Best American Meets the Best Canadian - Picks by Molly Peacock

 As a dual citizen of both the United States and Canada, and as a poet who publishes in both, I play a constant compare and contrast game as I navigate between the two literary cultures.  Americans often think of Canada as just another state north of the border, though Canada has its own entirely  complicated culture.  Canadians look down to their southern neighbors with mystification marbled with hauteur and jealousy, the way someone who lives happily in a small house on beautiful acres looks at a neighbor who's built a McMansion right up against the property line.  Yet occasionally there's an American literary idea that intrigues Canadians, if uneasily.

     The idea of collecting the best poetry of the past year is one of those distinctly American ideas that has been adopted, but adapted in the great North, where people are nervous about ideas of THE BEST.  Yet Tightrope Books, a small press (yes, in Canada a small press can have a very large reach) under the valiant leadership of Halli Villegas, has undertaken to launch a Best Canadian series.  2008 was our first year.  As an admiring copycat of David Lehman, I am the General Series Editor.  Our first judge was the young, super well respected Stephanie Bolster, a poet all Canadian literature followers know, but who is not known in the US, where the few Canadian poets known are two better recognized as prose writers (Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood), one better recognized as a lyricist (Leonard Cohen), and of course, the inimitable Anne Carson.

    Our first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English is as different from its US counterpart as Canadian poetry itself is different from what is written to the south.  Same language.  Contrasting ways with it.  The poets of both my countries look inward for their communities;  very few poets trespass across either border.  Canadian poets, accustomed to looking to the south, know the names of American poets;  but American poets don’t know about their Canadian counterparts. They wonder, Who are these people?

    All this week I'll be trying to tell you by introducing Canadian poets from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, with heaps of thanks to Stacey Harwood.  Here's the first, by Margaret Avison, one of my faves.  It has a Marianne Moore-ish prickliness, and it unfolds as a metaphysical conceit.  It doesn't completely hit you at first, and I'll have more to say about this unwillingness to hit a reader on the head tomorrow.  I've kept the Canadian spelling -- yes, we keep the "u" in armour (and in glamour, too). 

Molly Peacock

Hag-Ridden

A plague of locusts is
a reminder that the
focus on knees and thighs
in stringy and gangling
insects can inspire in-
vidious
comparisons.
Nimble in
chain-armour (below) with an
upside-down carapace (shellacked),
these tiny
obstreperousnesses model
adoptable fashion trends.

The elderly, too,
are scant in under-
pinnings, and
angular.  But,
unlike locusts, these
swarm very seldom.  Each may
go with a stick; a plague, perhaps first to
themselves, Yet, their
undemanding pleasure in the
world out under such a
mysterious (some days dazzling) sky
may be a to-be-
desired infection.

by Margaret Avison

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
Tightrope Books

Comments

[Bruce Meyer]

Molly is certainly right about Avison. She had a prickliness to her poetry and could be very prickly in an interview. If anyone is interested, an interview I did with her appears in Lives and Works: Interviews with Canadian Writers (Black Moss Press, 1991). It was one of the few interviews Avison gave. The other side of Avison, however, was her charm, her ability to see a kind of delight in things from an askance point of view that was, at times, harder on herself than on her subject matter. I hail Molly Peacock's interest in Canadian poetry because it comes from her unique position as a passionate observer and a continual student of Canadian literature while at the same time from someone who is as astute a reader of poetry as you'll ever meet. If anyone is interested in Avison's work, they might want to see if they can catch up with Winter Sun or any of Avison's more recent volumes such as Wild Carrotts.

[Bruce Meyer]

One further comment about Avison and Canadian poetry's unwillingness to hit one over the head (Molly is correct, we're not that flashy here -- we whisper rather than roar, are comic rather than tragic, and go places quietly because we really aren't that much into marching bands) -- Avison has a poem from the 1950s -- I can't recall the title of it -- where she is having a picnic at Brock's Monument in Queenston (another point of contact between Canadians and Americans...although I heartily prefer this method over the former) where she hits her head on the inside upper wall of the viewing area at the top of the monument (by the way, the monument was one of the first terrorist targets in North America and was blown up by a Fenian in the 1850s and Brock's arm had to be replaced on his effigy at the top) and responds by saying "plash!" and having a religious epiphany. It is a cool poem. Thanks Molly for sharing Avison with American readers.

[Sylvie Planet]

I approve most heartily, and without a shrug of my French-Canadian shoulders, mais c'est la verity avec la difference. Bruce makes free use of the first-person-plural: who is this "we" who go places quietly and are comic? The statement is courageous, if only because no American poet would risk such a generalization. But it doth to these ears have ze ring of strangeness.

[Ian Lancashire]

Molly’s quite right about tastes in the USA. It has a stubborn insular streak in reading poets. A few months ago I found that the beautiful Poetry Foundation (Chicago) Web site didn’t list Canadian poets Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Leonard Cohen, Stephanie Bolster, Dennis Lee, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Tom Wayman … and many more.

The Foundation site does have an essay by Jason Guriel that slaps Harold Bloom’s “The Western Canon” around for his north-border blindsidedness. Bloom misses “E.J. Pratt, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, Earle Birney, Gwendolyn MacEwen, bpNichol, Robert Kroetsch, Lorna Crozier, Patrick Lane, or Susan Musgrave.”

But the Poetry Foundation also misses Pratt, Acorn, bpNichol, Kroetsch, Crozier, Lane, and Musgrave.

Harriet Monroe in 1912 promised that Poetry Magazine (Chicago) would “print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.” Has someone since then erected a mirror along the 49th parallel?

Better luck, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, India, the Caribbean, and all those English-speaking enclaves outside America and the UK!

[Craig Poile]

When I was asked to choose a poem by another author to read at the launch for Best Canadian Poetry in Montreal, I pounced on this one by Avison. It's punishing to read: enunciate the line-ends? read the phrases in parentheses in a hush or staccato? those polysyllabic monsters that lie in wait? But the challenge was worth the prize: to make a dense, complex poem immediately appealing to an audience, and use inflections to share what I had learned from this precise, fabulous (try to take the "u" out of that one) poem.

[Molly Peacock]

I'm thrilled with all these responses, both to The Best Canadian Poetry in English idea as well as to Margaret Avison herself. To Bruce Meyer's love of Avison's prickly distance, I should add her comments about this poem, written shortly before her death: "Hag-Ridden" was written in Margaret's eighty-eighth year, when she was well-acquainted with a need to use a cane on her daily walks out under the "mysterious (some days dazzling) sky." This comment can be found in the end notes to The Best Canadian Poetry 2008.

[Molly Peacock]

Sylvie Planet, thank you for reading this blog at 2am and adding that non shoulder shrug! Americans don't have much awareness of the dual languages of Canada. That's why the "we" is so fraught, you readers out there. . . Nous avons besoin d'un anthologie en francais aussi.

[Molly Peacock]

This blog is honored to hear from Professor Ian Lancashire, the pioneer of the fabulous website Representative Poetry On Line. If you've never been to this site, it's quite amazing. It's one of the most comprehensive and august sites for poetry in English on the web. (I say this with prejudice, since I sit on its Board of Advisors.)

The names that Ian reels out pack a punch for Canadian readers, but hardly make a "ting" in the ears of Americans, so I'm glad to hear this litany. Just to add: Jason Guriel, who takes Harold Bloom to task, is in The Best Canadian Poetry 2008.

[Jason Guriel]

Thanks for the comments, and just a quick note: I didn't find the absence of the names I mentioned in my essay to be a particularly terrible thing. I could do without the work of some (though not all) of those names. I would like to have seen a few of them on Bloom's list. The point is, the names I list, whatever you may think of them, are among the better known in Canada. While I don't think one should cede too much authority to any one critic's opinion, I do note, in my essay, that I found Bloom's list of eight names "instructive," because, when I first encountered the list, it seemed counter-intuitive in its inclusion of people like Daryl Hine who are (or were) not part of the Canadian canon that was being aggressively promoted, or so it seemed, when I was younger.

So while I think Bloom's list could've been much longer I don't think it's entirely blind. His few choices are great ones, in my opinion, and they suggest the sort of choices that we Canadians need to make, in the years to come, as we rethink our always-shifting canon. If we discover and promote the 'right' (that is, the best) talents others will come, a point made by Carmine Starnino in his book A Lover's Quarrel. This is probably not made clear enough in my essay.

I think Bolster's selection is excellent - though not just because I'm in the book! Indeed, it's refreshing to NOT find someone like Atwood in the book, especially since, as Bolster's introduction seems to suggest, Atwood could've been included. (But I'm not advocating for a ferociously and self-consciously 'alt' canon, either. If an Atwood has a good poem - as, for example, Atwood has had in the past - then that person should make the cut.)

[Sonia Elizabeth Di Placido]

I am so glad this discussion is transpiring between Best American and the latest 'new' Best of Canadian Poetry in English. Kudos to Molly! Not only is it a look at the relationships between the poet and his/her nation (US) (Canada) (Britain) and so on but it is also a 3 dimensional discourse in such that it offers a look at the poet in relationship to his/her nation then that body vs. the other body of poets from a different country and the relationship of those works to the nation. Molly has looked at the US, Canada and Britain: a healthy dialogue. Most notable for me, however, is the fact that the first Best of Canadian Poetry in English also invites a newer potential canon of writers to the fore showing diverse national identities and that Canadian poetry is on the brink of new frontiers with new poets establishing a diversified and a post-2010 era canon that has grown out of those 20th century poet fore-fathers/mothers. Yes, Harold Bloom points out the 20th century poets--an era that modestly set the stage for what is happening now. The time, I believe, for poets like Avison and Babstock, as mentioned above, begin to map out the onslaught of a new canon of Canadian Poets in the post-2010 era is arrived. Thus, inviting all poetry aficionados into a new epoch of Canada's widely best recognizable poetry, Barry Dempster, Helen Humphreys, A.F. Moritz, Adam Sol, and Carmine Starnino to mention just a few!

[Susan Cody]

Molly, thank you for these fascinating, intrepid and pioneering explorations of differences between American and Canadian poetry-- and for this startling poem by Avison.

I love the toughness of it, the articulate and uncompromising self-assessment, the choice of a kind of double-jointed back-handedness—and reclaiming of the subjective if not the individual-- over rue.
She uses the technical in a particularly cutting-in way—and of course the technical, the unhuman, here goes to what remains or becomes of humanness in old, mechanically- aided, old age.

I remember a poem, I think printed in The New Yorker, also on old age… the speaker sees the women of her youth at a reunion—and in seeing them suddenly sees how *she* is seen and what she has become. She pictures the company—-all as a large reptile, simply cut into more or less identical segments. I would like to read it again but have no way of finding it.
And speaking of The New Yorker, whose fiction editors quite rightly prize Alice Munro, what is it that makes Canadian poetry alien and unappetizing to their poetry editors? ( Perhaps this is not true—yet I can’t remember seeing a Canadian poet published there.)

[Susan Ioannou]

As a backdrop to this discussion, the book Canadians Are Not Americans: Myths and Literary Traditions by Katherine Morrison (Second Story Press, 2003) may be of interest.

[Molly Peacock]

I'm just catching up on responding to these posts, and I want to thank Craig Poile for reading that Avison poem aloud. It's worth the "punishment" to figure out how to deliver it. She thanks you, I'm sure, from wherever she is now . . .

All the best,
Molly

[Molly Peacock]

Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments, Jason. I'm glad you were impressed with Stephanie Bolster's choices. I was, too. As the General Series Editor I didn't want to interfere with her process, and I must say it was absolutely meticulous. She found many stunning poems, yours included.

As for naming the names of Canadian poets, I think we need to do that wherever and whenever we can. It keeps bringing these poets into the light of an American readership -- a readership that only knows a very few of them So I'm very glad you have added to Bloom's list, even while appreciating his opinions.

[Molly Peacock]

Sonia Elizabeth Di Placido makes an important point about the new canon: that's very much why we're engaged in this project. By naming names we're enlarging the existing canon, or at least changing it. I also like to think of projects like this as shaping the landscape of contemporary letters -- or perhaps simply acknowledging that the landscape is now being influenced by new weather and new upheavals.

[Molly Peacock]

Susan Cody, thank you so much for those comments on Avison and her "double-jointed back handedness." It's too bad that The New Yorker's website doesn't have a way of helping people identify poems such as the one you remember. And I wonder if anyone out there has been tracking Canadian appearances in that magazine. . . .Anyone?

[Molly Peacock]

Susan Ioannou, I'm going to look for that Canadians Are Not Americans book. . .

[Zach Wells]

I know George Johnston published at least a couple of times in the New Yorker. I think maybe David Solway. Maybe Eric Ormsby. But not sure.

[fussball]

Gute Arbeit hier! Gute Inhalte.