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| 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
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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)
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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)
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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.
__________________________
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
