Egad, it’s wonderful and a wonder what’s online. And where it may lead — A 1940s thesis for Harry Hugh Cook’s MA. And another English thesis from the 70s on Souster by Karen Margaret Wood. I haven’t read all of either but a from few dozen pages in I want to process what I’ve gathered thus far.
Cook said that if poetry sales relied on living an interesting life, Souster would be in trouble. Seems a tad harsh. At the time he said that Souster was only in his 20s and would go on to write for several decades. Wood characterized his people’s poetry as being emotionally-laden vignettes, and often dark stories. Either of those make him sound dreadfully dull.
In theses time capsule they consider prolific poet Raymond Souster. Souster will be the symposium focus at Purdyfest this year, July 29th, Marmora Public Library.
He’s still alive, in his 90s. He’s won the Governor General’s Award and Order of Canada. His name rings a distant bell. He was an Ottawa writer with Oberon Press starting some decades before I moved to Ottawa. I’ve probably browsed his books at the Ottawa U library. Oberon has been going since the 60s. In New Wave in Publishing the founder said he started a new publishing house because the nature of our nation was changing, from “a new sense of the differences involved in being Canadian. The centennial was the occasion.” and Macklam later adds, “Nationalist motives were of cardinal importance […] This is partly a matter of marketability, partly a matter of conviction.”
What is it to shape a nation thru poetry? What does it mean to shape or change? What is one changing from and why is that a catalyst?
Both Cook and Wood looked at Souster’s thought-lineage and what was going on in the national scene then.
Wood (p. 21) observes that people perceive that Souster wrote artlessly [haphazardly seems an easy place to find consensus; even Souster himself called himself emotional and sloppy], but she concludes that Souster made stylistic, political choices to not sidestep affectation and the refined form of the Victorian age he was born into, to deliberately resist the polish within his reach.
He was against the more prevailing attitude of let people who want to make political poems enter politics and leave the poetry alone. Poetry and class could be fused and couldn’t be shaken apart. His poems seemed to feature an uncommon number of streetworkers that he had no particular sympathy for. His poems worked against the idea of poetry as polished commodity, to keep it gritty, level with the average Joe. He wrote a poem about being told what he does isn’t poetry, Riding the Thundering Horse. Wood believes he edited to keep it towards raw and blunt, avoiding the sheltered and cooked and he ridiculed those who wanted art but unlike what his critics said, he did edit.
I gather people feel he isn’t talked about and is underappreciated. Earlier this year Derek Walcott suggested Souster was one of catalysts to allow Canadian poetry to get to the post-modern by going thru “unpoetic” workaday observation as a stage. His influence seems unremarkable because we take his ground-breaking premises for granted. They are normalized and internalized and so invisible. And set foundations for Babstock and Starnino.
The funny thing about this discussion is that except for the MA by Wood, every player is male. Every person leading to or away from Souster. Anyhew.
Souster joined Dudek’s side. Cook talks about the competing poetry mimeographed magazines of the 40s,
Whereas the Preview poets chose the British for their mentors, First Statement poets looked to the Americans, to Whitman, Crane, Frost, Fearing, and Sandburg. They wrote poetry from their own experience, shunning metaphor and symbol for the sake of forth-right statement.
[…] First Statement objected to Preview‘s assertions that poetry should be the handmaiden of
politics. Louis Dudek wrote [that] Preview, had the following faults;
(1) a clever aptitude for exploiting the unreal universe of language;
(2) a pedantic absorption in the second-hand universe of books, literature and erudition; and
(3) a falsified devotion to a special universe of ideas, chiefly sociological and-political ones.
By way of correctives, First Statement can suggest three slogans for the poet’s masthead. No poly- glot displays. No poetry about poets and poetry.
Ooh, I’m feeling nailed on the frame of “polyglot displays”. Several of my poems in Thirsts use Chinese, French, Arabic, Hungarian, Latin or Spanish. Is it being posh? Or would it be denial of what is immediately around to exclude that which I don’t happen to have as mother tongue? Multilingual texts and conversations are more the norm now than perhaps they would have been in the 40s? Or would Montreal in the 1940s have more first generation Canadians and more of a swirl of multicultural stew?
I use the second-hand universe of books begetting books. Books are just a dead lop from a person. (As in a piece, not as in a dead bunny — so sad.) Are epigraphs giving credit where due or self-justifying defence, or coattail-riding?
If one writes books and they are never referenced, then why would one write books? It would be a terminator seed.
I like that these notions would be questioned instead of just done and instead of just sniped at.
How fascinating that people should actually debate such things instead of retreating to mutual solitudes of whatever turns your crank (with the belief that only one crank and one way to crank it or else getting cranky) with the occasional flame war breaking out among trolls.
What’s worth writing about? Only things past your noses, or about your nose, or outba ryou esno?
What poetry is can be understood by what people are taking in, passing along vs. passing on mentioning. How do we choose our forms and subjects and stances? What makes them click or fail to click?
It’s a pleasure to explore just one route in detail. A day for lyric. A day for sound poetry. A day for haiku. A day for spoken word. Each has strengths and weaknesses. To catch sight of their outsides without understanding their mechanics, their [word come back to me] essential character needs attentiveness.
My bias is that getting into someone else’s shoes, not just touristing in their poetry can offer more development as a writer or person. If there is no awareness of what others do and cross-pollinating, curiosity, respect and interesting, then everyone is comfortable speaking to their own little crowd of converted. And just by chance meetings could one dissatisfied person encounter the other solitude, leap over to it, never to be heard from again from the old group.
If we find people who we can hear and who can hear us easily, it’s a joy and a relief that we are able to understand something and by understood by someone but it can’t be a place to hide. (That would make it a closed loop.) If you read only what you already like..you can only be mentored for a while. It becomes solipsism and gets pretty boring after a while.
Cook related:
John Sutherland attacks a Preview writer’s strong socialist stand in the following manner, “This man uses words in the way one uses fists to clip people on the jaw. He is a socialist aching for a revolution, and he has found the perfect art.”
What an interesting idea. From the safety of words being bold and combative while talking about equality, peace, etc. To be bold and reckless with words while talking peace would suggest that the speaker really believes the words are impotent, doesn’t it?
It’s a worldview that informs what makes someone think something worth the breath to express. Is it the same that makes someone believe it worth time to listen?
Wood in her thesis related the words of young critic A.J.M. Smith, Dec 15, 1926 in McGill Fortnightly Review:
Poetry today must be the result of the impingement of modern conditions on the personality and the temperament of the poet. Some have been awakened to a burning enthusiasm by the spectacle of a new era; others are deeply disturbed by the civilization of a machine-made age. Some have heard music in the factory whistle; others have turned aside into solitude that they might better harken to the still small voice.
Nearly a century ago. Same sort of question and responses.
Yet Wood was saying this is the context to understand Souster. He was reacting simply in simplicity against the overbuilt structures of Victorianism.
Would this academic bent, the extension of dadaism and refusal to mean or play the games of vignettes in prosaic grammar and social orderliness be a natural response to our ubiquitous poetry which tells a lyric mood without momentum, that relies on Self-Expression, that reacts with closure against tmi of decades of overt confession?
All kinds of poetry go on in all decades but. All kinds of poetry and political bents come from all kinds of geographies. First Statement and Preview with their conflicting aesthetics (or depending on how you look at, complementary niches) were both from Montreal.
How does it all fit together and move? Are any of these labels genuine groups or alliances or patterns or just individuals and categories of convenience?
New York style of writing percolated into Montreal and cross-pollinated. Toronto’s New School of Writing is getting traction for a more poets about poetries and polyglot and inclusion.
People have embraced writing stories of their own lives. Every adult basic education and primary school class takes it as their due that they can write poetry and they should write about themselves. People’s poetry for decades has been positioned where rich people writing airily in forms used to be.
Is it then natural to assume this is a cause of making a poetry for poets, an in-group niche poetry so that the purpose is not to Take Back Poetry for the People. It is to distance oneself from The People’s poetry.
If so, this would mean churning out as many people as possible thru MA programs, PhDs, lecture series, forums, retreats, etc, would be a way to make Non-People’s Poetry economically viable since they rely on an educated audience to make sense of their points of reference.
If this is true, we are riding in a movement to build walls, territories, specialities to rebel against the status quo as it now stands with plain language, a reliance on internal consistency of register and metaphor and a sensible storytelling verse that may dabble in a coy way with the leap but never get both feet off the ground.
If there is to be academic poetry of social criticism that would be easiest if there were an opposite pole doing the opposite.
If all the people’s poetry can be swept with apathy against The Way Things Are and write upbeat verses of denial, that would be a way to in aggregate unconsciously create distinctions.
Are aesthetics as complex as we think or is poetics just amoeba reacting to light and dark, hot and cold? If we’re too chill(ed), we move toward emotional heat and chaos, too overexerted/overcome we move towards cold rationality and order and stillness, trying to self-regulate towards moderate, and overshooting.