Commentary on Louis Dudek's Continuation I

 

Philip's Square, Montreal

 

 At the point of greatest awareness and primitive terror

                        the poem recommences

                                            Louis Dudek, Continuation I, p.18 

Commentary (discussion, insights, thoughts, opinions, dead ends, provocations) on book one of Louis Dudek's Continuation.

-o-

Robin Blaser writes: 

The first run of the great meditative poem, Continuation, was published in 1981, a weaving so alive that it will, as I noted, stop only with the author, and not in the closure of form. This narrative — and it is narrative for all the appearance of fragmentation — unlike the previous long-poems, does not follow the path of a literal journey. In this one, the mind darts, travelling through the poetic effort of the whole century and gauging his own part in it. But the tone is more urgent than ever before... (19)

We begin with the perfect first line for this book; Dudek writes, “So, let’s continue...” It’s the continuation of a poem that has already begun, an infinite poem, a poem in progress, the continuation of a project that began before Continuation.

Dudek has several themes in this work, for instance, poetry and being a poet. These themes are Dudek’s foundation for the poem; he includes many references to being a poet that only a poet would make and possibly understand. This is the thing to remember, he’s writing about the importance of poetry in his life, but he’s not writing about writing poetry, that’s something different. Poetry is his life discipline, it’s what gives his life coherence and meaning, it’s what separates Dudek from other people. I think this is a crucial point to understanding the poem. 

Charles Olson, borrowing from Robert Creeley, writes that “Form is never more than an extension of content”; the form in Continuation is the juxtaposition of single or several lines that are an extension of the poem’s content, in the form of fragments, epigrams, and statements, placed before and after each other. Olson continues: a “possible corollary...that right form in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.”

 -o-

How did Continuation get the form it has? How did the epigrams get the order that they have? How did Dudek decide how to order the epigrams in the poem? Was it thought out by Dudek or is it a random assemblage? Although it reads as a randomly assembled poem, I suspect it was mostly thought out, that Dudek didn’t totally trust a random arrangement such as John Cage might have suggested. My reading of the poem is that although it has a fragmentary quality it also still has Dudek’s (almost invisible, but intended as such) controlling hand selecting, assembling, and ordering the poem. The effect of the organization of the lines corresponds to listening to someone thinking, it is a stream of consciousness.

-o-

Rereading Continuation this morning it occurs to me that the assembly of Continuation I is based on Dudek's subjective associations, what one line or sentence or single word suggests to him is the impetus of the next line or sentence; it could be as minor as a single word, taken from the text, and what follows is what it suggests. It is a wholly subjective way to assemble the ideas and lines that he has written. The whole project is all ideas, but by Continuation III he also reflects on personal experiences, for instance on experiences from his childhood, otherwise it is all ideas; it is “ideas in poetry”. Pound said that "only emotion endures" and Dudek agrees with this, but he doesn't necessarily act on it. The template of Continuation includes two main ideas, they are the nature of poetry and the divine presence, which is God. Poetry, and the other high arts, are an expression of the divine. And Dudek follows Mathew Arnold's insight that "our religion is poetry."

But God is a nice short word

        for something too vast to imagine. 

(78)

 

Then, referring to Continuation, Dudek writes

Piecemeal is how they come to to me

The prefabricated pieces 

                I put together

Much in the order in which they came

(78)

-o-

Beyond a few sentences, in our lives, there is nothing

(11)

 

The real world

is silent, we must be silent to hear it

(11)

 

Who cares, does anybody care

about your precious mind and what goes on in it?

 (13)

 

 

But to accumulate lines, is not that a pleasure?

To weave them into patterns,

                        is not that happiness?

(13)

 

 

O the poet that incredible madman

            possessed by what he hardly knows or comprehends

See him coming toward you, his fat cheeks on fire

convinced of his potency, his craft, his supreme art

that no one needs or understands

(13)

This seems to suggest something of Dudek’s hesitation regarding self-revelation in poetry, the loss of privacy in life, and the poet as celebrity; but writing poetry is also his greatest pleasure (which he refers to elsewhere as an addiction greater than sex or drugs). Some of the least self-revelatory poets are close to being confessional poets. Dudek greeted my confessional, self-revelatory poem, "Divisions", with nothing but affirmation, even writing that he would publish it. 

 -o-

The influence of epigrams is also seen in this section; at first they seem like so many disparate and unrelated statements, not poetry but statements, injunctions, conclusions, no metaphor, no music to the language, no emotion:

 

The conscious mind knows nothing of art

That’s why we forget our dreams

 

(Give a dying man a post-hypnotic suggestion

see if it works...)

 

It’s come about so that anyone

who isn’t killing himself for pleasure

is a puritan

 

Having lost the dream, I feel no anguish

Lassitude itself is a dream

(16)

 -o-

Section Two:

Here is Dudek on poetry, epigrams, and Pound’s Cantos.

 

(The anthologists themselves are the only readers)

(19)

 

No one is superior to another, no one

In the end, what matters is that you’ve got a record

                                    of what you said

(20)

 

As the true mimesis

                        a poem without direction

(20)

 

-o-

The poem, so far, seems to be a lot of statements that are disconnected, or unconnected to each other, or to other unrelated statements, and are not conventional or formal poetry. But then we read other lines:

 

The carrot greens are hanging out of the garbage bag

They have served their purpose

 

Necessity is the will of God

What he wants most is to exist

 

Wish you were here

                        having a good time

 

I am the imagination that creates

                                    an image of itself

 

The poets have been trying to conceive man

Now they want to be as well as to conceive

 

So Ezra was ok

            He survived our misunderstandings

 

As the body disintegrates, the spirit grows more firm

(21)

 

-o-

Then, we must consider randomness as a way to give art depth, it’s all thrown out at you, none of it seems to have much depth in a linear, discursive way.

The following is Dudek as he begins this new unexplored area of poetry: it is to understand the psychology of writing poetry, that we understand life better in the act of creativity; cis life affirming.

 

The style

simple but not commonplace

a complex of clichés

 

Speak with your full intelligence

Speak from the secret mind

 

Expect miracles

(22)

 

-o-

Then we find wholeness and vision in synchronistic experiences, even in writing this poem there is the miracle of meaning unfolding, it is the “meaningful (synchronistic) coincidence” in which the universe is unfolded, even that which is apparently random has an inherent meaning.

 

Coincidences

The coincidences of this world

(23)

 

-o-

We have epigrams on poetry (some express Dudek’s bitterness at his lack of greater recognition). Dudek’s literary papers (25) are housed in Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, and his personal library is at Special Collections at McGill – neither is a “dunghill”, rather, they show the greatness of the man despite the comment.

 

But there was the epic poetry all around

                                    that they ignored

(24)

 

Poetry a cottage industry

(25)

 

The poem, a man talking to himself

(25)

 

A poet, let’s say in the ‘major’ league

 

but if he goes into eclipse

no one is interested in studying his dunghill

any more

 

                        The ‘literary papers of’

                                   

(25)

 

-o-

Section Three:

This section of epigrams is pure randomness, too bad Dudek was condescending about John Cage who might have complemented (and developed/articulated/elaborated on) Dudek’s assemblage of epigrammatic statements. The juxtaposition of Dudek’s epigrams results, curiously, not in confusion and nonsense, but in something meaningful.

Personally, I do not think of Dudek as a “philosopher-poet”, he’s a poet; “philosopher-poet” detracts from his poetry. If we go to the work, this isn’t a systematic exposition of ideas, it’s random thoughts thrown at the reader. A poet is rarely a philosopher, most poets prefer to be called poets.

This poetry also gives the reader the expression of Dudek’s soul as separate from the public man. What holds these statements together is the persona of the speaker, it is not an old man with a scowl, it is a poet who speaks here. There is a lot of passion in Continuation I:

 

Canadians have never learned to think

Have never learned to take up the subject

(31)

 

The poetry of the commonplace

                        (Dudek’s “Snowbound”)

(33)

 

-o-

 

(“I don’t want your fake poems

                        I want a record of your mind”)

 (33)

 

Most, when they write criticism

            are frustrated by their own mediocrity

and have to take it out on others

who turn out, no matter how, a bit of the real thing

(35)

 

One doesn’t get particularly wise as one gets older

                        only a bit milder,

we kill with diminished zest

(35)

 

-o-

While Pound railed against usury, the Federal Reserve and the monetary system (that Henry Miller parodied in his essay, “Money and How It Got that Way”), Dudek rails against the way low art, or popular culture, has undermined high art (an example of high art in music would be Bach and Mozart; I mention classical music because it is one of Dudek’s passions).  However, the passion in Continuation is not for people or social justice, it is not a poem of great outer passion, but it is a passionate poem with respect to poetry and this is also evident in the energy (which is passion) required to write this long poem. The fact is, Dudek’s emotional range in Continuation is limited—he is an intellectual, not a man of great emotions—and this is a deficit to the poem—as poetry demands emotion, as stated by Pound and repeated by Dudek. However, the range of emotions in this work is not meant to be extensive, it is a work of ideas, insights, a work articulating a lifetime of thinking about poetry. Dudek laments what poetry has become, how it is no longer high art, it is entertainment, marginalized, and for this reason he is angry, bitter, as always an outsider to “poetry biz”.

Now, all there is is low art, low culture, vulgarity, and no one makes the distinction between the two, especially not the artists.

 The strongest emotion in Continuation is anger at the crassness and commercialization of contemporary society. Regarding old age, Dudek’s response is not emotional, it is more resigned to being old, and descriptive of the condition of old age. The problem of high art versus low art is one of Dudek’s lifelong issues, something he returns to again and again (in his numerous book reviews one of his complaints is that poetry is being debased by, for instance, violence (in Patrick Lane’s work) and by poets who haven’t read anything, don’t know much about poetry, but still want to call themselves “poets”).

 It used to be that low culture’s demands on one’s time were minimal, now we are constantly bombarded with advertising and commercialization; it seems that all there is is low art. Low culture demands a commitment, in money and time spent on it, and its presence in our daily life, that is way out of proportion to the value that it gives one. It seems that every few weeks Apple is selling a “must have” gadget, a modification of some other gadget, and people line up the day before to dutifully buy this stuff, I have no idea why they can’t wait a few days before spending their money. I suspect that immediate purchase, immediate gratification of the retail gene, precludes the consumer’s  awareness that more of this junk is not necessary...

 

Life   literature   I tell you

I’ve seen and heard far more

                        interesting things in books

than ever I saw hamburgers in life dancehalls

Beer Campbell Soup Bingo

Used Cars or shit salesmen

                                    their thoughts

dishrag dust stale cheese albumin

 (37)

 

-o-

There’s a lot of passion in this first book of Continuation; it is the passion of writing poetry and having found a voice through which the poet can speak.

 

An ecstasy in the throat...

...

Even on the street, patches of perfection

...

 

Poetry is an experience   How you explain it

                        is something else

 

Like flying — and the theory

(38-39)

 

-o-

Continuation represents a lifelong commitment to the discipline of writing poetry. Below, as well, a reference to John Cage in Dudek’s poem:

 

There is even the freedom to write bad poetry

 

No one is obliged to read

Or listen

Prokofiev’s body odour, very acrid

John Cage’s monkeyshines

(40)

 

-o-

The illusion of any art form, to make it seem unself-conscious, to make it seem “easy”, while knowing that it is a lifetime’s effort to get to where Dudek can write this poem.

 

The poetic stream

            (at least to make it seem so

                                    like all appearance)

—streams

            of consciousness

(40)

 

-o-

Dudek`s passion is poetry but he was also a perceptive critic of contemporary society and changing values. “We’ve lost the battle” he says, and the evidence surrounding us is that he is right.

Here is the passionate Dudek, the poet who is a social critic in his poetry and who denounces commercialism and the demise of propriety in general, but also the downfall of high mimetic art and cultural values.

 

We’ve lost the battle

against stupidity, vulgarity

Lost it, Messrs Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, etc.

Lost to the Beats, the Beatles, the Activists, the McLunatics

To Pop & Op & “multiple media”,

                                    to “total environment”

To psychedelia & Flower Power

                        the New Left, SDU CEGEP, UGEQ, & MAUT

Lost to the new barbarian      

without a scrap of poetry worth a pin

(42)

 

-o-

Robin Blaser describes Dudek as a “walking loneliness”. A man isolated in himself, a person alone. I am not convinced that this is the truth. Dudek was a thinker and an introvert, but he was also a family man and a professor greatly beloved by his students. Dudek affected an intellectual isolation that was also self-isolating, his position seems to be that he was interested in the mind while everyone else was caught up in what is fashionable and temporary. It is a curse to be born introverted, it is lonely, but in the second half of life it is a blessing as it allows one to be alone while others find being alone a terrible experience. Some people like being alone, in fact if you want to get anything done you need to be alone a lot of the time. There isn’t much time for partying, drinking, carousing if you have work to do. One also needs to balance working for money, looking after one’s family, running a household, and one’s own creative work. Personal relationships, family and friends, and colleagues, are very important to someone like Dudek, but he is also a man of solitude. He missed teaching when he retired, he missed the daily necessity of at least a minimum of human contact outside the home. He was also physically not well, bad health understandably made everything worse than had he been healthy. We need to remind ourselves that as a poet Dudek’s dialogue with the world, his way of addressing what is important to him, is through poetry.

 

Life  a Tunnel of Terror

                                    (I never talk to anyone

                        about what really concerns me)

The unreality of things

 

                        How everything vanishes

like a vapour

 

...

 

The wound in the psyche bleeds

            rubber, ferric oxide, salt . . .

 

Man the big bacillus

(44)

 

-o-

Section Four: this is a section of complaints and anger at the media:

 

Dudek picks up what he began late in Section Three, his critique of society and his positioning of poetry against what society has become. Poetry, for Dudek (and Matthew Arnold), has taken the place of religion, it is his personal place of meditation, of thinking over what is truly important to him.

 

This is not a “large canvas” on which Dudek writes, he is concise and his concerns are poetry, the journey of the second half of life, and some social commentary.

 

I would like to tell Louis, “Not to worry”, you wrote just enough, you wrote prose and poetry, you were an editor and educator, and you were always concerned with poetry and the affect of the media on cultural values. You exemplified a concept of what it means to be a poet, not only writing poetry, criticism, and poetics, in the tradition of Olson, Corman, Pound, Whitman, the Romantic poets, and others.

 

He begins by writing:

 

I worry I write too much . . .

(46)

 

 

-o-

 

Why is there so little truth,

so much crap, ‘entertainment’

                        and other fake around?

Are they all that stupid? inveterate liars?

Is it self-interest? is it that lies pay off?

Or are they scared — to show what they are?

 

Is all this misery a result of misunderstanding?

A belief that reality is unbearable —

                        that any lie is better?

(46)

 

Mainly it’s the grown-ups are bloody liars

What are they trying to hide, anyway?

The ravages of time, on heart and body?

                        The source of their filthy money?

The sewage of commerce —

                        selling crap they make

                                                to cover the truth?

Or is it just death?  Inevitable death

                                                they try to deny?

(47)

 

These preceding comments give some indication of a different, passionate side of Dudek. But anger, especially the anger of an older man, is easy to criticize. Indeed., anger as an emotion is not a substitute for compassion, love, kindness (all of which one experienced when with Louis; he had an old-world charm and quality of courtesy that is lacking in most people). But Dudek was not only an older man but a man with position in society. This makes him an easy target in a politically correct society such as ours.

We have what Dudek wrote, but is something missing? If there is an emotional levelling-off in this poem, a dearth of emotions in this poem (for instance, where are the love poems?) we excuse this because we expect Dudek to be rational and intellectual at all times, always falling back on the belief in “reason over passion”, and possibly he might be correct in this. But this is poetry and the intellect will only take you so far, thinking does not generally move the heart. Dudek’s emotions, here, are a revulsion with the commercialization of society, how we’ve sold out our values to the interests of the media, the corporations, and what we’ve received in return is “The Big Lie of the NEWS-papers/in 72-pt Gothic...” (47) Today, we say that the MSM is biased, it’s fake news. 

 -o-

Robin Blaser writes: “Thus, Dudek’s phrase “by God today we mean poetry” is neither a religious nor anti-religious statement. But it does have to do with the work of meaning and with an open reality in which the human record is all we have to go on.” (11) Actually, I think Dudek meant what he wrote, poetry had replaced God for Dudek, poetry was Dudek’s spirituality.

 

But we always return to a source of redemption, poetry.

 

And the indifference of the world to God, God

                                    (by God today we mean poetry)

which is reflection, upon death, reality . . .

 

I mean what the prophets always said,

                        turn your face against vanity, turn from your “false gods”

 

The media, spreading their shit music,

                        shit talk, shit advertising

flowing with simple lukewarm consistency

                        through the long hot afternoon

Voices of vanity, incurable vanity,

                        of triviality

become the real, the commonplace, the everyday!

(48)

 

-o-

We have sold out our economic interests for the Made-in-China junk that fills our store shelves (”Nearly all the things you buy are unnecessary/ as well as poisonous” 49). We have bought into the triviality of social media. We buy, buy, buy, and none of it brings us lasting peace or satisfaction at any level but the most immediate, while what we had is gone. The universities have also experienced “The spread of illiteracy”. For Dudek redemption is in poetry, a place of thinking, communion, and emotional and spiritual depth.

 

Salesmen with shit on their tongue  Can’t stop.

                        lickety-click lickety-click lickety-click,

                                                America

One half salesmen the other half suckers

                                    one of each born every minute

Land of the fuckin’ free-for-all

(49)

 

-o-

Dudek has some kind of mystical belief in poetry that seems to contradict his other statements regarding the rational mind. Alas, poets have always made incredible statements and claims for poetry. It is a matter of faith.

 

(.0001 percent read poetry,

                        200 out of twenty million)

To change their minds . . .

 

. . .

 

Point 0-0-0-one — as many as get killed

on a good holiday week-end

(100 in Canada, May 20/68)

Drowned themselves in liquor, out of emptiness

                                                crashed in their cars

(50-51)

 

-o-

Section Five, the final section of Continuation I:

This section gives us a philosophical monologue on God, poetry, money, and the decline of society’s values. Dudek finds himself exhausted by the “new age” in which he lives.

 

Poetry as forbidden music

                        La musica proibita

The black lynx of art

(54)

 

And then this interesting statement on indeterminacy that also refers to the writing of Continuation I:

 

Chance exists only in the mind, not in nature

(54)

 

-o-

 This is followed by various epigrammatic statements; for instance:

 

The man who respects his superiors

            is more likely to have some respect for the general

 

Equality is contempt

for the differences that make us human

 

Tho’ you can learn more from ordinary people

            than you can learn from intellectuals

                                                or from books

 

Anyhow, virtue is sad

 

We live in God’s eye

(55)

 

-o-

The following is a beautiful passage about Montreal. There is real love for Montreal in this, this love for place in which, almost Whitman-like, the listing of places evokes the place, the name seems to contain the essence of the place. There is also the importance of place for a poet, for a poet is connected to a geographical place just as surely as to the time in which he lives:

 

A bird’s eye-view

It shoots down Atwater like a salmon

to its river and its lake-like curves

                        turning to spume at Ville LaSalle

Around it meanders from the city’s long shoulders

            Baie d’Urfé & Ile Bizard

the Lakeshore shallows sleeping around Ste Anne

Then descends, a shot-silk around the body

            of the beautiful island, thickening at the thighs

Back River, Ile aux Coudres, Ile Jésus,

                        Pointe aux Trembles, Bout de L’Ile

 

Here in front of us below the rapids

                        Au Pied du Courant—

opening the port to al the seas,

lovely and lyrical, like a long-legged Lilith               

she raises her breasts and lifts you to love

(57-58)

-o-

Place defines the poet and the poet’s work. A poet not connected to place— and this is increasingly common in a society in which people move every few years—cannot possibly know the place well enough so that the place is a part of his soul. The structure of the psyche, of the soul, must also be connected to place.

 

-o-

 A nomadic life is probably not best suited to writing poetry, we need stability to be poets—we need to live for many years in a single place—it is a conservative art given to a vision of place, but it is one place, at one time, to create one poetry. A poet can write of different places, but the psyche and the poet’s voice is the creation of a single place. We identify with one place, it is our psychic center. There is a soul to the city, any city, and the soul is different in each city; every city is defined by its astro-cartography. Voice is the manifestation of resolution of opposing forces in the psyche, in a single place. Speech is also a part of voice, and speech is identifiable with place. 

 

-o-

 An imaginary, sentimental connection to place is not the same thing as a psychic connection to place; you have to live in a place, or have lived there for number of years, to know a place as well as one knows one’s own existence, so that one’s existence is a part of that place. You have to love that place of your poetry. A poet should be able to walk down the street and be able to say this is where this event happened, a different building used to stand here, this is where my ancestors first lived, this is where my great great uncle was priest to a large congregation. Dudek has this connection to Montreal, a city in which he lived all of his life.

 

-o-

 See Chapter 4, “The Problem of a Total Commitment” and Chapter 17, “More on the Context of Locality”, in The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford by Wendell Berry for more on the importance of a poet’s life-long commitment to a specific geographical location. Dudek is at home in Montreal, he’s not travelling and not escaping himself in travel. That’s why Continuation is his greatest poem, in his own estimation, because it is the most accurate expression of his own psyche, the most faithful to his authentic voice which is an extension of geography, of locale, of where this individual comes from. Ronald Sutherland, in The New Hero, Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian Literature (Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, 1977), refers to an author’s intimate knowledge of his geographical place as “a sphere of consciousness, an inside awareness of subtle peculiarities.” (p. 89). 

 

-o-

 Olson had Glouester; Williams had Paterson; Bunting had Northumbria; Zukofsky has New York and Dudek has Montreal. It does not necessarily mean repeated references to place, but that soul is a product of that place, that one maps the very soul and psyche emanating from the soil, history, language, and essence of that place.

 

-o-

 

Back to rationality:

 

But the manic vision, is it the best of poetry?

(60)

 

-o-

 

And the question of aging, of getting old:

 

When you get up to a certain age

                                    you cease to be ambitious

Uncomfortable enough

                        without wanting other to plague you

(60)

 

-o-

 

And back to poetry:

 

Poetry is dream pouring over

                                    in to life

(61)

 

The love of art—

what rounds the ring in the circle of oblivion

Listen to the sweet sounds

                        the far echoes

Is it God—the gods—or transcendence?

                                    Is it eternity?

(62)

 

-o-

And then more on poets—they are the same as the old poets—lusting after the gravy train, money, grants, etc. But surely, why not? A poet needs time in which to write, so why not a professor’s job, or better yet, a teaching job in a junior college with no committee work and just twelve hours a week of teaching repeating the same old lectures year after year?

 

But poets love the gravy train

                                    O yes, they do

They love the gravy train

as much as lawyers, pimps, and con men do

 

Despite their moral fervour (in youth)

                                    they love the gravy train they do

(63)

 

-o-

Then, towards the end of Continuation I, we conclude with lines that move us into Continuation II, which is a description of students crashing down the halls, almost knocking over anyone in their way. All of us have seen this, especially at the end of a semester.  

 

 

Volleying down corridors

                        arms spread and screaming

the young have taken over

                                    with LSD

(64)

 

This is so descriptive that it must have come from a lived experience; anyone who has taught at the undergraduate level has a similar experience. 

-o-

 

Continuation I is a series of fragments, statements, and epigrams. Every part of the poem, like a Jackson Pollock painting, is its own centre, it has no narrative, only the present moment. Each “statement” is the totality of the poem, so if there is a centre to the poem it can be found on every page. What Dudek has written is a single sustained poem in a voice that is unique in poetry. One of his concerns is the poet in society and how (as he once said to me) the only real critic is time. But poets are avaricious for any recognition they can get, they want the kind of criticism and praise of their work reserved for the very few who make a name for themselves. The only “glory” is at the moment of writing a poem. The only motivation for writing is love for words, for poetry, for creativity. Dudek knew all of the emotions poets feel, he was not immune to the pettiness of poets. But he thought his way through these emotions and combined with his own self-effacing introversion, he rightly decided on rejecting the ego-centrism of poets like Irving Layton.

  

Let other poets thrive (as we grow older

                                    memories thin)

                        —who want the final judgement in their time

 

We’ll have each other

and wait for this, while violence and wars increase

 

As for glory,

get the moment down on paper

                        for an eternal slumber

 

And if anything remains, remember—

                        there was love, also a remnant

(64)

-o-

Montreal, 2012. Revised in October-November  2024. Note: I usually go back and edit what I've written and will edit this commentary in the future. 

Birds, robins, bird bath

 October 2024

“Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

 

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church
Where the wedding has been lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in
A jar by the door, who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Father Mackenziе
Writing the words of a sermon
That no one will hеar no one comes near
Look at him working
Darning his socks in the night
When there's nobody there what does he care?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

All the lonely people (All the lonely people)
All the lonely people (All the lonely people)
All the lonely people (All the lonely people)

Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was
Buried along with her name nobody came
Father Mackenzie
Wiping the dirt from his hands as
He walks from the grave no one was saved

All the lonely people all the lonely people
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)
(Ah, look at all the lonely people)

Songwriters: John Lennon / Paul McCartney

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.