Dear Sonja

Sonja Skarstedt

Sonja Skarstedt

1986

Sonja Skarstedt, after a long battle with cancer, died on Friday, July 31, 2009. Sonja was a dear friend to many of us, with a terrific sense of humour and a great spirit to live and create. Geof Isherwood, her husband and life partner--they were always together--informs me there will be a memorial gathering on Sonja's birthday, next October 2. We have lost someone who contributed so much to poetry in Montreal, with her magazine Zymergy, published between 1987-1990, and later with Empyreal Press, she was a tireless and generous worker for many of us whom she published and many more that she supported in other ways. She was also a great support and friend of Louis Dudek in his final years and published his last books for him. What a loss we have all suffered, especially Geof and his family. Sonja was only 48 years old and had such a youthful spirit. I remember Geof and Sonja driving out to Huntingdon to visit back in 1989 or 1990, a time when I especially appreciated their visit, and the years during the 1990s when we worked on books she published for us. Two years ago I published her chapbook, Abundances, online with Coracle Press. She was a terrifically creative person, a poet, a visual artist, a playwright, and most recently she had branched out to making films. You can find out more about Sonja at www.skarwood.com.

Re. Dk/ : Read the work

At the estate sale of the late Stephanie Dudek,
Vendome Avenue, 20 July 2020

The first issue of the new online periodical http://poetry-quebec.com/ is dedicated to the work of Louis Dudek. My article, "The First Person in Literature", on Louis, is available on the site. I add the following as a suggestion, a postscript, that we read a poet's writing, his body of work, and avoid those whose aim seems purely negative.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Louis Dudek made an enormous contribution to literature in Canada as a poet, publisher, and critic. He helped many poets realize something of their creative potential by mentoring, publishing their work, and reviewing their books.

Robin Blaser describes Louis as being a “walking loneliness.” Even Louis’ friendship with Ezra Pound, for which he has been criticized for being overly naïve in his support of Pound’s work, is the friendship of a someone who would find approaching Pound difficult. It is this criticism of Dudek’s relationship with Pound, who Pound referred to as Dk/, that I would like to discuss here.

People will dig up whatever they can to criticize someone else, or invent something, or reveal their personal grudges in their comments. When he met Pound, Dudek was young and in awe of the older poet, as many of us would be if we were in his situation. Another visitor of Pound’s at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Pound was incarcerated after the war, was Charles Olson. It took Olson several years of dealing with Pound before he finally made his break with him. Olson and Pound had personalities that were larger than life; alternately, Louis was introverted and introspective.

Assuming that Pound needed to be “disowned”, then perhaps Dudek, like Olson, should have disowned Pound much earlier in his career than he did. Dudek rightly identified Pound’s Cantos as one of the greatest works of 20^th Century literature; however, he never supported Pound’s political views.

Dudek went to Pound to offer his support as a younger poet to the older poet that he admired for his poetry, just as Olson approached Pound for the same reason. To find one’s own voice, as a poet, it is necessary to assimilate something of the work and vision of the poets who come before us and that we admire in our youth. Both Louis and Olson assimilated in their work what they learned from Pound, and both poets eventually found their own distinctive poetic voices. Pound’s poetry helps inform something of Dudek’s work, just as Pound’s poetry helps inform something of Olson’s work, but the majority of both Dudek’s and Olson’s body of work is original and beautiful, for instance Dudek’s Atlantis and Olson’s masterpiece The Maximus Poems.

Dudek’s respect for Pound is that of an introverted person for the elder poet who had accomplished more in his writing career than just about any other poet in the 20^th Century. However, Dudek was not without serious critical reflection on Pound: Louis confided to me that despite having taught Pound’s work for over thirty years he never convinced anyone to share his enthusiasm for Pound; as well, he accepted that Pound was "mentally ill", as others have diagnosed, but which in no way disqualifies Pound’s creative work. Louis would always direct his students to read Pound’s work, The Cantos, for themselves, to go to the source, and not get hung up on what others are saying.
Although I saw Louis only infrequently in the 1990s--at poetry readings at McGill and a group of us went to dinner at Ben's Restaurant after the readings with Louis--I was kept informed of how he was doing by Sonja Skarstedt, who did so much for Louis during that time. Sonja, who is a tireless worker for poetry, both writing her own work and publishing poets with Empyreal Press, also published Louis’ work in his final years.

I remember when Louis died in 2001, leaving the reception after the funeral, walking into the cold dark March evening, and feeling an incredible emptiness, knowing that an important person in Montreal, a city of poets, was Louis Dudek and that he was now no longer among us. I felt that a great man of letters had died.

What is the meaning of the poet’s life? Poetry demands everything from a person. It demands one’s time and one’s soul and being. The meaning of the poet’s life is his writing, and this means his body of work. The message, then, is this: pay your respect to an elder poet, like Louis Dudek, by reading their body of work. Avoid the writings of those who would destroy a poet's reputation and memory. These people don’t know what motivated the man, who he really was, or his future place in literature.

Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978 - 1998

Preface to Mapping the Soul, Selected Poems, 1978-1998 (Muses’s Company, Winnipeg, 1998)

When I was growing up, I had two dreams that profoundly affected the shape of my life. I was six years old when my father died; the first of these dreams occurred three years after his death. I dreamed two men from an orphanage came to take me away. They were waiting for me at the back door; they were going to put me in a wooden cage. This dream made a deep and lasting impression on me, not only as a reminder of the insecurity and transience of life, but also as an encounter with the powerful depths of the unconscious. In retrospect, this dream began my awareness of the imagination, vision, and what psychologist C.G. Jung calls “the shadow.” It also informed me of my own separateness from the world in which I lived.

The second dream came when I was around thirteen years old, and it is responsible for my embarking on a lifetime of being a poet and diarist. In this dream I was imprisoned in a room where the windows were covered with mud. Once I could see outside, but now I was enclosed and cut off from the world. However one may interpret this dream, my own interpretation as an adolescent was that I had to write down the truth as I knew it--what people had done and what I had done. Only by writing could I see things clearly. I knew intuitively that writing could clarify, order, and give perspective to experience. My concern was with saving my inner being, which I was afraid would be lost if I were unable to remember events. My conviction, even then, was that there is a heroism and bravery to the average person’s life and I was responsible for recording as much of what I perceived of this as possible. I awoke from this dream knowing I had to write and ever since this dream I have written poems as well as kept a diary.

In addition to these two dreams there was a third influence to the kind of poet I became. In 1967, when I was still in high school, I read an article in a newspaper; in it the American poet, Allen Ginsberg, gave advice for poets. He said, “Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked...” This statement made a lasting impression on me. It validated what I was already trying to do in my own poetry. For the first time I realized that the kind of subject matter I was grappling with as a teenager--content that was personal and confessional--belonged to a literary tradition and had meaning to other people. Even if I hadn’t read Ginsberg’s statement I would not have been deterred from continuing the writing I was doing--writing that attempted to understand deeply felt experiences. However, to discover that there was a public context for this kind of writing was enormously empowering, and allowed me to identify myself as a poet. My first chapbook, Poems of a Period (1971), published when I was in second year university, contains poems that have a thematic continuity extending from those early poems up to the work I am writing now. This present collection, Mapping the Soul: Selected Poems 1978 - 1998, presents a selection of twenty years from my body of writing. This selection is chronological, beginning with my first published book, The Trees of Unknowing (1978) up to the present selection from new, unpublished poems.

For years I struggled in my writing to express early experiences of grief and failure. I wrote many poems on these subjects, but none articulated exactly how I felt, or dealt adequately with what I needed to say, until I wrote the long poem “Divisions.” This poem is central to my early work--in it I was finally able to deal aesthetically and personally with the experience it discusses. Everything came together in the writing of “Divisions”: content, form, and the insight necessary for its writing. This was a breakthrough poem for me, written over a three day period in April 1977. I was finally able to express in poetry what I was attempting to do since I was fifteen years old. I photocopied “Divisions” and mailed it out to other poets and critics, including Northrop Frye and Louis Dudek, both of whom responded generously: Frye with a letter, and Dudek with an offer to publish the poem. In 1983 bp Nichol published the poem in my book Divisions, with Coach House Press.

There are two more factors that I believe have contributed to my writing. The first is the fact of being born in Montreal of a large, but dwindling, family of Irish descent. This Irish background is rich in experience and family history; names such as Callaghan, Flanagan, and Sweeney are all a part of the family which has been in Montreal since before 1840. They were not wealthy people, although a few made names for themselves, but they were hardworking and improved conditions for the lives of their descendants. Their values, religious faith, and large families made them what they were. I am grateful for being a part of this ancestry.

A final factor that has helped shaped my poetry is the tradition of writing poetry in English-speaking Montreal. Growing up in Montreal in the 1950s, I always took for granted that poets lived and worked in the community in which I lived. Poets were never “someplace else”—they were right here. So the idea of becoming a poet was never unusual. Just as I appreciate my Irish heritage, I also benefited from the poetry community into which I was born. In the 1970s I was associated with Vehicule Art Gallery where I attended and organized readings while a graduate student at McGill University. I associated with other poets, and my first full-length collection of poems was published.
I have always aimed at a directness of statement and emotion in my poems, to communicate an image and a strong emotion; to merge the personal self with the archetypal self. Poetry is the voice of the psyche speaking through the poet. These poems, selected from twenty years of published work, map the convolutions, terrain, and geography of the soul.

My poetic journey, from the early dreams and writing to the publication of this Selected Poems, has been a reaching out to other people. From the initial isolation as an adolescent poet until now, I have been blessed with meeting certain individuals who have encouraged and inspired me. My association with poet and editor Carolyn Zonailo began in 1989 with the publication, by Caitlin Press, of my book Family Album. CZ has edited my poetry and helped to prepare manuscripts for publication. We have shared a collaboration in writing and in life, living most of the year in Montreal, but spending as much time as possible each year in her native Vancouver, British Columbia. I would like to thank CZ for selecting the poems in this collection, urging me to write this preface, and for editing.

I would like to thank Louis Dudek for being my teacher and friend from McGill University days to the present. George and Jeanne Johnston extended to me friendship and the joy of discussing poetry and literature. Ken Norris, a colleague since the early 1970’s, has offered on-going encouragement. Jake Morrissey has often listened with appreciation to my work. Sonja Skarstedt and Geof Isherwood began Empyreal Press in Montreal in the early 1990s; with bravado and a belief in the importance of poetry they published each volume of The Shadow Trilogy. I would like to thank Endre Farkas and Gordon Shillingford for offering their support through the Muses’ Company. Finally, I would also like to thank the Canada Council for writing time during two grants, and for project grants in support of individual books.

Stephen Morrissey
Vancouver, British Columbia
August 7, 1998