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Poems not in the grip of self-declarative autobiography are the ones which weather best, the ones we return to throughout our lives. Egos in performance always register themselves in one of the temporary dialects of fashion. By contrast, the poets I admire are concerned with what there is to know, what they know they almost know, what they have yet to know and what it is likely they will never know. These gradations of knowledge inflect their speech. Call their concerns cognitive or epistemological if you like - or fabular, or mythic. Among the Canadian poets who share them are Margaret Avison, Jay Macpherson and P.K. Page. Here, I add Jan Zwicky. To quote George Steiner, writing in another context, all four of these poets share the belief that "knowledge, cognition and re-cognition are, in a sense, not unlike that of Plato's epistemology of the loving intellect, moral acts."¹

Given a deflection of self-hood and the reasons just implied, it is logical that biographical information about Zwicky is publicly spare. There is little more than this: she was born in rural west-central Alberta in 1955. She trained to become an academic philosopher and has taught philosophy, creative writing and humanities at a number of Canadian universities, including the University of New Brunswick. Presently, she teaches part-time at the University of Victoria. She has often worked as an editor, particularly for Brick Books of Ontario. She lives mainly in Victoria, but also, whenever circumstance allows, works and writes on a formerly marginal farm, now returning to earlier, natural possibilities, not far from Cornwall, Ontario. This property is the setting for some of her work. So also is rural Alberta. One concluding biographical detail: Zwicky is a musician. Strings - perhaps the violin, perhaps the cello. I do not know.

Zwicky has published five books of poetry: Where Have We Been (Brick Books, Ilderton, Ontario, 1982); Wittgenstein Elegies (Brick Books, Ilderton, Ontario, 1986); The New Room (Coach House Press, Toronto, 1989); Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (self-published 1996, trade edition Brick Books, London, Ontario, 1998); and 20 Small Songs (limited edition, Barbarian Press, Mission, British Columbia, 2000). Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won the Governor General's Award for English language poetry in 1999.

She has published two books of prose: Lyric Philosophy (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992) and Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau Press, Kentville, Nova Scotia, 2003). She has also published a number of articles and an open letter. Among the more easy to find are "Bringhurst's Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology" (In Poetry and Knowing, edited by Tim Lilburn, Quarry Press, Kingston, Ontario, 1995, pp. 65-117); "Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation" and "Once Upon a Time in the West: Heidegger and the Poets" (both in Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy, edited by Tim Lilburn, Cormorant Books, Toronto, 2003, pp. 120-150 and pp. 187-199). The most recent of Zwicky's publications is Contemplation and Resistance: A Conversation with Tim Lilburn and Jan Zwicky (Jack Pine Press, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, 2003). Finally there is an interview with Jan Zwicky by Anne Simpson in Where the Words Came From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Edited by Tim Bowling, Nightwood Editions, Roberts Creek, British Columbia, 2002).

This bibliography of Zwicky's publications is incomplete, but I hope that even so it indicates the extension and intension of her work. Think of it as a bell - all the poetry, all the prose. If you strike that bell at any point on its striking circumference, the tone rings with consistent clarity. Perhaps that metaphor explains the method of these notes. Perhaps it will excuse them. They do not deal with Zwicky's work, particularly her poetry, with anything close to the measure deserved. I was asked to provide only a short introduction to her new poems which appear in this issue of The Antigonish Review. The poems were not solicited. They arrived in Antigonish at the Review's office in the ordinary language of a mailbag. They were sent to me, as poetry editor, in the ordinary language of a cardboard carton (Maxwell House Coffee) containing four or five hundred other submissions from Canada, the United States, Ireland, Australia, France, Russia and China. I am working towards a parable: Zwicky's work has always treated the world external and prior to her words with passionate respect, valuing its resistance, its happenstance, its accidents.

The question is: what, for a philosopher and poet, is that external world? Does it, for example, consist of matter or thought, fact or idea, body or soul? That list could be extended. Should even the "or" in such tabulations be replaced by "and"? Or should it be replaced by some subtle device of wording which suggests not addition but co-relationship, co-inherence?

Consider two quotations. The first is taken from "Performative Utterances," an essay by the twentieth century English analytical and linguistic philosopher, J.L. Austin: "... we can issue an utterance of any kind whatsoever, in the course, for example, of acting a play or making a joke or writing a poem - in which case of course it would not be seriously meant and we shall not be able to say that we seriously performed the act concerned. If the poet says 'Go and catch a falling star' or whatever it may be, he doesn't seriously issue an order."² The second quotation is: "You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence ..." Those words are taken from the last letter Yeats wrote in the month of his death, January, 1939.³

It would be difficult to find two more antithetical propositions of meaning. The quotation from Austin is typical of logical positivism, the logico-analytic school of middle-European and Anglo-American philosophical thinking which was prime orthodoxy throughout the twentieth century and which still actively and aggressively survives. Among its founders was Bertrand Russell. So also, in an equivocal sense, as I will discuss shortly, was Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of the key books of Anglo-American logical positivism is A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936, second edition, 1946) which denies meaning to statements of ethic, of religion, of metaphor on the grounds that they are empirically and scientifically unprovable and inexpressible in logical terms. Zwicky could not have trained to be an academic philosopher in any English language university during the latter quarter of the twentieth century without being expected to accept as proven givens the main propositions of logical positivism. But, she is a poet. What she thinks of Yeats I do not know. But I suggest that as a poet she would know, probably has always known, that Saints and Songs of Sixpence need to be considered in other ways than by criteria of verifiable scientific fact and logico-empirical analysis. (So also does Hegel for that matter.) After all, if one really cannot catch Austin's falling star, one can hardly be expected to make any sense of "Sing a song of sixpence / A pocket full of rye: / Four and twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie ..." So why teach it? Why sing it? Why dance it, as children do? Why make poetry? Why think of philosophy, philo sophia, as the love of wisdom?

Zwicky's work is a sustained meditation upon such questions - as is the work of all major creators. On the discursive level, her meditation is most immediately accessible in the two prose books, Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. But her meditations are most subtle, acute and continuous in her poetry. I begin by discussing her prose here not because I agree with the kind of contemporary fatalism which considers prose to be sensibly articulate and poetry insensibly imaginative; nor because prose is antecedent in the process of her writing poetry. I believe the reverse is true, and I speak of her prose first in order to end lyrically, where her work begins.

Lyrical Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor are similar and radical in formal organization. Both are folio volumes of several hundred pages. Lyric Philosophy, the larger, contains nearly six hundred. Generally, although there are some variations, the left hand pages in each book present aphoristic or short paragraph meditations by Zwicky. The right hand pages present, for the most part, quotations drawn from a very wide range of sources which includes Presocratics, Canadian, British and American poets, early twentieth century physicists and epistemological theorists, psychologists, historians of science, eighteenth century British and French philosophers - to continue the list would be to list too much. On the right hand pages there are also illustrations: a photograph, an advertisement, reproductions of title pages and tables of contents, paintings, pictures of gestalt configurations and visual puzzles, geometric and mathematical proofs and (centrally) pieces of musical score by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. And everywhere in both books, on both left and right pages, by presence and quotation, is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who couldn't understand Shakespeare and who was a secret financial benefactor to Trakl and Rilke.

One of the most courageous things about these books is that Zwicky reads and applies to the authority of Wittgenstein. On the one hand, he is regarded by Anglo-American positivists who do not believe in the catching of falling stars as the prime founder and exemplar of their principles. For Zwicky, on the other hand, Wittgenstein is the ghost in the machine of logico-linguistic philosophy. The geist. In these notes, I can do no more than suggest how Zwicky carries this matter and of what importance it is to her as a poet that it be carried. As preliminary, I will re-quote a quotation from Wittgenstein which Zwicky uses early in Lyric Philosophy: "I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition."⁴ A hundred and fifty pages later (many of which pages are devoted to developing the senses in which Wittgenstein's remark is true), Zwicky writes of him: "The peculiarity of his early vision rests in its comprehension of analysis by lyric."⁵

By the word "lyric" Zwicky does not simply mean a short poem, suitable for setting to music, like Shakespeare's "Full fathom five ...," although she does mean that narrowly defined lyrics of such quality as Shakespeare's fall into her category of lyric. As she says "... lyric is lithe ... It is poignant, and musical," but she continues with something more: "It moves by association of images. It has been described as an attempt to make the space 'around' actual sounds, words, or lines resonant. As an evocation of presence ... Lyric is an attempt to comprehend the whole in a single gesture."⁶ Or again: "Lyric value is a species of teleological value: it perceives things exclusively as ends. In this it is genetically distinct from utility."⁷ In sum, for Zwicky, "What Wittgenstein said is bound up with his life, his manner of expressing his thought, the words and examples he chose. What he meant is bound up with a way of life and his written philosophical work is one expression of that way of life - one which presupposes fundamental links between personal integrity and the ability to mean, the ability to use a language with meaning ..."⁸ Add this in conclusion: "In lyric's idea of the world, language would be light."⁹

As said before, these notes I offer as notes of suggestion. They are meant to suggest the possibility of a conversation with Zwicky's prose. Its aphoristic form, in effect, invites such conversation. There is even conversation among her own aphorisms when she voices, in quotation marks, objections to her statements in the words of a voice antiphonal to her own. There is conversation also between the left hand pages and the right hand pages of her prose books; and there is an arch of conversation across the full span of each book and between the two books. Their aphoristic form is, in part, an homage to Wittgenstein who so frequently used it himself. It is also an apt vehicle for the lyrical. But in many ways the form of the books also resembles the kind of dialectical annotations Blake made in his copies of books by Swedenborg, Lavater, Wordsworth and Thornton. They also resemble in scope the huge body of similar annotations Coleridge made. The resemblances are both physical and, at a profounder level, poetic, philosophical and ethical ones. Looked at in a slightly different way, Zwicky's prose books are a form of drama, complete with act and scene divisions which are indicated by printing devices and typography. They are dialogic in form. And, like poetry, they invite the intercession of the reader as listener and interlocutor. How else could we respond, for example, to an aphorism like this: "But the speech of the body is our speech, is the movement of rain in an arm encircling a shoulder. Is the hawk in the closed fist"?¹⁰ Or to this: "In its most profound moments lyric recognizes its own impossibility as a solution to the problems of being human"?¹¹ Since they are, therefore, dramatic and invite our participation and intercession, I can only think of Zwicky's two prose books as Socratic.

Lyric, lyric resonance, Eros (again a Platonic resonance), the domestic, metaphor, clarity, wisdom, all these are words which stand for the play and ply in Zwicky's work. All of them are given meaning and adjustments of meaning and limitation of meaning when applied to the world throughout that work's run. Like Iris Murdoch, Zwicky has a deep dislike for and distrust of the logocentric privileging and posturing of Heidegger. Like Murdoch and A.S. Byatt, she also rejects the relativistic geometries of Derridean deconstruction. Like both, Zwicky also distrusts and avoids hypostatic absolutes. Her terminology is fluvial, referential and pre-linguistic. It is not centred by ego or self-hood. "Coming to experience the fit of human thought to the world," she writes in Wisdom & Metaphor, "is a way of finding ourselves at home."¹² Notice that her phrasing is not that of the world fitting human thought, but of human thought fitting the world. The way is left open for other kinds of thought. There is a deliberated, intuitive ecology at work in her words.

Zwicky's thought begins with lyric and with Zwicky's mode of lyric which is poetry. It is her way of returning to original sources. It is there at the end of "Language of Hands" from Zwicky's third book of poetry, the 1989 collection, The New Room:

Language visits the dentist: fevered
tooth to the world's
cold lunch. Twitchy, beaten yet again
by the unsayable, it's time
to scrape the nerve-pulp out, spirit
gone friable as ash.

In the desert of nth-order quantificational
logic and shopping malls, this is not
what Heraclitus meant. When you dry a plant out
water stays inside its soul like wisdom
in the muscles of a farmer's hand.
Language is a cactus.

Language is a hand, a hand
used to pulling on galoshes: ribbed nails, long thumb
that lies along a car door
like a donkey's ear against its neck.
Mottled skin and knobbiness unowned
anymore by anyone.

If it remembers hunger, it is
to touch, for tendons that flex and contract
into sound; to have been
a musician's hand with its cat-mind,
grasping the handle of a fridge door
the way a dancer walks in his body.

Your poor old slipper, speech:
worn out, kicked off
for having failed, grown threadbare.
There may be no words for the vibratoless
baroque of the cello world, which you
have tried to show me, galloped

each day right up to the edge
of what Kant understood, wheeled in its face.

It is also there at the end of one of her finest poems, "Driving Northwest," in Songs for Relinquishing the Earth:

Driving Northwest in July before
the long twilight that stretches into
the short summer dark, despite the sun
the temperature is dropping, air
slips by the truck, like diving,
diving,
     and you are almost blind
with light: on either side of you
it floats across the fields, young barley
picking up the gold, oats white,
the cloudy bruise of alfalfa
along the fencelines, the air itself
tawny with haydust, and the shadows of the willows
in the draw miles long, oh it is lovely
as a myth, the touch of a hand on your hair,
and you need, like sleep, to lie down now
and rest, but you are almost
blind with light, the highway
stretched across the continent
straight at the sun: visor,
dark glasses, useless against its gonging.
the cab drowns in it, shuddering, you cannot tell,
you might be bleeding or suffocating, shapes
fly out of it so fast there's no time to swerve:
but there is no other path, there is no other bed,
it is the only way home you know.

If you are talking of words, say that the way in these two poems is quick, balanced, lithe in the circuit by which it indicates, but does not confine, elsewhere. It is seemingly improvised but, in retrospect, absolutely accurate. Would you change one line-break? The words flicker backwards and forwards in flight like a shuttle of swallows. If you are talking of lyric philosophy, metaphor and wisdom, say that the way in these two poems is the same. They are instants of being almost blind with the light of it.

Endnotes

1. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Vintage,
   Random House, London, 2003, p. 113).

2. J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford University Press,
   Oxford, 1961, p. 228).

3. A. Wade (Editor), The Letters of W.B. Yeats (Rupert Hart-Davis,
   London, 1954, p. 922).

4. J. Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy (University of Toronto Press,
   Toronto, 1992, p. 51).

5. Ibid, p. 218.

6. Ibid, p. 134.

7. Ibid, p. 158

8. Ibid, p. 214.

9. Ibid, p. 422

10. Ibid, p. 144

11. Ibid, p. 506

12. J. Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor (Gaspereau Press, Kentville,
    Nova Scotia, 2003, p. 27 left).