Voice in Louis Dudek’s Continuation, "in the most amazing fragmentary way"

 

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

 

Finding one’s voice in poetry

4 October 2024

All poets need to find their voice, this requires talent, perseverance, and commitment to writing. From when I began writing poetry, in 1965, I knew I had to find my voice, I knew I had to write poems that I could stand behind --poems that were true to my inner self-- and those poems would accurately express the experiences that had formed or created my life. For me, the discovery of my voice in poetry was an important development in my work as a poet; I knew this instinctively, and I spent years writing every night until I finally wrote a "real" poem. 

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The journey to being a poet includes writing, study, reading, and having a few poet friends; it's a journey in that you don't know where you are going until you get there, and you never know if you will write a genuine poem until you write one. Discovering my voice in poetry was a breakthrough in my writing. In my early twenties I had written poems, for instance “there are seashells and cats”, and this was my true voice. This discovery of my true voice is shown in the poems in my first book, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press,1978); these were my first poems that I felt were genuine poems, poems that I could stand behind. Finding one's voice in poetry doesn't mean that you will stay writing the same way, what you say changes and how you say it changes, but that is only after you find your voice; another important poem, in my body of work, is “Divisions”, it was written over three days in April 1977.

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Writing Divisions (Coach House Press, 1983) happened during a period of emotional conflict, of unhappiness, of catharsis. Did Matthew Arnold say that poetry is our religion? This is a shared experience between poet and reader because the poet gives expression to spirit, soul, and psyche and the reader recognizes these important qualities in themselves. What one says in poetry changes as one gets older; nothing is permanent and content is also subject to change, but there is an ineffable quality to voice that doesn’t change; voice is the vehicle for the human soul and what it is experiencing, observing, and moved by, this becomes content, and it needs to be true to one’s inner being.

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November 2012 – June 2013

Revised October 2024

Montreal