Former Village Shopping Plaza

 On 5 November 2024:

On 7 November 2024:

Former Village Shopping Plaza

 On 26 October 2024.  

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

 

Halloween afternoon, 31 October 2024

 

On Louis Dudek's Continuation

Cedar Avenue,  Feb. 20, 1954

Louis Dudek's Collected Poems (1971) is the end of the first half of Dudek’s 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, this time juxtaposing unrelated dream generated images, 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. The mind is essentially very conservative and needs to make sense or impose order on what is perceived; there are also the 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; a new order is discovered in this way. In Continuation, by placing one epigram beside another unrelated epigram, the cumulative effect is a possibly 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.

A fall day in the West End of Montreal

 . . . and out for a morning walk. 18 October 2024.

“Revolution 9” by The Beatles

Bottle of Claret for you if I had realised...

Well, do it next time.

I forgot about it, George, I'm sorry.
Will you forgive me? Am 

Yes.

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number...

...then there's this Welsh Rarebit wearing some brown underpants
...about the shortage of grain in hertfordshire

Everyone of them knew that as time went by they'd get a little bit older and a litter slower but...

It's all the same thing, in this case manufactured by someone who's always/umpteen ...
Your father's giving it diddly-i-dee/district was leaving...
Intended to die ... Ottoman
...long gone through...
I've got to say, irritably and...
...floors, hard enough to put on ... per day's MD in our district
There was not really enough light to get down
And ultimately ... slumped down
Suddenly...

They may stop the funding...
Place your bets
The original
Afraid she'll die ...
Great colours for the season

Number 9, number 9

Who's to know?
Who was to know?

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9

I sustained nothing worse than ...

Also, for example
Whatever you're doing
A business deal falls through

I informed him on the third night, when fortune gives...

People ride, people ride
Ride, ride, ride, ride, ride

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9

Ride! Ride!

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9

...I've missed all of that
It makes me a few days late
Compared with, like, wow!
And weird stuff like that...

...taking our sides sometimes
...floral bark

Rouge doctors have brought this specimen

I have nobody's short-cuts, aha...

9, number 9

...with the situation

They are standing still

The plan, the telegram...
Number 9, number...

A man without terrors from beard to false
As the headmaster reported to my son
He really can try, as they do, to find function...
Tell what he was saying, and his voice was low and his hive high
And his eyes were low...

Alright!

It was on fire and his glasses were the same
This thing knows if it was tinted
But you know it isn't
To me it is...

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9

So the wife called me and we'd better go to see a surgeon to price it ...
Yellow underclothes
So, any road, we went to see the dentist instead
Who gave her a pair of teeth which wasn't any good at all
So I said I'd marry, join the fucking navy and went to sea

In my broken chair, my wings are broken and so is my hair

I'm not in the mood for whirling

How? Dogs for dogging, hands for clapping
Birds for birding and fish for fishing
Them for themming and when for whimming

...only to find the night-watchman unaware of his
presence in the building

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9

Industry allows financial imbalance

Thrusting it between his shoulder blades

The Watusi, the twist

Eldorado

Take this, brother, may it serve you well

Maybe it's nothing
What? What? Oh...

Maybe, even then, impervious in London

...could be difficult thing...
It's quick like rush for peace is because it's so much
Like being naked

It's alright, it's alright
It's alright, it's alright

It's alright, it's alright
It's alright, it's alright
It's alright

If, you became naked

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

Recorded 30, 31 May, 4, 6, 10, 11, 20, 21 June, 16 September 1968

On The Prisoner television show

McGill University campus, 1940s

The Beatles “Revolution 9” could be used as a surrealistic sound track, played over a psychedelic montage of images, for Patrick McGoohan’s television drama, The Prisoner (1967-1968). The protagonist in The Prisoner is played by McGoohan, a former secret agent who suddenly resigns his post but offers no explanation for his decision. McGoohan’s former employer finds his sudden resignation suspicious and McGoohan is abducted from his home and finds himself incarcerated at an unknown seaside location referred to as The Village; his identity is also attacked, he is referred to by his new name, Number Six; the head of The Village is, of course, Number One. The Village is a precursor, and suggestive of, the 15-minute city; in this case it is a place to keep former government employees, all with numbers for names, and they live in relative freedom (the freedom of farm animals), socializing, playing chess, reading The Village newspaper, and some inhabitants are informers on other inhabitants of The Village. The Village is no gulag, it might be called a benevolent incarceration, it is comfortable but no one can leave and the authorities are always attempting to either control or get information out of the inhabitants, and they are all prisoners. But Number Six is not a typical inhabitant, he fights back, he tries to escape. When interrogated Number Six repeats, “I Am Not a Number; I Am a Free Man”; his strength lies in his not surrendering to his jailers, his remaining freedom lies in his refusal to give up information about himself. He says, "I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!"  The whole series of seventeen episodes is a metaphor for our own existence; who do we believe and what do we believe? There is a penalty for noncompliance with the authorities, it is to be an outcast, detained, attacked, and denied one’s freedom; it is to be gaslighted. While other inhabitants of The Village have been pacified, Number Six constantly challenges the authority of his jailers; he is more determined than the other prisoners. No one escapes from The Village, attempted escape results in being chased down by an ominous giant inflated object called Rover, and inhabitants of The Village are constantly surveilled by CCTV. The Village is a dystopia somewhere between George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; it predates the 15 minute city. What else can we take from The Prisoner? It is that we are now, and have always been, prisoners, prisoners of ideas, race, social class, wealth, privilege or poverty, politics, our birth, gender, age, and/or religion, and this has decided the purpose and meaning of our existence. Our prison is self made and no one can free you but yourself. The Beatles were fans of The Prisoner and a Beatles song, “All You Need is Love”, was played during in the final episode; is it any wonder that the refrain, "Number Nine, Number Nine", is repeated in The Beatles most idiosyncratic song, “Revolution 9”? The Prisoner is both a psychological and political metaphor for contemporary life, now more so than in 1967. I nominate Laurence Fox to play in any remake of The Prisoner or a life of Patrick McGoohan.                                                         

Be seeing you.

Loyola campus of Concordia University

 

Vanier Library