On the way to Canadian Poetry class on Tuesday, October 11th, I passed a cyclist that had a kid on the back in a child seat. The mother’s
backpack though was right in the little boy’s face. It seems to me that she
should wear the thing as a chestpack whenever she has her child is with her.
George was only
four minutes late. He told us that he’d had a good time in Edinburgh and that
the whiskey had been real.
Patrick asked if he
had gone to Edinburgh because the government hasn’t yet told him to do anything
as the Parliamentary Poet.
George explained
that someone had “ejaculated” that he had done nothing as the poet laureate of
Canada. He said that he’d been travelling around reading poetry all over
Canada, and declared, “I’m the hardest working poet in Canada!”
I found out from
George on the break that this was something brought up on The National by Rex
Murphy. I looked it up later, but it seemed to me that Rex Murphy hadn’t
directly criticized George or his role. As far as I could tell, George had
complained that Parliament hasn’t been commissioning poems from him. Others in
government say that it’s the poet’s job to find things to write about regarding
Parliament.
I
found this from an interview of George by Prism International that was
published nine days before our class: “Though I
know what I should do and what could be done, my ‘handlers,’ so to speak, are
nervous about potential scandals or controversies that I–or other poets–could
provoke, thus damaging the brand of Parliament. So, I’ve faced–and do face–an
uphill battle in trying to convince well-meaning civil servants that my
function should exceed just rambling the countryside giving readings to all and
sundry. Concretely, I’ve made steps toward establishing a national poetry map
and a Poets’ Corner in Ottawa.”
We returned to Leonard Cohen and his
poem, “You Have the Lovers”. George said that the use of beauty in the
grotesque was an influence on Modernism. We also returned to the poem,
“Style”. George thinks that it is about the Cuban missile crisis. I asked then
why does he spend the poem talking about his style. George answered that it’s
because having a style is absurd in the face of annihilation. He added that at
this very moment there are dudes stationed all over the world, waiting for
instructions to launch nuclear weapons.
George used the word “abnegation” for “giving up”.
Our next poet was D. G. Jones. He went to the University of Guelph, which began as the Ontario Agricultural College. He was one of the founders of Ellipse, a publication that presented the French or English poetry of Canadian poets and offered the translation of each poem on the same page in the other official language.
George said the expression; “We are the land” is a nationalist overstatement.
George Grant’s 1965 essay, “Lament for a Nation” had an incendiary effect on English Canadian intellectuals because it claimed that Canada wants to become part of the United States. Diefenbaker refused to allow US missiles on Canadian soil. Pearson won the Nobel Peace prize but said that he would accept US missiles. He won the election. But Grant’s claim that Canada wants to become part of the United States ignited nationalism because people reacted against Canadian absorption by the US. Grant coincidentally died on the day that the North American Free Trade election was called.
I volunteered to read the D. G. Jones poem, “These Trees Are No Forest of Mourners”. George asked us to accompany this with Margaret Atwood’s “Survival” and align it with other poems, like “David”.
The Canadian landscape is a quiet, punishing reality. There is menace in our environment. I mentioned Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” as a further example.
Tom Thompson’s “Jack Pine” is seen as lonely, but not by indigenous people. There is a sense of separation.
Atwood’s novel, “Surfacing” was about going native on the cusp of feminism. The only way to be Canadian is to become one with the land. D. G. Jones felt that way too. Pierre Elliot Trudeau could make love in a canoe and rock a buckskin jacket.
The poem recognizes that the gothic element in Canadian literature arises from our sense that the Canadian wilderness is not ours and that is why it is dangerous. The attempted fetishism of the Canadian wilderness aims to soothe the fact that we do not belong. Canadians are good at making horror films because our cities remain garrisons.
At the end of the poem, the drowned son returns to nature.
D. G. Jones’s poem, “Beautiful Creatures Brief As These” was dedicated to Jay McPherson, who was a Governor General’s Award winner for her book, “The Boatman”. She was a mythopoeic writer like Northrop Frye. To be mythopoeic is to create or update myths. Al Bernie’s “David” is mythopoeic.
At Avenue Road and Dupont one can find the Jay McPherson parkette.
In the line, “They could not bear the weight of things”, the word “things” is italicized. George drew our attention to the verbs in the poem: “swarm, litter, break, bear, cry and hang”.
Little girls, “laugh as though the world were theirs, and all its buildings … were gifts of a benignant sun”. “Benignant” is an antonym for “malignant”. The poem presents schoolgirls as being innocent of reality. There is a note of mourning and of the seizure of reality. It is somewhat condescending in its imagining of a distressing world.
I asked what “Sulphur’s wings” would mean in the line, “Their dresses looser than the Sulphur’s wings”. We spent some time trying to figure it out until someone in the back, who might have looked it up online, said that it was a reference to a species of butterfly called the “Cloudless Sulphur”.
Our next poet was Alden Nowlan. George said that we could connect Nowlan to Souster as a down to earth poet. He was an autodidact. He was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, like George. He was a poignant poet who touches the heart, unlike others that want to make you think.
The anthology leaves out a lot of important stuff. Nowlan was a poor dreamer who actually believed that the Earth was flat. He was one of the founding members of the Canadian branch of the Flat Earth Society, which George said “of course” is headquartered in New Brunswick. Nowlan was committed by his parents to an insane asylum when he was fifteen years old. He confessed that his incarceration at the time was a good thing because he was on the verge of becoming a sexual predator. Just before he was committed he had been planning on raping a certain girl, but on the day that he intended to put his plan into action, she took a different route.
He has been called a regional poet, but every poet is regional.
During the break, George told me that he was going to be doing a lecture on Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers” at Innis College on the evening of November 9th. I think he said that the title of his talk would be “Blasphemy as Treason”. I made an appointment to talk with George about my essay on October 19th.
After the break, George said that Robert Graves and D. G. Jones are also mythopoeic. Alden Nowlan’s poem, “Warren Pryor” is in the ballad tradition. Influenced by Edwin Arlington Robinson, a US conservative, formal, anti-education poet.
We looked at Nowlan’s poem, “Ypres: 1915”.
I said that I found the poem to be sad because of its glorification of those foolish soldiers that participated in a useless war and an even more useless battle in that war.
George argued that it’s only sad if one forgets the poem, which is meant to make us proud. Vimy Ridge is a Canadian national park, even though the capturing of the ridge by Canadian soldiers was a worthless victory. It turns out that after Hitler visited the Canadian memorial, he declared it his favourite memorial to World War I because it did not symbolically represent Germany’s defeat. He put it under SS protection and so it was the only memorial to allied troops that was not defiled by German soldiers. King Edward dedicated the memorial when it was first unveiled. “Wasn’t he a Nazi?” I asked, and George said he was. Britain exiled him to the Bahamas. George said the Canadians served as shock troops because they were so repressed that they took no prisoners. They just killed everybody and then went to Tim Hortons. He says that it was the Germans that called the Canadians “shock troops”.
The poem depicts the Moors (Moroccans) as running away, but they had good reason to. There is also a memorial to the Moors at Vimy Ridge, but it has not been maintained well. George says of Nowlan’s poem that it is cinematic and very effective. He suggests that we draw a connection between it and Leonard Cohen’s “Style”. He says that lines 10 to 22 form a paragraph of stillness. This is where Canada was born. I think that is such a stupid idea. Canada could have just as easily been born by uniting in non-participation in that idiotic war.
George told us that Canada liberated not only Holland, but also parts of Italy.
He said that one has to read Nowlan in bulk to get the full flavour. He was a touchy feely poet but knowing what we know now about his early aspirations of being a rapist, one might want to keep one’s distance.
Our next poet was Eli Mandel.
I’m sure there was a reason why George started talking about Fort Henry in Kingston, but I lost the thread that somehow ran from Mandel, who had no connection to Kingston that I can find. George asked us why Fort Henry was built. I said, “To defend against the United States?” He said yes, because Kingston was where they had planned on putting Parliament.
During the October crisis, the United States started military manoeuvres just across the border from Kingston, because Kingston has always been the most likely point that the US would invade if they decided to do so. This was why the capital was moved to Ottawa.
I mentioned that it was Canadians that burned the White House to the ground. George said that’s true but it wasn’t white back then. It only became the White House after they rebuilt it. Up until the 1930s, both the United States and Canada had active plans as to how they would destroy each other if the need to do so arose. The United States’ plan was to use poison gas, while Canada’s plan was a scorched earth strategy through the heartland and of course they would just kill everyone.
Eli Mandel was also mythopoeic, but later on he shifted to a colloquial style. He’s the one that first referred to Irving Layton as being a Nietzschean poet.
George used the word “abnegation” for “giving up”.
Our next poet was D. G. Jones. He went to the University of Guelph, which began as the Ontario Agricultural College. He was one of the founders of Ellipse, a publication that presented the French or English poetry of Canadian poets and offered the translation of each poem on the same page in the other official language.
George said the expression; “We are the land” is a nationalist overstatement.
George Grant’s 1965 essay, “Lament for a Nation” had an incendiary effect on English Canadian intellectuals because it claimed that Canada wants to become part of the United States. Diefenbaker refused to allow US missiles on Canadian soil. Pearson won the Nobel Peace prize but said that he would accept US missiles. He won the election. But Grant’s claim that Canada wants to become part of the United States ignited nationalism because people reacted against Canadian absorption by the US. Grant coincidentally died on the day that the North American Free Trade election was called.
I volunteered to read the D. G. Jones poem, “These Trees Are No Forest of Mourners”. George asked us to accompany this with Margaret Atwood’s “Survival” and align it with other poems, like “David”.
The Canadian landscape is a quiet, punishing reality. There is menace in our environment. I mentioned Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape” as a further example.
Tom Thompson’s “Jack Pine” is seen as lonely, but not by indigenous people. There is a sense of separation.
Atwood’s novel, “Surfacing” was about going native on the cusp of feminism. The only way to be Canadian is to become one with the land. D. G. Jones felt that way too. Pierre Elliot Trudeau could make love in a canoe and rock a buckskin jacket.
The poem recognizes that the gothic element in Canadian literature arises from our sense that the Canadian wilderness is not ours and that is why it is dangerous. The attempted fetishism of the Canadian wilderness aims to soothe the fact that we do not belong. Canadians are good at making horror films because our cities remain garrisons.
At the end of the poem, the drowned son returns to nature.
D. G. Jones’s poem, “Beautiful Creatures Brief As These” was dedicated to Jay McPherson, who was a Governor General’s Award winner for her book, “The Boatman”. She was a mythopoeic writer like Northrop Frye. To be mythopoeic is to create or update myths. Al Bernie’s “David” is mythopoeic.
At Avenue Road and Dupont one can find the Jay McPherson parkette.
In the line, “They could not bear the weight of things”, the word “things” is italicized. George drew our attention to the verbs in the poem: “swarm, litter, break, bear, cry and hang”.
Little girls, “laugh as though the world were theirs, and all its buildings … were gifts of a benignant sun”. “Benignant” is an antonym for “malignant”. The poem presents schoolgirls as being innocent of reality. There is a note of mourning and of the seizure of reality. It is somewhat condescending in its imagining of a distressing world.
I asked what “Sulphur’s wings” would mean in the line, “Their dresses looser than the Sulphur’s wings”. We spent some time trying to figure it out until someone in the back, who might have looked it up online, said that it was a reference to a species of butterfly called the “Cloudless Sulphur”.
Our next poet was Alden Nowlan. George said that we could connect Nowlan to Souster as a down to earth poet. He was an autodidact. He was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, like George. He was a poignant poet who touches the heart, unlike others that want to make you think.
The anthology leaves out a lot of important stuff. Nowlan was a poor dreamer who actually believed that the Earth was flat. He was one of the founding members of the Canadian branch of the Flat Earth Society, which George said “of course” is headquartered in New Brunswick. Nowlan was committed by his parents to an insane asylum when he was fifteen years old. He confessed that his incarceration at the time was a good thing because he was on the verge of becoming a sexual predator. Just before he was committed he had been planning on raping a certain girl, but on the day that he intended to put his plan into action, she took a different route.
He has been called a regional poet, but every poet is regional.
During the break, George told me that he was going to be doing a lecture on Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers” at Innis College on the evening of November 9th. I think he said that the title of his talk would be “Blasphemy as Treason”. I made an appointment to talk with George about my essay on October 19th.
After the break, George said that Robert Graves and D. G. Jones are also mythopoeic. Alden Nowlan’s poem, “Warren Pryor” is in the ballad tradition. Influenced by Edwin Arlington Robinson, a US conservative, formal, anti-education poet.
We looked at Nowlan’s poem, “Ypres: 1915”.
I said that I found the poem to be sad because of its glorification of those foolish soldiers that participated in a useless war and an even more useless battle in that war.
George argued that it’s only sad if one forgets the poem, which is meant to make us proud. Vimy Ridge is a Canadian national park, even though the capturing of the ridge by Canadian soldiers was a worthless victory. It turns out that after Hitler visited the Canadian memorial, he declared it his favourite memorial to World War I because it did not symbolically represent Germany’s defeat. He put it under SS protection and so it was the only memorial to allied troops that was not defiled by German soldiers. King Edward dedicated the memorial when it was first unveiled. “Wasn’t he a Nazi?” I asked, and George said he was. Britain exiled him to the Bahamas. George said the Canadians served as shock troops because they were so repressed that they took no prisoners. They just killed everybody and then went to Tim Hortons. He says that it was the Germans that called the Canadians “shock troops”.
The poem depicts the Moors (Moroccans) as running away, but they had good reason to. There is also a memorial to the Moors at Vimy Ridge, but it has not been maintained well. George says of Nowlan’s poem that it is cinematic and very effective. He suggests that we draw a connection between it and Leonard Cohen’s “Style”. He says that lines 10 to 22 form a paragraph of stillness. This is where Canada was born. I think that is such a stupid idea. Canada could have just as easily been born by uniting in non-participation in that idiotic war.
George told us that Canada liberated not only Holland, but also parts of Italy.
He said that one has to read Nowlan in bulk to get the full flavour. He was a touchy feely poet but knowing what we know now about his early aspirations of being a rapist, one might want to keep one’s distance.
Our next poet was Eli Mandel.
I’m sure there was a reason why George started talking about Fort Henry in Kingston, but I lost the thread that somehow ran from Mandel, who had no connection to Kingston that I can find. George asked us why Fort Henry was built. I said, “To defend against the United States?” He said yes, because Kingston was where they had planned on putting Parliament.
During the October crisis, the United States started military manoeuvres just across the border from Kingston, because Kingston has always been the most likely point that the US would invade if they decided to do so. This was why the capital was moved to Ottawa.
I mentioned that it was Canadians that burned the White House to the ground. George said that’s true but it wasn’t white back then. It only became the White House after they rebuilt it. Up until the 1930s, both the United States and Canada had active plans as to how they would destroy each other if the need to do so arose. The United States’ plan was to use poison gas, while Canada’s plan was a scorched earth strategy through the heartland and of course they would just kill everyone.
Eli Mandel was also mythopoeic, but later on he shifted to a colloquial style. He’s the one that first referred to Irving Layton as being a Nietzschean poet.
Of
the poem, “Thief Hanging In Baptist Halls”, I suddenly realized it after we’d
discussed the poem for a while that he was talking about the thief that was
hanging beside Jesus on the other cross in the Bible story. Being nailed on a
cross represents elevated stasis, impotence and ineffectiveness. As an academic
and frustrated poet who also happens to be the dean, he identifies with this
nailed up character. Because it is mythopoeic, the poem is unnecessarily
difficult.
Of
the poem, “On the 25th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz”,
it is free of mythopoesie. It is cinematic like “Ypres: 1915”. “My words drift”
like “smoke”. He is using projective verse, based on Charles Olson’s theory
that the lines of a poem should be breathed.
Our
next poet was Milton Acorn, who was an autodidact. George says, “He was a
carpenter” and then begins singing a line or two from, “If I Were A Carpenter”
stops and adds, “But not a very good one.” He had an accident after enlisting
that affected his balance and so did not go to war. George said that Acorn was
a communist and so he did not wash. I asked, “Really?” George confirmed that
was the case. I laughed till I cried. This may be why his marriage to Gwendolyn
MacEwen didn’t last very long. Immediately after it she went to Egypt. Later
she got the Governor General’s Award during the same year that he was up for
the same prize. He cried conspiracy. He was later awarded the People’s Poet
award at Grossman’s Tavern. Both Irving Layton and Margaret Atwood were there.
He lived at the Waverly Hotel, smoked cigars and had bad hygiene and so he had
about him a Marxist-Leninist stench. He was also connected to Raymond Souster.
Acorn was from
Prince Edward Island, where class warfare was fought to liberate the citizens
there from absentee landlords that lived in Britain.
Of
the poem, “I’ve Tasted My Blood”, George remembers hearing Acorn read it at the
Free Times Café. George read this one aloud himself, in dramatic fashion, and
when he was finished he exclaimed, “Take that Rex Murphy!” He assured us that
he would, “Correct this ignorant man”.
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