T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label French Canadian poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label French Canadian poetry. Show all posts

Saturday, December 19, 2020

Thoughts on F.R. Scott


For the last six months I've been reading my way through the Montreal Group of poets who helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada back in the 1920s; the group includes four poets: F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco, Leo Kennedy, and A.M. Klein.

            It's a different experience to read someone's individual books than it is to read their collected poems. For instance, F.R. Scott's Events and Signals (1954) softens and humanizes him; perhaps this side of Scott isn't as evident as in his Collected Poems (1981). In fact, the Frank Scott in this earlier book is quite fascinating. "Departure" seems to refer to his separation from his lover P.K. Page in the late 1940s. For Peter Dale Scott his father's poems "A L'Ange Avant Gardien" and "Will to Win" refer to the artist and dancer Francoise Sullivan. We also know that Scott had a romantic relationship with the artist Pegi Nichol, one of his wife's best friends, which perhaps gives us a different perspective on his poem "For Pegi Nichol". Did the affairs have the silent approval of his wife? "Invert" and "Caring" give an insight into these affairs: it is that Scott was always looking for love but also afraid to leave his marriage with someone he also loved.  As we say, "It's complicated."

            I also reread F.R. Scott's The Dance is One (1973). Scott is not a great poet, he's more of a "minor major poet" whose importance lies in what he did (he helped bring modernism in poetry to Canada), who he knew (Leon Edel, A.J.M. Smith, John Glassco), and what he believed (an inclusive federalist vision of Canada). I met Scott once or twice and he was a lovely person. Louis Dudek told me that Scott controlled every aspect of Sandra Djwa's biography, The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987); I don't think Dudek's comment was a compliment for Scott but part of Dudek's aversion to falsehood in literature. Consider that Scott did not allow certain details about his private life to appear in Djwa's biography. Indeed, Dudek seems to have had a double standard when it came to Scott; Dudek rejected John Glassco's spurious memoir but he never objected to Scott's censorship of Djwa's biography which included his repeated betrayal of his wife in a series of affairs, but perhaps these affairs should remain private.  Should they? Is anything private anymore? What about the children? Where is justice at the individual level?  

            I was also very impressed with Scott's book of translations, St-Denys Garneau & Anne Hebert: Translations/Traductions (1962), and there are more translations in The Dance is One. Both Hebert and Garneau deserve a lot more attention in English Canada. Scott's work as a translator of French Canadian poetry deserves greater acknowledgement and is a part of his literary career.

            The title of The Dance is One is from Scott's poem "Dancing" and is also the inscription on his and his wife's headstone in Mount Royal Cemetery. Another of Scott's poems that deserves greater attention is "Letters From the MacKenzie River, 1956", published in The Dance is One (1973. In this poem Frank Scott refers to, among other things about the North, the residential schools; he is prescient in exposing how bad these institutions actually were, he writes,

                                   

                                    Upstairs on the second story
                                    Seventy little cots
                                    Touching end to end
                                    In a room 30 by 40
                                    Housed the resident boys
                                    In this firetrap mental gaol.

            There are other poems of Frank Scott that deserve to be mentioned, for instance "The Laurentian Shield" which is anthologized and among the best of Scott's writing. Otherwise, I am not a fan of satirical writing so those poems of Scott's hold little interest for me.

 

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

English and French Canadian Poetry


On Mount Royal

If English-Canadian poetry is largely narrative and French-Canadian poetry is largely lyrical, then the most interesting French Canadian poets are Émile Nelligan (1879-1941), St-Denys Garneau (1912-1943), and Anne Hébert (1916-2000). There is a dreamlike quality to the work of both Garneau and Hébert and I think the best way to understand their work is to think of their poems as one thinks of dreams, as visits to the unconscious archetypal mind, to be understood as one interprets one's own dreams. They are direct expressions of the poet's psyche and the collective unconscious of the French-Canadian people. I am always interested in what a poet's work says about the soul of the poet, the soul of the nation, the poet's private mythology. These are dark poets that I have listed, they write of the human , they write of the dark side of the Quebec soul, this means the French soul but also in a symbiotic-two solitudes kind of way the English-speaking soul; that is, my soul. We have a spiritual darkness in Quebec that people in the rest of Canada will find difficult to understand; few people want to look at the soul, they are afraid of what they might see.