The Antigonish Review
# 123
Allan Brown
Some Poetic Personae from B.C.
49th Parallel Psalm by
Wayde Compton. Vancouver, BC: Advance Editions / Arsenal Pulp Press,
1999. 175 pp. $15.95.
What the Living Won’t Let Go by Lorna Crozier.
Toronto, ON: McClelland &Stewart, 1999. 96 pp. $16.99.
Things That Keep and Do Not Change by Susan Musgrave.
Toronto, ON: McClelland &Stewart, 1999. 92 pp. $14.99.
Love And Other Things That Hurt by D. C. Reid.
Windsor, ON: Black Moss Press, 82 pp. $17.95.
The Colours of the Forest by Tom Wayman. Madeira
Park, BC: Harbour Publications, 1999. 157 pp. $14.95.
The five poets1
whose work forms the bulk of this study were shortlisted for the 1999
Livesay Poetry Prize, won by Lorna Crozier. There are some interesting
similarities as well as some obvious contrasts among them, but their accidental
rivalry for the award does not really provide enough linkage for a general
critical study based simply on their selection, which probably says or
suggests more about the tastes of the selection committee than about the
conditions of contemporary B.C. poetry.
What struck me most forcibly as I
read through these five volumes, however, was how much of their content
and effects depended upon and developed the traditional literary device
of the persona in both expected and unexpected ways. Too many, of course,
to be exhaustively explicated here; but enough, I think, to be usefully
suggestive, and that have further suggested a couple of other recent collections
by Marlene Cookshaw and Harold Rhenisch that display similar effects.
The use of persona is common enough
among writers, and commonly spoken of. In some situations a variety of
personae or masks,2 often false or at
least deceptive, will allow the speaker/speech to approach perhaps otherwise
unapprehensible truth. Cathy Ford, for instance, in a carefully detailed
study of gendered personae, suggests a form of practical deception - "When
you’re wearing a mask, you can say much more. No one will realize it’s
you. Until you speak" (50) - that will eventually concentrate to
a single truth: "The mask you wear tells everything about you"
(51). The opposite situation, in which a mask/speaker only becomes itself
by becoming pretty well everything else, is spoken to by Joe Rosenblatt
in a recent interview where he jauntily asserts that "Poets are natural
liars" (Chung 39).
There is no space here to wrestle
with the all too familiar demon of Autobiography in [or not in] Art. It
is sufficient to note that, though the "I" who appears in a
poem is not necessarily the "I" who appears at the breakfast
table, the "I" of the poem is still a very useful and
practical artistic pose. Like any pose we assume, so long as it remains
a pose and does not become part of what we treat simply as our more immediate
and intuitively known self, the poetic persona is outside of us, is in
effect a depicted thing, an object rather than a subject. If we contemplate
it as a pose, it is a second or third person (or thing), an "other"
of some kind; if rather we activate it as a pose, it becomes the poem’s
"I" - and maybe or maybe not also the "I" of
the poem.
Personae are still necessarily like
persons, of course. We expect a certain conduct from them, and we look
for and usually find them conforming to our expectations. Thus a poet’s
personae are limited on two sides - first by the perceptions of the poet’s
audience or readership, and second by his or her own choices, narrowed
by those expectations, of one or more culturally possible roles which
can range from the comfortably recognizable person telling "our stories,"
such as Lorna Crozier, to the delightedly defiant outsider Wayde Compton.
Tom Wayman in his accustomed appearance as venerable Old Lefty is equally
secure out/inside any society than can be denominated Tom Wayman Country.3
Susan Musgrave’s usually confident voice is muted, almost confused, in
Things That Keep and Do Not Change. She is searching for her parts
rather than performing them here. The authorial persona of D. C. Reid,
finally, seems to be playing itself, in an intriguing parody of the Sensitive
New Age Guy.
These positions are the radicals
of a continuum of personal, interpersonal, and artistic maskings. They
range from the lyrical impulse — compulsion might be the more accurate
term - to understand self, through a variety of ever increasing circles
of interest and objectivity, to conventional social and political limits,
even hints of the numinous, and the artistic circle/centre which is itself
both one and everything else.
Tom Wayman, of course, has been examining
a character named "Wayman" since the early 1970s, and like the
deftly imagined "Ferryman" in his new book he is both a self
and a mask: "I grew into the role / and then I answered easily to
the name." D. C. Reid, a less familiar literary figure, sees himself
with an intimate, compelling awareness, natural and surreal together:
I eat peaches insatiably
and why upon waking, bewildered by the day,
do I remember a hand ripped off in a casual way?
("Love At Yellow Point Lodge")
Lorna Crozier’s collection employs
the interpenetration of two narratives, one based on a real and one on
a fictional family. She confidently asserts a self-knowing relationship
with both, of a real mother’s joy - "It is my voice singing / when
she comes" ("The Night of My Conception 2") - and a fictional
sister’s sorrow: "There is no sadness / I can’t enter" ("The
Older Sister: Self-Portrait"). Susan Musgrave also presents a self
image in terms of family, with anecdote becoming a species of illumination:
On the last birthday my mother gave me
a bottomless cup.
...
I
was her poison
she said, the potion she could count on
when it came to sacrificing love.
("Poison")
Wayde Compton’s revisionist history
of the migration of blacks to Canada is centred upon the active image
of the writer/performer certain only of his own uncertainty - "always
an iffy prospect," as he advises in "The Cover." He looks
closely at the economic face of the country of his imagining in order
to discover his own:
this land
is the company’s own
ed, paid for. I wander it,
prospecting, guessing, divining ground, counting
days till
this transforms to home.
("Company")
Harold Rhenisch, a poet and novelist of German descent living in north
central B.C., also uses historical and geographical subject matter as
directives to his own person[a]. Contemplating a "tall, blue painting
of Barbarossa" during a European tour allows him to revisit "the
recolonization of mental territory" and discover that his "movement
// with the crowd on the shore / is a form of stillness" ("Barbarossa").
These selves are chiefly significant
as such, of course, and maintain themselves as sources and caches of artistic
as well as personal energy. But other actions of the flexibly working
persona can move outward as they "heave" the writer, to use
Ezra Pound’s vigorous image, "out of himself, out of his personal
limitations...and leave him simply the great true recorder" (113).
What that — or these — artists record is the variously known "other."
A careful writer often recognizes
self in other. In one of the author introductions that she wrote for the
anthology Breaking the Surface, Susan Musgrave speaks of the naturalism
in the work of Elsie K. Neufeld, the way in which "Her poems take
shape around you, the way an old sweater or jacket takes shape, and strengthens
our fragile lives." Musgrave can demonstrate the same empathic and
detailed descriptive talent in her own best verse. A characteristically
daring yet confident set of images appears in "MacBeth’s Ghost in
the Endive" with her evocation of the writer:
in the form of a bit of endive concealed
amongst the lettuce, avocado, and tomato
of my salad. You went down the wrong way.
Indeed, this poem and its mates in the volume, especially the six part
sequence "The Selected Poems of Paul Durcan," present what may
be a new voice for the Sea Witch herself.
Such effects of a sensitively employed
otherness - or, to risk a near tautology, such an interpersonal persona,
can be achieved in a demanding variety of ways. Harold Rhenisch, in one
of the gnomic prose poems in Fusion, speaks of "the world
outside of the poem, the exclusive, alien worlds of men and women,
that is the shamanic journey" ("The Red Shift"). The several
elements here form most of a schema for the activities of persona as a
whole.
An otherness can also be achieved
more simply as the reification of an abstraction or generalization, extended
until it becomes personal. Marlene Cookshaw, a Victoria resident and the
editor of The Malahat Review, produces such an effect with the
brief but ingenious allegory: "Guilt is a pool with ladders / rising
in every direction. / We climb and fall back and climb again" ("Over
the Shoulder").
In his vigorous, triumphant title
poem, Wayde Compton shouts a song "into a stranger’s land" that
becomes also precisely a definition as he "sing[s] Zion signified
/ among the other others." Tom Wayman’s "I’ll Be Right Back,"
a species of anti (or other)-elegy, achieves something almost of Compton’s
threatening tone in its doomsday prophecy:
When no one alive
remembers there was a person with my name
I’ll be right back.
Dennis Reid’s simple and moving statement
"I would be someone else" ("Being True") could stand
as a motto for his book. In the penultimate sequence, "The Girl From
The Far Country," he identifies the eponymous female other in "a
mirror" where "the two of her are strong and young and beautiful"
and goes on to carefully trace her/his situation as "Her mind moves
within its brain / in a way her face cannot comprehend." This feeling
of uncertainty, of the other as a shifting, unknowable entity, also informs
Lorna Crozier’s "Seeing-Eye." The poet wonders "what it
is / those dead eyes see," and then goes on to watch and herself
see through the animal who:
Sometimes...is a boat
drifting through the dark
...
leading them toward what shines.
The writer, while thus always distinct
from his or her subjects or individual presentations (or personations),
is also significantly related to or on a level with them, especially as
they function as readers or audience. In general, the poet is a member,
though not necessarily ideal or even exemplary, of that social class to
which most of the audience belong, or of a social class or other kind
of group which the poet expects that audience to recognize. The two radical
positions here are clearly those of the social insider Lorna Crozier and
the outsider Wayde Compton.
Crozier is able to assume and accept
a society without much concern. Her work in What the Living Won’t Let
Go continues the pattern of re-imagining the past, particularly a
semi-fictional past, that she developed in 1996 with A Saving Grace,
her revisiting of Sinclair Ross’s classic novel.4
It is basically a poetic form of Prairie realism, conservative in nature
and general effects, if not always in particular subject matter. Susan
Musgrave also assumes a society to see and see through, but presents it
with tongue firmly in cheek with the lyrical parody "Eleven Ways
of Looking at Canadian Unity" ("Do Not Make Loon Soup").
The tone is as delicious here as the putative subject matter:
The loon simmered in its watery kettle,
a small symbol of national unity
and fairly well cooked.
(III)
Tom Wayman’s socially directed poems
in The Colours of The Forest are equally precise, though in general
much grimmer than the quirky Musgrave. Typical here is the clear eyed
account in "It Was My Country" of "the couple unable to
sell their house / / now that the market for coal has shrunk / the pulp
mill has been declared / uneconomical." Wayde Compton’s critical
concerns with society have an additional historical component. The "Cast"
(part one of 49th Parallel Psalm ) oddly but significantly includes
B.C. governor James Douglas who encouraged the black emigration from California
in the 19th century. Compton rehearses the situation of the times, then
ironically asks:
O James Douglas,
did you ever see yourself
in us?
did you ever stop
in your war versus the wilderness
and think
we?
("JD") 5
Dennis Reid’s socio-political vision is as large or larger, including
in the aptly titled "What It Means To Be Human" a neatly turned
cameo portrait of "A baby rasping a breast / in African night, small
tongue / barely scraping the world." Reid’s nuanced approach here
is typical of the intellectual complexity and stylistic delicacy of Love
And Other Things That Hurt.
Reid has asserted a poetic which
usefully extends the scope of his and others’ personae. In his "Author
Statement" in the anthology Open 24 Hours, where most of part
two of his book first appeared, he explains that "I moved from a
narrative voice to an associative one" (31). The term "narrative"
as used here identifies personal or interpersonal concerns; "associative,"
which is another way of indicating metaphor (in the root sense meta
+ pherein of some thing(s) juxtaposed or transported), points to
the artistic persona as such.
He demonstrates his associative powers
in the three-part title poem of Love and Other Things with delicacy
and a certain coy distancing. He presents a kind of parody muse, an inspiriting
figure with a well-known cartoon animation background, who almost becomes
human:
In his eyes she flits like deelie boppers,
approximately Tinker Bell,
diminutive and sweet, harmless as a sparrow.
But a distinctively domestic sparrow, as "there are bills to be
paid, she frustrates / two inches from his powdered nose" ("2.
Religion, The Heart in Its Firmament"). Wayde Compton provides the
rougher, more disturbing side of this entertainment-artistic mask in the
ironic "BAND," where, himself his own musician, he reminds us:
You
can get into
any nightclub
in Vancouver
just by being black
and at the back door
claiming,
I’m with the band
A gentler observation appears in
the softly reminiscent "What You Remember Remains," in which
Lorna Crozier offers a humorous insight into the accidental creation of
art (here as the art of acting) and as a blend of the natural and familial:
Yesterday a crow strode across the grass
with my Welsh Grandpa’s stiffness
as if the bird had ruined his knees
from sixty years of gardening.
Marlene Cookshaw similarly combines a familial persona with a casual
reference to the transforming power of art in "Daughters of War"
as she describes the portrait she had taken on her twentieth birthday
"to give [my mother] just what she wanted, / the blooming girl behind
glass."
The most general presentation of
the artistic mask among these writers appears in Susan Musgrave’s elegy
"Desireless: Tom York (1940-1988)," where, in the tradition
of the classical pastoralists, she personifies a mourning, disappearing,
and then returning art form: "I had said there would be no more poetry
/ for friends dead, or friends dying // I knew poetry would come back.
It had to." Tom Wayman tempers and extends Musgrave’s generalization,
though in another mode. As serious an artist as any, he is always prepared
and often briskly capable of thrusting his artistic mask onto the satiric
stage. He mocks scholarship, journalism, and environmentalism together
with the solemn farce of "Poetry Overdose" (reprinted from his
earlier Selected, Did I Miss Anything?):
Each day on the planet
a million poems are written
...
With poems, as with mosquitoes
millions must be born each breeding season
so a pitifully small percentage
can annoy you when you try to sleep
give you satisfaction when you smack them down
draw blood
These various images, references,
and statements, and others similar to them as used by other writers, all
involve or in some way derive from the notion and perceptions of a divided/divisible
self or poetic person[a], both active and ambivalent. This ambivalence
or ambiguity of the self has two implications: in the first place, it
asserts, like other techniques of juxtaposition familiar in modern art,
the complexity of the human world. Nothing exists absolutely; qualification
is the first principle of intelligence and wisdom. Because all that we
know contains its own contradictions (self is unself; other, as Pogo might
put it, is us), all that we learn must be grounded in and arise out of
those contradictions.
In the second place, the general
and common ambiguity of the self invites and compels the reader to look
beyond the persona or personae to the center, the central concerns, of
the poem. In the poetic structure(s) characteristically used by these
and many other poets, the self, though still the observing instrument
and even the scene of conflict, is no longer the centre of significance.
Rather, the persona is, the poem is; the persona, quite simply, is the
poem; and the purpose of both / each is to show the world the poems point
to, and the poems as they point to their world.
______________
Notes
-
Unless otherwise specified, the citations (Compton),
(Cozier), etc. identify the five titles listed at the beginning of
this review. All other items are listed in Additional Works Cited
after these notes.
-
See, e.g., the entry "Masks" in Seyffert
381.
-
See Living on the Ground. More specifically,
he "remains Squire of Appledore, his estate near Winlaw, B.C."
[publisher’s note].
-
Her inclination to preserve and replicate such a
familiar social model appears as early as 1985 in an interview for
Prairie Fire where she states that "when I read Sinclair
Ross’s As For Me and My House I thought, Oh my God, he’s writing
about my landscape" (6).
-
Wayde Compton’s brashness throughout the book has
an interesting pendant in the quiet, hesitant comments and speculations
of Peter Hudson investigating the stories, real or "forged,"
of "those who were black pioneers seeking to build a home in
a hostile white frontier town" (19-22).
Additional Works Cited
Bowering, Marilyn, et al., eds. Breaking the Surface.
Victoria, BC: Sono Nis, 2000.
Burke, Anne, et al. Open 24 Hours. Fredericton,
NB: Broken Jaw P, 1997.
Chung, Emily. "Jamming with Joe Rosenblatt."
In 2 Print 18 (Summer 2000), 38-40.
Cookshaw, Marlene. Double Somersaults. London,
ON: Brick Books, 1999.
Crozier, Lorna. A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems
of Mrs. Bentley. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Interview. Prairie Fire 6.3 (August 1985): 4-15.
Ford, Cathy. "Five Women Poets," in Imprints
and Casualties: On Women, Language, and Memory, ed. Anne Burke.
Fredericton, NB: Broken Jaw P, 2000.
Hudson, Peter. "Natural Histories of Southwestern
British Columbia." West Coast Line 31.3 (Winter 1998): 19-22.
Pound, Ezra. Instigations of Ezra Pound. New York:
Boni and Liveright, 1920.
Rhenisch, Harold. Fusion. Toronto: Exile Editions,
1999.
Seyffert, Oskar. Dictionary of Classical Antiquities,
rev. and ed. Henry Nettleship and J. E. Sandys. New York: Meridian, 1956.
Wayman, Tom. Did I Miss Anything? Madeira Park,
BC: Harbour, 1993.
Living on the Ground: Tom Wayman Country. Toronto,
ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1980.
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