Jan
Zwicky and Robert
Bringhurst read together at Green
College, at the University of British Columbia, on Wednesday, March 20, in
the late afternoon: the last event in this year’s Play Chthonics series. I was
set to introduce them to the 40-odd people who had come to hear them in the
Graham House fireside lounge – a capacity crowd for a poetry reading, for that
intimate space – and Jan reminded me about one of the first times we had met,
which was in a two-term graduate seminar led by Don McKay at Western in the fall-winter
of 1986-87. She was teaching philosophy at Waterloo, I think, but would come
weekly down to London to audit the Monday evening class; her Wittgenstein Elegies had been published
by Brick Books earlier that year. I was a master’s student, and was just
getting underway writing what would turn out to be a thesis on the poetry and
poetics of Robert Bringhurst, which McKay was supervising. The seminar was
called “Poetry After 1945,” if I am remembering right, and each week was
focused on a different book, a different poet – chosen, I’m pretty sure, not
for any particular thematic or ideological reason, but because Don was
interested in them, and he thought that theirs were poems that we ought at the
very least to know about, to know: Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and For the
Union Dead, Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ted
Hughes’s Crow, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies, and selected poems from Denise Levertov,
Daphne
Marlatt, Seamus Heaney, Charles Olson, others. One guy in the seminar was
keen to do something with Sylvia Plath. (I remember also discovering, through
Don, Charles Wright’s The Other Side of the River that year.) And, near the end of term, Don had put on
Robert Bringhurst’s The Beauty of the
Weapons.
I don’t know
what had drawn or what was drawing me into Bringhurst’s work at the time,
whether I had picked it out from McKay’s syllabus, or found it on my own and then
taken the seminar to hear more about it and to encounter those poems more
fully. There was something that spoke to me quite forcefully and seriously in
those days, from Bringhurst’s writing, something important. And he was also one
of the few poets I had discovered who had a rigorous interest in philosophy, in
thinking. What caught my ear was that Bringhurst didn’t ever merely namecheck Heidegger
or Levinas
or the Pre-Socratics, never merely rehearsed Zen traditions (via Gary Snyder) or First
Nations mythtelling; he took these inheritances up with a keenness, a
self-awareness and a deliberateness that I had never met before, and he did it
not simply in but through poems, as poetry. Bringhurst aimed to have his work
converse, materially and essentially, with what Kinnell called
(in his brief “Prayer”) “whatever what is is.” Later poems would make this
conversation more formally explicit – his “Blue Roofs of Japan” had just
appeared in Pieces
of Map, Pieces of Music, Bringhurst’s just-issued collection from
McClelland and Stewart. The way I remember, it was this kind of
poetically-informed conversation to which I hoped that seminar aspired.
By the start of
second term, after I had been working at Bringhurst’s books for some time and
with the in-class discussion of his poetry fast approaching, I was certainly
aware that both McKay and Zwicky had been somehow more directly and closely implicated
in his writing than I might have realized at first (although I knew McKay knew
Bringhurst personally, and had sent him a few questions on my behalf about
sources for poems). “Sunday Morning,” from Pieces
of Map, is dedicated to them both, and suggests a kinship of thought and
approach – around listening, around wilderness, around alterity and ontology – that
Bringhurst characterizes as an interest, an inter-esse,
in “the musical density of being.” Their poetry, in many and various registers,
aspires to sing, to attain the condition of song. They were concerned, in the
late 1980s, to reactivate a particular trajectory of the lyric, its noetic
intensities.
So, what
happened in the seminar was: one of the
assignments involved presenting a close reading of a poem. I had chosen to
examine Bringhurst’s “These
Poems, She Said,” partly in response to an emergent line of questioning in
the class around gender politics. Bringhurst placed the poem first in his
selected, to enact a distancing irony, and to suggest a self-awareness about
the contingency of the seemingly sculptural monumentality, the mythic reach, of
the texts that followed:
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with
no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who
would leave his wife and child because
they
made noise in his study.
[.
. .] These are the poems of a man
like
Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend
but which nevertheless
offended
me. (Selected Poems 75)
The gesture at Plato isn’t just a
philosophy joke about an authoritarian metaphysian’s aversion to the erotic.
(It’s worth comparing Zwicky’s recent Plato
as Artist, which recuperates an alternative Plato.) Bringhurst creates a
miniature Socratic elenchus, replete with self-deprecating irony.
Uncharacteristically for Plato, however, the interlocutor in this poem is
female; the text’s antithetical manoeuvres, shifting from iterated critique to discomfited
reaction, both sustains the authority of the male poet’s voice – everything
remains filtered through him, and he is the one who affirms, at the poem’s
close, that the woman’s voice has spoken “rightly” – and also dismantles any
grounds he might have, other than a kind of empty verbal aestheticism (“You
are, he said,/ beautiful”), to claim argumentative high ground. He sounds like
he wins, but he can win only by losing, since the love he craves entails receptive
openness rather than the abstract and detached rhetorical management of a
well-turned phrase or line. In the seminar, I think it was difficult for me to
hear the conflictedness at the core of the poem, and instead I focused only its apparent claim to rightness, its mistaken feel of surety. This reading,
as you can imagine, didn’t sit well with Jan, and she told me so. What she
valued in the poem wasn’t any feint of attention or pretense of listening, but a
deliberate, intentional disavowal of ego; the poem, for her, in the white space
that slashes through its penultimate line on the page, opens itself to what
remains otherwise, to its ungovernable outside. (As I write this, I don’t think
those would have been Zwicky’s
terms; this is me, I’m sure, re-casting her critique. But however she put
it, her point was a good one.) She argued.
What
came out wasn’t just a corrective for me. More importantly, it was the sense
that there were real stakes here, that something in this poetry mattered. And
what mattered was the honing and the intensification and the acuity of
thinking, of thought as an exacting, lyrical unknitting of selfishness, of
self. That debate about poetics wasn’t just a remedial exercise, but an
enactment of this rigorous openness, one that takes itself seriously. “Knowing,
not owning” as Bringhurst puts in what he then called “Thirty Words,” which he
would incorporate into his “credo” in later editions of his selected poems: “Praise
of what is, / not of what flatters us / into mere pleasure” (Selected Poems 159). Neither Zwicky nor
Bringhurst takes this demand lightly; poetry is careful, serious business, and
since that evening seminar in 1987, I have tried to learn from and through
their work – and I continue to do so – to correspond with, to be responsive to
and responsible for, that care.
 |
| Robert Bringhurst Reading at Green College |
The
Play Chthonics reading, for me, reactivated this commitment to a poetry that
matters. Both Bringhurst and Zwicky presented principally new work, but their
tactics and idioms were still closely and thoroughly enmeshed in the kinds of
lyric thinking they have been practicing, in their distinctive ways, for
decades, and for which I have, for decades, admired them. Bringhurst read from
a set of what he called “language” poems, works that have little to do with
idiomatic American experimentalism, but addressed themselves to the
foundational becoming, the ontological pluralism, that he has pursued
throughout his career. Zwicky’s poems, by contrast, focused elegiacally on the
essential unknowability of things, on lost connections and on gaps and
silences. But her poems also distill their music from that loss, a music that
wants to draw out some of the human resonances with a world in which we are all
implicated, to converse openly with the unvoiced plentitude of what we are not,
which is also what we are. At different points, both she and Bringhurst
coincidentally described encounters with a heron as an image of this attentive
address.
After
the reading, I picked up a copy of a
CD that Zwicky had recorded (in June 2011) called, simply, Jan Zwicky Reads. I have been listening
to it off and on for the past month. As at the live reading, I find that as I
listen certain of her lines seem to hang in the air, to resonate: “that bare
light not yet sweet with birds.” Zwicky’s melopoeic technique, her mastery of
the phonemic music of language, evident here in the audible meshwork of
consonants and gently modulating vowels, is more than “sweet” craft; what
inheres in these voicings – I’m sure that’s the right term for this lyric practice
– is more than the mere pleasures of listening. Zwicky offers in small, in
lines such as these, a musical elenchus, a negation (“not yet”) that highlights
the hiatuses and epistemological uncertainties that poetry seeks to bridge, as
metaphor, but also construes as its substance, as its inevitable shortfall,
again as metaphor, as approximation, as asymptote: a version, I’d say, of what
Bringhurst has called, translating Paul Celan, “the
caught light’s closeness / to audibility” (Selected
Poems 143). The sweetness Zwicky’s poetry seeks out is never the sugary or
the saccharine, but is consistently a resonance,
a harmonic sweet spot, where the disparate textures of an unclosed world can briefly,
barely, touch and argue, catch and hum, collide and sing.
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