of reality. The first stanza provides a definition of the mind through simple declarative sentences: (1) “The mind is the other” (Selected Poems 196). Far from defining the mind as one’s own inalienable property, the speaking homo sapiens in the poem tries to capture its essence in terms of what it is not. That is the reason why the mind is conceived as the other –​i.e., other (non)human beings, other minds, other (non)living things in the world. This is exactly the opposite of solipsism, that is, the delusion that one exists in a sort of isolated sphere, closed on the outside, separate from all other perceiving consciousnesses, that one lives in their own mind and that nothing is real. Conversations with a Toad eloquently affirms that “our mind is physically and figuratively, made of this world and not separate from it” (Goulet 139). To acknowledge that the mind is the other is a statement of humanity, to begin with, accepting that there are creatures other than ourselves that have minds of their own and deserve respect and attention. As Abram contends in Becoming Animal, “[m]‌ind arises, and dwells, between the body and the Earth, and hence is as much an attribute of this leafing world as of our own immodest species” (111). (2) “The mind /​is a long complication of water” (Selected Poems 196). One of the primordial elements out of which reality is made, water figures prominently in Bringhurst’s poetry as a symbol of everything that is elemental. In this declarative sentence the mind is equated to water, but, to our surprise, we learn that it is “a long complication of water,” not just simple water. Water is simple enough; it does not think. It is transparent, fresh or salt water; it does not lie. If the mind is a long complication of water, then there might be something wrong about the way it interprets the world. Unmediated perception is an illusion, for the perceiving self is already a

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conglomerate of heterogenous elements. Hence, perceiving reality already entails some process of falsification of the raw data provided by the senses, since humans cannot avoid bringing to this act of interpretation all their prior experiences, cultural presuppositions and expectations. Language itself is part of the process too, acting as a membrane between the self and the world. (3) “The mind /​is time, space and all creatures” (Selected Poems 196). This all-​ encompassing view of the mind transcends the Cartesian body vs. mind dualism and entails an epiphanic realisation of universal kinship. As Abram puts it, the more-​than-​human world is “part of the very constitution of the mind, of its real structure and architecture” (Becoming Animal 123). In its dialogue with “larger eco-​mental processes that are indivisible from the existents of the earth,” the polyphonic mind, “an intermingling of the human intellect with its larger non-​human surroundings” (Dickinson, “Bringhurst” 41), is spacious enough to contain the universe in its entirety, including time and space, those basic Kantian coordinates that organise all human experience. As Morton suggests, “time and space are simply functions of the way (human) thinking happens” (“The Liminal” 276). The mind is thus a microcosm, a model of the world at large, and the treasure-​house of everything one has lived and experienced, as there is room for memories, sensations, emotions, ideas, thoughts, findings, and insights of a whole lifetime within one’s boundless mind. That the mind is all creatures is expressive of an ecological sensibility. As Latour observes, “[t]‌he more nonhumans share existence with humans, the more humane a collective is” (Pandora’s Hope 18). (4) “The mind /​is the world” (Selected Poems 196). This is the logical deduction that stems from a sort of Aristotelian syllogism. If the mind contains all creatures, as well as time and space, if it is the other and a long complication of water, then the mind is the world in its entirety. It is not simply a container; it is the world. Bringhurst had already essayed similar equations in The Blue Roofs of Japan, a poem rich in metaphors, where the world is conceived as a bowl full of tea one holds in one’s hands. For poet-​thinkers like Bringhurst, Zwicky or McKay, metaphor is a vital way of looking at the world that “acknowledges how things simultaneously are and are not the same, that allows each element in the metaphor to remain whole, that points to a larger ecology, that perceives the relation –​the points of congruity and the spaces –​between things” (Goulet 139). Bringhurst finds such spaces in polyphonic structures, as he “tells us that a polyphonic structure is natural, is the shape of the world, of our minds, of what-​is” (Goulet 141). After all,

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homo sapiens is not the sole possessor of mind. With great lucidity, Abram asks “What if mind is not ours, but is Earth’s? What if mind […] is not a special property of humankind, but rather a property of the Earth itself –​ a power in which we are carnally immersed?” (Becoming Animal 123). If this happens to be the case, if mind is a property of the universe and not an exclusively human possession, as Bringhurst himself believes, then “we all partake of the wide intelligence of this world –​because we’re materially participant, with our actions and our passions, in the broad psyche of this sphere” (123). (5) “What we keep in the head, /​with its dark facets, this jewel, /​is a small, disproportional model” (Selected Poems 196). The mind does not replace or exhaust the many-​sidedness, diversity and richness of the world, nor the uniqueness of our unmediated, sensuous experience of reality. It is but a small model, a replica of the world in miniature. Thus, there are as many such disproportional models as human beings there have been, are or will be. And yet experience is always larger than what we might think or say about it. The mind is a true jewel that partakes of the vitality it senses around it because it is in and of the world. Perception and language are simplifying tools of sorts in our epistemological confrontation with the world; they turn into a manageable form what is seemingly unformed chaos. The second stanza gives the impression of a riddle. “What we are not is all we can think with” (Selected Poems 196) is repeated twice, as it is an essential part of the message the speaking homo sapiens is trying to put across to his audience. Because, in the poet’s view, “the mind is built from sensory experience of the world” (Goulet 142), and because the mind is the other, it is impossible to think (of) the world if it is not through the not-​self and the nonhuman. It is thus imperative to forget about oneself and one’s own subjectivity to be able to think (about) the world as a commonwealth of beings. “In the leaking cup of the skull /​we dip up the other. Daily we trade it /​for money, for comfort, for power” (Selected Poems 196), reads the poem. The captivating metaphor at the core of the second stanza equates the skull with a leaking cup, suggesting that the mind is not omnipotent, not perfect, not completely reliable. In this leaking cup we dip the other, as the mind is conceptualised as water in the first stanza. It remains unclear whether what we trade daily for such banal things as money, comfort or power is one’s leaking cup of a skull (our mind) or the other that we perceive through our senses, i.e., a more-​than-​human world that we simply exploit mindlessly. In “Breathing Through the Feet,” Bringhurst claims that we live in a society where we lose our peace of mind for such absurd things as money and jobs. This is a society

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which, we suspect, has lost all sense of reality and of what the essential priorities should be. Possibly the toad has an important lesson to teach us in its asceticism and austere lifestyle: “to hold and let go /​is all we can do with whatever we are” (Selected Poems 196) is an invitation for us to be mindful of what we are whilst not forgetting that it might be wise to get rid of our sense of self from time to time, so as to gain a refreshed awareness of a more-​than-​human world that comprises other consciousnesses, other living beings, and sentience other than human.

VI A World Perfused with Signs The philosophical interlude on the nature of the mind begun in poem IV is resumed and further expanded in poem V. However, this time the meditation focuses on the way humans come to terms with the reading and interpreting of the book of the universe, and also on such essentials as light, time and space. The whole poem is concerned with reading what-​is, that is, reading a world perfused with signs and symbols for humans to decipher. What science, philosophy and art have been doing for centuries on end is reading what-​is –​i.e., trying to unravel the mystery at the core of reality and to render it in terms understandable to the human mind, through the medium of words, mathematical formulae, musical notation, lines and colours, wood carved or stone sculpted with grace and shapeliness, taxonomies and classifications, topographical maps or time lines, just to mention some of the procedures that Northrop Frye calls instruments of mental production in one of the essays collected in The Stubborn Structure (1970). These are only human-​made constructions, tools to render the real comprehensible to our minds, but they do not replace or exhaust the real thing. Humankind has spent its whole existence on earth reading and interpreting signs, but not all signs found in the world are of a verbal nature and so not all reading is verbal. To borrow Bringhurst’s words, READING IS DIFFERENT FROM LOOKING OR WATCHING. It is listening with the eyes, evaluating signs against a lexicon of memories. We were reading waves and rivers, winds and clouds, the tracks of moose and grouse and hare, long before we started reading words. We were also reading stories with our ears a hundred thousand years before there were any writers writing. The reading we do now –​novels, poems, the daily paper –​owes its life to that apprenticeship in paying ecological attention. (“Reading What Is” 195; our emphasis)

Reading the myriad signs scattered in reality is a way of listening or paying ecological attention, and also an act of humility whereby we acknowledge that we belong among the multiple life forms –​(non)human beings and (non)living things –​that populate this world. Paying attention means that we care. By contrast, indifference to the world is a form of cruelty, expressive of a view of life that

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disregards the infinite value and sacredness implicit in the more-​than-​human world. In the opening lines of poem V of Conversations with a Toad, the speaking homo sapiens reminds readers that humans living in industrial societies are not able to pay ecological attention any more, for they seem to have forgotten how to listen to the world with both their eyes and ears: “My people no longer stare into water /​and fire for clues to the future. We no longer /​read even the signs in our faces and hands” (Selected Poems 196). This is the picture of a dehumanised world. In a society where the priority is money and jobs, comfort and power, humans have forgotten how to read the book of the more-​than-​human world, even if its pages remain wide open for us to see. No longer do humans look into water or fire in search of potential clues about what the future might bring; and no longer do they even seem to know how to interpret the signs in other fellow human beings’ bodies and gestures. All we care about is exploring far-​away places through the potent lenses of telescopes (“lenses and mirrors”) that “sop up the spilled light of the stars” (Selected Poems 197) or deciphering rocks “while we loot them” (197). Deciphering the meaning of rocks as we tread upon them –​or the meaning of starlight as we observe it through a telescope –​is not an inherently evil undertaking. Rather, it testifies to humans’ noble ambition and desire to know, which Aristotle defined as a sort of cupiditas naturalis in the opening words of his Metaphysics. In this regard, Bringhurst points out that the ultimate vocation of human beings is to learn, for we cannot fight the compulsion to understand reality and find truth, any more than we can ignore the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing wrong about astronomy or geology, as long as the world is given due respect and is not looted, misused or abused just for the sake of material benefit. The danger inherent in intellectual enterprises like those of astronomy or geology is that, in their compulsion to know, humans run the risk of forgetting the pre-​eminence of the sensuously real over constructs of the mind. Hence the act of looking into the past, analysing rocks, examining the human events woven into history or producing topographical maps does not exhaust the multiplicity, plurality and diversity of the real thing. If the earth is damaged in the process, then what started as a noble enterprise turns into something pernicious: “Toad, as we level the future we make /​topographical maps of the past” (Selected Poems 197). The second part of poem V is an accomplished meditation on starlight. Telescopes serve a very practical purpose for astronomers: they reach where the human eye cannot reach in the observation of stars and planets floating in outer space far away from the Earth. The telescope is an extension of the eye, in much the same way a book is the extension of past humans’ breathing minds, or the ploughshare is an extension of the human arm. However, there is something else to telescopes and what they can accomplish. What the mirrors of telescopes reveal

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to us is that light is not quite what it seems. It has travelled a long way to reach the earth, and it is much older than we think. What we see might be but a pale shadow of the pristine, original light that abandoned its home stars eons of time ago. The same applies to the things on earth: “things are leaving /​and taking their light with them” (Selected Poems 197), words with ominous connotations signifying that the loss might be irreversible. The speed of light is simply amazing, and light moves through time and space with a grace of its own –​it reaches its destination unimpeded and unaided. Billions of years is what it might take light to reach our amazed eyes when we look up at the sky overhead at night, which is a long time on a human scale if we bear in mind our average life expectancy. On a different scale, say that of rocks or toads, billions of years are not that much: Ten billion years seems long to us, toad, though to you it is little: a few dozen times the age of your ancestors’ graves in these rocks. Only two or three times the age of the oldest rocks we have found. (Selected Poems 197)

Biological time and geological time do not coincide exactly when we fold them one upon the other. The origins of toads can be traced back in biological time to their “ancestors’ graves” in the Precambrian, just as rocks are known to have existed for a longer time, even before humans and nonhumans started breathing and walking on earth. Because toads and rocks have lived longer than we have and are ancestral forms of existence, they have much to teach us humans. Learning to attentively look at and listen to them is no waste of time and might be a rewarding intellectual and aesthetic experience. It is no wonder that Bringhurst regularly calibrates his awareness by immersing himself in wild nature, in the company of the nonhuman, and by listening quietly for what it has to teach, trying to understand the place we occupy in the grander scheme of things. As a species, homo sapiens is self-​absorbed enough to think itself the measure of all things, but a look at geological and biological time proves that this is not the case and reveals itself to be a salutary, sobering practice. If life is sacred, then all creatures, living and non-​living alike, have a contribution to make to the vibrant mesh and beauty of the world. None is dispensable, but none is essential either. Yet the sum of the parts is always lesser than the perfect Gestalt of the whole. The closing movement and stanza of poem V is a synthesis of light, space and time. The thinking and singing at the heart of the poem have been relentlessly unfolding towards this point with the texture of transcendence: “What is is too quick for our fingers /​and tongues to keep up with. The light /​outmanoeuvres us. Time and space close over us, toad” (Selected Poems 197). In spite of being endowed with this jewel

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of a mind, we humans are not able to capture what-​is once and for all, for good. Knowledge is always tentative, and reality is vaster and richer than what we might manage to understand and convey through scientific discovery. Light is faster than our minds; it moves at speedlight, which is also faster than the speed of sound. It is also faster than our speech capacity or our faculty to verbalise what we appear to find out about the ultimate essence of things before it vanishes into nothingness. The sky (i.e., the universe) will not yield its final mystery: “The lock of the sky will turn but not open” (Selected Poems 197). On the other hand, time and space remain a puzzle, so that the only thing left for us to say is tautological redundancy: “We are where we are and have been here /​forever” (197). We are somewhere in the middle of what is called space and also in the middle of a different kind of substance called time right now. What came before now and what will come after now is a mystery, since time is not completely transparent to the human mind. This is the reason why the talking homo sapiens in the poem chooses these closing words as an afterthought: “longer, that is, than we can remember” (Selected Poems 197), for deep time is unfathomable to the human mind. Like toads, we also have ancestors who lived long ago, but the memory of a time now gone has somehow abandoned us. It is these ancestors that link us to the past, in much the same way it is our offspring that links us to the future, as Bringhurst suggests. In this respect, the poet interrogates time and space in a broadside called “First Meditation on Time” (2008). Following Konrad Lorenz, he thinks that “the experience of navigating space is the biological origin of mind” (n.p.). Space is not simply occupied by humans; as embodied animals we move in and through space the best way we can. We walk, dance, fly, swim, and stroll in space too. We also move in time, despite its eel-​slippery texture, as much as time moves through us. Fumbling for words that best capture the mystery of space and time, Bringhurst offers us a gift in the form of an epiphany: “space is the unfolding of Being out of itself, while time is the slippage of Being along itself ” (n.p.). We might be somewhat rooted in space, but time is an altogether different category that defines the realm where the ontic comes to flourish.

VII From the Depths of Precambrian Time Poem VI of Conversations with a Toad is a probing meditation on the biological diversity of the earth, where different teeming forms of life coexist with one another. Thus, the composition opens with a quick look at ancient biological history encapsulated in just two lines  –​“Your ancestors, toad, were kings /​in a world of trilobites, fish, bryozoans” (Selected Poems 197)  –​and then it moves forwards to an eloquent juxtaposition of the realms of the human and the nonhuman. The tone of the whole piece from beginning to end is overly

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elegiac, since humans, as a species, are mindlessly determined to destroy the only home we have on the wrong assumption that we have an inalienable right to take dominion over the whole of creation. Destroying the world is tantamount to ceasing to have meaning. No other species in the world seems to behave in this self-​suicidal way, trying to disconnect itself from all links to universal being and relentlessly heading towards the precipice of self-​annihilation. The speaking homo sapiens asks the toad: “Is it really so onerous, toad, to live /​and to die at less distance from being?” (Selected Poems 197). Fortunately, the world is made up of creatures other than human beings. The biological diversity of this shared oikos is simply boundless; there is no exhaustive catalogue comprising a definitive record of all the different species of insects that exist or have existed on earth, for instance. Millions of insects remain unnamed, uncatalogued, unclassified, which is a true miracle if we bear in mind that humankind’s dominion over animals begins with the foundational act of naming them. In our relentless search for order, when confronted with the real in its wonder, the act of naming is a primordial gesture that entails categorising things or species so as to account for their existence. The danger implicit in categorisation is that it is oblivious to the specifics and protean singularity of the entities populating the earth. Humankind’s obsession with taxonomies does not exhaust the huge diversity of (non)living creatures on earth, though, which is a good reason to be happy: “It is good news, toad: that no one can list /​what exists in the world” (Selected Poems 198), says homo sapiens. However, humans’ hubris and compulsion to conquer and domesticate the more-​than-​human world are implacable: “Named or unnamed, if it lives, we can kill it” (198). The statement is simple and goes straight to the heart of the matter. It seems that nothing will stop humans from overexploiting the earth’s resources in their search for money, comfort, power  –​those banal goals humans set themselves to achieve in their lives. Bringhurst’s message is not just a powerful ecological warning, but also a call for us to envision a different way of relating to the world which is respectful towards what-​is and guarantees a sustainable future for all species on planet Earth. As Heidegger observes, “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being” (Basic Writings 245). In “Wild Language,” Bringhurst meditates on homo sapiens’ predatory control and management of earth’s resources “in industrialized economies and colonial regimes” (269) and suggests other ethically viable ways of dwelling in the biosphere: That choice is to participate in the biosphere, learning enough about it to recognize and accept that we can never be anything more than junior partners: a few million or billion human cells in a brain the size of the planet. Right now those human cells are acting like a cancer, a tumor in the wise, old brain of planet earth. (269)

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And in “The Silence That Is Not Poetry –​and The Silence That Is,” Bringhurst reflects on biological diversity as well as on the sacredness of all forms of life, not just human life. “Genetics, molecular biology, comparative anatomy, European cave art, Buddhist tradition, shamanic tradition, the theology of St Francis of Assisi and a thousand other mystics (pagan and Jewish, Christian and Muslim), and a hundred different traditions of Native American narrative cosmology” (“The Silence” 302), he claims, remind us that homo sapiens has much in common with other nonhuman animals and are part of the wild. “The wild is the biosphere: this tiny hollow ball which is the only place in the universe where you or I are free to be what we are” (“Wild Language” 269), he writes. It is not “something to conquer or subdue; it’s something to try to live up to” (“Wild Language” 268). Despite the insistence of “European and colonial civil law, canon law and the sharia” (“The Silence” 302) that humans are to set themselves apart and take “dominion over all other creatures” (302), the poet insists that short-​term richness derived from the overexploitation of the planet “can only leave us destitute in the long term” (302). And yet, spending our lives in a state of self-​absorbed egotism, we seem unable to see what is best for the common good of all creatures on Earth. In the light of homo sapiens’ determination to destroy our only home and, with it, all forms of life in our relentless race towards self-​annihilation, Bringhurst highlights a basic fact of bioethics: “a principle my friend Don McKay has stated very nimbly and simply in six syllables: We don’t own what we know” (“Wild Language” 270). All these statements testify to the absolute coherence of Bringhurst’s thinking about being and ecology, about the way humans should start relating to the world if they just realised that there is no other morally acceptable way to behave if we are to preserve life as we know it on Earth. Bringhurst’s poem closes with a short meditation on earth scripts and the different kinds of records that the earliest living creatures of the world and human beings will leave at the end of time. In beautifully modulated words, homo sapiens speaks of the modest signs the earliest living forms left on the ground just to say they existed on Earth millions of years ago. There is a simple and moving delicacy to the natural signatures they have left on Precambrian rocks as proofs of their ephemeral existence: “the earliest creatures, too soft to leave fossils, /​too light to leave footprints, have left us /​old proteins and sugars as signatures” (Selected Poems 198). As Wheeler suggests, “DNA code is, like human language, indeed, not a mechanical but a semiotic, and thus interpretive, phenomenon in which cells (and bodies and organisms) have learned to make many meanings” (“Natural Play” 68). By contrast, humans are determined to leave a more ambitious legacy and more durable proofs that they have trodden upon Earth. Hence, the chronicles other humans will read in the future will

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be “filled with our griefs and achievements” (Selected Poems 198). The stone constructions of prehistoric times, the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek and Roman temples and statues, the manuscripts of Tang China or of Renaissance Italy, the poems and novels of all times and human languages, the paintings, sculptures and musical pieces, were all meant to persist, namely to survive the passage of time, edax rerum, and testify to humans’ achievements. But the talking homo sapiens in the poem does not forget humans’ griefs either: the pain inflicted on other creatures, including the Earth itself; the nonsense of innumerable wars that have reduced “the population of heaven” (196); our greedy everyday acts and the grief we inflict upon one another. There is something ominous about the closing line: “a poetry spoken by locusts as they descend” (198). Locusts are a destructive insect, and so a poetry spoken by descending locusts ready to destroy whatever they may find in their way points to environmental apocalypse.

VIII Meaning Takes Precedence A meditation in four stanzas on the sacredness and immortality of being, on the precedence of meaning and on the existence of truth regardless of humans’ actions: this is the conceptual matrix at the heart of poem VII of Conversations with a Toad, a poem marked by deep thinking, perceptual accuracy and linguistic economy. These are all attributes of great poetry, which is meant to be durable, like the sugar and protein signatures left by primitive life forms on Precambrian rocks. Every musical word falls exactly into place in this concise and resonant statement on the destruction of the world and the persistence of being despite ecological calamity. The first stanza dwells on mortality and immortality. Life is a finite, precious gift. According to Stephen Greenblatt, “nothing –​from our own species to the planet on which we live to the sun that lights our days –​lasts forever. Only atoms are immortal” (The Swerve 6). Death is the price we must pay for life, Bringhurst says, and it is a fair price we must be ready to charge when the moment is ripe for us to leave this world. The last life and the one resurrection the poet discovers in the natural world comes down to perpetual metamorphosis and the trans-​corporeality implicit in eating and being eaten: the toad eats the moth and the moth becomes an indistinguishable part of its body; the eagle feeds on the overrun body of the deer lying inert on the road, and the deer fuels its flight. Instead of being buried in a hole in the ground, many animals experience this kind of death and this kind of resurrection. Much the same happens in the world of trees: “Woodlice breed in the fallen alder” (Selected Poems 198). A dead alder becomes food for woodlice, which feed and breed on it and metamorphose the dead wood into something new in their living cells, while “red-​shafted

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flickers” feed on the fallen alder too. “Uses will form for us too in the end” (198), concludes the first stanza, which is a reminder of humans’ mortality. When we die, our bodies will be nourishing food for other microscopic creatures and we will dissolve into that indestructible continuum of life –​a world which is “a site of ongoing hybridizations” (Iovino, “Bodies of Naples” 101) where all corporeal entities are open and substances intermingle with each other. The core and geometrical centre of the poem is in the second stanza, which is woven with five simple declarative sentences that tessellate the words truth, meaning and being with great dexterity: What is is the truth. What precedes it is meaning. We will not destroy being, toad. We will not. But I think we will overreligiously clean it. (Selected Poems 198)

What-​is (i.e., reality or being) is the truth, which does not need humans to keep on existing. Before truth, there is only meaning, which is made up of all the things and creatures that are woven into the body of being, the vibrant flesh of the earth. For centuries on end, the human mind has directed its own attention to being, the heart of metaphysics. The Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, many other Western philosophers, and Oriental sages of different historical periods have asked the same questions time and again, and so their insights into being are still valuable, a precious vademecum that Bringhurst has tried to rescue from oblivion to the benefit of contemporary readers. These remnants of visions and tattered fragments of wisdom are a talisman, a personal pharmacopoeia the poet wishes to preserve at all costs. They remind us of the fundamental questions we should be asking at a time of unprecedented climate crisis, instead of insisting on our determination to destroy the world. The old in their knowing remind us that being is plural, manifold, varied, many-​voiced, fluid. Though its outward appearance may be changing all the time, being remains serenely the same, as it is immutable, eternal, immortal. Therefore, hard as we may try, humans cannot destroy being. Homo sapiens is a part of being itself alongside other life forms. In Bringhurst’s work, metaphysics is pure physics: what-​is is what-​is, in almost tautological terms. Poetry is a property intrinsic in being, an aspect or attribute of reality, and humans have no monopoly on being, truth, meaning or poetry. The third and closing stanza dwells on ancestral voices coming from afar. It remains unclear whether these voices are those of the ancient Presocratics, the Eastern sages and the First Nations, who knew how to pay ecological attention, how to really listen to the world and, as a result, how to grasp the nature of reality. Those ancient voices still conceived of the world as a sacred space populated

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by gods. Yet these voices might also be the voices of being itself, singing and dancing in the world to make itself audible to us, trying to catch our attention. As Bringhurst claims in the Foreword to The Calling, “in the world of bats and birds and human beings, sometimes there is silence, and sometimes there is being calling out to itself in the hope that being is listening” (12). The voices mentioned in the last stanza of poem VII are the voices of being claiming our attention: Yet the voices still seep through us too. Even through us, who have long since forgotten: to pray does not mean to send messages to the gods; to pray means to listen. (Selected Poems 198)

Paying attention to what is close at hand is our proper, endless work, but humans living in industrial societies have forgotten to listen to the real. We no longer believe that the world is a place populated by gods. However, the voices still seep through us. In the Foreword to The Calling, Bringhurst also speaks of “a lot of homeless gods –​who dream of alpine meadows, rivers, rocks and trees and coral reefs and coves –​forced to make do for a time with a diet that might consist of little more than sterile earth and poisoned air and water” (14). Exiled from a biosphere where toxicity is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, these are the gods our ancestors believed in, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome, the gods of the Oriental sages, the gods of the First Nations living in pre-​industrial societies. They all had sharp minds and true stories to tell about what they found out about a community of sentient beings and about the ultimate essence of things. Their voices are still speaking loud and clear, and the only thing we have to do is to listen for what they might have to teach us, as Bringhurst tirelessly does in his own poetry.

IX  Feet, Dreams, Rocks Poem VIII of Conversations with a Toad braids three miniature meditations on hands and feet, dreams and rocks, and the mind as a tangible or palpable entity endowed with a peculiar physical texture. What do these discrete and seemingly unrelated elements have in common? The first stanza dwells on the difference between hands and feet, a recurrent motif in Bringhurst’s work. In the poet’s view, hands are more dangerous than feet, which are much more respectful towards the world. In treading upon the earth, one’s feet become the literal link between our porous bodies and the world. Similarly, in speech and in breathing, the air leaving and entering our lungs in the form of meaningful sound strings or simple breath is also a link with the air that surrounds the earth –​with the

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enfolding liquid of a “Commonwealth of Breath.” In any case, the equation at the heart of the stanza aligns hands with eyes and feet with ears, and the poet seems to stress the pre-​eminence of listening over seeing. In fact, Bringhurst’s is a poetics of hearing what-​is rather than a poetics of seeing what-​is. For him, being is singing and dancing and the best way of approaching its mystery is through one’s ears and feet. The notion of breathing through one’s own feet translates into something like paying ecological attention to what-​is. This is one of those elementary truths we need to be reminded of, because in dominant industrial societies we do not have time or patience to listen to our fellow human beings or to the real any more. However, this is not the only problem in dominant capitalist societies. The talking homo sapiens of the poem claims that nowadays we live in a world where “we have barely stopped binding the feet /​of the women” (Selected Poems 199). Binding someone’s feet, particularly those of women, is an expression of cruel dominion, so that this could be interpreted as being a call for gender equality, for respect among the sexes. This is one of the reasons why the poetic voice considers, from an ironic standpoint, the possibility of binding men’s hands so as to prevent them from binding women’s feet. The best course of action, it concludes, is trying to weigh them (both men and women) “back into frequent touch with the ground” (Selected Poems 199), so that they will learn to breathe through their feet again. The two closing lines of the first stanza are a celebration of the act of paying ecological attention: “Like eyes, the hands open and close, squeeze and release. /​The feet, like the ears, are always wide open” (Selected Poems 199). The second stanza concerns dreams. The whole picture gives the overall impression of unreality. Near an enigmatic stream, the embodiment of perpetual metamorphosis in Herakleitos’ thinking, are pictures of dreamers who possibly stand for all the visionaries that have existed upon Earth. Having cleansed their senses, visionaries are capable of seeing beyond the polished surfaces of objects and reaching into an invisible core of meaning at the heart of things. But ­history teaches that visionaries are only madmen or madwomen, social misfits on the margins of empires, and that sometimes they end up being ostracised by the community whose very eyes they seek to cleanse. Seeing ahead of their time, they have learnt something whose existence we do not even suspect. One is also inevitably reminded of the cave paintings of prehistoric times, with their stylised representations of humans hunting big mammals, frozen in mid-​motion for eternity. The hands that painted those paintings were those of visionaries –​ ones who still breathed through their feet and touched the texture of the world with non-​aggressive, careful hands. The history of humankind is, after all, rich

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in anonymous visionaries that have not filled chronicles with griefs but with true achievements instead. The closing lines of the second stanza appear to shed some more light on the preceding ones: “Close your eyes, say the rocks, /​and dream of things seen in the darkness. /​Open your eyes and dream of the sun” (Selected Poems 199). Ancestral rocks, which co-​existed with toads, bryozoans and trilobites in the Precambrian, hide a primordial wisdom within themselves. Rocks also speak a language of their own, as humans have no monopoly on meaning or language in Bringhurst’s view. Much can be learnt by just looking at rocks, for they are a meaningful part of the book of the world. While to the uninitiated rocks might be simply dumb entities that sit in silent self-​complacency, geologists know how to interpret them, how to decipher the messages imprinted on them by the hand of time. In this poem, Bringhurst personifies them and makes them speak to humans. It comes as a delightful surprise that rocks, of a hard, tangible nature, should speak about something so truly volatile and eel-​slippery as dreams. They teach humankind an elementary lesson: if asleep, humans are to pay attention to what they dream of amidst the wombish, enfolding darkness of sleep; if awake, they are to pay attention to what their eyes see and daydream of the sun. In other words, the speaking rocks urge humans to remain alert to reality with a maximum of concentration, for much of the ultimate essence of things is revealed in dreams and wakefulness alike. What humans listen to the rocks saying is that everything is connected to everything else and that being is an unstoppable continuum in perpetual flux. The mind, the jewel we treasure in our skull, is a miniature model of the world at large. And it is the mind that the speaking homo sapiens turns to in the last stanza. The third stanza could stand alone as a separate short lyric, but it does make sense that it should come as the closing stanza of poem VIII, particularly after a stanza concerned with rocks and dreams. The stanza opens with a simple declarative sentence –​“The mind is a body” (Selected Poems 199) –​and then it is followed by a long enumeration of seemingly disparate elements. The mind is thus a physical embodied entity, firmly rooted in the real, and so its peculiar anatomy consists of parts of the human body (shinbones, wrists, milkteeth, ankles, lungs, limbs), parts of animals (wings, fins, feathers, dewclaws) and parts of plants (roots, petals, leafstalks). This apparently random enumeration constitutes an accurate catalogue of the world-​within-​the-​human-​mind in the end. When this catalogue is placed against poem IV of Conversations with a Toad –​another probing meditation on the nature of the mind –​, we experience a moment of revelation: the mind is the world, a microcosm or miniature model of the Earth. In the mind there is room for everything, for animals and plants alike, as the in crescendo enumeration

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in the penultimate sentence makes clear: “It is larva, pupa, imago, sea urchin, /​ tree” (Selected Poems 199). This particular enumeration is not random at all: larva, pupa and imago are all stages in the life of an insect, especially one with wings (imago is the final and fully developed adult stage, in fact). These are the stages the moth that the toad feeds on goes through. They are also expressive of the incessant metamorphosis inherent in all living creatures. Apart from the insect in its different incarnations, there is place in the mind for the sea urchin (the small sea creature with a round shell covered with spikes), probably endowed with a similar anatomical complexity, and also for a tree. From the tree of the mind drop “ripening ideas” (199), for ideas are the fruits of the mind, which is a tree. The twofold metaphor is apt in that it gestures towards the interconnectedness and unity of the cosmos and also to the fact that the mind is an all-​embracing reality capable of encompassing the whole of reality within itself.

X The Path through the Nonhuman Poem IX of Conversations with a Toad is a complex meditation on how the nonhuman makes possible communication among human beings. It is a truism to say that humans are social animals, that isolation is unnatural. About 23 centuries ago, in ancient Greece, one of the high points of human civilisation, Aristotle affirmed that man is a political animal. That we humans are social animals means that we live in a community with other fellow human beings, and that, inevitably, we need the presence of others to make sense of ourselves and of our place in the world. To ensure our well-​being, we are in need of bonds –​ physical, intellectual, emotional –​and we need to feel that we fit in a particular scheme of things, that we belong among beings that are not completely dissimilar to us. Speech, the mind and the heart play a crucial role in the construction of one’s own human and social identity. This is a logocentric and anthropocentric interpretation of humans’ social nature, deeply ingrained in the very foundations of a long tradition of Western thought. What Bringhurst’s meditation brings to our attention is the importance of the nonhuman in the interpretation of the human. We do need to acknowledge the existence and presence of nonhuman animals to be able to make sense of ourselves. Only by walking the road of the nonhuman will we be able to make ourselves whole again. This is the fundamental lesson at the heart of this meditation for two voices. Originally conceived for one voice only in the first two textual incarnations of the poem, ever since its publication in The Calling this has been a composition for two voices –​those of homo sapiens and homo narrans. The former leads the meditation towards an illuminating conclusion, whereas the latter punctuates the thoughts

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and words of the other by speaking aloud almost exactly the same words uttered in poem I of Conversations with a Toad. These are the opening lines of poem IX: Toad, all the roads from a man to a woman, a man to a man, woman to man, woman to woman lead through the nonhuman. This is the reason, toad, for musicians. (Selected Poems 199)

To put it very simply, there is no way of reaching out to the other but by walking the road of the nonhuman. It is not a shortcut; it resembles more strolling, going for a quiet walk in the solitude of the woods or the mountains. For Bringhurst, the eyes are to the mind what love is to reason. Like speech or the capacity for thought, human love is what makes us genuinely human. It is out of love that the grander achievements of humankind have materialised. It is love which makes us empathetically care about the others, their material well-​being and their emotional harmony. Love makes things cohere. This is simply acknowledging or ascertaining what-​is. Musicians are prototypical in their way of coming to terms with the nonhuman through their playing of musical instruments, originally made out of parts of animals:           In this poem a man  talks We speak to each other by means           to a toad. The toad may  listen of the bones and the horns and the bodies           or he may not.  That and bowels of dead animals, plucking           is not the man’s concern. their gutstrings, thumping their bellies, plinking           I suppose it is not the toad’s concern their evened teeth laid out in a row.           either… (Selected Poems 199–200)

Music is made possible by musicians making their own melodies out of parts of animals’ anatomy –​bones, horns, bowels, gutstrings, bellies, teeth. Bringhurst’s lines are a poetic enactment of music in themselves: notice the alliteration of /​b/​ in the sequence bones-​bodies-​bowels-​bellies, for instance, or the incantatory repetition of a simple connector like “and” in “the bones and the horns and the bodies” (199), or the –​ing forms plucking, thumping and plinking, which ­suggest the nonstop flux of reality. Speech is also made possible by the existence of these very animals. “We speak to each other by means of them” means that it is necessary to step outside oneself, look at the more-​than-​human world of which we are a part, and listen to being before moving our lips to utter a single word that might make sense. If not, silence is preferable to speech, Bringhurst teaches

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us as well. The lines quoted above concern communication, but communication may take the form of music or speech, which are not completely unrelated to one another, and also the form of a sonata, a fugue, a painting, a sculpture, a gesture, a choreography or dancing piece, one look, or silence, which is also pregnant with meaning. Silence means. This is the reason why the third voice in the poem, that of bufo boreas (the toad), is still heard in the background, silently punctuating the humans’ voices. The silences of the toad are “the most meaningful /​parts of the poem” (Selected Poems 193), reminds us homo narrans again. Without them, man would not be able to find his own silence, the one he desperately needs to be able to listen to being and learn a fundamental lesson: The animals give us our speech and the means            nevertheless, that the silences of our thinking, just as the dreamers’            of the toad are the most important –​ masks open the doors of our dreams.            I mean the most meaningful –​ The voice is a face. The face is a vision.            parts of the  poem.            How could the man in the poem  find             his own silence without them? (Selected Poems 200)

Speech and thinking are made possible by animals, which give us the means to be able to do both things. Once again, the dreamers of poem VIII are invoked here. Are they still the visionaries that have existed throughout the history of humankind? Dreams unveil some of the profoundest recesses of the human mind; they are a mirror, a book, and a text, but they are not easy to decipher. One has to go beyond the mask of convention and common sense to unravel their logic or true meaning. Finally, the poem closes with a twofold equation which keeps echoing like a mystery long after we have finished reading this piece aloud: “The voice is a face. The face is a vision” (200). The revelation at the heart of this poem is simple enough:  we need animals to make sense of ourselves, no matter whether we make up our minds to walk the roads of art, science, philosophy, speech, silence, or dreams, in search of a final, transfiguring vision.

XI  The Persistence of Poetry, the Destruction of the Biosphere Conversations with a Toad can be said to bespeak our terrible estrangement from the world. If we look up the word meditation in the dictionary, we learn that it means at least two different things:  first, the practice of thinking deeply in

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silence, especially for religious reasons or in order to make your mind calm, and second, serious thoughts on a particular subject that somebody writes down or speaks. And if we look up the word thought, this is what the dictionary, among other things, says:  (1) something that you think or remember, (2)  a person’s mind and all the ideas that they have in it when they are thinking, (3) the power or process of thinking, (4)  the act of thinking seriously and carefully about something, (5) ideas in politics, science, etc. connected with a particular person, group or period of history. Meditation and thought are closely related words; at some point their meanings intersect, especially if we juxtapose sense (2) of meditation and senses (2) and (3) of thought. Poem X of Conversations with a Toad could be said to be a meditation on thought. Thought stops for a while, looks deep inside the mind, and comes up with a handful of words which are attempts at self-​definition. The mind moves along three steps in its investigation into the nature of thought. The first stanza opens with two enigmatic statements about mountain goats, and these are followed by two possible definitions of thought: In winter the mountain goats think. In summer they gather. Thought equals solitude. Toad, is there no other answer? Thought is the mind walking the ridges and edges of being, not the tuned instruments crooning their perfect routines. (Selected Poems 200)

Humans have no monopoly on thought either, no more than on meaning, language or poetry. If it is the animals that “give us our speech and the means of our thinking” (Selected Poems 200), as suggested in poem IX, then it is only natural that they should speak a language of their own and think in their own way too. The opposition is seasonal: in winter, taciturn mountain goats choose to think in solitude, and in summer they gather to celebrate their being alive with their fellows. Two interpretations are close at hand: solitude (and also silence) is the essential prerequisite for deep thinking to unfold, or, maybe, one is plunged directly into solitude, even in the middle of a crowd, when one gives oneself over to thinking seriously and intensely about something. Thought is solitude: this is the first equation we find in the opening lines of the poem. The second equation follows immediately:  thought is “the mind walking the ridges and edges of being” (Selected Poems 200). The mind is a body and so it has got feet with which to walk. Being is the unknown territory explored conscientiously by thought in its excursions towards the peripheral zones that are far away from its geographical centre. It is summits, high points, and edges that the thought prefers

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going to. Beauty is difficult and complex, and this is what thought is after. Unlike music, thought does not seek to comprehend being through “tuned instruments crooning their perfect routines” (Selected Poems 200). Thought takes its chances and takes risks in going into the unknown, unchartered territories of being. There might be several possible names for this: speculation for its own sake, the pleasure of dialectics, the dance of the intellect among words and ideas, ripening ideas dropping from the tree of the mind, or the task of philosophy in asking fundamental questions. Smoothness, the absence of complexity, is blasphemy, we learn in the first line of the second stanza. The geometrical centre of the poem is the most complex of all three definitions of thought:             …  Thought is the mute breaking through in the voice. Like ice going out in the spring, the voice giving way. The language dug up by the roots where thought has been speaking. (Selected Poems 200)

There is an amazing density of meaning in this stanza. Thought is trying to find words to convey what is otherwise ineffable, going back in time to a pre-​verbal stage of humankind in search of elemental pieces of truth that have not been uttered yet, but are visible out there if we only pay attention. Giving voice to those insights or intuitions is something thought strives hard to do. The mute, the ineffable, the unsayable finds its way through the voice (the pre-​eminence of speech over writing is taken for granted here again), with a naturalness that resembles such phenomena as the melting of ice in springtime. At the edges of being, quotidian language will not do and fall apart; it must return to a more pristine state. Language is dug up by the roots from the living soil, so that thought can make itself discernible in verbal disguise to other minds. This is thought on the edge, making the most of language to communicate its findings or the fruits of its investigations into reality, since being always defies verbal definition. The poem closes with a warning addressed to the toad: humans are determined to cease to have meaning and, in the process, they are about to destroy everything they find on their way. The talking homo sapiens warns the toad about the impending destruction of the world, while, somewhere between the lines, there is the optimistic message that the persistence of poetry and being is a reality too. Humans’ greed is insatiable and invincible; their hunger and thirst for money, power and comfort is unappeasable, so there is only one thing left for the toad to do: to go away. What is round the corner is a silence that is not poetry, a dead form of silence that breeds no thinking or singing: “Leap, toad. Our invincible /​greed, a dead silence, an absolute /​absence of meaning, is closing” (Selected Poems 200).

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In Learning to Die, Bringhurst and Zwicky have offered a lucid meditation on how to live and die in the age of the Anthropocene with a modicum of grace and wisdom. A cornucopia of scientific evidence suggests that the destruction of the planet owing to human practices in late capitalist societies is simply inevitable. And yet, in the face of environmental calamity, Conversations with a Toad ultimately offers us “a visceral sense of our shared ontology” (Sandilands 169), because Bringhurst is determined to listen for whatever lessons the nonhuman world might teach us. For a whole lifetime, he has been trying to capture those lessons in the poems he has been composing. Because real poetry is “walking on the ground and breathing” (Bringhurst, “Breathing” 99) and he has been “trying to live on closer, less arrogant terms with the real –​which is […] for the most part nonhuman” (103), he has always kept “the company, for preference, of the rocks and trees, the loons and the seaducks who at this moment are close out the door” (110) and ignored the reader “for something larger” (110) which includes us or not, as we choose. The poet’s ultimate concern is then to awaken us to an enhanced awareness of our deep ecological bond with the earth, a community of beings that is more-​than-​human in nature.

3 Breathing through the Feet Standing on the bare ground, —​my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,  —​all mean egotism vanishes. I  become a transparent eyeball; I  am nothing; I  see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. —​Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836), p. 39.   The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections. —​Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (1855), p. 36.

I The Human Voice in a Garden of Colour “One of the most innovative experiments in all of English-​speaking poetry,” New World Suite No. 3 is possibly Bringhurst’s polyphonic masterpiece and “marks another attempt to emulate the world as we experience it, as a bandwidth full of sound and song” (Dickinson, “In the Wake” 12). Whereas The Blue Roofs of Japan and Conversations with a Toad were conceived as poems for two voices, New World Suite No. 3 consists of a lengthy text arranged in four distinct movements and incorporates a much more complex interpenetration of three voices that enact a deep philosophical and ecological meditation. In “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue,” the afterword to a special limited edition of the Suite by the Center for Book Arts, the author explains how the poem evolved over time in search of a more perfect typographical incarnation. As in the case of many other Bringhurst poems, the editorial history of the Suite is truly complex. Though, as Bringhurst says, poetry lives and thrives ultimately in the human voice, this particular poem has known three different printed incarnations21 over time, 21 (1) Trial design proof for a projected edition of ‘New World Suite Nº 3.’ Mission, BC: Barbarian Press, 1993. A broadside containing staves 38–​45 from the second movement of the poem. (2) In the 1995 Calling edition the complete text is published in staves of three lines for the three voices of the poem: the first voice (male) is in bold, the second voice (female) in italic, and the third voice (male) in roman. (3) New World Suite Nº 3. New York: Center for Book Arts, 2005. This was the Center 30th Anniversary Publication and consisted of four volumes, each mounted on (and detachable from) a lectern base. The contents of the volumes are these: the poem for three voices, reprinted with minor revisions from The Calling version but redesigned by Bringhurst, in a binding designed by Hedi Kyle –​volume 1 (black covers): “First Voice (Viola)”; volume 2 (ochre covers): “Second Voice (Violin)”; volume 3 (blue covers): “Third Voice (Cello)”; volume 4 (black covers) contains an afterword, Subscribers to the Edition, Center for Book Arts Directors

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apart from an early trial proof. Thus, the Suite was composed as early as 1990, but it had to wait for 15 years to find its perfect typographical design, as the poet believed that “with adequate resources” he could “make the texture of the poem more palpable and easier to see” (“Licking” 5). Before 2005, this complex poem had known a previous incarnation in The Calling (1995), which the author did not find typographically satisfying, since “[t]‌he three simultaneous voices were printed black on white, one beneath the other, in roman, italic and bold: rows of words in three-​line staves. The result looked less like a score for strings than like a score for pure percussion” (“Licking” 5). Much earlier, in 1993, Crispin and Jan Elsted, at Barbarian Press in Mission, British Columbia, had produced a trial design proof for a projected edition of the same poem which never saw the light of day. Much later, in 2009, Gaspereau Press would publish a more accessible edition of the text in the author’s Selected Poems, the final third of which is almost completely devoted to his polyphonic poems. Printed on the page, the poem looks like a garden of colour, given that Bringhurst “gets around the technical challenge of writing for three voices who speak as a simultaneity by printing their lines in ochre, blue and black, and stacking them into musical staves” (Dickinson, “In the Wake” 12). Needless to say, the Gaspereau Press edition gave Bringhurst’s polyphonic poems a wider circulation, since Conversations with a Toad and New World Suite No. 3 had also been originally published in limited deluxe editions and were hardly accessible to a general readership. At any rate, the Suite is a work of gigantic proportions, as the very typographical incarnation of the poem as an art object in the 2005 Center for the Book Arts edition makes evident. In a short note on Bringhurst’s poem, Yvonne Korshak and Robert J. Rubin give a brief but enlightening description of the book: & Staff, and Colophon. There are no male or female voices, but string instruments instead standing for the three voices, which are superimposed upon one another and printed in three different colours (black, blue & ochre). The first voice in each case is printed in black at the mid-​centre of the line, whereas the second and third voices are printed in blue (raised) and in ochre (lowered) to indicate simultaneity. Not all three voices coincide all the time or exactly at the same time, and so spatial arrangement on the page is also of the essence. (4) In the 2009 Selected Poems edition, the Suite is reprinted with some minor textual variants in three colours. Lines are centred, raised or lowered; clusters of three lines are numbered within each single movement of the poem. Typographically, this edition is legible and affordable, in Bringhurst’s view. If the 2005 edition presented separate scores for all the three voices, now it is a pleasure to see all three voices superimposed within the boundaries of a single page. Yet “the multi-​coloured montage on the page is simply a tantalizing reminder of what you’re not experiencing, […] its aural incarnation” (Lee, “Braided Skeins” 153, 154). In this chapter, all quotes from New World Suite No. 3 are lifted from Selected Poems.

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In an extraordinary tribute to the human voice, Robert Bringhurst wrote his long poem, New World Suite Number Three, for three voices, each corresponding to a musical instrument –​viola, violin and cello. The poem is in four movements. […] As in a polyphonic oratorio, the voices move from solo to singing in combinations with other voices, and so the book holds a score for each voice, the reader’s lines in black and those of the other two voices in ochre and blue. When singers perform together, the black overlaps the other color or colors: thus one can listen to the three voices together visually as well as aurally. (72)

The Suite is the fruit of at least three fundamental components: polyphony, an ecocentric ethics, and philosophical thinking. Let us examine each in depth. First, from a purely formal perspective, polyphony –​or the interpenetration of multiple voices inspired by the practice of musicians and by nature itself –​is the device deployed by Bringhurst to convey the polyphonic texture of the more-​ than-​human world, where myriad (non)human voices are found to coexist on democratic terms as part of a vast semiotic-​material network of agentic, meaning-​bearing entities. Bringhurst found the inspiration he needed for the Suite in the polyphony of the more-​than-​human world and in polyphonic music. In the realm of music, polyphony is a formalisation or humanisation of something uninvented, since its source is ultimately to be found in a many-​ voiced world –​in the singing of frogs and birds, in monolingual or multilingual conversations eavesdropped on in the street, in the soundscapes of the earth. Yet the poet also learnt a great deal from musicians about how to make poems for multiple voices. In “Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue,” Bringhurst dwells on the importance of Canadian composer Glenn Gould’s example for his own polyphonic poetics. The “thoroughgoing polyphonic texture and subtlety of form” (“Licking” 10) of Gould’s The Solitude Trilogy (1967–​1977), a radio documentary where “ambient sounds and background music play while people talk” (10), taught him to handle polyphony and remains, in Bringhurst’s view, “one of the most accomplished and important works of literature ever produced in North America, in any medium or language” (12). In addition, after writing The Blue Roofs of Japan, he started to read music scores and listen to jazz and classical musicians from Haydn, Bach, Schönberg and Shostakovich to Stravinsky, who taught him much about structure and “how to deal with divergent, interpenetrating voices,” even if the challenge of “how to print a polyphonic poem” (“Licking” 4, 5) had to be tackled yet. In terms of structure, the suite as a musical genre provides the poet with the model for the composition of his polyphonic poem:  four movements going each at a different pace (moderato, andante, adagio and lento), in which musical instruments have been replaced by three human voices. As if to

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mimic the polyphonic texture of the more-​than-​human world, all three voices interpenetrate at certain points in the Suite to convey density of meaning and profundity of thought on being, time, history and ecology in the age of the Anthropocene. The poem is also a moving homage to homo sapiens’ voice and an aesthetically rewarding challenge for readers. In this respect, Bringhurst claims that even if our eyes are not trained to read several texts at once, our ears are better schooled in the polyphony found in the world of (non)human voices. As he observes, “[i]‌n normal conditions, humans all inherit what it takes to learn multiple languages, catch multiple voices, and hear through the biological fence” (“Licking” 10). Secondly, the Suite is an example of what Bristow (2015) has termed “Anthropocene lyric,” i.e., poetry that is concerned with interrogating how humans relate to the nonhuman world in a new geological epoch marked by unprecedented anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere. In other words, the Anthropocene lyric cultivates humans’ awareness of the fragility of oikos and instils in us an enhanced sense of the interdependency between the human and the nonhuman. The Suite is thus a meditation on how human practices in dominant capitalist societies threaten the integrity of habitats and particular life forms in different locales around the world. In this respect, drawing on Neils Bohr’s ­theoretical physics, Barad’s agential realism insists that the universe is a “dynamic process of intra-​activity” (Meeting the Universe 396), a site of intra-​active agencies where everything emerges in a process of shared becoming. Ethics in Barad’s view is “intra-​acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming” (Meeting the Universe 396). Taking responsibility for their actions, humans are thus interpellated to rethink the way they relate to the more-​than-​human world, to envision new ways to live on earth with a sense of duty and responsibility. In line with Alaimo’s notion of trans-​corporeality, in the Suite Bringhurst “does not concentrate on bodies, things, and objects as separate entities, but instead traces how the (post)human is always already part of the intra-​active networks and systems that are simultaneously material, discursive, economic, ecological, and biopolitical” (Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins” 195). In this more inclusive ontology, sensitive to the agentic powers and porous nature of all entities, “our bodies exist among other bodies, enmeshed, and intra-​acting transcorporeally, with all sorts of substances, including food, water, air, and a full range of industrial chemicals” (Sullivan 92). What Bringhurst also accomplishes in this complex polyphonic poem is making visible the vitality of matter with a view to re-​awakening readers to a more inclusive environmental awareness, for, as Bennett argues, “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-​destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (Vibrant Matter

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ix). In the process, he directs readers’ attention to ontological entanglements at the heart of the world and to anthropogenic forms of toxicity that threaten the integrity of the biosphere –​i.e., the integrity of biodiversity, of nonhuman life, of cosmic matter of the planet Earth –​in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, Bringhurst advocates for a “non-​ rapacious ethics of sustainable becoming” (Braidotti, Transpositions 278), for a democracy of inter-​being in a multivocal, entangled commonwealth of bodily natures. And third, deep thinking is inextricably linked to Bringhurst’s polyphonic singing in the Suite. In fact, as Zwicky observes, “[l]‌anguage rooted in music is the linguistic medium in which the images of lyric thought are at home” (Lyric Philosophy L216) and “[t]hought, listening to presence, attends the concrete tonal and rhythmic being of language” (L238). The four movements making up the poem are a sustained meditation on being, poetry, history, time and homo sapiens’ relations to the more-​than-​human world. A  closer look at the title reveals that the suite as a genre brings together pieces of map and pieces of music, which is to say a multifaceted meditation on being and time, on history as manifested in episodes like the colonisation of the New World by European settlers and the scientific revolution that Copernicus and Galileo Galilei among others initiated in modern Europe, snapshots of urbanscapes and ancient sites of the native peoples of America, tattered fragments of myths accounting for awe-​ inspiring constellations in the night sky, as well as a forceful denunciation of the destruction of the biosphere by capitalist practices. Hence, polyphony reveals itself to be the most effective poetic device to capture the interwoven nature of the more-​than-​human world, one where all bodily natures have coevolved throughout eons of time. Earth is one and plural at the same time, a single ecology of selves consisting of manifold agentive, embodied entities in perpetual intra-​action with each other, deeply immersed in a commonwealth of breath. Closely related to the deep thinking of the Suite is cultural and historical syncretism –​“cultural layering and folding” (“Licking” 14), in Bringhurst’s words –​, another remarkable feature of this complex poem that harmonises music, pieces of map and human voices. Disparate elements from all around the world are condensed into a single vortex and, as a result, all times and places seem to be part of a simultaneous here-​and-​now, conveying a kaleidoscopic view of the world. The Suite features thus a profusion of geographical references to places that function as imaginative settings for each of the four movements: Maps as well as voices are braided together in the Suite. The names of Aztec, Mayan and Inca sites (Tenochtitlan, Tikal, Cuzco, Pisaq) turn up side by side with the names of ancient North American settlements  –​some in British Columbia (Ttanuu, Kitwancool) and others in New Mexico (Chaco Canyon, Acoma, Gila,

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Frijoles). Threaded in with these are the names of some pitmines and cities. The first movement includes some recollections of a desecrated landscape in the Amazonian Basin, side by side with memories of a village in northern Manitoba. The second movement is set in the Hopi country. The third adopts the voices of Chinese immigrants to Saskatchewan. The fourth, based on a mid-​winter walk in central British Columbia, superimposes the figures of two hunters, Orion and Prajapati, who are two interpretations of the same constellation: one inherited from Greece, the other from northern India. (“Licking” 13–​14)

For Bringhurst, the Suite is “a grossly simplified portrait of the land in which he lives,” but also “a grossly simplified set of allusions to the damage that has been done here and to the piecemeal richness of memory and tradition that still somehow survives” (“Licking” 14) ever since settlers set foot on the New World and exercised dominion over the earth’s resources. Oblivious to the sacredness and wisdom incarnate in the land they conquered, the earlier settlers inflicted pain upon the other they encountered on the American continent, decimated the numbers of (non)human beings through firearms and contagious disease, and caused massive destruction in the newly discovered paradise.22 Faced with centuries of abuse and overexploitation, Bringhurst salvages tattered pieces of wisdom from remote times and spaces, and sings a moving vindication of the rights of a breathing earth. At the same time, he directs our attention to the wisdom native to the land, where highly industrialised metropolises stand side by side with ancient sites from pre-​ industrial, pre-​literate societies that knew themselves to be in and of the earth.

II  Listening to the Heartbeat of the Earth The first movement of the Suite, “All the Desanctified Places,” can be best characterised as a catalogue of the world in miniature, even if it is difficult, if not impossible, to cram the whole world into the space of just a few pages. “What is is an idea recurrent in time”: these are words that are repeated time and again in Bringhurst’s Suite. The message amounts to nothing more than time changes human beings and the earth, and yet humans’ greedy management of the earth’s resources seems a recurrent motif throughout history. The poet also wishes to emphasise a primordial lesson:  being is one and plural, every single entity in the world is distinctly unique and yet is connected to everything else along a 22 By the end of the 19th century, “in under four centuries, disease, warfare, hunger, massacre and despair had reduced their population from an estimated 7–​10 million to less than 250,000. As well as costing them their independence and more than ninety per cent of their land, the long struggle against Europeans and Euro-​Americans had ruptured their sense of reality” (Wilson 283).

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boundless continuum of existence. A monolithic rendition of the world is what we would get to hear if Bringhurst’s poem were homophonic (spoken by just one single voice), but the three interpenetrating voices offer a multilayered view of the earth instead. Thus, the whole world (all places) and the whole history of humankind (all times) are brought together into one single vortex of maximum emotional and intellectual density through “the ever-​shifting polyphonic cascade of voices discussing the cyclical nature of life and reality itself ” (Wood, “Anatomy” 119). What all the places have in common is that they are desanctified places, as the title of the first movement suggests. Desanctified is the opposite of sanctified (“made holy”) and so all the places named in the poem are not considered holy any more. It follows that the living, invisible presence of gods and goddesses has ceased to be felt or perceived by humans. Part of Bringhurst’s poetic agenda might be a re-​enchanting or resacralisation of a universe apparently devoid of the presence of the divine, impoverished to some extent, because humans are unable to see what they have in front of their eyes unless it can be exploited and exchanged for money, power or comfort. “All the Desanctified Places,” the longest of all four movements, consists of six clearly identifiable parts, typographically demarcated by Bringhurst: (1) staves 1–​17, a meditation on being, history, and time; (2) staves 18–​41, an invocation of all the desanctified places on Earth; (3) staves 42–​60, on the overexploitation of the earth’s resources by dominant capitalist societies; (4)  staves 61–​99, a meditation on the plurality of worlds and of being, and on the destruction of the world and the persistence of being; (5) staves 100–​116, on the pleasure of being alive and sensuously immersed in earth (i.e., to be in and of the earth) and on the return to earth upon one’s death; and (6) staves 117–​128, on singing being back into visibility. In what follows, a detailed analysis of each of these six parts aims at elucidating the structure and thematic unfolding of movement I of the Suite. Staves 1–​17 open with a brief meditation on what-​is and on time inspired by Hegel’s philosophy of history. Each voice propounds a different definition of being: (1) “What is is what has happened, Hegel says, /​and what has happened is what is /​spread out through time” (Selected Poems 203); (2) “What happens is what is” (203); and (3)  “What is is what is timeless caught in time” (203). One of the sharpest minds of Western philosophy, Hegel knew how to think deeply and pay attention to fundamental questions, of which his writings on time and history give eloquent evidence. He presupposed that history entails a process where humankind has been making spiritual and moral progress and advancing towards self-​knowledge. History is not chaotic, but has a plot that it is the philosopher’s task to discern. Some historians have found its key in the

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operation of natural laws of various kinds, but Hegel’s attitude rested on the faith that history is the enactment of God’s purpose, i.e., the gradual realisation of human freedom. Time, and History with capital letters, is then the relentless unfolding of the human spirit in its unimpeded march towards freedom ­following God’s blueprint. To turn to the three definitions of what-​is quoted above, the implications are the following: (1) what has happened belongs to the realm of the past and the past is real because it is finite and completed; (2) what happens in the present is what is real, unfolding in a perpetual present that knows of no limits, no precedents and no consequences; and (3) what-​is is that which is eternal, immutable, the core of unchangeable meaning at the heart of what does change from one minute to the next. The third appears to be the more perfect of all three definitions, since it harmonises change and immutability into one simple definition spoken by the female sensibility in the Suite. “All the Desanctified Places” explores then the arrival of the earlier settlers in the New World: “They were coming /​like sprung prisoners, /​beating their own ears /​into ploughshares” (Selected Poems 203–204), sings the first voice. The personal pronoun they refers to the pilgrims, Christopher Columbus and all the early settlers that emigrated from Europe to America in search of better life conditions. With them they also brought much havoc and destruction to the New World and its dwellers. The second and third voices are more specific about the humans that set foot on the American continent: farmers, shopkeepers, slavers and Quakers strongly opposed to violence and war, workers, freeloaders, thieves, policemen and women  –​a long enumeration that comprises the whole social spectrum and people from all walks of life. The heart of this second part is, however, a new attempt at defining history. The violin (i.e., the female voice) says: The rhythms of history are the rhythms of buying and selling, obeying and forcing, instead of the rhythms of giving and bearing. (Selected Poems 203–204)

This female sensibility looks reality in the eye and finds out that historical events are governed by oppression of the weak at the hands of the strong, by money and material transactions, by the brute force of rule and slavery, not by a compassionate understanding of what it means to be humane towards other embodied, vulnerable beings. The female voice wonders which rhythms we humans should listen to and, embracing an ethics of care, suggests that it is high time we were empathetic towards other bodily natures. The common good, the well-​being of (non)human beings, is what we all should be striving for. By

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contrast, the third (male) voice affirms that “history /​is the savior of nature, time /​the savior of space” (Selected Poems 204), which gestures to the fact that history is what saves man from the savage state of nature and plunges him into a social life governed according to rules by which everyone is expected to abide. Staves 1–​17 close with a reflection on what the settlers left behind in the Old World. Many of them thought of themselves as being the people chosen to start a New Eden or Jerusalem in America, but when they set foot on this living land, it was already populated by humans and nonhumans alike. Yet these immigrants of European descent only saw how much profit they could make from the vast expanses of land, rivers, lakes and woods they found in the newly discovered territory. They were “fleeing Copernicus, fleeing from Galileo” (Selected Poems 204), says the first voice. Astronomers and men of science committed to unearthing the principles of reality, both Copernicus and Galileo were visionary men, aware that there was a true plurality of worlds, and made important contributions to the scientific revolution that took place at the beginning of the Modern era. Scrutinising the arrangement of heavens, Copernicus propounded a heliocentric model of the universe in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi (1543), which the Church declared anathema and heresy, because there was no way of explaining how a transient body like the Earth, filled with meteorological phenomena, pestilence, and wars, could be part of a perfect and imperishable heaven like the one postulated by Aristotle. Later on, Galileo Galilei made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials, as well as to the development of the scientific method. His insistence in Il Saggiatore (1623) that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognised method for discovering the facts of nature. His earthshaking discoveries with the telescope revolutionised astronomy, undermined Aristotelian cosmology and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system. However, he was pronounced to be suspect of heresy, condemned to life imprisonment and made to abjure formally by the Inquisition. He spent the rest of his life in solitude, doing research on the sciences of motion and strength of materials. In any case, the settlers who left Europe and headed towards the New World were fleeing Copernicus’ and Galileo’s findings, which is to say that many of them were incapable of seeing beyond the surface of things, inasmuch as they refused “the news that what is /​is bigger than history” (Selected Poems 204). Two new definitions of time are formulated by the first and second voices in the poem respectively. According to the first definition, “[t]‌ime /​is the earth and the sky turning imperfect circles /​not God on his tall parade to the end of the line” (Selected Poems 204–205). Time is the imperfect circles implicit in the dance of

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the earth and the sky, which is a subtle reference to Copernicus’ and Galileo’s astronomical findings, and history is no master plan thoughtfully designed by God. The second definition embraces a mythical explanation: “Time is the sky and the earth, dancing” (Selected Poems 205) to the tune of the heartbeat of being, pervasive in a breathing cosmos. Staves 18–​41, the second part of “All the Desanctified Places,” open with an incantatory litany of names of ancient Aztec, Mayan, Inca, and North American sites or settlements:  Cuzco, Technotitlan, Acoma, Kitwancool, Pisaq, Tikal, Chaco Canyon, Ttanuu, Frijoles, Gila. They are all places once populated by the peoples native to the land, who were not coming from beyond the sea, fleeing from the beginning of the modern era of scientific discoveries, but had lived in the New World long before the immigrants set foot on their continent. All these native peoples had a deep ethical regard for the land as oikos or home to life in all its manifestations. They shared the same spiritual sense of being an inextricable part of the earth, deeply entangled with other living and non-​ living creatures that were perceived as articulate subjects, “able to communicate and interact with humans for good or ill” (Manes 15). Given their animistic conceptualisation of the earth, they viewed the more-​than-​human world as a sacred place inhabited by gods and spirit beings that made themselves a home in mountains and stones, oceans and rivers, animals and trees. Faced with the inexhaustible variety of the biosphere as the home of life, they felt a deep sense of reverence and gratitude for everything they received from the earth. In other words, they all could breathe through their feet and pay the world the ecological attention it deserved in exchange for the cornucopia of gifts it gave them. The relentless passage of time and the devastating effects of colonisation erased much of the legacy of all these native peoples and ignored the wisdom contained in the myths and stories of their oral literatures. What the speaking voices of the poem now record as they look closely at the desolate landscape of all the desanctified places is the result of such devastation: “the churches squat on the ruins” (Selected Poems 205), a most subtle reference to the impact of Christianisation and the civilising mission the white man saw it was his duty to fulfill in the New World. Mere tourists unable to really hear, see and understand what these ancient sites represent, “visitors gnaw at the moth-​eaten light /​with mechanical eyes” (Selected Poems 205). In his vindication of the immense value of the oral literatures of North America, Bringhurst has tirelessly complained that most Americans are tourists in what has been their homeland for centuries and that they ignore an ancestral legacy which is older and richer than they think, including a wide range of oral literatures overlooked by university curricula, literary histories and official institutions. Currently, “[w]‌hole towns are trussed

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up in the webs /​of our fences and parking lots, /​guardrails, turnstiles, interpretive signs” (Selected Poems 205–206), which suggests the artificiality of modern cityscapes and of human-​made interpretive labels imposed on these ancient sites. Modern humans are further removed from the organic truth that the people from pre-​industrial societies could experience firsthand on this same ground called the New World. Because so many layers of artificial signs have been superimposed on the original sites, there is now no way of touching the pristine truth these people were able to feel: “The truth predigested in place, like a caught /​moth, through the alchemical weight of our hands” (Selected Poems 206), says the second voice, and “The truth is broken like bread /​in our hands” (206), says the third voice. After all, as Buell suggests, the physical environment is being “increasingly refashioned by capital, technology, and geopolitics” (Writing 5), so much so that the “‘natural’ and ‘human-​built’ dimensions of the palpable world” have become “increasingly indistinguishable” (3). To this must be added the widespread ecological illiteracy amongst people living in colonial societies, where the land has become a text that homo sapiens needs to learn how to read or think with again. Next to the names of these ancient sites, located along the American continent, stand the names of modern cities or metropolises  –​Denver, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Boston. Though far apart in time and in space, all these ancient and modern places invoked in the Suite are co-​present in time and space in a polyphonic literary work that sings of what-​is as being “what is timeless caught in time” (Selected Poems 203). Bringhurst is following here in the footsteps of T. S. Eliot, who, in section V of The Waste Land, spoke of “[f]‌alling towers /​ Jerusalem Athens Alexandria /​Vienna London /​Unreal” (Selected Poems 68). The same sense of unreality pervades the staves where the three speaking voices visit the desanctified places of modern urbanscapes. What they record is the negative effects of pollution in modern cities and their deadening impact on human souls. Echoes from the theme of life-​in-​death and death-​in-​life, which is pervasive in Eliot’s poem, are also heard between the lines. In this respect, staves 28–​36 draw the reader’s attention to at least three fundamental issues. First, the advance of pollution in modern cities is now unstoppable and fatal: “the motorized spirochetes move on their cancerous business, /​the tumors of asphalt and neon enlarge” (Selected Poems 206), which gestures to humans being the tumour damaging the earth. As Barry Commoner observes, “we are in an environmental crisis because the means by which we use the ecosphere to produce wealth are destructive of the ecosphere itself. […] The present course of human civilization is suicidal” (294–​295). Second, the urban scenery is a space dominated by death: “the living are dead and the dead pretend /​to be living” (Selected Poems 206), says the female voice in a moment of revelation. And third, there is a certain kind of beauty in

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cities when seen from the distance, from an aircraft: “Hour by hour the tumors enlarge, /​and their beauty is visible from the aircraft, /​like that of bacilli seen through the microscope in the lab” (Selected Poems 206), claims the third voice in words that bespeak humans’ desire to see into things far away in the distance (macroscopic realities) through telescopes, or deep inside the material texture of things (microscopic particles) through microscopes. This second part closes with a new juxtaposition of the ancient sites on American ground and the modern metropolises of asphalt and neon. Some odd words may need elucidation. “The path /​from the kiva23 is empty” (Selected Poems 207), says the first voice; and “The roads between city and country are filled. /​The way out and back from the vision /​is empty” (Selected Poems 207), says the second voice. Among the Pueblo Indians of the southwestern United States, the kiva is a subterranean ceremonial and social chamber, a sacred space for rituals; at its very heart resides the tribe’s connection with the earth in the form of a simple hole excavated in the ground, symbolic of the people’s origin. Visions of things unseen were possible in the kiva as the male members of the tribe gathered for their rituals, but nowadays those visions have vanished for good and the path leading to the kiva is not trodden by humans any more. By contrast, the asphalt roads linking little villages and towns with the big cities are filled with cars ceaselessly taking people from one place to another. The conceptualisation of space is completely different now: the Pueblo Indians needed only to be reminded that they were part of the earth by the presence of that simple hole in the centre of the rounded kiva, a representation of the cosmos itself. Modern humans spend now their time running from one place to another, though they might not know exactly where they are heading to. Urbanscapes are dehumanised spaces to which even animals do not dare come close: “Four-​wheeled kachinas24 live year around in the town. /​Therefore the deer remain dead, /​and the pronghorn are spooked by fences” (Selected Poems 207). Kachinas were ancestral fertility spirits among the Pueblo Indians that acted as intermediaries between the realms of the human and the divine. They made themselves visible in the traditional rituals where the men of the tribe would wear their masks and be temporarily transformed under their influence. In the modern urban world, there seems to be no room for kachinas (they are motorised as well) and the pronghorn, the American antelope found from Alberta to northern Mexico, is scared to death by the fences humans build to protect themselves from the wild. Humans feel no longer at home. The natural world has to be subdued, domesticated, reduced to comprehensible human 2 3 See the entry on ‘kiva’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 16, p. 9278. 24 See the entry on ‘kachina’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 15, p. 9005.

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terms, even if this implies destroying it in the process. At his point, history is defined as “a clock ticking, a blade /​sliding between the earth and our shoes” (Selected Poems 207) –​i.e., history is the progressive alienation of humankind with respect to the non h ​ uman. That blade prevents humans from breathing through their feet, from feeling their ancestral bond to the earth. Since the time of the late Neolithic period (4500–​3200 BCE), the odyssey of homo sapiens on earth has been one of relentless conquest and management of the planet’s resources. The shift from a society of hunters and gatherers to one of herders and farmers had profound implications in our way of relating to the world. The domestication of animals through ranching, of plants through farming, and of language through writing was expressive of the conviction that humans had an inalienable right to stand on the summit of creation and dominate over all other creatures. Progressively, over the centuries, the world ceased to be perceived as a sacred place where humans and gods could live side by side in harmony, and the other (the wild) became a menace, something to be subdued and exploited as a portfolio of resources to satisfy human needs. In Bringhurst’s view, wild does not mean “undisciplined, unpredictable, savage, frightening, fierce, raw, crude” nor “formless” nor “untouched by humans,” as there are no wild places on the earth, “except deep in the sea or high in the air” (“Wild Language” 261, 262). In his idiolect, wild means “undomesticated, unmanaged, uncontrolled by human beings,” “extremely sophisticated” and “self-​sufficient” (261, 262). Put simply, “[t]‌he wild is the real, and the real is where we go for form and meaning. Meaning doesn’t originate with us” (264). Colonial regimes have turned their back on this salutary notion of the wild. In staves 42–​60, the third part of “All the Desanctified Places,” readers are plunged into the middle of the Amazonian Basin, with its gigantic rain-​forest and immense river. “The first movement includes some recollections of a desecrated landscape in the Amazonian Basin, side by side with memories of a village in northern Manitoba” (“Licking” 14), explains Bringhurst. The Amazon is thought to be the lung of the entire world, because it is home to forests untouched by humans’ greedy hands that give us oxygen galore. But the thematic concern of staves 42 through 60 is the overexploitation of the earth’s resources by humans. The (male) first and third voices stress the fact that the planet is almost on the brink of environmental apocalypse because of humans’ mismanagement of the earth’s wealth: “All over the world, the earth /​is tortured for money” (Selected Poems 208). Widespread deforestation and mineral extraction in pitmines are only two instances of anthropogenic interventions in natural ecosystems with a negative impact on the earth’s morphology. Thus, the first voice speaks of “the

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ashes still warm and the blood still fresh /​in the logging slash, and the featureless mud /​of the goldfields pulped with a high-​pressure hose” (Selected Poems 208), while the third voice speaks of “rivers going bankrupt” (208) owing to water pollution. The Amazon is no longer the pristine place it used to be; homo sapiens’ greed is invincible and his advance is unstoppable. With the realistic statements of the male voices contrasts vividly the intense lyricism of the female voice. First, it speaks of the mother of rivers (the Amazon) as having “thousands /​of rivers for mothers” (Selected Poems 208), and then it dwells on the different ways of torturing the earth devised by humans over time: homicide, genocide, fluvicide, terracide, matricide, and parricide. Puzzled by these euphonic words, the female voice wonders what they mean “when we say them” (208), as if to suggest that we humans are careless in our handling not just of words, but also of natural resources. They are all words of Latin origin denoting variations on the same theme, namely forms of killing where the agent is always homo sapiens. “This is not history” (Selected Poems 208), asserts the first voice, as if it were to abjure its own humanity; “This is the whipped /​earth ceasing to whimper, /​closing her mask” (208), says the third voice without hesitation. In the face of the massive destruction of the biosphere, it is important to note that the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, signed in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010, remains a forceful statement on the rights of the Earth as a living being. Fluvicide and terracide are just to instances of systematic violations of the Earth’s rights. Violations against our soils, air, forests, rivers, lakes, biodiversity, and the cosmos are assaults against us, where us means all living beings, including human beings, forests, mountains and sentient entities. The Declaration also emphasises that each sentient being is a cosmos in itself within a pluriform and multivocal world with which humans have an indivisible and interdependent relationship. What-​is is visible most of the time if we dare open our eyes and ears, but “[t]he real, in our presence, is speechless” (Selected Poems 209). Being speaks its own language, since humans have no monopoly on meaning or language. Meaning is prior to language and to speech, for every single thing in the world is an agentic entity and a vessel of meaning. However, being turns speechless in our presence, especially if we bear in mind humans’ way of approaching things with a view to drawing material benefits from them. Being remains one, indestructible and immutable, but also plural and mortal at the same time. The first voice sings: What is is an idea recurrent in time, not your apocalypse, not your jihad, not Armageddon. What is is mortal but plural (Selected Poems 209)

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Apocalypse and Armageddon are both words used in the Bible (the holy book for Christians and, in part, for Jews), whereas jihad comes from Islam. All three words evoke catastrophe or situations that involve some kind of violence. Thus, apocalypse is the end of the world as described in the Book of Apocalypse in the Bible, though it also means, more neutrally, “a situation causing very serious damage and destruction,” and Armageddon refers to a battle between good and evil at the end of the world or, in general, “a terrible war that could destroy the world.” By contrast, jihad in Islam means a spiritual struggle within yourself to stop yourself breaking religious or moral laws, and it also denotes a holy war fought by Muslims to defend Islam. What-​is has nothing to do with war, struggle or violence. “What is is an idea recurrent in time /​and there is no end to it” (Selected Poems 209), even if it is mortal and plural. Regardless of humans’ wars and attempts at imposing their own religious creeds upon other peoples throughout history, being keeps on existing in unity and diversity. That being is plural means that it assumes different guises: all things, living and non-​living, are distinctly unique, and yet they are a constituent part of a boundless continuum of existence. However, being, in the perishable forms of existence it leads, is mortal too. Deep at its irreducible core, being survives in spite of the passage of time, though. Members of the species homo sapiens that are aware that they belong among a larger scheme of things understand that being is invincible and that we are an indistinguishable part of it. In light of massive anthropogenic impacts on the earth, what is in order is “a stronger ethic of care for the nonhuman environment” (Buell, Writing 6), which will result in a more livable oikos for humans and nonhumans alike. The fourth part of “All the Desanctified Places” (staves 61–​ 99) concerns ­memories of a village in northern Manitoba (staves 61–​75) and the plurality of worlds, as well as the destruction of the biosphere and the persistence of being (staves 76–​99). The little village in northern Manitoba is the setting for what begins as a meditation on the perpetual torture of the earth everywhere. The long litany of geographical places begun in part 3, where names of ancient sites on the American continent were invoked alongside names of modern big cities and pitmines, still goes on to encompass the world in its entirety: “In Brazil… Indonesia… in the Philippines… /​Chile… Ontario… Manitoba…” (Selected Poems 210), the overexploitation of the earth’s resources is ubiquitous. Hence, “the limbs and the stumps /​of people and trees” (210) are all part of a desecrated landscape that bespeaks homo sapiens’ hubris. In this regard, the Suite bears witness to environmental destruction and traces “the disturbing ways in which the materials of everyday consumerism are the very stuff of destructive global networks” (Alaimo, “Oceanic Origins” 200), “trans-​corporeal networks in which human bodily practices are

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responsible for vast networks of harm” (202). To make toxicity and bodily porosity more explicit, in a place called “God’s Narrows” children are seen playing tag in ditches, amid heterogeneous masses of detritus, “dodging the corpses /​of dogs and the used plastic diapers /​and Kleenex and kotex and broken machines” (Selected Poems 210). The contrast is dramatic enough, for children pursue their innocent games amidst the debris of a civilisation engaged in the ferocious exploitation of the planet’s resources. Bringhurst is not oblivious to the increasing vulnerabilities faced by those most impacted by environmental degradation either. Thus, the material deprivation of these children is further enhanced by the simple fact that even for their basic necessities they depend on food that “has come 2000 miles in bottles and cans,” on bread “the colour /​and odor of old snow” (Selected Poems 210), brought to them in cellophane, on music coming from Tennessee, and on stories that emanate not from the living soil of their own land but are collected instead in a book “from a place without caribou, moose, wolf, lynx” or “without a whiskeyjack, black spruce, beaver or bear” (Selected Poems 211), which is possibly meant as a reference to the Bible. These stories urge them to believe in an afterlife, fed on “the eggwhite and sugar of visions” (211) of another world, “not on the meat of the knowledge that this /​is that different world” (211), says the female voice. “Dead words” (211), says the third voice, is what these people are being fed on. Instead of being taught how to enjoy this life on earth, they are made to believe in the delusion of an afterlife, even if there is no other world. This is nourishing food, the meat of true knowledge, not the sugar of unreal visions, since the purpose of social and environmental justice is life, that is, to ensure “the continued ability of all “selves” to live not better, but well” (Adamson 267). Staves 76–​99 contain a profound meditation on the plurality and indestructibi­ lity of being. In the service of clarity in our critical analysis, we will divide the meditation into five fundamental and inextricably linked ideas which are all expressed by the three voices simultaneously: (1) To say that there is a plurality of worlds sounds like a truism, yet each speaking voice offers a different viewpoint. Thus, the first (male) voice says: “I do not know how many /​worlds, past, present and future, exist. /​I know there are many” (Selected Poems 211–212). Far from being monolithic, the world is plural and there are innumerable worlds owing to the Heraclitean nature of a cosmos in perpetual change. The second (female) voice is more tentative in the way it tackles the matter and so asks several rhetorical questions as to the number of worlds in existence. “With how many faces? /​And how many trees, /​full of how many voices?” (Selected Poems 212), it asks, expressing gratitude and humility in the face of the awe-​inspiring grandeur of what-​is.

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Finally, the third voice goes straight to the heart of the matter by insisting that there is no duplicate for this Earth: “there is no other world /​than this, with its different faces, its trees /​full of voices, its eyes like trap doors” (212), which is a moving tribute to the vitality of a breathing cosmos populated by a myriad of life forms. (2) The capacity of homo sapiens for destruction is unimaginable and unsto­ppable. The practices of dominant capitalist societies are simply self-​ suicidal and fatal for the biosphere:  “What is is not what we have built; /​ it is what we have not yet found time /​to destroy” (Selected Poems 212), says the first voice in words that are strongly reminiscent of section VI of Conversations with a Toad: “It is good news, toad: that no one can list /​what exists in the world. But not good enough. /​Named or unnamed, if it lives, we can kill it” (Selected Poems 198). The dichotomy at the heart of the Suite’s words is not just between human-​made and natural things, but also between humans’ proclivity toward destructive practices in their relation to the nonhuman and their creative capacities for accomplishing sublime things. Power, money and comfort –​not grace, virtue or goodness –​have become humans’ ultimate goals in life in a society run amok. That such mundane goals should be the compass guiding human action is expressive of a civilisation that has lost all sense of reality and common sense. By pursuing such goals, we are irreversibly damaging our oikos and the living creatures with which we share a commonwealth of breath: “This hunger for life /​everlasting will kill us. And kill /​many others” (Selected Poems 212–213), says the first voice again. “Trout, mountain hemlock /​deermice, deer” (213) all take the worst part due to our mindless, destructive actions. (3) Despite homo sapiens’ attempts at destroying the earth, being remains ­indestructible and beauty will survive in one way or another. Thus, the first voice sings: “Being will be here. /​But this beauty that visits us now will be gone” (Selected Poems 213), in words reminiscent of section VII of Conversations with a Toad: “We will not destroy /​being, toad. We will not. But I  think /​we will overreligiously clean it” (Selected Poems 198). The deterioration of the biosphere and the loss of biodiversity are detrimental not just to the well-​being of all life forms on earth, but also an effrontery to beauty. Nonetheless, with astounding optimism, the second (female) voice sings: “This beauty, like all beauty, /​is mortal, but beauty will be here” (213). We cannot kill beauty any more than we can kill being. Bringhurst’s words are then a hymn to the persistence of being despite the destruction of the world, and a celebration of the mortal beauty intrinsic to the planet, with its welcome imperfections and earthy asymmetry.

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(4) What-​is is one and many at the same time –​i.e., being is plural, diverse and polyphonic. “We are one, even though /​we are many” (Selected Poems 213) and “The size of the heart /​is the number of creatures” (213), says the female voice. Every thing on Earth, living and nonliving, is connected to everything else along a continuum of existence. The first voice essays another ­variation on the same idea:  “The number of ideas of being /​is many, though not beyond counting” (213). The size of the heart and of the mind is ­boundless, as it must encompass all sentient beings and the nonhuman world at large. Again, the third voice sings: “The size of the mind is the number /​of s­ pecies of creatures” (Selected Poems 214). It is good news that no one can list what exists in the world, says the voice of homo sapiens in section VI of Conversations with a Toad, and the first voice of the Suite now affirms: “And I do not know how to measure /​the depth and extent of what is in the world” (214). The richness of the world is inexhaustible, almost beyond counting, and words fall short of accomplishing an exhaustive t­ axonomy of everything that exists. (5) The real is also invisible and is inhabited by gods. “What we cannot see must be /​equally many. /​Zero and one are two instants, two gifts, not two answers” (Selected Poems 214), says the second voice. The first voice claims:  “I think that when counting the gods, zero and one /​are two answers equally useless” (214). And the third brings the point home: “How many gods can you name? That is the size /​of your view of the world” (214). That the world is a sacred space was a truism for ancient peoples who still breathed through their feet, and also for visionaries and mystics of all times. The realm of the invisible is full of gods and goddesses that want to be seen or felt by humans, who have ceased to feel their presence in the natural world. As a result, gods are homeless nowadays, wandering or adrift in a desacralised world, and we are impoverished as a result. Maybe if we cleansed our senses and our will, we might be able to see. To say that there are no gods is to deny the existence of what we cannot see, which is logically or rationally indefensible. To say that there is only one god is probably the result of our cultural upbringing in communities embracing monotheistic religions like Christianity, Islam or Judaism. To say that there are ­innumerable gods and goddesses wherever one turns to look is the expression of the polytheistic belief found among ancient civilisations that were truly prepared to acknowledge the sacredness of the real and to believe in what their eyes could not see. The size of our view of the world depends then on the degree to which we are prepared to see the divine in the minutest details of this inexhaustible world.

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In its conciseness and lyricism, the fifth part (staves 100–​116) of “All the Desanctified Places” constitutes a tribute to the beauty implicit in life and in death. First, all three voices come up with the insight that the world is unique and irreplaceable:  “There are no blueprints /​or duplicates elsewhere” and so “Descriptions /​and photographs will not do for rebuilding the world” (Selected Poems 214), which is an admonition to take good care of our oikos. The experience of what-​is cannot even be fully captured through the medium of songs or stories. At this point, the poem turns metapoetic and becomes a probing reflection on the nature of poetry. All three interpenetrating voices speak almost exactly the same words, and thus they converge into one meditation which consists of three little steps for the mind: (1) The nature of stories. “The stories are maps” (Selected Poems 215), say both the second and third voices. Maps are a formalisation or humanisation of something which is real or uninvented –​the world with its earthy ­asymmetry, with its manifold imperfections, with its subtle geographical features, adorned with mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans. Maps do not exhaust or replace reality; they put it into a manageable piece of paper and make it comprehensible in human terms. Being a gross simplification of the world, maps are not completely reliable, and yet, in Bringhurst’s words in the Suite, maps hide a wealth of meaning. If stories are conceived as being maps, then they are maps of the real and shed light on what-​is. Mythmaking is a universal compulsion, found in oral literatures all around the world, but myths are not naïve stories dealing with relations and interactions between living and non-​living, human and nonhuman, beings. Like science or philosophy, mythology is a complex ecology of thought that seeks to grasp reality and account for the grandeur and mystery humans experience when confronted with the world. If by stories the speaking voices of the Suite mean myths, then it makes perfect sense to claim that stories are maps that help us navigate through, across and into the real. In their concern with universals, myths are accurate, coherent and musical renderings of what-​is. (2) The nature of songs. According to the first voice, “The songs are not maps, /​they are caches and trails” (Selected Poems 215), and “Song is edible /​ thought but not seedgrain” (215), according to the second voice. Songs are a pleasure to eat, they taste good on one’s tongue, but they are not maps of the real. What they offer us instead is caches and trails, alternative ways of touching what-​is and reaching the core of the real. If stories are myths tessellated into the coherent Gestalt of a mythology, then songs are poems, things made by the heart and the mind of humans too, but of a very different

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nature. There is edible thought that you can suck out of a poem, which is made of words and something else. Poems give us useful clues and partial insights into reality, but not a total map of what-​is, which only myths seem to accomplish. However, humans need the music and the nourishing pleasure that song, like dance, can and does give us. (3) The role of singers or poets. “The singers /​bring in the hands of their voices /​thought like dried meat” (Selected Poems 215). Poems are more the product of oral composition than of writing in Bringhurst’s view. They are born in the human voice and truly themselves when spoken aloud by a single voice in homophonic poems or, even better, by several voices in polyphonic poems like the Suite. Singers (or thinking and singing poets) are visionary humans –​i.e., they can see into aspects of reality that often go unnoticed to most mortals. Poetry begins with an act of humble attention and wonder in the face of the awe-​inspiring mystery of what-​is. If there is no curiosity, no act of primordial attention, then poems do not have a true chance to be born. Therefore, poets are singers who handle thought with their voices, and it is in the hands of their voices that they bring with themselves whatever precious insights they have found in their conversation with reality. The thought they bring in their poems does not replace real experience, for life is most itself when lived in the first person; it is dried meat, still nourishing to our exhausted bodies, though. They also bring “thought like the light /​it is given by water and oil” (215) –​sharp ideas about the real, rendered into naked words, unadorned, with the simplicity of water or oil. The closing staves (110–​116) of the fifth part celebrate the pleasure of being physically alive in a world where humans are sensuously immersed. When death comes, humans dissolve into Mother Earth with the perfect naturalness with which one must approach death, the fair price one must pay for having lived. The first voice speaks in these terms: “I return to the earth’s lap /​all that remains of all she has given me: meals /​for the eye, the belly, the hand” (Selected Poems 215– 216). With moving humility, the male voice speaking these lines gives everything back to the earth, for nothing truly belongs to him, not even the nourishing food for his senses nor whatever is left of the ruined meat of his old body and of the bones that sang when he was being loved by women or when he was loving the world through touch. The same sense of humble gratitude echoes in the words of the female voice: “I too must return to the earth’s lap, with all /​she has given me. Even my children are hers” (215–​216). Even her most precious belongings, her children, belong to the earth and so she is ready to give them back when the time comes. As an embodied, material and vibrant being, the third (male) voice

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admits that he too must return to the earth’s lap all that is left of him: “The mind like a mildew jewel” (216), the muscles and bones with which he loved women and enjoyed the world, and “eyes crazy for water, trees and stones” (216). Whereas the fifth part concerns the distinction between songs and stories as well as humans’ return to the earth’s lap upon death, the sixth part (staves 117–​ 128) of “All the Desanctified Places” dwells on a mysterious song that is hidden somewhere –​under the sea, under the seacliffs, under the mountain –​and that has to be sung back again into audibility. What this song might be is a mystery at first, but then it becomes evident that it is the song of being, singing itself loud and clear for all humans to hear. Now the three voices speak exactly the same words, though they are arranged differently in their score for a live performance. A subtle reference to the descendants of the early settlers who set foot on the New World is found in the opening clusters of lines: “The children of those who cross over /​the water must wander” (Selected Poems 216) and “Their children’s children /​must swim through the ground” (216–​217). These lines suggest that they are still wanderers in what has been their homeland for centuries and that they are forced to swim unnaturally through the ground, and not in water, since they are unable to see the mystery implicit in this vast land that is home. The core of this little piece of music is a lyrical tribute to the song of being. There is a song that is elusive and tries to evade humans’ presence, probably because they do not know how to listen to it with due respect and gratitude any longer. It seeks to hide itself wherever it might not be found by the inquisitive and destructive hands of humans. With the passage of time, it has receded into the corners of the world; each of the three speaking voices provides a different location –​under the seacliffs, under the sea, and under the mountain, back into the hills. Now this song is to be found only in those remote hills, and when the song sings, the hills dance. This happens “only when no one /​is looking” (Selected Poems 217), but humans do still have a chance to join the hills in their dancing, if the hills are happy and dance too. Curiously enough, it is the female voice that unveils the existence of this song, and of “the story that tells where to find it” (217), since songs are caches and trails and stories are maps of the world. And she goes on: “The song has gone under the seacliffs. /​Year after year it sings itself farther /​under the mountain” (217). The song of being is poetry, which is an attribute or aspect of reality in Bringhurst’s thinking. In our Western mindset, “nature is silent” (Manes 15) and devoid of speech, but the poet has been listening all his life to the poetry of the world “with eyes, ears, mind, feet, fingertips” (“The Persistence of Poetry” 43). What poetry says is that “what-​is is: that the real is real, and that it is alive” (43). At any rate, there is a redeeming sense of hope in the closing staves of Movement I of the Suite. Humans might not

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care about the well-​being of the earth, but there is still a chance to redeem ourselves by preserving our only home, by relearning to listen to the inaudible song of being, which wants to be heard amid so much dissonant noise, and to “dance it back out again” (217).

III The Lessons of Pagan Thinking “Who Is the Fluteplayer?,” the second movement of the Suite, is set in the Hopi country. Counted among the Pueblo Indians, the Hopi have lived for centuries in northeastern Arizona in a hostile environment. Since 1882 they have lived in what is called the Hopi Indian Reservation, located within the greater Navajo Reservation. The word hopi means “peaceful, mannered, civilised, polite people,” and, unlike the Navajo, the Hopi are indeed a peaceful, sedentary people that adapted to the harsh, dry environment of their land in relative seclusion for a long time, in spite of the Spanish explorers’ first skirmishes into their territory. They learnt to live from whatever the earth gave them in the form of corn –​i.e., the bread of life to the Hopi –​for farming and animals for ranching and hunting. Life was always a hardy struggle for existence, with water as a scarce and precious essential. As a consequence, rain-​making rituals were fundamental to the Hopi’s survival. Given the richness of Hopi culture in general, it is no wonder that Benjamin Lee Whorf, the well-​known linguist, should have paid attention to their language. In the 1930s, he seized the characteristics of the verbs of the Hopi language to illustrate the so-​called “Whorfian hypothesis,” which acknowledges that language closely governs our experience of reality. The Hopi language frames the way in which the Hopi talk about their universe, and the same holds true for all individual languages and peoples around the world. Faced with a vibrant world, and with a view to grasping the complexities of the universe, the Hopi resorted to mythology, which was deeply ingrained in the fabric of their everyday life. To the Hopi everything has a being or spirit of its own, every form of life is sacred, and everything is connected to everything else in the indestructible spiritual unity of all animate life. Echoes from the Hopi’s mythology are discernible in the second, andante movement of Bringhurst’s Suite, which consists of two distinct parts. On the one hand, the first part (staves 1–​20) resonates with powerful echoes from the Hopi’s worldview and recreates a mythical account of the origins of humankind in which the earth marries first the sky and then the sea –​a myth that is strongly reminiscent of other ­cosmogonies like Hesiod’s Theogony. On the other hand, the second part (staves 21–​52) juxtaposes three closely connected stories that tell of a constellation in the sky, of a primordial darkness somewhere in the underworld dreaming of all the creatures on

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earth, and of the marriage of the sun and the moon. In the end, we learn that the flute player is no other than the trickster Coyote, one of the sons to the sun and the moon along with the twins, the little war gods. Throughout the whole movement, the mythology and ecological wisdom of the Hopi’s oral literature function as imaginative counterpoints to the devastating impact of predatory capitalism upon the biosphere. Turning to the first part, staves 1–​20 are set in a recognisable landscape  –​ that of the country of the Hopi  –​in northeastern Arizona. In the framework of the Hopi’s mythical worldview, the whole universe is teeming with spirits and beings that participate in the unbroken unity of all life. Like amongst other native American peoples, mythology is crucial for the Hopi and storytelling is a gift found only among talented individuals in a society organised in matrilineal clans. A  mythology is a complex constellation of myths, rich in symbolical meaning and sharp as a knife in their capacity to shed light on the world. It is, in other words, the carrier and preserver of the most immaterial part of tribal culture, an ecology of living thought and a complex prism through which a community sees into the real. Since the unseen world is populated by a host of beings, communion with nature has brought the Hopi to an absolute reverence for the wisdom of the past as preserved in their legends and myths, to deep respect for the sacredness and wisdom of trees, clouds, sunlight, and starlight, as well as to a vibrant faith in the subtle order pervading the cosmos. However, this invaluable body of unwritten literature remains largely unexplored or unknown to academia. It constitutes the ancestral precedents of all the literature produced on the continent, even if the literatures of European descent written in America since the times of the white man’s colonisation of the New World have ignored them as extravagant outpourings of primitive people amazed at the mystery of natural phenomena. In this respect, Bringhurst has tirelessly vindicated the value of the oral literatures of North America, not just in seminal essays like Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities (1998) and Prosodies of Meaning:  Literary Form in Native North America (2004), but also in his translations of Haida myths. Bringhurst’s interest in Haida culture dates back to his arrival in Vancouver in 1980, when he started studying the Haida language on his own to gain a firsthand knowledge of the cultures native to the place he would call home and a tradition to live in. As part of his trilogy devoted to the art of the Haida mythtellers, he produced A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999), an in-​depth study of Haida literature, and he translated the work of Ghandl in Nine Visits to the Mythworld (2000) and of Skaay in Being in Being (2001). To this end, he used the Haida stories

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painstakingly transcribed and collected by American linguist John Swanton during a ten-​month visit to Haida Gwaii in 1900. Swanton was very respectful and thorough as he listened to Haida mythtellers and “got a whole literary culture written down on pieces of paper at a time when people thought native Americans didn’t have anything to say” (Dafoe C1–​2). In Haida literature, Bringhurst found an invaluable corpus of work that had been ignored for almost a century and yet connected him deeply to the land where he dwelled: “[T]‌his is the real Canadian literature. It’s oral and belongs to people who don’t speak English or French and who aren’t represented in the libraries and the university curricula. Restoring it is an important task” (Dafoe C1–​2). If the size of the mind and the heart is the number of species of creatures, then the mind and the heart of the Hopi is truly great. If the size of their worldview is measured in terms of the gods they can number, then theirs is a huge world populated by spirit beings like the Spider Woman or Earth Goddess (Mother Nature), spouse of the Sun and mother of the twin war gods, the figure of the trickster Coyote, or the kachinas (i.e., supernatural beings representing anything from rain, animals or stars to the spirits of dead ancestors, and acting as intermediaries between the divine and human realms), all prominent in Hopi mythology. Earth Goddess is represented by the sipapu, the literal opening dug in the floor at the centre of the kiva (the round ceremonial chamber), standing symbolically for the womb of Mother Earth and representing the hole through which humankind originally emerged from the underworld. In fact, the creation myth of the Hopi claims a common origin for all humans in the interior of the earth, out of a region of darkness and moisture. Fleeing a world of misery and pain where some individuals became disobedient, these early obedient humans managed to escape to a higher plane by climbing a hollow reed or cane that Spider Grandmother caused to grow into the sky, emerging in the fourth world at the sipapu. This is then the fourth plane or world on which humankind has existed; all previous three worlds were either destroyed with their wicked people in them or left behind in total chaos. It is said that the emergence was accompanied by singing, possibly by the magic twins, the two little war gods, or by the mockingbird. The hole was never closed and all the germs of living things kept coming out of it into the world aided by some spirit being. Bringhurst’s evocation of Hopi mythology is done with astonishing linguistic economy in just a few staves (1–​10). Thus, to the Hopi there is room in this world for the peaceful coexistence of such elemental things as mountains, sheep, deer, pronghorn, birds, trees, humans and gods. When living creatures die, they are thought to dance “in their white masks on the polished floors /​of the western lakes” (Selected Poems 218), whereas “the lords of the mountains” (218) go to

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die to the eastern mountains, where the healers, probably the medicine men or shamans of the tribe, dream in solitude. The “white masks” are reminiscent of those much more colourful masks worn by priests in ritual dances where they metamorphose themselves into any of the kachinas or spirit beings that ­populate the world. “It is silent, except for the bluegreen songs of the birds” (218), says the second (female) voice. Like many primitive people, the Hopi believe that when a bird sings, he is weaving a magical spell, and so they have their own songs for grinding the corn, for weaving their blankets and baskets, for planting, for hunting and even for war. In Bringhurst’s poem, the spatial arrangement of the birds and the roots of trees in the world is no random choice: “Four storeys up are the homes of the birds. /​Four storeys down /​are the trees’ roots” (219), says the second voice, while the third voice insists on the same idea by simply reversing word order. “In the four directions are oceans” (Selected Poems 219), says the first voice, completing thus the topography of the Hopi world. What is unexpected in this idyllic picture of the world is the presence of pollution ruining the roots of trees: “Poisons /​percolate into them all” (219). Nowadays, the Hopi make a living from the natural resources of their environment, but certain companies are granted permission to drill their land in search of oil, gas or coal, in exchange for money, and yet bringing toxicity to the environment. As in the pitmines and deforested Amazon Basin, humans’ greed is invincible in the Hopi country, which is on its way to becoming one more desanctified place. In staves 11–​20 a mythical account of the origins of humans, animals and plants is given in intensely lyrical language. We are back in the realm of beginnings, for this is a creation myth reminiscent of other cosmogonies found in different cultures around the world. The first and second voice are now in charge of pushing this narrative forwards, whereas the third voice keeps on repeating the words of the first and second voice in staves 1–​8 almost literally. With great dexterity, the interpenetration of the words of the second (female) and first (male) voice provides a musical account of the origins of humankind. 18 lines suffice to recreate the essentials of a cosmogony. “The earth was married to the sky, /​but he was cold, and so she left him. /​She lives now with the sea” (Selected Poems 219), sings the female voice. The earth marries the sky and bears children, but then she leaves the sky because it is cold and bears new children with the sea. Interestingly enough, the sons and daughters of the earth by both the sky and the sea are all called “persons.” Upon closer inspection, one finds that these persons are meant to include both humans and nonhumans, which does make sense in the Hopi’s view of the world as the expression of an animate unity of life. Humans are cooked, but “deer, bear, /​douglas-​fir, the earth, the sun /​and snowstorms all stay raw” (Selected Poems 220), says the female voice. Therefore, there are two kinds of persons: “cooked”

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persons, whom daylight cooks progressively through exposure to the sun, and uncooked or “raw” persons, including animals, trees and snowstorms, whose roots are in the cool darkness of the underworld. Furthermore, cooked persons are said to keep their forms stable, whereas uncooked ones are endowed with an astonishing capacity for metamorphosis: “Cooked persons keep their forms /​and uncooked persons change them” (Selected Poems 219), says the first voice. In any case, Earth is seen as the origin of all things and creatures, human and nonhuman alike, and there exists an indestructible bond between all creatures and Mother Earth. As in Hesiod’s Theogony, Earth is thought to be the feminine principle out of which life springs into existence through her union to the masculine principle embodied first by the sky and then by the sea. This comes as no surprise, as the Hopi’s is a society of matrilineal clans where women play a crucial role, and so the feminine (terra matrix) is prominent in their myths. The second part of “Who Is the Fluteplayer?” (staves 21–​52) tessellates three mythical accounts: the existence of what looks like a knife-​shaped constellation up in the sky (staves 21–​26), a catalogue of all the creatures on Earth born out of darkness’ thinking (staves 27–​37), and the story of the marriage of the sun and the moon (staves 38–​52). All three stories are subtly interconnected to one another and also to the preceding staves in the first part. To begin with, they are meant to evoke the complex mythological substratum upon which the Hopi based their everyday life and conception of the world –​a worldview in which everything is sacred and inhabited by spirit beings. The attitude of the Hopi towards the world is one of utter respect, reverence and gratitude, all of which are values that seem to have been forgotten in the desanctified places listed in the first movement of the Suite. In addition, the creation myth told in the immediately preceding staves is resumed firstly in the story of a constellation that is prominent in the sky (Mother Earth’s first husband), and secondly in the way all creatures emerge out of the womb of the earth. The story of the marriage of the sun and the moon is expressive of the annual calendar by which the Hopi organised their propitiatory rituals and celebrations to ensure rain-​making and the fertility of the land from which they made a living. A number of clues scattered in the opening staves (21–​26) lead us to think that the first lines concern a mythical account of a constellation whose shape resembles that of a knife. Thus, the knife is placed in the sky and its heart and its eye are stars: “In the sky is a knife made of stone with no handle. /​The morning star is its eye. /​The heart of the earth is not in the sky” (Selected Poems 220), sings the first voice. “The heart of the knife /​is the evening star, /​beating, not blinking” (Selected Poems 221), says the third voice. Both the sky and the earth are somehow endowed with a heart and an eye. The eye of the stone knife of the sky is the morning star; its heart is the evening star. The handle is missing, and

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yet “it flies /​like a bird” (220), says the second voice. By contrast, the earth’s heart is not in the sky, but somewhere underground, beating “in the motionless stone” (221), according to the second voice. The earth’s eye is open, but hidden, so that humans cannot see it. This eye that remains open recalls the sipapu, the hole on the floor at the centre of the kiva that symbolises the womb of the Earth, out of which all creatures emerged and keep on emerging into life. But acknowledging that the Earth has its own eye is a way of anthropomorphising it so as to remind humans that the Earth is also a living creature and so we should not torture it for money, power or comfort. “The world’s thought is called the sun” (221), says the female voice. Two metaphors at the heart of what the female voice says highlight the importance of the sun among the Hopi: as a giver of warmth and light, the sun is revered as the king in the sky, as the world’s thought, for “[t]‌hought is light” (221). As opposed to the darkness of the womb of the Earth, the sun is the true eye of the sky, and its light, essential for all living creatures on Earth, is the Earth’s darkness’ dreams materialised in the realm of the living. Staves 27–​37 concern the catalogue of living creatures that are born out of the thinking of the darkness underground:  “Behind the earth’s back, hiding from thought /​under rocks, in the roots and leaves /​of trees, is thinking” (Selected Poems 221), says the first voice. What darkness is thinking is the inexhaustible catalogue of living things in the world. In this context, thinking (of) creatures is tantamount to creating them ex nihilo, in much the same way God’s utterance of names in the Book of Genesis brought (non)human and (in)animate things into being. At this point of movement II of the Suite, all three voices join and the coalescence of ideas, sound and rhythm is truly accomplished, particularly in staves 33–​37, where the names of species of creatures living on Earth are spoken not simultaneously, as in preceding or subsequent staves, but in sequence, as if to highlight their uniqueness. There is room in the Hopi world for the magpie, wolf, whitetail, cottonwood, mule deer, oriole, ponderosa, cougar, pronghorn, aspen, bobcat, macaw, Douglas-​fir, mountain sheep, Steller’s jay, and Coyote (Selected Poems 221–222). The size of the mind and of the heart is the number of species of creatures in the world, said all three voices in the first movement of the Suite. This fundamental idea –​an enhanced sensitivity to the vast richness of our shared home –​is further articulated in these lines, which embrace all beings on Earth, including trees, mammals and birds. The size of the Hopi mind and heart is astonishing, for it acknowledges the existence of the others (animals and plants) with which humans share the world, our only oikos. These earthborn beings are the thoughts of darkness’ thinking, and the catalogue goes on and on with pleasing variation, emphasising the vast diversity of life forms on earth, punctuated by the second (female) voice’s temporal references –​summer

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or winter at sunrise and at sunset –​, which somehow prefigure the myth of the marriage of the sun and the moon in subsequent staves. Staves 38–​52 tell the story of the marriage of the sun and the moon, which recalls that of the sky and the earth: “The sun is married to the moon. He doesn’t touch her” (Selected Poems 222). Similarly, the earth was married to the sky, but she left him because he was cold. However, the sun cannot touch the moon, not because he does not want to, but because they cannot share the same sky at the same time owing to the succession of day and night. As the third voice puts it: “These are the chief equations describing the motions /​linking the heart and thought of the world” (Selected Poems 222). The heart is in the motionless stone, or somewhere underground, in the bosom of the Earth, symbolising the darkness of night, whereas the world’s thought is the sun shining in the sky, symbolising the benign warmth of daylight. Thus, earth and sky are reunited in the daily rotation of the Earth around its own axis, which brings about the alternation of day and night and governs the motions of the sun and moon across the sky. Upon closer inspection, this mythical story of the marriage of the sun (masculine) and the moon (­feminine) accounts for a natural phenomenon that was awe-​inspiring for the Hopi, who would always pay attention to the motions of the sun, moon, stars and clouds in the sky. The myth is a living reality to the Hopi. After all, rain-​making rituals were of the essence to ensure good crops and the survival of the community. And what about the sea, the second husband of the earth? Salt is thought to be the sun’s elder sister, probably because the sun sinks into the sea waters on the horizon when it sets, and “His grandmother lives /​in a blue house near a dark beach littered with shells. /​He visits her there in midsummer at dawn” (Selected Poems 222), right at sunset, when the moon is about to ascend the night sky. The sun and the moon have their own children: the clown, who is the trickster Coyote, who comes in summer, and the twins, who are the two little war gods (“gamblers and soldiers”) and come in winter. These are the words spoken by the second voice: The clown of summer discovered the flute, and he is the raw person whose picture you see on the face of the motionless stone where the heart of the earth beats. There he is playing his flute, and here we are dancing. (Selected Poems 223–224)

So the flute player is Coyote, a raw person, capable of changing his form and appearing to humans under a number of guises. Coyote, the trickster of Native American tales from California, Southwest, and the plateau region, is perhaps the most widely known of the trickster figures. In the Pacific Northwest the trickster

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is the Raven, Mink, or Blue Jay –​each of whom is also viewed as a transformer figure, responsible for bringing the ordered world out of Chaos, and a cultural hero, credited with transmitting the skills of survival, such as fire making, from the gods to humans. Wisakedjak, anglicised to Whiskey Jack, is a cultural hero trickster of the Eastern Woodlands. Another is Nanabozho (the Hare), who in the Southeast is called Rabbit and who became identified with African Hare trickster as Brer Rabbit.25 In any case, like the first movement, the second movement of the Suite also ends with dancing: whereas in the former it was the hills that danced alone when nobody was looking, or humans that danced with the hills, here humans dance to the rhythm of Coyote’s flute-​playing.

IV The Path of the Dao, or a Life in Accord with Nature Movement III of the Suite,​“The Children of Zhuang Zi Confront the Frozen Saskatchewan River,”​“adopts the voices of Chinese immigrants to Saskatchewan” (Bringhurst, “Licking” 13–​ 14). From the Hopi country of northeastern Arizona we move upwards to the north, for the movement is set in a different geography –​that of Saskatchewan covered in snow with the frozen river –​and in a different moment in history  –​when Chinese immigrants are heading towards Saskatchewan in the very heart of Canada. “Snowcloud, darkness, snow” (Selected Poems 225): these are the three concise brushstrokes with which Bringhurst describes the setting. “The truth is, there is no horizon” (225), he adds, in view of the vast expanses of land ahead. The children of Zhuang Zi are the Chinese immigrants, whom the poet has chosen to name after the well-​ known philosopher. The choice is deliberate, as the meditation enacted at the heart of this part of the Suite owes much to the Chinese sage’s notion of dao. Like the Presocratics or the mythtellers of the native oral literatures of America, Zhuang Zi belongs among the great ancestors whose wisdom is still relevant today. Thus, movement III is an adagio with meditative overtones, which means that the heart of the Suite is beating more slowly now, as if to evoke the heavy steps of the immigrants making their way through the vast expanses of the Saskatchewan prairie covered in snow. The three voices speaking in this part are dramatic impersonations of the Chinese immigrants –​the first voice speaking in the first person, and the second and third voices in reported speech. Movement III of the Suite enacts a meditation on what is and what is not, on the objective nature of reality, on the (un)knowability of the world, and on the ethical implications of acknowledging that being is a unity that comprises a continuum 25 See the entry on ‘trickster tale’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 28, p. 16787.

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of existence ranging from the humble grass on the ground to the stars up in the sky. Three conceptual threads are thus woven into this meditation on being. First, the nature of what is and what is not. The exploration of being begins with two complementary statements, spoken by the first and second voices in the poem: (a) “What is not is not hidden” (Selected Poems 225) and (b) “What is /​is not hidden, although it is hiding” (225). It is significant that the statements are not spoken simultaneously, but in sequence, which highlights the specific epistemological weight of each statement within the meditation on being. What is and what is not are inseparable, other names for being and non-​being. What is not is the invisible, or that which is not easily seen, but it is not hidden. We humans do not seem to be able to see what is not any longer; our inquisitive gaze stops at the surface of things, does not cross the threshold that leads into the core of the real. Similarly, what is is not hidden either, though it is hiding –​i.e., it is elusive to humans’ perception. In the closing staves of the first movement of the Suite, the three voices spoke of a song which was perpetually singing itself further back into the hills, away from humans. That was the song of being. Everywhere being is singing, but we feel that being is dumb to our ears and invisible to our eyes. “The truth is one thing” (225), says the second voice, and “The sky /​and the earth, like the truth, are one thing” (225), says the third voice. The truth is not many-​sided but one single entity, according to the second voice, but it is also the marriage of the earth to the sky, a reconciliation of opposites into a single unbreakable entity. “Add us also, the sum is still smaller than two” (225), adds the second voice, which acknowledges that even if humans (and all living and nonliving entities) are added to the sky and the earth, reality is still one, the truth is one thing, being is one. Metaphysics is thus firmly grounded in physics, which is enhanced by a special interlude on a pun in staves 7 to 9, where an idiom is interpreted literally, leading to misunderstanding: “Watch your step. /​And I did so and tripped, and he laughed. /​Not your foot, but your step, he said” (Selected Poems 225–226). Second, the interconnectedness of all things in the universe and the inescapable path or the Dao. “Nothing can stray. There is /​no way of leaving the path. /​ What you are is what is” (Selected Poems 226), says the first voice with solemn gravity. And it adds: “It runs /​all the way through. The grass /​and the stars are your innermost nature” (226). And the third voice says: “The snow underfoot and the stars /​in the sky are your nature” (226). The statements spoken aloud by the two voices emphasise the unity of what-​is, the unbreakable continuum of existence that encompasses the grass on the earth and the stars in the sky. Nothing can stray because everything falls into place in the grander scheme of things: the logos governs the universe. This thinking resonates with echoes from Zhuangzi’s teachings, which had a decisive impact on the development of

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Chinese Buddhism as well as on landscape painting and poetry. The Chinese sage Zhuangzi26 or Chuang-​Tzu’s original name was Zhuang Zhou (b. c. 369, Meng, China –​d. 286 BCE). Not much is known about the details of his life. He is said to be one of the earliest interpreters of China’s early Daoism and his work (Zhuangzi) is considered as one of the fundamental texts of Daoism, even more comprehensive than the Daodejing, wrongly attributed to Laozi for a long time. The core of Zhuangzi’s teachings is that insight into reality comes with the realisation that everything in life is both dynamic and continuous. This is what he called the Dao27 –​the unity of all things, the omnipresent substratum beneath the whole universe as the ultimate source of what-​is. Whatever we say about the Absolute Dao is not the Dao, which defies verbal definition and has no beginning and no end, no true demarcations, limitations or boundaries. Virtuous, wise humans are free from the bondage of circumstance, personal attachments, tradition and the need to change this world. They simply allow things to follow their own natural course and do not value one situation over another; they live a life of serenity in accord with nature.28 When placed against Zhuangzi’s concept of the Dao, Bringhurst’s words “Nothing can stray” (Selected Poems 226) make perfect sense:  the Dao implies spontaneity, non-​interference, lettings things take their natural course. Everything falls into place in a process of perennial metamorphosis in a world where everything changes and yet somehow remains the same. The world is still a sacred place where the invisible exists, including a host of gods, even if humans cannot see them: “The gods come, unseen, to drink /​at the thought’s edge” (Selected Poems 226), says the second voice. Gods thrive on humans’ mildewed jewel of a mind, at whose edge they drink directly from the water of our thinking. And third, the importance of an education in human emotions. The closing staves of movement III of the Suite speak of emotions and of what surrounds them. The elemental lesson concerning emotions seems to be spoken by the Chinese grandfather mentioned in previous staves, possibly a re-​incarnation of the old Zhuangzi. It is possible to entertain several emotions at once, “each in due measure” (Selected Poems 227), and yet it is necessary not to lose sight of one simple fact: that emotions are surrounded by the stark reality of an objective world, also called “an empty space” or “a boundless space” (227), which takes 26 For further details on his life and character, see the entry on ‘Zhuangzi’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 30, pp. 18193–​18194. 27 For further details, see the entries on ‘dao’ and ‘Daodejing’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 8, pp. 4322–​4323. 28 See the entry on ‘Zhuangzi’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 30, p. 18194.

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precedence for all three voices. Unlike emotions, the stars in the sky and the snow underfoot remain tangible things of this world. Emotions are essential in human communities, since the capacity for empathy is what makes us truly human and humane. However, wise or virtuous humans know how to recognise and manage those emotions while keeping an eye on something larger than their own selves and subjectivity. The real exists in an objective manner; it is ubiquitous, it is out there, and we are part of it. “That is good order” (227), reads one of the lines, since for Daoism wisdom resides in non-​attachment.

V The Stars on the Page, the Words in the Sky “Winter Solstice, Cariboo Mountains,” movement IV of the Suite, is lento, “based on a mid-​winter walk in central British Columbia,” and “superimposes the figures of two hunters, Orion and Prajapati, who are two interpretations of the same constellation: one inherited from Greece, the other from northern India” (Bringhurst, “Licking” 14). The setting of the poem is British Columbia, home to the poet, with its mountains rich in caribou, lying naked before the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, and the temporal framework is winter solstice. An avid outdoorsman, Bringhurst feels at home amid the mountains that have given him spiritual nourishment and inspiration throughout his career. He is not just alert to nuances of being dancing in daylight or in the night sky, but also aware of the cultural layering surrounding those captivating pictures in the sky. He mentions Orion and Prajapati, stories that betray the ubiquitous fascination constellations have held for human beings since antiquity. At any rate, the three speaking voices are interwoven in the fabric of the poem, so that the same cluster of messages is being repeated over and over again, thus creating an incantatory tapestry of musicality and ideas. According to Dickinson, in the last movement of the Suite, “as technological civilization exhausts itself, mythic time begins to re-​assert itself ” (“Robert Bringhurst” 39). The movement opens with a brief meditation on the mystery implicit in the sun’s motion across the sky, as well as on the profound implications thereof: “The sun burns to the ground and is kindled again, /​teaching the one lesson deeper than hunger” (Selected Poems 228), say the first and third voices. What “the one lesson deeper than hunger” might be is easy to discern if we consider what happens to the sun as it journeys across the sky from sunrise to sunset. It seems as if it were to die for good, and yet it rises over the horizon once again every morning with a renewed promise of light and warmth. The central death and life dichotomy is at the core of the meditation: the desire to live, which is greater than mere survival, is always deeper than hunger. What follows this

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elemental truth is the tessellation of two constellations and two myths lifted from Greek and Indian mythology, respectively. In staves 3 to 6, the Orion and Ursa Major myths are juxtaposed with great linguistic economy; both share striking parallelisms, because, to begin with, in both stories a hunter is stalking preys that are not quite what they seem: “In the night sky, Orion, /​disguised as a deer, is out stalking Aldebaran, /​the doe, his daughter, forever” (Selected Poems 228) and “Arcturus, spearing the Great Bear of heaven, sees /​in her eyes, now and always, the eyes of his mother” (228). What are Orion, Aldebaran, Arcturus and the Great Bear? The simple, straightforward answer is that they are constellations or stars within constellations, but they hide a wealth of cultural layering. The first cluster of stars brings together Orion, Aldebaran and, indirectly, the Pleiades; the second cluster of stars reunites mother and son, Ursa Major (the Great Bear) and Arcturus (the bear-​guard). Let us consider Orion and Aldebaran in the first place. A prominent ­constellation located on the celestial equator and visible throughout the world, Orion29 is also referred to as “The Hunter” and is one of the most conspicuous and recognisable constellations in the night sky. In the wider map of the sky, Orion is fighting Taurus (the bull), accompanied by two other major surrounding constellations, Canis Major and Canis Minor, his two hunting dogs. Orion can be easily seen in the night sky in late fall to winter in the Northern Hemisphere, late spring to summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and so it is perfectly accurate that Bringhurst should have seen the constellation around the winter solstice. It is named after Orion (Ωρίων), the hunter in Greek mythology whom Zeus placed among the stars as a constellation after his death. Though the earliest record of Orion in Greek literature is found in Homer’s Iliad (lines 486–​489; his dog Sirius is mentioned in Book X, 29) and the Odyssey (Book V, line 283) as well as in Hesiod’s Works and Days (lines 598, 623), most of the stories about him are recorded in incidental allusions and in fairly obscure later writings. A Hellenistic work titled Catasterismi provides a long summary of Hesiod’s tale on Orion. According to this account, Orion is the son of Euryale, daughter of Minos, King of Crete, and Poseidon, the god-​sea. He walked on the waves to the island of Chios, where he got drunk and attacked Merope, daughter of Oenopion, the king of Chios. The father blinded Orion in vengeance for what he had done to his daughter and drove him away. Then Orion arrived in Lemnos, where the lame smith-​god, Hephaestus, had his forge and decided to help him. He told his servant, Cedalion, to guide the blinded hunter to the uttermost East, where Helios, the sun, would heal him and restore his sight. Sitting on the giant’s shoulders, Cedalion took Orion to his destination and he recovered his sight. Afterwards, Orion returned to Chios to take vengeance on Oenopion, 29 See the entry on ‘Orion’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 21, p. 12477.

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but the ruler managed to hid underground and escape his wrath. The hunter then travelled to Crete, where he hunted with the sylvan goddess Artemis and her mother Leto. In the course of the hunt, Orion threatened to kill every beast on earth. It seems Mother Earth objected and sent a giant scorpion to kill him and punish his hubris. Orion dies of the scorpion’s sting. After his death, the goddesses asked Zeus to place Orion among the constellations in the sky, where he is seen being chased by Scorpio, the constellation representing the scorpion that killed him. In another version of Orion’s death, Eos falls in love with him and takes him to Delos where Artemis kills him with her arrows. In yet another version, Apollo objected to his sister Artemis’ love for Orion, whom the goddess shoots only after being tricked by her brother into thinking him a sea monster. She then laments his death and searches for Orion in the underworld until he is elevated to the heavens, where he is connected to several constellations, including the Pleiades, Canis Minor and Canis Major, his dogs, and Taurus, the bull. As for Aldebaran,30 also called Alpha Tauri, it is a reddish giant star in the constellation Taurus lying 65 light-​years from Earth and one of the 15 brightest stars. The name Aldebaran is Arabic and translates literally as “the follower,” ­presumably because this bright star appears to follow the Pleiades or Seven Sisters in the night sky. In Bringhurst’s poetic rendering, Orion, disguised as a deer (the Rig Veda refers to the Orion constellation as Mriga, “The Deer”), is stalking Aldebaran (the doe, his daughter), which is the brightest star in the ­constellation Taurus. Both Orion and Aldebaran are related to the Pleiades, for these two constellations appear to follow the Seven Sisters. The Pleiades are among the nearest star clusters to Earth and the most obvious ones to the naked eye in the night sky. It is no wonder that they have been known since antiquity to cultures worldwide. In Greek mythology, the Pleiades (Πληίαδες)31 are the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and the Oceanid Pleione. They all had children by gods (except Merope, who married Sisyphus), and they were companions of Artemis, the sylvan goddess. The Pleiades eventually formed a constellation. One myth recounts that they all killed themselves out of grief over the death of their sisters, the Hyades. Another explains that after seven years of being pursued by Orion, they were turned first into doves and then into stars by Zeus. Orion became a constellation too, and continued to pursue the sisters across the night sky. Regarding the Great Bear and Arcturus, Ursa Major is Latin for “Greater Bear” and refers to the Great Bear, a constellation of the Northern Hemisphere. It was one of the 48 constellations listed in The Almagest by the famous astronomer 3 0 See the entry on ‘Aldebaran’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 1, p. 325. 31 See the entry on ‘Pleiades’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 22, p. 13329.

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Ptolemy32 in the 2nd century. It was referred to in the Old Testament (Job 9:9; 38:32) and mentioned by Homer in the Iliad (XVIII, 487). The Greeks identified it with the nymph Callisto, who was placed in the heavens by Zeus in the form of a bear together with her son Arcas as “bear keeper” or Arcturus; the Greeks named the constellation Arctos, the she-​bear, or Helice, from its turning around Polaris, the Pole Star. The Romans knew the constellation as Arctos or Ursa. In Greek mythology, the story of the nymph Callisto (Καλλιστώ) is a sad Arcadian myth. The longest extant account of the myth is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book II, lines 405–​530. According to some authors, Callisto was a nymph of the woods; according to other authors, she was king Lycaon’s or Nicteus’ daughter. As a follower of the virgin goddess, Callisto had taken a vow to remain a virgin and spend her days hunting in the woods and hills with Artemis’ maiden huntresses. Zeus falls in love with Callisto and, to lure her into his embrace, he cunningly approaches her in the guise of the sylvan goddess while she was separated from the train of virgin nymphs. Her pregnant condition was discovered some months later while bathing with her fellow nymphs and the goddess, who, enraged, expelled her immediately from the group. Poor Callisto gives birth to Arcas, later called Arcturus. To avenge her wounded pride, Hera, Zeus’ jealous wife, transforms the nymph into a bear. While in bear form, and 15 years later, Callisto encounters her son Arcas hunting in the forest. Seeing her son after so long, she went forth to embrace him. However, not knowing that the bear was his mother, Arcas was about to shoot his bear-​ mother with a jabelin, when, to avert the tragedy, Zeus hurled them both into the sky and placed them among the stars as the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor,33 respectively. Finally, Arcturus,34 also called Alpha Böotis, is the brightest star in the ­constellation Böotes and one of the five brightest stars in the night sky. Arcturus is next to Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, for it lies in an almost direct line with the tail of Ursa Major; hence its name, Αρκτοῦρος (“Guardian of the Bear”), derived from the Greek words ἄρκτος (bear) and οὖρος (“watcher or guardian”). This is all the wealth of background information that has been condensed in staves 3 to 6 in Bringhurst’s “Winter Solstice, Cariboo Mountains.” By juxtaposing two constellations and two myths together (the Orion and Ursa Major myths), an astonishing density of poetic meaning arises as a result. Movement IV of the Suite also anticipates Bringhurst’s Ursa Major (2003), a long poem in five acts that explores the story of the bear-​woman in Greek and Cree mythologies, as 3 2 See the entry on ‘Ursa Major’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 29, pp. 17213–​17214. 33 Ovid’s original account of the catasterism (i.e., the metamorphosis into stars) of both mother and son is in Metamorphoses, Book II, lines 496–​506. 34 See the entry on ‘Arcturus’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 2, p. 825.

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recorded by Ovid in his Metamorphoses and by Leonard Bloomfield in Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree (1930), respectively. Even if myth is at the core of movement IV of the Suite, there are at least three more threads of lyrical singing in the remaining staves: (1) “The stars and the darkness glide at one speed, /​going nowhere to everywhere, or the reverse, and returning” (Selected Poems 228–229). Or, to put it differently, “The stars and the darkness /​glide at one speed, /​ going everywhere, nowhere, or both, /​and returning” (228–​229). These two variations on the same theme are spoken by the first and third voices at different points in the poem, and they come right after each of the myths presented at the core of the fourth movement of the Suite  –​ after the Orion myth, in staves 7–​8, and after the Ursa Major myth, in staves 20–​23. Both variations are somewhat an expression of humans’ amazement at the grandeur of the universe, in the presence of the stars shining up in the sky. It is no wonder that Aretus, Ptolemy, Hypatia and many other ancient Greek philosophers, astronomers and thinkers shared this same sense of amazement in the face of the awe-​inspiring beauty of the night sky. Stars still remain a scientific puzzle, and so humankind has not ceased raising its amazed eyes in their direction. The fact that the distance of stars is measured in terms of light-​years is itself a puzzle to the human mind. Light emanating from stars travels in all directions across the universe, going everywhere and nowhere, for eternity, because there might never be an end to its travelling. Constellations, those puzzling pictures in the night sky, have been a true source of inspiration for innumerable civilisations over time. Myths accounting for their existence are the work ancient peoples produced to make sense of the universe and remain a gift to subsequent generations. Time and again, art –​literary and pictorial works of art, in particular –​has turned for inspiration to the vast reservoir of knowledge that has been preserved in myths, for mythopoeic thinking is a respectful acknowledgement of the fact that humans fit in the grander scheme of things in the universe and also a gesture that betrays humankind’s gratitude for being part of the inexhaustible grace of a breathing cosmos. (2) “The wolves speak /​to the moon on behalf of the mountain” (Selected Poems 229). Wolves are said to howl at the moon, especially when there is a full moon shining in the night sky. Here they are personified, as they are endowed with speech. The occurrence of this seemingly enigmatic

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statement makes sense in the wider context of the Orion and Ursa Major myths. Like the stars making up these constellations, the moon shares the night sky with them, even if it is only a satellite, a celestial body devoid of light of its own. The moon is important in ancient mythologies worldwide. In this particular context, it is closely connected to Artemis, the sylvan and virgin goddess with whom Callisto used to hunt in the woods before being cunningly seduced by Zeus. The wolves are reminiscent of Callisto’s father, king Lycaon, who was turned into a werewolf by Zeus. The story goes like this: once Arcas, Callisto’s son, was born, Zeus decided to hide him in an area of Greece known as Arcadia, in his honour, to prevent jealous Hera from taking revenge upon him. During one of the court feasts held by Lycaon, he decided to test Zeus’ omnipotence and see if he could distinguish between animal and human meat. Thus, Arcas was placed upon the burning altar as a sacrifice to the gods and challenged Zeus to make him whole again. The king of the gods became enraged and made his son whole again, but in anger he changed Lycaon into a wolf, the first werewolf. (3) “Year after year, we who have traded our voices /​for words circle back to the pool /​of alkaline silence to listen” (Selected Poems 229). Repeated twice at two different points in the poem (staves 11–​13 and 23–​26), this is a central statement in movement IV of the Suite. As Dickinson argues, owing to the hubris and commodification of the nonhuman world, ecological illiteracy is “one of the conditions of life in a colonial society” (“Robert Bringhurst” 30). In the closing lines of the Suite, “[i]‌t is the descendants of colonists who […] are the ones now set adrift, orphans searching the land for forms of meaning they never learned to listen for” (“Robert Bringhurst” 39). But the statement is metapoetic in nature, as the we speaking it is possibly meant as a reference to the figure of the poet too. Poets raise their eyes to “the pool /​of alkaline silence,” the night sky, and listen attentively to the stories and lessons the constellations in the sky have to teach them. The voices of ancient mythtellers have now been replaced by words, those with which we try to touch the mystery implicit in the visible and invisible world. Constellations in the sky tell us something about our pristine origins –​fallen stardust, that is what we are. They also remind us of the myths our ancestors used to tell to account for the mysteries of the world. Human affairs have changed much down here, on Earth, but “the pool of alkaline silence” (229) remains almost the same, a witness to all that has happened and keeps happening among mortals. It is no coincidence that all three speaking voices in Bringhurst’s Suite should conclude with the same words: “circle back to the pool of alkaline

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silence to listen” (229). Listening to being is a fundamental action going on in many Bringhurst poems, and being makes itself particularly visible in the night sky. The Suite comes to an end with a celebration of the mystery of what-​is. The philosophical claims made in the poem are inextricably linked to Bringhurst’s central insight, i.e., the interconnectedness and polyphonic texture of reality, which encompasses the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate entities, in a symposium of the whole that is an unbroken vibrant, agentic and living unity. The aim of his lifelong endeavour is to capture the poetry of what-​is, which tirelessly affirms that what-​is is and is real. According to Timothy Morton, an object-​oriented ontologist who follows the Heideggerian and Derridean tradition, “art happens in the liminal space between things” and poems are “relationships between beings” (“Liminal Space” 269). A poem is “a kind of lens that focuses the attunements between beings” or, in other words, “a little ecology” in the sense of “a coexisting of several beings” (“Liminal Space” 271, 274). A probing meditation on being, history, myth and ecology, and also an accomplished vindication of the need for humans to take care of Earth, our only home, New World Suite No. 3 is one such gathering or meeting of beings. The Suite is thus an example of lyric philosophy and philosophical poetry, for “in deeper, more reflective poems, thinking and singing are one” (Bringhurst, “The Philosophy of Poetry” 109). Its narrative architecture is complex and rich, and “metrical patterns and phrases overlap and echo one another in ways reminiscent of vocal chamber music from the Renaissance period” (Wood, “Anatomy” 102). Paying ecological attention to what-​is, Bringhurst unveils “a cosmos pulsating in patterns very different from those we typically perceive” (Wood, “Anatomy” 131), offering thus countless opportunities for illumination. The main epiphany comes down to this: “The wild is the biosphere” (Bringhurst, “Wild Language” 269) and homo sapiens is “so deeply enmeshed in the fabric of nature that all separation is an illusion” (266). The choice Bringhurst encourages us to embrace is “to participate in the biosphere” (269), instead of taking control and managing the planet, which is the choice imposed and naturalised in dominant “industrialized economies and colonial regimes” (269). As Bringhurt puts it, “[t]‌he wild isn’t something to conquer or subdue; it’s something to try to live up to: a standard better than gold. Humans are part of it, and in the long run have no choice but to be so” (268). In an essay titled “Notes: Unspecializing Poetry,” Wendell Berry argues that “[t]he structure of a poem ultimately involves the structure of the life around it. Structure is intelligibility” (82). This is possibly what the Suite ultimately accomplishes: it successfully mimics the patterns pulsating beneath a

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breathing cosmos of which we are a part. We only need to breathe through our feet to let the bond flourish again. As Bringhurst points out, “‘Breathe through your feet’ is a gentler, more informative, less self-​centred and less frustrated form of the well-​known adjuration, ‘Pay attention.’ It doesn’t mean pay attention to me; it just means pay attention” (“Breathing” 107). Breathing through our feet, we might gain a renewed awareness that we belong with the nonhuman and that we are a part of the vibrant flesh of the earth.

4 Just a Breath Away from Darkness Mens antiqua manet. —​Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, l. 485, p. 94.   Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem  —​ and death, only incidentally and to the extent it is experienced as loss by those who remain alive. […] The more precious a thing is, the greater becomes its power to hurt us by simply being absent. —​Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (2011), L89.

I A Plurilingual Polyphonic Palimpsest Art happens in a liminal space between things: between the stars in the sky and the humans dwelling on earth, between those of the sky and those on the ground, between stories and myths told by different civilisations over time. Bringhurst’s audacious experimentation with polyphony reached something of a climax in Ursa Major:  A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers (2003). It wove not only several voices into the telling of a universal myth –​that of the constellation presiding the night sky in the northern hemisphere –​, but also luminous threads from several cultural traditions and mythologies  –​Greco-​ Roman (Mediterranean) and Cree (Amerindian). The overall impression is that of a palimpsest, as Ursa Major is a paratactic, polylingual and polyphonic poem of tremendous energy and intricacy. Several voices speak at the same time, and they do so in several languages, both modern and classical, to tell a collaborative version of a moving story that turns out to be common to various cultures around the world. Bringhurst himself explains the genesis of Ursa Major in detail: In 2001 a dance company in Saskatchewan commissioned me to write a spoken score on the theme of the Great Bear. The major indigenous language in Saskatchewan is Cree, and some compelling stories are told in Cree about the relations of humans and bears. I thought it would be interesting to set one of these against the story of Zeus and Callisto. So in Ursa Major, which I wrote in the winter of 2001 and 2002, there are six speakers speaking four languages: English, Greek, Latin and Cree. (“Licking” 12)

As published in 2003, Ursa Major35 consisted of a preface by Bringhurst, a masque in five scenes telling the Ursa Major story (with the score given in both 35 This is the editorial history of the poem: (1) Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers. Kentville, NS:  Gaspereau Press, 2003. Script of a work commissioned by the

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linear form and as a voice map printed in different colours), a series of notes on the sources of the text, and a perceptive afterword by Canadian poet and critic Peter Sanger. Bringhurst’s reflections on his own work in his preface highlight at least two essential aspects that are worth considering: first, the oral genesis of Ursa Major, a piece commissioned by the “choreographer Robin Poitras for performance by her company New Dance Horizons, based in Regina, Saskatchewan” (7); and second, his illuminating meditation on the polyphonic and polylingual nature of the poem: Most of the text of Ursa Major is meant to be spoken rather than sung, but I am interested in the ways in which speech can be musical, and in the ways in which music can speak. The speaking voices here make use of several musical devices or techniques. One of these, employed by Hera […] is retrograde motion. […] A  more essential tool, employed throughout the work, is polyphonic speech. By that I  mean, two or more voices often speak at once, though they have different things to say. The voices intertwine with one another, but their separate agendas prevent them, on the whole, from falling into a reciprocating, linear exchange. There is as a consequence little or no conventional dialogue. Where the polyphony is antiphonal, the voices alternate, like traffic at a four-​way stop. Where it is sustained, the voices do not pause for one other; their crossing is continuous, like traffic on a cloverleaf or overpass. The polyphony throughout Ursa Major is sustained unless specifically marked otherwise. (7)

Sustained polyphony is something Bringhurst had already attained in New World Suite No. 3 with great dexterity. However, whereas the Suite braided three voices speaking English simultaneously at some points, Ursa Major intertwines up to four voices speaking different languages in sustained or antiphonal polyphony. In Iain Higgins’ view, Ursa Major is “a relational hymn in which the separate multilingual voices (Latin, English, Greek, Cree) disappear into the mostly sustained sonic “shoom” of vocal counterpoint” (“Bear Bones” 42). The text is given twice: first in “linear form” and then as “a voice map,” which is “in its utter “illisibility” a post-​structuralist’s dream, and there is no little pleasure to be got pouring over its complex text with its several alphabets” (“Bear Bones” 42). In his preface, Bringhurst points out that polylingual polyphony should not be a problem for spectators, since we live in a multilingual world and our ears are choreographer Robin Poitras, with an afterword by Peter Sanger. (2) Ursa Major: A Masque for Speakers and Dancers. 2nd edition. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2009, revised from the 2003 edition. The voice map is printed in five colours and Sanger’s afterword is omitted. (3) Selected Poems. Kentville, NS:  Gaspereau Press, 2009. A  section entitled “Ursa Minor” contains the monologues and choruses from Ursa Major (2009) in nine sections. In this chapter, all quotes from the poem are lifted from the second edition.

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tuned to hearing many voices speaking simultaneously, overlapping, colliding into one another all the time:  “All of us are practised, after all, at living in a multivocal, multilingual world. We have no choice. No other sort of world exists” (7). However, Ursa Major remains a huge challenge to “the audience’s attentive capabilities” and “language-​processing faculties” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 234, 253), owing to its sustained polyphony and the density of meaning associated with the cultural layering woven into its very fabric. “A score and a performance are of course two different things, each ideally indebted to the other” (8), says Bringhurst in his preface. In fact, Ursa Major was originally conceived as a multimedia work, “fusing words, music, dance, and a “kinetic” set” (Clarke C7), which are all the ingredients implicit in a choreography in time and in space. However, the only thing we have now left is words –​the score of a performance36 that took place on two occasions in Saskatchewan in March 2002; we do not even have the ghostly traces of recorded form.37 Higgins insists that a silent reading of the score is not enough, as “without experiencing a performance it is next to impossible to feel the work’s effects or think seriously about the concerns it embodies or enacts, including those of selective cultural cross-​breeding and appropriation, and myth as opposed to history” (“Bear Bones” 42). At any rate, Ursa Major remains a handsome art object and a typographical challenge for both Bringhurst,38 an expert typographer himself, and Andrew Steeves of Gaspereau Press, running “two or three of four languages together in painstakingly exquisite passages, using various densities of ink” (Clarke C7). Brian Henderson provides a succinct description of the overall architecture of the poem:

36 In his afterword, titled “Late at the Feast,” Sanger writes: “The best commentary upon Bringhurst’s Ursa Major can only be its performance. Of the seven choreographies out of which it is made, only one can be offered by a printed text with some accuracy –​the choreography of its words, of its Latin, Greek, English and Cree. The other six choreographies at work in the masque, and audience, can be registered only glancingly, if at all, on the page” (77). 37 “Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to know how such a polyglot polyphony might sound, and this beautiful book is limited by the lack of a CD recording of a performance” (Higgins, “Bear Bones” 42). 38 “As with The Blue Roofs of Japan, we printed the full text twice, but not on facing pages. It appears first in a linear form, one voice at a time, like an ordinary stageplay. This is easy to read but disguises the texture completely. The second version is the voice map. […] In the map, all the voices are superimposed on the page as they would be in performance. […] Three different writing systems are used. The English and Latin are set in the Latin alphabet –​varying as need be between roman and italic –​and the Greek is set in Greek. The Cree is set in two ways, in Latin letters and Cree syllabics, because both those systems have their devotees” (“Licking” 12–​13).

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Part I displays the voices consecutively as a form of playscript for ease of reading, while Part II is a voice map […] which braids the voices as they would intertwine with each other in the polyphony of performance. This is the core of the book and the most visually appealing: four languages, three alphabets, three typefaces (plus two screens of them) pattern the page. (117)

The beating heart of Bringhurst’s masque is the universal myth of Ursa Major, the familiar constellation also known as the Great Bear or Big Dipper. One and the same myth unfolds into full bloom in the poem, though two stories from two different cultural traditions are being told by different voices: “Ovid’s retelling of Arcturus and Callisto, […] and Bear Woman, a Cree story by the mythteller Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw about a hunter who falls in love with a woman who is not what she appears to be” (Dickinson, “In the Wake” 12). This is a recurrent characteristic of Bringhurst’s poetics, which is fond of cultural syncretism and a kind of “ply over ply” technique whereby he salvages tattered fragments of wisdom and remnants of visions from different literary traditions and thought-​worlds. As Dickinson observes, “[t]‌hese gathered traditions […] are tools through which people millennia apart have tried to understand where they are and what they are doing” (“In the Wake” 12). In this regard, Bringhurst has made use of two types of sources for his poem: (1) Greek and Latin sources, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book II), the only surviving substantial source for the story of Callisto (a bear myth) in the western classical tradition, and (2) Cree sources, particularly the story entitled “The Bear Woman,” one of many that Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw told to Leonard Bloomfield at Sweet Grass Reserve, Saskatchewan, in 1925, collected in his Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree (1930). Ursa Major is thus a beautiful tessellation of stories which leaves no room for improvisation and nothing en route. As Sanger puts it, “Bringhurst’s masque is a performative act of re-​collection and collaboration. Throughout its five scenes, it brings into collaboration and re-​collection four languages, two traditions of myth (the Mediterranean and the Amerindian), and all the arts (poetry, music, sculpture, painting, and architecture)” (“Late at the Feast” 79).39 What is remarkable about Ursa Major is that it is a profoundly subversive poem in its cultural relativism and overlapping ontologies from the Greek and 39 Regarding the careful selection and arrangement of sources making up this poetic palimpsest, Sanger says: “In Ursa Major the narrative structure –​within which its lyrics are spoken, sung, chanted –​is explicit. It is polyphonically composed within each scene and from scene to scene in sequences of very deliberately chosen narrative sources” (“Late at the Feast” 81).

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Cree thought-​worlds. In fact, by bringing together the Cree, Roman and Greek mythologies into a unitary whole, Bringhurst is underlining the universality of stories about Ursa Major, while at the same time emphasising the universality of certain human concerns. According to Sanger, Ursa Major is a poem about human knowledge, about that which is worth knowing and preserving throughout time across human cultures, and also a poem “about the transformations of desire –​betrayal, bitterness, loss, passion, yearning –​so central to myths (transformations of gods and humans to animals and vice versa and living creatures to shiny bits of firmament)” (Henderson 117). Art is a mode of knowing or grasping the complexity of reality, or, as Bringhurst puts it, “an opening made in the air. It is seeing and saying and being what is in the world” (“Breathing” 111). In oral literatures from the First Nations, stories and myth cycles are considered ““seeing instruments” that offer “a complex navigational system” for understanding human relations to the stars, animals, soils, and planting cycles, as well as information about how to “see” spans of time and history unavailable to a human in a single lifetime” (Adamson 261). Ursa Major is one such “seeing instrument” that allows Bringhurst to tackle transcendental questions like whether it is possible to protect the environment from humans’ greed and overexploitation, to “build a more livable political world where humans acknowledge the right of “sentient beings”  –​forests, rivers, mountains  –​to maintain and continue evolutionary cycles” (Adamson 264). Like Conversations with a Toad and New World Suite No. 3, Bringhurst’s polyphonic masque denounces the negative impact of the practices of capitalist societies on the more-​than-​human world. It does so by interweaving two versions of the same myth from pre-​industrial societies that sought to relate to the nonhuman with a sense of duty and respect. Ursa Major is not just a complex tessellation of stories from different c­ ultural traditions in several languages, a “contrapuntal mythtale mélange” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 233), but also a rich tapestry braided with translations and original poems by Bringhurst. As Clarke observes, “[t]‌his performance work  –​part original translations, part original poetry  –​merges Greek, Latin, Cree and English, literally, cascading and colliding together, voices and languages in a deft orchestration of polyphony” (C7). In this respect, Bringhurst might be following in the steps of Ezra Pound, who imported into the English language subtle cadences from Greek, Latin, Anglo-​Saxon, Italian, French and even Chinese ideograms. Like the Modernist master, over the last four decades the poet “has been busily remaking Canadian poetry […] by borrowing forms and ideas from multiple language and cultural traditions, especially those of

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First Nations peoples” (Clarke C7). In Ursa Major Bringhurst is poet, linguist, typographer, cultural historian, and translator all in one:  a man seriously committed to his vocation as poet who relishes the materiality of words and the universality of myth. No matter whether in the Cree renderings, or in the translation of Ovidian hexameters and of fragments originally composed in classical Greek, the clarity shines through the “singing simplicity” (Clarke C7) and plain syntax of Bringhurst’s language. His is a poetry that thinks and sings with transparency and conviction, which has been part of his poetic agenda from the very outset of his literary career.

II  Ovid’s Myth on Callisto and Arcturus In Ursa Major, Bringhurst tells the story of the Great Bear constellation in a symmetrically shaped five-​act masque, composed for six speakers working in four languages, that fits in “the tradition of the Renaissance masque in its allegorical orientation” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 233). A gigantic tessellation of stories, songs and chants in tongues of epic proportions, the poem tells several versions of the Great Bear creation myth concurrently in Greek, Latin, Cree and English –​i.e., two classical languages of prestige rescued from the cradle of Western civilisation, one of the living languages of the First Nations of North America, and a modern lingua franca. There is no room for improvisation at all in this well-​wrought polyglot piece of choreography or “radically ecological structure” (“Late at the Feast” 80), as Sanger calls it in his afterword to the 2003 edition. From a number of heterogeneous sources emerges a rare unity called Ursa Major, a long poem where translations (not always literal) from the Greek, Latin and Cree occur side by side with original poems by Bringhurst, merging into one another with total assurance. What follows is a detailed, scene-​by-​scene analysis of the intertextual tapestry at the heart of Ursa Major that seeks to unveil the ironic juxtapositions and narrative tensions punctuating the poem. At the beginning of each scene, Bringhurst gives a detailed description of the speakers and dancers taking part in the action, as well as careful instructions as to the way voices are to interact with one another in their collaborative telling of the Ursa Major myth. Thus, in Scene I there are four speakers (Ovid’s Daughter, Translator, Hera and the Celestial Janitor) and four dancers (Star Bearer, Callisto, Hera and Moon Woman). Ovid’s Daughter’s and the Translator’s voices (in Latin and English, respectively) are simultaneous. “To these, the third voice (Hera’s) is soon added; then briefly, a fourth (the Celestial Janitor’s). Toward the end of the scene, Hera is speaking alone” (Ursa Major 13). To sum up, three different

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languages concur in the telling of the myth –​Latin, English and Greek –​in “Scene I:  Metamorphosis One,” and up to four voices speak simultaneously at some points. Thematically, Scene One explores the myth of Callisto as retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Book II, lines 401–​541. As Bringhurst points out in note 1 at the end of his book, “[t]‌he lines spoken by Ovid’s Daughter (and translated, not always reliably, by the Translator) come from book 2 of the Metamorphoses –​ the only surviving classical source of any substance for the story of Callisto” (Ursa Major 89). The poet is prompt to emphasise that his translation of the Latin text is not literal, though. In his afterword, Sanger provides an excellent summary of the myth: According to Ovid, Callisto was one of a company of nymphs attending the goddess Diana (or Artemis, to use a Greek name), sister to Apollo, during Diana’s life as a huntress in Arcadia (translatable from the Greek as bear-​country). Zeus, returning from extinguishing the fire caused by the fall of Phaeton, which almost consumed the universe, sees Callisto and falls in love, or lust, with her. He changes himself into the form of Diana, embraces the unsuspecting Callisto, then changing back into his own form, rapes and renders her pregnant. Callisto tries to conceal her pregnancy from Diana, but her condition becomes public when Diana forces her to strip and bathe in a spring. Diana banishes Callisto for losing her virginity. Alone, in the woods of Arcadia, Callisto gives birth to a son, Arcturus. Hera, Zeus’ wife, takes revenge upon Callisto after the birth by turning her into a she-​bear. Lycaon, Callisto’s father, raises Arcturus. As a she-​bear, Callisto lives for fifteen years in solitude, afraid of humans, of gods, of her fellow beasts, until Arcturus accidentally discovers her while he is hunting. She recognizes him, pausing to gaze at him before fleeting. Arcturus construes her pause as aggression, not knowing it is love, and prepares to spear her. Zeus then intervenes to change both into stars. Hera’s revenge is to secure from Neptune and Tethys, Neptune’ wife and mother of the main rivers in the Universe, the promise that neither Arcturus in Boötes nor Callisto in Ursa Major will ever be able to conceal themselves below the levels of the waters of earth. (“Late at the Feast” 84–​85)

What Bringhurst does not say about his deployment of the Ovidian text is that he is tessellating illuminating fragments into the living fabric of his own poem, as if he had managed to salvage them from a badly damaged papyrus roll. Of the over one hundred lines Ovid devotes to the Callisto myth, Bringhurst quotes 28 lines or portions of lines lifted from the Latin text –​he excerpts twelve fragments, “each between one and five lines, beginning with line 401 of Book II and ending at line 507” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 240). The same Latin words from Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses appear in scenes 1, 3 and 5 of Ursa Major, delivered by Ovid’s Daughter and accompanied in scenes 1 and 5 by Bringhurst’s translation into English, voiced in slightly delayed polyphonic

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overdraft by an actor-​dancer designated the Translator. Sanger meditates on the fragmentary nature of the Latin text and draws this conclusion: Bringhurst’s use of Ovid, therefore, offers the Callisto myth in a radically fragmentary form, characterized by abruptions, unassigned pronouns, and unexplained relationships. The effect is as if we were reading all that remains of a text recorded on a badly damaged papyrus roll. They are fragments of beauty, strangeness, bitterness, violence. They invest us with the sense of being part of a myth working at the limits of endurable human knowledge. But they are, nonetheless, fragments. They exist as such in Ursa Major, because Bringhurst wishes us to see and hear […] that the immediate, cultural tradition of which they are part exists only in the most damaged, intercepted form in the modern world. (“Late at the Feast” 83–​84)

That all we find in the opening section of Scene One is a handful of resonant Latin words accompanied by a deft translation into English does not necessarily mean that there is no logic to the way Bringhurst has arranged the Ovidian fragments to form a whole. At least five distinct parts are discernible in this pattern: (1) The first cluster of Latin words (lines 405–​408 from Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) provides the geographical setting where the story of Callisto takes place, a land in ancient Greece called Arcadia, literally “bear country.” Etymologically speaking, “Arcadia” comes from “Arcas” (Ἀρκάς), the name of Arcturus, Callisto’s son, as a child, whereas “Arcturus” (from arktos + ouros) means literally “guardian of the bear.” The simplicity and elegance of Bringhurst’s rendering of the original Latin shines through lines like these: “He gave the land back all its wild grasses, gave the tree limbs /​ to the trees. He gave the country life again” (Ursa Major 13). The poet uses repetition and parallelism to obvious effect here:  they build on a moving musicality surrounding an idyllic setting where there appears to be no room for any form of violence. (2) The second cluster of Latin words (lines 412–​416) describes the nymph Callisto with great linguistic economy as seen by the king of the Olympian gods and goddesses, omnipotent Zeus. It is only natural that the setting of the story should be Arcadia, for the story of Callisto is an Arcadian myth. According to some authors, Callisto (Καλλιστώ) was a nymph of the woods; according to other authors, she was king Lycaon’s or Nicteus’ daughter. She had made up her mind to remain a virgin her whole life and spend her days hunting in the woods and hills in the company of Artemis’ maiden huntresses. But one day Zeus saw her and fell in love with her. Assuming Artemis’ appearance to approach her cunningly, he was welcome by unsuspecting Callisto, but then he revealed his true self, made love to her and

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rendered her pregnant. The poor nymph tried to conceal her secret and shame from Artemis and the accompanying virgin nymphs as long as she could. In Bringhurst’ fragmentary but evocative rendering, the emphasis is laid on the spontaneous naturalness of her costume and hair-​dressing (“her dress just wrapped around and pinned, /​a white cord knotted in the hair she never combed” (Ursa Major 13)), which is expressive of the unstudied natural beauty of the wild, and on her virginity, as she is depicted as being a virgin huntress carrying “a spear or a bow in her hand:  /​one of Moon Woman’s warriors” (Ursa Major 13–​14). Artemis (or Diana) is the sylvan virgin goddess, daughter to Zeus and sister to Apollo, and Callisto is part of the goddess’ retinue of virgin nymphs, roaming the woods and the hills. Interestingly enough, in Bringhurst’s poem, “[f]‌ollowing Ovid’s example with Callisto, […] none of the characters are actually named, except for the epithets “Moon-​woman” for Artemis and “the Queen” for Hera” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 240). (3) The third cluster of Latin words (lines 438, 464) focuses, on the one hand, on the horrible shame Callisto must endure after having been raped by Zeus, while she cannot avoid loathing the woods that know her secret, and, on the other hand, on Artemis’ anger at discovering Callisto’s pregnancy (while all the nymphs are bathing together in a cool pool completely naked) and on the subsequent banishment of the ashamed nymph as a punishment for breaking her vow of chastity. What is left unsaid by the masque’s fragmentary words is eloquent in itself. The rape has been omitted altogether, although Callisto’s shame in the face of what has happened gives the reader an idea of the horror. The Ovidian line 439 “huic odio nemus est et conscia silva” becomes “then she hated the flowers and trees /​that had seen it and felt it” (Ursa Major 14) in Bringhurst’s rendering, where the natural world is perceived as being a living, feelingful entity. The physical violence accompanying Zeus’ rape of Callisto, “a parallel to industrial culture’s forcing of the earth to yield to its will” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 242), is not overtly stated but indirectly evoked via the reference to Callisto’s state of mind. What is indeed explicit is the dialectic violence conveyed by the words ascribed to Artemis as she finds out the truth about the nymph’s pregnancy and banishes her away from her presence. In Bringhurst’s rendition, the Latin “i procul hinc, dixit, nec sacros pollue fontes” (l. 464)  becomes ““Get away from here,” Moon Woman said. /​ “Don’t pollute the sacred pool!”” (Ursa Major 14). The words with which the goddess dismisses poor Callisto will give plenty of food for thought for Arcturus’ moving meditation on the relationships between immortal gods

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and mortal humans in scenes 2 and 4 of Ursa Major. How is it possible for love to pollute the sacred waters of Artemis’ pool when Callisto is only the victim of Zeus’ sexual assault? What is left for simple humans to do in the face of the overwhelming presence of immortal and powerful gods? Bringhurst’s poetic accomplishment lies in that he manages to eloquently juxtapose just two single Ovidian lines to convey Callisto’s shame and Artemis’ rage at discovering the loss of the nymph’s virginity. (4) The fourth cluster of Latin words (lines 474, 477–​480, 483–​485) shows Hera, Zeus’ wife, taking revenge on poor Callisto as she discovers that she has given birth to Arcas, her husband’s illegitimate son. Hera, who had not been slow to realise her husband’s infidelity, is determined to take revenge on the nymph. This is exactly the point in Callisto’s story at which the jealous wife turns the nymph into a horrible she-​bear. Hurling insults, Hera grabs Callisto by her hair and pulls her to the ground. As she lies spreadeagled, dark hairs begin to sprout from her arms and legs, her hands and feet turn into horrible claws, and her beautiful mouth turns into gaping jaws that utter only ugly growls. In Bringhurst’s rendering, the crucial moment of Callisto’s metamorphosis is conveyed through these moving lines: “When she lifted up her arms /​to beg for mercy, they were already dark and turning shaggy, /​fingers shrinking into toe and growing long, sharp claws” (Ursa Major 14). Deprived of human speech, she cannot but produce horrible meaningless noises: “What erupted from her throat /​was just a rough noise, a storm wind whipped in the pit of her belly” (Ursa Major 14). However, her mind remained exactly the same (“mens antiqua manet,” says the Latin in ­memorable terms), which means that the she-​bear still has got a human mind and a human heart: “Yet her mind stayed just the way it was” (Ursa Major 14), says the Translator with moving simplicity. At any rate, from an ecocritical perspective, Callisto’s metamorphosis into a bear can be seen as “dramatizing the estrangement we feel from the natural world which bore us, which we may now perceive as frightening and unfamiliar” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 242). (5) The fifth cluster of Latin words (lines 494–​495, 500, 501, 502–​504, 506–​507) shows Callisto roaming the Arcadian woods as a she-​bear, but still retaining her human mind, for fifteen years and encountering her son Arcturus quite by chance. Once a huntress herself, she is now pursued by hunters, terrified of other bears and wolves in the mountains, even if her own father, Lycaon, had been himself turned into a wolf by Zeus after he had dared test and mock Zeus’ omnipotence by giving him cooked human flesh. One day she

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comes face to face with her son, Arcturus. “Incidet in matrem,” says the Latin: “by chance he met his mother” (Ursa Major 15), translates Bringhurst into English. This is a climactic moment in Callisto’s story. The she-​bear recognises her son and tries to approach him, but he backs off in fear, not knowing “what spooked him” about those eyes “that didn’t blink and never left him” (Ursa Major 15). He would have speared the bear, not knowing it was really his mother, had not Zeus intervened by sending a whirlwind that carried them up into heaven, where the omnipotent god transformed Callisto into the constellation Ursa Major and Arcas into the constellation Boötes. He placed them side by side as shining bits of light on the firmament for eternity, “leaving them to endlessly re-​enact their chase through the skies” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 240).40 So, fortunately, though Arcturus nearly kills his mother, Zeus intervenes on time and makes both mother and son constellations in the night sky: “caught them up and spun them through the nothingness /​and set them in the sky beside each other, made them into constellations” (Ursa Major 15). “Sustulit et pariter raptos per inania uento /​inposuit caelo uicinaque sidera fecit,” says the original Latin (ll. 506–​7). That is the end of the metamorphosis as told by Ovid in Book II. That this is the most familiar version of Callisto’s story is no doubt due to Ovid’s pre-​eminence as a storyteller in his Metamorphoses, but there were other versions in antiquity, some of them older than Ovid’s and preserved in tattered fragments. One of these fragments Bringhurst salvages from classical Greek in the second movement of Scene One, which juxtaposes Hera’s song, overlapping the Latin and its translation into English, and the Celestial Janitor’s words, “chanting polyphonically with Hera as he sings her into place” (Ursa Major 16). Hera’s song goes like this: “Καλλιστὼ κατέπεφνεν άπ’ άργυρέοιο βιοιο…. /​ … ἀπ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο … /​ Καλλιστώ, Καλλιστώ …” Bringhurst translates it into English as follows: “Callisto 40 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book II, lines 496–​506 is the original account of the catasterism of both mother and son. This is the literal translation into English: “And now Arcas, Lycaon’s grandson, had reached his fifteenth year, ignorant of his mother’s plight. While he was hunting the wild beasts, seeking out their favourite haunts, hemming the Arcadian woods with his close-​wrought nets, he chanced upon his mother, who stopped still at sight of Arcas, and seemed like one that recognized him. He shrank back at those unmoving eyes that were fixed for ever upon him, and feared he knew not what; and when she tried to come nearer, he was just in the act of piercing her breast with his wound-​dealing spear. But the Omnipotent stayed his hand, and together he removed both themselves and the crime, and together caught up through the voice in a whirlwind, he set them in the heavens and made them neighbouring stars” (95).

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killed with a silver bow /​… with a silver bow … /​Callisto, Callisto …” (Ursa Major 15), which is repeated as a sort of musical refrain in scenes 3, 4 and 5. In some accounts of Callisto’ story, she is said to have been killed by Artemis herself with a shot of her silver bow, perhaps urged by the wrath of jealous Hera, as a punishment for breaking her vow of chastity, which is what these ancient Greek words appear to evoke. In note 4, Bringhurst provides the source of Hera’s song, “the only line concerning Callisto in the surviving remnants of Greek epic”, which “[t]‌hough likely genuine […] has been shorn of all context, preserved in isolation in a tongue-​in-​cheek assortment of quotations known as the Certamen or “Contest of Homer and Hesiod”” (Ursa Major 90), likely originating in the 4th century BCE. And in note 5, Bringhurst explains that “[t]he lines the Celestial Janitor chants in scene 1, as a summons and reply to Hera’s song –​and which Hera finally translates into English in scene 3 –​are taken from the first book of the Iliad” (Ursa Major 90). This is Bringhurst’s majestic rendering into English of the Greek lines, which show Apollo, Artemis’ brother, the god of science, music and poetry, shooting arrows at the Achaeans in anger, with consummate dexterity, in the Trojan war: The god of light descended like the darkness, with a flock of arrows keening at his shoulder. He was trembling with anger. He kneeled far back from the ships and nocked an arrow and took aim, and the silver bow started its heart-​stopping scream… (Ursa Major 16)

The third movement of Scene One shows Hera “speaking over the Latin and its translation, then singing in Greek, then speaking in retrograde motion, then singing again” (Ursa Major 16). She addresses poor Callisto in anger as she is about to transform her into a bear: You whore, you bore my husband’s son to spite me, didn’t you? You’ll pay me though. You’ll pay for that right now. adimam tibi namque figuram … I’ll pull your hair and squeeze your eyes. You’ll be a bear. You’ll fraternize with bugs and worms and prairie dogs. You’ll fart and stink and poop your clothes and spend the winter buried in the ground. (Ursa Major 16)

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These are the words Bringhurst ascribes to the jealous wife as she takes revenge on Callisto, as soon as she learns of his husband’s infidelity. What is striking about these lines is the plain, colloquial language used by the goddess. The violence and ­aggressiveness implicit in the words come as a surprise, since one does not expect the queen of Olympian gods to speak like this. Hera is giving full vent to all the anger she holds in her chest, and poor Callisto is the inevitable target of her malicious words. The Latin words “adimam tibi namque figuram” have been translated earlier into English as “I’ll drive the beauty out of you” (Ursa Major 14). By metamorphosing the nymph into a growling she-​bear, Hera deprives her of all her mortal beauty, human speech and all other human attributes, while ostracising and condemning her to the company of sylvan animals. Like all bears, she will have to spend the cold winter “buried in ground” (Ursa Major 16). One thing remains intact inside her, though: “mens antiqua manet,” said the original Latin text, suggesting that her mind is still human. On the other hand, musicality is achieved through a very simple device: Bringhurst has Hera repeat exactly the same words quoted above in retrograde motion (i.e., in reverse order). The scene closes with Hera singing her Greek song, fading to silence and darkness.

III A Blind Cree Mythteller on Bear Woman “Scene II: Arcturus Awakens” is a complex scene. The speakers are Kâ-​kîsikâw-​ pîhtokêw’s Son, the Translator, Arcturus and the Celestial Janitor; and the dancers are Callisto, Arcturus, Hera and Moon Woman. Once again, Bringhurst provides detailed instructions on how polyphony is to work:  “The first three voices are simultaneous. Late in the scene, a fourth voice (the Celestial Janitor’s) is added. At the end of the scene, the first two voices cease, then the third, so the Janitor speaks his last lines alone” (Ursa Major 19). Up to four voices speak their messages simultaneously, each going separately on their own agenda while at the same time contributing to the collaborative undertaking of telling the Ursa Major myth. Two completely different languages are now threaded into the tapestry of the poem –​Cree and English. Nowadays, there is a short supply of readers (or theatre-​goers) “equally fluent in English, Latin, Greek and Cree” (Ursa Major 7), as the poet points out in his 2003 preface to the poem. However, he wants readers to look at and listen to the original sonic texture of an old story as told to Bloomfield by mythteller Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw, the major Cree author.41 41 Bringhurst contributed an entry on Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw to W. H. New’s Encyclopaedia of Literature in Canada: “[H]‌e dictated 33 stories or narrative poems and a few short songs to

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In note 2, Bringhurst gives the details concerning the source of the Cree story that is the core of scenes 2 and 4 (about one half is told in each scene). In the early 1920s, Bloomfield began his classic work on North American Indian languages, contributing the first of many descriptive and comparative studies of the Algonquian family. In the summer of 1925, on the Sweet Grass Reserve, Saskatchewan, the Cree mythteller Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw (b. ca 1850, d. 1935), anglicised as “Coming Day,” reputed “by other Sweet Grass Cree to know more traditional stories than any other member of the band” (Sanger, “Late at the Feast” 85), told Bloomfield many stories, including “The Bear Woman,” later collected in a 350-​page compilation titled Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree (1930). Bringhurst has thus salvaged a precious text from a classic in its field, corrected minor errors in the linguist’s romanisation, and translated directly from Cree  –​one of the vernacular languages spoken in North America that is now as a rule forgotten by academia and yet sustains a living body of literature. There is an immense body of oral literatures, preserved mostly in the form of transcriptions made by linguists, anthropologists and ethnographers, awaiting careful edition, translation and critical elucidation, Bringhurst contends. They are buried in archives in libraries across North America that the poet has visited to unearth literary texts of undisputable quality. In an essay titled “What Is Found in Translation,” Bringhurst argues that translation serves three basic social functions:  keeping our links with the past and the valuable insights of the classics; keeping cultures and languages in touch, informing people of their neighbours’ achievements; and making discoveries –​ i.e., finding out texts that have not yet been given the ­attention they deserve and sharing the discovery with other humans so as to enlarge their perception and size of the world (75). In the same essay, he dwells on his personal literary canon and insists that, as a writer, he needs “a picture of the whole of human literary history” that gives him “a sense of how large and various, but also how finite and fragile, are the the linguist Leonard Bloomfield. These texts were published in Cree with Bloomfield’s English translations in 1930 and 1934. Eighteen of the tales are âtayôhkêwin (stories set in myth time); the others are âcimôwin (stories set in historical time). They range from very simple to marvelously intricate in structure… […] He learned the art of telling myths from older hunters, […] while fighting encroaching Europeans, in 1885. He lived a hunter’s life himself when he was young, and with others of his people, he endured the difficult shift to an agricultural and sedentary life that came with the establishment of the Treaty Six reserves in 1884. When he was blinded, probably by smallpox near the end of the 19th century, his memories of the older world flourished, and he stood back from the new” (571–​572).

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time and space of the species to which I  belong” (87). Bringhurst is well aware that any consideration of the literary legacy he has received from his ancestors must begin with an appreciation of the literary history of the land which he calls home. It is no wonder that he has been readjusting his mental map of the literary world where he lives for a long time, paying attention to the oral literatures of over a hundred languages of the First Nations of North America. As in the case of the translation from Ovid’s Latin, Bringhurst is also prompt to point out that his version of “The Bear Woman” should not be “misconstrued as a precise and literal rendering” (Ursa Major 90)  of the original Cree story. That it owes much to Bloomfield’s transcription of the story is evident when Bringhurst’s poem is placed against the linguist’s rendering. Bringhurst’s version is a completely different text though, rich in musicality and echoes from the original Cree, whose simplicity manages to shine through his English. There is no room for ornament, for superfluous adjectives or convoluted structures. Simple literary devices such as repetition (of key words, phrases or sentences, and ideas) will do to evoke the ancient flavour of the story originally told on a Cree reserve in 1925 by a blind, illiterate man. Myths were of the essence to the Cree,42 one of the major Algonquian-​speaking North American Indian tribes, whose domain included an immense area from east of the Hudson and James bays to as far west as Alberta and the Great Slave Lake in what is now Canada. Originally inhabiting a smaller nucleus of this area, they expanded rapidly in the 17th and 18th ­centuries after engaging in the fur trade and acquiring firearms. Wars with the Dakota Sioux and the Blackfoot and severe smallpox epidemics, notably in 1784 and 1838, decimated their numbers significantly. For subsistence they relied on hunting, fowling, fishing and collecting wild plant foods. Though they frequently hunted hare, it seems that they preferred hunting larger game such as caribou, moose, bear, bison and beaver. This partly accounts for the presence, in “The Bear Woman,” of a hunter hunting buffalo and of a woman who turns out to be a bear herself. The plot of “The Bear Woman” can be briefly summarised as follows. A hunter lives all alone in the middle of the forest and spends his days hunting buffalo, from which he takes only little meat to take home and ensure his survival. After what seems to be a long time, he begins to feel terribly lonely, but he continues hunting buffalo and taking only little meat from the hunted animals. One day, upon returning home from hunting in the woods, he finds out that someone

42 For basic information, see the entry on ‘Cree’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 7, p. 4065.

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has been in his home, doing such household chores as sweeping the floor and piling a stack of firewood next to the house. To his sadness and disappointment, he realises that there is no one inside his house, but he finds a pair of good moccasins and wonders whether it was a woman that had visited his home while he was away hunting. Determined to find the unknown woman, he leaves home early the next morning and spends another day hunting buffalo. Once again, as he comes back home, he is sad to find out that there is no one in his home. However, one day he comes back and finds a beautiful woman sitting on his seat. The stranger takes care of him, prepares food for him and asks him to bring more meat the next time he goes hunting, since her family is very hungry. The man spends thus most of his time hunting, whereas the woman spends her days getting the food ready for her family. Sometime later, they set out on a journey to the woman’s land to visit her family and give them the food she has been preparing for them all the while. The hunter is amazed by how the woman succeeds in taking all the bundles of gear and provisions to their destination almost effortlessly. All she does is stepping on every bundle of food and it will come up exactly at the place where they camp for the night. At last they arrive to her family’s home and her father, mother and sister are very happy to see that she has brought them so much food to eat. To the hunter’s surprise, he finds out that the woman is not a woman, but a bear instead, and that her family members are all bears as well. Upon discovering the truth, he feels sad because he cannot stay with them any more. In Ursa Major, the story is told in two halves, in scenes 2 and 4, respectively. The first half finishes at the point where the hunter asks the bear woman about her origins; the second half finishes with the hunter leaving the bear family in a state of utter dejection. At first, the reader might wonder what the deeper connections between this Cree story are with the Ursa Major myth or with Ovid’s account of Callisto’s metamorphosis in Book II of his Metamorphoses, but the link is obvious: here are two versions of one and the same myth masterfully tessellated by Bringhurst to offer yet another version for 21st-​century readers. In the Cree story, the bear woman is the counterpart to Callisto, the virgin nymph in Ovid’s story that was metamorphosed into a she-​bear by Hera upon her discovery of her husband’s infidelity. However, the differences are remarkable, since the protagonist of the Cree myth is a woman who reveals herself to be a bear by the end of the story, whereas in the Ovidian text a young woman falls prey to Zeus’ assault, is repudiated by the sylvan goddess Artemis, and transformed first into a she-​bear by furious Hera and then into a constellation by her husband. What both stories have in common is that they explore how immortal gods interfere in mortal humans’ lives and how

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it is humans that always take the worst part with them. Metamorphosed into a bear, Callisto is thus forced to roam the woods and mountains all alone for 15 years until one day her son Arcturus meets her and almost spears her. In the Cree story, it is the hunter that leaves the world of bears or spirit beings, with sadness filling his heart, as he does not fit in their world. Yet the metamorphosis that remains central to the Cree story is “not that of a woman into a bear, but the inner transformation of the lonely Cree hunter” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 254). Being a lonely and wasteful hunter taking only small portions from the buffalo he hunted for his own meals, he comes to the realisation that he is “part of a larger ecological community” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 232). What is more, Ursa Major “suggests parallels between the isolated hunter, the character of Arcturus, and a careless, alienated non-​Indigenous North American culture still in need of such an understanding” (232–​233), i.e., the understanding that humans are part of the larger flesh of the earth, which needs our attention and respect. The Cree and Latin stories share another fundamental aspect, namely desire, which is central to their respective plots. It is out of a savage form of desire that Zeus approaches Callisto, rapes her and renders her pregnant. By contrast, it is a tender form of desire that prompts the Cree hunter to help the bear woman by hunting buffalo and ensuring meat provision for her hungry family. Both stories share a similar setting as well, for it is in the midst of the woods or the mountains, be it in ancient Arcadia or in the vast expanses of Canada, that both Callisto and the Cree hunter spend their days in solitude. Incidentally, Callisto was also part of the retinue of Artemis, a huntress goddess herself. Spending time by themselves, in the company of trees, rivers and mountains, both the Cree hunter and Callisto are solitary hunters, outsiders on the fringe of society, who experience first-​hand contact with the overwhelming presence of powerful spirit beings or gods. Both undergone an experience that results in pain in the end. Nonetheless, there is a radical difference between Callisto’s story and the bear woman story. Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw’s Son is the narrator of the bear woman story and Ovid’s Daughter is his counterpart in Scenes 1, 3 and 5. Both myths are thus “being transmitted within the masque as family property, in accordance with Amerindian practice” (Sanger, “Late at the Feast” 86). However, even if both are transmitting their bundles of words as valuable family property, Sanger argues, “Ovid’s Daughter speaks in fragments. Kâ-​ kîsikâw-​ pîhtokêw’s Son transmits his myth in full” (86). Paradoxically, Ovid’s written version of the myth is told in a fragmentary form and “breaks apart in performance,” whereas the Cree story told by an illiterate mythteller “endures as an integrity” (86). What is more, when it comes to the portrayal of the relationships between humans and

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animals, there is “a reverse symmetry” when Ovid’s story and the Cree myth are juxtaposed: “the lonely hunter is seduced by a bear in the form of a woman, while Arcturus encounters his mother in the guise of a bear. Both young male hunters are in the process of learning key lessons” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 245), both are about to experience a moment of anagnorisis or revelation. As suggested above, desire is at the centre of Ursa Major, and so is knowledge. Myth allows human beings to gain valuable knowledge of the world and the mystery implicit in what-​is. Myth is not science or philosophy, but it remains a potent tool of knowledge in humans’ intellectual confrontation with the world. Indeed, Sanger claims that “the nature of knowledge” is of the essence in Bringhurst’s poem, since Arcturus, like his grandfather Lycaon or like the hunter of the Cree story, wants to know an atom of irreducible truth: “The masque is about the ways in which human beings may come to know what is of most value for them to know” (“Late at the Feast” 86). If myths are ecological structures of knowledge passed down from one generation to another, then it is only natural that Bringhurst, concerned with universals, should have tessellated two stories concerned with a bear-​woman and with the way mortal humans relate to immortal gods in Mediterranean and Amerindian mythologies. What humans learn from their encounter with the gods is that their presence is irresistible and overwhelming at the same time, and hence cannot be endured for long. Their power is simply consuming for mere mortals:  “You can have what you want, but you can’t have it for long” (Ursa Major 28), says Arcturus in words that echo the Latin “nulla potentia longa est” (Ursa Major 14). And yet there is something moving about the closing lines of the Cree story in Scene Four: … kâ-​kiskêyihtahk wâkayôsah kâ-​wîwit     … he knew that he was married to a bear, ôh îskêwah k-​êtêyihtak,     who seemed to him to be a woman, ôhi mînah kisêyiniwah nôtokêsiwan wâkayôsah ês ôhi.     and the old man and old woman were both bears. Êkwah mihtâtam êkâ tahkih ta-​kîh-​wîcêwât.     And he was sorry he could stay with them no longer.                                (Ursa Major 51)

The Cree myth ends with an epiphany –​with its hunter-​protagonist’s discovery that his wife, her sister and their parents are all bears. As Sanger points out, By transforming themselves into human beings they are giving the hunter care, honour, love; and by expecting him to trust and to follow his wife’s instructions, they teach him to know the stricken nature of his former, aimless, egocentric solitude. If at the myth’s end the hunter is “sorry that he could not always be with

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them” it is because he knows both that there is a more complex and finer state of existence than solitude, and that there are matters which exceed his ego’s mastery. (“Late at the Feast” 87)

Similarly, Arcturus is looking for a moment of anagnorisis and so it is no coincidence that Scene Two should be titled “Arcturus Awakens.” In the second movement of scene 2, Arcturus is able to tell his own bear-​woman story. He speaks “in the unexalted vernacular of Canadian prairie English” (Sanger, “Late at the Feast” 87) and in sustained polyphony over the Cree and its translation into English. He does not even use the proper names of the characters involved in the story  –​Zeus, Callisto, Artemis and Hera  –​and yet Arcturus awakens, literally “becomes conscious of the day-​world of the present, carrying the past with him, across a divide” (Sanger, “Late at the Feast” 87). Arcturus revisits the bear story in four distinct parts throughout his monologue. It comes as a nice surprise that such a detached and yet moving account of the Ursa Major myth should be voiced in colloquial language. In any case, at the heart of Arcturus’ own meditation on the way gods relate to simple mortals is an awakening to a new form of consciousness. The four movements of the poem focus on Zeus, Artemis, Hera and Callisto’s catasterism, respectively. Callisto, the innocent nymph, is somehow trapped in the middle of a dangerous triangle so intensely pervaded by love and hate that there seems to be only one way out. The ­monologue opens with an acknowledgment of the simple fact that gods always manage to have their own way, while an elemental distinction is drawn between “the ones in the sky” (immortal gods) and “the ones on the ground” (mortal humans). The two opening stanzas give voice to Arcturus’ quiet resignation in the face of the irreversibility of what has happened: Perfectly simple. One of the ones in the sky wanted one of the ones on the ground. And got what he wanted, as usual. Then couldn’t keep it. If they can’t, who can? What a way to find yourself a mother. But what other way is better? You can have what you want but can’t have it for long. That’s the rule. (Ursa Major 28)

As pointed out above, there is something portentous about the verse line “You can have what you want but can’t have it for long,” which resonates with echoes from the Latin “nulla potentia longa est” (i.e., no power lasts for long), quoted in Scene One from Ovid’s Callisto story. Nothing lasts for long:  everything is ephemeral and so it is bound to vanish into nothingness. What has happened

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once is irrevocably lost forever, because time cannot be reversed. It flows forwards inexorably, and nothing or no one can stop it. Arcturus is painfully aware that he is the fruit of Callisto having been raped by the king of the Olympian gods. “What a way to find yourself a mother,” he says with striking emotional detachment. In between the lines lingers the message that not even the powerful gods can make love last forever, and if they cannot keep it, who can? Certainly, not humans, because, unlike gods, we are perishable and imperfect. As Wood and Dickinson observe, this epiphany entails “a growing wisdom regarding the impossibility of ownership and the imperative of eternal change” (“Ursa Major” 246). Zeus fell in love (or “in lust,” says Sanger) with Callisto, but once he raped her and rendered her pregnant, he directed his attention somewhere else because of the inconstancies of his will. In the second movement of Arcturus’ monologue, the focus is on Artemis. Ovid’s account of the story makes it clear that Artemis banishes Callisto away from the company of her virgin huntresses as soon as her pregnancy is made public. They are bathing naked in a pool and Callisto’s secret is unveiled to the astonishment of everyone present. Arcturus emphasises not just Artemis’ violent reaction as she learns of Callisto’s secret, but also the impurity implicit in the nymph’s pregnancy. Artemis chases her out “because she was impure” (Ursa Major 28), says Arcturus, who muses on the relationships between gods and mortals, questioning “received concepts of sexuality and purity” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 245). He further elaborates on the paradox of impurity being associated with motherhood, birth or loving: “Being a mother, you see, is impure. In some people’s /​thinking. Love is pure but loving isn’t. Even thinking /​about loving isn’t pure, in some people’s thinking” (Ursa Major 28). In Wood and Dickinson’s view, Arcturus is “posited as the child of the wild earthly beauty and a powerful and desirous god, who unwittingly hunts his own mother, of whom he is afraid” (“Ursa Major” 245). There is an ecological dimension to Ursa Major, pulsing beneath the surface of climactic moments in the bear story recounted from the vantage point of two literary traditions –​Greco-​Roman and Cree. From an ecocritical standpoint, “Arcturus represents Western civilization, inheritor of the perspectives of ancient Greece and Rome, now transplanted to North America” (245). He is the embodiment of the territorial imperative, of the compulsion to exploit and take dominion over the earth’s resources, which is characteristic of capitalist societies where homo sapiens is conceived as the lord of beings. The third part of the composition is devoted to the jealous wife, Hera, taking revenge on Arcturus’ mother after learning of Zeus’ infidelity. The target of her anger is Callisto again, whom she transforms into a growling bear, depriving her

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of her beauty and of all human attributes, except for the human mind. As a result of this pitiless attack, Callisto ends up spending her days inside the ground, “and that was where /​she really did become a mother. That was where /​she bore her child” (Ursa Major 28). And in the closing, fourth part, an eloquent contrast is set up between Hera, who “hated her so much /​that she wanted to bury her in the ground” (Ursa Major 28–​29) and Zeus, who loved her enough and “wanted her /​up in the sky” (Ursa Major 28). Zeus intervenes to change Callisto into a constellation and place her in the night sky, just in time to prevent Arcturus from spearing his own mother. Zeus “lifted her into the sky” (Ursa Major 29) and made her into a constellation discernible from the ground to the unassisted eye surrounded by darkness. The closing lines of the monologue are indeed a ­meditation on light pollution in modern cities –​any night-​time artificial light shining where it is not actually needed. Though a mortal herself, Callisto managed to survive in the firmament in the form of shining bits of light called Ursa Major, but humans will not see her unless they are in a dark place. Arcturus appears to suggest that humans living in dominant industrial societies commit an act of hubris in wanting their mortal places on the ground to be as bright as those up above in the sky:              If you live on the ground you can see her. Not from your cities, of course, but from out on the prairie. The ground is getting awfully bright these days. In fact, it looks as though the people on the ground want their places on the ground to be as bright as anything in heaven. (Ursa Major 29)

In the third part of Scene Two, Arcturus continues his monologue without interruption and a new voice is added, that of the Celestial Janitor, “speaking in antiphonal polyphony with Arcturus” (Ursa Major 29). Their voices are threaded harmoniously, in much the same way the sky and the earth are married to one another. We learn to look at the sky as if it were earth, and the other way around, to look at the earth as if it were sky. In other words, the sky is earthed and the earth is skied. Now Arcturus’ voice resembles that of a shaman treading on ­mythical ground in an extended meditation on the sky and its dwellers: “Once upon a time, you know, the sky /​was absolutely dark. Dark as the ground. /​There were no stars” (Ursa Major 29). Going back to a primordial darkness where there were no stars in the sky, Arcturus meditates on the simple fact that darkness is common to the sky and the earth, those universal elements present in many cosmogonies around the world. The sky and the earth resemble one another much

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more than we will ever know, as things are never quite what they seem to be. Stars were people once, “loved and hated by the ones who never die” (Ursa Major 29), and they were elevated to the skies once gods and goddesses started to meddle in human affairs. Simple mortals (the ones “who lived on the ground” (30)) were made into stars by loving and hating gods, and “on their way to turning into stars” (29) they became the plants and animals (i.e., constellations) in the fields of the heavens. What comes as an unexpected revelation is that “[t]‌he plants and animals /​on the ground used to be people who lived in the sky” (Ursa Major 30), that is, gods and goddesses, immortal spirit beings embodied in forms recognisable to the human eye. Bringhurst is evoking here the animism of pre-​industrial civilisations and re-​enchanting the world, which has been stripped of traces of divinity in rapacious industrial societies that see nature as a commodity or ­portfolio of resources to be exploited to serve our material needs. Arcturus’ monologue ends with a reference to her mother, “dancing on the yellow wall of heaven” (Ursa Major 30). The immortals in the sky live only in and through the mortals on the ground:  they eat what humans eat without eating anything at all, feel what humans feel without feeling. Curiously enough, humans think them, think “everything that they think, /​without thinking” (Ursa Major 30), which means that they do not make any effort at all to think the song of the earth with all its teeming living forms (stones, water, mountains, trees, flowers). The thoughts of the immortals are the things that exist and populate this world of ours, but, paradoxically enough, gods and goddesses would not exist if humans did not eat or feel for them. Arcturus is proud to announce that Ursa Major /​Callisto is “a woman of both worlds, /​with no escape from feeling or from thinking” (Ursa Major 31). Though transformed into a bear, she still preserved a human heart and a human mind; now that she is a constellation, eternal and immortal like the ones of the sky, she cannot avoid partaking of both realms. In the face of it all, Arcturus awakens to a new form of consciousness. As Sanger puts it, he is after a new form of knowledge: In Ursa Major, he [Arcturus] inhabits all the times of his life and transformations; he is what he was, what he is as we listen to him speaking, and what he will become. He lives in Arcadia and on the Sweet Grass Reserve in Saskatchewan and in the constellation Boötes. The lights shining forth at night […] are stars in the constellations of Arcturus’s present earth, an earth which he learns to see as sky, a sky he learns to see as earth. […] In the Ovidian myth, Arcturus, not knowing his own mother, prepares to kill her. Turned into a star, he can only follow her ­constellation in diurnal revolution around Polaris. (“Late at the Feast” 87)

In the meantime, the Celestial Janitor has been invoking the four classical elements:  “Grandmother earth, /​grandfather fire, /​grandmother water, /​and

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grandfather air” (Ursa Major 29). Both he and Arcturus have taken the reader back to an elemental world of essentials, to a primordial time where cosmogonies take place. The core of his message is found in these illuminating words, placed exactly at the geographical centre of this collaborative meditation: We are at home only so long as we are inhabited, alive only so long as we are lived in by the places where we are. (Ursa Major  29–​30)

Being pervaded by the genius loci, breathing through our skin pores, we ­acknowledge that we humans are a tiny part in the grander scheme of things. This is what it means to be inhabited by the places where we happen to live. Our flesh is an extension of the flesh of the earth, or rather our bodily existence is enmeshed in the bodily texture of the earth. Then, the Celestial Janitor chants the incantatory litany of the irreducible elements the earth is made of –​aluminum, calcium, iron, potassium, manganese, sodium, silicon, and zinc  –​, one word per line, acquiring a specific weight of their own. Listing “a series of metals and elements from the periodic table which are the building blocks of life” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 247), the Celestial Janitor appears to relish their very texture on his tongue. The elements of the earth are nothing more (and nothing less) than the thoughts of the gods, “that twist with their milk-​smooth /​faces and crystalline edges /​in the breasts of human beings” (Ursa Major 31).

IV Lycaon Taking Revenge “Scene Three: Metamorphosis II” of Ursa Major is a transition scene in the overall architectural design of the poem. The speakers are Ovid’s Daughter, the Translator, Hera and the Celestial Janitor; the dancers are Callisto, Hera, Moon Woman and the Star Bearer. Once again, Bringhurst provides detailed instructions as to the way polyphony works in this particular scene:  “Three, then four simultaneous voices. At the end of the scene, Ovid’s Daughter is the first to fall silent, then the Celestial Janitor and the Translator, leaving Hera the last word” (Ursa Major 33). Placed at the geographical centre of the Ursa Major story, the scene consists of three clearly distinguishable parts. The first part provides Ovid’s account of Callisto’s story as told in Book II of his Metamorphoses. Ovid’s Daughter speaks the Latin words and the Translator speaks over the Latin, with a slight delay, in English. What Bringhurst gives us is a fragmentary account of the story in which all the essentials are noted down. The monumental lives of the epic tongues the poet deploys make themselves felt in a peculiar way in the opening movements of

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scenes 1, 3 and 5, where Latin leads the way and the rest of languages follow, and in the opening movements of scenes 2 and 4, where it is the Cree language that gives voice to the moving bear woman story, one of the sacred myths of this North American indigenous people. In the second part of Scene Three it is Hera, the jealous wife, that dances and sings in classical Greek, in sustained polyphony with Ovid’s Daughter and the Translator, but “[t]‌hree times she suddenly interrupts Ovid’s Daughter, the Translator and herself to speak in piercing English” (Ursa Major 35). She sings two familiar handfuls of resonant Greek words: one lifted from the extant fragment preserved in Certamen or “Contest of Homer and Hesiod,” telling of Callisto being killed with a silver bow (probably Artemis’ bow), and another one lifted from Book I of the Iliad which the Celestial Janitor chanted as summons and response to Hera’s song in Scene One. And in the third part of Scene 3, which is new, it is the Celestial Janitor who speaks in Greek, “over Ovid’s Daughter’s continuing Latin and Hera’s closing song” (Ursa Major 36). At this point, the Translator stops translating from Ovid’s Latin and turns to Greek. In note 5 at the end of Ursa Major, Bringhurst provides the source of the Greek words: “The lines the Janitor speaks in Greek in scene 3 (which the Translator renders directly) are from two anonymous astronomical texts: the Catasterisms and a commentary on the Phainomena of Aratos” (Ursa Major 90). Whereas the opening movements of scenes 1 and 3 provide the reader with a fragmentary account of Ovid’s Callisto story, now Bringhurst rescues two constellations of Greek words from two anonymous astronomical texts, the first one from Catasterisms and the second one from a commentary on Aratos’ Phainomena. Constellations, those curious pictures in the sky, have been a ­fascinating scientific puzzle to humans since antiquity. Written around 150 CE, Ptolemy’s The Almagest described the traditions concerning constellations widespread among the Greeks, which had been popularised in the famous poem The Phainomena, by Aratos (275 BCE). The great astronomer Hipparchus’ sole surviving book, The Commentary (147 BCE), tells us that Aratos’ poem is for the most part a copy of a work with the same name by Eudoxus (366 BCE), which no longer survives. These books held the earliest descriptions of the Greek skies, and in them the constellations are already fully formed. Whereas in the case of Ovid’s Latin and the blind storyteller’s Cree bear-​woman story Bringhurst does not provide a literal translation (as he himself explains in the notes), now the poet offers a literal rendering of both Greek fragments into English, looking at Callisto’s story from a different perspective. This is the first fragment: ταύτην Ἡσίοδός φησι Λυκάονος θυγατέρα         Hesiod says she was the Wolf Man’s daughter,

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    ἐν Ἀρκαδίᾳ οίκεῖν,             living in Arcadia, ἑλέσθαι δὲ μετὰ Ἀρτέμιδος         a member of Artemis’ band,     τὴν περὶ τὰς θήρας ἀγωγὴν          travelling the game trails         ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσι ποιεῖσθαι….              out there in the mountains… (Ursa Major 36)

The she mentioned in these lines is Callisto, who is said to be the Wolf Man’s daughter, i.e., Lycaon’s daughter. Lycaon was King of Arcadia and was transformed by Zeus into a wolf, thus becoming the first werewolf. Hence he is Arcturus’ grandfather, whom he celebrates in an accomplished monologue in Scene Four (“Arcturus Dreams”). A full account of Lycaon’s story is found in Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. After Zeus seduced Callisto in the woods and rendered her pregnant, Lycaon decided to take revenge on the king of the gods and test his power. He wanted to know if Zeus was able to distinguish between animal and human meat. So, according to the Hesiodic Astronomia (Αστρονομία), he had the baby Arkas (Callisto’s son by Zeus) cut up and served to him as food on the table. According to Ovid’s account, Lycaon “kills a hostage, stews and roasts portions of the hostage’s body, and serves that meat to Zeus” (Sanger, “Late at the Feast” 87). His plan was to shame Zeus by revealing the trick once he had eaten the meat. Whichever the case, Zeus could smell the difference even before the meat was placed on the table and turned the Arcadian king into a wolf as a punishment for his hubris. In Scene 4 Arcturus gives a detailed account of the full story. The rest of the first Greek fragment gives the essentials concerning the nymph Callisto: she lives in Arcadia, she is a virgin huntress in the retinue of Artemis (the Moon Woman, one of the sky who spends part of her time on the ground), and she spends her days hunting in solitude in the mountains. The second cluster of Greek words explicitly identifies the constellation Boötes, placed next to Ursa Major in the night sky, as Arkas, Callisto’s babe son, seen as the Bear-​warden. Transformed into a bear and set among the stars, Callisto, the bear-​mother of the Arcadians through her son Arcas, became Ursa Major. The other constellations appearing close together in the sky are Ursa Minor and Boötes. Significant to astronomical observers since antiquity, Arcturus, also called Alpha Boötis, is one of the five brightest stars in the night sky, and the brightest star in the northern constellation Boötes. It lies in an almost direct line with the tail of Ursa Major (the Great Bear), and next to both Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Hence its name, derived from the Greek words for “bear guard” –​from

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arktos (bear) + ouros (watcher, guardian). So the constellation lying next to Ursa Major is actually Arkas, “the son of Callisto and Zeus, /​who lived in the country of the Wolves” (Ursa Major 37) –​i.e., in Lycaon’s Arcadia. The whole fragment is worth quoting in full, because the simplicity of the original Greek shines through Bringhurst’s rendering into English: περὶ τοῦ Βοώτου τοῦ καὶ Ἀρκτοφύλακος …         As for the Cowherd or the Bearguard … περὶ τούτου λέγεται, ὅτι Ἀρκάς ἐστιν         they say that he is actually Arkas,     ὁ Καλλιστοῦς καὶ Διὸς γεγονώς·             the son of Callisto and Zeus,         ᾢκησε δέ περὶ τὸ Λύκαιον.           who lived in the country of the Wolves. (Ursa Major 37)

Scene Three closes with Hera’s ironical commentary. Breaking off her song, she says “with a knowing laugh” these words:  “That’s not the only thing they say” (Ursa Major 37). Indirectly she is suggesting that there is something else to Callisto’s story that is being left unsaid, particularly Zeus’ infidelity, which prompts her to take revenge on Callisto and turn her into a growling bear, ostracised and condemned to roam the woods in solitude for 15 years.

V Blood Like Sap from a Poplar In “Scene Four:  Arcturus Dreams” it is now the turn for three languages  –​ Cree, Greek and English  –​to be woven into a complex tapestry that is expressive of Bringhurst’s fondness for cultural syncretism. Ursa Major is an elaborate ­multicultural artefact that betrays the poet’s mastery in handling literary materials and sources as diverse as a Cree story dictated to Bloomfield in the summer of 1925 by a blind man called Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw, and Greek words lifted from a work entitled Certamen or “Contest of Homer and Hesiod” that evoke the figure of Callisto in a beautiful though fragmentary way. Against these ancient words spoken in Cree and classical Greek, the poet juxtaposes his renderings into English as well as original poems voiced by Arcturus and the Celestial Janitor that are a moving meditation on the Ursa Major myth. Though not overtly political in its intent, Ursa Major, Noah Richler suggests, “is writing that quite defiantly denies our present, or at least (and subversively) implies that it is fleeting, and its principal languages are either “dead” or relegated to a political hinterland” (B1–​2). By placing Cree at the very centre of Scene 4, Bringhurst is making a political as well as a literary statement having to do with the way

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academia tends to overlook the vernacular languages and literary traditions that once sprang from the living soil of North America. By placing Cree side by side with classical Greek, the author seems to be implying that, as a poet with a sense of vocation and a serious commitment to poetry, he cannot but make an effort to know as much as possible about the entire literary history of humankind if he is to make a significant contribution to a Weltliteratur that leaves nothing en route. Ever since he started composing poems in the early 1970s, he has been making the necessary readjustments to his own mental literary map of the world, paying attention to a wide spectrum of literary traditions and to oral literatures of North America that are still awaiting their turn to be made more accessible to a wider readership. Scene Four consists of three distinct parts, even though the voices merge into one another to produce a coherent whole endowed with a complex polyphonic texture. The speakers are Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw’s Son, the Translator, Arcturus, the Celestial Janitor and Hera; the dancers are Callisto, Arcturus, Hera and Moon Woman. In the first part, Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw’s Son speaks in Cree, while the Translator translates his words into English sotto voce, with a slight delay. The telling of the sacred bear woman story begun in Scene Two is now resumed, so that what the reader gets to hear now is the second half of the story. In the second part of Scene 4, Arcturus speaks a moving monologue on his grandfather, Lycaon, in sustained polyphony with Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw’s Son and the Translator. In the third part of the scene, the Celestial Janitor starts speaking his own meditation on the stars that make up Ursa Major “as soon as Arcturus has spoken, in sustained polyphony with Kâ-​kîsikâw-​pîhtokêw’s Son and the Translator” (Ursa Major 49). This meditation is followed by Hera singing to herself her song in Greek (briefly joining the Celestial Janitor) and by the closing lines of the Cree bear story. Arcturus’ monologue offers a new perspective on Callisto’s story in four movements, only the first of which concerns the nymph. In the opening lines, Arcturus gives voice to his own sense of astonishment:  “But what would a girl be doing out hunting?” (Ursa Major 48). The mountains, the solitary woods, are not the right place for a young, beautiful woman, he seems to imply. In fact, the stanza depicts Callisto as a sylvan huntress, ease at home among the creatures of the woods, while a distinction is drawn between “earth women” –​i.e., mortal, vulnerable, bleeding women  –​and “sky women” (Ursa Major 48)  –​i.e., immortal, powerful, non-​bleeding goddesses. Callisto has little in common with these supernatural beings from the sky who live only temporarily on the ground. Artemis herself is a clear illustration of what it means to be “one of the sky”: she is the Moon Woman, silently present throughout Ursa Major, a captivating presence in the

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night sky and an agile huntress on the ground. Goddesses are not restricted by the purely material demands of their bodily functions: they do not need to eat, they do not bleed, they do not experience pain, they do not die. Why, then, should Callisto spend her days in the company of Artemis’ retinue when not even their blood is the same? Those of the sky have got a vegetal-​mineral kind of blood that is described through a deft string of similes embedded in a parallelistic structure: “their blood is like sap from a poplar, /​white as snow, clear as water, and sweet, /​like the annual blood of the maple” (Ursa Major 48), which bespeaks the ubiquitous presence of the divine beneath all the (in)animate beings dwelling on earth. Movements 2 and 3 of Arcturus’ monologue have as their subject matter Lycaon’s story. The literary source for Bringhurst’s account of the story is Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Scene 3 the poet had already anticipated the same subject in just a handful of Greek words he rendered literally into English. Here, the emphasis is first placed on Lycaon’s hunger for knowledge and curiosity about the relationships between mortals and gods. He is an avid man, “riddled with questions” (Ursa Major 48), and so the second movement of Arcturus’ ­meditation opens with a seemingly endless string of questions regarding the distance separating the sun from the earth, the flatness or roundness of the earth itself, the roundness of the sun, the changes of the moon phases, the very nature of the gods, and the place humans occupy in the grander scheme of things:                Are the gods really gods? And are human beings special to the gods, or like the gods? And are human beings special to the gods, or like the gods in any way? He was riddled with questions. He wanted most of all to know how earth people –​ humans –​fit together with the others. If the gods are really gods, is the flesh of men and women any different in their eyes than venison and berries? He wanted an answer to that. (Ursa Major  48–​49)

The tone of these verse lines is incantatory, an auditory effect brought about by repetition. Lycaon was concerned to find out about the ultimate nature of gods, about the way they related to mortal humans, but he wanted to test the limits of Zeus’ knowledge above all, particularly after he learnt of what he had done to his daughter Callisto, whom he had raped and rendered pregnant. Unlike the spirit beings in “The Bear Woman,” who were very hungry, the Greek gods do not eat or drink –​they are not constrained by such human necessities. “The aroma of the food /​is all they’re after. You eat it for them” (Ursa Major 49), says Arcturus. Because they are not genuinely embodied beings or bodily natures, it is through humans that gods eat or feel or have a truly genuine existence. However, out of

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hubris Lycaon decided to mock Zeus by serving him human meat for food, just to see if he could tell animal from human meat. The story is well-​known and rendered in colloquial terms in the third part of Arcturus’ monologue: Anyway, my grandfather thought it would be good to test the father of the gods, to see if he would notice any difference –​or would care about the difference –​ between goat soup and human soup. He chopped up a Greek boy and put him in the kettle. (Ursa Major 49)

Zeus could smell the difference from afar (“That’s my dad!” (Ursa Major 49), Arcturus boasts enthusiastically) and would not forgive the king’s daring ­action. Lycaon’s challenge is an effrontery to Zeus, and so he transforms him into a wolf, the first werewolf ever known. The tone of the language employed by Bringhurst is reminiscent of the language used in the English rendering of the Cree bear story: it is simple, of a gnomic quality, and imbued with almost mythic resonances. “He gave my mother’s father four long legs /​and fangs and fur and a curly tail. He changed /​his flesh and bones” (Ursa Major 49), writes Bringhurst in words that echo Callisto’s metamorphosis first into a growling bear by Hera and then into a constellation by Zeus, as recounted by Ovid and translated into English by Bringhurst in Scenes 1 and 3 of Ursa Major. The closing movement of Arcturus’ meditation explores the way gods relate to human beings. The incantatory rhythm of this last stanza partly accounts for the title of Scene 4, “Arcturus Dreams.” If in scene 2 Arcturus awakens to a new truth about Callisto’s story (hence his personal version of the myth), in scene 4 the young man starts dreaming and speaking as if he were a shaman, endowed with a new capacity to see into things transcendental. As Sanger suggests, “[b]‌y the scene’s end, he has freely entered a freshened, visionary cosmic world unlike the stagnant one in which the stuttering text of Ovid at the masque’s beginning had left him stranded. Like a dreaming shaman, his eyes closed, Arcturus in flight has entered the palingenesis of a renewed cosmology” (“Late at the Feast” 88). This is a moment of revelation Arcturus experiences with rare intensity: he comes to an awareness that humans can do familiar activities with the gods –​they can eat or sleep with them, and even bear their children (notice the pun on “bear”) –​but they are dangerously close to a point where they can be metamorphosed into sentient or non-​sentient beings by powerful gods. Notice the gradation in crescendo deployed to obvious effect by the poet: mere mortals are “a breath away /​from being rocks and trees and wolves and deer /​and bears and stars and darkness” (Ursa Major 49). It all depends on the capricious nature of the omnipotent gods, since it is up to them to turn humans into rocks, sentient trees, mammals (wolves,

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dear, bears), constellations on the firmament, or simple darkness, which might well stand for oblivion. Humans are thus “[j]ust a breath away /​from deathlessness, and just a breath away /​from all that darkness in between the stars” (Ursa Major 49), occupying a liminal space between mortality and immortality. In the ancient Greeks’ eyes, the human race was at the mercy of a set of capricious and man-​like deities such as Greece had inherited from Homer, gods whose malice could continue to pursue its victims even beyond the grave. The ruling powers of the universe cannot help concerning themselves intimately with human or mundane affairs. The belief that humans are the playthings of powerful deities may seem to put them in a very humble and pitiable position indeed. Thus, humans might earn the favour or the enmity of gods with their acts. At the gods’ hands, Arcturus meditates, humans may become either immortal, even if they may have to pay a high price for it, or obscure figures interspersed in the “darkness in between the stars” (Ursa Major 49), condemned to utter oblivion. Callisto becomes immortal in the form of a constellation up above in the sky when Zeus turns her into Ursa Major, visible to many human cultures since antiquity and discernible to the naked human eye in the Northern Hemisphere. Close by lie Ursa Minor (the little cub or Arkas) and Boötes, where Alpha Boötis is Arcturus (the grown young son), the bear-​guardian. In this respect, Sanger claims that Ursa Major is “a radically ecological structure”: It proposes that the distinctions and dismissals which enable a technologically driven society to regard itself as having reached a state of infinite equilibrium are suicidally false. Such distinctions are predicated between humans and animals, between the temporal (or the temporary) and the eternal, between the profane and the sacred, between the animate and the inanimate, between an egocentricity conceived as normative and a state which, significantly, no language sharing root forms with Latin has created from the plural form of ego: the word nos, or we. Call this state ‘noscentric,’ and consider it to include all things sentient and (perhaps) insentient. (“Late at the Feast” 80)

The third part of Scene Four closes with the Celestial Janitor’s meditation on the stars that make up the constellation Ursa Major.43 Being the third-​largest constellation, Ursa Major is undoubtedly one of the most familiar star patterns in the night sky. It is made up of seven stars that form the rump and tail of the bear, while the rest of the animal is comprised of fainter stars. The opening two stanzas have been lifted and revised from the piece IV.3 (a meditation on fire) in Bringhurst’s Elements (1995; revised 2008) and draw an exhaustive anatomy of the constellation. Merak and Dubhe are called the “Pointers” because the 43 See the entry on ‘Ursa Major’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 29, pp. 17213–​17214.

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line Merak-​Dubhe points to the Pole Star, “where the Cub is still sucking what once /​was the nipple of heaven” (Ursa Major 49–​50), meaning Arkas. Dubhe comes from the Arabic al-​dubb (“the bear”), and Merak comes from the Arabic al-​maraqq (“flank or groin”). In addition, Alioth, Mizar and Alkaid are other stars in the Ursa Major constellation: they are the Great Bear’s “throat, not her rump and her tail” (Ursa Major 50). Second in line along the tail is the wide double star Zeta Ursa Majoris, the two members of which are called Mizar and Alcor. The name Alioth is applied to the next star along the tail, Epsilon Ursae Majoris. Alkaid lies at the tip of the bear’s tail. On the other hand, Arcturus, namely Alpha Boötis, is the brightest star in the constellation Boötes. It lies in an almost direct line with the tail of Ursa Major (the Great Bear); hence its name, derived from the Greek words for “bear guard.” Had not Zeus intervened, he would have nearly killed his mother with a spear, unaware that the bear frozen still in front of him was actually his mother. Hence the reference in the poem to “the point of a spear” (Ursa Major 50) being bitten by the Cub, Arkas the babe. Three constellations (Ursa Major, Ursa Minor and Boötes) are thus invoked in these lines: She is stretching her neck and her tongue to Arcturus, her son, who is clutching the butt of the spear: Arcturus the man, who is Arkas the cub, who is biting the spear that is piercing the throat of his mother the Bear. (Ursa Major 50)

The closing stanza of this meditation on the stars that make up Ursa Major becomes a moving reflection on the nature of fire. After all, stars are shiny bits of fire on the dark firmament at night. At this point, the poem turns more philosophical, as Bringhurst applies the name ‘fire’ to very different kinds of realities: (1) “Things that exist but do not have a substance –​/​mind, for instance –​are usually fire” (Ursa Major 50). Fire is the ultimate principle of reality or αρχή for Herakleitos. In “Everywhere Being Is Dancing,” Bringhurst writes apropos fire: “The mind, says Herakleitos, enjoys going back to being water, but it thinks by being fire. Fire can turn into anything and fire into anything […] and everything is linked together by thinking” (28). The mind is conceived of as fire, probably because it illuminates the dark recesses of reality in its relentless search after the truth. Intangible, invisible and unknowable, the mind remains a true mystery, like fire, which has always held an irresistible fascination for human beings from all places and all times. (2) “As for history, /​that nightmare, it is fire” (Ursa Major 50). Fire is associated here with history, the relentless and pitiless unfolding of events over

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time governed by the whims of tyrants and greedy men. The history of humankind is marked by greed, nonsense, violence, war and destruction, and so it is a form of self-​consuming fire. However, being is indestructible and bigger than history. “What is is bigger than history” (Selected Poems 204), says one of the three voices in New World Suite No. 3 in Movement I, staves  14–​15. (3) As for technology, “it offers you the wherewithal /​to cook the feast, the guest, the host, /​the dining hall, the whole shebang” (Ursa Major 50). These lines gesture towards homo sapiens’ repeated attacks on the more-​than-​ human world, for technological advance has contributed to increasing the torture and pain inflicted upon the earth. In this context, Bringhurst’s words are a vindication of a new environmental awareness. The poem closes with an invocation addressed to all four elements and two well-​known trickster figures (coyote and raven), as well as a request for them to cleanse our senses, restore us our common sense, and save the world from our greedy manners: “Earth, water, air, fire, coyote, raven, bathe us. /​Clean our bones” (Ursa Major 51). Philosophy and science were born of humankind’s desire to know in the face of the awe-​inspiring grandeur and beauty of the world. The most notable thing about the universe is the order it displays in events on a cosmic level like the movements of sun, moon and stars. That we should still raise our eyes and direct them towards the shiny bits and pieces of light shimmering in the night sky testifies to the endless fascination stars hold for humans. It also bespeaks the attention given to the heavens by the very first thinkers in the cradle of Western philosophy:  Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, among others, would lift their eyes to the skies and scientifically account for what they saw. That 2,500 years later Bringhurst should have decided to compose a literary work of art on the constellation of Ursa Major is a palpable proof that the κόσμος (Greek for “order”) remains as inexhaustible and captivating as ever to human eyes, and that humans have not changed that much after all.

VI Elements of a Vibrant Universe Latin, Greek and English are the languages that find a luminous and spacious room in “Scene 5: Metamorphosis III” of Ursa Major. The speakers are Ovid’s Daughter, Hera, the Celestial Janitor and the Translator; the dancers are Callisto, Hera, Moon Woman and the Translator. As for polyphony, “[t]‌he first two voices are simultaneous. As Ovid’s Daughter concludes, a third voice (the Celestial Janitor’s) joins the conversation. The Translator joins them momentarily” (Ursa

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Major 53). Six parts are discernible in Scene Five, a truly complex tessellation of fragments from a wide range of literary sources once again. First comes Ovid’s account of Callisto’s story in Latin, with no translation into English this time, as the audience is already familiar with these Latin words. In the second part it is followed by Hera’s vengeful song. According to Sanger, “it is the manipulative, slightly spiteful, condescending, trans-​ Atlantic accented voice of vindictive Hera which, in concert with the voice of the Celestial Janitor, celebrates a cosmos in which the day-​lit reality of earth and the night-​lit mythology of sky are co-​inherent” (“Late at the Feast” 88–​89). In the third part, both Hera and the Celestial Janitor speak in sustained polyphony: Hera keeps on giving voice to her irrepressible anger, while the Janitor celebrates earth’s composition in an exultant hymn of cosmic dimensions. In the fourth part, the Translator speaks in intermittent but not antiphonal polyphony with Hera and the Celestial Janitor, first in English and then in classical Greek, addressing the minimal elements or building blocks the whole universe is made of. From this point onwards, the scene becomes increasingly fragmentary. The fifth part shows Hera and the Celestial Janitor speaking in antiphonal polyphony:  whereas Hera mentions a litany of names of 21 prairie First Nations, the Janitor keeps on celebrating the basic constituents of which gods’ and humans’ bodies are made  –​i.e., the common substratum of vibrant matter of which all are participant. The sixth, final part closes with the Celestial Janitor’s last meditation on the elements and on Ursa Major, shining in the night sky. The first part of Scene 5 concludes with Ovid’s Daughter Latin words on the metamorphosis of Callisto and her son into shining constellations in the night sky by Zeus: “sustulit et pariter raptos per inania uento /​inposuit caelo uicinaque sidera fecit” (Ursa Major 54). Immediately afterwards come Hera’s words, first singing her fragmentary song on Callisto being killed with a silver bow in classical Greek and then speaking aloud in English. The overlapping of Ovid’s words and Hera’s song and poem is eloquent in itself: whereas Ovid celebrates Zeus’ intervention averting the tragedy on behalf of Callisto, nearly-​ killed by her own son Arcturus, Hera’s spiteful words remind us of a different version of the story, according to which it was Artemis (probably urged by Hera’s wrath) who killed the poor nymph for her infidelity to the virgin goddess. Then Hera addresses Zeus with ironical and irreverent words to remind him of Artemis’ reaction as Callisto’s pregnancy was made public: “My darling Zeus, how sweet of you /​to make them into stars. /​But you remember what your daughter said” (Ursa Major 54). At that point Hera switches back to Ovid’s Latin: “nec sacros pollue fonts” (Ursa Major 54). Bringhurst’s instructions are precise at this point: “Hera’s speech, again, is timed so that her speaking of this

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Latin line falls just after the same line spoken by Ovid’s daughter” (Ursa Major 55). Callisto stands naked before Artemis and her virgin huntresses, and her shame is visible to everyone present. The Latin words in the imperative with which the goddess expels her from her company translate as “Don’t pollute the sacred pool!” into English, as though motherhood or loving were impure, as Arcturus puts it in Scene 2, whereas love in the abstract were not. Hera’s spiteful poem goes on like this: That sacred pool now is the whole ocean, all the seven seas. That chubby little sow will never have another bath, or ever bathe her baby either. They can wash themselves in air or lick each other silly for all I care, but they won’t pollute the water. (Ursa Major 55)

The literary source for Bringhurst’s poem is again Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Lines 508–​530 tell of how Hera was now even more enraged to find her rival Callisto glorified among the stars. In line 521 Hera complains overtly:  “esse hominem vetui:  facta est dea!” (Ovid 96), which translates into English as “she whom I drove out of human form has now become a goddess” (Ovid 97). Enraged that her attempt at revenge had been frustrated, she appealed to her foster parents Tethys and Oceanus, gods of the sea, and persuaded them never to let the bears in the sky bathe in the northern waters, thus providing a poetic explanation for their circumpolar positions. Hence, as seen from mid-​ northern latitudes, the bear never sets below the horizon.44 In Bringhurst’s version of the end of Callisto’s story, Hera uses spiteful, colloquial words full of anger to refer to the mother and baby bear. Arkas’ teeth must remain fastened to the sky’s breast, to “the nipple of the world,” to “the star that never moves” (Ursa Major 55) (i.e., the Pole Star), for eternity, and neither mother nor child will ever be granted permission to touch the sea waters. That is the punishment Hera asks of Oceanus and Tethys as a personal favour to avenge Zeus’ infidelity and his intervention on behalf of Callisto and her son. In the third part of Scene 5, Hera continues her poem without interruption and the Celestial Janitor starts speaking in sustained polyphony with her. Hera repeats exactly the same words of her poem quoted above (Ursa Major 44 This is Ovid’s account in Metamorphoses (Book II, lines 527–​530): “But do you if the insult to your foster-​child moves you, debar these bears from your green pools, disown stars which have gained heaven at the price of shame, and let not that harlot bathe in your pure stream” (96–​97).

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55), but this time in retrograde motion, to achieve a rare form of musicality. For his part, the Celestial Janitor celebrates the very vitality and creativity inherent in inorganic matter, focusing on the essential elements the earth is made of:  “Earth /​at its purest is crystal and metal” (Ursa Major 55). He uses exactly the same words spoken by him in the third part of Scene 2 of Ursa Major (31). What we get to listen to is a litany of incantatory elements –​ “Aluminium, calcium, iron, potassium. /​Inorganic proteins” (Ursa Major 56) –​that are conceptualised as being the “thoughts of the gods” that are to be found “in the breasts of human beings” (56), which entails an acknowledgment of the “synthesis of the inorganic, the human, and godly power” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 248). The world is thought into existence by the gods, but those thoughts are truly embodied in physical entities that do find an echo in humans’ minds and hearts. The lines are short, marked by strong enjambment and punctuated by a long list of adjectives that seek to capture the nature of gods’ thoughts: “orthogonal, hexagonal, /​simple, symmetrical, /​ latticed, rotational…” (Ursa Major 56). In the fourth part of Scene 5, the Translator starts “speaking softly at first, but growing louder and shifting step by step toward incantation as she moves from English to Greek, in intermittent but not antiphonal polyphony with Hera and the Celestial Janitor” (Ursa Major 56), as Bringhurst’s instructions make clear. Her words are fragmentary, as if they had been salvaged from a papyrus roll badly damaged by the passage of time. In note 3 at the end of Ursa Major, Bringhurst informs us that “the Greek forms used by the Translator in the final scene are vocatives. She is speaking to, not of, the classical four elements” (Ursa Major 90). This piece of information is relevant, for the poetic voice speaking these words enumerates basic constituents found in the world: “Hydrogen… /​carbon… /​ alphabet… /​dust…” (Ursa Major 56). They are the characters in which the book of the world is written, but also dust or nothingness in the end, for everything is subject to perpetual metamorphosis and is ultimately perishable. Then the voice shifts to Greek to address air, earth, fire and water –​“ἄερ … /​χθών … /​ πῦρ … /​ὗδορ …” (Ursa Major 56)  –​, the four classical elements and the smallest constituent parts of being. Spoken by the Translator, these are bundles of crystal-​clear, medicinal words that evoke the timeless, immutable realm of essences. There is a form of elemental poetry implicit in them, even if they look like simple catalogues. If we had to do with just a handful of words, these would probably be the least dispensable of all, as they embody precious information. They affirm that the sky and the earth are one and the same thing, since they are both written in the same alphabet  –​one made of vibrant matter, invisible particles where everything forms part of a living, breathing universe. They also

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remind us that “deep down everything is connected and irreducible to a simple substrate” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter xi), a train of thought that “resonates with an ecological sensibility” (xi). In the fifth part of Scene Five, both Hera and the Celestial Janitor speak “in phrase-​to-​phrase antiphonal polyphony” (Ursa Major 57)  with each other. As a score for performing voices, the typographical layout on the printed page is appealing to the reader’s eye, for the words spoken alternately by Hera and the Janitor look like tattered yet precious fragments of visions rescued from the past. “If earth is the sky of the gods, she [Hera] gazes at what to her appear to be stars in the prairie night, even constellations” (Wood and Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 253). Thus, whereas Hera lists up to 21 prairie First Nations, some of whose names (“Little Black Bear” or “White Bear”) sound like they are stars “shining forth at night from the Cree communities spread from Alberta across Saskatchewan, to western Ontario, […] in the constellations of Arcturus’s present earth” (Sanger, “Late at the Feast” 87), the Janitor dwells on the differences that set the immortals (those in the sky) apart from the mortals (those on the ground). He compares the voices, bodies, hearts and thought of gods and humans: The voices of the gods are water; Ours are air; their bodies fire; ours are water. Gods have hearts of air, but ours are earth. Their thought is earth, and ours is fire. (Ursa Major 57)

“This intriguing matrix of metaphorical relationships is as concise and elegant a set of propositions outlining his conception of the complementary forces of gods and mortals as Bringhurst has ever offered” (Wood & Dickinson, “Ursa Major” 252). Whereas gods are said to be endowed with water voices, fire bodies, air hearts and earth thought, humans are seen as having air voices, water bodies, earth hearts and fire thought. Upon greater examination, it turns out that all four classical elements are present in the very composition of immortals and mortals alike, which gestures to an unbreakable bond between them. On the one hand, the gods’ voices are made of water, as water is found in the rivers, seas and oceans of the world, where gods manifest their own presence. Similarly, their bodies resemble fire in their evanescent, immortal condition, their hearts are air (voluble, whimsical, incapable of truly feeling human emotions), and their thought is earth, for their thinking brings the entities of this world into existence. On the other hand, it makes sense to give humans voices that are air emanating from their lungs, to say that their bodies are water (the principal component in

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our bodies), to give them earth hearts (fond of earthly beauty and pleasures), and to affirm that their thought is fire, a flame seeking to illuminate reality that is fuelled by humans’ desire to know. Callisto’s father (Lycaon) wanted to know whether gods were any different from humans, and the answer is that they have much more in common than we might think at first. Gods cannot help meddling in human affairs on earth, because they eat, feel and think through humans. They need humans as much as humans need gods. Immediately after this matrix of metaphors is spoken in antiphonal polyphony, both Hera and the Janitor return to sustained polyphony, as they move towards the closing of Scene 5. Hera directs the audience’s attention towards “All those fires on the coal black prairie, /​every night forever more, forever more, forever more” (Ursa Major 57), a reference to the prairie First Nations (for Hera has learnt to look at the earth as a skied earth) and to the shiny bits of fire on the fi ­ r­mament –​ i.e., the constellations made up of stars that were once mortals living on the ground and were turned into the plants and animals of the sky. The metaphor “fires on the coal black prairie” (57) is thus a potent reminder that the sky above is a replica of the earth below, or the other way around:  that, like Arcturus awakening and dreaming, we should learn to look at the sky as if it were earthed, and to look at the earth as if it were skied. Hera’s last words in Ursa Major are once again the cluster of fragmentary Greek words that tell of Callisto being killed by Artemis with a silver bow. It seems that the vengeful queen goddess is incapable of forgiving a sin that the poor girl did not commit herself. Finally, in sustained polyphony with Hera, the Celestial Janitor gives voice to the closing lines of Ursa Major, which are lifted from section IV.4, a two-​stanza meditation on water from Bringhurst’s Elements. The first stanza dwells on the eternal metamorphosis that brings all four classical elements together: In the aspens and the spruces, the larches and birches,… … earth is climbing a ladder of water and water a ladder of air, and air is climbing a ladder of fire, and fire descending a stair of air and water into the earth that is reaching and climbing with tiny hands a ladder knotted of water, fire and air. (Ursa Major  57–​58)

The idea occurs that the earth (with its nourishing minerals) is travelling together with water up the roots of the trees (aspens and spruces, larches and birches), that the water travels up the limbs and into the upper leaves of the trees, that the air set free from the leaves is travelling further upwards into the

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sky with its shiny bits of fire (stars). The whole process is repeated the other way around:  the nourishing light shed by the stars of the sky (including our Sun) travels downwards through the vast expanses of air till it reaches the water of the rivers, seas and oceans of the world, as well as the earth. All four elements are thus connected to one another for eternity. There is no way of interrupting the perpetual flux implicit in this gigantic commonwealth of breath. As Wood and Dickinson point out, “[t]‌he timelessness of myth is here linked with the eternal rotations of the stars relative to the mortals’ eye-​view and the rhythmic pulsing of biological life, echoing in many ways the conclusion of New World Suite No. 3” (“Ursa Major” 253). The second stanza in the Celestial Janitor’s meditation (and last verse lines of Ursa Major) focuses on the Ursa Major myth again. Callisto, the she-​bear hunted by her own son Arcturus in the mountains, clambers up the spear shaft, shinnies up the tree, transforming earth and water, fire and air, to fire and air and earth and water (Ursa Major 58)

She who was a hunter in Artemis’ retinue is now being hunted by Arcturus. As soon as Zeus transforms her into a constellation in the night sky to avert the tragedy, she becomes part of the grander scheme of things on a cosmic level: she keeps a human mind and a human heart trapped within the body of a bear, and yet she who was a mere mortal is now immortal and partakes of both realms. Her blood is turned into the water and snow of the gods of the sky, and into the sap of poplars. She keeps on lighting the night sky to remind those on the ground that the gods are not far away, and that the whole world is in a state of perpetual flux. The closing lines of Ursa Major gesture towards the endless transformations of the elements that constitute our breathing cosmos. They also represent a moment of clarity and acceptance: air transforming into air and earth to earth and fire to fire and water to water and blood to water and blood to snow and hunter to hunted and breath to air all over and over and over again. (Ursa Major 58)

Like New World Suite No. 3, Ursa Major remains a technical accomplishment, a beautiful art book and a moving tribute to the more-​than-​human world. As a material entity, a poem has “a physical architecture” and exists “in some kind of (physical) medium, a carrier wave of meaning, as it were. This medium could be […] paper or metal or stone; it could be (human) breath” (Morton,

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“Liminal Space” 271). Yet a poem for several voices printed on a page is half alive. As Bringhurst observes, “a poem is most itself when it is spoken… […] The printed text should be as fine as it can be, but it should never be the final incarnation” (“Licking” 16). Bringhurst draws a most interesting distinction between bilingual books and polyglot books: Bilingual books, with one language on the recto and another on the verso, can be a joy to handle and read. Two is a number at home in the standard codex form of the book, just as it is in the eyes and ears of readers, and in their feet and shoes. Polyglot books, containing three texts or more, are a problem of a different order. People have tried for two thousand years to make them work in codex form –​with sometimes interesting results –​but in general polyglot texts are more at home in separate books or in the scroll, which can be opened as much or little as you please: to a spread of one page or of five. (“Licking” 5)

Ursa Major is a polyglot book in codex form, but this is no obstacle to the mission Bringhurst has set out for himself. As an eco-​masque for several speakers and dancers, it draws readers’ attention to the trans-​corporeality that brings gods and mortals, human and nonhuman beings, animate and inanimate entities together. In providing a collaborative version of the Ursa Major myth, Bringhurst resorts to Cree and Greco-​Roman mythologies to build a whole out of other wholes from diverse languages, literary traditions and thought-​worlds. However, myth is not just about storytelling, as it seeks to provide humans with a seeing instrument, a compass to interpret and better understand the complexity of reality. Deep at the core of the bear myth, whether set in Arcadia or Saskatchewan, are anthropological universals, human preoccupations and concerns that stay the same despite the passage of time. They have to do with love, carnal desire, the desire of knowledge, mortality and the way humans relate to the nonhuman. Humans are just a breath away from the vibrant matter out of which the cosmos and its dwellers are all made of, in much the same way Callisto is just a breath away from darkness or immortality.

Conclusion The Mind Is the World: Lyric and Ethics in the Age of the Anthropocene All things have the capacity for speech –​all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. Indeed, what is perception if not the experience of this gregarious, communicative power of things, wherein even ostensibly ‘inert objects’ radiate out of themselves, conveying their shapes, hues, and rhythms to other beings and to us, influencing and informing our breathing bodies though we stand far apart from those things? —​David Abram, Becoming Animal (2010), p. 172.   Lyric philosophy: thought in love with clarity, informed by the intuition of coherence; by a desire to respond to the preciousness of the world. —​Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (2011), L103.

I Poetry, Thinking, Singing In “Lucky Truth,” Bringhurst’s Opening statement to the Conference on Poetry and Philosophy, held at the University of Warwick on 26  October  2007, the poet ponders how poetry and philosophy connect as disciplines or gestures of the human mind. Drawing on Plato’s intimation that “love is the foundation of ­philosophy,” called “philo-​sophia, love of wisdom” (197) in ancient Greek, Bringhurst wonders whether the philosopher, who trusted the lexical accuracy of his mother tongue, could not have chosen a better denomination for poetry, “something like ὀντοφιλία (ontophilia, love of being) or φιλογαῖα (philogaia, love of the earth)–​something descriptive of poetry’s posture” (197). If such had been the case, “he might have thought more fruitfully and charitably about what poetry and philosophy have in common” (197), argues the Canadian poet. Plato was clear that music was at the very root of the moral life and of ontology, so Bringhurst is puzzled that he did not go any further into the link between music and poetry. Any discussion of the relations between poetry and philosophy, Bringhurt argues, is fruitless if music is not brought to it, for all three domains “form a kind of conceptual nucleus” (197). He further elaborates on the connection between the three of them: “poetry, truth, and music are names for aspects of reality as

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well as names for things we make and do” (197–​198). Poetry is, among other things, “a name for a characteristic or condition of reality. Poetry is the lucky form of reality, not just the lucky form of language – in the same way that music is the lucky form of truth, not just the lucky form of sound” (198). If poetry is a characteristic of reality and philosophy is “the attempt to understand and accept reality” (198), there is then no reason to dissociate philosophy from poetry. The profound implication thereof is that “the realization of the poetry of reality in the poetry of language” (i.e., the act of writing poetry) turns out to be “an essential philosophical act: an act without which philosophy isn’t complete, isn’t itself, isn’t honest and faithful to what-​is” (198). Poetry is, thus, not just the name of “something present in reality,” but also “the name of a corresponding kind of linguistic and intellectual behavior. Poetry gets written, or orally composed, because mind and language are trying to answer to the poetry of the real” (199). The roots of Bringhurst’s thought on poetry are to be found in previous essays where he discusses the nature of poetry and its epistemological implications. His is an ars poetica that transcends words and sees poetry as a ubiquitous aspect of reality. Thus, in a seminal essay like “Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing is Known,”45 thinking deeply about poetry and the kind of knowing it makes possible, he writes: I don’t know how poetry knows. What it knows I also cannot say, though I have heard poetry say it, so I know it in that passive sense. That it knows seems to me only a kind of tautology poorly phrased. I  would rather say that poetry is one among the many forms of knowing, and maybe it is knowing in the purest form we know. I would say that knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control –​ knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being, hearing and echoing the music and heartbeat of being –​is what we mean by poetry. (15) What poetry knows, or what it strives to know, is the dancing at the heart of being. […] Poetry is knowing. Knowing is moving in tune with being. (16)

Bringhurst is not alone in thinking about poetry, knowledge and reality in this way. Like philosophy, poetry is “thinking in love with clarity” (Zwicky, “Dream Logic” 140), which comes as no surprise, since philosophy has been traditionally understood as “the love of wisdom” (142) and the word “wisdom” has an ancient pedigree. A look at its etymology reveals that the adjective “wise” “is very old and comes from a generalized Indo-​European root meaning to see or to know” (144). As 45 First published in Chicago Review (Chicago) 39.3–​4 (1993): 138–​147. It was later revised in Poetry and Knowing: Speculative Essays and Interviews, edited by Tim Lilburn, Kingston, Ontario: Quarry Press, 1995: 52–​64. Then it became the opening piece in Bringhurst’s volume of collected essays Everywhere Being Is Dancing:  Twenty Pieces of Thinking, Kentville, Nova Scotia:  Gaspereau Press, 2007.

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the incarnation of a five-​pointed conversation concerning the relationship between poetry and philosophy, the volume Thinking and Singing. Poetry & the Practice of Philosophy (2002), edited by Lilburn, gathers the illuminating words of poets and friends Dennis Lee (on cadence), Don McKay (on wilderness and metaphor), Tim Lilburn (on the eros driving philosophy), Jan Zwicky (on lyric philosophy) and Robert Bringhurst (on poetry as a form of knowing being) apropos a question posed by Lilburn in the Preface to the book: “What does poetry know and how does it know” (1). Their thinking testifies to an ongoing interest in the connections and intersections between both disciplines, and in how poetry knows what it knows as a sharpened mode of understanding. Poetry and thinking are inseparable –​their very juxtaposition seems even tautological –​, they all seem to agree, and most significant to them, poetry offers an alternative way of thinking. As Lilburn observes, “[t]‌he hunch slowly grew in me that poetry was a particular form of knowing that dominant, current thinking […] didn’t know or had forgotten. […] Poetry was a way of doing philosophy, perhaps was the true way or a residual version of this” (“Preface” 1–​ 2). In Poetry and Knowing (1995), an earlier compilation of essays also edited by Lilburn, Zwicky writes that “[w]ithin the domain of lyrically expressed thought, the distinction between poetry and philosophy has no meaning” (“Bringhurst’s Presocratics” 77)  and that “[p]hilosophy without passion is bookkeeping in the history of ideas” (73), which clearly gestures towards the profound overlappings and crossings of both disciplines. In Thinking and Singing, interrogating the division between philosophy and poetry in their respective essays, all five poet-​thinkers “chip away at human illusions of superiority” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 7), give pre-​ eminence to listening as expressive of “receptivity for others’ natures and histories” and of “an escape from both egotism in the human realm and anthropocentrism in a broader context,” and find out that “the profoundest listenings are awake to the pre-​linguistic” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 9). In their view, “[p]‌oetry is largely listening” and so what is needed is “a kind of negative attention, an alert emptiness” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 2). Zwicky expresses it in memorable terms in Lyric Philosophy: “To attend is not necessarily to take action; it is, first and foremost, to listen” (L142). All over the world, conceived as a vast semiotic-​material network, “things are being said with or without words” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 15), and it is the poets’ mission to capture what is being said –​i.e., “the copious rhythms and interchanges of other species named or unnamed, as well as of everything formed from water, fire, air, and earth” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 10) –​as best they can through the medium of words that coalesce to form poems. In this regard, Lee thinks that a poem starts with rhythm, “in the preverbal flex and coherence the words arise from. A poem tries to enact that wordless tumble and surge in its

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own medium” (“Body Music” 19). He maintains that “[a]cts of rhythm attention [“a species of natural prayer” (42)] comprise a syntax for knowing the world” (20) and that “being is plural, with or without our permission. […] For polyrhythm is not a human creation. To think otherwise is hubris” (55). He further elaborates on this: “What a poem mimes is not a static structure, but an active cohering. Kinetic rhythms of being. A cosmophony, more than a cosmology” (23). For his part, McKay insists that we keep otherness scrupulously in mind and, building on Emmanuel Levinas’ thought, defines ethics as “the calling-​into-​ question of our freedom to control, process, or reduce the other” (“The Bushtits’ ” 69). It is with ethics, and not ontology, as suggested by Heidegger, “that we should begin our attempts to understand the world” (69). Quoting from Levinas’ essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (from Entre Nous), McKay goes straight to the heart of the matter: “addressing the other is inseparable from understanding the other” (69), which is to say that epistemology, ontology and ethics are interdependent. Address is thus “an acknowledgement of limits to personal freedom, a nod to others’ existence” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 7), and also a salutary reminder that we don’t own what we know. Addressing the other is not about taking dominion or control over them, but about “constructing respectful modes of interaction” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 7) between the self and the other, and between the self and the world at large. In other words, it is about “[e]‌nvisaging rather than naming” (McKay, “The Bushtits’” 72), a gesture that “acknowledges a responsibility, a limitation of the freedom of beings in favour of the other” (70). Attention and humility are in order. Lyric thought and humility go hand in hand. Zwicky expresses it succinctly in her essay “Bringhurst’s Presocratics”:  “Lyric celebrates the cosmos, not the perceiver thereof. […] Lyric thought is characterized by humility as much as by longing” (110). Bringhurst embraces the same sense of impersonality that marks ontic poetry –​i.e., one concerned not with the petty egotisms of the self but with the more-​than-​human world. “Composing a poem is a way of leaving the self behind and getting involved in something larger” (Bringhurst, “Poetry and Thinking” 145), since approaching reality with humility and gratitude requires that we do so in a state of utter nakedness, with arms wide open to the unknown. Faced with the endless fascinations of the world, rather than “accept[ing] human intelligence as the key to the universe,” all five poet-​thinkers go for a humbler way and choose “to live with the shortcomings of logic and the perpetual incompleteness of our knowledge” (Bartlett, “Introduction” 11). They accept the epistemological limits of homo sapiens, the ultimate unknowability of reality, and the sense of radical uncertainty that is intrinsic to our attempt to understand breathing Earth. An awareness of limits is wisdom, and to love

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wisdom (and knowledge) is “to know (in the sense of acknowledge) that we do not know (in the sense of have an articulate account)” (Zwicky, “Dream Logic” 148)  all that there is to be known about a vibrant cosmos. Furthermore, they accept that all knowledge is “carnal knowledge” (Lee, “Body Music” 21), one made possible by the immersion of the body in “the rhythmic coherence of what is” (“Body Music” 42), in the “sounding plethora” of “manifold being” (“Body Music” 49), for no other kind of knowledge is possible if it does not feed on the porous, sentient body’s response to or intra-​action with the beings populating the world. There is not “a total whiteout of the ego” (“Body Music” 57), but the Cartesian division between “self-​contained subject/​observer” (“Body Music” 57) and perceived object is weakened. In “Going Home,” Lilburn, for his part, advocates the need to “begin from scraps” and “learn the names for things as a minimum –​not to fulfil taxonomies but as acts of courtesy” (184) when we are trying to be in a place. In an act of topophiliac devotion, he urges us to “[p]‌ractice an activism of forgetting the royalty of one’s name, of yielding, of stepping aside. This will be like breathing with the whole body, the new, larger body of a place that might take us in” (184). He further adds: “a sense of the distance of things has a wonderful ascetic effect: it breeds deference; it provides optimum growing conditions for admiration” (185). Knowing is “being looked after” (185). Zwicky qualifies the nature of the attention we pay to things: “An I think we pay attention to ‘em different if we think we’re doing ’em a favour (like missionaries for the natives) than if we think they’re out there on their own, doin just fine thank you, irregardless of us” (“Once Upon a Time” 196), which echoes Heidegger’s exhortation to let things alone and “‘let beings be,’ rather than reducing them to the status of ‘standing reserve’” (McKay, “The Bushtits’ ” 69). Building on Heidegger, Zwicky dwells on “this Role of the Poet Stuff [as the Shepherd of Being], language as the House of Bein, and poetry as Primal Speech” (“Once Upon a Time” 194), on his ideas that “without human language, there ain’t nothing  –​not even Nothin” (194), just to conclude that “The disease is thinkin human language creates the world” (195–​196). In a crucial essay like “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger argues that “[l]anguage itself is poetry in the essential sense” (72), by which he means that language is much more than a tool of communication that serves the purpose of expressing what we know. Its primordial essence is “projective saying,” i.e., the naming of things, bringing what-​is into the open for the first time. “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings being to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being” (“The Origin” 71). Poetry is thus a force that opens up the realm of truth and brings humans to the measure of their being and their world; it is “the

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saying of the unconcealedness of what is” (“The Origin” 71). To Zwicky and her fellow poet-​thinkers, what-​is takes precedence: it antecedes language and homo sapiens’ attempts at understanding and verbalisation. Hence, she proposes that we re-​read Heidegger’s thought differently: Why not say ‘Language is the House of Bein’ an mean Bein is delicate ’n sensitive ’n needs protectin; an poets, who’re sposed to be good with words, can help out in this important task without any puffed ideas that they’re doin any more than holdin the door open or makin sure the plumbin’s fixed. They can care about Bein […] without thinkin they’re makin it happen. (“Once Upon a Time” 197)

As shepherds of being and embodied minds, poets do not cause the world to exist or make poetry happen in Zwicky’s train of thought. They are sensitive to the fragility, beauty and patterned resonance of what-​is, and so they seek to capture being in and through words as best they can. Poems are thus ultimately rhythmic and sonic artefacts born of the world or, in other words, the verbal embodiment or incarnation of the poets’ response to the heartbeat of being. As Lee puts it, “[e]‌mbedded in kinaesthetic space” (“Body Music” 57), the self is “one swatch of the plural whole” (57), because “[b]ody music is the mind of poetry. Its rhythms think who we are, and what the world is” (57).

II  An Embodied, Enworlded Mind “The land has a mind of its own,” writes Bringhurst (“The Mind of the Wild” 9), acknowledging that the earth is endowed with a vast consciousness and that homo sapiens is not the sole possessor of mind. On the contrary, human mind can be seen as ultimately stemming from this vaster mind around us, or, to put it differently, as an extension of a primal consciousness that encompasses all the minds of all the creatures populating the earth. With regard to the human mind and ecological interconnections, environmental feminist writer Susan Griffin writes: The mind is a physical place. The mind is made up of tissue and blood, of cells and atoms, and possesses all the knowledge of the cell, all the balance of the atom. Human language is shaped to the human mouth, made by and for the tongue, made up of sounds that can be heard by the ear. And there is to the earth and the structure of matter a kind of resonance. We were meant to hear one another, to feel… We are connected not only by the fact of our dependency on this biosphere and our participation in one field of matter and energy, in which no boundary exists between my skin and the air and you, but also by what we know and what we feel. (“Split Culture” 17)

Likewise, in an early essay titled “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest” (1923), Aldo Leopold muses on earth as being a vast breathing

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body endowed with a consciousness of its own. He argues that “[m]‌any of the world’s most penetrating minds have regarded our so-​called “inanimate nature” as a living thing” (94). In this conception of an “organized animate nature” (94), it is possible “to regard the earth’s parts –​soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere, etc. –​as organs, or parts of organs, of a coordinated whole” (95) and to ascribe to earth “that invisible attribute  –​a soul, or consciousness  –​which […] many philosophers of all ages, ascribe to all living things and aggregations thereof ” (95). And he adds: “[I]n our intuitive perceptions, […] we realize the indivisibility of the earth –​its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being” (95). The hunch that the earth is a living, breathing organism comes from afar, though. It can be traced further back in time to earlier philosophers and some of the sharpest minds that have existed on this planet. Thus, in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, Anchises, Aeneas’ father, “full of the knowledge that his life in the afterlife has brought him, tells his son […] something of the structure of the cosmos” (Sanger, Oikos 9). In Dryden’s 1697 Virgil’s Aeneid, his translation of the original Latin text, the passage reads thus: Know first, that heaven and earth’s compacted frame, And flowing waters, and the starry flame, And both the radiant lights, one common soul Inspires and feeds and animates the whole. This active mind, infused through all the space, Unites and mingles with the mighty mass. Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain, And birds of air and monsters of the main. The ethereal vigour is in all the same; And every soul is filled with equal flame. (Virgil 235–​236)

In the original, Virgil speaks of “mens agitat molem,” which literally means “mind stirs the soil.” Dryden has perceptively rendered it into English as “This active mind, infused through all the space /​Unites and mingles with the mighty mass,” emphasising that “a metaphysical ‘mens’ animates a physical ‘molem’ ” (Sanger, Oikos 11) –​i.e., that matter is not inert or dead stuff, that the cosmos has a mind that is palpable in a myriad of life forms. Most significantly, in his translation of Virgil’s words, Dryden gives prominence to the common breath shared by men, beasts, birds and monsters, which is expressive of what ecophilosopher David Abram would term a ‘Commonwealth of Breath’ (Abram, “Afterword” 313) some centuries later. It is air that suffuses the larger, luminous world and brings all life forms into an indivisible whole. In Becoming Animal, Abram sets himself the ambitious task of restoring homo sapiens’ sense that

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we are enworlded, embodied minds, part of  –​ not apart from  –​ a more-​than-​ human world where we are sensuously immersed qua sentient bodies. This amounts to acknowledging “our interbeing with the earth” and to cultivating in us “a new humility in relation to other earthborn beings” (Becoming Animal 3). In constructing an earthly cosmology and sensuous physics of being, prompted in part by the disastrous consequences of our increasing detachment from the living world and the relentless devastation of the biosphere in the Anthropocene, Abram comes up with precious insights concerning the unity and interconnectedness of being, our vibrant animal bodies’ yearning for the larger body of earth, and the recognition of embodied, earthly intelligences other than our own. The earth is thus a breathing body populated by things or material bodies that are ensouled and share a universal material substratum that connects them across a vast network of material-​semiotic relationships. Let us turn now to the essential tenets of Abram’s ecophilosophical thinking, which are central to Bringhurst’s own polyphonic ecopoetics. Consciousness, meaningful speech and thought, which we ascribe to homo sapiens alone, are not the sole prerogative of our species. In Abram’s view, consciousness or awareness is not “an interior human trait” that comes into full bloom in our skulls, but rather “a ubiquitous quality of the world” (Becoming Animal 37). Most importantly, faced with “the profusion of bodily forms” and “the innumerable styles of sentience that compose the earthly cosmos,” the perception of one’s breathing body as “a locus of awareness” (selfhood) “co-​arises with the earliest experience of otherness” (38). Since early childhood, the “self begins as an extension of the breathing flesh of the world, and the things around us, in turn, originate as reverberations echoing the pains and pleasures of our body” (38). The thought dawns on us that we inhabit a breathing cosmos, that everything lives, and that we are sensuously embedded in a vibrant network of relationships, in “a wild community of dynamically intertwined and yet weirdly different lives” (41). Later on in life, we are drawn deeply into the vortex of language, which is not an exclusively human possession either, Abram maintains, but “a property of the animate earth” (Becoming Animal 11). Human speech arose as a response to an expressive “cosmos that already spoke to us in a myriad of tongues” (4), and so its fundamental function is not mimesis, “not to re-​present the world around us, but to call ourselves into the vital presence of that world –​and into deep and attentive presence with one another” (11). Language is thus much more than a tool for communication and knowledge in our epistemological confrontation with the world at large; it is a membrane mediating our relationship with an expressive cosmos populated by entities that are vessels of meaning in themselves. In this context, thought is “engendered by the difficult eros and tension between our

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flesh and the flesh of the earth” (4), since it is our sensing and sentient animal body that remains “the primary instrument of all our knowing” (8). As a result, knowledge is always carnal and feeds on the participatory life of our senses in a world where material things are also bodies. In other words, knowledge stems from our intra-​action with “the more-​than-​human matrix of corporeal encounter and experience” (7). It is “the inexhaustible otherness of being” (45) that sustains our desire to know, even if the beings and things that arrest our gaze can be known only partially. Because “I myself am a thing myself,” because “I am a body” and “not a disembodied mind,” writes Abram in words reminiscent of Karen Barad’s onto-​epistemology, I “can encounter things only from my own thingly position in the midst of them” (45). Unavoidably, we are a part of the world we seek to know and understand. What is more, I  have “only a finite access to the things around me” (45), owing to the “the ultimate unknowable-​ ness of things” (70). This acknowledgment is a salutary reminder that humans cannot possess what-​is for good through the act of knowing, and so the ultimate unknowability of the world is to be accepted and embraced instead. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s phenomenology, Abram claims that the act of sensory perception is the bedrock of human knowledge, the most elemental evidence of “the ongoing interweavement” (Becoming Animal 58) of our porous bodies with the sensuous world. As he puts it, We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because […] we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight. Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, and touched by the beings around us. (Becoming Animal 63)

The implications of Abram’s core insights are profound. As animal bodies, we are part of the living biosphere that we ponder and seek to understand. We “are woven of the same fabric” and we are “palpably entwined with all that we see, and hear, and touch” (71) in the vast mesh of living things comprising the earth. In sum, “we are in and of the world” (72), materially embedded in a gigantic field of agentic beings –​in the thick of earthly life –​, and so “[a]‌ll our knowledge […] is carnal knowledge, born of the encounter between our flesh and the cacophonous landscape we inhabit” (72), replete with beings that are participant, with us, in an ongoing process of shared becoming. In evolutionary terms, if we accept that the human species has been shaped by forces operating in the enfolding biosphere, “the matrix within which our organism came to acquire its current form” (78), then

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we are bound to acknowledge that “we are born of this planet, our attentive bodies coevolved in rich and intimate rapport with the other bodily forms  –​animals, plants, mountains, rivers –​that compose the shifting flesh of this breathing world” (78). What unites all living forms is nothing more and nothing less than air, “an amniotic substance” and “an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world” (101) in which all living forms are immersed. Abram suggests that we call it “Eairth” instead of simply Earth, so as to emphasise that the self or ‘I’ is firmly inscribed within that fluid element. Recognition of our thingly nature and of our substantial kinship with a breathing earth has a sobering, salutary impact on our deeply-​ingrained tendency toward self-​aggrandisement and sense of exceptionalism. Our sense of wonder is re-​awakened to the boundless exuberance of the world, our bodily senses are refreshed and cleansed as it were, and reality is re-​enchanted as a result. In fact, the original dichotomy in Descartes’ philosophy was not between mind and body, but rather a deep divide “between the mind and the whole of the material world” or, in other words, “between mind and materiality, or between sentience and the sensuous cosmos” (Becoming Animal 109). What made the Cartesian segregation of the mind from the body highly pernicious was the fact that it empowered the “rational mind of the Enlightenment” to comprehend and master the material cosmos, “to reflect upon the material world as though it were not a part of the world” (108), from an objective, detached position outside of nature. Hence, the act of knowing became an act of mastery and owning. In the Modern Era, which marked the beginning of science as we know it nowadays, the dissolution of a pre-​Copernican ordered cosmos (conceptualised as a huge interior or warm enclosure) led to Europeans finding themselves “adrift in a limitless space, a pure outside” (155), experiencing nature as “a pure exterior,” which gave rise to “the modern conception of mind as a wholly private interior, and hence of each person as an autonomous isolated individual” (155), endowed with an inner world of their own. Our “solitary sense of inwardness,” Abram claims, “is born of the forgetting [of] […] the ancestral sense of the surrounding earthly cosmos as the voluminous inside of an immense Body, or Tent, or Temple” (154). Baruch Spinoza offered a different version of the matter instead, countering the Cartesian premise that mind is “a special possession of our species” (Becoming Animal 108). “[E]‌very tangible body within the material world,” Spinoza maintained, “is also an idea within the vast, encompassing intelligence that was known inwardly (to some) as God and outwardly (to all) as nature” (109). Mind and matter are thus but “two different attributes, or aspects, of one and the same substance, which he [Spinoza] called Deus, sive Natura, “God, or Nature”” and so “all things were ensouled” (109). Consequently, if we leave behind

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“the assumption of a limitless human mind (or spirit)” (47) taking dominion over the natural, material world through the act of knowledge, if we allow that matter is not dead, but animate and self-​organising instead, if we accept that intelligence or mind is “an attribute of nature in its entirety” (109), as Spinoza’s prescient intuition suggests, then the Cartesian division between res cogitans (mind, spirit) and res extensa (body, matter) collapses and we find ourselves in the midst of “a diversely differentiated field of animate beings” (47). No longer is homo sapiens on the summit of the hierarchy of existence, but rather in the midst of an enmeshed continuum of life, “our own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape” (47). Mind is a property or an aspect of the cosmos, and human beings qua embodied minds partake of the wider intelligence of the earth. “Mind as a medium” (124), enfolding us and circulating through our porous bodies: mind as a fluid medium in which we are materially situated –​ sensuously immersed  –​alongside a profusion of ensouled things; a medium from which we cannot extricate ourselves without compromising our very existence. The mind is the world, and the world is the mind. As Abram argues, the brain is “an introjected earth” or, in other words, “an introjection of the earth, an analogue or avatar of the planet happily riding atop our spine” (128). The world we inhabit is “our larger flesh, a densely intertwined and improvisational tissue of experience” (143), and all bodily natures are kindred, “interdependent constituents of a common biosphere, each of us experiencing it from our own angle” (143). Abram concludes thus: After three and a half centuries spent charting and measuring material nature as though it were a pure exterior, we’ve at last begun to notice that the world we inhabit (from the ocean floor to the upper atmosphere) is alive. The feelings that move us […] are born of the ongoing interchange between our life and the wider Life that surrounds us. They are no more ours than they are the Eairth’s. They blow through us, and often change us, but they are not our private possession, nor an exclusive property of our species. With the other animals […] we’re all implicated within this intimate and curiously infinite world, poised between the tactile landscape underfoot and the leaden sky overhead, between the floor and the ceiling, each of us crouching or tumbling or swooping within the same big interior. Inside the world. (Becoming Animal 158)

We are part of a breathing earth, the one Bringhurst’s polyphonic lyric turns to over and over again so as to step in tune with the heartbeat of being. Over five decades he has been attending to what-​is and composing poems which are his way of responding to the vitality he senses in the more-​than-​human world. Confronted with the mind of the wild, Bringhurst has breathed through the feet and paid sustained ecological attention  –​a form of attention sensitive to the

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beauty and fragility of oikos –​not to the self, but to something larger and more fascinating that comprises us all: to poetry as a quality of reality, to the patterned resonance of what-​is, to the heartbeat of being. Born in the voice (that is, born in and out of the depths of a sensuous body), his polyphonic lyric seeks to emulate the mind, the flesh and the rhythms of a many-​voiced earth, and by emulating them, to make visible and celebrate the deep bonds that unite homo sapiens to other earthen beings along a boundless continuum of existence. Poetry and philosophy are synonymous and rhyming gestures in a lifelong emotional and intellectual project that responds to the poetry of the real and dwells on ontological form. Moments of ontic revelation are what Bringhurst expresses in language of gnomic clarity, in words with the texture of crystal that sing loud and clear of what-​is.

III Anthropocene Lyric and the Wild In “The Mind of the Wild,” one of the three meditations gathered in Learning to Die (2018), Bringhurst defines the wild as “everything that grows and breeds and functions without supervision or imposed control” (12), “sufficient to itself –​self-​ directed, self-​sustaining, self-​repairing, with no need for anything from us” (13). Further elaborating on the concept, he claims that the wild is “a big, self-​integrating system whose edges are everywhere and whose centre is nowhere” (33)46 and “has room within it for humans but does not need and cannot tolerate human domination” (10). Reminding us of the interdependence of homo sapiens with the nonhuman (i.e., we are a part of –​not apart from –​a breathing earth) and of the need for humans to rethink the way we relate to the biosphere, Bringhurst writes: The wild is not a portfolio of resources for us or our species to buy and sell or manage or squander as we please. The wild is earth living its life to the full. The earth’s life is much larger than our own lives, but our lives are part of it. If we take that life, we take our own. (12)

Liminal creatures as we are, existing “on the margins of the wild” (Bringhurst, “The Mind of the Wild” 32), the wilderness is the only place to go to calibrate one’s mind and hone one’s awareness to the heartbeat of being, “because it’s what your mind was born from” (32). Put simply, the earth is “a moral and 46 In “The Etiquette of Freedom,” one of the essays collected in The Practice of the Wild (1990), Gary Snyder observes something similar. The wildness is pervasive and ubiquitous: “it is everywhere: ineradicable populations of fungi, moss, mold, yeasts, and such that surround and inhabit us” (14). Homo sapiens’ embodied minds are also wild: “the depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas” (16). Even language has room for the wild, as he affirms in “Tawny Grammar,” also included in The Practice of the Wild: “The grammar not only of language, but of culture and civilization itself, is of the same order as this mossy little forest creek, this desert cobble” (76).

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ethical benchmark” (38), “the basic moral reference is the ground beneath your feet” (39). In the midst of the Anthropocene, because “the dominant human culture is increasingly toxic to the wild” (20), it is of the essence that “we learn to think like an ecosystem” (36) more than ever before. A  sobering dose of humility, attention and deep listening are in order, the one gained “just by spending a day in the wild –​alone with reality, keeping quiet and letting things unfold” (31), embracing a form of “reverential silence” (30) that leaves all egotism behind, claims Bringhurst in words evocatively reminiscent of Thoreau’s Walden. Once again, Bringhurst is not alone in thinking about the wild like this. Recognising that humans cannot be separated from the land, Leopold gives voice to beautifully similar ideas in an essay titled “Wherefore Wildlife Ecology” (1947). The land “is something more than a breadbasket” (337), he affirms. It is “a community of which [homo sapiens] is only a member, albeit now the dominant one. […] We love (and make intelligent use of ) what we have learned to understand” (337). For his part, in a perceptive essay titled Oikos (2014), Sanger dwells on the etymology and meaning of the word “ecology,”47 whose definition is “of crucial interest to us as living human beings” (5). Sanger quotes the definition given by the Oxford Concise Dictionary in its fourth edition of 1951:  “a branch of biology dealing with living organisms’ habits, modes of life and their relations to their surroundings” (5). A  look at the etymology of the word reveals that it derives “from the Greek oikos, which means ‘house’ ” and from “the word logos, meaning ‘word’ or ‘reason’” (6). Thus, according to its semantic roots, ‘ecology’ means “‘house reason’ or ‘house words’ ” (6). Grasping the full meaning of the word entails

47 According to Jonathan Bate, “[t]‌he word ‘ecology’ (oekologie) was coined in 1866 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel and defined more fully by the same scientist in 1870: […] ‘the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—​the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment’ ” (77). While ecology, from oikos and logos, is literally the “study of the house,” ecocriticism is the “criticism of the house,” which is to say of the environment as represented in literary works of art. And yet the definition of oikos is a challenge in itself. In What Is Nature? (1995), Kate Soper sought to answer this fundamental question. In her conceptualisation, nature was, as opposed to culture, “everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity” or, put simply, absolute “‘otherness’ to humanity” (15). This was the most fundamental sense of the term “nature,” which Soper also defined as being “that totality of being of which we in some sense conceive ourselves as forming a part” (21). Nature is thus “both that which we are not and that which we are within” (21) at the same time.

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acknowledging that “the biological is our home” (6), that oikos or earth is home, and so ‘ecology’ is “‘earth word,’ ‘earth reason’” (6). To Sanger, though he does not mention the word explicitly, the Anthropocene represents “the moment in technological possibility where ‘ecocide,’ ‘genocide’ and ‘suicide’ have become synonymous terms” (7), since, in light of the current practices of dominant capitalist societies, “earth reason, the house reason of ecological economy, is denied or ignored” (7). In Bringhurst’s definition, the Anthropocene is “a human-​d ominated geological epoch” begun with the Industrial Revolution, “an episode in geologic time during which the wild is subverted by the tame” and also “a geological event: a momentary though possibly momentous blip in the earth’s biography” (“The Mind of the Wild” 17). It is expressive of hubris and of humans’ concerted attempt at destroying the biosphere as the home life has built for itself over eons of time. Oikos or the nonhuman world has been one of the perennial preoccupations of lyric, and so nature poetry has deep roots in Western and Eastern traditions alike. Yet a new species of nature poetry has emerged in the face of the climate crisis put into train by the onset of the Anthropocene, aggravated in the second half of the 20th century by the acceleration of globalisation, industrialisation and overpopulation, as well as by the strain they all put on the earth’s resources and life-​sustaining capacity. In this context, ecopoetry or Anthropocene lyric is not just a form of giving voice to socio-​cultural critique, but also a call to “stir readers to action in new ways” (Bryson, The West Side 3), since it is not oblivious to the ethical dimension inherent in poets’ vocation to bear witness to their times. Honouring the etymology of the word “ecopoetry,” ecopoets are, in Bryson’s view, place-​makers, sensitive to oikos as the shared home of life. In composing ecopoems inspired by a breathing earth that is seriously imperiled in the Anthropocene, they draw readers’ attention to the interconnectedness of the more-​than-​human world and cultivate Tuanian topophilia, i.e., “the affective bond between people and place or setting” (Tuan and Schoff 4). Thus, ecopoems seek to nurture in humans a strong sense of “topophiliac devotion to the places we inhabit” (Bryson, The West Side 12), help us to reorient ourselves in the world, navigate it and make it place, home. An ethics of care is thus instilled in humans, which might ultimately lead us to view the natural world not as a pure exterior or a commodity to exploit as we please, but rather as a home we are called on to protect from the pernicious practices of industrial societies. Humility is also part of the ecopoet’s mission. A deep sense of humility flourishes in us when the epiphany occurs: we are a small thread in the mesh of living things and

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we are bound to accept its ultimate unknowability. Knowing is not an act of domination, but the humble awareness of our own epistemological limits. Building on Bryson’s insights, and drawing on Abram’s eco-​philosophical thought on the symposium of the whole48 that the breathing earth is, Bristow proposes a different label for ecopoetry, “Anthropocene lyric,” and suggests that the term “more-​than-​human” reminds us of the mutual dependency of the human and the nonhuman. He claims that the Anthropocene lyric encourages us to see homo sapiens “not within the world but of the World” (2) or “enworlded” (129), a conception that counteracts human exceptionalism and the centuries-​ old Cartesian split between “matter and mind as ontologically distinct and irreducible categories” (126). By cultivating a form of sensitivity to what Bristow calls “perilinguistic wavelengths” (3), the Anthropocene lyric enhances humans’ awareness of the beauty and vulnerability of the biosphere, of “the plight of biodiversity loss and species extinction, supervened by human-​induced climate change” (3), and encourages us to perceive the earth as a community of sentient beings where the human and nonhuman realms are mutually interdependent. As an ecopoet and multifaceted humanist, Bringhurst’s artistic-​intellectual project of a lifetime “seeks to re-​enchant the world” (Wood & Dickinson, “Introduction” 5), but not from the perspective of an intellectual observing life from his ivory tower, but rather with his feet firmly planted on the ground, responding to the conundrums of his age –​an age marked by ecological calamity, climate crisis and precarity –​and seeking to offer generous insight to his fellow human beings. If anything, Bringhurst cares deeply about other species and about homo sapiens, and is deeply committed to the calling of poetry. Approaching the world with intense curiosity and deep empathy for both the human and nonhuman, he embraces the robust conviction that poetry can help us navigate our relationship with the world by encouraging us to cultivate the kind of attentiveness that poetry fosters. The capacity of poetry to ethically fashion the human imagination, so that it comes to rethink the way homo sapiens relates to the earth, is not to be ignored. Ecopoetry has the power to prompt individuals to take responsible action to change things for the better and to envision alternative ways of dwelling on earth, with a sense of duty and responsibility. In this regard, Bringhurst cultivates a poetry that is firmly rooted in the more-​than-​human world. As the purest form of knowing, and as a characteristic of the reality it seeks to understand, poetry cannot be simply stripped of its ethical dimension. 48 As Roszak and Roszak observe, “all things and creatures on Earth share a common destiny. We are linked to one another in what the poet Robert Duncan once called a symposium of the whole” (226).

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According to McNeilly, Bringhurst’s poetry represents “a call to interrogate both ontology and praxis, self and action” (60) and seeks hard to enact a “recovery of the vestiges of possible relationship, of ecological bond” (60). There is a strong moral dimension to Bringhurst’s disavowal of “ownership-​claims,” “of any deliberately sinecured form of human property or dominion” (McNeilly 52), as expressed in his polyphonic poems and essays alike. Faced with the unprecedented overexploitation of the earth’s resources and the mass extinction of species put in train by “overbreeding, overbuilding, overexploiting, overhunting, overfishing, and by relentlessly consuming fossil fuel” (Bringhurst, “The Mind of the Wild” 19), the poet sees it as part of his mission to instil in us a sense that “human gain can come only by renouncing human gain” (McNeilly 57), that ecology is “a question of response and responsibility, of careful exchange:  human beings cannot keep taking, without giving back” (McNeilly 58). Bringhurst’s poetic agenda is thus a timely response to an unprecedented climate crisis, but also part of a particular Zeitgeist. Given the acceleration of environmental degradation we are witnessing in the Anthropocene, it is no wonder that, in the early decades of the 21st century, we are witnessing the emergence of new ways of thinking about the human  –​also thinking beyond the human –​that “recognise the imbrications of social and ecological factors” (Huggan and Tiffin viii) in the age of neoliberal capitalism, “characterised by the conspicuously uneven distribution of natural resources, the forced displacement of animals and people, and routine abuses of transnational corporate power” (viii) that have manifested themselves in a variety of expulsions, as theorised by sociologist Saskia Sassen in Expulsions (2014). At the very centre of its agenda, the so-​called environmental humanities have placed “the moral and ethical relations that obtain between humans and non-​humans in an ecologically threatened world” (Huggan and Tiffin viii) so as to counteract “technocratic approaches to environmental management by emphasising the historical depth and cultural specificity of current environmental problems” (Huggan and Tiffin viii). Given “the capacity of environmental texts to model ecocentric thinking” (Buell, The Environmental Imagination 143), poems can change the world for the better indeed, as they can act as catalysers for action that quicken environmentalist commitment. In this regard, Huggan and Tiffin do not hesitate to highlight “the capacity of poetry to counteract the instrumentalism of hyper-​rationalist and materialistic values and to celebrate ‘the totality of nature’ by engaging with human feelings and sympathies in a broadly intersubjective, mutually beneficial way” (104). In the face of the ubiquitous depredations of neoliberal capitalism, literary texts have the “capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for the

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material transformation of the world” (Huggan and Tiffin 14), as “there is no social justice without ecological justice” (37), which is one of the fundamental premises of postcolonial ecocriticism. Imaginative literature can be thus turned into “a catalyst for social action” (12), inasmuch as it can “make exploitation and discrimination of all kinds, both human and nonhuman, visible in the world; and, in so doing, […] help make them obsolete” (16). In this context, environmental writing or environmentally-​sensitive texts –​like Bringhurst’s –​are overtly marked by a deep sense of engagement, ­commitment and denunciation of practices that are damaging or destructive to the more-​than-​ human world. Ecological degradation is a form of slow violence, as conceptualised by Rob Nixon in his homonymous book: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (2) striking mostly “those people lacking resources” (4) in developing or third-​world countries of the Global South. To Nixon, it is a matter of the utmost urgency to have writer-​activists that succeed in voicing this slow violence through works of imaginative literature. In this regard, the Anthropocene lyric, as a species of environmental writing, can ultimately make slow violence visible and instil in people a sense of the urgency to rethink our relationship with the more-​than-​ human world in light of today’s climate crisis. This is poetry as a form of radical commitment to preserving the integrity of the more-​than-​human world and as an agent of (social) transformation, capable of changing the current state of affairs for the better. In fact, in a manifesto titled “Bring Your Shovel!” (2014), Alaimo calls for “a posthumanist resilience, enacted through our immersion in networks that are ecological, material, technological, multispecies, and subcultural” (n.p.) and reminds us of the need to “undertake mundane revolutionary practices that foster intersubjective well-​being through a million minute attempts to foster the resilience of ecosystems, the survival of species, the just distribution of health, wealth and opportunity” (n.p.). Poetry might not save the earth, yet it can act as a catalyser in humankind’s attempts to attain environmental and social justice. It can shape our consciousness of the world around us and push us gently to responsible action. “Can poetry save the earth?,” asks John Felstiner in his homonymous book. And he answers: “For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken” (357).

IV Everywhere Being Is Dancing It is not necessary to spend a long time reading the impressive books composed by our ancestors –​poets and philosophers alike –​to learn one of the most

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elementary things about reality, which is the wholeness, unity, interconnectedness and sacredness of life, both human and nonhuman. All beings are precious, unique and irreplaceable, and yet intimately related to one another across a boundless continuum of existence. However enlightening and captivating the company of our ancestors might be, a look at the library outdoors will teach us as much, and in much less time, than thousands of volumes full of printed matter and valuable insights into what-​is. Our responsibility might be to try and make the most of whatever amount of fleeting time and ineffable beauty we are given on earth. Our proper job might be to pay attention. At any rate, being a humanist, if by humanist we mean someone who cares deeply about what it means to be human, entails being deeply interested in humankind –​in everything which is somehow related to human beings –​and in the mangle or mesh of which we are a part. The sacredness of life is one of the elementary things Bringhurst can teach readers who are sensitive to the fact that life is not solely human, but rather an attribute of a breathing earth. There are several other elementary lessons one can gain from reading or closely listening to Bringhurst’s poems and essays. First, the past is the nutriment of the present and we are all united by an indestructible bond that makes us members of the same species, homo sapiens, one more species among a myriad of species living together in this world, though we are self-​centred and short-​ sighted most of the time and seek to exert dominion over what exists. Second, language and culture are among the most precious legacy we have inherited from our ancestors, and we are bound by the responsibility to hand them down somewhat enriched or enlarged (never impoverished) from one generation to another. Third, there is no replica for the biosphere as the home life has built for itself, and so we had better take good care of a planet that is being incessantly assaulted by the greedy practices of dominant industrial societies, intent on ­destroying the earth. Fourth, poetry is a form of knowing, a way of coming to terms with and responding to reality with the maximum of intensity, and hence poetry is inextricably linked to philosophy and science, which are also forms of paying attention and responding to a polyphonic world. And fifth, poetry has nothing quintessentially to do with words or language, for poetry is in the very texture of things, and meaning –​which is not the sole prerogative of humans –​is vaster and precedes words in a world populated by expressive beings, endowed with a capacity for speech. Bringhurst’s poetry is a species of poetry that cultivates what Zwicky calls lyric thought or lyric philosophy, which the poet-​philosopher defines in these terms in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of Lyric Philosophy:

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Lyric thought is thinking whose eros is coherence, whose syntax is synchronic, whose structure is resonant. What is lyric thought for? For the discernment of lyric truth –​the nature of timeless, unlanguagable, resonant reality. Where the eros for coherence is coupled to an eros for clarity, the result is what I  have called lyric ­philosophy. […] What then is lyric philosophy for? I believe it is a necessary part of the attempt to discern the nature of the good life: how to be fully human in the larger human and nonhuman world. (n.p.)

If, as Zwicky argues, “[p]‌hilosophy is thinking in love with clarity” (Lyric Philosophy L18), then Bringhurst’s poetry, which attends to what-​is with a ­maximum of sensory and intellectual alertness, also dreams of clarity and accuracy. Zwicky says: “The virtue of precision is not just that it allows greater accuracy, but that it requires self-​discipline. […] True self-​discipline is a form of homage to what is not self ” (Lyric Philosophy L213). In Bringhurst’s view, “[p]oetry is a quality or aspect of existence. It is the thinking of things” (“Poetry and Thinking” 139), as the Presocratics anticipated with astonishing pre-​science about 2,500 years ago. Poetry is an attribute of reality. Poetry is being, and being is pervasive, inescapable and eternal. What-​is is also immutable and indestructible, a unity resembling Parmenides’ being, even though our senses might teach us exactly the opposite. But appearance is not essence, and Bringhurst is a poet dwelling in intellectual heights where the essence of things is what really counts in the end. At the heart of his poems is the primordial encounter between the perceiving subject and the perceived reality, or, to honour accuracy, an a­ wakening to the fact that we are sensuously immersed in the fabric of a world where we are just a tiny thread. At the interface between bone, blood and breath, on the one hand, and mountains, birds and trees, on the other hand, are human speech and the mind. Through the pristine act of perception –​an act which is always fresh and new, dependent on each and every one’s idiosyncrasies –​, humans listen to and speak with the world. The senses give us the raw materials or data we need to build concepts upon. Bringhurst’s poems are his way of responding to and conversing with the fragile beauty and vulnerable intricacy that he senses in the world. Like Thoreau, he might go to the woods not just in search of food for thought, but simply to pay attention and feel truly alive amid the manifold forms of life the forest embodies. Humility, tranquillity, silence, peace and quiet, gratitude, the unstoppable stillness of being: this is what he finds in the wilderness. He comes back whole to his study and he tries to capture by means of words the evanescent, fleeting moments of revelation with the texture of transcendence that he experiences when immersed in the wild. With the passage of time, he has found polyphonic poems to be the best vessels to emulate the democratic plurality of being he perceives in the world. Other humans would have simply made use of

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lines and colour on a canvas, musical notes on a pentagram, or mathematical formulae, to try to capture being. But the true mystery at the heart of knowing being is that knowledge becomes a part of the very fibre of your embodied self. Back in ancient Greece, Plato said in Protagoras 314b:  “μαθήματα δὲ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἄλλῳ ἀγγείῳ ἀπενεγκεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἀνάγκη καταθέντα τὴν τιμὴν τὸ μάθημα ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ψυχῇ·” (108). Bringhurst’s rendering of this piece of wisdom reads thus:  “You can’t carry knowledge away in a sack; when you’ve paid what knowledge costs, it is, unavoidably, part of your very own life” (What Is Reading For? 35). About 24 centuries later, Northrop Frye observed something similar in the opening lines of “The Instruments of Mental Production,” an essay collected in his book The Stubborn Structure: “the knowledge of most worth, whatever it may be, is not something one has:  it is something one is” (3). But Frye is aware that knowledge is not synonymous with wisdom, and so he adds: “The only knowledge that is worthwhile is the knowledge that leads to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life” (15). To Bringhurst, poetry is a form of concentration and his poems are his way of getting involved in, not taking control of, a breathing earth and the great feast of being, which is otherwise known as what there is to pay attention to. The paradoxical thing is that being does not let itself be captured so easily. It is not hidden, but it is hiding; it refuses to be caught by humans. We only need to pay attention to breathing Earth to let the more-​than-​human world speak to us loud and clear, for everywhere being is dancing, knowing is known.

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Bringhurst, Robert. Jacob Singing. San Francisco and Vancouver: Kanchenjunga Press, 1977. Bringhurst, Robert. The Stonecutter’s Horses. Vancouver, BC: Standard Editions [Pulp Press and William Hoffer], 1979. Bringhurst, Robert. Tzuhalem’s Mountain:  A Sonata in Three Movements. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan Books, 1982. Bringhurst, Robert. The Beauty of the Weapons:  Selected Poems 1970–​1982. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982. Bringhurst, Robert, Geoffrey James, Russell Keziere, and Doris Shadbolt, eds. Visions:  Contemporary Art in Canada. Vancouver and Toronto:  Douglas & McIntyre, 1983. Bringhurst, Robert. The Raven Steals the Light. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984. Bringhurst, Robert. Ocean/​Paper/​Stone. Vancouver, BC: William Hoffer, 1984. Bringhurst, Robert. Tending the Fire. Vancouver, BC: The Alcuin Society, 1985. Bringhurst, Robert. The Blue Roofs of Japan: A Score for Interpenetrating Voices. Mission, BC: Barbarian Press, 1986. Bringhurst, Robert. The Blue Roofs of Japan. Vancouver, BC: William Hoffer, 1986. Bringhurst, Robert. Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto:  McClelland & Stewart, 1986. Bringhurst, Robert. “Breathing through the Feet:  An Autobiographical Meditation.” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. 99–​110. Bringhurst, Robert. “Vietnamese New Year in the Polish Friendship Centre.” Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. 111–​121. Bringhurst, Robert. Shovels, Shoes and the Slow Rotation of Letters: A Feuilleton in Honour of John Dreyfus. Vancouver, BC: The Alcuin Society, 1986. Bringhurst, Robert. Conversations with a Toad. Vancouver, BC and Shawinigan, Québec: Éditions Lucie Lambert, 1987. Bringhurst, Robert, Catharine McClellan et  al. Part of the Land, Part of the Water: A History of the Yukon Indians. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1987. Bringhurst, Robert. The Black Canoe:  Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Point Roberts, Washington and Vancouver, BC: Hartley & Marks, 1992. Bringhurst, Robert. The Calling: Selected Poems 1970–​1995. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995.

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Bringhurst, Robert. Elements. New York: Kuboaa Press, 1995. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Point Roberts, Washington and Vancouver, BC: Hartley & Marks, 1996 (2nd edition). Bringhurst, Robert. Boats Is Saintlier than Captains: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Morality and Design. New York: Edition Rhino, 1997. Bringhurst, Robert. Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities. Vancouver,  BC:  University of British Columbia English Department, 1998. Bringhurst, Robert. A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, vol.  1. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1999. Bringhurst, Robert. Nine Visits to the Mythworld. Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, vol.  2. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000. Bringhurst, Robert. Being in Being: The Collected Works of Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, vol. 3. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2001. Bringhurst, Robert. The Book of Silences. Los Angeles, CA: Ninja Press, 2001. Bringhurst, Robert. Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers and Dancers. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2003. Bringhurst, Robert. The Fragments of Parmenides. Berkeley,  CA:  Editions Koch, 2004. Bringhurst, Robert, Koch, Peter et al. Carving the Elements: A Companion to the Fragments of Parmenides. Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2004. Bringhurst, Robert. Prosodies of Meaning: Literary Form in Native North America. Winnipeg, MB: Voices of Rupert’s Land, 2004. Bringhurst, Robert. The Solid Form of Language. An Essay on Writing and Meaning. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2004. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. Point Roberts, Washington and Vancouver, BC: Hartley & Marks, 2004 (3rd edition). Bringhurst, Robert. New World Suite No. 3. New York: Center for Book Arts, 2005. Bringhurst, Robert. “Afterword. Licking the Lips with a Forked Tongue.” New World Suite No. 3. New York: Center for Book Arts, 2005. 3–​16. Bringhurst, Robert. The Old in Their Knowing. Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2005. Bringhurst, Robert. And Much More, Not Ourselves: The Work of Jan & Crispin Elsted. Mission, BC: Barbarian Press, 2005. Bringhurst, Robert. Wild Language. Nanaimo,  BC:  Institute for Coastal Research, 2006.

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Bringhurst, Robert. The Typographic Mind. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006. Bringhurst, Robert. “Reading What Is.” Reading Writers Reading:  Canadian Authors’ Reflections. Ed. Danielle Schaub. Edmonton:  University of Alberta Press/​Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006. 195. Bringhurst, Robert. The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006. Bringhurst, Robert. “The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World.” The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006.  40–​45. Bringhurst, Robert. “The Vocation of Being, the Text of the Whole.” The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006. 46–​63. Bringhurst, Robert. “Native American Oral Literatures and the Unity of the Humanities.” The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006. 64–​80. Bringhurst, Robert. “Poetry and Thinking.” The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006. 139–​158. Bringhurst, Robert. “Wild Language.” The Tree of Meaning:  Thirteen Talks. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2006. 257–​276. Bringhurst, Robert. “The Silence That Is Not Poetry –​and The Silence That Is.” The Tree of Meaning:  Thirteen Talks. Kentville,  NS:  Gaspereau Press, 2006. 299–​322. Bringhurst, Robert. Everywhere Being Is Dancing:  Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007. Bringhurst, Robert. “Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing:  Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007. 15–​32. Bringhurst, Robert. “Singing with the Frogs:  The Theory and Practice of Literary Polyphony.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007. 33–​62. Bringhurst, Robert. “What Is Found in Translation.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing:  Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville,  NS:  Gaspereau Press, 2007.  73–​90. Bringhurst, Robert. “The Philosopy of Poetry and the Trashing of Doctor Empedokles.” Everywhere Being Is Dancing:  Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007. 93–​110. Bringhurst, Robert. The Surface of Meaning:  Book Design in Canada. Vancouver, BC: CCSP Press, 2008. Bringhurst, Robert. Why There Are Pages and Why They Must Turn. Berkeley, CA: Codex Foundation, 2008.

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