On Louis Dudek's Continuation

Cedar Avenue,  Feb. 20, 1954

Louis Dudek's Collected Poems (1971) is the end of the first half of Dudek’s body of work; the second half begins with his Continuation books (published in 1980, 1990, and excerpts were published in two separate books published in 1997 and 2000). In fact, Dudek's Collected Poems contains poems from both halves of his published poems; there is what was published before Continuation and after that there are the Continuation books; one leads to the other, they overlap, and Dudek's Collected Poems is the border between the two. 

Some critics consider Dudek overly influenced by his mentor, Ezra Pound. Here is what Northrop Frye wrote in a review of Dudek's Europe (1954):  

I find large stretches of the book unrewarding. In the first place, the influence of Pound is oppressive. Pound is everywhere: the rub-a-dub three- and four-accent, the trick of snapped-up quotations and allusion, the harangues against usura, the toboggan-slide theory of the decline of Europe after the Middle Ages, and so on. In the second place, the conversational style brings the ideas into sharp relief, and the ideas are commonplace, prejudice reinforced by superficial tourism... 

Well, that wasn't very nice but it’s also how some critics perceived Dudek’s poetry; of course, all poets are influenced by previous generations of poets, or by specific poets belonging to previous generations of poets. The turning point for Dudek’s poetry was his use of epigrams, for instance in Continuation, and the importance of epigrams is shown when Dudek said that all good poems begin with, or contain, a significant epigrammatic line. 

Reading Continuation, one statement, one line, one epigram, doesn’t always lead in any meaningful or logical way to the next line or epigram; there seems little relationship to the previous or the following line or epigram. We know how the mind imposes order, or invents order and meaning, in what is perceived; when meaning isn't apparent, it is imposed by the mind. Reading Williams Burrough's cut-ups, those randomly selected excerpts of texts, one finds some incredible, and startling, juxtapositions of images and ideas; a similar effect, this time juxtaposing unrelated dream generated images, is found in poems by the Dadaists and the Surrealists. Here is William Burrough's statement on the human mind imposing meaning:

Our ancestors saw the creatures of the constellations in the apparently unorganized distribution of the stars. It has been shown experimentally through the viewing of random white dots on a screen that man tends to find pattern and picture where objectively there is none: his mental process shapes what it sees.                                                                                                                                   
                                        --William Burroughs, The Job, Interviews with
                                        Daniel Odier (1969), p. 360

The human mind has a meaning function and a narrative function; our concept of reality is based on consensus, on common agreement, on what we have been conditioned or told to believe is real or factually true. There is the narrative with its structure of beginning, middle, and end or whatever arrangement one wants. The mind is essentially very conservative and needs to make sense or impose order on what is perceived; there are also the very infrequent moments of “Ah-Ha!”, those sudden insights or illumination, or epiphanies, that transcend both the meaning function, the narrative function, and consensual reality; a new order is discovered in this way. In Continuation, by placing one epigram beside another unrelated epigram, the cumulative effect is a possibly meaningful statement. Dudek, the social conservative, a man who was outwardly the advocate of the intellect, of “reason over passion”, also had an  irrational side, as do all artists and poets, and this can be seen in Dudek’s Continuation.

Louis Dudek's white book

Here I am with Louis Dudek, not sure who took the photograph; it is 1993 
at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, at the League of 
Canadian Poets' AGM, when Louis was made a life member of the
League (an organization he helped to found)

1.

 

One day in the mid-1970s, Louis Dudek came to our graduate seminar with copies of his Collected Poems, (1971); "Does anyone want to buy a copy?" he asked; it was $5.00. I never had any money and passed on buying his Collected Poems, but a few months later I bought a second hand copy of Dudek's Atlantis at The Word Bookstore and I forgot about the Collected Poems of Louis Dudek. Over the intervening years I bought most of Louis' other books as they were published and around 1997, when the League of Canadian Poets AGM was held in Montreal, and I had nominated Louis for a life membership, I brought at least ten of his books with me to the AGM for him to sign. That was a bit much but Louis went along with it, we sat together, he signed his books, he gave his speech, and he left. He mentioned that one of the books of his that I had brought with me that evening had not been distributed, hang onto it, he said, it will be worth something one day, but I forget which book he was referring to. Like all good teachers, Louis was good with fatherly advice. He told me that my M.A. degree would get me a teaching job, and it did and that set me up financially and employment-wise for thirty-five years of my life. Then it was 2020, twenty years later, and I was at Stephanie Dudek's estate sale;  Stephanie was Louis' first wife and, although he died in 2001, many of his books were still stored at the Vendome Avenue home where he used to live. There were copies of Atlantis, in pristine condition, still unwrapped from when they were printed in the UK and shipped over to Montreal. I bought a few copies just for old time's sake and as I left I asked if they had any copies of Louis' Collected Poems; someone, I was told, had just bought all the copies they had, I was out of luck. And then, finally, I found a copy on Amazon; you don't often see Dudek's Collected Poems, 3,000 copies were printed but it didn't sell many copies when it was published and it wasn't widely reviewed. I finally found a used copy for sale by a book seller in Vancouver, for $10.00; I placed my order and a few days later received a phone call, the book was missing a page, did I still want to buy it? Of course I did. The price was reduced to the original $5.00 it had been in 1975 and my copy, a former library copy, was sent to me.