Commentary on Continuation III, Introduction (Edited)

 

Downtown Montreal, 1960s

This third book, really never more than a proposed book, by Louis Dudek, and continuing his Continuation project, was meant to be his final Continuation statement; the incomplete and unassembled nature of this text coincides with the incomplete nature of the whole project. There isn’t a completed book titled Continuation III; there are bits and pieces, an assemblage of fragments that are significant. Continuation III is the deconstruction of Continuation I and II. It is the intervention of life over art, the separation of artifice and authenticity. The triumph of truth over poetry’s facsimile of authenticity. It is where poetry ends and the last words and absolution begin.

Final lines in Continuation III:

Stand there and remember

the paltriness of worldly claims

and the immensity

that is always now.

--The Surface of Time (2000), p. 84

-o-

The content of Continuation III was published in two installments by Sonja Skarstedt’s Empyreal Press. “Continuation III [Fragment]” and “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” both appear in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997). “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” is the only section of all three "Continuation" that deviates from the style, use of epigrams, and line breaks found in the previous two books. The final poems are in Dudek’s last book, The Surface of Time (2000).

There is no single volume or completed series of poems called Continuation III but there are fragments, and completed sections, of what might have been the text of this non-existent third book. In Dudek's The Caged Tiger (1997) there is "Continuation III (Fragment)"; it has four sections and the fourth section emphasizes the importance of poetry; this is followed by "Notes for Ken" (Norris), these are page numbers and notes explaining some of the references and meaning of this section. Then, Dudek published Surface of Time (2000) and the final Continuation III poems are included here, "Sequence from "Continuation III". This is the conclusion to the Continuation project; it emphasizes the importance, value, and journey of Dudek’s poetry, both writing poetry and reading poetry; in addition to poetry the other topic in the Continuation texts is God, the divine presence, and there are references to both God and poetry throughout all three Continuation books. Suddenly, the poem ends, not in mid-sentence but it ends (as life ends), the various fragments have ended but it still has the feeling of continuation; it might serve as Dudek's literary “last will and testament": it's the gift of the importance of poetry. But it is also a failed completion of the Continuation project and proves my belief that most long, multi-volume poems end in failure, not in completion, and, as Pound said of his Cantos, it does not cohere. 

These two books in which the Continuation III poems appear contain other short poems, and this might suggest that the energy for completing Continuation had run out, I suspect that this is the case; perhaps poetry is a young person’s activity, it requires energy the old don’t have; but Dudek might have asked himself why write short poems when the larger and more consequential Continuation project needs to be completed? The obvious answer is that he no longer had the energy or strength, or vision, to sustain a longer poem.

-o-

Continuation III is preoccupied with and describes what it’s like to be old. It has a quality of increasing fragmentation, the body is collapsing, it's closing down,, it is beginning to reach its end.

It is possible some parts of Continuation III were written much earlier and then recycled into the final book. I have tried to indicate both the movement of time and the various insights in these three books; dates for composition remain approximate, for instance, the embryo of Continuation III was in 1990.

-o-

"Continuation III" (this section is found at the end of The Caged Tiger) is divided into four sections with an additional section, “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]” at the very end of the book. Between these two sections is “Notes for Ken [Norris]”, that briefly elaborate Dudek’s vision in personal terms, not abstract ideas but poetry. This writing is Dudek in his old age, in which the theme of youth vs. (old) age is further developed. This is a poem of summation of the important points in Continuation I and II. The fragmentary nature, writing in fragments, is important here. It seems that in old age all there is are fragments; indeed, one doesn’t have the strength to write a long poem without relying on the fragmentary nature of the poem. In old age this is all that’s left of the individual; it’s fragments, not much else but fragments and inevitable death. And death, meditations on death, run throughout this poem. While this is the weakest of the three books—because it is incomplete and published in two separate volumes— it might also be the most moving, written directly from Dudek’s profound experience when he wrote this section.

-o-

The most difficult time in a person’s life is when they are at their weakest, it is when we are old. If one is a sensitive or intelligent person old age is a time of physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual decline to inevitable death. As one grows old the body wears out, just as the body of an old car rusts, parts wear out and have to be replaced, and nothing works as well as it used to. After a lifetime of stress one’s ability to handle emotional conflict is at its lowest; we’ve survived death, divorce, betrayal, but there isn’t much left to us, our nerves are shot... The brain is also wearing out, thought processes are not as fast as they used to be, there is the possibility of dementia and senility. As well, one wonders if the spirituality that was once a support is now viable, facing the end one might wonder if religion was never more than a fairy tale; or, one’s spirituality is strengthened by the circumstances of one’s life. Around you, all of your old friends and family members are dying, you are more and more alone, and you must face your own inevitable death. There is the chance that one’s family, one’s own children, have turned on you and invented a rift, the very people you loved the most have become the biggest disappointment of your life. Do they care? Perhaps not at all. This is a dismal picture of old age. This is what Dudek is writing about when he says that old people are either always smiling or always scowling; that the older one gets the more one looks like a corpse. Some old people are strong and resilient, they have the support of loving families and have a positive outlook on life; however, many others become bitter as they grow old, and some become insane, gags, with their inability to handle the terrible final demands of their existence.

-o-

Note the fragmentary nature of Continuation III, note that it is a fragment in a fragment. Life has dissolved into its separate parts, there isn’t the energy to work on a larger manuscript.

-o-

There is still poetry and “shining”, what is brilliant, mysterious, against the world of appearance, is a counterpoint to the world of appearance and possible illusion. The infinite, one of Dudek’s favourite words, seems to be a part of life, for those able to perceive it, as well as the experience of poetry. Some excerpts:

We are tied to a chariot called time

and dragged along the road

(58)

Well, you’re old only once

Something to be said for that



And thanks to the collection of manuscripts

we now know, before we die

what our friends really thought of us

(59)



Against this, he writes:



There are days when

whatever is is bright



(63)



An Appearance Erscheinung

not “mere appearance”

but a shining

EPIPHANEIA

(64)



Why should I bow to authority?

The poem is my authority

if I want truth.



(65)



-o-

Tragi-comedy, comic-tragedy

Let’s see how you will laugh

when your time comes.

(69)



And accept everything that is given—

pain, darkness, death.

So I am living it

for the last time

like the young

who are living it

for the first time

Ah!

The lilacs falling over themselves

on the garage roof,

and the trellis of trees, making their leaves

for a new summer.



(70-71)

-o-

the one you lie to is the one you love.

“Santuzza, criedi mi!”

cries out Turridu

and died with the lie on his lips.



“Santuizza, credi me! Santuzza, credi me!”



If it’s the truth it fits like a glove,

but the one you lie to is the one you love.

. . . .

Where are the kind friends that used to pass,

and the lovers, with laughing loves—

where are they gone from this world of glass?

(71)

-o-

I am a hole in space,

empty as matter, hungry as death—

can eat up the universe in my maw.

I push into unknown infinite world...



(Came to the sun, came to the earth

and wedged into matter)



I am an interloper,

even now as I push my pencil in the dark

and write this poem.

(76-77)

-o-

His advice:

Keep pushing ahead

with all the language arts,

developing new brain cells

And the reader rubbing his bald pate

in irritation—

Canadian (or American)

“entreprenoors”

sipping their “kreem the menthe”

to their “déjà voo”—





Some of this is beautiful, simply exquisite writing. 

(I don’t remember what the event was all about but in the mid-1990s I was driving Louis and a few others to a Greek restaurant (on the corner of Northcliffe Avenue and Sherbrooke Street West), I remember Dudek correcting me on my pronunciation of “déjà vu”... it was the same restaurant where the poet Keitha MacIntosh used to spend hours correcting student papers and drinking tea. She lived across the street in the large apartment building on the northwest corner, on the corner next across the street from the restaurant. Alas, she, too, has departed (in August 2012) this veil of tears... this vale of soul-making.). Actually, I think Keitha may have been there when we entered the restaurant, but not sure about that.

-o-

Ah, the tears, the tears of forgetfulness

for all our sorrows

For all the good we leave behind

(Even you, my dear,

whom I love more than myself

—the self that I despise)

(82)

-o-

Back, for a minute, to epigrams:

The New Yorker has set a very high standard

for perfume advertising

So has “the Booker Prize”

for best-sellers.

(86)

-o-

Underlying the whole poem is the importance of poetry, but also of languages, of knowing several languages possibly in order to be a literate and educated individual. In his old age Dudek was translating Greek poetry using a bilingual dictionary; he told me, “it’s simple”, just follows the order of the words and look them up in a dictionary.

-o-

The second section in Continution III is “Bits & Pieces [A Recitation]”. This section is made up of “Bits & Pieces”, but it’s an interesting poem. It posits two voices of the same person speaking with some directions or instructions as to how it should be read (for instance, “cut here”, “pause”, “break”, “long pause”, and so on). The voice that is italicized could be Dudek’s thinking while the voice in plain type could be Dudek addressing an audience; there are other variations of this. Italics could indicate answers or responses the one speaking, the unconscious mind, the fragmentation of the speaker’s voice, and so on.


The world is always full

of the young.

(99)

The body breaks down. If one medicine fails

you try another.

In the end they all fail.

But you keep on trying.

Only youth

never fails.

(106)

-o-

“Sequence from Continuation III” appears in The Surface of Time (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 2000). This is the final “sequence” and conclusion of the poem. It is fragmentary, as thinking is fragmentary, moving from one thought to the next but always overshadowed with Dudek’s concerns: poetry, infinity, youth vs. age, and so on. Poetry seems to be one approach to an awareness of eternity:


Time and space are a construct,

we know it.

But before time and space, what was there?


Eternity is the surface of time.

(80)


What started things, what

was there before the creation

in unknowable to us.

But it shines

from a leaf, from a letter

on the perfect page.


Poetry is a wandering search

an escape from gravity—

a space-walk in the open.

(81)

-o-

And then we have a memory, an anecdote, regarding the “many funerals” Dudek attended as a child. It is the beginning of his sense of mortality, of the utter transience of life. It is the positioning of youth and age beside each other, of an awareness of temporality, an awareness of death. But with this awareness is also a more difficult awareness, it is of the magnificence of life, the multiplicity of existence, the “shining” features of life, the transcendence of temporality found on poetry and life.

Then, he gives us another memory from childhood, “How you fumbled in class,/ how you failed in arithmetic” (83), and then the final, compelling and deeply moving words of this monument of poetry. For, as I remember thinking as we left Dudek’s funeral (on the side of Mount Royal, within walking distance of St. Joseph’s Oratory) that cold March day in 2001, we had greatness among us, we had a Colossus (as Henry Miller referred to a writer friend of his) among us, and now we are alone to face the demands of “savage modernity”:

Go out in the sun

some Sunday morning

when the clouds are melting

over St. Joseph’s,

look down from Mount Royal

to that other world.


It is far off and glorious—

at the heart of creation—

no tin-can world

of savage modernity,

but the everlasting

world of a present

where you stand

in the pale light of allness.


Stand there and remember

the paltriness of worldly claims,

and the immensity

that is always now.

(83-84)

-o-

Postscript: Just last night I was reading some comments on Dudek's poetry, written by another poet who was a fan of Dudek's poetry. This poet praised Atlantis and sections of his other long poems, but nobody (not even my poet contemporaries) will stand up for Continuation; one critic, who knew Dudek, didn't even have the correct title of the poem, throughout his discussion of the poem he refers to it as Continuations. My God, can't we even get the title right? Most critics disparage or ignore Continuation and yet, if you read interviews with Dudek, read what he said about the poem, the whole project took over forty years to write, it is meticulously written, and it is Dudek's longest piece of writing. Continuation should have been three books, and it should be republished as such but in one volume. It is Dudek's most experimental writing. And yet, it is ignored, it is treated as something critics wish had never been written, it's an embarrassment. My contention has always been that Continuation is a significant poem in Dudek's body of work. Well, times have changed and we've entered a very dark time in western civilization, not just in Canada but in the west; in Canadian poetry the (golden) days of Modernism, of Irving Layton, Al Purdy, include F.R. Scott in this short list, and others has ended and what we have today is the irrelevancy of poetry and poets; not one poet today has the public status of earlier poets, not one poet is a public personality or presence in the media, not one poet is listened to. It could be that one day people will read Continuation and understand exactly what Louis Dudek is saying, that's what happens with difficult literature, with time the educated public find what was formerly difficult fairly obvious in its meaning.  13/02/2026


Note: Written in 2012; revised October - November 2024, 2025. Thought: the best final statement is to put in writing what one is thinking, don't leave it up to chance or the possibility that someone might understand what you are saying. Suggestion for poets: be your own critic because the critics may never write about your work and you need to explain what you are doing.

Edited: 13 February 2026.

Commentary on Continuation II, Introduction

 

Of course, Continuation II  begins where Continuation I ends. Here we have twenty-one sections, each one an enlargement and development on the totality of the poem. The quotation from Baudelaire at the beginning of this second book defines Dudek’s ambition in Continuation; it is to write “a poetic prose, musical without metre and without rhymes, subtle and staccato enough to follow the lyric motions of the soul...” That is, this is a poetry of the psyche, of the poet’s soul, the poet’s meditation on what enters the field of his perception and then becomes a part of this long poem. This is Dudek’s project, not necessarily influenced by Ezra Pound but Dudek’s original vision and voice. 

 

Yes, volleying down corridors

with arms spread out and screaming,

the young have taken over

(9)

 

All of us who have taught at a post secondary level will appreciate this image! Dudek wisely deleted mentioning LSD, found in the previous text, it was a bit of an overreach and its deletion improves the poem.

-o-

 

This section begins with observations on teaching art, the modern age, The youth have given up even cursory respect for the elders, “Leaving historians who grace us with dignity/ to note/ some trivial shifts in domestic arrangements” (9); our society is portrayed as “A dying insect, twitching his legs, to keep alive” (9).

 

Then Man in the mass   group thinking

—    infantile, ferile, insane

 

with concentration camps

            (a sick inmate supported by friends

to save him from being shot

                        for not standing)

(10)

 

-o-

But always the concern for art, even with this beginning detailing some of the horrors of modern man. Note the use of the word “shining” that is prominent in Continuation III; and despite the negative comment regarding mysticism, there is a mystical sensibility in Dudek regarding writing poetry and the perceptions of one growing old. It is “art a forward urge”.

 

Art attempts to exteriorize the psyche

                        to internalize the ego —

submerge in the oldest self

 

But mysticism is regressive

and art a forward urge

 

Cruelty the inner hell

                        as action, without control

 

Yet there is also light, shining on the mind,

                        a great kindness

(11)

 

-o-

This first section ends with a prayer; Dudek is seventy-two years old when he published Continuation II; his attention is turned to several things: a world in which cruelty and war are ever-present; the changing relationship between children and adults; an unknown future; the necessity of the creative mind to penetrate the dark future.

 

Lord, let me have wings

            in my late years, when baldness comes

Open my skull to heaven like a mirror

 

Let me think nothing but

            eternal thoughts, out of that dust a gavel,

the ashes of existence

 

Make new hope possible, form future birds

            Laugh at wounds, tear all obstacles aside

and show, naked, the creative chromosomes

(13)

 -o-

Does it cohere? That’s one of the tests of poetry. How many poets, after writing some of their most significant work, ask this question? Pound. Olson? But not W.C. Williams.   

-o-

What is banal and trite has its place here, in Continuation II, unfortunately, it detracts from Continuation I; this is regrettable because it is difficult enough to string together all of these epigrams without the distraction of inferior epigrams, it makes you doubt the validity of the whole work and the reader thinks “Dudek’s lost it, the inspiration of Continuation I is lost on Continuation II”, and I think this may be the case (see note below). Continuation II is a longer book than Continuation I, and the projected Continuation III was never completed and what was published is incomplete. Continuation II is almost a separate book, it is as though Dudek is trying to find his way, his direction, in the second Continuation book. 

 -o-

Note: On writing poetry in old age

What needs to be addressed here is the affect of old age on writing poetry and on poets. There are exceptions but, as far as I can see, and what I have experienced, is that old age is the termination of writing poetry, of writing good poetry. Dispute this if you want, and I will be the first to agree with you, but my experience is that writing poetry takes energy and old people often don't have the necessary energy for this work; writing poetry takes time, to let the unconscious transform experience and thought into poetry. The old, in my experience, are concerned with the ending of life and what leads up to this: this is what they talk about: loss of health, loss of family and friends, loss of one's old position in society, sickness and death. There are significant exceptions to this but my impression is that old age is of such magnitude that concern with it takes over one's life. This may account for Dudek's Continuation declining as it did.

Written in 2012; revised: October-November 2024 and January 2026. 

Note: I had planned to return to Continuation II and complete this project but, as they say, "life got in the way". I have some notes on "Continuation III” and will publish them here, but so far, they, too, are incomplete. It is still a worthwhile task, the textual analysis and discussion of Dudek's Continuation books. Continuation is a doorway into many discussions. As it is, Continuation doesn't cohere; but, if the first two books and the completed work in Book Three were published as a single book, or even just Book Three published as a single book, or even just put this work online, perhaps that would let readers see the significance of the work as a whole, completed, and not just disparate writings.

 

 

 

On Louis Dudek’s "Continuation"

Cross-Section: Poems 1940-1980 (Coach House Press, 1980), Louis Dudek

 

My copy of Louis Dudek’s  Cross-Section: Poems 1940-1980 (1980) used to belong to my friend Sonja Skarsteft, it is one of several books given to me by Sonja’s husband, Geof Isherwood, after Sonja’s passing and it is a book that I treasure because it was Sonja's and it was inscribed to her by another friend, Louis Dudek. Cross-Section is a selection of Dudek’s previously unpublished poems, organized in chronological order from 1940 to 1980. A poem entitled "Fragment of Continuum", the final poem in the book, immediately caught my attention, written in 1980 it is similar to Dudek's Continuation poems in its form and content; the poem is conversational, it is a stream of consciousness that easily fits as a part of Continuation, albeit not quite as good as Continuation, but there must be some connection between this poem and Continuation.

Dudek was uneasy about publishing Continuation, it is idiosyncratic, unlike anything else he wrote, and either readers are willing to extend their idea of what poetry is or they dismiss it as obscure and without artistic value. Continuation was not well received even by Dudek's friends; for instance, Mike Gnarowski was condescending about the poem when I mentioned it to him a year or so before he died. But Louis persevered, as any poet must persevere who writes something considerably out of the main stream of contemporary poetry or their usual work; however, Continuation is also similar to Dudek’s previously published long poems and it is a development on his previous poems. It was years in creative gestation before it was finally published; it also parallels Dudek's growth as a poet.  

Here (revised) is the publishing history of Continuation from my essay, "Reading Louis Dudek’s Continuation: An introduction to a major Canadian poem", published in "Montreal Serai" around December 2013: 

The publishing history of Continuation is interesting; Continuation I ( 1981) and Continuation II (1989) were published as separate volumes by Vehicule Press; Continuation III was never completed but parts of it were published in two separate books, they are:

Continuation III, found in The Caged Tiger (Empyreal Press, Montreal, 1997), has four sections; “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), concludes with "Sequence from 'Continuation III', which would be section six of "Continuation III".

In Dudek's "White Book", his Collected Poetry (1971), there is an excerpt from "Continuation I" which he subtitled "An infinite Poem in Progress". Dudek’s explanation of "Fragment of Continuum", published the year before Continuation I was published, is also explained but in a footnote to the poem, and it could also describe what he is doing in Continuation; a "continuum" he defines as "Something in which a fundamental common character is discernible amid a series of insensible or indefinite variations". As in Continuation.

There should have been Continuation III, not only excerpts published in two of Dudek’s books.  I am told that Dudek’s literary executor was Mike Gnarowski, but probably due to old age or dislike of Continuation, Professor Gnarowski never published a complete three volume Continuation; there should be three volumes to this work--it should be triadic--the number three suggesting completion, a creative and archetypal manifestation of the creative spirit. Continuation remains incomplete as two volumes; the number two as an archetypal number suggesting the absence of completion, and this reminds us that the poem remains unfinished.

Multiple book length poems are difficult to write and to get published, and difficult to sustain to completion; for instance, some long poems do not cohere, think of Pound's Cantos or Olson's Maxiumus Poems. Dudek's Continuation ends in the poet's acknowledgement that old age preoccupies his thinking and his daily activity and the poem shows the effect of being old; with the exception of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, the long poem is not the domain of old poets as Dudek experienced. Of course, there are exceptions, there always are, but still, few old people have the energy required to maintain a sustained creative effort such as the long poem. That’s just common sense.

Voice in Louis Dudek’s Continuation, "in the most amazing fragmentary way"

 

Montreal, 1920s

Even in 1965, when I began writing poetry, I knew I had to find my voice; finding my voice lead me to eventually write real poems. Louis Dudek found his voice in poetry in Continuation:

I feel that in Continuation this is my voice, this is my true voice in poetry. It’s the personal voice that at age fifteen, or even earlier, I already had, and therefore I worked all my life to record on the page. That was the breathless adventure...I think my discovery of myself, gradually, through thinking and through a sort of philosophical monologue, tossing about the life questions, comes together finally, so that in Continuation II I am where I am supposed to be.                                                    (Louise Schrier interview, 51)

Epigrams preoccupied Dudek’s last forty years. The epigram gave Dudek the key to writing Continuation; the composition of Continuation is based on two breakthroughs: Dudek’s discovery of epigrams which lead to Dudek’s discovery of his voice in poetry.

In his Notebooks 1960 – 1994 (The Golden Dog Press, Ottawa, 1994), Dudek writes, “The great poems tend to be great expository statement. And each such poem is a central poem for the poet in question, containing the core of his vision and thought.” (Notebooks, 29) That’s what is in Continuation, Dudek’s “vision and thought.”

Louis Dudek writes that his “breakthrough” in discovering his voice in poetry came about when he was writing En México (1958). What caused this “breakthrough”—this discovery of voice—in Dudek’s writing? There was the cathartic journey to Mexico, to escape the “dejection” that he felt at home, caused by his conflicted situation in life, and to resolve an inner conflict. Going to Mexico is Dudek’s descent to the underworld, to a place where the unconscious mind is never far from the surface of consciousness and daily life. That’s where he discovered his voice; that’s where the second half of his life, from 1956 on, is born.

Let’s read some excerpts of Laurence Hutchman’s interview with Dudek on 25 June 1992:

 I suppose I do [that is, Dudek considers Continuation his best work] because it is the most completely worked out, a case of finding a voice for myself in the poetry. I explain that in the interview with Louise Schrier in Zymergy 8. In Continuation I and Continuation II, I at last found a voice where I could say exactly what I want to say, and everything I want to say, in the most amazing fragmentary way. (Hutchman, 103)

 ...you have to take risks in poetry. What is poetry trying to do on the page? It’s trying to represent the poet’s thought. If that’s what it’s trying to do, then ultimately you have to create a fictitious form that is doing that. Not one that is spurious, but the actual thought with all its fragmentary wayward digressions. And yet, if you read Continuation I and II, you find that it’s really not digressing so very much. It’s actually obsessively concerned with only one kind of subject. (Hutchman, 104) 

The process is the internal monologue, only that part of it in the mind which deals with this question, which is poetry. But it’s as if you were listening to me thinking as if it were recorded. (Hutchman, 104)

En México is the beginning in the transformation of Dudek’s poetry:

 ...I think it was in 1956—I went to Mexico to write En México, and there’s a great deal of dejection underlying that poem and that whole period of my poetry. (Schrier, 46)

...the poem En México is fascinating in the way it got the form it has... I wrote down lines of poetry fragments as they came, and these later became the poem. This method is something you will find developing gradually in my poetry... (Schrier, 47)

Here is the important passage in the Schrier interview regarding Dudek’s discovery of voice:

Now, from the time when I was, say, about eight or ten years old, I can remember a mode of feeling and consciousness that was all my own, which I knew was the way I saw things or felt things. Not that I had any idea of the importance of this, it’s just that I remember it. But, ultimately, the purpose must be to take that consciousness, which is always you, which is continuous and perhaps enriching itself with experience, and find a way of putting it down on paper. So essentially the form is the truth of your being: it must correspond to what actually is happening in the human mind. (Schrier, 47)

 Dudek to Schrier:

...in Mexico I just collected lines, sometimes two or three lines...and wrote them on scraps of paper...They were lines and passages in no particular order...There was no sequence, no form...it’s what happened in Mexico actually. I arranged the poem right here on the table, in what looked like an emerging form. And then I typed it, and I moved things when I needed to, until I got a damn good poem out of it. (Schrier, 47-48)

Dudek in interview with Schrier:

I would say that throughout life one is looking for an adequate way of saying certain things or finding a form in poetry. And one of the best things to study in my poetry would be how from the first beginnings, from certain early poems, through Europe, through En México, “Lac En Coeur”, and so on, I have been groping for a form, that becomes realized in Atlantis, and then proceeds on to Continuation II. That is to say, I believe, I want to talk truly to myself, or think for myself, though it is also a poem for other people of course. (Schrier, 50)

The form is also present in Atlantis but only fully realized in Continuation I. The questions is how was Continuation “assembled”? Because of its fragmentary nature it lends itself to a random assemblage, cutting up the various epigrams and fragments of poems, putting them in a hat and the first pulled out of the hat is the first in the poem. This roughly corresponds to the way William Burroughs, or the Dadaists, would have created the poem. This is also how I would have done it, randomly, with a Zen-like belief in the inherent meaningfulness found in random selection. But I am not convinced that Dudek would have trusted this method for his own writing, I suspect that he carefully pieced together bits and pieces of poems, fragments, into an “intelligent but unintelligible” poem.

En México, a book length poem published in 1956, is Dudek’s journey into himself, it is the exploration of the subconscious mind, the shadow, the inner man in a period of flux and searching. Mexico represents a place where the division between life and death is not as hidden or blurred as it is in Canada and The United States of America. In Mexico life and death are more the surface of things than in the United States and Canada, death is not hidden, it is not under layers of cultural preconceptions; for instance, I am editing this on the Mexican "Day of the Dead"; our Halloween has little psychological meaning.

Dudek refers to travel in his poetry, we can see this in the titles of his work: Europe, En México, and even Atlantis. But he is also someone who said that despite these books he never really liked to travel, and he didn’t travel much in his life. Instead, he lived most of his life in Montreal and he taught at McGill University for over thirty years. Even Atlantis isn’t truly a “travel” poem, it is a poem of spiritual discovery. It may be that part of “voice” in poetry comes from involvement with living in a specific geographical place for much of one’s life, or positing it a location as one’s psychic or spiritual home. Williams had Paterson; Zukofsky had Brooklyn; and Olson had Gloucester; I mention these because they are book length poems like Louis Dudek's Continuation. For some poets voice requires commitment to place and a need to make something new, a need to understand what this life we lead is all about.

Dudek writes: 

All writing is distillation, from the life to the work, but poetry especially is a distillation: out of much verbiage and stupidity, to refine an image of the seraphic sage; or more simply, to find a voice, lost in the clutter and noise of existence, which speaks with perfect clarity, with simplicity, out of the true self. (Dudek, 1983)

Voice is a vehicle for the content of poetry, but it is also inseparable from poetry; content expands when an authentic voice is discovered. Voice is not style, style changes but voice is the expression of the inner, psychological dimension of the poet; voice is the expression of psyche. The expression of voice changes just as our actual voice changes with age, but once an authentic voice is discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the poet is saying.

November 2012 – June • Montreal

Revised October 2024

 

"Laurentian Shield" by F. R. Scott

Events and Signals, F.R. Scott,
Ryerson Press, 1954

 

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic,
Not written on by history, empty as paper,
It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes
Older than love, and lost in the miles.

This waiting is wanting.
It will choose its language
When it has chosen its technic,
A tongue to shape the vowels of its productivity.

A language of flesh and of roses.

Now there are pre-words,
Cabin syllables,
Nouns of settlement
Slowly forming, with steel syntax,
The long sentence of its exploitation.

The first cry was the hunter, hungry for fur,
And the digger for gold, nomad, no-man, a particle;
Then the bold commands of monopolies, big with machines,
Carving their kingdoms out of the public wealth;
And now the drone of the plane, scouting the ice,
Fills all the emptiness with neighbourhood
And links our future over the vanished pole.

But a deeper note is sounding, heard in the mines,
The scattered camps and the mills, a language of life,
And what will be written in the full culture of occupation
Will come, presently, tomorrow,
From millions whose hands can turn this rock into children.

Preface, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche

 

Preface

 

 

T

he Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche is a collection of essays and short statements on poetry and poetics. This book complements my previous book, A Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019) also published by Ekstasis Editions. I’ve spent many years in the solitary work of writing poems and thinking about poetry; this book summarizes, explains, and enlarges on that subject. The book is divided into three sections; they are: ideas about poetry and writing poetry; a discussion of several Canadian poets, including F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Louis Dudek, and the poets I knew from the early days at Véhicule Art Gallery; and shamanism, psyche, or soul in poetry.

 

1          H.W. Garrod in his book, Poetry and the Criticism of Life (1931), writes that it was Seneca “who first said, what Ben Jonson and many others have said after him, that the critic of poetry must be himself a poet.” There is a tradition of poets writing about poetry; Louis Dudek’s writing is full of a contagious enthusiasm for poetry; Irving Layton wrote with bravado about the importance of poetry in Waiting for the Messiah (1985), and there are important statements on poetry in the prefaces of some of his books. Three other books of essays and commentaries on poetry need to be mentioned: co-edited by Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967); An English Canadian Poetics (2009) edited by Robert Hogg; and On Poetry and Poets, Selected Essays of A.J.M. Smith (1977). I also recommend George Whalley’s extraordinary Poetic Process, an essay on poetics (1967).

 

2          In Canada we rarely celebrate our poets, I refer to poets of previous generations; even poets who died only five or ten years ago seem to have never existed judging by their absence from our cultural or daily life, or their being mentioned for their poetry, or their poetry being quoted. We don’t name bridges or airports after our poets, that’s reserved for dead politicians no matter how dubious their contribution to our national life. This collective amnesia does not augur well for our future; if we can't even remember a few dead poets who helped define what Canada means, then what kind of a country will we end up having?    

 

3          What are the perennial qualities of poetry? There is the dichotomy between two approaches to poetry, two types of poets, Apollonian and Dionysian, classical and romantic, formal and informal, cosmopolitan and nativist. No matter which group of poets one falls into one of the things that makes for great poetry is if the poet has found his or her authentic voice: has the poet written something that is true to their inner being and is insightful of the human condition; and the corollary of this: does the poem move us emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually? This is the type of poetry that interests me; these perennial qualities make for great poetry.

 

4          My approach to poetry has always been intuitive. Intuitive people know that intuition gives us knowing but without proof, while intellectual knowledge is substantive but often lacks the insight and originality of intuition. When intuition precedes intellectual understanding, as it does, then it is necessary to find evidence for one’s intuitions. Most of my insights into poetry—for instance, and I’m obviously not the first to say it, that poetry is the voice of the human soul—originated intuitively. In this book I am trying to substantiate my intuitive insights into poetry, this has helped me to better understand my thinking on poetry and, I hope, it is of interest to readers.

 

5          No real poet ever decided to be a poet, it doesn’t work that way; if it was a decision they probably didn’t last long writing poetry. I answered a call to do this work and now I ask, is there closure on this activity that has dominated my life? This book is closure for my writing about the meaning of poetry but, as for writing new poems, I don’t want to end up as some old poets do, and that is publishing perfectly written but meaningless poetry. I hope I will be long gone before that happens. Of course, there may still be a few poems to write, and a few odds and ends to write about poetry; there is no age for retirement for poets, there is just the slow act of disappearing.   

 

 

                                                                                                Stephen Morrissey

                                                                                                Montreal, Canada

                                                                                                16 November 2021

Morrissey, Stephen. The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche. Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, 2022.

Review of The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

Here is a link to Cynthia Coristine's review of my new book, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry; what a terrific review for which I am very grateful!

The review can be found here, or copy and paste the following: https://poets.ca/review-the-green-archetypal-field-of-poetry-stephen-morrissey/

The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry

Here is the front and back cover of my new book, The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry, on poetry, poets, and psyche, published by Ekstasis Editions a few months ago. The book was published at the same time as Ekstasis Editions published books by Ken Norris and Endre Farkas, both of whom I've known since the mid-1970s. I thought I had reached the end of writing, now it seems I have a few more years left in me. 

Books can be ordered from Ekstasis Editions.

The Green Archetypal Field of Poetry: on poetry, poets, and psyche gathers a selection of essays and short statements on poetry by Stephen Morrissey. While best known as a poet, Morrissey’s critical writing is an important part of his literary work. In this book he writes on the legacy of Canadian poets who helped bring modernism to Canadian poetry. Morrissey’s approach to poetics reminds us of the enduring importance of Beat, Romantic, and shamanic poetics. Morrissey suggests that poems originate in what he calls the green archetypal field of poetry. This is Stephen Morrissey’s second volume on poetry and poetics, after The Poet’s Journey: on poetry and what it means to be a poet (2019).

 

Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the 150th Anniversary of his Assassination

Today, 7 April 2018, is the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Thomas D'Arcy McGee in Ottawa. Celebrations of his life and memory are at present underway in Montreal. I made this video at McGee's mausoleum in August 2013, in it I read the Gazette's report from 1868 of the assassination that took place only hours earlier. We haven't forgotten him in Montreal, he is forever remembered. 

McGill Fortnightly Review

Mark McCawley, the editor of Urban Grafitti, was in favour of online/digital magazines, I was in favour (and still am) of both, but I prefer a hard copy, on paper. This was one of the few things about which Mark and I disagreed. Online periodicals can disappear when the editor discontinues the site/periodical, and what is digital can be revised or altered in the Orwellian future. Hard copies of periodicals, kept in archives, can be researched years from now and I have done this type of research. So, for instance, two of the Montreal Group of poets (Scott and Smith) founded The McGill Fortnightly Review and it was published from 1925 to 1927; a few years later they published The McGilliad. Even today these periodicals are fascinating reading. The full run of both periodicals is available at Special Collections at McGill University or online at https://blogs.library.mcgill.ca/…/mcgill-fortnightly-review/

Review of In the Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets

Laurence Hutchman on Grand Blvd near Somerled, Montreal, March 2016

                                 

Laurence Hutchman 

In the Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets

Guernica Editions, Toronto, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-5507-309-1

Conversations with Eight Poets

by

Stephen Morrissey

             Laurence Hutchman's In the Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets is a valuable addition to our knowledge of modernist Canadian poetry. The poets interviewed in these conversations are Ralph Gustafson, George Johnston, P.K. Page, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, and James Reaney. All eight of these poets have made important contributions to Canadian literature—they are all distinguished members of the Canadian poetry canon—and several have also contributed as translators and publishers.

            There is an easy intimacy between Laurence Hutchman and the poets he is interviewing. It feels as though we are listening in on good friends having a friendly but serious conversation on a subject about which both of them are passionate. Each interview is prefaced with a vivid and detailed description of the poet's home or place of work where the interview took place. When Hutchman is invited into Ralph Gustafson's Eastern Township's home he sits by a warm fire in late December; he describes the "chilly November morning in Saskatoon" when he rode a borrowed bicycle to interview Anne Szunigalski and entered her home where he admired paintings "everywhere on the walls, mostly done by her own family."
            Just before the interview which takes place in James Reaney's university office, Hutchman notes, "We sit on a green couch for the interview. On the wall facing us there is a painting of Reaney's, of The Nihilist Spasm Band. Above us is a picture, 'A Well Organized Athletic Meet on Centre Island, 1907 two women carrying eggs on a spoon.' Above those are topographical maps representing Grand Bend, St. Mary's and Stratford." Hutchman's awareness of the minutiae and detail of the place where the interview takes place enhances each interview that follows. In these interviews we are invited to know the human side of the eight different poets. Indeed, these conversations are an invitation for new readers to explore each poets' work.
            Scholars will find In The Writers' Words, Conversations with Eight Poets a valuable source of insight into these poets' work; recent criticism I've written on Louis Dudek's major long poem "Continuation" has been deepened by reading the interview with him. I can hear Dudek's voice—engaging and inquiring—in his discussion with Hutchman; Dudek states,

                        In Continuation 1 and Continuation 2, I at last found a voice where

                        I could say exactly what I want to say, and everything I want to say,

                        in the most amazing fragmentary way... you have to take risks in poetry.

                        What is poetry trying to do on the page? It's trying to represent the

                        poet's thought.

                        Many of us have fond memories of having met these eight poets. I remember meeting James Reaney at a League of Canadian Poets AGM in Toronto; he was wearing a tie decorated with books that I liked so much it took me a year before finding a similar tie for myself. In Edmonton, a few years ago, Mark Abley's excellent keynote address at the League's AGM was on Anne Szumigalski and it brought her life and work to a new audience. Elsewhere, I heard Fred Cogswell and Ralph Gustafson read their poems and from time to time corresponded with them. I sat and talked with Al Purdy after one of the times I heard him read. Louis Dudek, besides being my professor, was a friend until the end of his life. I remember being a first year graduate student at McGill University and walking into the English Department's staff lounge and seeing Laurence sitting discussing his own poetry with Louis Dudek. Dudek's DC Books published Hutchman's first book, Explorations (1975). George Johnston was a good friend, we both lived in rural south-western Quebec after he retired from teaching at Carleton University. In addition to many discussions on poetry George taught me the basics of the art of bee keeping which I did for many years. George and his wife Jean were both good friends and warm-hearted people, over the years of knowing them I also got to know some members of their family. During their careers all of these poets that Hutchman interviews readily made themselves available to newer poets. Reading Hutchman's conversations with them reminds me of the generosity and welcoming spirit of this modernist generation of poets, many of whom made an indelible impression on me.
                  All eight of these poets began writing and publishing during the 1930s to the1950s. Individually and collectively they made a significant contribution to Canadian poetry. P.K. Page, reminiscing about when she lived in Montreal, reminds us of poets we may have forgotten but who are still important for their role in Canadian literature, they include Patrick Anderson and John Sutherland. She also remembers with fondness Montreal poet A.M. Klein; Page says,

            ... he was only nine years older than I but he seemed to belong to a different generation. This had to do with a series of things, I think, with the fact that he was married, had children, and a law practise. He was already established as a poet... I find him a  wonderful poet and can't think why people today don't see it. But they will again.

            In his interview George Johnston discusses the literary scene back in the 1930s when he was a student and had just begun writing; Johnston states, "To tell the truth, I was hardly aware of a literary life in Toronto, except at the university. There was one intellectual sort of magazine which came out once a month..." This comment by Johnston reveals to us how far Canadian literature has progressed over the last sixty or seventy years.

            The eight poets Hutchman interviewed spent a lifetime writing poetry and thinking about poetry; theirs was a life centered on literature and poetry. The New Brunswick-based poet Fred Cogswell, who did a tremendous service for poets across Canada during his many years of running the literary small press, Fiddlehead, makes this statement on "the philosophical nature of ... poetry":

           

The particular philosophical nature of poetry is that its function is to illustrate the  qualities of the human mind that are the basis for the attitudes we have as human beings. Keep going farther than you've already gone, or you become a victim of what you've written up until that moment.

            In the interview with P.K. Page, living at the west coast edge of the continent, in Victoria, BC, a clap of thunder is heard as the interview comes to an end. PK says to Hutchman, "You're conjuring up gods that we don't normally have." This is what Hutchman does in all of these interviews. He conjures the gods of poetry. Hutchman's interviews with each of these eight poets is an intimate conversation with each individual. We hear their voice, their commitment to poetry, and their example of a life lived for poetry. Hutchman's book stays vivid and lively and brings the reader directly into the personality and writing of each of the eight poets. For anyone of any age, either scholar or reader, who is interested in the modernist poets of Canada, this book is an indispensable companion to the poets' collected works. That is part of the magic of this book.

                                                                        Stephen Morrissey

                                                                        Montreal, September 3, 2013