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. 

 _______

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.

_________

 

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.

__________________________          

November 2012 – June 2013

Revised October 2024

Montreal

Defining Voice in Poetry

The discovery of a poet’s voice brings authenticity to the poet’s work, that the work communicates the content and form of the poem as well as the poet’s inner being, his or her soul or psyche. 

__________________________

It isn’t the sound of your voice or how well you read a poem out loud that is voice. It isn’t a poem for several voices. It isn’t slam poetry or performance poetry. It’s the essence of who you are as it is expressed in the way you write, it is your own original distinctive individual voice.

__________________________

Voice in poetry, to be authentic, must be true to the self of the poet, to the inner, subjective, self-perception, self-knowledge, of the poet. Voice has to be authentic and true to the poet’s inner perception. Poetry happens when psyche has access to the world.

__________________________

The point is to discover one’s voice, and then you continue writing and voice changes in what one writes, but the discovery of one’s authentic voice is a border one needs to cross in order to write the work that follows, work that one can stand behind, that gives one the self-assurance to expresses one’s vision. 

__________________________

Voice is a vehicle for the content of 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. Voice changes just as our bodies change with age, but once an authentic voice is discovered then voice will remain authentic to the poet, no matter what the poet is saying or in what form it is being said.

__________________________

There is no way to find one’s voice, it must be discovered by the poet, but not all poets find their voice in poetry; in a way, an authentic voice finds the poet. After voice is discovered the person writing poems is a real poet, not someone who also happens to write occasional poems. Voice in poetry comes to you, you can work on your poetry but that doesn’t guarantee you will find your voice; voice is like any other creative work that comes to the person. If someone who writes poems never finds his voice, he or she is not a poet. How can they be when writing poetry is predicated on writing from an authentic voice? This does not diminish what a poet writes before the discovery of voice, some great poems can be written before voice is discovered as a prelude to finding one’s voice, as a precursor to the discovery of the poet’s authentic voice.

__________________________

First, you have to be born a poet and realize you are a poet by writing poetry, then you have to put in your 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. There’s nothing romantic or fun about being a poet. It’s a lot of hard work to be a poet and as you get older it gets harder and harder, not only because it is solitary work but because of all the additional work that comes with writing and building a body of work; for instance, the time consuming work of organizing and placing one’s archives, working on one’s selected poems, keeping up correspondence, managing what you have created over a lifetime, and the effort to meet the demands of life as one gets older. If you live long enough you, too, will not be immune to the demands of old age.

__________________________

Voice is the expression of the poet’s integrity as a poet. Voice is the expression of the poet’s character, sensibility, and integrity as a human being. This is why it has such importance to poets.

__________________________

Discovering one’s voice does not disqualify or negate what the poet wrote before this discovery, but it is a sign of the poet’s maturity as a poet. 

__________________________

Voice is when we speak from the heart, from the soul, without pretension or affectation, but with honesty and truth without censoring ourselves, with only one conviction, to be true to our inner necessity, to what we have to say (not what we want to say or should say, or think we should say) but abandoning these things of the self, to speak from the real and authentic self, not the layers of self, but from the heart and from the soul.

__________________________

The genesis of both the content of the work and the voice expressing the work are simultaneous, they can’t be separated. An authentic voice is discovered in writing poems.

__________________________

Voice in poetry is not one’s “style” of writing; style may be narrative, minimal, formal, visual poetry, or what have you. Voice is access to psyche from which poems are written. If a poet hasn’t discovered his or her “voice” they haven't become a poet.

__________________________ 

A poet can’t “search for a voice”, but all poets need to find their voice. Voice comes to the poet, it isn’t something you can “find”. Voice is the expression of the poet’s psyche; it is the congruence of events that allow the poem to authentically express the inner, spiritual and psychological being of the poet.

__________________________

Stephen Morrissey                                            

November 2012 – June 2013,  Montreal

 Revised: 2 October 2024

On a life of fearless writing

 

I've spent a lifetime writing: a diary I've kept everyday since January 1965, books, poetry, book reviews, criticism, and correspondence.  Why did I do so much writing? On one hand, I enjoy solitude and being creative. On the other hand, there were things that happened in my life that I understood better in the act of writing; writing helped me to understand something about life and expressing this in a poem was both to discover something new and to have a numinous experience.

    This writing I am talking about has to be fearless, the writer is going to a place that is marked with signs saying "No Trespassing", "Do Not Enter", and "Enter at Your Own Risk". The important things in life are not easy and they aren’t free, they are a lot of work. You may be afraid to write something down, or afraid to follow where your thinking is going, you may be inclined to censor your writing; just remember that no one else need ever read what you are writing, you can tear it up after you've written whatever you want to say, but you need to have courage and be fearless to do the writing. How could it be otherwise? Writing has to be a precise expression of what the soul has to say, what the soul perceives; this is more difficult than you might think.

    What I am saying will mean very little to most people, but this is not meant for most people, it is meant for poets. A poet wants to write an authentic poem, a poem that is authentic to what the poet wants to say, to be true to the poet's inner being, and this requires years of writing and rewriting poems. All of a poet's work can be seen as one long poem, it is the poem of one's life, continuous and unbroken. You don't just sit down one day and write something you call a poem and think that makes you a poet, there is a lot more to it than this. 

    Writing poetry is not an obsession or even a compulsion, it is that there is no alternative but to do the writing that presents itself to you; it is what one does and to do anything else is to deny the Call to do this work; if you deny the Call you have betrayed your life, betrayed your mission in life. Not even God is as important as your soul, you can live very nicely without God but if you betray your soul you will have no life at all, just confusion and denial. Don't worry, God will forgive you for not believing in Him, He doesn't need your belief, He doesn't even need you. To see life, the particulars of life, and to express them, is to communicate things of the soul and poetry is the voice of the soul. Writing is always a movement in the direction of wholeness and understanding, of creativity, of making something new. It is a triumph of formulating and expressing in an exact way the thing you want to write, it is the achievement of wholeness over division. So, at the basis of writing is finding wholeness, truth, and Oneness with life. That's how important writing is to a poet and why poets need to be fearless when writing poems.

Notes on Voice in Poetry

                      

The discovery of a poet’s voice brings an authenticity to the poet’s work, that the poet’s voice communicates the content of the poem as well as the poet’s inner being, his or her soul. Voice in poetry is the expression of the soul.

__________________________

It isn’t the sound of your voice or how well you read a poem out loud that is voice. It isn’t a poem for several voices. It isn’t slam poetry or performance poetry. It’s the essence of who you are as it is expressed in the way you write, your own original distinctive individual voice.

__________________________

Voice in poetry, to be authentic, must be true to the self of the poet, to the inner, subjective, self-perception of the poet. The voice has to be authentic and true to the poet’s inner perception. Voice has to be an expression of the authentic self, not the self covered over with falsehood and conceit.

__________________________

The point is to discover one’s voice, and then you continue writing and voice changes in what one writes, but the discovery of one’s authentic voice is a border one needs to cross in order to write the work that follows, work that one can stand behind, that gives one the self-assurance to expresses one’s vision. 

__________________________ 

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.

__________________________

There is no way to find one’s voice, it must be discovered by the poet, but not all poets find their voice in poetry; however, after voice is discovered the person writing poems is a real poet, not someone who also happens to write poems. If someone who writes poems never finds his voice, he is not a poet. How can he be when writing poetry is predicated on writing from an authentic voice? This does not diminish what a poet writes before the discovery of voice, in some way voice might exist as a precursor to the discovery of the poet’s authentic voice, or at least the reader can see the potential for the birth of voice in the early work.

__________________________

First, you have to be born a poet and realize you are a poet by writing poetry, then you have to put in your 10,000 hours of apprenticeship. There’s nothing romantic or fun about it. It’s a lot of hard work to be a poet and as you get older it gets harder and harder, not because of writing poems but because of all the pother work that comes with writing and building a body of work; for instance, organizing and placing your archives, working on your selected poems, writing criticism, keeping up correspondence, managing what you have created a lifetime building, and so on.

__________________________

Voice is the expression of the poet’s integrity as a poet. Voice is the expression of the poet’s character, sensibility, and integrity as a human being. This is why it has such importance to poets.

__________________________

Discovering one’s voice does not disqualify or negate what the poet wrote before this discovery, but it is a signifier of the poet’s maturity as a poet. 

__________________________ 

Voice is when we speak from the heart, from the soul, without pretention or affectation, but honestly without censoring ourselves, with only one conviction, to be true to our inner necessity, to what we have to say (not what we want to say or should say, or think we should say) but abandoning these things of the self, to speak from the real and authentic self, not the layers of self, but from the heart, with honesty, and from the soul.

__________________________ 

The genesis of both the content of the work and the voice expressing the work are simultaneous, they can’t be separated. They are the same process. The work is written in the voice as the voice is discovered and as the work is written.

__________________________ 

Voice in poetry is not one’s “style” of writing; style may be narrative, minimal, visual poetry, or what have you. Voice is access to psyche from which poems are written. If a poet hasn’t discovered his “voice” he hasn’t become a poet.

__________________________ 

A poet can’t “search for a voice”, but all poets need to find their voice. Voice comes to the poet, it isn’t something you can “find”. Voice is the expression of the poet’s psyche, the congruence of events that allow the poem to authentically express the inner, spiritual and psychological, being of the poet.

__________________________