Peter Stevens

Setting Poetic Sail for the Nineties: Out of the Doldrums of the Eighties into the Open Sea of the Nineties

As I began to try to put my thoughts about the parlous state of Canadian poetry and the possibilities that might open for it in the '90s into some coherent form (there's no guarantee that I will ever achieve that coherence), I received a copy of The Third Macmillan Anthology, edited by John Metcalf and Kent Thompson. In it are two articles about Canadian poetry, one by Kevin Connolly, "Canadian Poetry: The Year In Review," decrying the lack of good poetry in 1989, one by Fraser Sutherland, "Room at the Top: The House of Poetry in the Vacuous Eighties," the very title of which suggests its wide-ranging swipe at the mediocrity of the last ten years of Canadian poetry.

The gist of both articles fits in with my own sense of the paucity of good poetry in this country in the last fifteen years or so, with a few exceptions, of course. Connolly's article is much more polemical, even propagandist, in that it subscribes to the general Metcalf view that Canadian literature is hyped up, that it falls sadly below world standards for the most part, that its tottering stature is bolstered only by financial injections by the Canada Council. Connolly takes Quarry Press to task for publishing a bad anthology, Poets 88, edited by Bob Hilderley and Ken Norris, a book Connolly claims seems "as if it were thrown together over the course of an afternoon (253). " The poets in this anthology become Connolly's whipping boys and girls, and there is "a legion of somnabulant rivals" for the Oscars of poor poetry in 1989, according to Connolly, who reserves his praise for only five poets: Stuart Ross, Paulette jiles, Phil Hall, Robert Kroetsch and Joe Rosenblatt, three of whom are established, so the outlook for the future of Canadian poetry, based on the publications in 1989, is bleak indeed.

Sutherland's piece is an even more haymaking attack, as can be judged by an early generalization in the article:

 Few highlights, not even much low life.
 Or life at all.  A time of no consensus
 and God knows, no dialectic, displaced
 at the centre of national culture by
 fiction writers, reduced to
 selfcongratulatory coteries, poets lived
 in the suburbs of creativity ... A 
 querulous and self-defeating species of.
 feminism was the only movement to feebly
 rival the nationalism of the sixties and
 the early seventies (268).

By the end of the article Sutherland is also fulminating about the system of financial aid to small presses as a result of which there was a plethora of books of very undistinguished poetry:

 Poems that could just as easily, and more
 effectively, be written in prose; poets 
 ... with talent, or at least cleverness,
 who were diverted into garrulous
 attitudinizing or a terminal attack of the
 cutes. Chfldren's verse poses as adult
 poetry. Metaphors were launched, and then
 got misplaced by Mission Control.
 Fulsomely sentimental tributes were paid.
 Camp following came disguised as
 innovation (271-72).

Sutherland also finds the anthologies published in the '80s as being out of touch, sadly repetitious or without real focus on the better poetry: he maintains Dennis Lee's selections for his New Canadian Poets 1970-1985 (McClelland & Stewart, 1985) were done with only "shotgun precision" (273). (More of that anthology later.) Sutherland essentially finds nothing vigorous in the newer poets; most of the delights of poetry came from already established poets so that "satisfactions tended to be retrospective" (268).

In spite of Connolly and Sutherland having their own axes to grind by chopping off the heads of most of the newer poets, their contention that these mutilated corpses were examples of the state of recent Canadian poetry is generally true; for both writers, publishers, especially the small presses, had loosed these zombies to make for a night of the living dead in poetry. Both attacks contain a good deal of sense, together with some suspect views as wen as judicious statements about the quality of the work of a few good poets.

What has happened to Canadian poetry since that riotous upsurge during the 60s and early 70s to make it the target of these attacks? And if indeed it has mouldered towards decrepitude in the 80s, what are the prospects for the 90s? Perhaps a quick survey of those heady days in poetry will help explain how it fell away into the general inadequacy of the 80s.

From about the mid-60s on, even the bigger publishers got in on the poetry scene and suddenly small presses blossomed and released a spate of books of poetry, large and small, experimental, colloquial, poems on broadsheets, poster poems. And the readings! The big-name poets drew hundreds and even those not so wellknown had sizeable audiences. The Canada Council gave money to send poets scurrying abroad to exotic places, which poets then turned into fodder for their next book of poems. The Council also sent poets into the far and near corners of Canada. Most cities were abuzz with poetry circles, workshops, discussion groups thrashing out the merits and demerits of different ways of being a poet chanting shamanistically like bill bissett, talking conversationally like Al Purdy, making outrageous rhetoric like Irving Layton, zeroing in with a tight intensity like Margaret Atwood.

Part of this explosion of poetry was connected with the 60s counterculture, a new consciousness in a younger generation that accepted poetry as never before as a way of life, a protest against worn-out establishment and traditional ideas: before the 1960s a poetry reading was a fairly rare occurrence. Irving Layton had been giving readings across the country and maybe that was the start of the notion of the poet as personality. It seems now that to be published by a larger press it was necessary for the poet to have a personality to be exploited as a commercial hook to hang the poetry on. Eventually that grew into tl,-e poetry centering on the personae of such poets as Al Purdy, Earle Birney and Alden Nowlan and a little later Tom Wayman who went so far as to include himself as a third person persona in some of his poems.

So in the 60s we find that poets and poetry were establishing more of a public presence though of course the audience for poetry was never a large one. Still, poets at that time could rely on a consistent response and most poets giving readings through the 60s and into the 70s had reasonably sized audiences. That interest in poetry as a public act, as an oral art rather than simply an esoteric printed manifestation of intellectual puzzles or high-flown rhetoric was further stimulated by another phenomenon, the Vancouver scene of the 60s. In 1963 Earle Birney started the first creative writing department in a Canadian university. He invited writers from the U.S. to come and give readings. Some of those writers were still operating in Beatnik modes. Others were elaborating different approaches to poetry, particularly one which put breath and the oral as all-important - and so the reading of poetry aloud was an essential part of their presence and their influence. Some older poets latched onto these newer poetic methods - Earle Birney himself, for instance, and Dorothy Livesay, returning to the west coast after being out of the country for years, found herself caught up by these new ideas and changed her style to suit the times. Then Earle Birney's students went on to establish themselves in Canadian poetry - George Bowering, Frank Davey, Lionel Kearns who all become known on the reading circuit, as well as others from the Vancouver poetry scene - bill bissett and Joan Newlove, for instance.

In his own way Al Purdy typified these changes in poetry. Purdy had been publishing chapbooks of poetry since 1945. His verse had been locked in the style of traditional English poetry learned from his school days. Finally he broke through to a new, colloquially based style, full of a hectic helter-skelter of wide and disparate references, cohering around the almost self-mocking, off-hand persona of the poet himself. And that breakthrough first came to our attention in the crucial year of 1963 for the first book he wrote in his new style, Poems for all the Annettes, was published just a year before. That style went on to win the Governor-General's Award for poetry in 1965 with his book, The Cariboo Horses.

While these new ideas and energy focussing on personality and readings, as well as the dominance of American styles, produced some good poetry, one is reminded of some of the strictures Robert Bly raised about American poetry of just a few years before, particularly in an essay, "A Wrong Turning for American Poetry," recently published in a collection of his essays, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (Harper & Row, 1990). Bly has his own hobby horses to ride, in particular his concern with deep-image poetry but some of his ideas are relevant in some way to the situation of Canadian poetry as it was developing in the 60s and 70s. Bly's main complaint about American poetry at that time is that it is too attached to objects and he cites William Carlos Williams as an example, and of course Williams was very much a poet whose influence was very strong in that movement of young poets in the 60s, the so-called Black Mountain poets whose example was followed by many of the Vancouver poets. Bly claims that this insistence on "no ideas but in things" wipes out an individual voice; in Canada the Williams' influence through Olson resulted more in the poet placing himself in the poems as one of the things, and thus creating a personality. According to Bly, this kind of poetry lacks any inward life, any spiritual intensity and for the most part the resulting poetry is rooted in the idea of offering the everyday world almost as being poetic in itself. In Canada one might suggest there were some notable exceptions to this - the names of Phyllis Webb and D.G. Jones will suffice, even though their personalities were part of their poetry. Bly insists rigorously in his essay that the examples to follow, examples ignored by American poets, are to be found in European poetry. Canadian poetry in the '60s turned away from its English style which had been at the root of the first modern poetry in Canada to an almost exclusive adherence to American models. The result was that Scott and especially Smith were dismissed, other poets such as Ralph Gustafson were neglected and this anti-Englishness is still prevalent today. While the emphasis has been on boosting some of the new names in Canadian poetry, there remains a group of poets still tied in different ways to contemporary English poetry, though with some American tones (rough equivalents perhaps of Thom Gunn though none sounds 'like him) who have been virtually ignored: Christopher Levenson, Christopher Wiseman, Robin Skelton, Mike Doyle and Don Coles among others though the last-named has become a more recognized poet.

This Americanized poetry centering on personality was somehow fostered through the 60s even in the surge of nationalist feeling which erupted in the latter part of that decade. Certainly, in spite of these deficiencies and the general concern with just one specific way to approach poetry, the 60s and the mid-70s was in many ways a very lively period for Canadian poetry. What happened to that liveliness? Why did Canadian poetry begin to founder, stumbling away from the achievement of the previous generation?

Economic decline and inflation curbed the publication of poetry to some extent in the 80s. But that should not necessarily have militated against the free readings sponsored by the Canada Council; however, the Council's fees did not keep pace with inflation and nowadays there are less money and fewer venues for readings. The Council has lowered the numbers of readings a poet can give in one year and also the number of readings at each venue.

But it was not just economics. Much of the energy seemed to go out of our established poets. The breakthrough element associated with Purdy and Birney backfired. Many younger poets adopted their mode of writing but sounded only like weak imitations, though one or two, poets like Tom Wayman and Patrick Lane, for instance, rose above the purely imitative.

And no centre like Vancouver in the 60s emerged. The League of Canadian Poets was formed with high hopes of pushing poetry across the country, uniting the poets in one body to become a cultural pressure group and for some years it did something for poetry and the poets until it fell into internal squabbles, a wearisome accent on constitutional issues and the formation of independent caucuses, all of which made inroads into the idea of unity of action and certainly removed the emphasis from poetry itself.

Afew years after the League was formed the prose writers banded together in the Writers' Union. That was altogether more successful. Very few prose writers were part of that reading spree of the 60s and 70s but due in large part to the efforts of the Writers' Union the prose writers began to outnumber the poets in readings. In fact, Canadian fiction was much more lively and of more interest to the public though nowadays it too is going through a period of stasis with a lot of post-modernist twaddle posing as fiction. At one time I waited eagerly for new books of poetry by Atwood, Birney, Purdy and others but now it's fiction by Hodgins, Munro, Davies. A further factor is that two of our best poets, Atwood and Ondaatje, are spending more time on fiction.

Still, in spite of these mitigating factors, the question remains - Why did poetry fall into waywardness, into undistinguished quality from the mid-70s on? Firstly, those years of the 60s covered a lot of ground, opening up in both form and content. The oral possibilities in the use of a heightened vernacular and the breath theories derived from Olson and his Black Mountain associates were established on a wide front, led on one side by a steady production of good volumes by such poets as Al Purdy and Earle Birney, on the other side by a flood of work of more questionable quality by poets like bp nichol, bill bissett, George Bowering and Frank Davey. From that sprang a whole stream of colloquial and prosaic imitators and pretentious wafflers and experimenters until the surge degenerated into the proliferation of lots of small presses who sometimes published washes of poetry, at times self-conscious, at times self-serving, even self-parodic, proclaiming itself as the new oral age when in fact many of these poets sounded flat and chatty with no real urgency in their voices. Innovation often sounded like echoes of old surrealists, the vernacular strain often lapsed into rhetorical trickery or street-corner loutishness and in general in this welter of verse, very few voices managed to produce individual tones.

Dennis Lee in the introductory essay to his anthology, The New Canadian Poets 1970-1985 (McClelland & Stewart, 1985) makes the point that the new generation of poets represented by his selection was faced with the problem of discovering itself without simply repeating the poets who had most immediately preceded them. Lee calls the later poets an eclectic generation because it often operated at individualized levels without knowledge of what else was happening in the work of other poets, though I am not altogether sure that doesn't apply to every generation of poets. Lee summarizes the forms and themes of these forty-five poems as cohering around prairie regionalism, feminism, the immigrant experience, work experience, often with political ramifications, expressed by a concern for voice, a new approach to image-making and what Lee calls the phenomenological urge by which he seems to mean the ways in which poets allow the process of the poem to proceed as the poet wills it into being with all its modifications inherent in the thought-and language-currents as they surface in the writing.

All this sounds exciting and thought-provoking but in fact the anthology is disappointing reading. With the best will in the world the reader will find only about a fifth of the poems worth returning to. Perhaps this is the case with most anthologies: to try to select poets who on the one hand look already mature, on the other hand promising, is difficult. One can look back at anthologies from earlier periods and see a lot of forgotten names. A case in point on the American scene is the anthology, Quickly Aging Here, edited by George Hewitt (Anchor Books, 1969). Only about three or four of the poets in that anthology have remained as a presence on the poetry scene and none remarkably so. And Lee's claim that this eclectic generation has in fact produced its own different styles and themes is an exaggerated contention, for often many of the poems seem to have been written as repetitious echoes of each other or as prosy ramblings of uninteresting incidents and ideas.

The same is true for another anthology which includes some of the same poets: Canadian Poetry Now: Twenty Poets of the Eighties (Anansi, 1984) edited by Ken Norris. Both editors see this generation of poets bringing in a new consciousness to Canadian poetry, poets who, according to Norris, have already reached maturity. So if we are to have any sense of what might happen to Canadian poetry in the '90s, then perhaps first we should look at which of these poets might become the central figures of the closing decade of the twentieth century.

Robert Bringhurst is being talked about as a poet already mature in his writing. Robin Skelton has labelled him "without doubt a major poet." Bringhurst certainly does not rely on personality in the sense in which I have been using it. His poetry is not difficult in its language though at times it is obscure in the calmness of its assertions which are filtered through a mediatative tone so he seems to be assuming an oracular, even somehow elemental, voice, even projecting, though this may be unconscious, a guru-like far Eastern philosophic utterance. And that ed es towards a speaking through personality. His later work shows a refreshing openness to other voices in his use of dramatic monologue, his speakers drawn from an enormous variety of place and time. The Zen quality, the calm, almost gnostic mood remains even in his latest work, full of enigma and paradox: "I can affirm/that there is nothing to affirm." It is possible, however, to see to some extent Bringhurst's poetry as having that inwardness, that spiritual intensity that Bly misses in the poets of North America, a quality he believes is essential in poetry.

The name of Roo Borson appears in most anthologies and discussions of recent poetry until her name has almost become symbolic for this new generation of Canadian poets. She too has something of the calm intensity of Bringhurst though for me her poetry seems limited in its concerns and the calmness tends to thin out the poetry almost to the point of vacancy. After I have read many of Borson's poems I sense a feeling of vagueness in spite of some good images, a sense that I am having to give far too much to the poems to flesh them out. While her poetry flickers around feminism, several others seem to make poetic use of the voice of women, some without the polemics and stridency that mars much of this kind of poetry. Two poets who make feminist sense without speaking from propagandist platforms are Bronwen Wallace and Robyn Sarah.

Then there's the poetry of Christopher Dewdney who in some way may illustrate Bly's demand for inwardness though in a different way from the one Bly may have had in mind. I find it a hard battle to come to terms with Dewdney's poetry. He draws on paleontology and a breadth of scientific knowledge so he creates a daunting world to enter for the non-specialist. His earliest poems delve into the substrata of landscape, an inwardness of landscape, burrowing down mole-like to surface with visions of fossil life, prehistoric, another existence. Added to that more recently are also some aphoristic pieces, mystifying in their paradoxes but offered sometimes almost slangily, sometimes in a jaunty voice that sounds as if he is saying the simplest and most straightforward of ideas.

The thinning out of language that took place in Canadian poetry in imitation of the persona poets of the 60s and 70s, with its use of the casually colloquial, the throwaway gestures has been turned around to some extent by two poets who appear in Lee's anthology, though not in Norris's: Don McKay and Don Coles. McKay is not afraid to dash into extravagant image-making even as his voice hangs onto conversational tones. At times some of his poems lose themselves in his abrupt changing of gears but on the whole his language is refreshingly strong. Don Coles assumes a quiet tone in many of his poems, buttonholing the reader by a use of conversational turns of phrase, though his poetry avoids roughshod colloquialism. His is a poetic voice that is assured in its choice of a formalized spoken quality often undercutting his assurance with a tentative quality groping towards doubts within in another kind of example of Bly's inwardness.

These poets seem to me to be those we might expect to become dominant in the next ten years. Others who have been put on one side over the last few years might be rediscovered as Canadian poetry will begin to open itself up to more outside influences as it reacts against that American-based colloquial thinginess invested in personality. For instance, in all the focus on women poets in recent years, somehow good women poets have been virtually ignored, probably because they have refused to be polemical in their feminism. I am thinking particularly of Florence McNeil and Heather Spears though the latter finally achieved some recognition after years in the wilderness with her winning of the GovernorGeneral's Award for Poetry last year. And the women poets nowadays seem to have forgotten the example of Pat Lowther whose poetry, while feminist and personal in a broad sense, expanded into political concerns outside feminism. Both sides of her poetry had none of the stridency and propaganda of other women poets. Something of the Lowther tone surfaces in the two women poets I have already mentioned: Bronwen Wallace and Robyn Sarah. Both in their own way try to extend their poetry outwards from domestic and polemical centres, from family events, and women's problems as mothers, friends and lovers. Their poetry still tends to centre on themselves though they are both listening to recreate what they hear and remember from their environments as women and from the fact of women's place in that environment.

Margaret Atwood has dealt roughly with the same ideas but her poetry has nearly always kept the persona of the poet at a distance from the immediate, subjective situations recorded. Recently Atwood's poetry has tackled the wider implications of liberation in strongly political language but that has also enabled her to deal with broader political topics to do with liberation, torture and captivity.

Yet in spite of some successes from these women poets none of them for me reaches the level of some Americans: the wrenching private drama of Sharon Olds, the bitterly direct and engaged poetry of Carolyn Forche, the deliberate, almost hushed serenity in the pastoral vision of Mary Oliver.

As well as trying to grasp some idea of those poets who might develop into the leading figures of the 90s in Canadian poetry, perhaps one should try to extrapolate from what has been going on in the 80s the trends and developments which will arise in this closing decade. As much of the history of poetry is one of reaction, innovation coming out of response to the modes of previous generations, the 90s, I think, will see a poetry reacting to too much insistence on the colloquial and the conversational as well as the hesitancy and thinning out of language we saw in the 80s. The sprawl and prosiness that the poets influenced by the work of the 60s use will be replaced by tighter structures. Kevin Connolly in the article already mentioned objects to the notion of the arrival of a new formalism. While he may be partly right in suggesting that it isn't really here yet, I already have a sense that experimentation in the 60s' vein and the process-poem (serial poems included) will not loom so large in the 90s. We are already seeing volumes which are more thoroughly organized around themes elaborated as cornplete books, not presented either as on-going speculations incomplete in themselves or as random lyric outpourings. Books like Ondaatje's Secular Love and Paulette jiles' jesse james Poems are two examples which might prove to be forerunners in this mode: personal narrative with a kind of objective stance built in or elaborations of historical mythic interests. Heather Spears's books have something of this quality as do Christopher Dewdney's and it can already be seen in the work of Kristjana Gunnars and Judith Fitzgerald. It has also surfaced in the work of some younger poets like Maggie Helwig and Steve Heightoh.

This insistence on a more formal organization of individual poems and books will probably lead to a rediscovery of English patterns which were once current as part of Canadian poetry. In the rush to become Americanized in the 60s, English poetry was generally dismissed, perhaps to a large extent justified. But recently in some ways English poetry seems to have been going through its own turmoil and the new English poets, while still stiffer and more reserved than their North American counterparts, are certainly writing a poetry more lively than it has been for many years. This, I think, will infiltrate into Canadian poetry once these English poets stop trying to follow in the footsteps of Phillip Larkin.

Influence from outside will be much more widespread in the next decade, changing the face of Canadian poetry. The tearing down of borders and frontiers in Europe at the end of the 80s will see a more thorough exchange of ideas about poetry and its connection with social and political events. Canadian poets will have more European poetry available to them as it will be translated and published on this side of the Atlantic and this will have repercussions on the work of Canadian poets, becoming a rough equivalent of Bly's notion of paying more attention to European poets. And in the same way as perhaps other countries in the Third World move towards more freedom, the work of their writers will become known and so will exert some pressure on Canadian writers.

Canada will also rapidly become a more cosmopolitan society throughout the 80s. Lee in his introduction to his anthology points out that the immigrant experience is a principal theme for his poets. Immigrants will continue to play a growing role in poetry by bringing their own ethnic sensibilities into play. I fully expect that at some time during the 90s a Canadian poet will emerge from that wave of Asian immigration in the 80s and we will see a poetry rising out of a mix of North American and Oriental modes. This immigrant influence will be further elaborated by more of the effects of black language from those coming here from Africa and the West Indies. Already we have some poets working with regular English and their own patois as in the case of the dub poets.

While much of this kind of influence may be felt in form and language, it will bring with it in all probability a new political sensibility. Canadians have recently been through their own crises concerning the nature of Canaclianism, federalism, provincial sovereignty and the situation of the aboriginal people so the arrival of immigrants and the new fervour about independence will necessarily penetrate our poetry. I expect to see a more politically oriented poetry in the 90s which may take the form in Canada of a sense of how the country can accommodate its ethnic variety without flattening everybody and everything to one uniform consciousness.

Fraser Sutherland in the article discussed at the beginning of this article suggested that feminism was the political movement replacing the nationalism of the 60s and 70s. There is no doubt that feminism will remain in place in the 90s. Much of the stridency will disappear; the polemical aspects will no longer matter that much, so I expect women poets will be more concerned about digging into the ways in which they see the world rather than into the ways the world treats them. In that sense I see their concerns, while different from male concerns, being expressed simply as a fact of their existence and in that way that side of feminism which dogmatizes the male as enemy will disappear. While gender differences will remain significant in poetry, there will also be more of a drawing together and this in turn will link to those notions of ethnic differences. Individual differences will be accepted eventually without rancour, influences will pass across defined borders so all this will result in a poetry about freedom through political issues (in the widest meaning of that word).

All this might sound optimistic and positive about the state of Canadian poetry in the 90s but the darker side is that economics will continue to play an increasing role in the poetry scene in this country. Already there are significant cutbacks in subsidies and grants forjournals and small presses - there are already rumours circulating about the impending demise of several publishers. I expect some small magazines will fold but as has always been the case others will arise though not in the same numbers. The same will be true of the small presses, and the larger publishers will cut back even further in their commitment to poetry. The poetry reading scene will never return to the halcyon days of the 60s and 70s: Canada Council has already had to pare down its assistance in this area and in other areas, such as publication grants and financial help for individual authors. Thus, the new poets will find it a much tougher proposition to'make their way to being recognized. If one takes the John Metcalf position, this may be for the good of Canadia n literature: only poets of true merit will rise to the top and those supported by subsidy in one way or another will sink. I wish I could be sanguine about the idea that true merit always wins out but I suspect that in the 90s we may lose a lot of new poets deserving attention. In another way it may even be possible that established poets may have difficulties if publishers and magazine editors are too interested in discovering new voices. Already there have been significant shifts of established poets no longer being published by those companies who published their work previously. So we may be faced with the fact that our mature poets may be reaching for a new maturity of vision but consigned to being published by much smaller publishing companies.

The audience for poetry will remain small so I do not expect a significant return to the publishing of poetry by the larger companies. It may be that if these larger companies plunge into poetry again, their reasons may have nothing to do with the merit of the poetry published. One hears enough horror stories now about acceptance and rejection in the dominant world of fiction and the insistence on promotion almost on a showbiz scale that poetry, if it's taken on, may return to the cult of the personality.

These are all tentative speculations, based in part on a reading of the poetry of the last twenty years and in part on a reading of some of the newer poets. It is difficult to keep up with everything published in Canadian poetry and impossible to subscribe to or even read all the little mags and journals which publish poetry. It is entirely possible that I have missed some developing trend. In any case it is possible that even now someone is scribbling away somewhere in Canada, inventing new images, undercutting all trends, discovering an entirely new approach to poetry to create poems which are expressed in an absolutely unerring uniqueness of language, a poetry that will turn the whole Canadian poetry scene on its head in the 90s. I hope so.

Back

Editorial Office:
The Antigonish Review
P.O. Box 5000
Antigonish
Nova Scotia B2G 2W5
Canada
Telephone: (902) 867-3962
Fax: (902) 867-2448
E-mail: tar@stfx.ca