Jack Hughes! Jack Hughes! she wailed
at a white-haired man, Der WeiBe Engel!

whose eyes behind tinted lenses flicked
like an analog needle. Then he was gone.

Some say she was his other woman.
Some say her beef was with Guinness

(that black door marked with a toucan)
more than it was with him or his missus,

camogie queen and once runner-up
at the Rose of Tralee: Hurly Mary,

now best known as the mother of Gord,
that poet’s poet of the common man,

whose particular brand of strum and dang
can still be heard, from time to time,

the famous twang of that broken string
on There’s a Love Knot in my Laureate.

But things are better today. Much better!
Streets that once burned like phosphorous

are now prosperous. Signs everywhere:
Spa Wholesaler: Martin Loofah King.

Joomange: French, all kosher, safari.
Prosperous maybe, but still a bit shady:

note the camel-coat crewcuts in suits,
flipping through on-sale racks of thobes,

while a diva in burka winks knowingly
at a man sipping tea in Mahatma Grande’s.

“Golan shites,” the lot of them, says Lloyd
E. Dawe, the oldest retailer on the block.

But the old have a way of forgetting
just how bad it was back in the day

with the brothers Quixote, Don and Wiley,
two hard men—no soft centaurs these—

running a little behind from the Deli Llama,
selling it to all in tents and porpoises,

but strictly medicinal, the whole front
innocent as chasing rabbits with a hoe.

Innocence thrives where we begin.
My old self follows me around like an

idiot suivant, who knows only one thing
in this world. And how that thing ran true,

and still runs true today. A radical naiveté—
Oh little turd who made thee? Take this

couple, twenty-something’s turned thirty,
who have traded in their designer dogs

for an all-terrain stroller. Hi, Digger!
Hi, Digger, squawks their two-year-old

at an idling truck, a cement mixer,
while twirling a bead with chubby fingers.

His parents gape at him in astonishment.
And I gape in astonishment as well,

when behind them, exiting The Gap,
a dwarf in a three-piece pinstripe Armani

barks, like some kind of small arms dealer,
into the beak of a throwaway phone.

Queer to the fisherman her request,
when he would have taken her to a dance,
or out in a boat to the island of turrs,
placed her there among the puffy chicks,
her eyes hard and cold as a gull.

And calculating now on the beach
her stance, how to accept this gift from him,
how to turn gift into transaction.
Tie them with rope in a nylon sack,
a nylon rope—chain might be better.

Make do. One makes do in the field.
She looks back at the cone of coiled rope.
Looks for snags. Feels the heft
of the bag as she starts to swing,
rhymes to it with a rock of her hips.

Thinks metronome and swinging scrotum,
then laughs as she tosses it high,
watches its weird centrifuge as it falls,
its Hockneyesque splash,
the rope feed, slacken and curl.

Everything up until now has been
a rehearsal. Time now for action,
for the crab to cock a beady eye,
tilt its way across the sea floor,
time for sea slug, for conner, for lobster,

for starfish, sculpin, and jiggling tides.
In theory, three months work by these
will strip the harbour seal heads,
leave three seal skulls fresh from the sea,
cold and clean enough to lick.

But in practice, flesh clings stubbornly
and must be picked away with a scalpel,
a job the scientist will delegate,
not wanting to relinquish objectivity.
So in latex gloves, with blade and hook

the student help sets out to unsculpt
actual flesh from actual seal. In cotton
masks they face their subjects, their eyes
dark and water-filled as they inhale
the sea’s brine and onion smell.

Later, I felt a prickle, a draught in my eye.
This was the southwest breeze blowing
where the stone-blind mole had passed.

This was the meat of what was unspoken.
The absolute bedrock of morals, the top-soil
of incomprehension in which you turned
and said: Your wife tells me everything.

This was the unknown known, the mole
surfacing through the green. And blinking
by the swings on that suburban lawn
was my penchant for darkness and filth,
my penchant for sticking my nose in.

My Greek doppelgänger, the heteronymic poet Andreas Karavis, who at one time enjoyed a certain notoriety, may be on the point of reappearing, if only briefly. I’ve received of late several inquiries from American readers who have discovered his work and professed an interest in his origins and purpose. Perhaps the time has come for a re-evaluation.

Andreas Karavis was no mere hoax or delirium or hypothetical construct but a veritable mentor who stood for many different things and embodied many different possibilities. How to account for his apparition? On the personal level, I knew that, as happens at least once in the career of every poet, I had arrived at that curious writing juncture which may be described as both impasse and crossroads. My previous book, Chess Pieces, following on Bedrock and Modern Marriage, represented the end of what I call the “psychic decade,” a period of eight to twelve years in which poets tend to consolidate their verbal deportment and to begin impersonating themselves. Soon their poems start to read as if they had been stamped on the page. For my own part, the tone, stance, and voice, the fastidious poetics and the inclination to the cerebral which had marked my work throughout that period were now, I believed, exhausted and needed to be replaced by a new poetic language which engaged the world more directly. An exaggeration perhaps, but this was something like the purpose and effect that I hoped Karavian language would achieve for me. Put another way, Karavis represented a deliberate and systematic attempt on the part of someone who had lost confidence in his poetic identity to find himself again in translation.

But that was not all. Karavis was not only Greek but curiously Canadian by way of imaginary emigration. In other words, he had started to assume, for me, a remedial significance as well since his work might equally be understood as a sort of moly, a drug intended to combat the arid, sanctimonious, overly earnest and presbyterian atmosphere in which much of our own literature malingers. Thus I slowly came to regard Andreas Karavis, from a Canadian perspective, as an antidote to the spiritual lethargy of many of our best known writers, in particular Margaret Atwood, the goddess of dullness (whom Karavis would have called akoskiniti, which is to say “unsifted”) who sums up all that is most depressing and parochial and unadventurous in Canadian life and letters. Alexander Pope got it proleptically right when he described the “Goddess of Dulness” in The Dunciad as

Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She rul’d, in native Anarchy, the mind.

For Atwood, despite her dowager status in Canlit, is a writer who, with very little in the way of linguistic flare and visionary intensity, writes (or wrote) a kind of period poetry that gives the impression of having long passed its “best before” date. As with most of the characters in her novels, so with the words in her poems: predictable, unvarying, wooden, truncated, connotatively flaccid, oddly nasal in their timbre, and devoid of real signifying power because relying for their effect on a near-perfect correlation with the cultural temper of an audience desperate for corroboration. Owing to this bizarre resonance, Atwood was spared the labour of development as she was exempted from the struggle with language. She had only to be herself as she was – facile, clever, priggish – for the reader’s easy identification with a recognizable and idealized self to occur – but a self not qualitatively different from the one already in place. Atwood owes her success to the fact that the reader does not transact so much with the poetry or the fiction as with a privileged double with whom she or he merges and assimilates, doubt assuaged and dispossession overcome, whether as a woman, an intellectual or a Canadian. Readers of Atwood merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.

So, in this context, who is Karavis? Simple, really. Karavis is meant to counteract the malady of Atwoodism that we suffer from in this country, the coast-to-coast slackness and blandness that devitalizes so many of our writers. Total strangers to attic salt, we tend to look askance on anything that resembles creative friskiness or the innovation of stylistic heterocosms since these distract us from the drab and subfusc literary mise en scène we have comfortably settled into. Our problem is that for the most part we are not happy unless we are indefatigably recounting our flat and uneventful lives, inviting our readers to share in our misery or our dullness and to feel somehow elect in doing so. Tameness-and-sameness is the name of the game, as evidenced in the generally torpid quality of the writing itself, in both poetry and prose.

For genuine vitality, the positing of alternative worlds to enrich and transform or anyway modify what is already there, is precisely a function of style, not of artificial plot structures or fashionable prosodies. Style is inferential presence, that is, stylistic presence in the honorific sense of the term is always the expression of that which is not immediately patent or localized but must be intuited and sought. But Canadian style as a generalized phenomenon is only the topographical quotient of timidity divided by resentment. There is little or nothing left over, no aliquant remainder to suggest further “operations” on the world. If style is not experience per se but a way of imagining possibility, one might say that for the most part what is designated as “Canadian style,” certainly in our poetry, is almost entirely reproductive and literal – which would account for its devastating monotony.

In this light, the Karavian style or mindset, construed ideally, represents instead the tenor of play, of different possible outcomes, of seductive risk rather than suffering endurance, of defiant otherness rather than complacent identity, of all that is possible and plural and exalted rather than what is single-pleated and given and commonplace. It is as if Karavis took as his watchword the opening lines of the sixteenth century poet Stephen Parmenius’s Paean, a Latin paraphrase in hexameters of Psalm 104, which, although written prior to his departure for North American waters, may along with his De Navigatione be considered as the original “Canadian” poem from which the rest of our tradition has deviated. Parmenius, our national poet before the fact, sailed with Sir Humphrey Gilbert and perished in a storm off the coast of Sable Island in 1583. The exordium of the poem reads:

Nunc age, pars nostri melior, seu spiritus auram
Seu mihi mens alacres vitam diffundis in artus,
Dicamus bona verba . . .

[Now come, O my better self, let us compose
excellent phrases, whether as soul
you give my joints their spirit
or as mind you animate all with life . . .]

The key is: O my better self. But after the sinking of the Delight and the loss of Stephen Parmenius, Canadian poetry was pretty well dead in the water, although every now and then a reincarnation of the poet’s brave and enterprising spirit reappears, an Irving Layton or a Gaston Miron for example, ready to tackle the mammoth boredom and savage indifference of the national temper. (“If now you look/ For new and strange adventures,/” Parmenius writes in the De Navigatione, “Corresponding to your talent and your fate/ You’ll meet monsters and giants that even Hercules/ Would not scruple to subdue.”) But as I suggested above, Canadians do not as a rule make aerial writers who know how to stay aloft. Exceptions like Layton and Miron aside, most of our poets (and novelists) – not all, thank the Lord – at their best may fairly be described as brilliant plodders, but when they attempt to soar they seem alarmingly like Icarus wafting over the Bermuda Triangle.

As for Karavis himself, although I regard him as a kind of displaced and updated Parmenius, as a sailor in uncharted waters and an inaugural voice, it must be admitted that he knows very little about Canadian poetry. When I first interviewed him in the early nineties, he had no idea that such a thing even existed. During our second interview several years later, despite my having acquainted him with some of our most resonant names through a selection of choice translations, he was still of the same persuasion. I suspected he might readily go along with the terse summation of Michael Schmidt, editor of Carcanet in Manchester, who wrote that “Canadian poetry is a very short street.” When I pressed for clarification, he grew serious and replied: “Everything you have sent me reeks of artificiality, of poets who have no umbilical connection to the source of their inspiration, who have no spirit, and who are therefore driven to build hovels in the air. Yes, one must strive to reinvent oneself, but one can only reinvent oneself from the ground up in accordance with the indwelling spirit. And this is why the poetry – or the translation you have provided me – reads like an overly simple recipe in the hands of an incompetent chef. It is painfully inauthentic and prosaic. I mean by this that the work you have brought to my attention is only the fabrication of the ordinary. In short, it seems to me that these are poets whose main effort in life as well as language is to rehabilitate the cliché. They have yet to learn that words, like good wine, must have tannic grip and length on the palate. And the syllables must ring like worry beads beating time on the haunch of the wine bottle.”

As Karavis somewhat puckishly put it in a three-quatrain rhyming poem about the poet’s roving eye and loquacious tongue – the subject is the poet’s traditional hankering to seduce the Muse – the last stanza of which I have tried to versify into an English equivalent, while retaining the original closure:

His eye diverted by a pretty wench,
his Greek transmutes into a kind of French;
with fruity eloquence, though bald and gross,
he speaks the logos spermatikos.

Which brings me to the subsequent point I wish to make. As should be obvious by now, Karavis is meant to be fun, a property that doesn’t exactly abound in our literature. (The only recent exception I can bring to mind is Don Akenson’s “historical” novel, At Face Value – taken by many of its first readers as straight biography – in which he “reveals” that late nineteenth century Tory backbencher John White was “actually” a cross-dressing prostitute, one Eliza McCormack.) It is important to emphasize that in at least some of his facets and aspects, Karavis was begotten in laughter among friends at the supper table. These sympathetic accomplices contributed to planning out portions of his itinerary, presiding with growing enthusiasm and ever diminishing control as Karavis soon proceeded to embark upon a second career, escaping both his creator and collaborators.

In this way began the Karavis saga – or is it comedy – as he made his debut in a public world he had heretofore resolutely fled, turning in the process from an obscure and insular word-trawler into a peripatetic illuminist adventurer. As I wrote in the Introduction of the Companion to Karavis’s Saracen Island, Karavis was observed by the Press on the same evening “delivering a lecture in Patras, giving a reading at the British Council in Athens, and attending a black-tie gala on Chios as the guest of honour of one of the wealthiest Greek shipowners.” Our hope and intention was to construct a modern version of the The Fakenham Ghost – a fiction which flourished in early nineteenth century England – as the inscription on one of that book’s engravings suggests:

A favorite the Ghost became;
And, ’twas his fate to thrive:
And long he liv’d and spread his fame,
And kept the joke alive.

Every week something new seemed to add to the general ambience of merriment and surprise. The Greek Home Office scoured the country for Karavis, his wife Anna Zoumi and the literary magazine Elladas, of which Ms. Zoumi was an associate editor, before coming to the conclusion that Karavis was an emanation. Diana Kuprel at Books in Canada could scarcely contain herself when she bannered Karavis in the Great Authors section as “Greece’s modern Homer” in an effort to enliven a somnolent milieu. The late Peter Davison, poetry editor at The Atlantic Monthly, printed an early Karavis lyric, waggishly acknowledging me as translator, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies in the course of a review I wrote of Edmund Keeley’s Inventing Paradise provided the poet with a platform on which to display his runic cum metaphysical aplomb. My dentist Mel Heft, who posed for the poet’s photograph, hammed it up for the press at the Embassy reception held at the Molivos restaurant in Montreal in honour of Karavis, repeating the one phrase he had memorized for the occasion: “My name is Andreas Karavis. Who are you?” Minas Savas (whose translations of Yannis Ritsos are among the best we have in English) began his Karavis retrospective for The Greek American for April 2001 by affirming that “all present in that Montreal restaurant saw the man with sun-beaten features, a fisherman’s cap over a Mediterranean face, who after a few comments in Greek departed as if duty demanded more substantive business.” A short while after the event I was approached by the president of Jockey Canada through his friend, the same Dr. Heft, with a most tempting offer to model a line of underwear, no doubt strutting my stuff beside a Doric column and leering saucily at the camera.

Next, journalist Matthew Hays, on assignment for the Globe and Mail, traced and interviewed one Maria, landlady and Laundromat owner in Montreal’s Park Extension, who considered herself a poet and was rumoured to be related to Karavis. Eric Ormsby (an important member of the board) ran into the poet, who was plainly bent on pursuing an assignation, in the lobby of the Pera Pallas Hotel in Istanbul. He was later sighted by several people in New York, in the general vicinity of the Caravas Restaurant in the Village, which I had never heard of until then. Critic W. J. Keith produced an intriguing account of his unexpected encounter with Karavis’s unacknowledged older brother, Christos, who put an entirely different complexion on the Karavis story. My sister also got into the act, writing to the newspapers and journals under her Greek married name with fulsome attestations of the bard’s existence and his impromptu performances in the tavernas and caféneions of Pigadhia, the capital of the island of Karpathos where Karavis lived for many years. This triggered a phone call from a retired Orthodox priest who remembered Karavis fondly from a visit he had made to the island in the mid-eighties. (Enas megalos piitis, alla paraxanos andros, mallon,” he averred, “a great poet, but a rather strange man.”) When George Sanderson, former editor of The Antigonish Review, having accepted several Karavis pieces for publication, wrote to request the original Greek poems to print with facing translation, I had no choice but to make a full confession. Sanderson cracked up. Instead of being offended, he gave me his blessing. “It’s about time we had some fun in this country,” he said.

And so, encouraged by the circle of intimates whom an irate correspondent to the National Post, in a fit of anti-Karavian petulance, later called the “supper table jokesters,” I decided to live it up for a change by letting my poet appear on the scene as the heir to Greek Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis – and it was not long before I was informed by a reasonably well known Canadian poet/editor at a party one evening that in her estimation Karavis was indeed Nobelizable. Another poet, who must have stumbled across an obscure translation somewhere, confided that Karavis had exerted a significant influence on his development. Still another Canadian writer, who had never commented one way or another on my work before, sent congratulations for my bringing so visionary and “big-voiced” a poet into a diminished poetic landscape. There was no doubt in my mind that had I published these poems in a book issued under my own name, the most I could have expected would have been a brief réclame followed by oblivion.

So I was also engaging in an act of cheeky satire apropos the Canadian literary gambit for survival, since we are so insecure in ourselves and in our programmatic quest for a national identity that we cannot believe in our value and substance unless we are franked from outside. Of course we like to use our putative natal “Canadianess” as a distinguishing mark to draw attention to our supposed difference rather than adopt the plenary criterion of intrinsic excellence as writers. But in relying upon such cosmetic features we come to resemble the Canadian poet Ralston McTodd, the “powerful young Singer of Saskatoon” and author of Songs of Squalor whom P. G. Wodehouse in Leave it to Psmith brought to the attention of England’s upper classes. McTodd’s most memorable line, “Across the pale parabola of joy,” speaks volumes.

Most of the Canadian literati, I regret to say, like Ralston McTodd (or, for that matter, the “lugubrious Canadian poet who specialized in verses concerning suicide attempts and metaphysical laments” whom Louis de Bernieres introduces us to in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), are basically small writers whose primary appeal is to a local patriciate of loyalist citizen-readers or a tightly meshed network of like-minded practitioners – writers who, if they are fortunate, may in time be press-and-publisher-boosted to international fame and descried identity, laurels twining around their monograms. A Canadian is someone who needs to be re-Canadianized by non-Canadians to become Canadian at last. The fate which Canadians most wish to avoid is subsumed in Al Capone’s withering remark: “Canada? I don’t even know what street that’s on.” A short street, probably.

In my own case, it might eventually become known that Andreas Karavis was David Solway and then, I hoped, the question would need to be posed: what sort of a place is this that impels a writer to break the rule of poetic cabotage and metamorphose himself into a sixty-eight year old reclusive Greek poet in order to be properly acknowledged? The point was emphatically made by Ben Downing in an article commissioned by the scholarly journal Lingua Franca on the subject of Karavis, and picked up shortly afterward by the Guardian, the TLS, the BBC Meridian World Service and Le Monde’s Courrier International, among others. And that is the question: how to escape what Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word called those “Canadas of the soul” where certain artists, deprived of audiences and venues, wear out the years, however safely, in exile?

This is, obviously, a variant of every poet’s epic dream: to find some day, as one comes to anchor in a strange yet familiar and desired latitude, the blind dog of recognition stirring on the hearth. That’s why I’ve said in an interview when I was questioned on the Greek poet’s spatiotemporal reality, “If Karavis did not exist, I would have had to invent him.” (Nicos Nicopoulos, owner of the Symposium restaurant in Montreal, was so delighted by the story of Karavis’s life and work as laid out in Saracen Island and the Companion, that he said to me one evening: “You should write a book about him.”) I needed Karavis in order to materialize on the plane of literary existence in this country since the passion for linguistic variety and architectonic discipline when manifested in one’s own work is the kiss of death here (as poets like Norm Sibum, Eric Ormsby, Robyn Sarah and Michael Harris have discovered).

Canada, too, I believe, requires a good dose of Karavian seasoning if our poetry is to become playful and lusty and dynamic again, as it was in Montreal’s fabulous forties with Irving Layton, A. M. Klein, Louis Dudek and P. K. Page. My friend Carmine Starnino, who in the course of a review archly cast suspicion on Karavis’s existence, recounted that some of his readers refused to accept his conjectures. Starnino, aware of Karavis’s provenance almost (if not quite) from the beginning, maintained that the poet filled an affective and imaginative demand, “as if,” he told me one day, “people actually need him to exist.”

For my own part, I regarded Karavis as flexible and accommodating: everyone was welcome to contribute to his calendar, to board his caique and to some extent influence his direction. He was in some sense a communal project regardless (or because) of the fact that this project was all about the irreplaceability of the personal and the surfeit-over-penury function which he (or it) represented. The essence of the character is a certain predicative generosity and I myself, his surmised creator, have experienced a surge of imaginative vitality as a result of his ongoing hospitality.

Manifestly, there are many layers of possibility associated with the character of the poet, whether he is palpable or merely ectoplasmic. If the former, may we not commit to him as a friend who brings more than one domain to bear upon our lives? (“What is a friend?” I once asked him. “A friend,” he replied, “is someone whose unconscious you can trust.”) And if the latter, might we not endorse Peter Davison’s reply to a literal-minded reviewer from a Montreal newspaper, ferreting information for the scoop of the week: “But think a little: poetry for most of us exists only on the page: it exists because we read it. Karavis’s poems are real poems. Is it better to be a real person who writes false poetry than to write real poetry under a name you have invented yourself?” And to repeat, Karavis was an attempt to bring something I reckoned had long been missing from the literary climate of this country and its pale parabola of joy: an element of complexity and verve, the stimulus of what he has called the “paralife,” the warp drive out of the single, limited, constraining, Precambrian exo-self favoured by our national evolution. It is no accident that the poet I imagined as our national griot should hail from elsewhere.

In interiore homine habitat veritas. Given a belief in the spirit as an inner material dimension or substance as real as the body which must be worked and kneaded without remission and assuming at the same time a passion for the genetic effusions of revivifying language, we may then find ourselves in a position to approach the artifact and say, with Isaiah’s craftsman, “It is ready for the soldering” (41:7). And this is the true nature of joy, the discovery and projection of something that we always were in the mode of benign possibility and might have been in the world of recalcitrant circumstance had things been different. How else transcend our native blandiloquence? The ability to reinvent ourselves – several times over the course of a lifetime – is what makes the experience bracing and unpredictable. It is what makes our spouses continue to find us interesting.

As I have argued elsewhere, we are blessed with a bare handful of truly excellent writers but these are generally discounted or misprized. Their only hope is to don some sort of mask or project a second self, a “secret sharer,” as did Irving Layton who, having changed his name many times, assumed the guise of prophet and clarigator, or novelist Trevor Ferguson who salvaged a foundering career by resurfacing one day as John Farrow, an enigmatic and hard-edged detective writer with a highly developed introspective gift and a penchant for rolling cadences.

I cannot pass judgment on my own work but I concede that I do wish to survive, which may explain some of the hijinks in which I have engaged (and why I like to consort with jokesters, who are usually remembered fondly). I have been instructed by certain readers in the know that it is the partial satiric thrust to which I alluded above, one calculated to promote my own literary currency, which is among the major reasons behind Andreas Karavis. This is the story which those who believe that Karavis is a figment – and not a real person hiding behind a presumed counterfeit – would like me to tell. Thus – to take just one example – after years of systematic neglect I recently discovered, while browsing the Vancouver Public Library’s web page for new acquisitions, that I was now “the noted poet.” Quite a metamorphosis. But how much should I reveal and how candidly should I do it? Why should we come to expect or perversely crave the meagerness of pure quiddity except in a world devoid of imaginative heightening? And who can determine the extent to which apparent disclosure is itself a fiction?

For there is always the possibility that much of what I’ve written here about how Karavis came to be is in fact an invention or a fantasy. I’ve stressed that it is important to have fun, in poetry as in life, even at the expense of the intractably real – or the myth of the dismally empirical. Indeed, the French travel agency, Authentic Holidays, in its Bienvenue en Grèce newsletter, prints this entry on Lipsi, Karavis’s home island in the Dodecanese archipelago: Cette île n’est pas touristique. Andreas Karavis, poète, est de cette île. It pleases me to announce that I’ve just received an invitation from Karavis to visit the island to celebrate the birth of his second son, Athanasios.

Sou zissi, as the Greeks say to bless the newborn. “May he live for you.”

“If you’re a painter, you’re not alone. There’s no way to be alone. You think, and you care, and you’re with all the people who care . . . To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in . . .”

—Franz Kline to Frank O’Hara in “Franz Kline
Talking,” Evergreen Review Reader, ed. Barney Rossett
(New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968), p. 204.

AFFIRMATIONS AND CURRENT ANXIETIES

For more than four decades, I have sought to make consciously informed paintings, drawings, and wall constructions that have been rigorous, complex, and resonant in visual and material terms. As well, it has been crucial to me to pursue directions and issues that seemed authentic to my own particular temperament, curiosities and capacities while maintaining a sense of wonder and admiration in relation to the great art of the past and present that I have encountered. Having now produced thousands of works, I have come to recognize in my sustained practices that I have had no desire to have my own art replace the accomplished art of others. Rather I have been more interested in building my own critical contributions on an intellectual and psychological foundation of historical art and pictorial knowledge and understanding. Over these many years, my studio practices have increasingly acknowledged, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, historical precedents and cultural continuities, while investigating perceptual experiences and expressive circumstances that engage the urgent present. Although aspiring to be an artist of ambition and substance has been at the core of my personal goals, my essential sense of social responsibility has, in fact, compelled me as well to participate actively in the development of necessary cultural, educational, and social infrastructures whenever useful opportunities presented themselves. Furthermore, these simultaneous efforts as an educator, administrator, and writer have been deeply informed by my intense commitment to serious art making as a profession and a life’s calling of aesthetic and ethical consequence. In doing so, I came to realize that I cared little about material success, but rather hoped to serve my diverse communities in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, I have also recognized that worthy insights in the studio demanded a particular kind of courage, focus and discipline if I was to develop a convincing body of art that truly embodied a sense of human continuity, insight, and perceptual immediacy worthy of prolonged contemplation. Painting has come to serve me as an essential metaphor for the negotiation between the individual and the collective, between the intellect and the hand, between emotion and analysis, and between the past and the present. I long ago realized that my unconscious need to make art would have to be integrated into a more comprehensive and explicit understanding of the origins, possibilities, and responsibilities of art making and its diverse histories if I was to make a serious contribution as a practitioner. I have immersed myself deeply in the great western traditions of painting that have set the highest standards of aesthetic accomplishment, and have provided, for me, the most profound paradigms for visual expression and communication.

Unfortunately, in recent years I have become increasingly aware that the majority of those models and standards of creative achievement that first nurtured my ambitions and stimulated me to seek to be a serious painter are no longer fashionable nor of much interest to the current generation of dominant Canadian curators, critics, and artists. Sadly, a genuine desire for an understanding of and a responsive engagement with certain fundamental philosophical sources, essential varieties of visual experiences, and formal complexities of profound visual art seem largely to have given way to a level of self-satisfied superficiality, smug ignorance, and self-delusion that is deeply troubling. The urgent and often transcendent works of visual art that, in the very recent past, had attracted disinterested criticism and scholarship, and were catalysts for many ambitious artists have, apparently, lost much of their currency with many of the people who now seem to control most of the contemporary Canadian art world. The influential interventions of these equivalents of self-interested “spin doctors” and fashionable marketing strategists can be characterized by their ideologically driven advocacy, apparent lack of long term knowledge, and blindness to plastic form. Their overt desire for personal control has diminished the nature of much critical discourse, and has also deeply infiltrated the curricula both of studio and art historical studies in art colleges and universities. This is also a time when some of these same curators, cultural entrepreneurs and other self-interested interpreters brazenly appropriate the hard earned, and often slowly resolved efforts of artists of integrity, and subjectively manipulate the actual art into fictive displays and thematic spectacles, or appropriate works of art as mere specimens in a mode of simulated research or textual speculation.

For knowledgeable observers and mature artists of integrity, this is a generally disturbing time in which the visual arts, particularly painting, seems to have been trivialized by many of those same individuals whom we have traditionally expected to be principled and discerning guardians of culture.

Although my assertions may seem to be coloured by a generational nostalgia for an ideal time of widespread cultural awareness, balanced analysis, and professional standards that never really existed, I am convinced that there is ample current evidence in art periodicals, public gallery exhibition catalogues, and university course descriptions that intelligent visual art has been generally marginalized by a repressive flood of seductive, technological diversions, pointless commodities, and textual tyrannies. That said, I am also aware that a few public intellectuals, scholars, and critics of genuine learning, empathy, and insight remain committed to serious inquiry and expression while resisting the temptation to replace the truly “visual” in the visual arts with clever, linguistic confections that do little to elucidate the perceptual experience and content of works of visual art. For the sake of moving my ideas along, I must resist citing at this point the many writers, educators, and artists who have stimulated my thinking, and have inspired my practice. In my previous writings and in my teaching, I have regularly referred those to whom I owe much, and will do so again elsewhere in this article. I am certainly heartened by the few persistent, artistic peers who continue to trust the worth of the visual, and bravely investigate their deeply held interests and sense of necessity. Moreover, because I occasionally encounter recent works of accomplished art, uncommonly inventive painters, and wise analysis in unlikely places, I remain guardedly optimistic that reason and a mature desire for challenging visual experiences will eventually, again, find empathetic and generous audiences. It is with these hopes in mind that I write this text, and spend so many days in my studio anxiously seeking aesthetic results that are convincing, personally essential, and seemingly inevitable.

When I consider how I became the artist that I am today, I take great pleasure in remembering the first hand encounters with works of great art, as well as those conversations with wise and educated teachers and mentors who helped me grasp the necessities of disciplined personal commitment and the critical understanding of formal structure required of truly serious artists. Conversely, I sometimes search for those obvious signs of the corruption of the same values that have been precious to me. In my more cautious, self-effacing, even doubtful moments, I wonder if the changes that I observe are simply the results of the shifting priorities of an obviously unstable and irrevocably consumerist society, and wonder if they are simply inevitable. I worry regularly about these apparent symptoms of a pervasive cultural and ethical decadence that may have permanently undermined the genuine search for hard won pictorial insight and integrity. However, when I am able to set aside, even briefly, my own version of romantic idealism and am truly honest with myself, I must also acknowledge that the seeds of cultural and ethical decline have probably always been present in the character of the human condition. It seems to me that the territories of serious art making have possibly always been contested, certainly in living memory. On the other hand, for those of us who care about the freedom and responsibilities of being fully engaged visual artists, it is crucial that we remain vigilant as we reassert the viability of our chosen studio disciplines, and that we affirm our commitments with confidence and unembarrassed authority. I believe that as independent artists we have the responsibility to be agents of legitimate cultural specificity as we resist the leveling influences of the mass entertainment industries and global capitalism. The sum of all the visually intelligent art of the past and present reminds us of how formal elements, physical matter, technical developments, and an infinite range of subjects can be integrated into causally structured objects of contemplation and discernment. These rigorous and resonant works of art embody what it is to be human at a given time, and in a specific circumstance. It is in relation to that art of high ambition, complexity, and coherence that I measure my own practices, and have learned much about the expressive potential of pictorial form to be continually rethought in accordance with newly emerged meanings. Life experience has also persuaded me that rigorous art making can also be a crucial process of evaluation and re-interpretation of the familiar that may result in a fresh awareness and a sense of renewal.

OPPORTUNITIES AND EDUCATION

“The individual in search of personal expression, when confronted with the local stock of possibilities available to him upon his entrance, must select the components he will use. This gradual accommodation between temperament and formal opportunity defines the artistic biography.”

—George Kubler, The Shape of Time, (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1962) p. 65.

In the previous paragraphs, I have mentioned some of the disturbing factors that must be faced by today’s professional visual artists as they pursue their careers both in public and in the privacy of their studios. Nevertheless, given the attendant uncertainties, I expect that it has always been difficult for most sensitive individuals to find their way as serious artists, particularly those from economically modest backgrounds, as well as to sustain and to renew their creative lives over an extended period. In this regard, I would like to pause to reflect on those conditions that enabled me to follow the uncertain path to becoming an artist and to consider, in retrospect, what factors may have influenced my aesthetic choices, my evolving understanding of pictorial form, and my many career opportunities. I am hopeful that my brief account of the journey that eventually led me to direct my talents toward the challenges and joys of being a painter may be more broadly instructive. I suspect that my experiences have not been fundamentally different from those of countless other North American artists.

Through the imperfect filter of memory, I recall that during my early childhood and adolescence, more than fifty years ago, I began to test my interests and opportunities as an artist. Thanks to my early public education, I was introduced to the worlds of literature and art that provided glimpses of life’s wider possibilities. In primary school, the specialist art teacher in the big hats, Miss Tricker, swept into the classroom with bags full of materials and her expert enthusiasm that encouraged my creative potential. In grade six, there was the exotic and kind Miss Lafitte whose beauty and association with her pirate ancestor encouraged my imagination beyond the confines of the seemingly grey walls of Hill Street School and the working class neighborhood where I lived. Then, in junior high school, the inspiring Miss Mabel Jackson introduced me to the books of Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and Ernest Hemingway. Moreover, I also remember fondly my first trips to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my grandfather, who pointed out the extraordinary paintings of Thomas Eakins, including the remarkable Max Schmidt in a Single Scull. Other visits to that temple of visual culture perched high above the Schuylkill River, where Schmidt himself had rowed, provided memorable encounters with Stuart Davis’s intriguing Something on the Eight Ball, and Andrew Wyeth’s luminous Groundhog Day. At some moment during this time, I learned that Andrew Wyeth lived in nearby Chadds Ford, and that his father, N. C. Wyeth, had illustrated my cherished volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, Treasure Island.

Although there were no paintings on our walls at home as I grew up, my father’s copy of a 1938 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which was bound in thickly woven, green cloth, offered instructive illustrations of the great Camden, New Jersey poet’s expansive text. In addition, the reproductions of paintings in the World Book Encyclopedia and John Canaday’s reactionary survey, Mainstreams of Modern Art, a gift from my parents, provided useful versions of aspects of art history that stimulated my curiosity. Finally, my wonderfully flamboyant high school art instructor, Miss Katherine Starr, praised my developing talents and, in my senior year, arranged for me to receive a scholarship to attend a Saturday class in illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art. I began to focus my tentative creative ambitions in the visual arts while I continued to maintain a relatively un-critical attachment to the comforts and challenges of literature. On the other hand, with my immature awareness and insecurity about what a serious artist actually did, and how one earned a living, I accepted my parent’s well-intentioned counsel and applied to the nearby Kutztown State College, which was well-known regionally for its art education program, and which would enable me to earn a primary school through high school teaching credential for Pennsylvania. To my knowledge, I still had not actually met a practicing artist. I certainly didn’t understand the career implications at the time of choosing to enter a publicly funded, teacher preparation program instead of enrolling in an independent, professional art college.

At Kutztown in the early sixties, I began to be awakened to what it might mean to pursue a life as an artist because of the encouragement of such empathetic, practicing artist-professors as Rosemarie Sloat (an expressionist painter), Bruce Carter (a humanist printmaker), Karl Karhumaa (the figurative sculptor), Nunzia Alagia (a graphic designer), and Robert Baumler (an abstract painter). Moreover, the curriculum required me to take a diverse range of art and design studio courses that ranged from drawing, painting, and printmaking to ceramics, illustration, jewelry making, costume design, and stage design. A selection of other required and elective courses in art history, art education theory, and liberal arts and sciences completed my education. Textbooks, rather than primary sources, tended to dominate the assigned literature. I developed a familiarity with certain general assumptions about pictorial composition, including notions of balance, harmony, rhythm, and variety. Unfortunately I recall no intense studio critiques of specific works, and certainly no rigorous discussion of the construction of pictorial space, or the orchestration of dynamic form. Equally important to my maturing consciousness were remarkable student friends who introduced me to the fiction and poetry of the Beats, to Dylan Thomas’s life and poetry, and to the honesty of traditional folk music. With Gino Bianco as our compelling leader, I was persuaded to work on the campus newspaper, the literary magazine, and at numerous other campus organizations while I became increasingly political and compulsively active. We challenged the campus status quo when many of us were elected to student government, and became crucial irritants to the college president’s restrictive policies. Of course, this was the period of the developing Civil Rights Movement, greater student activism, and the assassination of President Kennedy. Together, Bianco, Killeen, Santoro, and I, traveled to Washington to cover the solemn ceremonies and the funeral of President Kennedy for the college newspaper. When the article describing the tragic events was published the next week, a couple of my drawings accompanied the text.

Despite the hostile efforts of certain reactionary faculty, I graduated with a degree in art education in June 1965. Surprisingly, I received the Honor Prize for Painting, for a small painterly interior with a figure. Reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn’s work of the time, this acrylic on cardboard was purchased for the College’s collection, and continues to hang in a hallway of the art department. Within two weeks of graduation, I received my notice to report for a physical examination, as the beginning of the process for my induction into the United States Army. The Vietnam War was underway.

Thanks to a generous scholarship, I spent much of the summer of 1965 at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine where I had the extraordinary good luck of studying with two distinguished artist-teachers, William Holst and Morton Grossman, in a physical environment of inspiring natural beauty. Holst was a very accomplished abstract painter who had been a student of Hans Hofmann, and shared his deep understanding of the relationship between visual expressiveness and plastic form. (See note #1 below.) Through Bill Holst, I began to understand Hofmann’s ideas concerning the construction of pictorial space as well as to consider more rigorously the inherent potential of each medium, painterly process, and visual elements. This pragmatic introduction to many of the tenets of modernism persuaded me to reflect more carefully on the possibilities of abstraction and non-objective painting to communicate a quality of purposeful exploration and philosophic insight. Morton Grossman was a gifted painter of gestural abstractions in watercolour and acrylic who was extremely enthusiastic about my abilities and encouraged my greater understanding of colour as an essential component in the construction of dynamic pictorial space. The additional presence that summer of numerous other artists of exceptional character and achievements among the faculty, such as the visionary educator-poet, M. C. Richards, the textile sculptor, Lenore Tawney, the ceramist, Toshiko Takaezu, among others, created an exciting and nurturing learning community in which art and life seemed to merge. Furthermore, the highly gifted, small student body came from across the continent and from other parts of the world, and pursued their work with seriousness and skill. Fran Merritt, the founding Director, wisely guided all aspects of the school with a gentle and bemused knowledge and sensitivity that seem to celebrate the individuality of each student, staff, and member of faculty. His deeply felt assertion that there was a place for everyone at Haystack permeated daily interactions. In addition, the simple framed and shingled buildings of the school itself, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, suggested the vernacular architecture of the coastal region, and integrated beautifully into the natural surroundings of the rockbound island. Haystack was a place of creative harmony and provided me a cherished opportunity for great personal growth. I felt for the first time that I might have a life as an artist. Unfortunately, this idyll was shattered when I reported for my military physical exam in Bangor, Maine. Within two months, I found myself on my way to boot camp in Missouri.

During the nearly two years of disturbing military service, between 1965 and ’67, in several locations in the United States and Germany, I managed to find opportunities to enrich my first-hand experience of historically significant art that deepened my sense of what might be possible as an artist and what choices might be required in the creation of substantial visual art. A posting near Nurnberg gave me a valuable opportunity on several occasions to visit Albrecht Durer’s home and to see actual examples of his intensely observed and invented drawings, paintings, and prints. In addition I saw a large exhibition of Paul Klee’s intimate watercolours and paintings that impressed me with their visual intelligence, expressive diversity, formal invention, and sensitivity to the character of chosen materials. Upon my first visit to the Tate Gallery in London, I encountered Mark Rothko’s darkly emotive and large-scaled paintings, and they moved me greatly. The hovering, atmospheric expanses of colour truly seemed to be the spatial embodiment of the sublime, while transcending their material facts. Originally painted as a commission for the Four Season’s Restaurant in New York City, I was convinced that Rothko had created remarkable paintings of great spirituality and mystery with purely pictorial and technical means. Also, I was very impressed by the purposefully designed gallery at the Tate where the paintings were then housed, and in which these very particular canvases could be slowly and carefully savoured. That singular experience remained unmatched for me for years, and continues as crucial evidence that non-objective painting can provide profound perceptual experiences.

Portrait of the artist in his studio.(Photo by Fran Gallagher-Shuebrook)

Another significant experience at the time involved a fortuitous discovery in the base library of a deeply informative article, “Impurity,” by Alan Kaprow in a recent issue of the then influential magazine Art News. (See note #2 below.) In this remarkable text, Kaprow, the reputed originator of the Happening and a former student of Hans Hofmann, astutely compared the contrasting intentions, pictorial means, and individual content that were evident in the paintings of Pollock, Newman, and Myron Stout. I was deeply impressed that Kaprow had so empathetically discussed the major achievements of these different artists without foregrounding his own practice in the article. Although the details of his analysis have faded from memory, his respectful interest and deep understanding of the influential achievements of the preceding generation has remained an important model for me.

Upon the completion of my military service, I returned to Haystack toward the end of the summer of 1967 to study with English designer, Peter Gee, who offered a colour workshop that deepened my sensitivity to the systematic use of colour in the construction of pictorial and evocative space. Gee also urged his students to consider the use of emerging plastic materials and Day-Glo colour as ways to invoke cultural artifice and social meaning as an alternative to more conventional references to nature and related subjects. This learning experience helped me to trust pre-meditated planning, visual judgment, and improvisation as equally valid processes in the making of coherent and meaningful art.

Following nine months as a social worker in Wilmington, Delaware, I accepted a teaching position in an inner city junior high school in Reading, Pennsylvania, and pursued a master’s degree in art education at Kutztown University. Benefiting from the guidance and encouragement of James Carroll, I began to read historical aesthetics, and contemporary art theory and criticism, with particular attention to the writings of Clement Greenburg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krause. Specifically, I explored systems theory, and paid close attention to the paintings of Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and others. My interest in sculpture was stimulated by Cleve Grey’s book, David Smith on David Smith. (See note #3 below.) I found Smith’s writings in this volume extremely poignant, and they greatly influenced my aspirations as an artist at the time. Later, I also saw the David Smith Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. This extraordinary experience compelled me to contemplate how welded steel sculpture might simultaneously address the pictorial and the physical. I soon came to realize how Smith’s sculpture at times denied gravity, implied movement, employed colour pictorially, and acknowledged the properties of materials. My interest in David Smith led me to the study of and admiration for the abstract sculpture of Tony Smith and Tony Caro. The paintings that I produced during this period explored hard-edged, geometric structures that were formally reconciled to the rectilinear support. In a few cases, I explored modestly shaped canvases as I struggled to explore my newly acquired understanding of formal organizations, and colour as an essential structural component. Although I continued to be interested in most serious art, whether explicitly representational or non-objective, I was determined to make paintings that relied primarily on their internal visual logic, and resisted overt references to the externally observed world. I completed a series of systematic colour paintings during 1968-69 academic year. Fortuitously, I came across an announcement in a Philadelphia newspaper about a new Fellowship Program for young artists and writers at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts that had been founded recently by Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, Myron Stout, Fritz Bultman, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, and others. I applied for and received that life changing Fellowship and moved with my family to Provincetown at the end of the summer of 1969.

In Provincetown, with my partner, Fran, and our son, Paul, we found ourselves in a community that had a long and rich history as a place where independent thinkers, artists, writers, and political radicals lived in an interdependent community with fishers, merchants, entertainers, and tourists. Traditional values, divergent sexual orientations, and unconventional behaviour were also evident, at times in surprising combinations. I finally found myself in a context where being an artist was not regarded with suspicion. At the Fine Arts Work Center, I had regular contact with staff members, Myron Stout, and Fritz Bultmann, both of whom had been students and friends of Hans Hofmann. (See notes #4 and #5 below.) Through informal conversations and critiques, Stout and Bultmann shared their vast knowledge of art, as well as their profound understanding of plastic form. Moreover, they welcomed me into their homes and studios, providing alternatives to my suburban and working class origin. Additional studio critiques with Robert Motherwell, Alan Kaprow, Jim Forsberg, and other visiting artists reinforced my comprehension of and commitment to the particularities of visual and expressive structure in my own paintings. Encounters with resident staff writers, Stanley Kunitz and Alan Dugan, and such visiting authors as Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, further enriched the stimulating environment. Moreover, writing Fellows, Louise Gluck, and Roger Skillings (See notes #5 and #6 below.), were deeply disciplined and exemplary colleagues who provided compelling models of commitment and resolution. The privileged year of living in that remarkable village offered us many opportunities for extraordinary conversations, short-term employment opportunities, and social interactions with cultural figures of note such as Jack Tworkov, Ross Moffett, Mary Oliver, Larry Rivers, Jacob Druckman, Hudson Walker, Edwin Dickinson, Karl Knaths, and many others. We also learned first-hand about financial insecurities as independent artists. We were challenged and transformed by the experiences, and better prepared to return to life in a less compatible and supportive milieu. With the encouragement of Morton Grossman who had taken up a professorship at Kent State University, I accepted a graduate assistantship to pursue my Master of Fine Arts degree at that Ohio school, turning down several other offers. My brief period of excitement and optimism about further graduate study soon turned to anxiety and disgust when the National Guard tragically murdered unarmed students on the Kent campus on May 4, 1970. Unfortunately, with no other immediate option, I naively rationalized our relocation to Ohio.

The education that I received at Kent State University far surpassed my expectations. With a full graduate scholarship, teaching income both from Kent and several local museum education programs, as well as from the G.I. Bill, I immersed myself in my studies, which included a broad range of courses in art history, literature, philosophy, and studio. My advisor, Mort Grossman, introduced me to the other faculty and graduate students, and enthusiastically encouraged my maturing studio practices that broadened to include sculpture, installation, and printmaking, as well as painting and drawing. I discovered that many of the other MFA students were extremely gifted, critically informed, and ambitious. I particularly valued the extraordinary paintings and insights of Craig Lucas, who has remained my good friend over these many decades. I was also provided with an excellent personal studio and access to first-rate technical facilities.

Although I flourished academically in all aspects of the MFA Program, we became increasingly alienated from government foreign policy under Nixon and began considering leaving the United States. Remarkably, the Kent State University library had excellent holdings on Canadian art, and Dr. Ben Bassham, a superb art historian, guided my independent investigations of Canadian culture. Moreover, KSU’s Blossom-Kent Summer Program gave me an additional scholarship and employment to study with R. B. Kitaj and Leon Golub with whom I had a wonderful rapport. Additional contacts with other significant visiting artists such as Lynda Benglis, Dorothea Rockburne, Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsburg, and Robert Duncan were important catalysts for my learning and growth as an artist. Daily encounters with Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork, Buried Woodshed, on the Kent campus further suggested to me that my suspicions about the deterioration of the once-perceived, just political and social aspirations of the United States were probably correct. Due to unprovoked police violence on the anniversaries of the May 4th shootings, the discovery of undercover agents among student groups, and other related travesties, we resolved to leave. Miraculously, an offer from Otto Rogers of a sabbatical replacement teaching position at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon enabled us to begin our seemingly new lives in western Canada. In August 1972, we loaded our blue Volkswagen bus with Fran’s piano, our daughter and son’s toys, and assorted necessities; hitched up the over-flowing, home-made trailer with the rest of our meager belongings, and continued our northern journey in search of a safe and nurturing community. When we eventually crossed the border, passed the strip-mined landscape of southern Saskatchewan, and, then, found ourselves travelling on the open prairie beyond Regina, we were greeted by Humphrey and the Dumptrucks as they played the tune, Going Back to Saskatoon, on CBC radio, and felt sure we were coming home.

Our optimism about our future in Canada has, of course, largely proved well-founded. Our family has worked hard to fulfill ourselves and to contribute to our chosen country. I have certainly pursued my work as an artist in several different communities, and have deepened my knowledge of historical precedent, my awareness of cultural difference, and aesthetic possibilities. Over the last thirty-six years, I have greatly benefited from the extraordinary examples of the numerous artists, writers, academics, and other exceptional citizens whom I have had the good fortune to know. In my judgment, my art has become more resonant, more expansive, and more accomplished because of these many experiences and opportunities for reflection and service. My professional work, particularly as an educator, administrator, and writer, has helped me to clarify my beliefs, objectives, and standards that I have sought to pursue in the studio.

LANGUAGES of the VISUAL

“To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1951), p. 100.

Over the years, I have sought to gradually internalize the countless influences in my paintings and related practices, and can, now, better articulate those fundamental beliefs that I am convinced are crucial to a truly visual art, particularly for the continuation of informed painting and drawing. Optical and physical facts and how they could be organized to assist my understandings of perception and interpretation have become an essential component. I longed to make paintings that celebrated the visual and could not be subverted into another art form. As I mentioned previously, I have had no desire to replace the practices of others, but rather have sought to make art that added my own efforts to the extended traditions in accordance with my own capacities and circumstances. I have felt that one could not escape the weight of the past, and that it was necessary to confront the visual languages to which I have had access. I did not want to avoid precedent that might be useful; nor did I wish to exaggerate that originality of my own efforts, as I had come to realize that many other artists often had. I was committed to learning from the past as well as to meeting the challenges and inventions of my contemporaries, as fully as I was able. I seem to have developed a love affair with all great art throughout history and in each culture that I encountered or intentionally sought.

In the late sixties, when I had first felt confident enough to make my entry as a professional, I began to understand the historical and ethical imperatives and responsibilities that the readily available versions of Modernism placed on my own practices. It became evident to me that I was most deeply affected by painting and sculpture that investigated immediate perceptual reality with a disciplined intelligence and a psychological profundity. The plastic interrelationships between the visual elements of colour, plane, line, scale, etc. presented expressive possibilities that could be perceptually accessible and did not depend on information that was external to the dynamic pictorial experience. Although the official art world was beginning to tire of the pictorial anxieties of the first generation of the New York School, I was personally intent on comparing the sublime grandeur evident to me in the evocative works of Motherwell, Newman, and Rothko, and the coherent improvisations of de Kooning, Kline, David Smith, and Hofmann with the ironic images and mechanized propositions of Andy Warhol and certain other Pop artists. My intellectual allegiance remained with the earlier generation while I developed a pronounced skepticism toward the often, formally arbitrary nature of Warhol’s actual paintings. Nevertheless, his clever exploitation of the strategies of mass culture and industrial production in the creation of his public persona demanded respect. My range of interests quickly expanded to include the systematic explorations of Albers, Stella, Tony Smith, and Judd, as well as the strategic colour-field processes of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. To this core of compelling, first-rank American artists from whom I learned a great deal, I soon also added Jack Youngerman, Al Held, and Ellsworth Kelly. Each of these painters impressed me with their vital examinations of seemingly familiar issues such as positive/negative interchanges, ambiguous spatial structures, and immaculately focused, formal situations. Moreover, I began to dutifully read the criticism of Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Rosalind Krause, and Michael Fried while I savored the writings of Hans Hofmann, Joseph Albers, David Smith, and Fairfield Porter.

Against this background of recent and contemporary American art, I began to look back attentively at the origins of Modernism in Europe in the obvious achievements of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian. I also began to read their own writings about art, as well as those of Paul Klee, Vassilly Kandinsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Almost simultaneously, I developed a deep fascination with English painting and sculpture that had been largely ignored by the art history and studio professors with whom I had studied. Early to mid-century painters such as Augustus and Gwen John, David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Ivon Hitchens, and Ben Nicholson captured my attention, and offered appealing alternatives to the aggressive, sometimes chauvinistic examples of much contemporary American art. Among the, then current, English artists who also seemed to raise significant issues, Anthony Caro, R. B. Kitaj, Richard Smith, John Walker, and William Tucker most intrigued me. In addition, I began to reflect on the earlier, still meaningful to me, examples of paintings in the United States that derived from observation but depended on a fully articulated, formal organization for expression. Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Edwin Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keefe, among others, seemed relevant models of aesthetic integrity. Moreover, the painterly distillations of Fairfield Porter and Richard Diebenkorn further convinced me that representation continued to be a viable option.

With the beginning of my appointment at the University of Saskatchewan in 1972, I felt a pressing responsibility to unpack this densely layered heritage, and to discern the essential visual structures and strategies through which painting and drawing could convey meaning. My more mature grasp of plastic form, as well as my pedagogical knowledge, enabled me to design courses that were comprised of rationally conceived, development sequences of assignments that would provide students with a relatively stable body of useful, transferable knowledge and experience. In addition to my confirmed objectives of equipping students with the knowledge and skills for constructing formally coherent and personally meaningful images, I sought to promote a greater awareness of the authentic contributions of Canadian artists that were certainly equal or superior to the accomplishments of practitioners from other nations. This, in turn, I believed would nurture their own confidence, and would encourage them to recognize that valid and pertinent art could be created in the immediate Canadian context. At the time, I developed great admiration for the historically significant work of Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, Paul Emile Borduas, Jack Bush, and Jock MacDonald, as well as the contemporary achievements of Paterson Ewen, Bill Perehudoff, Dorothy Knowles, and Otto Rogers. Eli Bornstein’s influential presence as former head of the Art Department in Saskatoon encouraged my interest in Russian and eastern European Constructivism as well. Consequently, my early educational responsibilities and pedagogical aspirations for my students greatly influenced my own essential aesthetic commitments, curiosities, and priorities that have, in fact, largely continued to the present day.

THREE PARADIGMS

“Not by planning and not by choosing
I learned the mastery.
What a damnable trade
Where winning is like losing.”

—Stanley Kunitz, “The Bottom of the Glass,”
The Testing Tree, (Boston and Toronto: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1971), p. 56.

Embedded in the foundations of my beliefs is an unshakable expectation that truly profound painting requires a thorough integration of subject and form in the communication of a desired content. I also have come to believe that authentic meaning can only be achieved through the viewer’s perceptual engagement with the actual work of art. There are a few key painters in western culture whose work clarified a few essential factors that must be addressed if a painting is to have aesthetic integrity. In my view, Paul Cezanne was the first artist to understand fully the potential of a painting to embody its own inherent order. Although it may have, in fact, been inspired by the observation of the literal world, a completely convincing painting would, nevertheless, exist as a separate, though perhaps equivalent, expressive reality. Patrick Heron, the late British painter-critic once wrote that

when Cezanne resolved visual realities into countless groups of delectably ordered strata of fragmented brush strokes parallel to each other, he was magnifying something seen. But the stacks and shelves and clusters of square-ended parallel brush-strokes are not invented arbitrary abstraction: they are the intuitive magnification of fragmented stratifications which his remarkable eye saw hinted at absolutely everywhere in the visible world . . . these clusters . . . came into existence as a space-creating plastic device, and one of immense originality and power.

—In “Solid Space in Cezanne,” Modern
Painters. (See note #7 below.)

Cezanne achieved a remarkable union of emotive image, process, and formal specificity in his extraordinary paintings. Cezanne’s paintings are comprised of a relational accumulation of judiciously located planes and lines of nuanced colour derived in large part from observed subjects. For instance, in his paintings of Mount Saint Victoire, which rose above the farmland outside of Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne employed the formal elements of subtle lines and small planes as “common denominators” that visually connect different literal objects and subjects such as sky, rocks, water, and foliage into gently rhythmic orchestrations of arresting, painted sensations and movements. Recalling the specificities of seen places and things, Cezanne’s compelling paintings seem to possess an inner necessity that demands the viewer’s careful scrutiny of their shimmering surfaces and complexly constructed spaces. His pictorial assertions and doubts function as equivalents of his own restrained confidence and human vulnerability. In my view, a deep understanding of Cezanne’s immensely original achievements has an ongoing relevance for any painter who aspires to an art of substance and continuity.

Also inhabiting my Pantheon of essential painters is, not surprisingly, Henri Matisse, whose adventuresome leadership in the conscious exploration of the dynamics of colour influenced generation after generation of painters throughout the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first. He recognized painting as a vehicle to investigate the optical and psychological tension that was possible between the physical facts of the picture plane and the perceived spatial properties of colour. Always sensitive to the potential of the interaction of colours to evoke light, Matisse was also capable of employing contrasting hues and tones, saturations and intensities, and atmospheric passages and solid surfaces in the purposeful construction of images of disarming beauty and deceptive, emotional complexity. In addition, he often tested the poetry of elegant and economical simplicity while, in other instances, he considered the expressive potential of the juxtaposition of complicated patterns and structures derived from the observed domestic environment. At other times he fashioned haunting images that were simultaneously exotic and on the verge of recognition even though they were conjured from direct perceptual experience in Paris, Morocco, or elsewhere. Later in life, when illness threatened to disrupt his inquiries, Matisse dug deeply into his vast visual memory and employed his profound pictorial intelligence in the construction of painted paper collages that ranged from poetic representations of the figure to seemingly non-objective integrations of structurally expressive colour and emotive shapes. As in Cezanne, I am thoroughly convinced that the insights and implications of Matisse’s hugely inventive paintings, drawings, collages, and sculpture demand the sustained consideration of every artist of serious ambition.

Following the inspired alchemies of Matisse and Cezanne, the apparently logical yet daring deductions of Piet Mondrian seem, in retrospect, the product of cerebral investigations into a verifiable formal order disconnected from the experience of the world. Yet Mondrian, too, began his creative journey with the careful scrutiny of the visual offerings in the external environment and its metaphysical propositions. From his earliest works to his final canvases, Mondrian produced paintings of material grace and transcendent beauty. His early light-filled landscapes are characterized by colour relationships and organic structures that are coherent and refreshing gifts to the eye and the spirit. These paintings have a sense of necessary negotiation between sensory experience, spiritual faith, and conscious awareness. As his search for wholeness proceeded, Mondrian eventually understood the significance of the perceived spaces between literal things. This epiphany led him to the consideration of possible congruence and interactions between pictorial intervals, planes of specific colours, and the actuality of the physical canvas. His initial investigations sought to reconcile pictorial incident to the shape of the support that belied a desire for a logical order that had its roots in his spiritual beliefs. Through a system of provisional constants and variables, he explored oppositional relationships between horizontals and verticals, primary hues, black and white, contrasting rectilinear shapes, etc. At times, the literal or implied compositional focus seemed to acknowledge the field of vision. A faith in the relative stability and specificity of precisely structured formal and material elements seemed to offer an almost universal vocabulary that could transcend national boundaries, the flux of historical narratives, and the vagaries of previous knowledge and external reference. Of course, at the end of his career, while living and working in New York City, he allowed the social and cultural rhythms and colours of urban existence to enter his practice. This embrace of new experiences and his acceptance of these seemingly contradictory impulses reinforce the probability that art making must always be subject to reconsiderations and renewals. Mondrian’s rigorously human abstractions offer precise perceptual experiences that exemplify the possibility of unity and the value of ideals while also suggesting that the tyranny of absolutes belong to the domain of ideologues who desire control and have little respect for individual creativity or collective worth. For me, Mondrian’s rewarding paintings serve as monuments of aesthetic and ethical integrity and discernment that resist consumption and commodification, while existing into the future as resonant objects of contemplation and dignity.

In the previous pages of reverie and reflection, I have sought to make sense of my long journey, to date, and of those countless influences that have shaped my beliefs and practices as an artist. I have been obviously privileged to have known countless gifted individuals, and have seen great art in the many parts of the earth where I have lived and traveled. I was fortunate to have been invited to live in Canada many years ago, and have always taken my responsibilities seriously as a artist, educator, and citizen. I have come to believe that our nation has produced significant art and artists that offer complex examples of the intersection of unique circumstances and opportunities. Our best artists, many of whom I have known personally as colleagues, or have studied with respectful attention, deserve the admiration and support of the nation. They have contributed in estimable ways to the state of our individual and collective identity. Without them, Canada would exist as a valuable though largely unexamined piece of real estate to be plundered by external forces. As our artists have meditated on their experiences in Canada and elsewhere, and have acted with their hearts, and heads, and hands, they have also shared in that vast and varied enterprise of continuity and change that has been art around the world. I believe deeply that the experience of and practice of art develops an understanding and sensitivity to human commonality and difference.

As Hannah Arendt so wisely affirmed in her book, The Human Condition, “the immediate source of the art work is the human capacity for thought . . . Works of art are thought things, but this does not prevent their being things.” She further asserts, however, “the proper intercourse with a work of art is certainly not “using” it; . . . It must be removed carefully from the whole context of ordinary use objects . . . their durability is almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes. . . . In this permanence, the very stability of the human artifice, which, being inhabited and used by mortals can never be absolute, achieves a representation of its own.” (See note #7 below.) It remains my own firm conviction that one of the most important objectives for great works of art is to embody the continuity of civilization and to encourage hope for human endurance and understanding.

NOTES:

1. Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real, (Cambridge and London: The M.I.T. Press, 1967).
2. Alan Kaprow, “Impurity,” Art News, January 1963, pp. 30-33, 52-55.
3. Cleve Grey, (ed.), David Smith on David Smith, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1968).
4. Louise Gluck is the former Poet Laureate of the United States and received the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, (Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1992).
5. Roger Skillings is well known for his short stories set in Provincetown and the novel, How Many Die, (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001) that examines the impact of AIDS on that community.
6. Patrick Heron, “Solid Space in Cezanne,” Modern Painters, Spring 1996, p. 17.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 167-168.

Stunt
Claudia Dey
Coach House Books, 2008
220 pages, $19.95

Claudia Dey’s debut novel, Stunt, is written in the present-tense first-person semi-omniscient. That first person is Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old for the first two sections before doubling in age overnight to eighteen for the final three. In meandering flashbacks, she gives us her history, including conception and birth. This knowledge about events she could never remember, in other parts of the city, or in the hearts and minds of characters she passes on the street comes across as absolute fact. Eugenia admits few maybes, few I imagines into her narrative; everything seems to come from a wise and literate oracle, and is often too beautiful to be doubted.

This is a novel of bold statements, beginning with the first line, “It is night.” The night in question is one like any other in Eugenia’s nine-year-old life: her father wakes her in the dark so he can bike them (Eugenia on the handlebars in her nightgown) down to the lake to fish. They catch nothing, and on the way home, they stop at construction sites and abandoned warehouses so that Eugenia can perform acrobatics for her father: handstands on cranes, leaps off abandoned sewing machines. Her secret nickname is “Stunt” and her father’s name is Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Her mother is Mink and her sister Immaculata. It’s a bit reductive to say of that list of names, “It’s that sort of book,” but in some ways, it is. Stunt is a book where everyone has a strange name, each embodying a personality: Ingenuous Eugenia, Pure Immaculata, Foxy Mink. Sheb Wooley has the same name as the guy who recorded “The Purple People Eater” in 1958.

The genius of Stunt is that, simultaneously with the word games and magic, runs a very sad, very tough story about a girl searching for her father: the morning after their last fishing expedition, Sheb disappears, leaving behind only a cryptic apology note, some cutout birth announcements, and fish (he didn’t catch them; they jumped into his pockets). The note is its own kind of bold statement, addressed as it is to Immaculata and Mink, but not Eugenia. She chooses to interpret this as meaning that he meant to take her with him but was somehow prevented. The rest of the book is about how Eugenia tries to end their accidental separation.

Though for almost all of the present tense of the novel, Sheb is absent, he is the heart of the book and its subject – literarily; his pronoun through the novel is not he but you. This book, like so many great love letters, is a description of the loved one to himself, in the gleam of the speaker’s affection. Sheb seems to be a brilliant but unstable artist, prone to self-destruction, but it’s hard for a reader to truly discern his outlines in the face of Eugenia’s fierce love. He’s the one who told her to love bold statements, after all, and she uses them to great effect in describing her dad. When Sheb launches a multi-day rant about white sugar and white bread, Eugenia says only that she and her sister

are not afraid. If one of us interrupted your sermon and said ‘Hold me,’ you would. And you would do it so well that we would wish you stood on our street corner with a sign that read FREE HUGS and that all the sorrowful people with sleep lines on their faces could go to you and be mended by your good grip.

Eugenia knows all is not as it should be, somewhat; she “think[s] for a second that you are bad for me.” But though the book centres on this nine-year-old’s preternatural insight, she is in many ways only nine, and she loves her dashing, creative, complicated father and there’s nothing she can do about that.

Stunt is set in Parkdale, in Toronto’s West-End, a neighbourhood where people carry “grocery bags filled with stale bread for the pigeons and peanuts for the squirrels” and “[a] heap of wedding dresses lies on the stairs of The Salvation Army, exhausted swans.” Dey’s Parkdale is a gritty paradise, and Sheb is a Parkdale hero – a portraitist who screens old films on the wall of his studio and, watching them, cries “for a thing downed, a thing won. . . .” The women of the neighbourhood crave his paint-spattered, erratic company almost as much as Eugenia does. Everyone he meets feels his manic warmth, but only the family sees the dips of the sine wave, when he locks himself in his studio or bedroom and cannot be reasoned with, spoken to, or even fed.

Eugenia has always tried to protect her father, and when he slips her grasp and disappears, she trembles to imagine him, “in the Rosedale ravine, blinkless and shivering . . . the last of your kind.” She has to find him, and so begins her quest, typical of the Bildungsroman: trying to find the other, and in doing so, finding yourself. As Eugenia moves down her own street to wider Parkdale and finally into all the wild and distant tendrils of Toronto – Scarborough Bluffs, Ward’s Island, the Lakeshore – she loses her nine-year-old body, her mother, her sister, and whatever shreds of innocence she still possessed. She never loses her hope or love or mordant wit, but still, this isn’t an easy book – there’s a lot of tubercular coughing and burnt skin, a lot of loss and sadness.

And yet, somehow, to read Stunt is a breathless joy. Dey’s great triumph is to be able to stun readers with tragedy and comfort them with beauty in the same sentence. Eugenia’s losses are no less horrific for being beautiful, but we are somehow better able to take the news in words so striking, so strangely lovely, and often, so blackly bleakly funny. Eugenia’s mother runs away naked after being seen without her wig, driven not only mad but vulnerable by the disappearance of her husband. And the fate of the creepy next-door twins is too Gothic to be described in any words but the artful lunacy that the author uses.

In interviews, Dey has said the writing of Stunt took about five years, and I can well believe it – this writing is burnished, and there are very few sentences that are merely serviceable. It seems to me that the sparkle of a wonder in Stunt comes much more from the language inside the narrator’s head than anything else. I was deeply involved in the plot, but it is confusing, and I found it worth reading the book twice to get all the nuance of sound and sense. This is a book you should open at random: “[she] wants to touch me as though she paid admission”; “When she did come to bed, she would not wash. In the morning, when she picked up her pastry, her hands were those of a chimney sweep”; “I know she was in [her house] because as an unemployed existentialist, she had no reason to leave.”

Recently, I’ve been hearing the term “poet’s novel” used in an almost pejorative, certainly dismissive way. Maybe there’s some cause for this: in the worst-case scenario, a novelist with poetic leanings will freight dozens of sentences in a row with minutely perfected imagery, elegant and strikingly original language, forcing the reader to acknowledge the writer’s skill in every word – often without even getting the characters out of the car. This makes for an exhausting reading experience – if the writing is more important than what it conveys, the reader will likely sink into despair, or perhaps a nap.

It took some time to work out why Stunt is not like this. Maybe it’s because Dey is not a poet but a playwright, and thus there’s far more action and dialogue in this book than description and reflection. So when we learn that Eugenia “hear[s] Immaculata . . . in her too-small white slippers . . . lumber along the hallway . . . the mariner battling smoke and fog,” we get a strong image and Immaculata gets closer to the door. Even though there are many swirls of flashback and memory (probably a couple too many, in truth), Stunt’s quest-structure speeds along – this book moves, and something unexpected or tragic or funny is always happening. Same goes for the gorgeous language – it’s there in such abundance, but always in service to the characters and plot, so you’re free to ignore it if you like – there’s always more.

The semi-skew of the book, the way it takes place in Toronto seen at seventeen degrees counterclockwise, is never more apparent than in the dialogue. Not all of it is realistic, tinted as it is with fairy tales or film noir or fantasy, but somehow that unrealistic dialogue does allow us access into the recognizable and relatable characters who speak it. And, often, it’s damn funny:

“How did you break your nose?”
“I didn’t break it. Somebody else did.”
“Why?”
“He said he didn’t want me to forget him.”
“He must have said it a few times.”

Some might say that humourous digressions like these contribute to some of the confusion readers might experience. Same goes for the catalogues of everyone who lives on a given block, the history of the Toronto Islands, and the backstory of almost every character encountered. Me, I would rather have the incredible wealth of detail even though I got to the end of my first read thinking several characters were dead who weren’t. I also had considerable trouble figuring out what exactly happened on Eugenia’s first night on the Island.

Stunt isn’t a perfect book, and things get a little murky at times. The many sidebars and loops in time could probably have been smoothed out a little. Most events can be figured out, though it does take a fair amount of work. Dey has a lot of faith in her readers, and she’s given us options of what to focus on – gorgeous prose, compelling characters, a vivid city and a heartbreaking plot. Each creates the others – these characters, so unique and alive, could not live elsewhere than this mythified Parkdale, and these wild events are organic to both the place and the people. And a slightly confusing narrative structure can’t help but fit Eugenia’s noble and unknowing struggle to find what is missing, repair what is broken, with only the insufficient tools of grim wit, cowboy boots, and endless love. When the real world intrudes on her dreams, Eugenia’s weapons are not enough to defeat it. But the real world was there all along and can never be defeated anyway, though Claudia Dey’s Stunt is a bold and welcome re-imagining of it.

Noble Gas, Penny Black
David O’Meara
Brick Books, 2008
69 pages, $18.00

And suddenly there breaks forth the evidence that yonder also, minute by minute, life is being lived: somewhere behind those eyes, behind those gestures, or rather before them, or again about them, coming from I know not what double ground of space, another private world shows through, through the fabric of my own, and for a moment I live in it [. . .]”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (emphasis mine)

With the publication of The Vicinity in 2003, David O’Meara established himself as one of the best contemporary poets in Canada. As proof of O’Meara’s skill, consider his “Riding the Escalators” (from The Vicinity), which is the apotheosis of formal dexterity synchronized with inquiry into the very possibility of inquiry in a “post-post-modern” age (to borrow one of O’Meara’s formulations). O’Meara’s poem is a pantoum, a poetic form that recycles lines across stanzas (the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the immediately proceeding stanza, and so on and so forth). The poem’s form is an iconic rendering of the poem’s department store “escalator,” which cyclically runs “from the clearance shelves in the bustling concourse, / and up into 2nd, 3rd, 4th floors.” “Let’s get lost in everything / as we glance around,” begins the poem. It’s unclear, however, whether losing one’s self is even possible in such a scenario – Keats never had to negotiate his Negative Capability in a consumer-culture wonderland of buy buy buy and more more more!

So, on the one hand, the speaker becomes an object as passive as those he describes: “We’re shuttled through clothes, sportsgear, perfume, appliances.” Differences from product to product and between product and consumer are erased, as everything becomes “an unbroken arrangement of progress.” In such a homogenous time-space, it’s impossible for the speaker to “get lost,” to experience “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” (to quote Keats), or to be shocked by the unexpected. On the other hand, constrained by the escalator’s restrictive and instrumental form, the speaker – like a poet – must use ingenuity to break the “unbroken arrangement” of things: first, through the simultaneous “reverse in sequence” and reflection “on the mirrored descent” (“reflection,” literally meaning a “bending” difference); second, by the refractive function of the poetic imagination (“refraction,” meaning “to break”), which proceeds to re-evaluate items, quite literally (“Descending, we might price each item, in order / to imagine what a bit more cash could buy”), and at the same time rescue those items rendered obsolete in “clearance shelves.” The poem’s opening and closing imperative, then, “Let’s get lost in everything” is powerful in its ambivalence: it suggests an unintended disappearance of self and agency (“lost” in a negative sense, in which case the imperative is an ironic indictment) but also the imagination’s recursive turning in upon itself in order for the speaker to survive (the mind’s eye as “everything”).

The other conspicuous effort from The Vicinity is “Letter to Auden,” a 26-stanza epistle that kvetches “about our damaged lot as humans” as we enter the new millennium. O’Meara suggests to his correspondent that, generally speaking, the world really hasn’t changed all that much since his time: citizens still display ethical disregard for fellow citizens (“You’d find our mixed-up planet feels far too familiar – / We can hardly cry a / Tear as we wipe each other out”). But one thing has changed: the world has succumbed to an implosive technological determinism, which renders negligible the all-important “commonplace”: “love, interest, praise, and gratitude.” These dialectically related concerns of stasis and progress make for an appealing poem. That said, one of the poem’s drawbacks is that it’s rhetorically pitched at one (repeated) note, offering nothing in the way of dramatic or tonal modulation.

I’d like to think about that notion of the “commonplace.” As the Romantic disappointment at the end of O’Meara’s “The Valley Temples of Egypt” intimates, one doesn’t need to look far and high in order to be affected; that is to say, to feel human and humble. O’Meara’s affective commonplace can be found in his signature colloquial rhythms, diction, and tone. It’s that commonplace style that protects The Vicinity’s elegiac “Poise,” for example, from distasteful histrionics. Likewise, in “Sister,” O’Meara quietly speaks of the threat of self-destruction: “Talk is you’re back [...]. They say the rate you’re / going, you’re bound // to burn up, burn out.” Finally, it’s worth briefly remarking on “The Basilica at Assisi,” where O’Meara adopts the Yeatsian “mask” of a manual labourer: “Oh, I took this grunt work / for room and board and a few / measly lira.” Grunt language for grunt work, which O’Meara doesn’t want to romanticize or render heroic in any way; the poem’s pragmatics ensure that doesn’t happen: in the final lines, the worker imagines going to “Urbino or maybe Florence / where the real money is – ”.

O’Meara’s work hasn’t always been so at ease or naturalistic. His debut collection, Storm Still, often stumbles on account of some conceptual over-reaching – see, in particular, the interesting but ultimately failed long-poem “Soundings,” which presents the diary of Don Antonio Pigafetta, who was part of Magellan’s expedition. I don’t mean to suggest Storm Still is altogether unworthy of our attention; as far as first collections go, it’s far better than most. “Debut,” for example, is extraordinarily haunting by virtue of its ominously-charged symbolism. And it’s a poem, for better or for worse, destined to become a beloved anthology piece. The speaker recalls being “pursued by a bull. He was the hulking monster of my preteen terror, and truth / was the moment when I broke the horizon” (there are echoes, here, of Wordsworth’s man “flying from something that he dreads”). That the speaker survives the threat, real and symbolic, doesn’t mean that the source of the threat will not reappear at some unknown point in the future. Thus, the speaker must live in permanent suspense, “holding his breath.” Moreover, in Storm Still, O’Meara’s joy in simple, yet musical statements is nascent:

Down in the rice fields, the frogs
are fornicating.
It’s spring after all.

O’Meara slips from relaxed speech to alliterative erotics and back again with startling ease and as certainly as spring’s arrival.

In O’Meara’s latest offering, Noble Gas, Penny Black, building off The Vicinity, the poet has given himself over totally to a style as well-wrought and totalizingly organic as the “hidden array of iron and carbon” he celebrates in “Structural Steel.” Thematically, those loose strands that textured his first two books have come together in a more woofed whole. O’Meara’s focused the fundamental relation between travel (“This mind, this pivot – this endless / drifting that clocks my time and place,” he writes in Storm Still’s “Omphalos), memory (the residue of the past, which haunts the present and fates the future), and self. He’s interested in the way “the invisible” or “immaterial,” those “shadows” of life (memory and place), leave a trace, thus shifting, however subtly, one’s way of being in the world. In other words, O’Meara pursues not the answers to but the relation between these three questions: where am I? when am I? and who am I? The answer is triangulated somewhere in between. O’Meara’s pursuit is propelled by some existential crisis. However, in Noble Gas, Penny Black, and unlike his earlier efforts, he responds firmly with the best coping mechanism he knows: love. It pervades this most intimate collection of poems, a collection far more affecting than the intellectual explorations of Storm Still or the Romantic meanderings of The Vicinity.

I’d like to draw a bead on what I consider the collection’s best poem, one of the best O’Meara’s written thus far in his short career: “Boswell by the Fire.” It touches on the book’s thematics, as described above. Stylistically, it’s conversational, one old friend reaching out to another; the aged Boswell – 18th century writer, most famous for his biographical Life of Samuel Johnson – imagines reminiscing with an intelligent and witty young lady he once befriended, thirty years ago, while living in Utrecht. Unlike the earlier “Letter to Auden” (another imagined conversation between disparate parties: O’Meara and Auden), “Boswell by the Fire” is more modulated, dramatically shifting in tone and perspective. It’s not a singularly-focused lament but a touching movement through multiple doors. This speaker is more self-effacing and endearing. At times, the speaker from “Letter to Auden” just sounds like a pompous ass, constantly positioning himself as morally superior to his peers. O’Meara’s Boswell, though, is a man coming to terms, as best he can, with the life he’s already lived and the decisions made therein. He’s willing to note that mistakes have been made. But he offers no extravagant apologies; no desperate expressions of regret for actions taken or not taken; and no empty promises that such things shall be overcome. If The Vicinity is O’Meara’s “civic gesture” (that is to say, public and, appropriately, often architecturally-focused), “Boswell by the Fire,” representative of Noble Gas, Penny Black on the whole, is a private gesture, marked by remembrance of a more human contact. Indeed, so many of these poems are about people together: family and friends, but especially romantic partners.

The simple title, “Boswell by the Fire,” effectively sets the Yeatsian scene (“When you are old and gray […], / by the fire”) and mood, both somber and contemplative:

I still think of those flatlands and empty horizons.
And Utrecht, its tidy squares . . .
The cathedral’s hourly summons
boomed through the draughty walls

and dark, ancient furniture of my single room.
At tea, I ate dry biscuits from a polished tray
those first afternoons, only twenty-two
but already thinking myself old.

Travel and memory mix. Note what O’Meara’s done, without much hullaballoo: the poem’s speaker – the present, aged Boswell – remembers life at “twenty-two,” whimsical and freewheeling; but that twenty-two year old, the speaker explains, is one who imagined himself older, something like the very Boswell speaking. In other words, Boswell presents a redoubled parallax version of himself.

Why has Boswell travelled to Utrecht? We quickly learn. To “make amends for an idle past,” and in turn “become industrious, chaste and good” – in other words, “a fine, firm gentleman.” O’Meara is subtle, only barely hinting that Boswell might have gotten himself in a little trouble in London. Not surprisingly, that sort of trouble happens upon Boswell again, in the form of “girls.” Boswell is spellbound by the way they look and behave: “profiles in doorways, / flushed whirls on the dance floor, / décolletage in candlelight.” In this description, it’s as if what enraptures Bowell’s imagination is the dialectic of surface appearance and secrecy, or the visible and invisible, which they seem to carry, uncannily, at the same time.

At this point in the poem (stanza 6), Boswell particularizes his foolish romantic indulgences. He discusses his misguided affection for one “Madame Geelvinck,” “young, / beautiful, coy, and spoilt.” “I slaved for her attention,” he says, “lugging baskets / on errands while doting on her son, bungling // my French in hope she’d correct me.” O’Meara’s Boswell communicates his young, misguided condition concisely: he doesn’t sugar-coat his mistakes or, worse, rationalize them away. They are what they are. Precisely when O’Meara might have let his Boswell run wild with wild expressions of desire and longing, there is a radical shift: an apostrophic “you” arrives in full force. This unnamed other woman – Boswell’s long lost friend, his imagined interlocutor – is set up as a counterpoint to Madame Geelvinck (just as the old Boswell is in counterpoint to his younger self). If Madame Geelvinck indulges in high society balls and fashion, and is burdened by the secret that what her fancy clothes and sexual experience cover is an empty interiority, then the unnamed “you” is full of life (“you were bashing a shuttlecock / across a badminton net the first time we met”); wit (“you mocked the pretence / of society, wealth, and dull marriages”); independent thinking (“proud and heated talk of freedom”); and gravitas (“a grin that betrayed the gravity of your every measured breath”). The unnamed you’s “private and public [face]” is one and the same. Of course, Boswell did not realize how good he had it: he loses “you.” But the speaker’s experienced enough to know that there is nothing that can “change it [his actions, his fate] now.” There is no “seize the day” rhetoric that can undo that which has been done. And yet, miraculously, despite the overall bleakness, there is a sweet optimism that underlies the poem.

It’s worthwhile noting that O’Meara’s language in the poem is, for the most part, plain and unadorned. But he has an acute sense of dramatic timing, knowing exactly when to inject a burst of figuration so as to enliven the verse and to heighten the affective stakes. That figurative language appears so seldom makes one take particular notice when it does; for instance, early in the poem, when Boswell describes himself as “a soaked dog” “on that cold day of rain” when Madame Geelvinck leaves town for good. There’s something remarkably bathetic (“soaked”) and coldly critical (“dog”) in that simile, but also a hint of pity. It’s the mixed perspective that confirms how encounter, memory, and identity work upon each other.

Just as Boswell travels to Utrecht and is forever changed by that experience, other speakers in Noble Gas, Penny Black travel, both literally and figuratively. In the case of the latter, travel suggests everything from the self’s transience and liminality to its eroticism and nomadism. Travel is a means of accessing memory, while at the same time a way of forgetting the past. Travel sets the concept of “home” into disequilibrium. In other words, travel is a condition of permanent suspension, like the speaker of Storm Still’s “Debut,” who’s always holding his breath.

In “Travel,” the speaker arrives “at the inside [...] thigh” of his lover, the locus of “erotic suspense.” In “Station,” set in the “Ankara Central,” a traveller describes his thoughts as “gently rocked” by “days which claimed nothing [...] / felt / but never held, like wind over water.” There, again, it is the invisible which leaves its trace on the porous body and mind. In terms of a nomadic self, travel – with all its errors and deviations – is a “portal of discovery,” one which debunks the myth that the self was “simply [...] an arc / from A to B.” With regard to the question of home, O’Meara seems to be suggesting that such a thing as home cannot, thankfully, be possible after travel; home is always, then, something deferred: “‘not yet, not yet, but soon.’” Or, as he puts it in “I Used to Live Around Here” – another standout poem from the collection – “I turn away [from this house], I reach back, I let it go.” Finally, travel as a symbol of general liminality or transience is indicated in poems such as “Tales from the Revolution,” “Czarna Polewka,” “The Throw” (a stunner!), “The Late Show,” and “Powerboat.” In that last poem, a dramatic monologue, speedboat racer Sarah Donohue describes the experience of being caught between life and death after a speedboat crash: “There’s no fear / you just know you’re gone.”

Though my comments, thus far, suggest my admiration for O’Meara’s poetry, I do have some quarrels with Noble Gas, Penny Black. First, the biggest flop in the collection is a five-part poem titled “The Old Story”:

They fell into the old story,
the self-unsettling tale that begins
with a shared double-take, extends
to playful grins

whose lips become locked, whose tongues
are soon mopping mixed gin off
the muscling swirl of another sweet
tongue.

If only the rest of the poem was as stellar as its opening. Underlying these rhythms is the ballad; and his ballad plays with the conceits that have come to dominate the form’s most popular contemporary avatar, the pop song: “the band’s raw twang was / soundtrack to what’s always on their minds. / Dear Willie Nelson, Dear Will Oldham.” There’s only one problem with what O’Meara’s trying to do. I’ve heard it done far better in actual pop songs. Second, consider the poem “Charlotte St.,” in which the speaker addresses his lover, talking about living in a “dark apartment,” burdened by financial strains (“two more weeks to another insufficient paycheque” or “how mean the restaurants look, how hard / everything seems”). The poem poses the question: how can love survive in such a difficult conditions? But in a rare slip, the poem ends with a note of falseness: “Let’s ditch this city, these jobs, all the bother / of having things, and keep only each other.” In those final lines, O’Meara settles for cheap, romantic sentimentality. Lastly, in terms of complaint, you’ll recall my mention of O’Meara’s affection for commonplace as a means of generating something more human. What such a tack risks, however, is occasional flatness or stasis: see, for example, a poem like “Root Cellar” or “Café in Bodrum.” They do not move (i.e. motion), and they do not move (i.e. make me care).

But I don’t want to leave off with that griping; so, let me draw further attention to other standout poems from the collection – poems you should relish. “Airport” and “Sick Day” are thrilling in the way they prove earnestness to be anything but a deficiency of style. The final line of “Airport,” in particular, when you arrive at it, will cause your eyes to well up. “After the Funeral” is a powerful elegy: however, what’s being eulogized, I would suggest, is not the unknown departed but the speaker’s ability to express feeling, one way or another, in response to death. The speaker’s ability to express feeling has waned. In the end, Noble Gas, Penny Black belongs in the small cluster of great poetry being produced in Canada these days. It’s formally challenging. It’s confident in its style. It’s the “commonplace” in praxis. And it’s a defense – timely – of love and togetherness.

The Door
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart, 2007
120 pages, $18.00

The usual modus operandi, one she herself has gone to great lengths to encourage, for exploring Margaret Atwood’s poetry is thematic. Rather than follow in the murky prints of the clan and add footnotes on the individual as victim in an indifferent, even hostile, natural and political macrocosm, on familial disaffection, on the past as sepulchral and inviolable law, on creation as futile reactivity, I’ll instead fondle the poems in The Door from an aesthetic perspective.

The Door is divided into five parts: poems on the personal; on writing; on war and politics; on prophecy; on old age. I like the ordering here. It mirrors the progression of a life through identity, creation, worldly concerns, wisdom (real or imagined), and the long goodbye.

The book’s opener, “Gasoline,” uses the spilled substance as a metaphor for attractive danger. “Was this my best toy, then?” And later: “I knew that it was poison, / its beauty an illusion.” Atwood is at her best with extended metaphors and witty dramatic turns, and “Gasoline” incorporates its effects organically, with resonance. “As if I could. / That’s how gods lived: as if.” The first line expresses the narrator’s limitations; the next one posits a fictional alternative. But even here, “lived” is in the past tense, though the last “as if” refers to “as if anything was possible,” not the narrator’s resigned “as if I could transcend hardship.” This is a curious passage, an important one in Atwood’s unfolding canon. It amplifies the ambiguity the narrator expresses in many of her earlier poems, going as far back as 1971’s “They Are Hostile Nations” from Power Politics, in which the ambiguities jostling between hope and resignation are unresolved.

“Europe On $5 A Day” is a mess. Terse banalities reign: “I can feel this place”; “The city’s old / but new to me”; “I walk along, / looking at everything equally.” It cocoons into the straitjacket of its subject matter. Here it may be appropriate to anticipate a response to this last charge of flatness and torpidity, the response being that dullness in this case is a strategy used to link form and content, thereby giving greater force and authenticity to both. I don’t buy it. Disinterested linguistic structuring puts readers to sleep. One can hardly be stimulated enough to explore, in depth, nuances and layers of meaning when there is little or no nuance and layering of sound, syntax, and feeling. To be quicker: music is necessary to evoke depth, and in an effective poem the two are fused and their conditional apogees disappear.

With the next poem, “Year of the Hen,” the heart sinks. It’s the “uh oh” moment, the first indication that the rest of The Door may resemble “Europe On $5 A Day” rather than “Gasoline.” “Year of the Hen” takes the list poem to new lows. A catalogue should at least be entertaining, various, sonically stimulating. The language in “Hen” is relentlessly depressing:

This is the year of sorting,
of throwing out, of giving back,
of sifting through the heaps, the piles,
the drifts, the dunes, the sediments,

or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks,
the closets, boxes, corners . . . .

Less poetically? What’s the difference between a “heap” and a “pile”? It’s lazy writing. And the inevitable happens. When a writer paints herself into a corner with an accumulation of undifferentiated grey, there’s a mild physiological panic to make room for oneself by an unconvincing leap of emotion, ending (as here) in bathos: “and fingered for their beauty, / and pocketed, space-time crystals / lifted from once indelible days.”

Elegies dominate the rest of the first section, one for the narrator’s father, one for her mother, three for the cat. And it’s the cat that receives the most connective grief, though, with the exception of some fine appellative fondness (“sly fur-faced idol” in “Blackie In Antarctica”), any sentiment in “Mourning For Cats” collapses into inane rhetorical questioning, no fewer than eight consecutive head-spinners (“Why such deep mourning?”) in the closing twenty-three lines.

“Heart” is a preemptive defense of the writer from his or her critics: sensitive heart-spilling artist being silenced by “instant gourmet[s].” The opposite is the reality, of course. There is a paucity of responsible criticism of contemporary Canadian poets and poetry. Many of those poets take this as implied, if not overt, consent for their efforts. The further irony to “Heart” is that its narrator’s commiseration with mawkish revelation is surprising in a poet who registers continuous flatlines on the electrocardiogram index. And there is a third irony: a conspicuous disparity between the harsh diction (twisting, shucking, coughing, broken, racket, guts, deep-red clot, coarse, wound) and the emotional tenor of the poem. It’s analogous to a vivisectionist decrying destruction. Organs from virile bodies must be excised to feed the possibility of life in “victims,” a reverse of the poems’s last-word claim of “heartless,” with its predatory accusation. (Contrast this poem with Atwood’s remarkable “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart” from 1978’s Two-Headed Poems, where the images are crisp, the assonance apt and purposeful, and the narrator’s ambivalence affecting.)

Ironies proliferate. There is something disagreeable about draping clichés like dull tinsel on a Boxing Day tree when defending the dedication of poets. “She never thought she could do this. / Not her.” . . . “Like the sun through mist.” . . . “Are they dead, or what?” . . . “surely there is still / a job to be done by us, at least.” These latter bon mots are taken at random from the rest of section II.

The middle, and longest, political section continues with infuriating questions: “Is it our fault?” . . . “Or does it?” “What if it does” . . . “Who let it out?” . . . “Why were we so careless,” all from “The Weather.” Is it a searching, honest open-endedness? Coy maneuvering, as in covering all bases? A posturing sublimity? See how adding a squiggly mark after a sentence can make one think? (As in, “how did this pass the publisher’s first screening?”)

“War Photo” is a lovely possibility for an arresting conceit, but the images are cancelled at the outset by the egregious description “very beautiful” for the dancer / dead woman. Repetition takes over as if to transfer feeling by insistent statement rather than imagistic surprise, phrasal lilt, or sonic suggestiveness: “dancing there on the ground,” “dead beautiful woman,” “it’s this beautiful woman.”

Atwood’s political attitudes are cheap scaffolding where thin, broad brushstrokes bleed off plank-pages with the first scrutinizing rainstorm. Dead language abounds. “Nobody cares who wins wars.” “Of course it’s better to win/than not. Who wouldn’t prefer it?” from “Nobody Cares Who Wins”; “They speak words, I think / They testify. / They name names” from “They Give Evidence”; “Even if you had remained alive, / we would never have spoken”; “Now though it seems I am asking / and you are answering” from “War Photo 2.” Political poems, especially, need attention to lyric sinuousness and organic shaping, lest they slide into propagandistic prose and ideological proselytizing. Bald messages belong in an op-ed daily, not in a poem.

“Another Visit to the Oracle” from Section IV is simply embarrassing in its mishmash of cryptic circularity, hermetic inconsequence, colloquial asides, and stray soliloquizing. The addressee is unknown though not important anyway since the “prophetess” narrator is a transparent excuse for one more installment in unengaged Survivalist declaration. Quoting is superfluous, but the final two lines are worth pondering for their terse philosophical applicability: “I tell dark stories / before and after they come true.”

On that fatalistic note, let’s knock on the volume’s closer. I detailed a bit the book’s first effort, “Gasoline,” as opening the door to the possibility of renewal or spiritual transformation. The same struggle, albeit with more energy and conviction, is available in Atwood’s 1971 “Hesitations Outside The Door” in which “The right lies would at least/be keys, they would open the door. // The door is closed.” And several sections later: “. . . there are no doors, / get out while it is / open, while you still can.” The usual artlessness prevails: haphazard line breaks, skinny diction, clumsy images (“shining blood”), numbing abstractions (“the false / bodies, this love / which does not fit you”), narrative separation, relentless repetition of metaphor (I’d love to have a loonie for every “rock/stone/boulder” appearance), and relationship struggles lacking idiosyncrasy – but at least something approximating engagement, if not passion, occurs in “The Door’s” “first draft.” Last year’s effort, despite its unhinged swinging, shuts – no, entombs – the protagonist in a kind of secular Calvinist futility. What can one say about the offensive reduction of an actual life in which, “you buy a purse, / the dance is nice / . . . you wash the dishes, / you love your children, / you read a book . . . The dog has died. / This has happened before / You got another”? The final, “The door swings closed” is not only anti-climactic but an obvious redundancy, devoid of tension because the lack of juice, the lack of verbal play, in the poem mirrors Atwood’s simplistic idea-phantom of wife and mother. The poem’s ersatz profundity is offensive not only in its reductionism, but because it uses an assumed particularity as a vide supra for universal extrapolation. (One may wish to read John Hersey’s novel The Walnut Door as a lively corrective for what an engaged author can do with this overworked, plain metaphor.)

Margaret Atwood’s poetic world is an uninviting one. I don’t merely mean the fictive psychogeography, but more the silty conduit with the reader. Her writing represents only one of the six primary tastes: astringency. Conspicuous by emotional absence are connections of sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and pungent, and more enjoyably, the resulting delicious intermingling.

Orphic Politics
Tim Lilburn
McClelland & Stewart, 2008
86 pages, $17.99

Orphic” is loaded with associations: it stands for a mystic sense, but of course derives its essence from the mythic figure of Orpheus. Aside from the relational ties to music, Dionysus, the arts, agriculture, and rapidity, the unavoidable dominant link is to the continually influential story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Even though the allusive density of Orphic Politics is daunting, I believe it’s rewarding (with direct ties to Orpheus’s descent, ascent, death, and ambiguous transformation) throughout the text to focus on the singular titularity because of allegorical propinquity as well as spiritual yearning.

Lilburn is not concerned with jotting down offhand verse of banal diurnal anecdote. In non-dual spirituality, there are the relative and absolute worlds, though (paradoxically) each can join with, and dissolve into, the other. But language is a logical construct. We can only converse in a relative sense. The idea or description or presentation, no matter how artfully transmitted, is not itself enlightenment. Lilburn’s spiritual antecedents were likewise concerned with the higher plane, but they knew the limits of words when it came to “falling/into knowing’s body” (“Theurgy II”). Lilburn, throughout his poetic career, has presented his terms (Names Of God), celebrated his epiphanies (Tourist To Ecstasy), wrestled with reconciling his visions to supreme consciousness (To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, Kill-Site), and amplified a change in that latter volume towards a frenetic, even desperate, attempt at union (Orphic Politics).

I realize the last charge may seem hyperbolic (though not as hyperbolic as the tone of Orphic Politics), but let’s investigate. Here, in its entirety, is “A Surgery Against Angelism”:

Set a fat layer of fire grazing into the chest of engine heat, breast-
stroking against motion perfuming from the sickness of volt swollen
inhalations. Let this heat
sag to a half-eaten meal not its own; let it eat rods,
iron shavings, green stones, dead yarrow, words headfirst
from a rock overhang in the upper right, a skeleton of a seal; let it learn
to heave-hiss through its mouth the complete psalmic blade.
Five pound fire gravities against hurtling’s musk.
In the chest of engine heat, a concussed floor;
whipped light-heads cough in blows’ trampoline, and choir above
their husks, they lurch into a blurred but, yes, readable circle, moving,
yes, the gear that jacks the cranial dome.
You go into the fish’s mouth which is the body of a cousin
at the volcano’s wedding.
We come out of the upper colon tunnel onto the ledge, sweet-looking
antlers to smoke from the cloud deer. We’ve built a shack
out of this numbnutsness,
we’ve hidden in this long grass. A stick will cure us.
Your eyes in the fish’s gut are moved like a wand around the dark.
The knife snugs down through skin. And this is politics.

Lilburn varies little the length of lines throughout his oeuvre, but especially so in Orphic Politics. The Whitmanesque effusions in Tourist To Ecstasy suit the long, rolling units, as do the occasional galloping enjambments in From The Great Above She Opened Her Ear To The Great Below. Though “A Surgery Against Angelism” is studded with emphatic stresses, the tone is searching and the physical resources compromised, a far cry from, say, Isaiah’s long confident declarations. I found myself consistently and naturally pausing at the medial foot, and this gave some energy to the back-end line which not only ran out of steam when subsequently reading the poem aloud, but which then also bogged the lines down in confused referents – always a challenge, at the best of times, with Lilburn’s work. Varied line indentations are arbitrary and rife in many contemporary free-versifiers, but I enjoyed Lilburn’s use of the severe indent as seen here in lines three and fifteen. The uncomfortable pause before “inhalations” creates an effective mimesis with the narrator, and the suspense before “at the volcano’s wedding” also works to set up the image’s surprise.

Speaking of surprises, what can we make of the imagistic leaping, in this poem and elsewhere? Starting with To The River, Lilburn’s narrative persona has, with few exceptions, been an ephemeral, hermetic (and Hermetic) presence, without history, idiosyncrasy, or emotional subjectivity. (The latter charge is somewhat ameliorated in Orphic Politics; more on that later). I can appreciate the daring metaphorical tags, and after many brow-scrunchers there is the successfully strong, “In the chest of engine heat, a concussed floor.” But the exception doesn’t negate the inaccessibility of long swatches of drifting animal/outback symbolism which, at least to this reader, confounds (and perhaps derides) any poetic equivalent to a musical ordering and understanding. Only a churl would cavil about a passage such as, “missiled hissing from the river through thinnest ice,/ runelling mud and spur” from “Fr. Paul Le Jeune. S.J., In The Forest,” but the approach shouldn’t be to obviate meaning altogether, a temptation influenced by Lilburn’s suggestion (in an interview) that the reader “just trust the poet and let yourself go.” No. Trust has to be earned. If I trusted any versifier who hurriedly stapled together their summa opus by being a blank container for every unfiltered rumination, I’d have Cerberus biting my brainpan a minute after Orpheus had fled the flood (temporarily) with Eurydice.

The wayward and scattershot imagery (“weather-drum, salmon-beaked,/Neanderthal forehead of weather” from “Politics”), the private mythopoeia from “He Holds” (“We’re talking the Epiphany of the Imam,/more or less, amigo, or Parousia in backflip.”), the glancing allusive intrusions (“John Stuart Mill/power-take-offs into his sideburn whorls, Gerard Manley Hopkins/Titans from a chair” from “Politics”), the narrative pinballing restlessness (“skid on your ass down the mudded incline to the pulse of cosmology/wobbling off the wall, poulticed by burning fish” from “Getting Ready”), all produce an insuperable fault in Lilburn’s work from To The River forward: obscurity.

Philip Larkin, speaking of his own contemporaries, decried “an obscurity unlike previous types in being deliberate and unnecessary”; the Advaita Vedanta adept Jean Klein criticized the two extremes of artistic procedure: giving away the game, on one hand, or completing all the work for the reader/viewer, the latter then becoming nauseated with its sweetness, and on the other hand, withholding all cards through malice, ineptness, or unreasonable challenge. Here’s an excerpt from “If Metaphor Is Theurgy, It Must Form”:

“the eggwhites castle of Aristoteleanism, which, un-
crossing its arms, monstrances itself as a reed boat smoothing through
crow-smoke and palms barging the loudly oiled, drive-in-movie-screen
forehead of Christianity
on a red leather Hausa cushion”

I try. But I simply can’t negotiate my way through this with any clarity. There is no transmission.

Unlike Ralph Gustafson, another densely allusive poet who used historical, musical, literary, and spiritual figures in philosophical juxtaposition with in-the-moment natural observation, but coloured those figures in human dimensions, with great sympathy, Lilburn trots out Plato and crew as disembodied treatises, suffocating with theory any link to Lilburn’s experiences. Why the numerous, various, and lengthy epigraphs? Is it simply to browbeat the reader with a muscled erudition? A deflection from a perceived inability to clear the high-jump bar without steroid shots from the canon? Whatever the reason, it was annoying to sit through (for instance) two Phil 204 lectures from Plato’s Phaedrus, and then to read only four Lilburn poems linked to the first, and three to the next.

And what of those seven poems? It is a grand irony that Lilburn, even with personal subject matter, cannot cut away the grandiose – “Ten yards of mineral hair fall inside the cruciform hummingbird” (from “Meeting The Angel, Tasting What It Sees”) – to reveal a clarity, a vulnerability, a recognition that one would like to receive what he is giving, when the story has Socrates showing up and changing the mind of Phaedrus in an impassioned support for the superiority of a lover’s worth for the beloved over any and all non-lovers/friends.

And this leads into the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The comparison of the latter myth with the Phaedra discourse is illuminating. Orpheus didn’t descend in a painful psychic katabasis because of mysterious illness, but through an impassioned choice to be reunited with his great Love. The narrative skein in Orphic Politics is diffuse, and the obscurity (at least partly) attempts to deny the fact that a self-contained, withdrawing illness is a poor precursor for elevating the experience into audacious confrontation with the gods of the underworld for personal salvation instead of union with the Beloved. Lilburn’s version of the Beloved is nebulous, all-encompassing, and sexuality, throughout his oeuvre, is narrator-merged with animals and nature, which is anathema to the idiosyncratic and specific qualities of an individual human, and which is given power in the Orpheus myth. Remember, even after Eurydice died the second and final time (Orpheus was so peculiarly enraptured, he risked a second descent), the lyrist rejected the advances of the Thracian maidens. Lilburn’s allegory is inapt for the same reason as his eroto-enlightenment urges are misinformed. “Nothing infinite but in finite things,” said Huang Po, said Pythagoras. In the negating-the-name Christian approach that Lilburn favours, just as in the non-dual approach of Advaita, the emptiness of Zen, the unnamable Tao, and the “shall not” deductions (not prescriptions, as universally mistranslated) of Moses, all esoteric spiritual traditions affirm an absolute reality which language cannot explicate or enter. But there is also a relative world, one which can be all the more affecting and joyfully celebrated (while hinting of enlightenment) when accepted without the overreach, as in this exhortation from Lilburn’s “Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World” from Tourist To Ecstasy: “Come mumblers after quarters, with your newspaper shoe shuffles from the high-heeled, well-healed, Dior-cheekboned streets.”

I realize this essay has drifted on occasion towards a concern with the ineffable (though not with the obsessional repetition of Lilburn‘s work), but when I read and experience these words from earlier Lilburn I enter a piece of heaven unknown before, and from which a confused katabatic drop of, “on a flake of dead skin, the Vita coetanea of R. Lull, in barn swallow” (“The Gift Of Europe”) had me wallowing.

An addendum of sorts: I liked Orphic Politics more than the To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, and Kill-Site series since the personal element (illness, in this circumstance) emerged, anchoring somewhat the Hermetic frenzy and giving it a more (at times) understandable and arresting metaphorical interplay. On that note, here are the powerful closing lines from “Orphic Hymn”:

The dogwood tree blooms in the full window a rising whine.
The temperature of this nuzzles in like sediment that’s already stone.
A knife waits, girlish, down the hill, flipping over, over, small
fish flash at the bottom of that boat, convinced, the knife, crossing
and uncrossing its legs.

I hope Lilburn continues, in his next volume, to touch and contextualize the universal with the personal, the absolute with the relative. For all the long-breathed imagistic pyrotechnics, sensory imprimaturs were fleeting and have evaporated (save for the above poem, and scattered lines from a few others), philosophical insight was poorly integrated or inappropriate, and form shattered into hit-and-miss shards of beautiful broken coloured glass.