racism and redemption in fredericton, nb

I am ashamed to say that I was not familiar with George Elliott Clarke before reading this poetry collection... but now I'm hooked! There is so much depth to this poetry that I'm excited to explore more of his writing, particularly his novel that explores the same story as this poetry does, called George and Rue. I love finding new writers to explore, and Clarke is a particularly awesome one because I've never read much from the Africadian literary movement. (Africadian being Canadians of black loyalist heritage whose original settlements were located in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.)

It's a big day for literature, or course, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows launching at midnight. My guilty pleasure of the weekend will be reading and enjoying the last book of the series -- we can debate literary merit all day long, but there's no debating having a good time.

Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of "George and Rue"
by George Elliott Clarke

Malignant English

Crown: I warrant you speak almost perfect English.

Rue: Should I utter pitted and cankered English?
Bad enough your laws are pitted and cankered.

Crown: Admit that, for a Negro, you speak our English well.

Rue: But, your alabaster, marble English isn't mine: I hurl
insolent daggers at it like an assassin assaulting a statue.

Crown: Your lordship, instruct this witness to speak civilly.

His Lordship: Accused, do your duty, as we must do ours.

Rue: My duty is to make narrative more telling,
Yours is to make malice more malicious.

Execution Poems by George Elliott Clarke tells the story of George and Rufus Hamilton, two Africadian men from Nova Scotia who were hanged in 1949 for the murder of a Fredericton taxi driver. The Hamilton brothers were cousins of Clarke, dead a decade before he was born, and in retelling their story through these poems Clarke weaves for us a story of family, cyclical violence, and racism. The art of this collection is Clarke's ability to create for the reader blurring lines between guilt and innocence, and right and wrong. For the most part, the reader wavers between being horrified by the crime and sympathetic to the perpetrator, shocked at the murder and sickened by the actions of law enforcement officials. As such, we are forced to confront ideas of socially constructed representations of innocence (white lawyers and judges) and guilt (black accused criminals). The effect is especially strong because Clarke acknowledges no awareness on the part of the system for the inherent racism it fosters. And in the end, blindness to this is Clarke's purpose. He never suggests that the crime doesn't occur, or that the Hamilton brothers are innocent, but he is careful to show the roots of violence, its motivations, and the assumptions of the court officials in the case.

An important issue in Clarke's retelling of the murder case and trial is language -- particularly the English language. As you can see in the excerpt above, the issue of "proper" English is a major one for the courts; how can a black man who commits crimes speak "white" English so effectively? In "Child Hood II," Rufus tells us about his desire to embrace the "secretly Negro authors" like Alexander Pushkin, who had Ethiopian heritage, and Alexandre Dumas, with Hatian origin; these authors who denied parts of their heritage to succeed in a white world are of particular interest to Rufus, and he is especially interested in the power of language for these men who have harnessed the dominant discourses of their times. He compares them with his own ability to express himself, referring to himself as "a poor-quality poet crafting hoodlum testimony, / my watery storytelling's cut with the dark rum of curses." He fears that he cannot fully defend himself or express his feelings about his actions because he lacks the proper words, but the book itself, written in the voice of him and his brother, shows that they have more power and aptitude in their English than the entire town of Fredericton. This comes across in the poem, "To Viscount Alexander of Tunis, Governor-General of Canada," where "A Citizen of the town of Fredricton NB," billing himself as "Anonamus," demands that the Governor General deny George's request for a stay of execution as "they is no different neggars & they both look a like in this cryme," and that "wee the peepul of Fredericton feel they must hang fore the bluddy homaside they did." Where it is amazing to the judge that two black men can speak "his" language, the good "white" residents of Fredericton, as they are represented by the writer of this letter.; The question Clarke asks us to consider is this: who owns and posesses the language? Does a white man with access to education and the birthright of the "mother tongue" automatically deserve to be seen as more capable than a black man, even when his ability is unquestionably superior? We are given two documents here: the letter, which represents the town, and the book of poetry itself, which represents the Hamilton brothers (because we are expressly told when their voices are being used). We question our own assumptions as a result of the juxtaposition and inversion of expectation.

Clarke also forces the reader to think critically about the roots of crime. We learn as we read the poems about the Hamilton brothers that they observed a lot of violence between their father and their mother; with their mother being partially Mi'kmaq, she becomes the target of racialized violence. "Pop" sees her as impure and worthy of his scorn, because "he thought her being mulatto / was mutilation." The boys are exposed to highly sexualized and disturbing violence as children, until one of the boys attacks his father and their mother dies of her injuries. They move from this life of violence into one of poverty, and Clarke seems to ask us: What did you expect them to do?

There's an interesting last note in the book, in a reproduction of the newspaper page announcing the completed execution of the Hamilton brothers:

In an article on dead poet W. B. Yeats in last week's Casket, we erroneously attributed to Mr. Yeats the book Cane, which was in fact written by the Negro American writer Jean Toomer. Yeats is, however, the author of the best-selling book The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. We regret the error.

This is interesting because it is an example of appropriation of voice -- the writer of the article assumed the high modernist poetry he encountered was written by a white man, instead of by an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The black man's voice was papered over with a famous white poet. What do we make of this in relation to the issues of language and ability in the text? It's interesting that the paper was willing to deny poetic ability to a black writer, feeling more comfortable with assigning it to a famous white writer instead. Again, it's about the assumptions we make about ability based on someone's skin colour rather than our own experiences of ability. I wonder also if it's a gesture to retelling the story -- the Hamilton's have only ever been written about by white newspaper reporters and white historians, whereas Clarke is re-appropriating the story for the Africadian people.

viva la saint lawrence

I'm taking a break from the anthology today due to the fact that it is quickly doing my head in. In the meantime, I'm going to tackle some of the other works from the poetry section of the list. Today, I'm looking at Charles Sangster, who is not a poet I am familiar with, but who published in 1856 the first Spenserian sonnet sequence in Canadian literary history. He was also one of the first poets to use obviously and undeniably Canadian images and subject matter as the backbone of his poetry. As bad as I am at (a) long poems and (b) colonial literature, I enjoyed this, and I think I've found a few things to say about it... Hopefully things I can process relatively quickly because I have a birthday party to get to. Yee haw!

The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay
by Charles Sangster

Quebec -- how regally it crowns the height!
The Titan Strength has here set up his throne;
Unmindful of the sanguinary fight,
The roar of cannon mingling with the maon
Of mutilated soldiers years agone,
That gave the place a glory and a name
Among the nations. France was heard to groan,
England rejoiced, but checked the proud acclaim, --
A brave young chief had fallen to vindicate her fame.

Fallen in the prime of his ambitious years,
As falls the young oak when the mountain blast
Rings like a clarion, and the tempest jeers
To see its pride to earth untimely cast.
So fell brave Wolfe, heroic to the last,
Amid the tempest and grim scorn of war,
While leering Fate with look triumphant passed,
Pleased with the slaughter and the horrid jar
That lured him hence to see how paled a hero's star.

This poem recounts a journey of the imagination from Kingston, Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the mouth of the Saguenay and Cape Eternity. The narrator of the poem is on a spiritual quest to be reunited with the woman he loves, known in the poem only as the Maiden. He is also on a pilgrimage to show his devotion to God, and indeed the reunion with the Maiden is a reunion with God as well, as the three seek to "prove / How unutterably deep and strong is Human Love" (that love being both between humans and of humans for God). The poem is also about embracing the creations of God -- the journey from the St. Lawrence to the Saguenay represents an internal journey from being controlled by a world of business, commerce, and the drive to possess, to the victorious act of shaking off those bonds and emerging free from the world of the material and ready for the world of the spiritual. Finally, the poem is about art, and the realization that the greatest art of all is God's creations of the natural world and of man. The narrator, over the course of the poem, comes to realize that nothing else can compare with God's design.

As the first narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas in the history of Canadian literature, the poem gets big points for effort, and though there re patches where the verse is rocky or rhythmically problematic, the overall effect is quite something. The impact is even more noteworthy when one considers that Sangster had almost no formal education beyond elementary schooling, and as such his poem is one of the beauty of Canada written by a Canadian everyman. This is not an academic telling, but rather a story that struck a talented but ordinary Canadian who was struck by the majesty of his country. This is not to say Sangster was ignorant (indeed, his poetry is filled with invocations of mythology, biblical allusion, and so on), but that his story is one of a Canadian man with a Canadian education telling a story of Canada. Such things are certainly worth celebrating.

One way the poetry is uneven, however, is in Sangster's compulsive romanticization of the Canadian landscape, especially in his descriptions of the Canadian Shield and other rocky geographies. His use of classical allusions and pastoral diction blunts and pasteurizes the rugged beauty of the landscapes he is trying to describe. The river "bubbles silver" and is "isle-enwoven." Even storms are signs of God's strength rather than violent, frightening experiences. This is all to add to the effect of the poem as an homage to God's creation, and while it's exquisitely as a pastoral it rings false to anyone who has been to this area of country and seen nothing that could be remarked upon as pastoral.

And interesting feature is how much Sangster draws on the history, both aboriginal (though heavily one-sides) and white, of the area he writes about. As in the example above, with Wolfe and Montcalm, the effect is one of chronicling a history and myth-making about place. Sangster is self-consciously creating a story of Canada, and the effect is a powerful one. It reminds us of the importance of this kind of documentation in the early days of Canadian literature, because the tradition had to first be built in order for it to be built upon.

An ancillary theme in the poem is that love, and especially the love of God, supersede art, as he writes: "The lips of Love / Make mellower music than a thousand strings / Of harps." God's creation, too, is more beautiful than anything man can create artistically, and even the poem we are reading pales in comparison to God's work; as devout as it is, and as much of a celebration as it represents, it is in "puny contrast" to the creation of God. Art does not reach us closer to God, but it allows us an opportunity to offer devotion to him and show awe of his creation. This is by far the most devout, Christian piece I have read thus far, and if startling in its lack of cynicism and its innocent optimism. Overall, even for the aggressively agnostic like myself, it was a welcom break from the hopeless cynicism of much of our national literature.

irving layton, the bitterest middle-class professor to ever hate middle-class professors

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Irving Layton, edited by Gary Geddes

Look, the Lambs Are All Around Us!

Your figure, love,
curves itself
into a man's memory;
or to put it the way
a junior prof
at Mount Allison might,
Helen with her thick
absconding limbs
about the waist
of Paris
did no better.

Hell, my back's sunburnt
from so much love-making
in the open-air.
The Primate (somebody
made a monkey of him)
and the Sanhedrin
(long on the beard, short
on the brain)
send envoys to say
they don't approve.
You never see them, love.
You toss me in the air
with such abandon,
they take to their heels and run.
I tell you
each kiss of yours
is like a blow on the head!

What luck, what luck to be loved
by the one girl
in this Presbyterian
country
who knows how to give
a man pleasure.

Oh good. Irving Layton's here engaging in his most favourite pastime of academia-bashing. I basically hate Irving Layton on a level so deeply within my subconscious that the very mention of his name causes my gorge to rise. Okay, maybe nothing that bad, but I just find him so nauseatingly hypocritical that it's almost impossible for me to read his poetry. I'm at the point where I actually have to make a running start towards the book and hold on for dear life. Any excuse to be distracted away from Layton I take gladly. I've never admitted my hatred for him in a class as to dismiss Layton in an English classroom in a Canadian graduate school seems to be about the equivalent of walking up and down the bible belt yelling, "God loves gays! God is a woman! God is black! God approves of interracial marriages! God believes in evolution!"

The fact is, Layton was the world's most pompous hypocrite. He supposedly loathed academia and the middle classes, and resented the academization of Canadian poetry (in the above poem, note the image in the first stanza of the "junior prof / at Mount Allison" muddying a poetic image). Yet he was perfectly content to belly up to the trough at several Canadian universities, accepting comfortably middle class positions as a professor of English at York, Concordia, and other painfully bourgeois institutions. Oh dear, however did the poor flower survive? In "The Fertile Muck," he claims, "I have noticed / how my irregular footprint horrifies them," claiming for himself some kind of privileged outsider status, when really he was the beloved poet of academia and the popular public. He was about as much of an outsider as our other national hot-house orchid, David Adams Richards, in a Toronto cocktail party. Oh wait! Not an outsider at all.

He resented Canada and the puritanical roots of this country (see the last stanza in the above poem), yet never left here. I would have been okay with him bailing.

deja vu, Mr. Scott... deja vu

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by F.R. Scott, edited by Gary Geddes

Charity

A code of laws
Lies written
On this beggar's hand.

My small coin
Lengthens
The harsh sentence.

I know we did F. R. Scott in the not-so-distant past, but thanks to the magic of anthologies we are revisiting him. Yay! Scott once wrote that poetry is "the making of something new and true" and "an exploring of the frontiers inside and outside the world of man [....] a kind of umbilical contemplation." The connections among things, hidden and otherwise, are of particular importance to Scott. In the poem above, for example, Scott suggests that poverty is created by our political system, and that when we do the very human act of attempting to help a person in need, we are in reality reifying the system itself -- we prove that we are willing to step in and take the reins and we remove the demand from the system itself. To Scott, this idea is the worst form of complacency because it allows the system to continue on unhalted, when really we need to dismantle social orders and rebuild a socialist state.

New times were coming, according to Scott, and such new times accordingly required new music. As he writes in "Overture," "This is an hour / Of new beginnings, concepts warring for power, / Decay of systems -- the tissue of art is torn / With overtures of an era being born." Social changes are tearing the world apart -- this is from 1936, where answers to the depression cycled between absolute socialism and absolute market control. There is a violent image here of the world battling between forces, and it is poetry that must begin anew to tell the stories of a troubled time. Old forms lose their relevancy, and new forms must emerge. We are on the cusp, in this poem, of a "world crescendo" -- the world is about to hit a fever pitch, and the results will be earth-shattering.

If this is the future, what of the past? In "Laurentian Shield," Scott ignores the reality of native populations on the land in order to create an empty landscape that he describes as "Inarticulate, arctic, / Not written on by history, empty as paper." It is only through human history, then, that we give meaning to nature. Scott's overarching view is a humanist one; that is, development that harnesses human ingenuity is progressive. As long as advancement is human-oriented and socially just, it is movement forward. As Scott believes, "The future of man is my heaven."

lady miriam, i presume

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Miriam Waddington, edited by Gary Geddes

Gossip

Professor Waddington will not be
joining the academic procession
she wrote a note to the Dean she
said that her gown was moth-eaten
and she had to stay home to tie up
the chrysanthemums or else they
would flop all over and kill the grass
and she would have to resod around
the flowerbeds a nuisance so she regrets
she will not be able to join the academic
procession if you ask me that woman has
a nerve she's not friendly and further-
more I hear she keeps late hours
looks at men what kind of example is that
for young girls all I can say is some
people are never satisfied

Miriam Waddington is concerned primarily with the interrogation of social norms. In the poem above, the nagging question we are left with is, who decides when a person should or should not be satisfied? Furthermore, the process of gossip is questioned. Who is the voice in the poem? It starts off in an official-sounding register, but by the fourth line of the poem the commentary is catty and back-biting in nature. And at the end of the poem, perhaps the voice shifts again -- who is determining Professor Waddington's level of satisfaction -- or is Waddington herself inserting that last line with a commentary on the gossips? Finally, of course, this poem is about gender roles. What are the challenges of being a woman maintaining a home and a career, and where is the breaking point? And the act of looking at students in a romantic, which especially for the period of this poem would have been perfectly acceptable (and the primary means of wife finding and wife swapping) for the male professors is fodder for critical gossip when engaged in by the female prof. The argument here is not that these actions are ever right, but why is it gossip for one and business as usual for another? Waddington's poetry is brilliant in its ability to force us to look differently at seemingly mundane situations.

Another such example is "My Lessons in the Jail," where Waddington asks us to think critically about the seemingly normal setting of an average prison. She writes that upon entering the jail one must "Salute their Christ to whom you cannot kneel." Waddington comments here upon compulsory faith and the flawed assumption that Canada is by definition a Christian nation. This national assumption marginalizes the other among the others -- that is, the non-Christians among the prison population. The poem is about Waddington's experiences as a social worker, and the "crown of thorns" she has chosen to wear in embarking upon a helping profession. As she leaves the prison, she writes: "Smile at the brute who runs the place / And memorize the banner, Christus Rex." With the focus on the "brutish" management of the jail, Waddington seems to ask if this is a Christian place at all -- without the banner, would you ever believe that God had touched this place?

She draws on her social work experience again in the poem "On My Birthday," where she questions her own ability to separate herself from her work. She refers to "the self I never was," commenting on the fact that her identity is embroiled in those she attempts to rescue. She suggests, considering her divorce, that "the woman from downward is never retrieved." That is, women are socially constructed to lose their identities in marriage, and in motherhood... and those who work outside the home, especially in a helping profession, lose themselves once again.

There is a fear of the future in Waddington's poetry. In "How I Spent the Year Listening to the Ten O'Clock News," she fears the violence and tragedy that seem forthcoming, but feels guilt at her choice not to have children, as she writes: "I have too much / to say thank / God I am too old / to bear children." For a woman of her generation to not desire children was akin to an admission of failure, and because she has the means she feels the obligation. But it's a scary obligation given the wars, tortures, and violence she documents through the poem. In "Ten Years and More," Waddington deals with the death of a spouse she had divorced, writing that she had written him a letter but "I was really saying / for the sake of our / youth and our love / I forgave him for / everything / and I was asking him / to forgive me too." How does one cope with a death and find closure when a divorce stands between the two people? There is a regret for the past here, for not having mended fences earlier, and Waddington seems to be trapped between regretting the past and fearing the future.

those poems are some purdy, ah'll reckon

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Al Purdy, edited by Gary Geddes

from A Handful of Earth, for Rene Levesque

Go back a little:
[...]
those origins
in which children were born
in which we loved and hated
in which we built a place to stand on
and now must tear it down?
-- and here I ask all the oldest questions
of myself
the reasons for being alive
the way to spend this gift and thank the giver
but there is no way

[...]
I say to him now: my place is here
whether Cote des Neiges Avenue Christophe Colomb
Yonge Street Toronto Halifax or Vancouver
this place is where I stand
where all my mistakes were made
when I grew awkwardly and knew what I was
and that is Canadian or Canadien
it doesn't matter which to me

[...]
I have no other place to go

If ever there was a poet who could be trusted to stand up for Canada, to paint images of Canada how she is and how her people truly talk, to not cloak Canadian vistas in classical imagery of ancient Greece and Rome and England -- if ever there was a Canadian Poet, capital-C capital-P, that poet would be Al Purdy. For Purdy, art is rooted deeply in place and people and voice, and those three things are meant to be represented as truthfully and as accurately as a poet's hand can render. In the poem above, Purdy begs for the country not to be dismantled by selfish whims, because for him there is no other place on earth where he is himself. He is rooted in the landscape of this country in such a way that without it, he would cease to exist.

The importance of place comes through in all of Purdy's poems, perhaps most notably in "The Country North of Belleville," which is Purdy's elegy for the land he grew up in. (One thing I've noted: in Canadian literature, it seems to me that only male writers are nostalgic for the colonial period. It's almost as though there is a cultural memory for the women that reminds them of the impediments to their own craft had they existed in that time period. Just an observation). For Purdy, this land is "country of defeat," a place that can be neither farmed nor mined successfully. People make a go of the land in fits and starts, but the successes and failures conflate one another so regularly that watching the cycle of the land it becomes difficult to tell when the good times are happening. The real tragedy, though, for Purdy, is that "this is a land where the young / leave quickly / unwilling to know what their fathers know / or to think the words their mothers do not say." There is not future here for the younger generation, and the land will be abandoned, or is in the process of being abandoned, over time. If we wish to return to this place, "we must enquire the way / of strangers" because the cultural memory is lost as the children step back from the land. We lose not only farmers, but the act of farming.

In "Cariboo Horses," Purdy tackles the idea that that which is Canadian is fundamentally inferior. Our horses, he points out, may seem like "only horses," of nondescript Canadian stock, but they are the "lost relatives" of the horses who dragged stone for the pyramids and traversed Africa and Asia. The foreign horses may seem more glamorous, but our horses share that line through htme memory of the species. Likewise, we may be "only Canadians," be we share the promise of ever race of humans to walk before us, and we need to work to create and shape a mythology of our own. Our history should move us more than the stories of foreign shores, because our history is all we have to fall back on.

the earle of CanLit

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Earle Birney, edited by Gary Geddes

from David

[...] And David taught me

How time on a knife-edge can pass with the guessing of fragments
Remembered from poets, the naming of strata beside one,
And matching stories from schooldays [...]

That day we chanced on the skull and the splayed white rib
Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff face, caught
On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of hawks.
And that was the first I knew that a goat could slip.

[...] Then grinning, he reached with his freckled wrist

And drew me up after. We set a new time for that climb.
That day returning we found a robin gyrating
In grass, wing-broken. I caught it to tame by David
Took it and killed it, and said, "Could you teach it to fly?"

In Earle Birney's poetry, a key theme is the imposition of man upon the natural world and the negative consequences of it. Birney claims to have felt like an outsider, observing the human condition from a privileged position within university halls and army barracks that made his insights on humans, and his empathy for the natural world, all the more poignant. In the example above, from "David," Birney has his narrator, Bob, learn an important lesson about will and desire. Bob wants the bird to live so that he might keep it as a pet -- it is his own selfish desire, and not the good of the animal, that is in question here. This lesson is tall the more important when David, critically wounded on the cliffside, asks Bob to push him over the edge so that he can die with dignity rather than live disfigured and in pain (should he be able to live at all). Bob wants David to hold on so that he doesn't have to make the life-or-death decision for his friend, but David forces Bob to face reality by reminding him of the robin with the broken wing. Is Bob trying to hold on to David for David's sake, or for his own? In the end, Bob pushes his friend over the edge, doing as David wanted, but knowing that he has killed David and his own youth in the process. A poignant poem, Birney asks us to question our motivations behind our actions, and also to remember that we are not individuals so importantly as we are members of a collectivity.

The idea of man and nature is revisited on "The Bear on the Delhi Road," where Birney watches two men trying to teach a bear to dance. The poem weaves together images of cruelty and beauty to create a very complicated image of the connection between man and nature. Though they do not wish the bear or the people around them any harm, by insisting on denying the bear's "wish forever to stay / only an ambling bear / four-footed in berries," the men are necessarily denying the bear's natural will and imposing a human desire upon him instead. The result in "no more joyous," but they have won a competition against nature.

Clear in both of these poems, as well as "Appeal to a Lady with a Diaper," is that Birney was troubled by contemporary society and misplaced values of decadence over substance. The bear and the robin have the potential to fall prey to the ever-changing will of man simply because they are of the natural world. Contemporary society devalues this for progress. Where progress is moral and socially just, Birney applauds it -- where it exists for its own sake, he cuts it to ribbons.

inclined to love klein

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by A. M. Klein, edited by Gary Geddes

Heirloom

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
Writ mournfully upon a blank front page -

Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders;
Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;
Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders;
And sundry other tomes for a good Jew.

Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save
The scorpion crawling on a printed track;
The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave,
Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac.

The snuff left on this page, now brown and old,
The tallow stains of midnight liturgy -
These are my coat of arms, and these unfold
My noble lineage, my proud ancestry!

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground,
When reading in these treatises some weird
Miracle, I turned a leaf and found
A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

A. M. Klein is a writer of culture, of collectivity, and of memory. In the poem above, Klein writes of heritage and of the paradox of connection between generations. He refers to common Jewish experience, referring to his lack of wide estates (the barring of Jews in Europe from land ownership), the importance of the learned tradition in Judaism, and the importance of the connection to his past. In "Heirloom," Klein is celebrating his faith and his family. The family Torah becomes his sacred ground; he is proud of his Jewish identity and celebrates his connection to his "noble lineage, his proud ancestry." Likewise, in his "Autobiographical" poem, he is conscious of the memory of tragedy in the collective sense of his people, and seeks to repossess and reappropriate a former term of abuse ("Jewboy") to make it instead a source of power and individual identification.

Klein also found community within the French Canadian tradition. He feels a connection to the Catholic nuns who nursed him through childhood illnesses in "For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu," wherein he looks for memory outside his own tradition and connects compassionately with people. Medical care crosses the barriers of faith and allows for a more cosmopolitan view of social issues. In "Political Meeting," however, Klein begins to point out some of the problems with Quebecois society. The dependence upon religion he begins to see as a spectral and oppressive force over the people. Klein also sees French Nationalism as problematic in the post-WWII era; the thronging crowds emerge like those of Nazi Germany, and the focus of the poem is the scapegoating of groups like the Jews in Montreal as the source of all problems for Quebecois people. The meeting is an anti-conscription meeting, and the images of encroaching Nazism are cleverly juxtaposed against the people who don't want to go to war to fight against it. Klein suggests, as Gustafson did before him, that to deny the existence of horror is to partake in it. There is no individuality and no responsibility within the nationalist groups, and iin the last lines Klein reminds us of the roots of racism and anti-semitism in Quebec:

The whole street wears one face,
shadowed and grim; and in the darkness rises
the body-odor of race.

But Klein didn't hate Quebec; in "Montreal," we see him relish in the cosmopolitan nature of the meeting of cultures in the city; he sees himself as shaped by the city and seems to embrace the history of the place. He is ever aware that all the landholders are immigrants, and mentions aboriginal history as still present and alive to remind the reader of that fact. Klein refers to his place in Montreal as a "seignory," not only a reminder of French history but a commentary on his own appreciation for the place; again, his ancestors could not own land in Europe, so to be able to hold land is a reminder of the possibility and opportunity of Canada.

ralph gustafson: the bard of the eastern townships

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Ralph Gustafson, edited by Gary Geddes

The Newspaper

That photo of the little Jew in the cap,
Back to the gun held by the Nazi
With splay feet aware of the camera,
The little boy his hands in the air,
I turn over, I don't want to see it.
As a member of the human race. I am
Civilized. I am happy. I flap the
Newspaper with the picture over
So that when it is picked up to be taken
Down cellar to be put with the trash
I won't see it. I am sensitive.
The little boy is dead. He went
Through death. The cap is his best one.
He has brown eyes. He does not
Understand. Putting your hands
Up in front of a carbine prevents
The bullet. He is with the others.
Some of them he knows, so
It is all right. I turn
The paper over, the picture face
Down.

In the poem above, Gustafson illustrates a keen eye for the satiric. He uses his poem to illustrate his disgust with those who turn away from tragedy and attempt to deny its existence. This so-called "sensitive" individual would rather shut his eyes to an atrocity than do anything to help. He is "civilized;" the death is okay because the Jewish boy didn't die alone. Gustafson makes clear in this poem that those who turned a blind eye to the holocaust helped to perpetrate it. In "State of Affairs," Gustafson is troubled by the cost of progress -- this, he writes, has become "a world of small boys with legs off." There must be sacrifice so that there might be progress -- in the end, the price is not worth the results. In another poem, "I Think of All Soft Limbs," Gustafson fears that "the trouble here is too / Much death for compassion." Contemporary society finds itself overwhelmed and desensitized by violence. Where we find our humanity, then, is in art -- in "At the Cafe at Night," he writes:

Let us refer to those two at the cafe
Sitting outside in the night, the electric
Bulb bare, the street past the chairs
Empty, they tolerate one another
Only because of Van Gogh's paint.

It is art that creates our relationships between people and therefore shapes our humanity.

But Ralph Gustafson also wrote of his home in Canada, where he saw unlimited possibilities for the future. While Europe was mired in horror and sadness, "here, all is a beginning." Canada represents promise, possibility, and chance in "In the Yukon." In Canada, the natural supercedes the physical, and the country celebrates the ceremony of the natural world. For Gustafson, this ends up as the ideal in comparison with Europe, where "kings [are] crowned / With weights of gold," but "you can't move." Where Europe is restrictive, Canada is freeing and open.

dorothy livesay: the most incredible woman in canadian literature

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by E. J. Pratt, edited by Gary Geddes

The Unquiet Bed

The woman I am
is not what you see
I'm not just bones
and crockery

the woman I am
knew love and hate
hating the chains
that parents make

longing that love
might set men free
yet hold them fast
in loyalty

the woman I am
is not what you see
move over love
make room for me

Asking the Canadian establishment to move over and make room was the life's work of Dorothy Livesay. He focus on the marginalized people in Canada from the 1920s to the 1990s makes her a unique figure because her career has spanned massive changes in the make-up of Canadian society, and the feminist lens through which she viewed the world enabled her poetry to be intensely socially conscious. Whether trying to illustrate the injustice of the internment of Japanese-Canadians (especially those who were naturalized Canadians or Canadian citizens) or fighting for a place for women's literature, Livesay's poetry is a beacon of social justice in the Canadian literary landscape.

In what I think is her best poem, "The Three Emilys," Livesay points out the challenges of being a mother, a writer, and a feminist. She starts off the poem with the smug standpoint that the titular Emilys -- Dickinson, Bronte and Carr -- "walk alone, uncomforted" because they were not able to have children. Livesay remarks that she has had the opportunity to do it "all" -- she has a family, and a career as a writer. But by the end of the poem, it is Livesay herself who is "uncomforted," because she feels that she has failed to give her all to her art as the Emilys were able to do. She determines, "the whole that I possess / is still much less" than what the Emilys achieved because she has not really balanced a career and a family so much as she has sacrificed both to achieve diminished success. For Livesay, the inability to live androgynously as the Emilys did has caused her conflict. She is a woman living in a world where women are supposedly capable of achieving everything, and yet she feels that she has failed at both tasks she set out to accomplish. Where at first she felt sorry for the Emilys, she is left feeling sorry for herself.

Livesay's interest in gender differenced culminates in her most anthologized poem, "Bartok and the Geranium," where man is the genius composer Bartok and woman is the mere geranium on his windowsill. But where Bartok is passion and flight, the geranium is compassion, nurturing, and love. Each takes on their roles, and it is only through the combination of both that perfection is reached. But in the end, the geranium gets the last laugh:

She's daylight
He is dark
She's heaven-held breath
He storms and crackles
Spits with hell's own spark.

Yet in this room, this moment now
These together breath and be:
She, essence of serenity,
He in a mad intensity
Soars beyond sight
Then hurls, lost Lucifer,
from heaven's height.

And when he's done, he's out:
She leans a lip upon the glass
And preens herself in light.

thirty-two short entries about canadian poetry

We're hitting the anthology bus today, folks, which means lots of short entries about many different poets. I'm aiming to write about 2-3 paragraphs on each poet, short and sweet, with an aim to touch on the key stuff about each poet. I'm going to skip the intro to each one, too, because the entries will be so short. Without further ado, here's E. J. Pratt.

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by E. J. Pratt, edited by Gary Geddes

Erosion

It took the sea a thousand years,
A thousand years to trace
The granite features of this cliff,
In crag and scarp and base.

It took the sea an hour one night,
And hour of storm to place
The sculpture of these granite seams
Upon a woman's face.

E. J. Pratt's poetry is very much about the power of nature over man and the de-naturalization of humanity. In the poem above, for example, Pratt illustrates the strength of the natural world -- the sea can, in a thousand years, reshape the land, and it takes a thousand years because of how strong the natural world is against its own elements. But in one worrisome night as a woman waits for her husband to return from the sea, the natural world can reshape a woman's face, carving wrinkles into it -- the human body cannot stand up to the punishment the natural world can provide. Humans are inherently weak in the face of natural challenges, but also are they weak against their own creations. Pratt seems concerned with the idea that man and machine can become one, and the power of industrialization was a clear preoccupation for Pratt. In "The Man and he Machine," Pratt personifies the machine as female, and has it intertwine itself with the male figure in the poem. He is able to "trace his kinship through her steel," and she in turn uses his body for her own gain. She in the controlling figure of the poem, and the man seems powerless in the face of her control.

Pratt also concerns himself deeply with human failure -- that is, hubris. In "The Titanic," human pride stands in the way of reasonable risk assessment. The man, arrogant and sure of the boat's prowess, is contrasted with the iceberg, which acts in a "casual and indeterminate" way that shows the power within its grasp. The iceberg assumes nothing of its own capability, and yet is changes history and world perceptions of progress. The human concern with luxury is also targeted in this poem; "lusciousness" protects men from "a surfeit of security," but that is in the end their downfall. In the final moments of the crash, men's last thought is for commerce and business. Pratt seems to suggest that man is ignorant of his submission to the laws of the natural world.

I want to end this post with a lovely quotation from Pratt:

A good poem is good because it is an unusual, imaginative, arresting was of writing English. We do no speak in poetry, except in rare moments; and if a poet writes so simply as to give the effect of spoken language, that effect is all the more startling and novel.

i'm thinking i don't understand a. j. m. smith

I don't get this A. J. M. Smith fellow, I really don't. I see that his poetry is beautiful and basically formally perfect, but as far as an important poet of Canada I have to say I kind of fail to get why Smith is such a man of stature. Maybe it's because I'm coming off of Scott, who is so obviously a poet of Canada and Canadianness, and interested in the future of this country -- but I just don't have any patience right now for artistically perfect depictions of the Canadian wilderness. Frankly, it bores me pretty freaking quickly.

That said, I have to grow an opinion pretty quickly if I want to bang this out before heading for Transformers. I hear that they are robots in disguise. Potentially more than meets the eye. I'm not sure, and I'm trying not to buy into hype or anything, but it's what I've been hearing.

Selected Poems from Poets Between the Wars
by A. J. M. Smith, edited by Milton Wilson

Swift Current

This is a visible
and crystal wind:
no ragged edge,
no splash of foam,
no whirlpool's scar;
only
-- in the narrows,
sharpness cutting sharpness,
arrows of direction,
spears of speed.

I think my biggest problem with A. J. M. Smith is rooted in my biggest problem with how we classify writers as Canadian. Do we really get to lay claim to a writer simply because he was born here? If his writing is more about the Thames than the Rideau, is he still Canadian? These questions plagued me while reading Smith's poetry, because his is the writing of a poet looking beyond the borders of Canada and abroad for his poetic scope. He left Canada at the age of 24, never to return, and where other ex-pats spend their lives recreating their Canada in words, Smith seems to have had a far more cosmopolitan scope. Smith is a "pure poet" by his own monicker too, which makes it even more difficult for me to access his poetry -- I don't really have even a flying interest in poetry that exists only to be pretty or capture an emotion. I wouldn't read a novel that had nothing to say about social issues I care about, and I feel the same about poetry. Especially given the fire and power of Scott's social conscience. Frankly, I read Smith grudgingly, and feeling more than a little bored and alienated from the poetry.

I decided I needed to flesh out my understanding of Smith a bit, and looked him up in my trusty Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, which pointed out quite a bit of interesting things about Smith. He was an important figure shaping the modernist poetry movement in Montreal, editing the Literary Supplement to the McGill Daily at an integral time in that publication's growth. He and F. R. Scott co-founded The McGill Fortnightly Review which would go on to be a premier literary publication in Canada. Smith apparently through this tenure influenced Scott, as well as A. M. Klein and others. Smith went on to be one of the foremost anthologists of Canadian literature in his day, and though he became a naturalized American his impact on Canadian literature was felt through to the publication of his final Canadian anthology in 1974. And his criticism has been well represented in my own readings for these comprehensive examinations. According to this Oxford Companion,

"Smith's critical essays -- written in an easy, lucid, and sometimes poetic prose -- reassert his doctrines of intensity gained through discipline; the negative effects of colonialism, which Smith equated with parochialism; and his reiterated belief that a poem is not a description of an experience, it is in itself an experience."

So now I see why we need to remember Smith. His impact on Canadian literature was massive, as he influenced two poets (Scott and Klein) who went on to be two of the most influential poets of their own age, and furthermore through his anthologies and criticism he has created and maintained an excitement about the literature that this country has to offer.

I still don't much care for his poetry. I think the emergence of looser forms and more socially conscious verse has made his image-driven poetry seem, to me, quite quaint and out-moded. Smith viewed his own poetry as decorative or ornamental, and I'm not sure poetry like that is of much value to me (or to audiences in a post-WWII world). That said, I understand better now his place in the Canadian literary canon, and I understand the importance of understanding his work and the works that he influenced.

poetry with a social conscience

I love F. R. Scott. He's such a delightfully cranky old man. He reminds me of the kind of writing in those old C. C. F. pamphlets from the early days of the party -- such hope for change, such excitement, and such powerful optimism. It's sad to think that we don't really have that same level of hopeful excitement in our political futures anymore.

This is a short one (there's only about twenty pages of poems in the assigned collection), but there will be a second entry later today on some other poems from the same collection (these ones by A. J. M. Smith.

Selected Poems from Poets Between the Wars
by F. R. Scott, edited by Milton Wilson

Efficiency: 1935

The efficiency of the capitalist system
Is rightly admired by important people.
Our huge steel mills
Operating at 25% capacity
Are the last word in organization.
The new grain elevators
Stored with superfluous wheat
Can load a grain-boat in two hours.
Marvelous card-sorting machines
Make it easy to keep track of the unemployed.
There is not one unnecessary worker
In these textile plants
That require a 75% tariff protection.
And when our closed shoe-factories re-open
They will produce more footwear that we can possibly buy.
So don't let us start experimenting with socialism
Which everyone knows means inefficiency and waste.

I think F. R. Scott is one of my favourite Canadian poets of all time, specifically because he marks for me the break in Canadian literature between the celebratory nation-building poetry of the confederation-era poets and the social consciousness of the modernists. F. R. Scott is very clear in his social mandate, but he also explores the Canadian landscape and is aware of the importance of building a literary and cultural legacy. But as you can see from the above poem, Scott's focus first and foremost was to push for and encourage social progress in Canada. Occasionally cynical and sarcastic, this drive carries through so much of Scott's work that the ultimate effect is one of hopeful excitement at the potential for change in such a young country as Canada.

Scott places the blame for failure to progress socially in Canada at the hands of politicians, seeing them as being either too bound to England, too concerned with their own finances, or too devoted to the goal of political longevity. In his "Ode to a Politician" he writes:

At school he learns the three Canadian things:
Obedience, loyalty and love of Kings.

To serve a country other than his own
Becomes for him the highest duty known,

To keep antiquity alive forever
The proper object of his young endeavour.

Young people, Scott suggests, go to school not to learn about the history of their own country, but instead to learn deference to England and to the social orders England constructed in Canada. To devote one's life to the protection of ancient ideals means that forward progress (especially the social progress Scott is interested in) is basically impossible. Likewise, he condemns the control of political structures by the wealthy in the same poem, pointing out that those who are successful in business rise to political power, and then try to run a country like a business. For Scott, this is and essentially flawed point-of-view, because it denies humanity. Indeed, the politician in "Ode to a Politician" comes to the conclusion that he should have done more for the poor, but it comes too late in his career and he can't make the difference he finally realizes he should have striven for: "Some glimmering concept of a juster state / Begins to trouble him -- but just too late." In the end, he becomes a British peer... he has sold out Canada to achieve abroad, an issue which troubled Scott.

Humanism is important to Scott. He writes in his poem "Eden" that Adam and Eve didn't fall from the Garden, but instead they chose wisdom over ignorance. This is positive to Scott because he values human possibility and doesn't believe anyone should willingly choose perfect ignorance over real wisdom and experience. He describes the so-called fall as Adam and Eve having "conquered the power of choice." Also, Eve is held up as the more active of the two. She seeks out the knowledge in the first place, and after the expulsion she tells Adam, "If we keep using this knowledge / I think we'll be back." Man can recreate Eden on earth; for Scott, the first step is social awareness and justice for all.

Scott is also concerned with other social issues, like racism and exploitation in Canada. Scott responds to the famous E. J. Pratt poem "The Last Spike" by asking,

Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?
Where are the thousands from China who swung their picks with bare hands at forty below?

Between the first and the million other spikes they drove, and the dressed-up act of Donald Smith, who has sung their story?

Did they fare so well in the land they helped to unite? Did they get one of the 25,000,000 CPR acres?
Is all Canada has to say to them written in the Chinese Immigration Act?

This is an awareness, a challenge, and a conscience far ahead of its political time (consider that the apology for the Head Tax didn't come until 2006!).

More to come later today... Now I'm off to the gym!

malcolm's katie: or, women are possessions and don't you forget it

I still don't like long poems. I think I get frustrated because deviations from the narrative line are so much harder to make sense of than in a novel. Maybe I'm just dopey. I've been reading the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford, however, and I like it quite a lot. She's very adept at capturing images for her readers and really taking time to construct a specific feeling of the colonial/confederation wilderness. Crawford has a real passion for landscape and even in her narrative long poem is fascinated by depicting the changing seasons.

Again, this entry may be on the short side as it is only one long poem and a few companion pieces.

Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story (and other poems)
by Isabella Valancy Crawford

The South Wind laid his moccasins aside,
Broke his gay calumet of flow'rs and cast
His useless wampum, beaded with cool dews,
Far from him, northward; his long, ruddy spear
Flung sunward, whence it came, and his soft locks
Of warm, fine haze grew silver as the birch.
His wigwam of green leaves began to shake.

In Isabella Valancy Crawford's famous long poem, Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story, the reader is introduced at the opening of the poem to Max and Katie, two young lovers secretly betrothed to each other. But Max is a poor labourer -- an axeman whose job is to fell the trees of the Canadian forest. Max is out logging many months at a time. Katie, conversely, is the daughter of a rich man (the Malcolm of the poem's title), and Max is convinced that Malcolm will never agree to the match. Katie promises Max that while he is away at the logging camp, she will convince her father to approve her marriage to Malcolm.

But Max has one last prediction before he leaves. He tells his beloved Katie that she is young, and that he is worried about her ability to commit to him. He predicts that a suitor will come while he is absent, and that this new suitor will test the extent to which Katie can really remain true to Max. This suitor does appear, and his name is Alfred. He knows Katie doesn't love him -- she tells him as much -- but he expresses to her that that doesn't really matter, because he is in love with her father's money and that love will find a way to conquer her doubts. Alfred engages in many manipulative techniques to attempt to secure the marriage -- saving Katie's life, telling Max that he is already betrothed to Katie, and even attempting to murder Max -- but in the end he is not successful and Max and Katie are united. Determining that Alfred is evil, Max kills him. Malcolm comes to support Katie's choice of a husband, and the first grandson is named Alfred in order to show that his evil can be conquered by love. That's the story of Malcolm's Katie in a nutshell, and now I want to talk about some of the interesting appropriations and commentaries that Crawford makes in the piece.

To start with, take a look at the passage I quoted at the opening of this blog entry. Note how Crawford appropriates aboriginal images as the "natural;" all the elements of the wilderness are coded native. The Winds are First Nations' Spirits, with the full gamut of wampum, wigwams, and moccasins. The mountains represent chiefs of the wilderness. Interestingly, though, the winter seems to be coded white. From the same section as the above quotation, we see:

"Esa! esa! shame upon you, Pale Face!
"Shame upon you, Moon of Evil Witches!
"Have you killed the happy, laughing Summer?
"Have you slain the mother of the flowers
"With your icy spells of might and magic?
"Wrapp'd her, mocking, in a rainbow blanket?
"Drown'd her in the frost mist of your anger?"

She later makes the analogy more obvious by referring to "Indian Summer" and contrasting that to "the cold Moon of Terror," whose whiteness is equated with Europeaness, elaborating on an attack on the Natives (Summer) by cruelty (Winter). What is interesting is that Crawford chooses to see this as a circular, cyclical relationship. She describes the summer as "always shot, and evermore returning," suggesting that there is no finality in death here -- does she mean that there will be an eventual reemergence of the native peoples, and that as summer returns so to do they? Later, this metaphor gets muddled. Winter weather is attributed to a North Wind Spirit, who is again appropriated from aboriginal custom, but he rails against the "White Squaw" of winter... Is she white as in European, or is she a Squaw (aboriginal) made of winter weather? But while the white man's place in this shifts, the elements as a whole remail native-tinged - for Crawford, to be aboriginal is to be of the land.

This interpretation highlighting the emergence of native peoples is supported by a passage wherein Max highlights some of the failures of Canada. He refers to:

A throne propp'd up with bleaching bones;
A country sav'd with smoking seas of blood;
A flag torn from the foe with wounds and death;
Or Commerce, with her housewife foot upon
Colossal bridge of slaughter'd savages.

Crawford here is making reference to the fact that Canada is built on the backs of dead aboriginal people. She highlights this in the poem in such an overt way that the message can't possibly be missed, and I feel like it must relate to the way she personifies the summer as native and the winter (or at least the killer of summer) as white.

Crawford also builds images in this poem of the rich experiencing progress only at the hands of the poor. For every blow of the axe in the wilderness, she writes, "Cities and palaces shall grow!" This is particularly poignant as it comes in the same section where Max is nearly killed by a falling tree -- Crawford seems intent on reminding us of the price of progress. Max is angry that gain for Katie's father has come relatively easily -- he needed only to come to the New World willing to work, and land was granted to him. Max works hard, but points out to Katie that it's hard to work for land you do not own. While hard work is valued in the colonies, the lack of free land places unexpected obstacles in Max's way.

I think, though, my major problem with this poem is that it supposes women as objects. Katie is Malcolm's until she is Max's -- for a while it seems as though she may be Alfred's -- but she is not her own person in any way. Though her will is ultimately met, it is only on (a) the good will of her father and (b) the cunning and strength of her fiance. This is a tale of the times, certainly, but Katie never seems opposed to this way of being in the world. Crawford is strong and bold enough to comment on the plight of the aboriginal population, but passes no judgement on the situation of women in the colony. I find this curious indeed.

I don't really think there's much point in commenting on the other poems here by Crawford -- the theme of nature-as-native is rehashed in the other poems, and for the most part they are otherwise rather quiet pastorals. Of these poems, Malcolm's Katie is clearly her most important work.

oh Acadia, you so fine / you so fine you blow my mind / Acadia *clap clap* Acadia

This is the first time I have ever made it through The Rising Village, because I spent my undergraduate degree (and my M.A., if I'm honest) being afraid of long poems and avoiding them at all costs. I blame it on an early and prolonged exposure to Paradise Lost, personally. Anyway, I remember reading excerpts of The Deserted Village in my third year, and being struck by the bleakness of the imagery. Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Deserted Village in 1770 to comment on the horrific state of affairs in the abandoned villages across England -- he writes of the challenges of poverty and the sins of chasing wealth. Our Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Rising Village in response to his uncle's poem and in order to show the opportunities available across class lines in the new world -- particularly in his beloved Acadia (now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). He didn't settle in Canada, and died in England in 1861, but his respect and passion for the emerging colony is palpable.

This is a short post, because (a) it's only one poem and (b) I want to take a moment to edit Oliver Goldsmith Sr.'s wikipedia entry, because it makes no mention of this Oliver Goldsmith and The Rising Village, which seems important.

The Rising Village
by Oliver Goldsmith

Happy Acadia! [....]

How pleasing and how glowing with delight
Are now thy budding hopes! How sweetly bright
They rise to view! How full of joy appear
The expectations of each future year!

[...]

While the poor peasant, whose laborious care
Scarce from the soil could right his scanty fare
Now in the peaceful arts of culture skilled,
Sees his wide barn with ample treasures filled;

[...]

Thy grateful thanks to Britain's care are due,
Her power protects, her smiles past hopes renew,
Her valour guards thee, and her councils guide,
Then may thy parent ever be thy pride!

I find the passage I have quoted above particularly noteworthy. All the lines come from the same stanza, though I have cut out some of the intervening lines. But the passage is so interesting to me because it seems to simultaneously rebuke and celebrate mother England. The poet says, essentially, that the peasant who could barely eek out a living in England finds life, liberty and riches in Acadia. He argues that Acadia has provided the new settler with budding hopes and joys and with the plenty and the opportunities for great success. But even thought peasants are likely only to find a future in the new world, Goldsmith makes it clear that they should be aware that they owe everything they have achieved to England. It is only through England's grace that the colonies exist undisturbed, and therefore -- regardless of the toil of those who work for their freedom from the oppressive ruling class system in England -- they could accomplish nothing without the hand of mother Britain. It seems like an awkward situation -- if you stay, you are beholden to England for your failures, but if you go, your successes belong to her as well. No wonder so many people wanted to run for the colonial hills!

Overall, the poem plaints a positive picture of Acadia and, by extension, Canada and the New World as well. Goldsmith is careful never to condemn England -- he paints just about the rosiest picture ever of the class system in the UK when he writes, "Majestic palaces in pomp display / The wealth and splendor of the regal sway; / While the low hamlet and the shepherd's cot, / In peace and freedom mark the peasant's lot." What a wonderful way of saying, "Stay where we put you!" But though he refuses to condemn England, that doesn't stop him from praising the new colony of Canada for it's difference from England -- Goldsmith has respect for the freedom and the options offered to colonists and his perception that Acadia is a significantly more democratic than was England. He is careful, too, to point out just how difficult the early experiences of the settlers had been -- he seems focused on illustrating how hard the settlers worked to "earn" their freedom from class struggle. At the end of the day, though, "The golden triumphant corn waves his head." The settlers have had success, and Goldsmith makes a point of explaining in the poem the process and work involved in clearing land. There's no doubt that he respects the hard graft of the settlers in the new colony.

There's a troubling discussion of the settlers "fending off" the aboriginal population. It's a product of (a) the time and (b) Goldsmith's privileged position as an officer of the British army, but for Goldsmith the greatest success of the settlers is their ability to survive the aboriginal attacks. He condemns the native people for believing that they "still retain possession of the soil," which belies a historical misunderstanding of the connection natives had to the land... And even if they had a possessive attitude, we know that no formal treaties were signed in the maritime provinces after the Royal Proclamation in 1763, so let's face it, the land really was their own. It's just interesting to be reminded of the political viewpoint of the period -- it seems so foreign to our own.

In relation to that, there is a celebration of the faith and devout Christianity of the settlers in the new land. In the Deserted Village, I believe (taxing my poor memory) that there is a section on the village chapel falling into disuse. The opposite is true in The Rising Village, where people who possess very little, as the settlers do, show gratitude for everything and believe all their blessings to be divined by God: "While, grateful for each blessing God has given, / In pious strains, they waft their thanks to Heaven." Settlers are pious because they know that "God alone can shelter him from harm." This is something worth celebrating, for Goldsmith, because it's impressive to him that the colonies, which he seems to fear could fall easily into religious disrepair, are really a bastion of faith and piety.

Acadia isn't perfect, however, and Goldsmith doesn't hesitate to point out the areas of colonial life that he has problems with. The doctor and the school teacher come under fire as being basically incompetent, but without enough competition for their jobs to encourage any kind of improvement. There is a sense that the colonies are a good place for the poor, but there isn't really any place for members of the professional classes, the middle classes, or the wealthy. The colonies are a place to go to work with your hands, it seems, and not your brain.

Finally, there's a really odd section in the middle where he outlines a failed love story. I don't understand the purpose of this. Is there a Flora and Albert in The Deserted Village? I am unsure, and will have to look it up later.

Anon and anon, my poetry loving peers.

canadian poetry is all the rage

I needed a break from the bleakness of the modernist period, and so I shook off the modernist shackles and moved into poetry for a little bit. You deserve the truth, dear blog readers -- I'm not really very good with poetry. I kind of find it... annoying. I'm big on literature that says what it means, or that has a really developed sense of irony. I'm not really one for metaphors. I actually don't mind the stuff I've looked at for today's blog post. I find contemporary poetry royally irritating. But this is good -- I'm facing my literary fears and leaving behind novels for the next month while I work through all the poetry and drama on my list. I'll see you again, novels... On August 6th. Sigh.

Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War
selected by Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies

Instead of starting with a quote from the text as I usually do, I'm going to do a survey of the themes across this collection and use quotations from the different poets as appropriate. The text here is broken into two sections -- part one is Foundations, and part two is Continuations. Foundations is the colonial period, and Continuations is the confederation period leading into the moderns only so far as the immediate post-WWI period can be considered modernist in Canada.

The Foundations period is a time of celebrating Canada, and comparing Canada to England and America. Robert Hayman, for example, wrote of the comparisons between Newfoundland (where he was a governor) and England as early as 1628. Jonathan Odell spoke of leaving America and coming to Canada as the time he "renounced our native hostile shore" in his "Our Thirty-Ninth Wedding Anniversary" in 1810. The comparison to the homeland reminds the reader of the newness of Canada, and adds importance to the development of a national literature separate and apart from the poets' home countries.

The comparisons tend to focus on celebrating the freedom and the democratic spirit of Canada, as for example Alexander McLachlan writing "The Man Who Rose From Nothing" in 1874:

In other lands he's hardly knows,
For he's a product of our own;
Could grace a shanty or a throne,
The man who rose from nothing.

For most of the poets in this Foundations period, freedom is celebrated and preferable in comparison with the comforts of England -- better to be less comfortable but to own one's own land than to have creature comforts but live as a tenant. In the end, it seems, the real thing that Canada offers to immigrants is relative freedom compared to the oppressive circumstances of England / America.

Indeed, there seems to be a consciousness in the early poetry of Canada of the role of poets as nation-builders. For example, Griselda Tonge was a poet who lived from 1803-1825. She was the great-granddaughter of Deborah How Cottnam, an earlier Canadian poet, and she makes an effort in her own poetry to echo back to the work of her great-grandmother. She is on one hand simply acknowledging the good works of a family member, but she is also creating a Canadian cultural legacy, showing that there is a lineage to writing in Canada and creating a kind of literary dynasty.

Many of the celebratory poems were loosely-veiled or not-so-veiled forms of propaganda to encourage immigration to the new colonies. In 1750, the anonymous "Nova Scotia: A New Ballad" emerged to sing the praises of Nova Scotia and remind people that, in the new world:

No landlords are there the poor tenants to teaze,
No lawyers to bully, nor stewards to seize;
But each honest fellow's a landlord, and dares
To spend on himself the whole fruit of his cares.

This is clearly propaganda, but other celebratory poems are perhaps less overtly tools for the attraction of new immigrants. One example of such is the joyful "Annapolis-Royal" by Roger Viets, which was actually distributed in pamphlet form.

Towards the end of the Foundational period, a real social consciousness emerged from the poets. John Arthur Phillips, for example, focused on the plight of the female workers who were making less than their male counterparts (sound familiar?) in his "The Factory Girl" in 1873:

A man gets thrice the money,
But then "a man's a man,
And women surely can't expect
To earn as much as he can."
Of his hire the laborer's worthy,
Be that laborer who it may;
If a woman can do a man's work
She should have a man's full pay,
Not to be left to starve -- or sin --
On forty cents a day.

[...]

If she sins to escape her bondage
Is there room for wonder then.

There's also the anonymous "A Popular Creed" that satirizes the idea that money is what creates a good man, and that the worst crime a man can commit is the crime of poverty. Other emergent themes are not really surprising, because they echo from the literature of the period -- a deference to God, a focus on the natural world, natives as representatives of pre-White Canada, and a sense of optimism about the choices and options available to people through immigration. These themes in large part carry through to the poetry of the Continuations period, because Canadian poetry will likely always feature things like nature in some capacity, but there are shifts that occur.

First of all, there is a stronger sense of an emergent national identity, and with that comes the beginning of a questioning of the demands of the empire. For example, as William Wilfred Campbell argues in "The Lazarus of Empire" in 1899:

But lowest and last, with his area vast,
And horizon so servile and tame,
Sits the poor beggar Colonial
Who feeds on the crumbs of her fame.

[...]

How long, O how long, the dishonor,
The servile and suppliant place?
Are we Britons who batten upon her,
Or degenerate sons of the race?

Campbell is clearly concerned with the relationship to the empire, which is interestingly early in Canada's progress as a nation. This way of exploring the Canadian identity is supplemented by a fear of brain drain and the challenges of being loyal to Canada. Charles G.D. Roberts wrote of this phenomenon as early as 1886 in a poem called "The Poet Is Bidden to Manhattan Island." This poem about 19th Century brain drain ends with the narrator of the poem referring to the United States as "pastures new," and pointing out that a Canadian poet has "piped at home, where none could pay." In the US, then, there is financial support for poetry -- the Canadian poet must choose between staying at home to develop the Canadian poetic scene. There is a sense of responsibility in the artists in Canada in this period that they are creating a national art.

This development of Canadian poetry was really important to the works of Charles G.D. Roberts. In his poem "Aye!," for example, Roberts sets an Ode to Shelley in the Tantramar. New Brunswick is inserted into the canon, here, but furthermore the Canadian marshland is equated with Shelley -- both are considered poets in the writings of Roberts, which is an interesting idea and adds legitimacy to the burgeoning poetic scene of Canada.

Not all poets saw it this way. For Bliss Carman, for example, in his "The Ships of Saint John" from 1893, he depicts Canada as a "great nurse and mother." Canada, then, is something that gives you what you need to grown, but that you eventually must leave. In this poem, Carman makes it clear that dreams are something that you fulfill elsewhere, not in Canada. This is fitting for a writer who started in Canada but eventually settled down and became a professional writer in the United States. (In "Wild Geese," he revisits this theme by lusting and longing to be with the geese who fly south -- he views it as an exodus and longs to be a part of it.)

The other major theme that emerges, especially in the Confederation Poets, is a privileging of the rural over the urban. In "Among the Timothy," for example, Archibald Lampman contrasts the "blind grey streets" of the city with the "enchanted climes" of rural Canada. There is an emerging nostalgia for the natural world that develops as a response to the urbanization and industrialization of Canada.

I have no pretty way to end this post beyond saying that it's midnight and I'm tired. More poetry tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen.