English Poetry in Quebec: Proceedings of the Foster Poetry Conference, October 12-14, 1963 9780773594210

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Quebec Proceedings of the Foster Poetry Conference October 12-14 1963 Edited by JOHN GLASSCO Montreal McGILL UNIVERSITY PRESS 1965

@ Copyright Canada 1965 McGill University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-18256 1000 copies printed by PImprimerie Judiciaire Enrg., Montreal

PREFACE

The inspired monk Bazhakuloff, whenever asked how he had arrived at a religious conception, answered that it simply came to him. The Foster Poetry Conference was conceived in much the same obscure way. All that is certain is that it had been stirring in the backs of the minds of F. R. Scott, A. J. M. Smith and myself for some time. We are all therefore responsible, except that my part in its evolution was a very minor one; the germinal idea merely came to me late in the summer of 1962. A few weeks later the project was broached to the two others—and it is their enthusiasm and judgment which mark its real genesis. By autumn it had been decided to hold some kind of informal conference of poets somewhere in the Eastern Townships at some time in the following spring. The seed then slumbered beneath the snow. Early in May the project was brought to the attention of Glendon Brown, M.L.A. for Brome, who volunteered to recommend a grant from the Quebec Government sufficient to cover the basic cost of any gathering of poets in Brome County. The receipt of $1,000 from Quebec at the end of August was our call to action. The first and only organizational meeting was held on September 1, 1963, when the date of Thanksgiving, originally proposed by Frank Scott, was finally adopted, and the outlines of a programme hammered out. Arthur 5

Smith planned the four seminars extempore, and suggested the leaders for each; he also agreed to deliver the paper, "The Poet and the Nuclear Crisis," which forms an important part of this book. Frank Scott undertook to persuade George Whalley to give another address— "Revolution and Poetry," which was to be another highlight of the proceedings. All this, together with a projected reading of poems by the participants, supplied the materials of a conference. Any further chronology would be out of place: it could only record the improvisations with which many difficulties were overcome and the dexterity with which still others were sidestepped or allowed to solve themselves. As it turned out, the resulting absence of ceremony was as much an element of the conference's success as were the informal surroundings of the Glen Mountain Ski Chalet in West Bolton where it was held: the atmosphere was, from the very beginning, free, uncluttered and spontaneous. On the other hand, the contents of this book reveal little of the ebullient character of the conference itself, any more than they afford a complete picture of what actually went on. The high standard of the formal discussions, the freedom and force of debate, the head-on collisions of opinion—these find only a partial reflection in the printed summaries of each seminar; while of the spate of controversy, badinage and invective which filled each night until dawn there is, alas, almost no record at all—and this is the more to be regretted because these informal sessions were at least as fruitful as the seminars themselves. For this was no sterile love-feast, no singsong or genteel eisteddfod. There was a constant sense of clash and conflict, not only between arriere-garde and avantgarde, between the forces of tradition and revolution, between the elders still presumably stumbling around in post-war academic darkness and the clear-sighted chil0

dren of a putative post-nuclear dawn, but between sharply differing conceptions of the role of the poet in society and even of the nature of poetry itself. There was indeed no one who did not contribute—either as one who spoke in foro, who murmured in the background, or who argued in the bar—to the nipping and eager air which was blowing during those three days. I have, however, spoken to no one who could define the essence of the gathering: it was variously likened to a convulsion, an electrical discharge, and an orgasm. I can add nothing to these definitions. Who can draw up Leviathan with a hook? Still, when such inchoate impressions had been received and noted, some sense of insufficiency persisted—and, the positive approach having drawn blank, it was decided to try the negative. A form letter was accordingly sent to all the participants asking for their uninhibited opinions of the proceedings, and stating that while bouquets would be thankfully received, brickbats would be of more value. It was both pleasant and, in a sense, disappointing to receive only criticisms of a minor and often contradictory nature—the seminars were not long enough; the conference itself was not long enough; the poetry reading was too long; it was too short; there were not enough older poets; there were not enough younger poets; there should have been more poets, more pundits, more iconoclasts, more critics, more students, more observers, more publicity; the quarters were too cramped; we should have been put on television. Nothing, in short, that could not have been done if there had been a little more money and at least twice the time to organize. The one point of agreement was that the gathering should be made an annual event. It is tempting to think that these overt reactions comprise the only criticism of the Foster Poetry Conference: perhaps they do. It is also tempting to think that all that was lacking was more money—and perhaps, insofar as 7

this would have allowed a fuller representation of delegates, it was. And, in the end, we must gratefully accept the verdict of these replies and conclude that, whatever unspoken dissatisfaction may still be felt with the temper and direction of English poetry in Quebec—however tedious, smug, hidebound and anaesthetized the older poets may appear to the younger, and however tedious, frightened, bewildered and incoherent the younger may appear to the older—the conference at least brought representatives of both age-groups into a friendly and often hilarious apposition, and clarified, though of course without reconciling, the aesthetic and intellectual positions which are always proper to each. The positive accomplishments of the conference are, however, already beyond dispute. It has served to initiate the idea of a continuing annual gathering of Quebec poets in rural surroundings; it has done the spadework of establishing the Eastern Townships as a natural focus of poetry not only for Quebec but perhaps for a large part of Eastern Canada; and it has supplied the framework for a possible rapprochement between French and English poets in Canada—something which is immediately necessary and in the long run inevitable. All these aims were set forth in a statement which was laid before the Minister of Cultural Affairs in Quebec in May, 1963; and, thanks to the grant which was made, all were achieved. This small conference may or may not take its place as a minor landmark in the history of English poetry in Quebec: that is for the future to determine. Plans are already being made for another conference to take place in 1965 in the village of North Hatley under the direction of Ralph Gustafson. It is hoped that the Foster Poetry Conference was only a beginning. John Glassco Foster,1964 8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Quebec Department of Cultural Affairs for the grant which made possible the Foster Poetry Conference; to Mr. Ralph Gustafson for recording the poetry reading; and to Mrs. Jocelyn Davoud for her invaluable services to the Editor as secretary. This work has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities Research Council of Canada using funds provided by the Canada Council. Many of the poems here printed have appeared in various collections and periodicals. Thanks for permission to reprint are due to the following: Cataract, for "The Game" and "For Kenneth Hertz" by Leonard Angel; Forge, for "For Dorothy, Age 16" by Sidney Aster; McClelland and Stewart, for "Alexander Trocchi, Public Junky, Priez pour Nous" by Leonard Cohen, from Flowers for Hitler; Delta, for "0 Montreal" by Louis Dudek; Limbo, Cataract and Oxford University Press, for "Lines" by John Glassco, from A Point of Sky; Delta and Contact Press, for "Kissing Natalia" and "Mountain Town—Mexico" by Eldon Grier, from A Friction of Lights; Harper's Bazaar, for "The Swans of Vadstena" and "Galla Placidia Builds her Tomb: Ravenna" by Ralph Gustafson; Tamarack Review and McClelland and Stewart, for "El Gusano," "El Caudillo" and "On Spanish Soil" by Irving Layton, from The Laughing Rooster; 9

Edge and Ryerson Press, for "Secret Flower", "The Comedians" and "To My Children" by Eli Mandel, from Dark and Secret Man; Catapult, for "R.I.P." and the Canadian Forum for "Mount Royal: an Aerial View" by Seymour Mayne, from That Monocycle the Moon (copyright by Seymour Mayne) ; Cataract and Delta, for "A Walk in the Mountains" by Henry Moscovitch; Cataract, for "Elegy for an Astronaut" by K. V. Hertz; the Canadian Forum, for "A Touch of Death Wish" by Alan Pearson; the Montreal Star and Klanak Press for "Eclipse," "Waiting" and "Mount Royal" by F. R. Scott, from Signature; Delta, Tamarack Review, and the Canadian Forum for "On Certain Canadian Poets", "My Lost Youth" and "Watching the Old Man Die" and Oxford University Press for "Business as Usual, 1946", "Fear as Normal, 1954" and "Universal Peace" from Collected Poems by A.J.M. Smith. Grateful acknowledgement is also made to Doubleday and Company, Inc. for "Elegy for Jane" from The Waking by Theodore Roethke, to McClelland and Stewart for "The Creative Process" by Irving Layton from The Laughing Rooster, and to The Centennial Review for "Revolution and Poetry" by George Whalley.

10

CONTENTS

5 Preface

John Glassco

9 Acknowledgements 13 The Poet and the Nuclear Crisis

A. J. M. Smith

29 The Creative Process

Irving Layton

43 The Poet in Quebec Today 51 The Reviewer of Poetry 59 The Little Magazine 65 Revolution and Poetry

F. R. Scott Milton Wilson Louis Dudek George Whalley

89 Selection of Poetry Readings 136 Resolutions adopted by the Foster Poetry Conference 137 Contributors 142 Delegates

THE POET AND THE NUCLEAR CRISIS A. J. M. Smith

These are times that try men's souls. I mean this literally. Not in the sense that men's souls are irked, annoyed, or exasperated, but that they are tested and brought to judgement. And this judgement is so deadly that if we fail or are found wanting, civilization, if not the race itself, faces annihilation—drawn up, like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus "Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud," and like Faustus also, unable to find a foolproof shelter: Then will I headlong run into the earth. Earth gape! 0, no, it will not harbour me! One almost feels that the description of Faustus' last hour is a prophecy of the fate of Faustian man, the Renaissance universal man, approaching its tragic climax in our own age. Professor Arnold Toynbee only last year described the nature of our plight in words that deserve to be remembered. 13

The year 1949 opened a new era in human history. Before that date the survival of the human race had been assured ever since the time, part way through the Paleolithic age, when mankind had won a decisive and unchallengeable ascendancy over all other forms of life on this planet as well as over inanimate nature. Between that time and the year 1949 man's crimes and follies could and did wreck civilizations and bring unnecessary and undeserved sufferings upon countless numbers of men, women, and children. But the worst that man could do with his pre-atomic technology was not enough to enable him to destroy his own race. Genocide, at least, was beyond his power until the atomic weapon had been invented and had been acquired by more states than one....

The tragic thing is that this fatal technological skill, which demands that man exert an almost superhuman moral self-control, has been acquired at the very moment when there has been, if not a breakdown, certainly a weakening of religious and ethical sanctions. The scientist, the statesman, and the soldier seem to have failed us. I suggest that we must turn to the scholar, the historian, the philosopher, and above all to the poet, who in his capacity as prophetic interpreter of the imagination may even become a saviour. The peculiar responsibility of the poet in this age of anxiety and fear is to awaken the imagination and touch the conscience of humanity. I say humanity because this is a work in which Frost and Pasternak are not rivals but collaborators. What are some of the qualities or properties of poetry that make it a fit instrument for registering (and affecting) the imaginative intuition and the ethical spirit of our time? The qualities we seek must be such as will sharpen our perception of reality and intensify our sense of what 14

it means to be a human being. Can poetry help us, in the apt phrase of Stringfellow Barr, to re-join the human race? I believe it can. Poetry has both a personal and a communal use. It draws mankind together by extending the power of feeling, while at the same time it sharpens and intensifies it. Poetry is an instrument of self-awareness, and awareness, like charity, begins at home. Without it we cannot usefully take up the burden of politics and ethics. The late R. G. Collingwood, the English philosopher and historian, in The Principles of Art, called poetry "the community's medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness." Because of its medicinal, therapeutic, and cathartic function, poetry must often seem distasteful. If I may repeat here what I said at the Kingston Conference, later published in Writing in Canada, "Poetry is language and feeling purified of the superficial. All the smooth, polite, gentle compromises that make for easiness and good humour in a suburban society, poetry brushes aside or ignores or penetrates beneath." Either directly or by implication it is critical and impatient. This is true not only of a Ginsberg, a Ferlinghetti, or an Irving Layton but of Catullus, Ovid, Dante, Donne, Blake, Baudelaire—of all the greatest poets. And of Swift, for all poets do not write in verse. By poetry I mean here imaginative and prophetic writing in whatever mode or form. Let me claim Swift as a poet, at least in his greatest work, and use him to illustrate my thesis. The great Dean of St. Patrick's, whose heart, as his self-composed epitaph tells us, was lacerated with savage indignation, has written in the second and fourth books of Gulliver's Travels some passages that since 1949 have taken on an intensity and relevance that even the dark mind of Swift could not have imagined. 15

Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, that typical patriotic well-meaning English medical man of the Whig ascendancy, is offering to communicate the modern European scientific know-how in the art of war to the humane and enlightened monarch of Brobdignag: In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into his Majesty's favour, I told him of an invention, discovered between three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain powder, into an heap of which the smallest spark of fire falling, would kindle the whole in a moment, ... and make it all fly up in the air together, with a noise and agitation greater than thunder. The good man of science goes on to describe the manufacture and use of cannon-balls, shells, cannon, mortars, and mines. He outlines the devastation that these instruments wreak upon f or tifi c at i ons, walls, towns, ships, and human bodies; and speaks of the irresistible power that the possession of such weapons would confer on the King, both for the purpose of keeping his own people subservient and of conquering his neighbour's dominions. But what does the King reply? The King was struck with horror at the description I had given of the terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I . . . could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation, which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof he said some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have been the first contriver. "A strange effect," comments Gulliver (like our own exponents of arms races and testings), "of narrow principles and short views!" 16

By how many megatons must we multiply the weight of this denunciation to make it adequate to the situation as we know it today? In our own age, more certainly than in Swift's, the name of the Muse, alas, is Cassandra. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust," she speaks in the voice of Mr. Eliot; or cries in W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming": Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . . or warns us in Auden's "For The Time Being": The evil and armed draw near; The weather smells of their hate And the houses smell of our fear. Death has opened his white eye . . . These are the voices of the poet in our time. Let us listen for a moment to the voice of a scientist—but a scientist who is also a novelist, the English writer, Sir Charles Snow. During the war, Snow worked alongside the men in England who were contributing their scientific skill to the development of the bomb that was later to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he described their actions and reactions and their responses to what was done in his novel, The New Men. His own point of view has been stated concisely in a number of reviews and critical articles. I will quote a short passage from one of these that appeared in the London Spectator in March 1954. Snow presents very vividly the moral dilemma in which the scientists found themselves. "Scientists have deceived themselves [as to the true nature of the problem] less than most of us," he writes. "When the bombs were dropped the scientists I knew 17

were even more horrified than the rest of us. Their horror was not simple; it contained the outrage of conscience, but it also contained an edge of fear." The outrage of conscience", however, was the more intense feeling. The release of atomic energy was the greatest single triumph of applied science: applied science had, even despite total wars, done far more good than harm to man's material existence: but now the first use of its greatest triumph was to bring about the largest slaughter of any day in human history. Something of what this involved had been mentioned earlier in the article: "With each bomb a population about the size of Oxford was destroyed, men, women, and children: the lucky were burned to death, or blasted to death, in a matter of instants: the others lingered." Sir Charles finds a somewhat uncertain hope that mutual fear on the part of the Soviet Union and the United States will be strong enough to prevent a future disaster: But I also believe that moral forces have not been quite negligible. I believe that the horror which most men felt when the two bombs were dropped, the horror which left on so many scientists a moral scar, has had an effect which is small by the scale of world events but neither altogether contemptible nor altogether selfish. I think it possible that a good many men, certainly in the West and maybe elsewhere, have asked themselves a question—for what purposes are we justified in doing these things to other men? To contemplate and prepare for (in the name of defence) the instantaneous destruction of millions of human beings suggests a failure in the realm of morals 18

and religion that is certainly a much more complete breakdown than anything testified to by teen-age delinquency or isolated individual violence or crime. And when this possibility is accepted with equanimity by a society and culture that believes (or professes to believe) that God is Love, holds that the Sermon on the Mount is the noblest expression of practical morality, and venerates Socrates and Jesus as our highest teachers, we are in the presence of an irony that might be tragic if it weren't so pitiful, and that cries out for a poet as powerful as Dante or a satirist as bitter as Swift to express it. A moral shudder ought to be sweeping the world; but there has been a failure of the imagination: we seem powerless to fear enough what may be done to us or to abhor enough what we contemplate doing to others. It is in both these realms—that of imagination and that of morality—that the poet and artist, even more certainly than the philosopher, the theologian, and the good scientist, can play his part. Poetry alone is perhaps unequal to the magnitude of the task. Only religion—but not religion alone, religion finding its voice in poetry—can unite humanism and moral fervour and provide an instrument and a technic that may be adequate to the task. Certain poets of the twentieth century—T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, W. H. Auden, and Dylan Thomas, to name only those who come first to mind—have become religious poets under the pressure of the destructive forces unleashed in this age of the great wars. They have shown us in some of their best poems what the reaction of the human heart must be in the face of an almost superhuman yet man-made evil. Eliot, Sitwell, and Thomas (and they are not alone, of course) lived through the London blitz of 1940. They were faced with a lesser horror than we are today—had we the imagination and conviction to feel it—but they 19

experienced this earlier baptism of fire in its immediacy and (being poets) with all their senses and all their mind. When one reads such intensely felt poems as Edith Sitwell's "Still Falls the Rain," Eliot's "Little Gidding" (the last and greatest of the Four Quartets), or Dylan Thomas's "Ceremony after a Fire Raid" or "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," we realise that ordinary realistic familiar poetry has been made obsolete. An apocalyptic, ritualistic, visionary, and sometimes mystical poetry alone is capable of dealing with this experience or of probing into its moral or spiritual significance. Here is a part of the opening section of Dylan Thomas' "Ceremony after a Fire Raid": Myselves The grievers Grieve Among the street burned to tireless death A child of a few hours With its kneading mouth Charred on the black breast of the grave The mother dug, and its arms full of fires. Begin With singing Sing Darkness kindled back into the beginning When the caught tongue nodded blind, A star was broken Into the centuries of the child Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone. Forgive Us forgive Us your death that myselves the believers May hold it in a great flood 20

Till the blood shall spurt, And the dust shall sing like a bird As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our [heart. One can hardly fail to notice here how unmistakably, if only by implication, the dead infant is identified with Christ—("A star was broken/Into the centuries of the child")—and how the guilt must be accepted by all of us, the child's fellow citizens, and does not belong only to the immediate agents of his death. But the poem needs a thoughtful reading if we are to discover (through the references to the blood that shall spurt and the grains that shall blow through our heart) that it is the celebration of an expiatory mass. Another poem on the raids of 1940 which like this achieves a marriage of poetry and religion is Edith Sitwell's "Still Falls the Rain." In this, horror and pity are fused with a devotional intensity that suggests medieval Christian art. Of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, it is fire, the rain of fire, that dominates the poem and the whole tragedy of Faustian man rises from his rejection of Christ and the endless wounding of his body by the cruelty and pride of our wars. At the climax of the poem the rain of fire descending from the bombers is equated with the blood of Christ. The identification of sinful man, victim and aggressor alike, with Faust is made explicit by a quotation from the tremendous final scene of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, where the flames of hell leap up to engulf Faust, who calls upon Christ too late: Still falls the RainThen-0 Ile leape up to my God: who pulls me douneSee, see where Christ's blood streaines in the firma[ment: It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree 21

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart That holds the fires of the world,—dark-smirched with [pain As Caesar's laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of [man Was once a child who among beasts has lain— `Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, [for thee.' With the invention of the nuclear bomb and the two tragic occasions of its actual use in war, the moral and religious tension expressed in Edith Sitwell's poems of 1940 increased almost beyond endurance. In 1952 Penguin Books published a widely circulated selection of her poems. The place of honour at the beginning of the book was reserved for what she named "Three Poems for the Atomic Age." These were "Dirge for the New Sunrise," "The Shadow of Cain," and "The Canticle of the Rose." Their theme is again the guilt we all share—as Christians and as human beings—and the power of the feeling they generate approaches a sort of controlled hysteria. The beginning and end of the "Dirge for the New Sunrise" will indicate something of the apocalyptic power and moral fervour with which this poetry assumes the responsibility of registering the shock to the conscience of the world: Bound to my heart as I xion to the wheel, Nailed to my heart as the thief upon the cross, I hang between our Christ and the gap where the [world was lost And watch the phantom Sun in Famine Street— The ghost of the heart of Man . . . red Cain, 22

But I saw the little Ant-men as they ran Carrying the world's weight of the world's filth And the filth in the heart of Man— Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater [heat than that of the Sun. And the ray from the heat came soundless, shook the [sky As if in search for food, and squeezed the stems Of all that grows on the earth till they were dry. —And drank the marrow of the bone: The eyes that saw, the lips that kissed, are gone, Or black as thunder lie and grin at the murdered Sun. The living blind and seeing dead together lie As if in love . . . There was no more hating then— And no more love: Gone is the heart of Man. As a poet, I myself can testify to the overbearing pressure of this crisis of the heart, a crisis of conscience that is compounded of fear and humiliation, a pressure that impinges upon us all, whether we are aware of it or not, with an ever increasing force. Gremlins jump out at us from the newspaper or TV screen, ogres coo or roar from every radio, and a sense of guilt assails us (not as Americans or Canadians or Russians or Frenchmen or Englishmen; not as Christians or Jews or Moslems; but simply as human beings, men and women, not cuckoos, apes, asses, donkeys, pigs or tigers)—the inescapable feeling of shame we experience when we hear certain names—Belsen, Guernica, Hiroshima, Budapest, Dresden. I also have had to write on this subject. I will read now a sequence of three short poems written over the whole extended period of the Cold War. I read them not so much for their own sake as because they illustrate the theme of this paper. 23

The first poem in the series was written in 1946. It is called "Business as Usual", and it sums up—a little ironically perhaps—our American sense of being finished with the unwanted entanglements of war, and ready to get back with relief to minding our own business. But of course this proved impossible, a premature and soon abandoned hope; and so when in 1954 I was collecting some poems to form a volume I realised that this piece was out-dated and untrue. It could not stand alone. I continued it therefore, or rather, wrote it over again in the light of what was happening then. We were testing atomic weapons in the Pacific and the nuclear arms race had begun. Some Japanese fishermen had been injured, and few of us—as Christians or simply as men of good will—were very happy or satisfied. Also we were afraid. This second poem of the sequence, then, is called "Fear as Normal." And now in 1962 when I was again getting ready some poems for a book I saw once more that the poem was outmoded and inadequate. The blast (of the poem, that is) was not in the megaton range: what had to be done, in a third and parallel poem, was to intensify the pressure. If the first two expressed scorn and pity, this one would have to heighten these emotions and resolutely reject any temptation to partiality or compromise. The only way was to withdraw to an almost astronomical distance—as Toynbee or Frazer do—so that the situation can be seen as involving the whole planet and all mankind. The last of the three poems is called—rather sadly and again ironically—"Universal Peace." Business as Usual, 1946 Across the craggy indigo Come rumours of the flashing spears, And in the clank of rancid noon There is a tone, and such a tone. 24

How tender! How insidious! The air grows gentle with protecting bosks, And furry leaves take branch and root. Here we are safe, we say, and slyly smile. In this delightful forest, fluted so, We burghers of the sunny central plain Fable a still refuge from the spears That clank—but gently clank—but clank again! Fear as Normal, 1954 But gently clank? The clank has grown A flashing crack—the crack of doom. It mushrooms high above our salty plain, and plants the sea with rabid fish. How skilful! How efficient! The active cloud is our clenched fist. Hysteria, dropping like the gentle dew, Over the bent world broods with ah! bright wings. We guess it dazzles our black foe; But that it penetrates and chars Our own Christ-laden lead-encased hearts Our terrified fierce dreamings know. Universal Peace, 19— Murder and suicide alas The double crime our pride commends. Too much and much too soon The stockpile overkill condones. The boom that boomerangs Around the sphere and what was twi-divided 25

Joins—how neat!—how dead!— A pock-marked scorched colossal Moon. Hatred and Fear: twins locked in a dead womb. Blind ice in orbit: heart and head Burned, cooled, cold, killed— Pax mundi singed and signed and sealed. Let me add a brief note on two passages in these poems. The sentence Hysteria dropping like the gentle dew, Over the bent world broods with ah! bright wings quotes ironically two famous passages, one by Shakespeare and the other by Gerard Manly Hopkins. In Portia's speech, of course, it is "the quality of mercy" which "droppeth like the gentle dew from heaven"; and in Hopkins' sonnet "God's Grandeur" it is the Holy Ghost which "over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." Today, it is neither man's mercy nor the grandeur of the Holy Ghost, but the mushroom cloud that broods over the bent (that is, the twisted, perverted) world. The other note is on the line "The stockpile overkill condones," and it is just a brief statistical corroboration. I quote from the study by Harrison Brown and James Real, The Community of Fear: "It is estimated that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. together possess explosive material corresponding to about sixty billion tons of TNT or about twenty tons of TNT for every inhabitant of the world." The irony is in the fact. But irony and the poetry of irony are not enough. Irony, satire, and even invective are fine, but they are largely negative. Despair, like apathy, is criminal. Where our salvation lies is hard to see—though where it certainly does not lie is plain. It does not lie in indif26

ference or acquiescence; above all it does not lie in continuing the arms race and in spreading the possession of nuclear weapons to an ever larger collection of states. Our poets know this well enough; and they know too, more profoundly, I think, than most of us, that the nuclear threat is a denial of life at its essential source. The young Canadian poet Milton Acorn in his poem "On the Toronto Fall-out Shelter," published in his recent volume Jawbreakers, is obsessed with the horror of a shadow that corrupts the very nucleus of life itself, sex, which is the beginning and continuation of life. To contemplate the killing of others on a grand scale is to kill the self, to kill one's own self. There is no defence and no escape. It is an integration of suicide, and to huddle in communal shelters is to return to a pre-natal and sterile womb. Knowing this, we ask for something positive. Poet and philosopher-historian alike suggest our salvation will be found (if at all) where Jesus and Socrates said it would. In "September 1, 1939", written at the beginning of the Second World War, W.H. Auden put our case and suggested a remedy: Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages. And the messages are simply this: We must love one another or die. A hard thing to do, you say, and I agree. But we must make the attempt: we have no choice. Arnold Toynbee has put it like this: "The negative deterrent provided 27

by mutual fear would have to be replaced by the positive bond of mutual love if the human race was to regain the certitude of survival." Another great English publicist and historian, A.J.P. Taylor, reviewing a number of books on the strategy of nuclear warfare in the New Statesman, recently agreed with the poets that the problem is essentially an ethical and religious one. "All these books," he wrote, "are to me a buzzing in the ears. . . . They all ask 'How can I prevent nuclear weapons being dropped on me?' This seems to me the wrong question. The, right one is: 'Would I drop these weapons on others in any circumstances?' " This is indeed a difficult forbearance that is asked of us—almost as difficult, indeed, as to be a Christian, a Platonist, or a humanist. But it is the arts and the humanities, and particularly poetry, the most humane of all the arts, that can offer that education in sensibility and virtue that we must submit to if we are to live.

28

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Irving Layton

There's a growing literature nowadays on the nature of the creative process and various theories, some good, some awful, are again being put forward to explain it. The pessimists among us infer their multiplication indicates an alarm that the twentieth century, with its stress on the routine and the mechanical, threatens the extinction of human creativity. Invalids, say these pessimists, speak obsessively about their health once they have lost it. Rather than summarize some of these theories—Plato's assurance that the poet is an inspired dunce, Freud's picture of him as a grown-up infant wallowing irresponsibly in the region of Id, Dr. Northrop Frye's necrophilia disguised as an interest in the anatomy of Criticism, etcetera—I think it might be more profitable if I describe some of my own experience of poem-making. The conclusions that follow are based almost wholly on selfobservation, though I quickly add I've checked them against those of other poets. It gratifies me to discover enough similarity between our views to give me con29

fidence I am not speaking out of a narcissistic daydream. But even if I were: what of it? In this business of writing a man can only speak of what he knows, of what he has himself been brought face to face with. What else is poetry but a self-authenticated speaking, a reaching down into the roots of one's being. Roots, did I say? That's much too nice a word. Confusions rather, doubts, perplexities, inner conflicts, joy, desire, chagrin—the terror and ecstasy of living daily beyond one's psychic means. Let's leave the nice words, and the thick evasive ones, to critics and aestheticians; especially to those pallid theorists who wish to depersonalize the creator and make of him a helpless purveyor of psychological archetypes requiring certification from them as to purity, substance, and value. When the corpse is laid out on the morgue slab, it's the nearest relatives who are asked to come down and identify it! Can anyone really explain what happens in the writing of a poem? I doubt it. There are those whose professional careers in the non-creative aspects of literature entitle them to a measure of dogmatism, but when I examine my own creative processes I am left wondering. Cut it any way you like, dissect it, take it apart at the seams, analyse it to your heart's content, human creativity remains a mysterious fact in our low-abiding, mechanical universe that bankrupts all the theories that wish to explain it. All that we can hope to do is to get at the experiential datum somehow and explain it from the inside. A description, then, not an explanation is what I'm offering by way of throwing some light on the nature of the creative process. Not "why" but "how" will be my concern, though for something as subtle as the writing of poetry the two may become inextricably intertwined, perhaps even indistinguishable. However, that doesn't really matter as long as in the search for truth—in this field anyhow—one remains innocent and humble. 30

With Shakespeare and Plato, I believe the true poet is inspired; impelled, that is, by forces his will is powerless to summon or disperse. It is simply impossible for anyone who is not a poet to will himself into becoming one, or by taking thought to write a single living verse. Just as for saintliness or creative statesmanship there must first be the vocation, so for the writing of poems that will endure. If there's one thing in this baffling universe I remain obstinately sure of it is that the poet, like the Hebrew prophets, will follow his calling even at the risk of incurring misunderstanding, hostility, and alienation. Better than anyone else, he knows the price he must pay for poems men facetiously call immortal. It's his readiness to pay that price that makes him eternally different from those who would explain him in their books or quiet classrooms. For inside him there's a demon that will not let him rest, will not let him live a life of normal usefulness. The major poets have large-sized, terrifying demons inside their psyches: put your ear to Iago or the Ancient Mariner and you can hear them growl. If one of these demons were ever let loose in a university the professors of literature would be out of a job. I hate to think of what would happen at the O'Keefe Centre or the Place des Arts! Demons? The cultured ladies and gentlemen would run shrieking in fear and disgust, stuffing their ears against those mordant and obscene truths the Prosperos of the world smilingly convert into an evening's entertainment. The lesser poets, on the other hand, are possessed by small devils rather than demons, though the former occasionally feeding on something indigestible in their owner's subsconcious might bloat themselves into an impressive hugeness. But great or minor, there's never yet been a poet able to move his readers who had not himself first been possessed by an inexplicable excitement, a sudden quickening of the pulse, a mysterious change that made him at once passive and alert, detached 31

yet all-absorbed, ice and fire, as if waiting for a revelation that might split the heavens—or come through a mousehole! There have been poets who claimed they heard voices, and William Blake said he had been dictated to by sundry angels. I believe them without reservation; there can be no doubt that this is what they felt they were experiencing in their moments of intensest inspiration. I wish I could report a similar occurrence in my spiritual biography. It would be great fun to casually drop such a piece of news at a cocktail party or announce it over the morning's breakfast juice. But, no, I've never heard spectral voices speaking to me and I must somewhat churlishly assert that no angel may be credited with a single line of my poetry. I suppose the prosiness of a scientific and technological age has scared away such visitations from our planet forever. Certainly I don't know of a single contemporary American or Canadian poet who in a state of believable sobriety ever claimed he heard voices or entertained angels. However, if I did hear of one, I hope I'd have the good sense to believe him at once. My own experience has indeed been one of being dictated to—minus the Blakeian angels. Well, perhaps dictated to is misleading and too sensational a way of putting the matter. So expressed it may push the already incredulous into a scornful cynicism. What I want to say is this: there are poems I've written for which it seems to me I can take no credit at all, their composition from beginning to end, from the first line to the last, having proceeded without any intervention at all of my will or reason, or where the intervention has been so insignificant—the changing of a word here and there— as to be negligible. And I would add too that I consider these poems among the best I've written. Though I had composed a considerable quantity of verse while I was at the university, it was only with the 32

writing of "The Swimmer" that I realized the poet's vocation might be mine. I had taken my wife to the beach at Caughnawaga where we spent the morning and the better part of the afternoon. After we had returned home I went out for a walk along St. Catherine Street and turned into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. When I was seated at the table, without warning a succession of images, induced no doubt by the day's experiences, threw my mind—there's no better way I can put it—into a lucid turmoil. The images were accompanied by an insistent rhythm that seemed to be scouring my innermost self for words and phrases to attach itself to or to lift up from my buried consciousness and carry forward in its irresistible sweep. Perhaps that's all that rhythm really is—the sound we hear when ideas and memories are fused and the past takes on the startling immediacy of the present. Rhythm is the sound we hear when time is wiped out; when there's no past or future, but only NOW. Luckily I had a pencil with me. I grabbed the napkin and spilled the entire poem onto it in a mood of such intense concentration that the restaurant and all its noises were completely blotted out from my awareness. Nothing existed for me at the time except the words I saw forming on the napkin: an irregular black stain whose magical growth gave me a sensation of almost unbearable ecstasy and release. What I've just described has happened to me many times since. My shabby everyday self seems to be flung aside and somebody bearing only the slightest resemblance to me takes over. I shall not bore anyone with the details but ask him simply to credit my report. "The Bull Calf" was written in less than ten minutes when I was enjoying the afternoon sunlight and had been thinking of everything but the young Jersey bull calf I had helped dig a grave for and bury more than a decade earlier. "El Gusano" was written in a field in Denia, Spain, almost in the form it has in the present 33

volume, minus a few lines the Muse had been overgenerous with. Almost the entire version of my poem, "Whatever Else Poetry Is Freedom" was put into my mind—I can describe it no other way—while walking along the road that led away from my summer cottage in Ste. Marguerite. The curious will discover a discrepancy between the version of the poem as it first appeared in the Canadian Forum and the final one that appears in my book, A Red Carpet For The Sun. The former is incomplete: inspiration at the end had gone dead or had disappeared and no matter how desperately I pleaded for its return, I was left standing on the road with the poem unfinished. So when I came to write the poem I ended it lamely by repeating the first line, a reluctant and bitter admission of defeat. The story, however, has a happy sequel as all stories that deal with the marvellous should have. For several months later, when I was not even thinking of the poem but was crossing a busy thoroughfare, the lines of the concluding stanza began to come to me. And if I'm still living and unmaimedthat too is something I marvel about. Perhaps an even odder story relates to the composition of my poem, "Women of Rome." I had been in that city for about a week, one of the many bug-eyed tourists August brings to Rome as it does flies and gnats in other parts of the world. I was staying at a small Italian pension. About two o'clock in the morning I was awakened from a deep sleep and found the line "Lie down in my ghostly mental bed" echoing in my brain. I took it for the familiar sign a poem was about to take shape and hopping out of bed sat myself down in attentive expectancy before the table, pencil in hand. But though I waited for an hour or more, no other lines came. I returned to bed, angered with the capricious Muse for having played a tasteless nocturnal joke on me and fell asleep almost immediately. 34

When I awoke the next morning my head felt like a cloud pregnant with rain. I again sat down at the writingtable and this time the entire poem poured out on my page until the last line, which was the very one that had startled me out of my sleep. Apart from some minor revisions, I might have been a scribe taking down sentences from dictation by some unseen supernatural source, temporarily lodged within me and ready to vacate the premises once the dictation was done. Now since we are dealing with mysteries, and Canadians—even some Canadian poets—are uneasy when these are alluded to, I ought to say something about the part revisions and craftsmanship play in the making of a poem. Reason, intelligence, craftsmanship are things everyone feels more at home with, more particularly Canadians who are likely to feel bewildered when demons and demonism are mentioned in their presence. Their Methodist sensibility, their practical good sense and cheerfulness, their Anglo-Saxon heritage of cosy realism and matter-of-factness make them suspicious of the unfamiliar and resentful at the inexplicable as if some mischievous prankster had invited them to attend a garden party naked. I imagine it's to cover their embarrassed selves that they clutch with such comic eagerness at flimsy shifts like Reason, Craft, and Archetypes. Let me therefore hasten to assure everybody I have as much respect for good workmanship and painful revision as the next conscientious poet. Anyone who has written as many poems as I have is unlikely to believe for even a single minute that reason and critical knowhow have no function in the creative process. Of course they do. The point I want to stress, however, is that these are of ancillary importance; that without the material given the poet when his unconscious (soul) is stirred into activity by a powerful emotion, his intelligence and craftsmanship are of no use to him whatever. Without the first he might just as well forget he ever heard about 35

poetry and take up bricklaying instead. Have you ever seen a locomotive standing idle on the tracks until someone pulled a switch and the wheels began to move? The switch: that's what I mean by inspiration; the psychic phenomenon of passive, expectant concentration that obliterates the division between past and present, subject and object, internal and external, and by intensely vivifying and cohering every part of the creator at once—his mind, senses, and emotions—seems so to magnetize his consciousness that polarities are reconciled and patterns of meaning formed out of memories, impressions, desires, and thoughts find their perfect release in word and rhythm. If it's a good poem he has put all of his living up to that point into it. And if it's a great poet who is writing it, what he wants to say and what he has to say become miraculously fused in the heat of composition. At that moment instinct becomes intelligence; memory, imagination; craft, creativity. The poet becomes the poem. Some writer has said, I do not recall where, that one line is given to the poet by his demon or by nature, the rest he must find out for himself. I never begin a poem until I have several such lines on my page, lines that drop unexpectedly into my mind and startle me by their rightness. From experience I know they never come unless a poem wants making, and I've come to regard these first lines as analogous to big gouts of rain that announce an impending storm. Not once have they ever fooled me. When I have a number of these lines before me, I attempt to find out what it is they are trying to say or, alternately, what it is they want me to say about them. Since the poem is in some sense already in my mind—a loose compound of feelings, memories, impressions, ideas waiting to be pressed together—the craft I employ to shape these lines into a poem, using as little putty (uninspired lines) as I have to, may be thought of as the scrubbing of a windowpane to allow 36

the sunlight to come through. Of course the more diligent the window-cleaning the more light will penetrate, but the ablest craftsman in the world can scrub his arms off, yet if there's nothing wanting to come through, the scrubbling will produce only aching back and muscles. Think of Swinburne's last inglorious years or recall Rilke's decade of painful sterility. Their earlier achievements and knowledge of technique could avail them nothing when the creative demon inside them lay chloroformed and inert. Yeats also had a period of barrenness when for more than two years he was unable to put down a single line of verse; and this happened to him when he was presumably at the very height of his powers. Will-power, character, determination, the possession of a first-rate brain, even the knowledge that one has written great poems in the past are useless if the peculiar ferment that brings up lines, images, and rhythms from the unconscious is lacking. No ferment, no poetry: that's the long and short of it! If I labour the point, it's because I am fearful that many forces in present-day civilization are seriously menacing the continued existence of poetic creativity. The danger, moreover, comes as much from its avowed friends as from its ostensible enemies. In this country the poet has always had to fight for his survival. He lives in a middle-class milieu whose values of moneygetting, respectability, and success are hostile to the kind of integrity and authenticity that is at the core of his endeavour. His need to probe himself makes him an easy victim for those who have more practical things to do—to hold down a job, amass a fortune, or to get married and raise children. His concern is to change the world; at any rate, to bear witness that another besides the heartless, stupid, and soul-destroying one men have created is possible. Seeing intelligence, intuition and primal joy destroyed by a society that values 37

them less than gadgetry or a car in the garage, the poet becomes a social critic whose radicalism is nonetheless thoroughgoing for remaining unexpressed in obvious propagandistic verse. He may choose instead the fragile lily with which to strike at the perverted values of a neurotic, acquisitive society. Indeed his very existence as a creative personality is an act of defiance, an act of uncompromising criticism. Yet I can't help feeling sometimes that the greater threat to the poet comes today not so much from his middle-class environment (by now this enemy has an easily recognizable face) as from those who wish to appear his friends and allies. They worry me a lot more than the assorted Philistines, joy-haters, and life-deniers that this country, for one reason or another, produces in such extraordinary numbers. They're the ones who wish to bracket the poet between Culture and Education and fob off their cerebral theories as having equal authority with the experience of the poet. I become depressed when I hear so much said about Education and what the poet can do for it; how important he is for Culture—that underarm perspiration odour of impotent old men! God, let me out of here! Somebody who loves poetry had better break open a couple of windows before that smell of chalk-dust suffocates us all. Hatched by sterile academics in their comfortable nests, should this notion that the poet is the servant of Culture and Education gain adherents in and out of the universities, you can kiss poetry a fond good-bye. The poet is doomed. Let him give up the struggle at once and become a school inspector, a writer of literary texbooks, or a critic. That way he'll gain both money and prestige and make life a whole lot easier for himself. But as long as he chooses to remain a poet he's intensely involved in the business of living and grapples with it in a way no one else can or dares to: that's his 38

anguish and his glory. I do not deny to the critic or theorist of literature sensitivity and concern, yet it cannot be said too often, in this developing haven of culture-Philistines most of all, that their activities are parasitic on those of the poet dedicated to exploring his own existential being for the meanings of human experience at a given time and place. It is with his personal experience and what he has done with it that critic, theorist, and educator concern themselves; it is with his feeling for life, his ability to evoke and re-create the illusion of it. For all their brilliancy, wit, erudition, concern, good citizenship, and throw in the kitchen sink as well, they cannot make us feel life: that remains forever within the province and capacity of the artist alone. What then is my fear? My fear is that envy, mediocrity, ignorance of the poet's true function and nature, and the prevailing neurotic joylessness may combine to extinguish whatever sparks of talent or genius may from time to time appear among us. It is so easy in this country for the castrated, the solid, and the seemingly wise to abash the callow young poet. It takes an unusual pugnacity to keep insisting the emperor has no clothes. In Canada we have no tradition of brawling, irreverent poets—no Villons and Rimbauds. Only that of a bunch of squares. We need wild-eye d poets to remind us constantly that the sober men of learning or business enterprise come and go, their voices silenced by death forever, but a lyric that despair or love gave birth to will last as long as there are humans left on this planet to read and respond. We need them badly to shout down the chorus of voices now rising from the white-mufflered throats of cultivated ladies and gentlemen as these are directed by the erudite flourishes of the Critic's baton in praise of poetic Spam. Above all, we need them to remind us that poets are neither scholars nor gentlemen, 39

but creatures with an indiscriminating appetite for life for whom "good taste" is something to wipe one's unstodgy behind with. Hegel said: "Nothing great is ever achieved without passion." We must keep repeating this, for our benefit as much as for that of the young writer. Frankly, I am disturbed to learn that over ninety per cent of the poets now writing in this country are attached to universities. I do not think this is is a healthy condition, though I am at a loss to say how it might be remedied. Some way must be found to keep the budding young poet alive and excited in this large untrammelled world of ours, there to learn the heartbreaking meanings of suffering, joy, lust, guilt, and love: anyway, to experience them at first hand even if he never quite makes out what the whole show adds up to. I must confess I do not altogether trust the poet-teacher. Too often he suffers from envy, disappointment, repression, that narrowing of sympathy and interest that spell the eventual death of his creative instincts. His experience of life grows thinner and thinner. So do his emotions. Even if he does escape those dread diseases of the mind and spirit, he is bound to fall victim to that conventional respectability all universities sooner or later exact from their teaching members. Though it enables him to develop his mind in a condition of ease and tranquillity, security destroys his soul. He becomes as stable as a university chancellor. Before long, like the power-hungry critics whom he at first despised, he ignores the voluptuous woman who has slipped out of her clothes in nude delight and turns instead to appraise the apparel she has left in a heap on the floor. Passion, ecstasy, adventure have departed; in their place he has substituted meditative calm, maturity, reasonableness, and so on: all excellent virtues to be sure, but not likely to produce a Villon, a Catullus, or a Yeats. Or if it comes down to that, even a T.S. Eliot. 40

IN THE DISCUSSION THAT FOLLOWED, D. G. Jones had this to say: "Mr. Layton appears to profess he is possessed by the Great White Goddess or some anima mundi which uses him as would a female praying mantis and then tosses him aside. It is a very romantic and very passive picture of the poet—too much like Wordsworth in the more naive pictures of the poet or Lucy passively moulded and inspired by Mother Nature. "I find his presentation of the poet's creativity plainly mystical—and not always in the better sense of that word, and I object that making poems and being a poet is not as passive a business as he suggests. I agree rather with Malraux when he says that people choose to become poets and painters because they like poems or paintings, would like to make poems or paintings themselves because they find such work significant, or delightful, or profitable in terms of money or prestige, or all three of these things. Further, though they may at moments be possessed, once they have chosen to write poems or paint pictures, they do not wait to be possessed; they go out looking for material for poems or paintings and deliberately exploit their experience. They are prostitutes offering themselves for possession. "I maintain further that if there is a kind of possession which takes place, it is the poem's possession of its own direction after a certain point in the composition—not a possession of life, or the world, or something more spiritual of the poet. In fact, once the poem is well established, it seems to me possible it might demand an ending quite irrelevant to the initial experience. That is, the demands of life which initiated the poem. There is a good deal of conscious awareness involved in recognizing this and developing the poem from point to point. There is a great deal of freedom at the beginning, but with each step the number of further possibilities becomes more limited, more highly defined, until at the end one has the sense that there is only one 41

inevitable conclusion. At any rate the possible conclusions can't be too many. In this way a poem evolves between freedom and necessity—the necessity to follow the suggestion of experience as a guide, the freedom to transform, translate, or otherwise take off from the initial suggestion as wit and words and awakened traces of feeling explore many possibilities—the necessity to conform to the rhythm established in the first line, the metaphor developed in the first verse, etc. "Art is the raising into consciousness of what otherwise would remain unconscious, the clarification and objectification of what otherwise would remain obscure and subjective. "As for the battle against the middle class, the consciousness of a struggle against the social classes which Mr. Layton recommended as part of the role of the prophet or poet, I maintain that once I am working on a poem I couldn't care less about the social classes. I am only interested in the shape of my poem." Louis Dudek contended that poetry is a free exploration of possible ways of feeling, of possible ways of experiencing the world. To find the language is to open up new possibilities in seeing and feeling—or doing so consciously—which does not mean rationally. George Whalley stressed the role of the critic and scholar, and Leonard Cohen said there were thousands of poems and thousands of poets in the world and that most of the poems don't get written down. The poets are specifically anal characters who like to collect it all.

42

THE POET IN QUEBEC TODAY imiimemmmEmmoemi F. R. Scott

Like other leaders of the seminars at the Conference, I am writing down months later from a few notes what I think I said at the time. Since that actually cannot be exactly recalled, I shall not hesitate to enlarge on ideas that are relevant to the topic and which are in the spirit of our discussion. The title, "The Poet in Quebec Today," is in one sense absurd. The absurdity would be more evident if we changed the title to read "The Poet in Brome County." The poet's only role is to be as good a poet as his talent allows him to be, wherever he may be, whether in Brome County or Timbuctoo. Nevertheless if we take the title to mean "What role in fact does the poet play in Quebec?" then there is a serious question to be answered. For it is evident that the social environment of the poet, as well as the geography of his country, are almost certain to affect in some degree the kind of poetry he will write. It is obvious that Quebec contains poets who write in English and poets who write in French, to mention the two major groups only, because that is the nature of our community. 43

Let me speak for a moment of myself as a poet who has written in Quebec. My early poetry was very influenced by the geography of Quebec. Coming back from Oxford, where for the first time in my life I was brought into direct contact with the European tradition, in which one soaked up the human achievements of great individuals and great nations past and present, and where always one was drawn back toward antiquity, I found Quebec presented a totally different kind of challenge. Here nothing great seemed to have been achieved in human terms. I was shocked by the ugliness of the cities and buildings by comparison with those that I had recently lived in, and there seemed so little that one wished to praise or draw inspiration from in our social environment or past history. But the Laurentian country was wonderful, open, empty, vast, and speaking a kind of eternal language in its mountains, rivers and lakes. I knew that these were the oldest mountains in the world, and that their rounded valleys and peaks were the result of long submersion under continents of ice. Geologic time made ancient civilizations seem but yesterday's picnic. This caught my imagination and I tried to express some of this feeling in what I call my Laurentian poems. It was a form of "internalization of the wilderness," and it sufficed me at first for poetic inspiration. As I became more involved in the human society about me, particularly after the great financial crash of 1929, the ensuing depression, and the emergence of revolutionary and reform political movements in which I participated, I found that I reacted negatively in my writing and turned easily to satire. The satire was the holding up of the existing society against standards one was formulating in one's mind for a more perfect society. It was not revolutionary poetry; it was satiric poetry, which is quite a different thing, though somewhat allied.. I have been fascinated in reading French-Canadian poetry to see its relationship to the community in which 44

the poets lived and wrote. The first book of poetry in the French language published in Quebec was written by a man called Bibaud and published in 1830. It is filled with political satire. One of the liveliest pieces is a diatribe against the Act of Union proposed in 1822 by the English minority in Quebec for the uniting of Upper and Lower Canada in the hope that this would enable them to obtain their will in the Legislature. It was proposed in the Bill to reduce the French language to second rank—an idea that emerged later in the Union Act of 1840. Bibaud has this verse in his poem: Que si malgre notre precaution, Quelque Francais veut faire une harangue, Faut renonce a sa pretention; Nous leur otons l'usage de leur langue. Bibaud was not a vigorous or revolutionary critic of political movements, but he related himself to them. Much of the early French-Canadian poetry that followed is completely devoid of satire and becomes sentimentally patriotic. What is known as the poetry of Le Terroir expresses the love of the land and family and church institutions, which constituted so much of the total life in Quebec during the long years when there was little in the way of social change. This poetry was folkloric and nostalgic. Its spirit found its most characteristic prose expression in 'lemon's Maria Chapdelaine. There are other movements and schools of FrenchCanadian poetry, but not till St-Denys Garneau can it be said that Quebec poets entered the twentieth century —and there is a touch of the fin de siècle about Garneau. I find that in the poets like Garneau and Anne Hebert and in younger ones like Giguere, Pilon and others who followed, there is a considerable amount of poetry which exposes the hollowness, hypocrisy and immobility of 45

French-Canadian society as it then was. Less so in Garneau, who wrestled with his internal philosophy and beliefs, though even he shows the beginnings of this condemnation: De /'amour de la tendresse qui done oserait en douter Mais pas deux sous de respect pour l'ordre etab/i In Hebert, Giguere and others the condemnation is far more clearly developed. Hebert's poem "Vie de château" contains the following descriptive lines (I use my own translation): Here is an ancestral manor Without a table or fire Or dust or carpets The perverse enchantment of these rooms Lies wholly in their polished mirrors. The only possible thing to do here Is to look at oneself in the mirror day and night. Giguere's poem "Saisons polaires" fixes the image of a stagnant society most vividly: No flame. No warmth. It was a cold life, the heart gripped in a ring of ice. The sun had withdrawn its rays and finally left the humans who had insulted it for so long. They had spat in its face, in broad daylight; they had violated love like a whore, right on the street; they had dragged liberty through the mud and barbed wire. The noblest reasons for living torn to shreds under our windows and thrown to the four winds. 46

In autumn, we watched the dead leaves fall and, mentally, counted them among the green ones that we should not forget the colour of our hope. In our deepest selves, secretly and timidly, there still wavered the idea of the dignity of man. But the centre of the earth was growing colder and colder .... No flame. No warmth. It was a cold life, the heart gripped in a ring of ice. Silently, we sought a new horizon on which to find a foothold for a new life, to start all over again, to reinvent everything beginning with ourselves. Then there is this little poem by Pilon, "L'etranger d'ici", written (he told me) after Duplessis had won another of his smashing electoral victories: He came from a country of devout pirates Where indifference was taken for dogma The idiot for master The sick man for the seer It was a country of useless struggles And magnificent ruins A country eaten out by vermin When he wished to shout out his rage They would not allow it They hardly allowed him to die I do not mean of course to imply that these poems were the most important that these poets wrote, or even 47

constituted the major part of their work. Far from it. However, we do find that where the poet moves out from his own internal self-expression to the contemplation of the society about him at this period, the poetry showed an awareness of the end of an era long before the politicians started to try to deal with it. It is quite evident that the poets, as usual, got there first. Quebec is in the midst of a period of "accelerated history" if not of actual social revolution. Are we to expect that poets will more directly express this revolutionary feeling? I would think that not only is this kind of poetry bound to emerge but that in fact it is already emerging. It is too early yet to know what will be distilled out of the turmoil and self-analysis. The very titles of poems appearing in little magazines like Liberte and Parti Pris show that the furore has reached the younger writers. Paul Chamberland writes an "Ode au guerrier de la joie," introduces it with a quotation from the Russian revolutionary poet Maiakovsky, and puts in it this verse: 0 l'extase de ton sang par la scansion de l'Hymne rouge dressant les troupes proletaires aux marches des cites sans maitres, l'extase hors des caries de l'ordre cadenasse. (Incidentally, if the "troupes proletaires" are the organized workers in Quebec, they strongly oppose the separatism that Mr. Chamberland preaches.) The same poet publishes a poem in Parti Pris called "Poeme de Panterevolution." Andre Brochu's poem in Liberte, "Printemps '63," ends with the naive and rather touching cry: Et les anglais a /a potence As an "anglais" I feel somehow called upon to help, and I am reminded of how Buddha, in a previous incarnation, 48

is said to have given himself to a starving tiger just to appease his appetite, and thereby to have attained much grace. These youthful outbursts at least show an involvement in the "tranquil revolution" that is taking place. To quote Jean Ethier-Blais, "Today, the poets of twenty to thirty are writing about a classless, socialist, Rousseauist society that they imagine is a natural flowering of Quebec's history." I do not find any sentiment of this kind in the English language poetry of Quebec. Though living in the same province, its writers do not appear to feel that it is their revolution which is taking place. On the other hand one could cite many examples among them of poets who have written bitter social satire, who have vigorously attacked the commercial and bourgeois values that deny and frustrate the creative spirit in man, and who have, therefore, participated in the changing of the society. For them, however, as for their French counterparts, the poetic function is by no means confined to this particular kind of expression and their poetry ranges over varying aspects of man's emotion and sensibility.

49

THE REVIEWER OF POETRY

Milton Wilson

When D. G. Jones introduced me as leader of this seminar he described the topic for discussion as "The Responsibility of the Literary Critic in Canada." I began the seminar by denying that my topic was anything quite so grandiose or that I intended to assume responsibility for very much. The subject before me, in fact, was simply "The Role of the Reviewer of Poetry"—in this case, Canadian poetry—and my intention was to lead the way into a seminar and not to provide a reviewer's manifesto. I thought that raising a lot of obvious questions and suggesting a variety of answers might serve the purpose. The questions (and possible answers) went more or less as follows. To begin with I asked: Who is responsible for the existence of reviews in the first place? Whose demand are they supposed to satisfy? The publisher? Well, the very fact that review copies are persistently distributed gives him some responsibility, and I suppose he thinks it worth while. The poet? Poets who dislike the way they're reviewed rarely disapprove 51

of the very existence of reviews or avoid reading them simply on principle. Indeed, poets are themselves among the most active reviewers. (If the response to a later request for a show of hands is to be trusted, the only poets in the room who had never reviewed a fellow-poet were Leonard Cohen, Eldon Grier and John Glassco.) What about the editors of magazines? Even they, working on the principle that people read more book reviews than they read books, help to perpetuate the review as a literary sub-species. Nobody is going to claim that reviews are indispensable, but there is at least a conspiracy of luke-warm supporters behind them. The least warm is likely to be the reviewer himself, who is bound to have stumbled into reviewing Canadian poetry inadvertently and is certainly not planning to make a vocation out of it. It is probably the least professional literary pursuit in the country. Well, whatever the demand for this marginal product, who is the audience? Or, to put it another way, which of his possible readers should the reviewer imagine he is writing for? Today's reader of poetry? Tomorrow's reader too? The poet himself? I suspect that the more a reviewer worries about posterity or even about what he'll think of his current opinion ten years from now, the worse his review is likely to be—just as (for a Canadian) trying to avoid being parochial is the one sure way of sounding very parochial indeed. Reviewing is a here-and-now matter. It may aim at justice, but not a last judgment. As for the poet himself as the reviewer's audience—well, no poet writes for an ideal audience of book-reviewers, and I have the same prejudice from the opposite angle. I don't mean that a poet shouldn't read reviews or can't learn something from them, but it usually works better if they're of somebody else's books. What should the reviewer's aims be? One possible answer is simply "to record a strong reaction." (This asumes an ideal, free reviewer who chooses what to 52

review and turns over to somebody else anything that he doesn't either love or loathe. On such a principle, a good many books of Canadian poetry are not going to get reviewed at all. After three years of doing the University of Toronto Quarterly's annual catch-all survey, I can't tell you how much I envy this particular sort of reviewer.) Another possible aim is the furtherance of some poetic cause dear to the reviewer's heart. The review can be a weapon in support of the kind of poetry that he wants to read, or wants to write, or believes society would be healthier if it produced more of. Another reviewer may see his main function as assisting readers who just don't know where to begin when faced 'with the vast multiplicity of contemporary books— even books of poetry—even Canadian books of poetry— that the presses offer him to choose from. This is the filter theory of book-reviewing. But few reviews are going to be pure reactions, pure propaganda or pure signposts. A very different extreme is what Keats might have called the negative-capability reviewer. Although he doesn't speak either to or for poets, he likes to take his stance inside the book itself and see what things look like from that angle. At his blandest he may be little more than a chameleon, taking on the protective colouring of whatever work he happens to be reviewing. But if, at the end of the review, he does move back 'outside to judge the book from his own individual vantage point, he may find it handy to have given the book plenty of rope in the first place. The inside-outside method is at least good exercise for the reviewer faced with a wide assortment of books to cope with. What about the appropriate tone? What sort of manner or attitude should a reviewer of Canadian poetry adopt? I can think of a good many adjectives to describe the tone of reviews I have known (or even have written), such as casual, efficient, condescending, smart, encouraging, impersonal, eager. I have a special feeling for that 53

last adjective. In a recent introduction by A. J. M. Smith I am mentioned twice: once to be told that I could learn a thing or two from Northrop Frye (which is true enough) and the other to be labelled "eager." Eager Wilson has a nice ring to it, although I hesitate to take it for an unqualified compliment. Anyway, whatever the reviewer's tone or purpose, it's a mistake to overdo it. Reviews aren't just too incompetent or too uninformed. They can be too efficient, too witty, too finished. I don't just mean polishing one's epigrams on the rough edges of the work at hand, turning bad books into the raw material of a good review. The better the book, the more dangerous it is to try too hard. The review starts to look like an end in itself. Whatever may be said of criticism, there's nothing autonomous about bookreviewing. You may think that your pains in writing an elaborate, carefully organized, polished review are evidence of how much the book means to you; in practice it looks like insufferable superiority. Skill in book-reviewing consists in knowing just how much skill to exercise. I can think of plenty of other possible questions to raise, such as: what sort of qualifications should one have to be a reviewer of Canadian poetry? Does the reviewer have any particularly distinctive role to play on the Canadian literary scene? But perhaps these are enough to start things going. THE DISCUSSION WHICH FOLLOWED took off from a number of the problems raised or implied in the introduction, such as the commitment of the reviewer to a program vs. his duty to the individual nature of the poems being reviewed, the responsibility of editors vs. the freedom of reviewers, the limited qualifications of reviewers vs. the demands of the really new, exploratory poem, and opened some further ones, such as the re54

viewer's possible contribution to the existence of a literary community, and the nature of his influence— good, bad or non-existent. The question of how committed to a programme for poetry the reviewer should be (as raised by Louis Dudek and others) tended to reduce itself more to the nature of magazines than reviewers. It seemed clear from the discussion that, whatever suited large-scale review articles in the quarterlies, little magazines (like Delta or Cataract) would lose most of their strength and value without a firm sense of direction into which the reviews should fit as well as the poems. Louis Dudek also wondered whether the reviewer shouldn't be enough of a critic to do some charting of the trends and influences in Canadian poetry and to try to place the book in its aesthetic and intellectual context. Irving Layton objected to what he took to be a subordination of the poet to historical movements or to the books he'd read. Such hindsight was generally wrong, he thought, and obscured the personal individuality of the poet, which was what the reviewer should be getting at. Louis Dudek replied that it was a fact that poets, including Irving Layton, were influenced by the currents of their time and by other books, however individual their creative process. Irving Layton replied by re-emphasizing the primacy of the latter. Alan Pearson brought the discussion back to the question of editorial responsibility for the reviews—often perfunctory or misleading— printed by magazines. Recent reviews of books by Milton Acorn and Phyllis Webb were cited by him and others. But most of those present seemed to feel that the responsibility of the editor lay in selecting the reviewer wisely; he couldn't dictate how he should do his job. Alan Pearson said he was bothered by how unqualified many reviewers were (by their inadequate range of experience of life) to say anything about the books they presumed to criticize. The writer was pressing into new 55

areas of experience, and the reviewer had no basis on which to judge him. Milton Wilson suggested that this was a problem beyond any question of the competence of reviewers. It was every reader's problem. If each really new work establishes its own precedent (as Irving Layton argued yesterday) then the reader must necessarily take a jump in the dark. Literature is not something for which anyone can be completely forearmed by experience. Frank Scott pointed out that the reviewer could serve a useful purpose by continuing to remind us of standards of craftsmanship: he mentioned T. S. Eliot's stricture on Shelley's handling of rhyme in the first stanza of "To a Skylark" as an example of the sort of specific criticism he thought we could have more of. Others noted that the Canadian poet's sense of existing in a literary community (despite the size of the country) was surprisingly strong (even a bit cosy) , and wondered whether it wasn't one of the reviewer's functions to provide a link in this sense of community. Eli Mandel argued that reviewers could be more experimental in their approach, particularly to established poets. It might be worth-while to try, say, an archetypal approach on an apparently untraditional poet and see what happened. Louis Dudek didn't see any point in perversity for the sake of perversity. Others wondered if the reviewer could affort to be so experimental, considering how few reviews the book was likely to get. According to Irving Layton, the dearth of serious, competent and experienced reviewers was the main trouble with reviewing in this country. The reviewers from whom a poet could expect any significant criticism were no more than about three. Because they were so few, they were too influential; more depended on their words than was healthy either for the reviewers themselves or for the poets and readers who took them seriously. He emphasized that he was less inclined to decry criticism as 56

such than to complain because there wasn't enough of the real thing. Others, among them Eli Mandel, then took up the problem of the influence of the reviewer and critic, but the seminar concluded a few minutes later.

57

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE IIIIIIIEM11•11111111•11111111•11

Louis Dudek

The theme I would like to suggest for the present seminar can be put in the form of a question: "Whatever happened to the little magazine?" Applying the question to ourselves directly: "Since 1942 or so, what has happened to Canadian little magazines?" In answer to the first question, the little magazines have not disappeared—there are over five hundred of them now in existence in English. But they've deteriorated sadly since the 1920's , often to the point of ,rank amateurism, illiteracy and insipidity. The entire movement has lost its integrity, its standard of high achievement, its direction. Why? I think the little magazines have been deteriorating gra lually over the past forty years. Northrop Frye would probably call this archetypal thinking: from a golden age, to silver, iron—and finally mimeograph. But look at the facts. The last number of Tish I received from Vancouver was so smeared and smudged by the mimeograph roll that I couldn't read it at all. "Modern poetry" has become not only incomprehensible but illegible! 59

The little magazine appeared in this century as a reaction to the big commercial magazines, the press, the so-called "mass media." We're the literary reaction against commercialism and mass culture. Ezra Pound's "To hell with Harper's and the magazine touch," around 1912, strikes the keynote exactly. With the spread of literacy in the nineteenth century, and the profitable exploitation of this market, a culture developed in which inanity became generalized as the respectable popular entertainment of the middle class. The criterion of popular taste became the lowest common denominator of all values. And the course of this degradation is to be found in the press and in the moneymaking motive that dispenses with any aspect of the commodity that doesn't pay off, and that therefore reduces literature to a marketable utility. Against this 'background, a conception of poetry emerges which is more ambitious and original in its desire to explore total reality than poetry had ever been in the past. But this new poetry could not break through without attacking the entrenched conformities binding literature and society. And therefore the new poetry became terribly concerned with society and reality. You see this in James Joyce, in Ezra Pound and in T. S. Eliot. Each of these is a culture-critic on a grand scale: and each of them published his first work in the rebellious little magazines of the teens of this century— in the Little Review, in Blast, in transition. After this initial attack on existing culture, however, the first modern poets and writers came to be accepted by the scholarly fraternity and were soon placed on a pedestal of critical adulation. Their original function was virtually ignored, just as most teachers ignore Shelley's early atheism and revolutionary activity. The mere complexity of art is more interesting because there the teacher can shine, and the student can be proved to be dull-witted. If rebellion or vitality is a test, 60

the young may have it over the pedagogue. The modern poets never became popular, of course, but they did acquire impressive reputations. The rumor of greatness was whispered in university corridors. And in the end one or two achieved Broadway success, as did Eliot and Auden. In the wake of this "establishment" situation in poetry, by the 1940's and 1950's the most important literary magazines had become relatively conservative, prestigeconscious, impressive more than expressive or artistically vigorous, so that their function had become thoroughly unlike that of the irresponsibles of the teens. London Magazine, Encounter, Partisan Review, compared with the earlier magazines, are like university quarterlies. Meanwhile, vis-à-vis the current Canadian literary magazines, the little magazines carrying on in the spirit of Blast, the Little Review, and Dial, deteriorated to the point of insipidity. The whole purpose of this type of magazine became muddled and confused as the leadership of the leading magazines was sidetracked from the main issue. The entire movement at the ground level lost its vigor and its artistic direction. With us, the little magazine movement is supposed to have begun in the 1920's with the Canadian Forum, the McGill Fortnightly Review, and later the Canadian Mercury; but it's obviously doubtful whether these periodicals should be called little magazines at all. The Forum is a familiar type of political magazine, like the Nation or the New Republic. The McGill Fortnightly Review took its name—and its ideals—not from any wild little magazine but from the English Fortnightly Review, a great nineteenth-century magazine. (Maybe in Canada we did not yet have the kind of embattled minority that makes the little magazine possible.) In the 1940's, with Contemporary Verse, Preview, First Statement, and Direction, the authentic type of 61

little magazine for the first time appeared in Canada. It was admittedly a minor imitation of the real thing. A. J. M. Smith, however, was quick to give recognition to the poets who appeared now for the first time in these magazines; he included most of them in The Book of Canadian Poetry in 1943 and 1947. Frank Scott and A. M. Klein were also ready to participate from the beginning in Preview. In short, the old group and the new came together in the little magazine movement in Canada, changing the shape of our poetry. Since then, our magazines have followed the road to dinner-jacket formalism like the American and English magazines. Have a good look at Tamarack Review or Fiddlehead, or Northern Review in its last years. Tamarack and Fiddlehead, for all their difference in content and purpose, are similar in this—that they never take a chance in publishing the kind of stuff that appears in Tish or Cataract. They would consider it below their standard of good taste (taste no doubt in the social sense) ; yet we all know—or ought to know—that Cataract and Tish will inevitably publish the new significant poetry, if any appears. (I have no special quarrel with any of the magazines, all power to them; and I certainly want a better Cataract and Tish before I recommend them to anyone: but I am trying to define the function of the little magazines by making these categories.) Unfortunately—and this is my whole point—the kind of magazines that I prefer have become petty, badtempered, individualistic little sheets, without a decent standard of production or even of literacy. They've gone to pieces because the stuffed shirts of the review type have arrogated to themselves too much of the available readership, ability and honour. Square values drive out real values in literature, or drive them to the periphery of minor lunacy. Our respectable writers and critics don't look in the right direction; they usually ignore 62

the little magazines where the real literary ferment is taking place. Every failure on the part of responsible critics to understand the social dynamics of modern literature, the fundamental protest against the conditions of modern life, and against the commercial levelling of mass communications and publishing, adds to the desperation and demoralization of the resistant minority, and creates the collapse in literary standards to which I refer. A small group of readers, a few hundred across Canada, who would understand the situation, and put in a good word for the writers from time to time, might provide support and encouragement for a continuing literature. But when I look at the peripheral little magazines and their circulations, I must admit that I doubt whether we have such a minimum number of readers and responsible critics.

IN THE DISCUSSION THAT FOLLOWED Leonard Cohen said that today the rebellion of the little magazines of the earlier period had fufilled its purpose, and that the mass magazines will print the most sensationally daring of material, so that good writers do not need to resort to the little magazines. This suggestion aroused much interest and was pursued with lively discussion: Was it true that certain mass magazines were open to free expression? (Cohen insisted that they were, if the writing was good enough.) Could one enjoy any decent writing groping down a narrow column flanked by advertising, as in the New Yorker? Did publication in these well-paying places solve the problem of the little magazines? F. R. Scott remarked that little magazines were at their best for a short period, while they represented a fresh group spirit, and that they did well to fold after a few years' existence. 63

Irving Layton asked why Delta continued publication, since it was apparently subject to the process of deterioration described. Louis Dudek, Delta's editor, replied that unlike Layton he did not feel he should produce a Canadian literature single-handed, and that he had hoped others would contribute some of it. Unfortunately, he admitted, Delta contained mainly the work of "Canadian hillbillies"—but this was the best that came to hand. Leonard Cohen continued his argument that the bigcirculation magazines, such as Esquire, were open to the most extreme kinds of writing, that in the past had been limited to little magazines. "If a writer is good, he can be published in these magazines now," he argued. Layton replied that there could be a sinister danger in these media of publication: to which Cohen answered that Layton himself had become a rebel figure much to the delight of middle-class audiences who watched him on C. B. C. Layton made the assertion that he nevertheless maintained his integrity. Other contributors to the discussion raised the question of mimeographed magazines, praising some of these in contrast to the printed media. Layton expressed the opinion that the best Canadian poetry magazine by far was the mimeographed paper Cataract (edited by K. V. Hertz, Seymour Mayne, Leonard Angel in Montreal). Tish, in Vancouver, received comment as a sign of some vitality in the far West.

64

REVOLUTION AND POETRY nommommmommime George Whalley

If I were less ignorant, I could give a conspectus and history of revolutionary poetry; but I found that I didn't know enough, and that when I faced up to the question I wasn't even sure that I could identify revolutionary poetry or say whether (if there is such a thing) it was called revolutionary because of its nature or origins or motives or effects. So, deprived of the comforts and amenities of the historical method, I find myself forced back upon the tedious necessity of thinking the thing out for myself. First of all: the word "revolution" is often used as a synonym for rebellion, perhaps because it sounds a little grander and has more of a cosmic sweep to it; but the two can be seen as distinct. A child can be rebellious, but few children are revolutionary. And I take it that we are thinking of those movements in human affairs— such as are now occurring in the province of Quebec— which define the successive steps of our advance from barbarism to enlightenment, from an existing (and therefore undesirable) condition to a future (and there65

fore more desirable) state of affairs. Revolution is a process: rebellion is either an attitude of mind or a phase in the process of revolution. Rebellion as an attitude of mind may arise from petulance, from a chronic sense of injustice, grievance, frustration, perpetual misinformation, a deep-rooted habit of saying "no" to anything and everything, a sense of exquisite but undeserved isolation, or a bad digestion. If this account of rebelliousness is at all true, poets must be often and easily rebellious, though for reasons that we need not examine here. But are poets revolutionary? Revolution, like law, is a metaphor. Revolution is not, as one might expect, a metaphor of turning upside down: it refers to the turning of a wheel, a process that passes cyclically through definable phrases. Aristotle— not Marx, as far as I know—first set down the sequence, drawing his inferences from his study of the changes in the form of government. A conqueror sets up a despotism in which be is tyrant with absolute power: (the word "tyrant" in Greek refers to the absoluteness of the power, not to the cruel or inhuman use of it). Tyranny gradually changes into monarchy; the right-to-rule becomes hereditary and traditional, and class distinctions establish mutual responsibility between the ruler and some of his subjects so that the king becomes prirrats inter pares. The nobility then supplants the monarchy and establishes an aristocracy. But once leadership becomes a privilege rather than a social obligation, aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy—the rule of the few; and oligarchy in turn degenerates into democracy—mob rule. Democracy falls into the hands of the first leader clever enough to seize and keep control of the mob; so we have a tyranny again, and the cycle starts over again. The cycle is the turning wheel—the revolution of the metaphor. Except at the transition from tyranny to monarchy (where the rule of arbitrary power changes to the rule of moral obligation) the process of revolution 66

is a sequence of triumphs of a "lower" order over a "higher" order, the affirmation of the principle of "freedom" or "liberty" against the tyrannous—because obsolete—authority of a scheme which has grown out of touch with life and the needs of life. To detect cyclic schemes and patterns in the flux of human affairs is a tempting comfort to historian and analyst. But Aristotle's analysis is acute, and his metaphor has become permanent. Marx, with the absolutism that is never judged to be tyrannous if the scheme be proletarian enough, decided that there must be an end to this interminable social-political game of bottoms-up: there must be a revolution to end revolution. The dictatorship of the masses would be followed by a relatively short though regrettable phase of bureaucracy while the old guard were being quietly disposed of; then the dawn would break, the state would end, and social perfection would be established permanently—to the greater good of man. No longer would the turning of the Great Wheel bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the Spring, nor any aristocrat of wealth, birth, or fortune to dominate his fellows. This digression into (what I take to be) Marxism is necessary. Could it be said that Marx in such matters is a dyed-in-the-wool realist? Can he be absolved of all taint of the prophetic visionary? When we examine the philosophical machinery by which the Law of Necessity becomes absolute, we find it in a process called dialectic —struggle, strife, discord between opposites. Hegel had preached a dialectic of ideas, as though ideas did not change their colour, force, and meaning in being passed from one mind to another or from one setting to another. Marx wanted something more elemental (which for the Communist means something non-human or abstract). Political and social energy he personified into Necessity: nobody, in his view, and nothing could stand before the silent tread of this brainless autocrat Necessity; in the 67

end all would be well, and all manner of things would be well, and mankind would come to haven in a paradise (where, one might note in passing, the luxuriance of the flowers owed something perhaps to the blood of the bourgeoisie with which the ground had been so liberally sprinkled). An Idea, in the Hegelian sense, is a kind of picture in the mind, a diagram of the order of things actual or desired. Since Ideas are not empirically derived, and cannot be shown to be logically connected with what in reason or custom we accept, they must be taken on faith, or trust, or hope. If the Idea is indeed an account of the structure of the moral universe, it is a myth. But most social ideas are not, in this sense, myths—a myth being a large imaginative structure, not a conceptual scheme or series of propositional statements. Nevertheless, ideas can inflame men to great feats of selfabnegation; ideas can become leading lights or seamarks or beacons blazing in the hills, or the smoky flames rising from the wreck of an ambassador's staff-car, or from the saturated stump of some monkish enthusiast whose composure seems insolently unaffected by the willing dissolution of his body. Ideas may tempt their advocates to force the Idea on others: and when a myth is handled in this way, it too becomes an Idea. The transition from one phase in the revolution of the wheel to another may be processive, unmarked by violence, "bloodless" we say with relief as though all revolution must be bloody. Indeed, we mostly think of the transitional phases in revolution as violent and destructive (though necessarily so)—like a flame set in dry grass, like a river overflowing its banks, or a dam bursting: the same elements in the same sort of context, but lawless, running wild, demonstrating (as a car out of control does) a horrifiying change of state; the power showing unexpectedly as ferocious and unbiddable (as in civilized societies it should not) in the eyes and teeth 68

and the convulsive movements of the hands. What releases the social power is usually the one idea under different names and figures: liberty, fraternity, equality, the casting off of chains, the treading down of oppression; the triumph of the simple and needy, the ingenuous, God's children; the restoration of life to creatures bent so under the burden of an alien life that there is scarcely any life in them. Our response to such calls is immediate and profound. Who does not stir to the resonance of the word freedom? Who would not wish to stand at the barricades (though preferably surviving) ? Who would not wish to stale and foul the inner sanctuaries of a bloated and over-dainty indulgence, and restore the mind and senses to a cleaner and more sober life, astringent as ears of wheat in the palm of the hand? The men grow beards; the girls practise musketry and take the field to render radical comfort to their comrades under arms; the children even face the tanks with Molotov cocktails or if need be with nothing more than the shrill effrontery of indignant guttersnipes. I am not myself a revolutionary; am not interested in the patterns of power nor intrigued by the chances of exercising power. What I know about these things is what I hear and observe and read. I have not swung a cutlass in the salt marshes, nor attended with zest the ingenious dismemberment by hand of enemies in public thoroughfares under a bright sun. Yet it is clear to me that at a certain moment patience runs out, and the power that is in itself no more menacing than the firing pin of an uncocked pistol, suddenly is set free. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned. A desperate minority emerges, ascetically dedicated (usually to the death) to destroy "the vested interests 69

of the reactionary." The Idea is a banner, abruptly and finally distinct and unalterable. A mechanism is set in motion; an essential starting-point is the depersonalizing abstraction by which the Idea spreads like a blaze of light or a stain to cover the whole of life, and the enemy is defined in a mortal category, to be pitilessly destroyed. The Americans were lucky: their enemy was not on the spot—they could have their revolution by correspondence. Not so the French, or the Russians, or the Hungarians. The movement that springs from the solitary and astonishing vision of one man, is now no longer personal but social; no longer particular and universal, but general and abstract. A mass movement is in flood; no one person can any longer keep his head above it or stand against it; and nobody can say where it will end. Courage, purpose, fanatical concentration on a few essentials, a murderous disregard for personal safety, a contemptuous disregard for order and decency: all these are brought into instant and blazing intensity, a burning-glass of withering power. Here surely is dignity, man rising to his full stature against the dragons of injustice, facing hazard and humiliation unprotected and without flinching. Almost the only thing we can be sure of is that, if the timing is good, practically nothing can stop the march of these forces. And we can be sure that when the victory has been won, and silence drains back into the stained and derelict streets, there will be some rueful thoughts as we wash the blood from our hands and arms; and we will look at ourselves with disgusted amazement, catching through the chinks of a sickening triumph, the glimpse of a self-betrayal. We have taken the law into our own hands; our indignation made it clear that we were right to do so; and yet the stains—on our hands and on our hearts—we had not thought the law had this colour. For the law is a metaphor too—first introduced I think by Francis Bacon. Suppose (the metaphor implies), 70

suppose the universe governed by an intelligent authority as a society is governed by a disinterested ruler; the ruler makes laws for the good of society which, on pain of punishment or deprivation, are to be obeyed. The threads of structural continuity that hold the universe together, the metaphor implies, bind us in much this same way—whoever made the laws: if we disobey them, we do so at the pain of punishment or deprivation. To be master of one's own fate has a good Whitmanish ring to it; to take the law into one's own hands has a fine swashbuckling note to it. But is not tragedy the exploration of what happens to us when we take the law into our own hands? Tragedy is not an account of illegal disaster, of fate interfering from outside: it tells us how, by instinct, we may set about methodically to destroy ourselves from within, and fascinated watch ourselves doing it. Good intentions, good motives, a self-disregarding concentration upon some point of abstract principle—all these are part of the scheme, but they are never half enough. Tragedy is not only a scheme but a mechanism; and once set in motion the process of self-betrayal is continuous and irreversible. Law is something other than the vested interest of reactionary lawyers; perhaps the law is easier to break than to understand simply because we are the law: the law of the universe is always our law because we see it with our own minds; we have access to the law when we know the law. When we defy the law, tragedy says, we destroy ourselves; when we break the law we break ourselves. We know by action; we know what we are by what we do and by what happens to us in the doing— for every thought and action looks forward and backward. Yeats, in a poem written shortly before his death, looked back over his life as a man of influence What had he done unwittingly? 71

Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? Did words of mine put too great strain On that woman's reeling brain? Could my spoken words have checked That whereby a house lay wrecked? And all seems evil until I Sleepless would lie down and die. Even if the revolution succeeds, and the end approves the means, the emotional debauch is followed by a haunting and desolate sense of betrayal. And the sense of guilt, coming on us asleep or awake, gathers to itself like a nightmare the images of brutal insensibility, of high principle brought to self-deception, the anguish of a self-mutilation that cannot justify itself in ascetic denial or surgical release: futile, fantastic, corrupt. My account of revolution probably lacks the broad information and benign detachment that is expected of "sound scholarly work." I want to make clear that, as far as I can see, revolution is not only something we do or can do—like voting, or selling insurance, or skindiving—but something that happens to us. We become possessed; we renounce part of ourselves in yielding to those parts which are exclusively identified with the revolution. We become instruments (bagpipes, FrenchCanadian horns?) through which the winds of Destiny or History or Necessity concert their tunes. Is this not much like one of the dominant pictures of the poet— also Mr. Layton's picture— the poet as the man possessed? Is it then the case that the poet is par excellence the instrument of revolution, the revolutionary leader? For is he not "the unacknowledged legislator of the world"? Now surely is a good time to examine the relation between revolution and poetry without the risk of parody. There is revolution in the air, and not only 72

in the Province of Quebec; and not all of it can be confidently forecast as gallows-work and public dismemberment of back-benchers. Canadian poetry is more vigorous and inventive than it has ever been before. We hear more and more insistently about a new wave of revolutionary poetry running side by side with outspoken demands for social and political reform. Does this perhaps mark the real intersection of revolution and poetry in our time? Let me turn aside for a moment to attempt the impossible: that is, to try to say what I think poetry is. To paraphrase Coleridge, it is so impossible to say what poetry is without saying what a poet is that I start with the poet. He is by constitution a person of unusual awareness, his sensibility being broad, exact, and vigorous. His awareness gives him a peculiar sense of the present; and this, in comparison with the defensive and formulated response of other persons, makes him seem to be able to see into the future, but in fact his intense concentration upon the present gives him special access to the past and the future. His concern is not with things but with relations—relations between himself and things and persons and ideas and places and experiences, and relations between any or all these without his being implicated beyond the necessary and undetached implication of the exact observer. Poems can be projections of desire; but what the best poems are, and what mature poets seem always striving towards is not the fulfilment of desire but the making and realising of vision. The "detachment of the artist" arises not from his withdrawal from experience: rather, it marks his ability —refreshing and liberating—of being able to apprehend what is not a projection of himself: he may, by grace, make things which are not in his own image. Desire easily masquerades as vision: and it is not easy to give ground rules for telling hallucination from vision; but desire holds us in a prison of ourselves, while vision73

by bringing us to what is not ourselves, and relating us to a world not made over into our own tautological image—releases us from ourselves so that we discover both ourselves and the world. Again, poems are things made, not self-expressions; they are expressive surely, but what is important is not so much what they express as that they are examples of a certain order of existence and relation, of a certain order of complexity and energy. Poems are, one by one, existences in their own right, independent (once made) of their makers; each being a universe, a garden, a room, self-contained, with its own language and customs which we, as well-mannered guests, must learn quickly if we are not to behave like brash and insulting tourists. When I say a universe, I mean (as Yeats has it) something single, globelike, whole; corresponding in this respect to the state of imagination out of which alone (according to Coleridge and others) a true poem, a universal poem can grow. Such a state is "the poet described in ideal perfection." Again, whatever else a poem is, it is a word-thing, a thing made out of language. For poetry there is no definable quality: but poetry is a state into which language may fall and into which a person may (by grace) come. When that state occurs (imagination) the poem finds itself (no matter how skilful, intelligent, and deliberate the poet's control during the whole process of composition) and goes its own way and becomes itself and is itself. The word made flesh is an existence, in its own right, integral and singular, intersecting with other universes no doubt, but nevertheless very distinctly and exquisitely itself and nothing else. Then I would say that poetry finds its universality by its sharp, almost obsessive concentration upon the particular. In renouncing the obvious and safe but approximate connections of generalisation, the poet always seeks the luminous particular—in detail, place, experience, word, tune, rhythm—that can release a profound (and therefore 74

indefinable and untranslatable) universal recognition. The poet enters into the world of imaginative structures by turning away from generality, even from logic, even from that other veiled logic of grammar and semantics, to find, invent, make (if need be, from scratch) the way words and phrases can hold together with the inevitability of a fugal pattern and the self-evidence of a dream. When this poetical thing happens to a person and to language, we say "imagination" has happened: which is neither moonshine nor make-believe but access to the whole world of universal realities which (though uninteresting enough under general categories) is infinite and unique and inexhaustible. On the one hand, the poem draws us into the universe of real and deep relations—the only world that anybody would seriously want to enter or live in; on the other hand, the poem becomes a sort of angel announcing an order of the world that is the birthright of us all—the world of imagination which is the world of supreme reality. The symptoms of that world are few, paradoxical, and astonishing. Existence and form become coincident; here order arises, self-shaping, out of a chaos of dark and compelling vitality which is also the world of our radical life; simple and complex are in luminous conjunction, so that what is complex can be seen in a simple order and the simple—like an atom or a universe —is breath-takingly complex. Freedom, which looked simple enough as the great revolutionary clarion-call, is seen at the heart of poetry as complex and self-determinate; here freedom consorts with necessity, freedom within deftly chosen limits becomes energy realizing itself in grace. Every good poem is a triumph of law, and an announcement of the existence of a law of the universe— our universe—that we are tempted to renounce. It is in this sense alone that poets are the legislators of the world: they remind us constantly—because this is the 75

only source for their work and the source cannot be separated from the work—of the way the world is made, our world, the world of relations, the world of knowing, remembering, loving. The poet is always making images of our world, or parts or aspects of it; presenting us with visionary glimpses of what we are, and what we might be, and where we are, and how: but in a way so ungeneralised that there is always the whiplash sting of accusation: this is not about, this is: this it not all people or all life in general, but each single and particular person, each life, each instant, each place. The poets do not make the laws: they make poems; and these, arising only out of a certain order of life, and that order radical to human life altogether, establish, assert, evolve, analyse, and commend the fundamental laws of our life. I started by guessing that poets were rebellious but not revolutionary. But now it begins to look as though the poet, as I have described him, would be just the person to lead a revolution, to provide the songs and images that could set a country ablaze, who could by his insistent needling and haggling at the vices and evils of our days encourage us to take arms against intolerable injustice and confusion. Yet I think not. If we think of the poets that could with reason be called revolutionary, they are a strange group because they are "revolutionary" in a number of different ways—sometimes in a political sense, sometimes artistic. Here are a few names: Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Pound, Whitman, Smart, Auden, Lorca, Goya, Schonberg, Bach. Yet who is to say that art cannot reform life, or that a change in literary procedure may not announce and even produce social change? Let us pick out two obvious ones: Shelley and Yeats. Shelley wanted to be a revolutionary: he wanted to initiate and support a revolution, and with the rest of mankind to reap the benefits of it. He found that flying balloons and distributing pamphlets and urging insur76

rection in Ireland met with less success than he expected. He may have noticed that nobody much was marching behind him; he certainly caught a glimpse of real political life that spoiled his taste for indiscriminate bloodshed. He turned away from the work of a practising revolutionary and concentrated on what he was best at —writing poetry. A better pistol shot than Byron, he never had a chance to lead a ragged and rebellious rabble. As a poet, he would be "the trumpet of a prophecy" so that he could by the incantation of this verse Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! The words Shelley wrote however were not a political programme, nor a scheme for action. They were simply an Idea (in the Platonic sense), a vision of human life perfected, in which man—released from the bondage of fear and hatred—would come to his full stature daemonic. But the release would be neither easy nor instantaneous: "This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue." What he hoped to do—and one understands his frustrated impatience and testiness —was to kindle "within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind." The Revolt of Islam was narrative, not didactic: Prometheus Unbound was not didactic and discursive, but symbolic and visionary, stylised to the point where the mind was its own image and even dramatic tension had vanished. His end as poet was to construct symbols, and to correlate them 77

into a myth. As a myth-maker he was perhaps neither as deft nor as self-conscious as Yeats (himself an incorrigible myth-maker) reported; but there is a remarkable if inattentive singleness to Shelley's work. The more distinct the symbolism, and the more substantial and intricate the myth, the farther removed from any mundane or identifiable social life. The movement towards symbolism is the movement away from the actual towards the real. It is the business of art to be unlike life in order to delineate and celebrate life. About this Shelley was himself clear: "It is the business of the Poet to communicate to cq–ars the pleasure and the enthusiasm arising out of those images and feelings in the vivid presence of which within his own mind consists at once his inspiration and his reward." Shelley's imagery was the imagery of the mind: he was not a "Naturepoet." And Yeats, searching that country as a boy and a young man, found there abiding symbols for his own use, to be used as not even Shelley had used them. Yeats, again, bemused by Maud Gonne, even thought for some years that he might become a leader in the Irish movement towards freedom, and tried as earnestly as an unrequited lover could to follow Maud's crack-brained inconstant political dream. There is no question that Yeats wrote some memorable political verses—songs that any Irishman can recall with a stinging sense of political irony even though they may not be suitable for shouting at the barricades—but these would not make him much reputation if they were not among the writings of a man of much greater stature. His most memorable political poem surely is "Easter, 1916," and that poem (Maud thought it trivial) is memorable because of its statement that even political devotion can transfigure a man. The men who were shot—selfish, drunken, vainglorious, inconsequent, half-mad—were transfigured by their single-hearted and hopeless devotion. The poem tells us—with what tense and sorrowful force—not what 78

the men fought for or died for, but simply that they died and were executed, that their cause was probably illconsidered but that they will be remembered, that they have become Cuchulains, heroes fighting the sea hopelessly and mortally. Love we know can transfigure a man; hatred can; but who ever thought that political zeal could transfigure a man, or devotion to a cause that was by all odds a long way from being either obviously right or definitely good? Even politics! And this too, in the poem, is part of the cycle of life; perhaps not only part of human possibility but of human necessity. Yet not very much like the mechanistic Necessity of the Marxian revolution. Yet not very much unlike the inner necessity that in tragedy not only destroys a man from within but ennobles him in his destruction and ennobles mankind in the witnessing of it. For tragedy is not warning but purification. A political revolution needs an Idea: at some point it must be fixed and generalized: it must become doctrine and so move out of the field of vision so that, by leaving the field of oblique or absent-minded action, it may enter the field of deliberate and coordinated action. It is at this point that a poet—whether promptly or with some hesitation and delay—leaves the revolutionaries. The poet, pivoted on the present, is an antenna: he sees what is happening and so cannot help to see what will happen. He lives with the great images of permanent life and relation: everything he thinks and sees falls into relation with these. He is the person who may catch the phrase or image, or write the verses or hum the tune that will, in the end, shape and lead the revolution. But wherever the machine or revolution, the deliberate scheme of directed will, passes out of the field of vision into the field of action, the poet is left aside—and must be: for the vision is constantly changing, and his vision is constantly changing. The world is constantly chang79

ing: it will not even stay still long enough to be changed into the form we want to change it to. Freedom, liberty, equality—these are large themes because they are very small indeed when they germinate from the vivid centre of the small universes of our loves and perceptions. We disarm our vision when we try to expand it to a cosmic scale: the scale of our vision is already cosmic, for it is centred on our own universe, our own order, our only world. When we become social we generalize, we become abstract, we lose the thread. Poets, like anybody else, can get hysterical and frightened: they can write verses that appear to be poetry and which yet have little kinship with the order or nature of poetry. What (for example) makes us think that there is anything more horrible about Hiroshima or Dresden than about the methodical carving-up of a girl-friend in a vacant lot—or the slow destruction of another person by affectionate possessiveness? We cannot possibly come into relation with the multiple deaths of Hiroshima or Dresden; and our attempts to do so stammer off into thin rhetoric or—if we are more honest—into incoherent grief. Dylan Thomas' "Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire, of a Child in London" is not outmoded by the nuclear bomb because it is individual, simple, and personal, and because even among the multitudinous deaths in the London bombing it refrains from the habit of statistical rhetoric by which Hiroshima too easily tempts poetry into journalism. But listen to this—which to my mind is as much to the point of Hiroshima (which occurred after it) as Edith Sitwell's more topical incantation of liturgical horror. Dylan Thomas wrote: Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother 80

Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other. Rhetoric is an attempt to raise the emotional level by means other than symbolical—that is, by means other than imaginative or poetical: by raising the voice, by accumulating high-sounding words, by indulging the "passionate intensity" that Yeats condemns rather than by scouring life to the bone with Swift's saeva indignatio. Understatement is better; yet it too can become a habit of rhetoric, a superlative trick by inversion. Anger, satire, indignation—all of these can easily become, like facetiousness, forms of defensive rhetoric, escapes from the much more difficult task of precision, pointedness, symbolic exactitude, the terrible brilliance of vision, honesty. To ruminate over the threat of atomic weapons, or upon the stain of guilt that spreads from the dropping of bombs or the villainy of politicians, is one thing. There is a political indignation that can burst into flame and singe more than the sleeve of a coat, as there is a lyrical power of intellect that can—at the turn of a phrase or a thought or a glimpse of an idea or even an equation—move with the catlike stealth of a dancer. But this is rare, because the centres of gravity are elsewhere: not in the head, not in the ephemeral history-making events of the wars which may in the end prove less memorable than Homer's Catalogue of Ships, or than the batting average of heroic baseball players. The poets are the legislators (though unacknowledged), the delineators of the law. They are revolutionaries in their continuous affirmation of human values, of the precious vulnerability of what is worth living for and dying for. But they are as deft in destroying a revolution as they are in encouraging one; for they cannot stop— even for long enough for the revolt to be mounted and to succeed. They must move on to a restatement—even 81

if thinking socially and politically—to a new vision, a rediscovery of what being always old is also always new. Sheer magnitude—the state, the world, thousands of deaths, millions of injustices—is for the poet nothing beside the turning of a snail in the sun or the sudden flash of delight as a cluster of words meets in due consort. If it's sheer magnitude we are seeking for themes, we don't have to go far from home: here is lying enough, cynicism, duplicity in the name of civilization, cruelty in the name of competition, wickedness massive enough and purulent enough surely to provide all the sense of guilt we can manage without bothering too much about new wars. There is still about our lives the ancient horror of Cain's first murder—the sheer startling inventiveness of it. There are primal evils abroad, if it's dragons we want, and original sin to spare. Yet even these homelike evils are not the poet's business, though he may brood over them and watch them enchanted; nor is the curing of them, nor the driving out of devils. Charms to keep the eyes straight and the heart pure are another matter: and so are all the recognitions of what is precisely itself and not by any means anything else, those things that in our making of them make us too, so that we are transformed and sanctified in the secular rite of creativity. The history of revolutionary periods does not encourage the view that political revolution and poetry go hand in hand. Looking for evidence in the early revolutionary period of America, I found this curious note: "American writers were, by and large, engaged in non-belletristic pursuits." Which means, I suppose, that they weren't writing much and what they did wasn't very good. That may well be typical: I am not aware that political revolt has produced any great poetry, though the episodes of revolution have provided themes for a few. Political verse too easily becomes bird-limed with rhetoric and ham-strung by case-begging. Yet there 82

is revolutionary poetry, even though it isn't particularly social or political. Indeed, I should venture to suggest that all true poetry is revolutionary in as much as it dislodges us uncomfortably and disruptively from what we have no business taking for granted, and renews our sense of life, and restores us to the plain cycle of life. But particularly I find this revolutionary power in the poetry that reminds us that we are "sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal," and ignorant and perplexed. I find the revolutionary power in the poems that are to do with the dignity of sorrow, the sorrowful dignity of compassion, Swift's harsh indignation, the blaze of the bitter vision, the prospect of thorns; in the poems of life and death, and death-in-life; poems that are gay and disrespectful and make much of the inventiveness of words and the inventions of love; poems that celebrate; poems that remember the dispossessed in the small clenched fist of their private loneliness; the sanity of madness and the madness of grief, and the open wound of unfulfilment, and the courage to spit in the eye of fate, and at the end when there is no hope to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." Which is to embrace much that is memorable and potent altogether in poetry. And if I am right in my claim, some poets at least will have been dangerous enough to suffer a fate worse than neglect—political assassination. There have been some, since Socrates: for those who insist that we think, and think compassionately, do not always win universal admiration. I wish I knew all their names to celebrate in a litany: it would be a list worth drawing up. But I think of one in particular, Federico Garcia Lorca, who—though no political partisan—was killed in a brutal and cowardly manner in the outskirts of Granada at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. (Milton, we recall, was not killed, nor even punished, for his partisanship; but I am not sure what conclusion we should draw.) Garcia Lorca 83

was killed for what he had written although his writings were not partisan; perhaps he was killed because his writings—being what they were—refrained from being partisan; anyway, he was killed for his friends, and for the scalding truth of a poetry that touched nothing more ephemeral than the roots of life. (The translations are those of Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili.) from Casida of the Clear Death There is no one who in giving a kiss does not feel the smile of faceless people; and no one who in touching a new born child forgets the motionless skull of horses. Because the roses search in the forehead for a hard landscape of bone and the hands of man have no other object than imitating the roots under earth. As I lose myself in the heart of some children many times I have lost myself in the sea. Ignorant of the water I go searching a death of light which consumes me. from Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Meiias But now he sleeps endlessly. Now the moss and the grass open. with sure fingers the flower of his skull. And now his blood comes out singing: singing along marshes and meadows, sliding on frozen horns, faltering soulless in the mist, stumbling over a thousand hoofs like a long, dark, sad tongue, to form a pool of agony close to the starry Guadalquivir. 84

Poetry is a solitary and private thing most often; though there are other attitudes it can adopt they seem to me less vigorous, less important. The public voice of poetry is not very different from any other public voice; though it may use words better, it too easily sells its privacy for no notable public gain. The effect of poetry is very difficult to determine even in oneself: its effect on our knowing is (among other things) to discipline emotion so that we not only feel more deeply but also more truthfully and exactly. Robert Frost once said that "When the good reader meets the good poem, he suffers an immortal wound and knows he will never recover from it." Over this the poet has no direct control when he writes or publishes a particular poem: his concern is for the virtue or value he finds or makes in his poem. If his political or social sense is strong, and his response to the evils of society acrid, he may write vigorous political verse; but in political verse there is always a drift towards rhetoric, towards generalizing, towards the approximations that may move crowds but do not seriously convince the speaker. When poems become -worlds or universes, they speak in positive affirmation out of an order stronger and more enduring than the other less radical though ever-present world of day-to-day, the world of expediency and compromise. It is not that poems can give an example or lesson: they seldom do. They enunciate the world of relation and value which we recognise as "our natural home." A good poem becomes revolutionary by asserting a world of such simplicity and strength that it accuses and shames the world of power and deliberation. The truly revolutionary poems spring out of silence and out of darkness; not being altogether of this world they tell us most about this world and about ourselves: as does this poem by Theodore Roethke so far removed from any conceivable world of politics or power. 85

Elegy for Jane° (my student, thrown by a horse) I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile; And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables [leaped for her, And she balanced in the delight of her thought, A wren, happy, tail into the wind, Her song trembling the twigs and small branches. The shade sang with her; The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing; And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under [the rose. Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such [a pure depth Even a father could not find her: Scraping her cheek against straw Stirring the clearest water. My sparrow, you are not here, Waiting like a fern, making a spinet' shadow. The sides of wet stones cannot console me Nor the moss, wound with the last light. If only I could nudge you from this sleep, My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon. Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: I, with no rights in this matter, Neither father nor lover. We are all—poets particularly—many things, changing from moment to moment; but we have no business °Copyright 1950 by Theodore Roethke, from The Waking by Theodore Roethke. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc. 86

abdicating from our responsibility for what we are and what we live among. Any present is our present; but there are an infinite number of ways (as those who lecture on decision-making may forget) of effecting change, of taking part: even to withdraw, to do nothing is a positive relation. I don't think we do well to try to be revolutionary: if we do, we shall probably overplay the part and end by not_ being revolutionary at all. Cries of disgust and indignation are well enough: they will do no harm; they clear the air and are fun to repeat if well-versed and the malice well-placed. But poets stand on better ground than that; they work in the field of a liberty which is always astringent and always inventive. Political revolution brings disorder through temporary abdication of freedom and inventiveness—in the name of freedom. Poetry is always for order and fluency, but its effect being always oblique is easily disarmed by deliberate effort, becoming nothing. Even if a poet wants to be revolutionary, he cannot escape the threefold first isolating command of his nature and craft: look clearly, speak straight, write pointedly. The poet's absent-mindedness, being the force of revolution set loose in the steady glance of a man like Lorca, is invincible. The state of the world—even the fate of the world—is really not our business.

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SELECTION OF POETRY READINGS INEEFERIEREGBEIMIESSMIN This selection was made jointly by A. J. M. Smith, F. R. Scott and John Glassco

Leonard Angel

THE GAME

Pawing, the cat leapt on it; clutching, rolled with it over on the grass like a lover, twice and once again pressed its red, its open mouth to the fowl's cold belly. —Spared it of all injury; Returning for another embrace stared with penknife eyes at the trace of its own sharp nails. Yet the bird, I thought, the dumb dead bird; it was unfeeling.

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Leonard Angel

FOR KENNETH HERTZ

Yes, how it all seems planned. And you need only act. You take an instrument to probe the body, carefully: you note how it glints metallically, and go at it. If it's your love lying on that bed— yes, that too is planned. So much the better. You will understand her. And if, as you say, you must ferret deeply, far into every passion as into caverns —how can you prevent snipping your own thread? Certainly one cannot. At worst, you will be simply lost.

But yet—what shall we or anyone say for one who (out of courage) locks the cage that holds him with a clawing lioness? Yes, it's as dark a way to the brightest of hills as to the junk heap of medical scraps: the two lie next each other deceptively, crossing over & back: back & over again, as if kissing each other till that final part. Poet and friend, on which path do you now tread so deliberately, with such strange, such curious meticulousness?

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Sidney Aster

FOR DOROTHY, AGE 16

A fool with crooked teeth and skin too creased to smile offended her. That night (troubled beyond sleep) her breasts became her own. Surely, it's modesty of sorts that now she is a tease. Each male who dares to smile sports a jaw of crooked teeth.

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Sidney Aster

CARTOGRAPHER

upon this river still as leaves on a humid day I chart waves and draw your face until wind triggers the water pain through flesh distorts the surface like your face when angered

Leonard Cohen

ALEXANDER TROCCHI, PUBLIC JUNKY, PRIEZ POUR NOUS

Who is purer more simple than you? Priests play poker with the burghers, police in underwear leave Crime at the office, our poets storm bankers' hours retire to wives and fame-reports. The spike flashes in your blood permanent as a silver lighthouse. I'm apt to loaf in a coma of newspapers, avoid the second-hand bodies which cry to be catalogued. I dream I'm a divine right Prime Minister, I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada, I accept an O.B.E. Under hard lights with doctors' instruments you are at work in the bathrooms of the city, changing The Law. I tend to get distracted by hydrogen bombs,

by Uncle's disapproval of my treachery to the men's clothing industry. I find myself believing public clocks, taking advice from the Dachau generation. The spike hunts constant as a compass. You smile like a Navajo discovering American oil on his official slum wilderness, a surprise every half hour. I'm afraid I sometimes forget my lady's pretty little blond package is an amateur time-bomb set to fizzle in my middle-age. I forget the Ice Cap, the pea-minds, the heaps of expensive teeth. You don a false nose line up twice for the Demerol dole; you step out of a tourist group shoot yourself on the steps of the White House, you try to shoot the big arms of the Lincoln Memorial; through a flaw in their lead houses you spy on scientists, stumble on a cure for scabies; you drop pamphlets from a stolen jet: 'The Truth about Junk';

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you pirate a national tv commercial shove your face against that window of the living-room insist that healthy skin is grey. A little blood in the sink Red cog-wheels shaken from your arm punctures inflamed like a roacimap showing cities over 10,000 pop. Your arms tell me you have been reaching into the coke machine for strawberries, you have been humping the thorny crucifix, you have been piloting Mickey Mouse balloons through the briar patch, you have been digging for grins in the tooth pile. Bonnie Queen Alex Eludes Montreal Hounds Famous Local Love Scribe Implicated. Your purity drives me to work. I must get back to lust and microscopes, experiments in embalming, resume the census of my address book. You leave behind you a fanatic to answer R.C.M.P. questions.

Louis Dudek

0 MONTREAL

Montreal! The only city in the world where the sun sets in the North! City entirely surrounded by sewers, one of which provides the drinking water Ruled by its ten per cent of English ... Where money talks—a refined language And French bombs explode ... Greatest frozen inland port Second largest English-speaking French city in the world Famous for parking lots ... Where the air-pollution in Westmount is not excessive Where unemployment follows overtime and layoff precedes holiday ... Where newspaper literacy is high Where poetry doesn't sell City of bop churches and modern bars Home of the Montrealer magazine Emporium of Pinky Stamps and the give-away trade Teenage harem of NDG (in summer shorts) Boy nursery (in rags) of St. Henri Old People's home of Westmount (in tweeds)

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You've got marble piles (people kneel in your banks) You've got the Hydra You've got leaking gas You've been sold down the Seaway You've been had, Montreal! They've shot up your City Center —the American way! Montreal, where's Stanley street? Montreal, where's my house? Montreal, where's the red light district I used to know? Where are your great traditions? where are your historical sites? Your plaques are rusting! You don't even know where to dig for Hochelaga! You've left the Indians in the slum of Caughnawaga while you go walking in furs! You're all blown up inside! Goodbye! Screw you, Miss Montreal! Mange les palates frites! Go chez Eaton! I'm moving to Ste-Agathe where I don't have to look at you anymore all through the summer (in Montreal, summer is three weeks in July).

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John Glassco

LINES Addressed to a dozen young Canadian Poets, after unwisely Devouring five Little Magazines at a Sitting

Enough, enough.

Gentlemen, I protest

Over and over and over These mementoes of your fornications Vignettes of your sensitive childhood Kicks from jazz, And all these poetics about poetics about poetics And the fearsome insults and the fulsome accolades AND your girl-friend's vulva AND your trip to Mexico Please, gentlemen, please

Eldon Grier

MOUNTAIN TOWN—MEXICO

Arms at my side like some inadequate sign, I lie awake in a dark room in an alien country. While plates of frost slide past my face, and needles cluster in the crepe-like air, my friend who has made his adjustment, urinates into a bucket with a thunderous ring. I must impress myself with certain things; the honesty of mountain people, the lightheartedness of a people never conquered by arms—and yet the monster of the mines lies dead beneath their homes, its scattered mouths decaying in a final spittle of stones. Into this piled-up town beneath astringent stars what did we bring with us that is simple and hopeful— into this confusion of times? Breadcrumbs for the blister of the floor, bottles crowding off the ebbing surfaces, memories of love, perhaps the gentle traumata of our intrusion. A jukebox rumbles out a tune, the singer holds her sex against my abstract form. We are the angels of ironic movement, she and I. Our pleasures are more permanent than the mountains here whose marrows fired in a day form quickly into sediments of tragic angularity.

I lie awake until the blackness burns to filaments of tired red. A horse sparks up the cobblestones. A voice speaks cleanly from the stage of cold beyond. No spout of sunlight ever entered to my bed, but stealthily an orange cat comes snaking through the door in search of food.

Eldon Grier

KISSING NATALIA

Invention begs from door to door in the indescribable darkness, a chorus of animals like canned laughter. I had it planned, drunk though I was, to drive you to the edge of the town and when you said 'thank you' as you always did, I was going to kiss you.

This was the plan and in the calm of decision I got you in, passed houses drawn up like fanatical serfs, my thin excuse trailing lifelessly after us like a rodent tail. (The general's coming, boys, and his aide-de-camp and faceless mariachis from the 'gatos'.) The engine slowed as my heart rose, your profile, dumb in the light, came to the edge of town, looked off to stepping-stones which glowed in the shallows, to total darkness, and Lord knows where. You said, "thank you," and so I put my hand there and kissed you. Were you scared? It must have come like a moon pie in the face, and unprepared for an instant, the trembling ring of your lips held me as a lover. The place reeked of the chemistry of rivers I remember now, and your mouth left the slightest aftertaste of earth.

Ralph Gustafson

THE SWANS OF VADSTENA

Alone she feeds the white swans. And could I know Her thoughts were not Leda Enfolded in that thrashing white? My love encloses her in a strength Of singing white and the gold beak Of my violence holds her. How should she not know? Where I stand apart, she leans On the grass by the white swans As they come to her on the surface Of the water. Where they move perfectly, She turns from the violence To my violence, taken in the white Tumult, unbelieving, making known And whole the blemished god.

LAST JUDGMENT: THE WESTWALL MOSAICS, TORCELLO Poked from their coffins, Risen on the trump Of the topmost angels blue-faced Goggle-eyed blowing their bum-splitting brass, The coughed-up dead, Stitchless, poor danglers, driven, Huddle their tiers of doom.

104 It is a just God. Nearly. Wow how Dull, dullward, done-in, That host—the heavenly half— Elected to Perpetual hosanna! May God be stone-deaf, Step down, snore in the stern, This salubrious canal afternoon Gentle with peels Of half-orange, green sops and Plopped pails Of mamma's garbage, Whiles in the oar-waggled boat Headed nowhere, the Two bare youths Swig from the old man's Valpolicella. They get from my girl on the bank Three cigarettes jubilo! They give her the whole Damned bottle of Valpolicella. Guilt bits, scarlet, doomed, damned, Tailpieces, hoofs, angels, trumpets, God, Cauldrons, pitchforks, palms and pious Slide from the wesiwall Up the canal in the cathedral In a shower of mosaics. "Ciao!" "Ciao!"

Ralph Gustafson

GALLA PLACIDIA BUILDS HER TOMB: RAVENNA

Her hand touched the wiry hair of lovers, and she passed through the cool rooms lovely, they say, but indifferent to her barbarity; night-blue stags drinking, arcs, stars, vegetables, encrusted in mosaics blue and dark blue bent around her tomb lighted by the vaulted windows closed by shaven amber, these, she passed along painted wood corridors to, come from the white sides of chariot drivers, boys, the roughened beds her knowledge of Him nailed on heaven, wearing her hair soft as the air doves and peacocks step through dipping on the path red rind of plums; paled by the honeyed passage of the lovers, she came, unsettling the hand of the artists of Syria on ladders beside the snow-cold tomb.

106

K.V. Hertz

ELEGY FOR AN ASTRONAUT

Over the mob's approving eyes today the missile waited— a steel finger; jeer to the sun. Spineless, across the nation the millions wailed for a hero. Monument high he would rise among them easing their fears; If their children squirmed they would whimper his name as a sign: Ulysses, they would say; Napoleon— But he never came.

Frantic now, they whipped a hick with praise; piped the male-smell to his armpits, and rigged his smile to carry in the nation's press. Then, when he was made packed him starwards in a tube that rose like the masses' cheers. Now, like a shrivelled moon, the phony hero circles the crowds daily— a blacked-out piece of garbage the only monument he could make.

D. G. Jones

SUMMER IS A POEM BY OVID (for Michael Ondaatje) The fire falls, the night Grows more profound. The music is composed Of clear chords And silence. We become Clear and simple as the forms Of music; we are dumb As water Mirroring the stars. Then summer is Ovidian, and every sun Is but a moth evolving In the large gloom— An excerpt from Ars Amoris: flame Is no more fleeting than the limbs Of boy and girl: the conflagration Is the same. While the fire falls, and night Grows more profound, the flesh, The music, and the flame All undergo Metamorphosis. The sounds Of music make a close, So with our several selves, Together, until silence shall compose All but the ashes in the pale dawn And even those.

109

D. G. Jones

CHRISTINE

Her world unfolds A sensuous tautology. She loathes A dialectic of the opposites, The barnyard world Of plants and animals: hers Is circular, Enclosed. It is a mirror-world, Where symmetry mates like to like, Where lines Though parallel still curve And meet, Where their embrace Is infinite, Complete.

Her body is a drift Of snow, and she alone may know Its secret springs, its sweet Declivities. Though she may go Naked before me, I remain Ignorant, Like one profane Before divinity. Her forelock droops And strays upon her face. She smiles And like pale Sappho, Dreaming, waits, Until the mirror is made flesh, Until familiar lips Whisper: to know another Is to know thyself.

111

D. G. Jones

MR. WILSON, THE WORLD

The world Is a spatio-temporal manifestation: Water and rock And Mr. Wilson in his woollen shirt, at once With winds in the poplar leaves, with light Delimiting the rate of change, the shape of waves, The atoms of tobacco smoke which rise In wreaths from his cigar—the sun Hot, still nodding to the earth, the air From ice-caps, raised To 58 or 62 degrees Fahrenheit: the world Is pungent, coloured — sand Sinks beneath your shoe (we've heard the wind) and stones Splash! The osprey disappears, dissolves, As suddenly returns, his wing Banked at another angle on the wind. And so all things

Deliquesce, arrange, and rearrange in field. As Mr. Wilson, who has just Hatched chicken feet on eighty pages, knows. He calls it music. Well, That's just his map, silent, static, posed.... Perhaps God keeps a map, or to compose This long unfinished symphony he fills Reams of paper, white as gulls, with chicken feet. Who knows? Enough if Mr. Wilson's pleased, if brass, if reeds, If skins of animals and steel Strings Translate his birdtracks into sound, dynamic And unfolding till we feel As on a day like this The full concatenation of the field — if men are free With all five senses sharp to watch The fish-hawk hang above the trees And drop ... to recreate Transformations such as these, the fish Alive with silver in the wind ... To imitate the process and to apprehend The ephemeral substantiality of things. Enough.

Boards clattor in the boat, the boat pulls free. Goodby, Mr. Wilson, your pants Balloon in the breeze. The clouds Troll across the hills, there is spray. Drift wood weather! The lovers Will all be indoors, deep in their blankets. Let them explore Their celebrated mystery, we Have a sense of the void through which pours, Molecular, vertebrate, cellular, on wind or in wave, The host whom the lovers inherit — that solitude In which there cohere All things. This is the weather when hunters Wait in the marshes till shadows Shake in the reeds, and then leap With their guns into action. Happy, they grieve The dead birds, and everywhere round them The universe bleeds into darkness. Yes, Mr.Wilson, the world Is a spatio-temporal manifestation.

114

Irving Layton

EL GUSANO

From the place where I was sitting I watched the weary stone-splitters Building a road to blot out the sun; And seeing their sweating bodies In the merciless, mid-day heat I wished I could do it for them: Turn it out like a light, I mean. And I almost rose up to do so When my eyes suddenly picked out A strange, never-before-seen worm Making its way on the dried leaves. It had a rich, feudal colour, Reddish-brown like the Spanish soil And knew its way among the stones So plentiful in Alicante. I love lizards and toads; spiders, too And all humped and skin-crinkled creatures But most in love am I with worms. These sages never ask to know A man's revenue or profession; And it's not at antecedents

Or at class that they draw their line But will dine with impartial relish On one who splits stones or sells fish Or, if it come to that, a prince Or a generalissimo. Bless the subversive, crawling dears Who here are the sole underground And keep alive in the country The idea of democracy. I gave it a mock-Falangist Salute and it crawled away; or Was it the stone-splitters frightened The worm off and the brittle noise Of almond-pickers? It vanished Under a dusty dried-up leaf For a restful snooze in the ground But I imagine if now tunneling Its hard way to Andalusia Faithful to the colourful soil Under the villas and motels Of those whose bankers let them stow Ancient distinctions and treasure In the rear of their foreign cars. O plundered, sold-out, and lovely Shore of the Mediterranean: This worm shall knit the scattered plots Of your traduced, dismembered land; And co-worker of wave and wind, Proud, untiring apostle to The fragrant and ..nduring dust, Carry its political news To Castile and to Aragon.

Irving Layton

EL CAUDILLO

In Spain, Generalissimo Franco is top dog: you know that because in every village and town there are at least one Avenida and one Calle named for him — yet nobody speaks his name! It's as if he didn't exist but that some novelist had given the alliterative title — Generalissimo Francisco Franco to an obscure masterpiece which no one reads any longer. Still, it's this very silence enveloping him like the muteness believing Jews offer their Tetragrammaton that clinches the Caudillo's existence. That, and the Civil Guards wearing hats of shiny, black plastic that hint at bull's horns. At night, on the dark road to Denia I saw one on a motorbike; His back receding, the distance made the contour of an idol's head; and though I'm no bull-worshipper, remembering the obscene red mouth,

I can see how that grey apparition out of the lightless groves of Crete might turn a man's bones to water anywhere.

Irving Layton

ON SPANISH SOIL

On Spanish soil how everything comes clear: Trees that pain has twisted — but look up high, Green leaves! The lizard with its tail snapped off Thrusting its neck for the unswerving fly. The stars extinct a million, million years Burn brighter in the Mediterranean sky. In the decayed villa of my mind, Love, There are some playful ghosts, but most are drear: They note the ruthless withering of the leaf And toads straws shall tickle to death each year. The wisp in the child's hand which once was grain Has blown me up too beyond all joy and fear. The mangled lizard, the caught fly, the toad Splitting his sides in a sweet death, these seek Me over an old trail of blood, then die. Who'll show me I do wrong to mourn the weak And win me from defiance and black hate I'll take their censure though they be stones that speak!

Eli Mandel

THE COMEDIANS

You might have expected music But they move so slowly they make no sound. Like swimmers they put their large hands Up before their huge red mouths As if to shove mountains of water Inches over so they can breathe. And yet you think you hear gasps, Snuffling, muffled yelps, occasional Screams when one wallops the other Or with a paddle shuffles on his enormous feet Toward his kneeling unsuspecting friend.. Sometimes in their drowning motions They remove their arms and heads And walk in their bodies like barrels. What brute muscle leaps inside that shell While pink girls roar into sugary cotton And the candied light sprinkles smiles Onto the sour faces of all carpenters? No longer do I care for those critics Who plead with me that Whitman is God. As for that other poet, he too was lying. Warmed by outlandish currents I have begun to build an aquarium Tolerant only for tropical fish Who move like swimmers without sound And nuzzle one another with their golden mouths.

119

Eli Mandel

SECRET FLOWER

Secret flower of my own design sometimes you are a house sometimes you unfold ages and ages old you are sometimes a house with four rooms and four kings and four queens Deeper and more secret darker and older you unfold a poison tree where you hang lovers on your petals I have watched the lovers drop from your petals into the room of kings before the table of judges.

How can this be? It is Sunday My children are making paper men no one has been poisoned no one has been hung there is even laughter in the room. Darker and still more secret older and unfolded beyond my designing heart beyond even my crying out through your four rooms past the hanging tree beyond the swaying lovers beyond the judges who is that lying on the green carpet? who is being carried on the stone tablet? why do these gesture and posture before me? I kneel before the four-armed god gather up the shredded paper heads lift myself from the floor and turn toward the suddenly open door.

121

Eli Mandel

TO MY CHILDREN

A rose grew in my head My father lay dead My mother fell among stones Two flowers grew in my loins I sing to my blossoming wife My father is dead My mother abandoned her life Why should I lay down my head Stony and brittle my days My children sing psalms The rabbis are ancient and wise Blessed be my flowering names

Seymour Mayne

MOUNT ROYAL: AN AERIAL VIEW stranded facing a mad river caught in its path a hilly mound protrudes from its dull green compatriots: on its forehead an advertisement for compassion

R.I.P. Here ... in this warm valley, velvety haven let it be known: ci-git Seymour Mayne at rest now, after this procession of kisses, between her soft breasts ...

123

Henry Moscovitch

MARTIAL TO A READER

Reciting you this poem, Metullus, I know it would make small difference If I go on or not. I do so since you've asked me to: and for propriety's sake. To put it otherwise. Since your brain is no doubt blank behind those fisheyes, what does it matter if they are open or closed? It is because Rome teems with runts like you that I, who was marked by the gods to sing of butterflies and hips must scrape my immortality from satire.

Henry Moscovitch

A WALK IN THE MOUNTAINS

Slowly, the flakes broke; slowly and softly, on battered hat and black wool coat. Then the wind leapt coldly upon us. He spoke of his dead father and the sadness of beautiful women. His sadness, he meant; and crossing his shadow over mine like a hawk, spoke of Greece and the loneliness of love. His own. Violence and the Aegean suns. Blue water like a sea of ink. "I've changed," he said. Went on. But the wind went higher. He clapped his hands but his face grew colder. And the snow had transformed him into a leper. We turned a bend. No sky above us. Only the snow falling Like dampened bits of psalter paper; And below us, the snow-filled lake with its skating shadows:— "I've returned, "he said, "returned to my city and this icicled country another man, haunted by ancient dreams & the tumors of old loves—" To his voice only the wind responded. Who else but he could understand?

125

Alan Pearson

A TOUCH OF DEATH WISH

Like a famished man I've hot-dogged my way thru' histories, gobbled up romantic eras. Like a dishevelled man I've combed the greek mythologies— stomped thru' Plato's beard— for words of light & harmony. Such hide & seek with facts, what utter foolishness! Death walks the streets, hear the sirens squeal. In the forest of streets a world whimpers; news-vendors with blue hands, bums, negroes & skull-capped iews. Desperate for explanations I watch scholars do surgery on hairs which leaves me unresolved; I shoo them from my door. (a feather would tumble their matchstick world)

Nothing matches the rhythm of my blood, women nod at my words & turn away. Men wrest a smug victory from my clamor by kicking questions back at me. I who have seen the world's wood cannot get thru' to them in that sanctuary from which they never stir. I who am the world's greatest footballer cannot kick back questions because they have none. Whether I scream like a siren blossom like a huge rose or revel with bandits in the wood they will not care. I think I'll find a shady tree stretch my 21 fingers—& sleep.

127

F. R. Scott

MOUNT ROYAL

No things sit, set, hold. All swim. Whether through space or cycle, rock or sea. This mountain of Mount Royal marks the hours On earth's sprung clock. Look how where This once was island, lapped by salty waves, And now seems fixed with sloping roads and homes. Where flowers march, I dig these tiny shells Once deep-down fishes safe, it seemed, on sand. What! Sand, mud, silt, where now commuters go About their civic clatter! Boulevards Where delved the shiny mollusc! Time, you're big With eon seconds now, your pendulum Swung back to ice-pressed pole-cap, that drove down This chest of earth, until the melting came And left a hollow cavity for seas To make into a water waiting-room. But sea-bed floated slowly, surely up As weight released brought in-breath back to earth And ground uprising drove the water back In one more tick of clock. Pay taxes now, Elect your boys, lay out your pleasant parks, You gill-lunged, quarrelsome ephemera! The tension tightens yearly, underneath, A folding continent shifts silently And oceans wait their turn for ice or streets.

123

F. R. Scott

WAITING

I suppose waiting cannot be avoided. Even a mother waits to bear her child And a promised bishopric must be confirmed. Often it's just a matter of fixed time Like coming-of-age, or the right to be Senator. But timeless waiting, the uncertain call, The bell not ringing in he empty room, Faces at windows, slow retreating steps— These scissors cut the fibre of our cloth. Thus waiting for you, prisoner of time, I saw the place of patience in the world— The slavish docile sullen empty face Of backward states and undeveloped tribes, History's backwash, waiting on unknowns, Unclaimed deposits, buried moidores, Old bearded prophets preaching a slow cause. This other kind, this lurking by a booth, This one-mast tight-rope you have left me on ...

129

F. R. Scott

ECLIPSE

I looked the sun straight in the eye. He put on dark glasses,

A. J. M. Smith

ON CERTAIN CANADIAN POETS

Although the muscle's weak that makes them men They have no impotency of the pen: They top their frowsy Muse, alas!—again!—agair-lagain!

A. J. M. Smith

"MY LOST YOUTH-I remember it was April that year, and afternoon. There was a modish odour of hyacinths, and you Beside me in the drawing room, and twilight falling A trifle impressively, and a bit out of tune. You spoke of poetry in a voice of poetry, And your voice wavered a little, like the smoke of your Benson & Hedges, And grew soft as you spoke of love (as you always did!), Though the lines of your smile, I observed, wore a little sententious. I thought of my birthplace in Westmount and what that involved —An ear quick to recoil from the faintest 'f al se note'. I spoke therefore hurriedly of the distressing commonness of American letters, Not daring to look at your living and beautiful throat. 'She seems to be one who enthuses', I noted, excusing myself, Who strove that year to be only a minor personage out of James Or a sensitive indecisive guy from Eliot's elegant shelf. 'What happens,' I pondered fleeing, 'to one whom Reality claims ..?' I teach English in the Middle West; my voice is quite good; My manners are charming; and the mothers of some of my female students Are never tired of praising my two slim volumes of verse.

131

A. J. M. Smith

WATCHING THE OLD MAN DIE

Watching the old man die I savored my own death, Like a cowardly egotist Whose every thought and breath Must turn and twist Selfward, inescapably. When he struggled for breath With a kind of unhinged sigh, I held my own in suspense. The body cannot lie. If blood and breath condense Even the Will cries death. This I was forced to learn, Watching the old man die, Hating his sharpened point That picked at my watery eye And unhinged my knee-joint Till death was my own concern. The body cannot lie. I savored my own death And wept for myself not him. I was forced to admit the truth It was not his death I found grim But knowing that I must die.

132

Neil Tracy

UNCLE REUBEN

His fat bum grumbles on the softest seat, Someone's tobacco clogs his pipe with tar; When someone lays a quarter on the bar His pot is empty as a heifer's teat; He must be careful what he has to eat, A blind man's pension don't go very far; And where he lives, the nuns are so damn near You never hardly see a scrap of meat ... You who have eyes to see and hearts to hear, He wrings the change from you, he haunts your door; He has no eyes, the more he has your ear; He spells the dark, which all good men abhor; Free meals, free whores, free baccy, and free beer; Skillful promoter—who could ask for more?

133

George Whalley

DIONYSIAC

Aquavit and beer to chase it On the patio, narrow between broken walls, And a black bird from Java in a Steinberg cage Whistling in the sun. After the aquavit (a wedding relic), Scotch With beer to chase it; and after the Scotch, Vodka. Meanwhile Antonio Vivaldi ran his Seasons Hi-fi all four of them fiddling flame to the sun's smouldering quiet. Then the flamenco. Whereupon Up rose Bernardino To shuffle a slow dance Seagull-eyed and penguin-footed Up and along the path in a reverie of castanets Self-enwrapped, self-in-the-sun-enchanted. More eloquent even the stillness of the silent girl Whose blue unseasonable eyes and quiet hands Incarnadined the air with their tendrilled passion. The dreaming dance of your stillness shapes in its fingers your heart to a helix of flame; Your eyes are lapis lazuli in a crystal skull. The music will never end. And your hands, as still as birds,

Renounce all motion, enclosed in the flame of your silence While the sun stands still and the bird pours down its indolent song unregarding. For here by the brooks of desire and in the mountains The sacrificial torches run indecorous through groves of sleep Hounding the dainty antelopes, soft to the touch, Till they lie dismembered and their eyes filmed with darkness. Now while the sun is high, while the music revolves As blank and unregarding as that bird's bright eye, The patio is desolate and the house empty. If there is life still, it does not move and there is no sign of it. The garrulous silence of an abdicated sorrow falls Whimpering from dark to dark through the aching spaces of the mind And the frenzy of this torrential sacrament Is gathered into a quiet cage Ingeniously constructed Of blazing music, birdsong, and a grave dance In a narrow place between broken walls.

135

George Whalley

VERONICA

The crumpled linen of her face Bears no imprint of victory Unless lost youth be triumph. But the eyes flicker With remembered lightning And a serpent's wise tongue Transfixes the forked victory That women hold over truth. So a solitary seabird Or a cold dawn may flood The eyes with bitterness of light. The flower borne for a cross Is a lost man's image Crucified with the nail prints Of passion on this crumpled linen.

RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED BY THE FOSTER POETRY CONFERENCE MNIIMOINEMIMI■MIIIMM

Sunday, October 13, 1963

1. Resolved that the Foster Poetry Conference commend the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Province of Quebec for its generous support which enabled the Conference to meet and for the encouragement thus provided to poets in Quebec; and, further, that the Conference commend the Province of Quebec for the continuing support of poetry through its distribution of literary prizes. The Conference further expresses the hope that the federal government and the governments of other provinces in Canada will be moved to emulate the example of the Quebec government in its effort to encourage the development of Canadian poetry. 2. Resolved that the Foster Poetry Conference make representation to the Humanities Research Council of Canada to request its support in the way of substantial grants which would make possible a series of lecture tours and readings by Canadian poets. 3. Resolved that the Foster Poetry Conference commend the C.B.C. for its support of Canadian poetry in providing opportunities for readings and discussion on radio; further, that the Conference urge the C.B.C. to consider the possibility of providing adequate opportunities for the presentation of Canadian poetry on its television facilities. The Conference further urges the C.B.C. to ensure that present radio recordings and tapes of poetry readings be preserved. 136

CONTRIBUTORS

LEONARD ANGEL: born 1945 in Montreal. Educated at Herzliah High School; presently attending McGill University. Has published verse in Forge, Cataract, of which he was a co-editor with K. V. Hertz and Seymour Mayne, and in Canadian Forum. SIDNEY ASTER: born 1942 in Montreal. Educated at Herzliah High School and McGill University. Winner of Lieutenant-Governor's Gold Medal in History, 1963. Now working for M.A. at McGill, on University Graduate Fellowship. Has published poems in Amethyst, Canadian Forum, Cataract, Fiddlehead and Forge. LEONARD COHEN: born 1934 in Montreal. Educated at McGill and Columbia Universities. Has published three books of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), and Flowers for Hitler (1964), and a novel, The Favourite Game (1963). LOUIS DUDEK: born 1918 in Montreal. Educated at McGill and Columbia Universities. Now a member of the Department of English, McGill University. Co-editor with Irving Layton of Canadian Poems, 1850-1952. Founder and editor of Delta. Has published six books of poetry and contributed to two joint collections, his latest being En Mexico and Laughing Stalks. Now working on a long poem, "Atlantis," and a collection of his poetry to be published by Ryerson Press in 1965.

JOHN GLASSCO: born 1909 in Montreal. Educated at Selwyn House School and McGill University. Has published two books of verse, The Deficit Made Flesh (1958) and A Point of Sky (1964), a completion of Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill (1959), a translation of The Journal of Saint-Denys-Garneau (1962), and a novel, The English Governess (1960).

ELDON GRIER: born 1917 of Canadian parents in London, England. Educated in Montreal. Taught painting at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. His work has been published in numerous literary magazines, has been read on C.B.C.'s Anthology and appeared in The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958). Has published five collections of poems, the latest being A Friction of Lights (1963).

RALPH GUSTAFSON: born Lime Ridge, Quebec, 1909. Educated at Bishop's University and Oxford. Senior Fellow, Canada Council, 1959. At present a member of the Department of English, Bishop's University, and living in North Hatley, Quebec. His books of poems include Flight into Darkness (1944), Rocky Mountain Poems (1960), Rivers Among Rocks (1961). Edited the following anthologies: Anthology of Canadian Poetry (1942), A Little Anthology of Canadian Poetry (1943), Canadian Accent (1944), and The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958).

K. V. HERTZ: born 1945 in Montreal. Educated at McGill University. Formerly co-editor of Cataract. Has published poems in Amethyst, Canadian Forum, Edge, Fiddlehead, Prism., Queen's Quarterly, Tish, and in Poesie/ Poetry 64. C.B.C.'s "New Canadian Writing" has also featured his work.

D. G. JONES: born 1929, Bancroft, Ontario. Attended McGill and Queen's Universities. At present a member of the Department of English, University of Sherbrooke. Has published in various little magazines in Canada and two volumes of poetry: Frost on the Sun (1957), and The Sun is Axeman (1961). Presently living in North Hatley, Quebec. IRVING LAYTON: born 1912 in Neamtz, Roumania; came to Montreal the following year where he has lived all his life. Educated at McGill University. Lecturer in modern English and American poetry at Sir George Williams University. Has published 15 books of poetry, of which A Red Carpet For The Sun won the GovernorGeneral's Medal in 1960, and Balls For A One-Armed Juggler the Provincial Prize for the best book of poems published in Quebec during 1963. In 1960 he was awarded the President's Medal by the University of Western Ontario for the best poem of the year. His latest book is The Laughing Rooster. ELI MANDEL: born 1922, Estevan, Saskatchewan. Educated at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Toronto. Taught at College Militaire Royal de Saint-Jean, University of Alberta, and is now at York University. Published "Minotaur Poems" in Trio (1954), Fuseli Poems (1960); editor with Jean-Guy Pilon, of Poetry 62. His new book, Black and Secret Man, appeared in 1964. Winner of Canada Foundation Fellowship in Creative Writing, and University of Western Ontario President's Medal for Poetry in 1962. SEYMOUR MAYNE: born 1944 in Montreal. Was one of the editors of Cataract; now editor of Catapult. Has produced one collection of poems, That Monocycle the Moon (1964).

HENRY MOSCOVITCH: born 1941 in Montreal. Educated at McGill and Columbia Universities. Associated with the Montreal poetry magazine Cataract. Has published two books of poems, The Serpent Ink (1956) and The Laughing Storm (1961) and was represented in Poesie I Poetry 64. ALAN PEARSON: born 1930 in England; came to Canada in 1954. Has published poetry in Canadian Forum, Evidence, Delta, etc. Produced Poems for 27 cents, worked as a script writer at The National Film Board and is active as a free-lance journalist. A book of his poems is in preparation. F. R. SCOTT: born 1899 in Quebec City. Educated at Quebec High School, Bishop's University, Magdalen College, Oxford, and McGill University. One-time editor of McGill Fortnightly Review, Canadian Mercury, Preview, Northern Review. Edited with A.J.M. Smith New Provinces (1936) and The Blasted Pine (1957). Has published four volumes of original verse, Overture (1945), Events and Signals (1954), The Eye of the Needle (1957), Signature (1964), and translations of the poetry of Saint Denys-Garneau and Anne Hebert (1962). A. J. M. SMITH: born 1902 in Montreal; educated at McGill University and the University of Edinburgh. Founder and co-editor of McGill Fortnightly Review in the 1920's. Edited with F. R. Scott New Provinces (1936) and The Blasted Pine (1957). Has compiled two anthologies, The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943, 1948, 1957) and The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English and French (1960). Three volumes of original verse, News of the Phoenix, winner of the Governor-General's award in 1943, A Sort of Ecstasy (1954), and Collected Poems (1962). Now Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Michigan State University.

NEIL TRACY: born 1905 in Sherbrooke; educated there and at Bishop's University. Member of the English Department of the University of Sherbrooke, in extension. Has published one book of verse, The Rain it Raineth (1937). GEORGE WHALLEY: born 1915 in Kingston, Ontario. Educated at Bishop's University, Oriel College, Oxford, and at King's College, London. At present Head of the English Department at Queen's University. Publications include No Man an Island (1948) , Poetic Process (1953), Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (1955) , and The Legend of John Hornby (1962). Also edited Writing in Canada (1956). MILTON WILSON: born 1923 in Toronto and has taught at Trinity College, University of Toronto, since 1949. An editor of Canadian Forum since 1947, he has written frequently on Canadian poetry for it and other Canadian magazines, and currently does the annual poetry survey for the University of Toronto Quarterly's "Letters in Canada" section. His publications include a Canadian anthology, Poetry of Mid-Century: 1940-1960 (1964) and Shelley's Later Poetry (1959).

DELEGATES

Leonard Angel, Montreal Sidney Aster, Montreal Leonard Cohen, Montreal Louis Dudek, Montreal John Glassco, Foster, Quebec Eldon Grier, Montreal Ralph Gustafson, North Hatley, Quebec K. V. Hertz, Montreal D. G. Jones, North Hatley, Quebec Irving Layton, Montreal Eli Mandel, Toronto Seymour Mayne, Montreal Henry Moscovitch, Montreal Alan Pearson, Montreal F. R. Scott, Montreal A. J. M. Smith, East Lansing, Michigan Ronald Sutherland, North Hatley, Quebec Neil Tracy, Lennoxville, Quebec George Whalley, Kingston Milton Wilson, Toronto

Unable to attend Margaret Avison, Toronto R. G. Everson, Montreal Peter Miller, Toronto Raymond Souster, Toronto Phyllis Webb, Vancouver