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| Cedar Avenue, Feb. 20, 1954 |
Louis Dudek's Collected Poems (1971) is the end of the first half of his 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 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. Are they arbitrary or are they an accurate representation of life? The mind is essentially very conservative with 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. In Continuation, by placing one epigram beside another unrelated epigram, the cumulative effect is a 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.
