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| Montreal, 1920s |
Even in 1965, when I began writing poetry, I knew I had to find my voice; finding my voice lead me to eventually write real poems. Louis Dudek found his voice in poetry in Continuation:
I feel that in
Continuation this is my voice, this is my true voice in poetry. It’s the
personal voice that at age fifteen, or even earlier, I already had, and
therefore I worked all my life to record on the page. That was the breathless
adventure...I think my discovery of myself, gradually, through thinking and
through a sort of philosophical monologue, tossing about the life questions,
comes together finally, so that in Continuation
II I am where I am supposed to be. (Louise Schrier interview, 51)
Epigrams preoccupied
Dudek’s last forty years. The epigram gave Dudek the key to writing Continuation; the composition
of Continuation is based on two
breakthroughs: Dudek’s discovery of epigrams which lead to Dudek’s discovery of his voice
in poetry.
In his Notebooks 1960 – 1994 (The Golden Dog
Press, Ottawa, 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.” (Notebooks, 29) That’s what is in Continuation, Dudek’s “vision and thought.”
Louis Dudek writes
that his “breakthrough” in discovering his voice in poetry came about when he
was writing En México (1958). What
caused this “breakthrough”—this discovery of voice—in Dudek’s writing? There
was the cathartic journey to Mexico, to escape the “dejection” that he felt at home, caused by his conflicted situation in life, and to resolve an inner conflict. Going to Mexico is Dudek’s descent to the underworld, to a place where the unconscious
mind is never far from the surface of consciousness and daily life. That’s
where he discovered his voice; that’s where the second half of his life, from
1956 on, is born.
Let’s read some excerpts of Laurence Hutchman’s interview with Dudek on 25 June 1992:
I suppose I do
[that is, Dudek considers Continuation
his best work] because it is the most completely worked out, a case of finding
a voice for myself in the poetry. I explain that in the interview with Louise
Schrier in Zymergy 8. In Continuation I and Continuation II, I at last found a voice where I could say exactly
what I want to say, and everything I want to say, in the most amazing
fragmentary way. (Hutchman, 103)
...you have to take
risks in poetry. What is poetry trying to do on the page? It’s trying to
represent the poet’s thought. If that’s what it’s trying to do, then ultimately
you have to create a fictitious form that is doing that. Not one that is
spurious, but the actual thought with all its fragmentary wayward digressions.
And yet, if you read Continuation I and II, you find that it’s really not
digressing so very much. It’s actually obsessively concerned with only one kind
of subject. (Hutchman, 104)
The process is the
internal monologue, only that part of it in the mind which deals with this
question, which is poetry. But it’s as if you were listening to me thinking as
if it were recorded. (Hutchman, 104)
En México is the beginning in the transformation of Dudek’s poetry:
...I think it was
in 1956—I went to Mexico to write En
México, and there’s a great deal of dejection underlying that poem and that
whole period of my poetry. (Schrier, 46)
...the poem En México is fascinating in the way it
got the form it has... I wrote down lines of poetry fragments as they came, and
these later became the poem. This method is something you will find developing
gradually in my poetry... (Schrier, 47)
Here is the
important passage in the Schrier interview regarding Dudek’s discovery of
voice:
Now, from the time
when I was, say, about eight or ten years old, I can remember a mode of feeling
and consciousness that was all my own, which I knew was the way I saw things or
felt things. Not that I had any idea of the importance of this, it’s just that
I remember it. But, ultimately, the purpose must be to take that consciousness,
which is always you, which is continuous and perhaps enriching itself with
experience, and find a way of putting it down on paper. So essentially the form
is the truth of your being: it must correspond to what actually is happening in
the human mind. (Schrier, 47)
Dudek to Schrier:
...in Mexico I just collected lines, sometimes two or three lines...and wrote them on scraps of paper...They were lines and passages in no particular order...There was no sequence, no form...it’s what happened in Mexico actually. I arranged the poem right here on the table, in what looked like an emerging form. And then I typed it, and I moved things when I needed to, until I got a damn good poem out of it. (Schrier, 47-48)
Dudek in interview
with Schrier:
I would say that
throughout life one is looking for an adequate way of saying certain things or
finding a form in poetry. And one of the best things to study in my poetry
would be how from the first beginnings, from certain early poems, through Europe, through En México, “Lac En Coeur”, and so on, I have been groping for a
form, that becomes realized in Atlantis, and then proceeds on to Continuation II. That is to say, I
believe, I want to talk truly to myself, or think for myself, though it is also
a poem for other people of course. (Schrier, 50)
The form is also present in Atlantis but only fully realized in Continuation I. The questions is how
was Continuation “assembled”? Because of its fragmentary nature it lends itself to a random assemblage, cutting up the various epigrams and fragments of poems,
putting them in a hat and the first pulled out of the hat is the first in the
poem. This roughly
corresponds to the way William Burroughs, or the Dadaists, would have created
the poem. This is also how I would have done it, randomly, with a Zen-like
belief in the inherent meaningfulness found in random selection. But I am not convinced
that Dudek would have trusted this method for his own writing, I suspect that
he carefully pieced together bits and pieces of poems, fragments, into an
“intelligent but unintelligible” poem.
En México, a book length poem published in 1956, is Dudek’s journey into
himself, it is the exploration of the subconscious mind, the shadow, the inner
man in a period of flux and searching. Mexico represents a place where the
division between life and death is not as hidden or blurred as it is in Canada
and The United States of America. In Mexico life and death are more the surface of things than in the United States and Canada, death is not hidden, it is not under
layers of cultural preconceptions; for instance, I am editing this on the Mexican "Day of the Dead"; our Halloween has little psychological meaning.
Dudek refers to travel in his poetry, we can see this in the titles of his work: Europe, En México, and
even Atlantis. But he is also someone
who said that despite these books he never really liked to travel, and he
didn’t travel much in his life. Instead, he lived most of his life in Montreal
and he taught at McGill University for over thirty years. Even Atlantis isn’t truly a “travel” poem, it
is a poem of spiritual discovery. It may be that part of “voice” in poetry
comes from involvement with living in a specific geographical place for much of
one’s life, or positing it a location as one’s psychic or spiritual home. Williams had
Paterson; Zukofsky had Brooklyn; and Olson had Gloucester; I mention these because they are book length poems like Louis Dudek's Continuation. For some poets voice requires
commitment to place and a need to make something new, a need to understand what this life we lead is all about.
Dudek writes:
All
writing is distillation, from the life to the work, but poetry especially is a
distillation: out of much verbiage and stupidity, to refine an image of the
seraphic sage; or more simply, to find a voice, lost in the clutter and noise
of existence, which speaks with perfect clarity, with simplicity, out of the
true self. (Dudek, 1983)
Voice is a vehicle
for the content of poetry, but it is also inseparable from poetry; content
expands when an authentic voice is discovered. Voice is not style, style
changes but voice is the expression of the inner, psychological dimension of
the poet; voice is the expression of psyche. The expression of voice changes
just as our actual voice changes with age, but once an authentic voice is
discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the
poet is saying.
November 2012 – June • Montreal
Revised October 2024
