 |
| Ste. Catherine street, downtown Montreal, 1954 |
First published in Montreal Serai, December 2013
by Stephen Morrissey
Louis Dudek was one
of my professors at McGill University, later he became a friend. As I’ve
written elsewhere, what brought me to McGill as a graduate student in 1974 was
the desire to study with Dudek. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in
my life. Dudek was a wonderful teacher; but, in addition to his teaching, he
gave me something that profoundly changed my life: it was the gift that all
young poets need, it is the confirmation of the value of their work by an older
poet.
__________________________
In Paradise, Essays on Myth, Art, & Reality,
Dudek writes: “In 1958 I published a book with a new kind of private meditative
rhetoric, En México, and in the
following year I wrote a poem, ‘At Lac en Coeur,’ with an even more quiet and
introspective bent, the beginning of all my later poetry. After that I wrote
the first draft of Atlantis, in the
form of a continuous meditation, in 1961. (It was published in 1967.) Since
then, I have been writing a poem called Continuation,
in the same manner—at times even more extreme as a private language—which I
expect to go on with until the end” (Dudek, 1992, p. 81).
__________________________
Continuation is Louis Dudek’s major work, a poem in three
volumes that preoccupied the last forty years of his life. The poem is
difficult for many readers due to its conversational and fragmentary style;
indeed, at times Continuation seems a
hodgepodge of unrelated statements (for an example of this, please see Appendix
below). Dudek’s concerns—for instance, the negative influence of the media on
society, the importance of the arts, what it being a poet means, rational
thinking in an irrational world, and growing old—are all present in the poem.
These concerns are essential to Dudek’s writing, vision, and his long literary
career, but before most readers can begin to appreciate these concerns in Continuation they need the key to
understanding the poem: the key is Dudek’s use of epigrams.
__________________________
The publishing
history of Continuation is
interesting; Continuation I and Continuation II were published as
separate volumes by Vehicule Press; Continuation
III is more confusing as parts of it were published in two separate books:
Continuation I (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1981), five
sections.
Continuation II (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1990), twenty-one
sections.
Continuation III, found in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997), has four
sections; however, later Dudek said that “Bits and Pieces”, included in The Caged Tiger, was section five of Continuation III; Dudek’s last book, The Surface of Time (Empyreal Press,
Montreal, 2000), includes “Finale”, which is section six of Continuation III.
_________________________
Susan
Stromberg-Stein and I were both students in Dudek’s graduate seminar “The First
Person in Literature”, fall-winter semester 1974-1975. I will quote from
Stromberg-Stein’s Master of Arts thesis, “Louis Dudek, A Biographical Introduction
to his Poetry” (McGill University, 1977), which gives a date for when Dudek
began writing Continuation: she
writes, “The idea for ‘Continuation 1’
came to him while he was still writing Atlantis
in 1961”; then she quotes from Atlantis:
I said to my friend,
“Don’t read this,
it’ll make you dizzy.”
But she read on,
said she couldn’t stop.
“What is it?”
I said: “The vertigo
of freedom.”
Why stop at all, she
said, why not go on?
“Of course I can’t
stop,” I said.
(Stromberg-Stein,
1983, p. 88)
The dates for Continuation would therefore be: genesis
of the concept of assembling fragments of thoughts and images into a long poem,
later used in its most fragmentary form in Continuation,
occurs around 1956 when he was writing En México which was published in 1958 (Dudek
states, “En México is made of
fragments...”, interview with Louise Schrier); reference to the first tentative
composition of Continuation, found in
Dudek’s long poem, Atlantis, was
written in 1961; and the actual composition of Continuation begins on 4 January 1967 (see the holograph of the
first page of the poem in the Louis Dudek issue of Open Letter, 1981).
__________________________
In Continuation
Dudek is creating a multi-book long poem. This type of project requires
maintaining creative inspiration and a long term commitment to a structure and
themes that will be repeated in the subsequent books. By “multi-book long poem”
I am referring to the major long poems written in the 20th century
in the English language, dominated by American poets; the major works are: Ezra
Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s
Maximus, and Louis Zukofsky’s A (there are other single or multi
book-length poems, but these are the important titles). Dudek is critical of
all these poets and he gives various reasons for his criticism; indeed, his
criticism of them is a way of explaining what he perceived as the errors these
other poets made in their work, errors he wanted to avoid. Perhaps he is also
laying his claim to the long poem form and making room for his own work, with
no deference or condescension to any who came before him. His previous book-length
long poems—Europe, En México, and Atlantis—were all significant works, but they were also preparation
for Continuation.
__________________________
The whole of Continuation is a series of meditations
and reflections on life in the late twentieth century; the following epigram
shows the seriousness with which Dudek approached his art:
“Art and the
artist,” I said, “is our religion”
Art is the true religion
(Dudek, 1990, p. 73)
__________________________
In his preface to Continuation One, Dudek states that the
poem “is a record of poetic moments and fragments. . . that I think of as
coming from an underground stream, a poetic gurgle that goes on behind the
other concerns of life, like an obsession, and pertains more to the mind’s
essential working than to any imposed pattern. If it has an order it is an
order in the nature of the mind itself, or of the world we live in, not in poetic
traditions or in ideas consciously held.”
__________________________
Dudek admired the
writings of Henry Miller, someone with whom he corresponded and at one time
wanted to publish. One winter afternoon in the mid-1970s, on a city bus home
from McGill, when I expressed to Dudek my enthusiasm for Henry Miller’s fiction
and non-fiction, he told me of his own admiration for Miller’s writing. At
first glance this is a curious association, Miller seems one of the most
dissimilar writers to Dudek; however, Dudek stated that his ideal for his own poetry
is to write in the conversational style of Henry Miller but always maintaining the
critical faculty of Matthew Arnold. In Continuation
Dudek is able to combine what he learned from Miller and Arnold and communicate
his own poetic vision.
__________________________
There are several
influences on Dudek’s work, for instance Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, and Matthew
Arnold. An important although less known influence is the French poet Stéphane
Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s influence on
Dudek’s work is in the use of chance or randomness and the fragmentary effect
it has on the poem. Continuation has
a kind of anarchic quality, it is a montage of disparate epigrams or
statements. Dudek states, in a 1992 interview with Laurence Hutchman, “If you
go back to the seventeenth century, the emblem poems in which a poem imitates
the shape of something, well, that was the first of its kind. Then, the next
important step, I would say, is Mallarmé and the poem Un coup de dés, “A throw of the dice,” where the words are
scattered, because he’s trying to say something about chance. Un coup de dés n’abolit pas le hazard (A
throw of the dice does not abolish chance). Of course, rather a self-evident
statement. Anyhow, that’s a wonderful poem of Mallarmé’s that had a powerful
effect upon me” (Hutchman, 2011, p. 113).
__________________________
“…it is his
(Pound’s) didactic obsession behind the whole ideogrammic show…” (Dudek
writing in a Poetry Canada Review
article, early 1990s). But the same can be said for Dudek’s epigrams: in a 1988
interview with Louise Schrier, Dudek states: “So his [Pound’s] Cantos are composed of a series of such
ideograms: presented pieces of history, examples of Malatesta, examples of
Confucius saying this or that; and out of these concrete examples and instances
the great epic develops. My method is analogous to that really, but it doesn’t
come from Pound. It comes from the original source of Imagism itself” (Schrier,
1990, p. 44). But the original source of Imagism includes Pound’s ideograms and
Dudek’s epigrams reveal his own didactic
obsession...
__________________________
Dudek’s epigrams are
similar but they are not the same as Pound’s ideograms. Pound’s concept of the
ideograms—developed from a manuscript given to Pound by Ernest Fenollosa’s
widow—present the ideogram or Chinese written character as a visual concept—an
image—available to poets; later this was developed into an aesthetic device
that can be found in the Imagists’ manifesto and poems. Dudek’s epigrams are
short concise statements, mostly lacking a visual quality, that develop into
poems.
__________________________
I remember Louis showing me the manuscript of his Epigrams before it was published, typed on onion skin paper, in his office at McGill. The epigrams are important to Dudek and especially to understanding his work in Continuation. One of the epigrams reads: “Epigrams are one-line poems. A lot of them together are like a long poem” (Dudek, 1975, p. 38). That “long poem” is Continuation.
__________________________
Dudek’s epigrammatic
insights are conversational, presented as though one is listening to someone
talking. It’s an informal style of writing, as Dudek’s attention jumps from one
observation to another; however, there is cohesion to what he is talking about;
many epigrams are variations that share the same subject. The structure of the
poem is organic and verbal. Continuation
could have been filmed with Dudek speaking the poem as he walks on Mount Royal
or along a street in Montreal.
__________________________
Dudek: “...if you
look at Continuation 1 and 2 you may say, ‘What he’s got here are variations.’ As Mike
Gnarowski said, ‘You know, you’re saying the same thing over and over.’ I never
repeat myself entirely, but actually if you examine it, and you number these
things or see them in different colours, you might get a sense of variation in
the way it occurs. It’s the way the ideas turn and return (Hutchman, 2011,
114).”
__________________________
Year ago, Dudek
suggested to me that to write a poem one needed a good first line or sentence,
something aphoristic, epigrammatic, or otherwise memorable. Any successful poem
that I’ve written begins with just such a sentence that seems to initiate a
stream of writing and then a poem. I had already described my writing
technique, in A Real Good Goosin',
Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets (1981) as “cranking it
out”. A few years ago, rereading this comment, I was embarrassed by it, I felt
“cranking it out” was flippant, that it lacked seriousness, but as I thought
about it I returned to thinking of my own approach to composition and “cranking
it out” seems a good way to write a first draft. That is, to write without the
apparent burden of preconceptions and self-censorship. For Dudek, a first line
or sentence with which he could begin writing a poem was the epigram; either
the epigram inspired the writing of the poem, or the epigram was the first good
line or sentence that begins a poem, or the epigrams are the poem.
__________________________
In his Notebooks, 1960 -1994, Dudek writes,
“Aphorisms (epigrams) give you more for your time and money than any other
literary form. Only the poem comes near to it, but then most good poems either
start off from an aphorism or arrive at one: ‘April is the cruellest month...’
‘We must love one another or die.’ ... Aphorisms and epigrams are the
corner-stones of literary art” (Dudek, 1994, p. 52).
__________________________
John Cage, one of
the most experimental composers of the last century, was also a poet; towards
the end of his life Cage served as Poet Laureate of the United States at the
Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Cage’s long poem, “How to Improve the
World (You’ll Only Make it Worse)” is a random assemblage of statements, it is
described by Cage as “a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories...”
(Cage, 1967, p. 3). This could just as easily be a description of Dudek’s Continuation. I don’t think there is any
poet whose work comes closest in concept to Dudek’s in Continuation than this work by John Cage; unfortunately, as was the
case of Dudek’s rejection of Marshal McLuhan’s work, and the work of other
avant-garde artists and thinkers of his generation, Dudek also rejected Cage.
__________________________
What seems
“meaninglessness” in Continuation
gives way to what is “meaningful”, you just have to keep reading long enough to
see what the poem is all about. Meaning is achieved by the repetition of
epigrams that share a similar idea; however, these epigrams are not
conveniently grouped together. Dudek juxtaposes epigrammatic statements in a
random non-linear way, but out of what seem “meaningless” statements comes a
wholeness, a sense of Dudek’s unified vision. In the very act of the random
assemblage of epigrams comes a new meaning and vision.
__________________________
Dudek, like many
other Post-Modern writers, ended up writing an open-ended and almost
“structureless poem”; this is one aspect of the movement of poetry in the 20th
Century and it is partly what made sonnets and ballads obsolete forms. This is
also what Jackson Pollock was attempting in his paintings. Visual artists, like
Pollock, aimed at creating art by circumventing the limiting imposition of the
ego on the work. Continuation, in
terms of visual art, is closest to the action paintings of Jackson Pollock; it
is art that has no center and no narrative, for every part of the surface of
the painting is the “center” just as every part of Continuation is the center of the poem.
__________________________
I can now see that
what Dudek liked about my visual poem, regard
as sacred the disorder of my mind (in The
Trees of Unknowing, 1978, for which he also wrote an Introduction), is the
epigrammatic aspect of it, as well as the use of white space indicating
silence, and that the poem can be read by one or by many voices simultaneously.
All there is to the poem is the single line, regard as sacred the disorder of my mind. It is a concrete poem
using a line from Arthur Rimbaud’s Season
in Hell, revisioned and reworked into a visual poem for voices.
__________________________
One day—it was the
afternoon of January 9, 1979—I was with Louis Dudek and Lionel Kearns, who
named his son Louis after Dudek. We had something to eat at a food court after
Lionel’s reading. My then wife was pregnant but was not expecting to give birth
for another four weeks. This was the one time I went off by myself, other than
going to work, while my wife was pregnant. I arrived home around 5 p.m., the
flat was in darkness, and I found an almost illegible note scribbled by my
mother-in-law, telling me to go to the hospital, that there were problems with
the pregnancy. A neighbour drove me to the Montreal General Hospital where my
son had been born prematurely. This is where I was when my son was born, not in
the birthing room at a major hospital, but with Louis Dudek and Lionel Kearns
talking poetry in a food court in downtown Montreal.
__________________________
“Some epigrams come
provided with a grain of salt, called wit.” “An epigram is the shining jewel in
the watch. There is no good poetry without some element of epigram in it.” “A
good poem improves, and a bad poem gets worse, as time goes by.” All three of
these epigrams can be found in Small
Perfect Things (Dudek, 1991, p. 90-91). More than a decade after his
passing we are just now catching up with Dudek’s work. Dudek’s poems are not
dated or clichéd, as I stated in my essay on Dudek, “The First Person in
Literature” (Collins, et al. eds, 2003), his poems are more relevant now than
when they were originally published.
__________________________
“I think of the long
poem, the stream of fragmentary but authentic inspiration, as the most
important development of modernism, although this has not yet been much
realized or acknowledged by anyone. It is a form of immense possibility for the
future” (Dudek, 1994,
p. 59). In this
statement, Dudek could be describing Continuation,
for Continuation is one of the great
Canadian poems of the twentieth century, it is a truly original work of poetry
unlike anything previously written. Indeed, Continuation
is Dudek’s greatest work, it is part of his enormous literary legacy as a
poet, critic, and man of letters.
_________________________
Note: My thanks to
Laurence Hutchman for the gift of Continuation
II, which got me writing these notes. My thoughts turn to my friends, the
late Sonja Skarstedt and her husband Geof Isherwood. They were Louis’s dear
friends and support in his old age and published, with Empyreal Press, his last
books. Sonja, still missed by her friends.
When I made
enquiries about Empyreal Press and their relationship with publishing
Continuation III, Geof Isherwood informed me that the work
for Empyreal Press was “99% Sonja’s effort.” Her literary papers are housed at
Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
November 2012
– February 2013 • Montreal
Appendix
In order to give the
reader a clear example of the fragmentary nature of Continuation, that is, of Dudek’s deliberate random assemblage of unrelated
sentences, lines, epigrams, phrases, and observations, I include the following
quotation from Continuation One:
Say it
As the true mimesis
a poem without direction
When they make dried
fruits
think of what goes off in the air
‘You could breathe
and live’
‘Miss Collins, what
is a hundred and four over n?’
The carrot greens
are hanging out of the garbage bag
They have served
their purpose
Necessity is the
will of God
What he wants most
is to exist
Wish you were here
having a good time
I am the imagination
that creates
an image of
itself
The poets have been
trying to conceive man
Now they want to be
as well as to conceive
So Ezra was ok
He survived our
misunderstandings
As the body
disintegrates, the spirit grows more firm
He said, ‘Nothing
can help,
The turbulence
inside is not responsive to rationality’
And so went away
The gnarled
features, face like a battered hammer,
and fists bleeding poems
To walk with twinges
of pure pain
punctuating every step,
fight the
violence erupting
Try to make language
live—
the
sun’s gift
O for a few
analyzable poems
that with a little
mortar one might fit
into a
history of philosophy
To realize what we
are, as living,
at the same time
that we live on the page
Since poetry is like
God, the one necessary element
missing from all we
know
The nursery at six
o’clock
an action
painting
(Continuation One, pages 20-22)
Works Cited
Cage, John. 1967. A Year From Monday, New Lectures and Writing. Wesleyan University Press. Middleton, Connecticut.
Dudek, Louis. 1975. Epigrams. DC Books, Montreal.
Dudek, Louis, the Vehicule Poets. 1981. A Real Good Goosin', Talking Poetics, Louis Dudek and The Vehicule Poets. Maker Press, Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. 1981. Open Letter. Issue dedicated to Louis Dudek. Spring & summer, nos. 8-9. Toronto.
Dudek, Louis. 1981. Continuation I. Montreal, Vehicule
Press.
Dudek, Louis. 1988.
Robin Blaser (ed.). The Infinite World, The Poetry of Louis Dudek.
Vehicule Press, Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. 1990. Continuation II. Montreal,
Vehicule Press.
Dudek, Louis. Interview by Schrier, Louise. 1990. Zymergy, # 8. Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. Early 1990s. Poetry Canada Review, Vol. 15, No. 1.
Dudek, Louis. 1991. Small Perfect Things. DC Books, Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. 1992. Paradise, Essays on Myth, Art, & Reality. Vehicule Press, Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. 1994.
Notebooks 1960 – 1994. The Golden Dog
Press, Ottawa.
Dudek, Louis. 1997. The Caged Tiger. Montreal, Empyreal Press, Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. 2000. The Surface of Time. Empyreal Press,
Montreal.
Dudek, Louis. 2011.
Interview by Hutchman, Laurence. In the
Writers’ Words, Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets, Guernica Editions,
Toronto.
Morrissey, Stephen. 1978. The Trees of Unknowing. Introduction by Louis Dudek. Vehicule Press, Montreal.
Morrissey, Stephen.
2003. ‘The First Person in Literature’ in Eternal
Conversations, Remembering Louis Dudek. Collins, Aileen, Skarstedt, Sonja
and Gnarowski, Michael (eds). DC Books, Montreal.
Stromberg-Stein, Susan. 1983. “Louis Dudek, A Biographical Introduction to his Poetry”. Golden Dog Press, Ottawa.
