Full text of "Continuing Continuation, on Louis Dudek"

 

Peel Street, downtown Montreal,1970s

First published in Urban Grafitti, Edmonton, AB, 27 March 2013.

by

Stephen Morrissey

 

“...remember/ the paltriness of worldly claims,/ and the immensity/ that is always now.”

—Louis Dudek, Continuation III  

 

 

1

 A curious literary synchronicity: on January 4, 1963, Margaret Avison experienced a mystical experience in which she discovered her faith in God; this had a profound influence on her future poetry. On January 4, 1967, exactly four years later, Louis Dudek began writing the first of three volumes of one of the most important modern poems in Canadian literature, Continuation.   In Notebooks 1960 – 1994 (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.” That’s what is in Continuation, Dudek’s “vision and thought.”   Several years before Dudek published Continuation I, Susan Stromberg-Stein referred to it as “a poem that will possibly be his [Dudek’s] final ongoing poem, for he has subtitled it ‘An Infinite Poem in Progress.’ In this work one observes the poet combining lyrical fragments and setting them into a continuous form that has the permanence of finished poetry...” (Stromberg-Stein, M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1977)   Dudek was not interested in writing an autobiography, he had an abhorrence of sensationalism, and he rejected what he considered any egotistical drawing attention to oneself. However, Ron Everson, an old friend of Dudek’s, states in a 1983 interview that Dudek’s theme in his poetry “is his whole life.” Dudek writes, “The whole story means my whole life... But you know we say poetry, or any art, is the expression of the life of the artist, of his whole psyche, of himself on the page . . . Each poet, in fact, out of the scattered thoughts going on in his mind, makes the construct that he calls the finished poem.” (Louise Schrier interview, 1990)   How a poet handles writing about “his whole life” depends on the poet’s intention; is the poet’s voice an authentic expression of his psyche or is it ego-centric and self-promoting? As well, Dudek does not condemn strong emotion in poetry or even highly emotional confessional poetry; what he condemns is self-inflation.   Dudek’s dismissal of John Cage, and other avant-garde artists, who might have embraced and supported what he was doing in poetry, is unfortunate. Dudek writes, “John Cage: A soft-brained idiot. The purpose of his inane talk is a subtle kind of self-promotion, disguised as humility, but full of name-dropping and self-pampering.” (Notebooks, 1994)   One of Dudek’s great underlying concerns in Continuation is the passion of a life lived for poetry, a life dedicated to poetry. He describes writing poetry as an “addiction.”   Dudek lived in New York City for a number of years in the late 1940s and early 1950s and it was during this time that he came under the influence of Ezra Pound; while there he knew other poets, including Paul Blackburn. I remember Dudek telling me of knowing Blackburn, that as they walked along a city street together Blackburn climbed a telephone pole and sat on the top of it.   Dudek’s years in New York City, studying at Columbia University, meeting Ezra Pound and other artists—being in a milieu of art and creativity—are the seminal years in Dudek’s creative life.   Dudek contributed to the image of himself as conservative in his criticism of hippies, experiments in alternative lifestyles, and student rebellion in the mid-to-late 1960s; however, his earlier long poems and Continuation, a poem that is more sophisticated and avant-garde than most poetry being written in Canada today, refute this perception.   Robin Blaser writes, “They understand him to be a reactionary, which is to say that they misunderstand him.” (Infinite Worlds, 1988)   Most people who have studied Dudek’s poetry feel that he was overly influenced by Ezra Pound; however, eventually this changed and as much as Dudek had once supported Pound he later found fault with him. This is an example of the puer overthrowing the senex, it is when the children or followers of people who are significant to them finally divest themselves of the other person’s influence; the alternative is to never fully realize one’s own potential. I suspect that it is only with Dudek’s growing discontent with the importance he had given to Pound that he was able to begin writing Continuation. As an aside, I remember Dudek telling me that in all of his years of teaching he never convinced anyone of the greatness of Pound’s poetry. (See, as well, Dk/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek, 1974)

  

 

2

 If having a large number of books by a specific poet, and books on that poet’s work, is an indication of a literary influence, then three significant influences on my writing have been Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, and Louis Dudek. They are poets I read and reread, poets whose work means much to me at both a personal and creative level.    In Continuation, epigrams are juxtaposed before and after other dissimilar epigrams, it is similar to the way people think, jumping from one idea to another apparently unrelated idea; in this, the poem is an “internal monologue”, that’s what Dudek called it.   Dudek’s Continuation is a post-modern poem attacking post-modernism and extolling the modernist movement.   Continuation is similar to a painting by Jackson Pollock, there is no narrative or focal point to observe, every part of a painting by Pollock is equal to every other part of the same painting. Similarly, every part of Continuation is equal, although different, to every other part, there is no narrative leading up to a climax in the poem.   There are two ways Dudek could have written (or “assembled”) Continuation, both presume that he already had the epigrams, short statements, and other fragments of writing that make up the poem. The first is by taking these fragments and putting them together in a random way. The second method would be to take all of the fragments and consciously piece them together giving the poem the appearance of a random organization.   Among the poets who influenced Dudek is Stéphane Mallarmé whose poem, Un coup de dés, is important to the writing of Continuation.   Three “epigrams” from John Cage: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.” “The goal is not to have a goal.” “As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.”   Dudek was always concerned about irrationality and the artist; he seemed to posit a connection between irrationality and the very people that he felt threatened the old, established order.   I think of Margaret Laurence’s novel, A Jest of God, with the blue faced barbarians waiting to invade the walled villa where children are playing with no idea of their possible destruction. What threatens to disintegrate society and destroy propriety—“barbarians” as Dudek described them—is always present.   Always present in Dudek’s work is the belief in the transcendent power of poetry. Poetry and art were accorded an almost religious quality by Dudek; his desire was to reinvent poetry and, like Ezra Pound, to “make it new”.    Dudek was always aware of the small readership for poetry and how inconsequential poetry is for the great majority of the population. (As many people die on the roads on a holiday weekend as read poetry Dudek once said.)   It’s a mystery how poems come to be written. It could be that writing poetry mostly comes in short bursts of inspiration (to inspire, to breathe in spirit); Continuation, a long poem, has the intensity of many short poems, or epigrams, put together.   Dudek is fairly relentless in his criticism of both Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, two highly distinguished Canadian scholars and critics. McLuhan, like Dudek, was very much involved with Ezra Pound in the late 1940s and early ‘50s.   Marshall McLuhan’s “probes”, his epigrams, are insightful and cause the reader to understand, in a new way, the digital and electric media that is so much a part of the world in which we live.   Three epigrams from Marshall McLuhan: “Discovery comes from dialogue that starts with the sharing of ignorance.” “Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.” “The story of modern America begins with the discovery of the white man by the Indians.”   McLuhan, who was conservative and a religious person, was one of the first academics to explain the new technological environment in which we live.   McLuhan writes: “I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitude.”   Dudek and McLuhan were writing and thinking from two different perspectives. Dudek’s is the world of poetry; he writes from a perception of the eternal and the infinite. McLuhan’s is the world of temporality, he is writing of a contemporary and changing world of electric media.   I never agreed with Dudek’s negative assessment of Northrop Frye; indeed, I wonder if there wasn’t some bitterness regarding Frye on Dudek’s part, especially after reading Frye’s mean-spirited 1955 review of Dudek’s Europe (1954); Frye writes: “... 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...”   In a 1965 article in The Tamarack Review, Dudek writes, “I consider both McLuhan and Northrop Frye as really poets manqués, best appreciated when we read their speculations as imaginative constructs made out of their real materials, not as ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ theories at all.”   A coincidence of dates: Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow, has just died, reported in the newspaper for 16 November 2012. The obituary states that T.S. Eliot died on January 4, 1965, two years to the day after Margaret Avison’s religious experience and two years before Dudek began writing Continuation I.   Louis’ cousin and close friend, the artist Stanley Roznyski, passed away on December 9, 2012. Born on February 21, 1931, he grew up near where Louis lived in the east end of Montreal. Roznyski has a moving eulogy for Louis in Eternal Conversations, Remembering Louis Dudek (2003).   Dudek writes: “…you can’t write good poetry because you’ve read many books or because you think great thoughts. Poetry is a mysterious process that happens to very few individuals, and they are not fortunate in it. (Emily Dickinson and Thomas Trehearne, completely unknown in their time; Blake and Holderlin, cursed with mental ills and isolation.)” (Poetry Canada Review, early 1990s) This reminds me of the lack of recognition Dudek felt his own poetry had received and his sense of isolation as a poet and a person. Robin Blaser describes Dudek as a “walking loneliness”. (Infinite Worlds, 1988)  

 

 

3

Three quotations from The Other Voice, Essays on Modern Poetry (1990), by Mexican poet Octavio Paz: “What is an ‘extensive poem’? The dictionary says that to extend is to increase something so that it occupies more space. To extend also means to expand, to develop, to enlarge, to unfold, to occupy greater terrain. In its original and primary sense, extension is a spatial concept. Hence an extensive poem is a long poem. Since in language words come one after the other in a row, an extensive poem is one that has many lines and the reading of which takes a considerable amount of time. Space is time.” “A great change: the first-person singular becomes the main character of the extensive poem.”  “The best example of the new poetics was Un coup de dés, a strange poem that has as its subject the act of writing a poem. But a poem never before attempted: an absolute poem. Not a poem on the poem but the poem on the poem.” In light of Paz’s definition, Dudek’s Continuation is an “extensive” poem.   Dudek suggests that his epigrams are a way for him to write poetry, they are the first line of a poem that proceeds to other epigrams and disparate lines and then a whole poem; or, he juxtaposes epigram after epigram in a kind of free floating mix of confused random associations that eventually, in a synergistic way, take on more meaning than if the epigrams were presented individually; this is how Continuation is similar to some of Cage’s writing in which dissimilar statements are juxtaposed together.   “Meaning” in Continuation is achieved by the repetition of epigrams (and other fragments of writing) with similar ideas; otherwise, on first reading, the poem seems “meaningless”.   In other words, as one might expect, this is not “traditional” poetry.   The “problem” with 1940s/1950s Abstract Expressionism—the art of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Marc Rothko and others—is that despite its relative popularity, more people wanted art to be a representation of “reality” than total abstraction. Abstract Expressionism was superseded by Pop Art—the art of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and others—an art extolling in an ironic way the very popular culture, or low art, that the previous generation of Abstract Expressionist artists condemned. This was suggested in John Logan’s play on Marc Rothko, Red.   Pierre Trudeau’s epigrammatic statement, “Reason over Passion”, was later used in an ironic way, it was sewn onto a quilt by the artist Joyce Weiland and is on exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.   Dudek began Continuation when he was 49 years old, a month later he turned fifty; the concept for how to write the poem was discovered by Dudek in 1956, when he was only thirty-eight years old; however, Dudek tells us that he could only write Continuation after he discovered his authentic voice, one that was a memory of his thought processes when he was a child. With this in mind, Continuation is Dudek’s life-long work, his life opus.   Dudek’s Continuation is one of the most radical poems in Canadian literature, “radical” meaning to go to the roots of poetry and language.    A common idea among Jungians is that “the brighter the light the greater the darkness.” Dudek’s emphasis on rationality hides the irrational dark side of the poet.   Dudek’s conservative persona is a mask worn by a poet whose life was lived quietly and conservatively but whose mind and imagination were open to a multiplicity of thoughts and creative ideas.   Rationality is a veneer of conscious order over the depth and many layered complexity of the unconscious. See C.G. Jung’s Red Book (2009) for a description of the journey into the unconscious mind.   All art is vision, or else it is the repetition of the past.   Continuation is, in some ways, one of Dudek’s “travel” books, but this is not travel to a place as was Europe (1954) or En México (1958); this is a journey across time, it is the journey of a poet’s life during middle age to old age and preparation for death; the last poems in Continuation III, including his final reflections on life, must have been written only months before Dudek’s passing.   In these final poems, Dudek returns repeatedly to the concept of time as infinity, he envisions an ultimate “shining” that illuminates the darkness of ignorance with a kind of mystical perception of life.

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This essay is dedicated to two friends—Richard Sommer and Keitha K. MacIntosh—both of whom I met in the early 1970s and both of whom passed away in 2012. I am grateful for having known them, and for their kindness and generosity to me.

 

Note: This essay continues the work begun in my essay Reading Louis Dudek’s Continuation: An introduction to a major Canadian poem.

 

 

Stephen Morrissey

    November 2012 – April 2013 • Montreal

 

 

 

 

Full text of "Reading Louis Dudek’s Continuation: An introduction to a major Canadian poem"

 

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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 20^th 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.

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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)

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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.”

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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.

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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).

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“…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... 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).”

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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 20^th 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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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“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. 

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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.

 

 

 

Commentary on Continuation III, Introduction (Edited)

 

Downtown Montreal, 1960s

This third book, the parts were written but never collected to make a book out of them, let's call it "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 similar 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.