|
The
biggest reason for an anthology like this, is the fact that books have
difficulty crossing borders, especially small press volumes of poetry (and we
all know big presses don't really publish poetry). For example, for reasons
still unexplained, Penguin seems to publish poets from every country they
have offices in, except Canada. Canadian poet Ken Norris, who teaches at the
University of Maine in Orono, says he regularly has to drive up to Montreal
bookstores to see what the Canadian poets are doing. On the other hand, if I
want to see what the Americans are doing, it's equally difficult. Unless I'm
really into what faber & faber are publishing (which I'm really not), I
have very little option in my local bookstores to see what the non-Canadians
are doing. At least through the internet, there are thousands of pages of
work being published by non-Canadians, with a multitude of online literary
journals throughout the United States; Canadians are years behind in
comparison, with almost no work online by some of our standards: John
Newlove, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, Don McKay, Steve
McCaffery and others, and online journals only popping up over the past few
years, such as Michael Bryson's The Danforth Review,
Rob Budde's stonestone, and my own ottawater and
Poetics.ca. And now, of course, it seems that every young
poet in Calgary and Toronto has started up their own blog. For years I've
been wondering if this is a sort of self-perpetuating ideal, keeping our work
inside our borders because of our lack of confidence. Or is there simply no
need to exist on a world stage? Does government funding to authors and books
keep us happy to our borders? Is there a safety in keeping to where we are?
Editor Sina Queyras has admirably built a collection of Canadian poetry for
an outside market, deliberately targeting the Americans as audience for her
anthology Open Field: 30 Contemporary Poets. Contributors
include Jeanette Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Christian Bšk,
George Bowering, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Anne
Carson, George Elliott Clarke, Lorna Crozier, Mary Dalton, Joe Denham,
Christopher Dewdney, Susan Goyette, Lydia Kwa, Sonnet L'Abb, Dennis Lee, Tim
Lilburn, Daphne Marlatt, Don McKay, Erin Mour/Eirin Moure, bp Nichol,
Michael Ondaatje, Lisa Robertson, Anne Simpson, Karen Solie, Todd Swift, Fred
Wah and Jan Zwicky.
A Canadian poet herself, with two collections (and a third forthcoming from
Coach House Books), if you know Canadian writing and look through Queyras'
selection of writers, it reads as though she is all over the map, moving all
over stylistic range, geography and age; reading almost off-balance and wonky
(there are writers here I would never have imagined side by side), she has
obviously built the anthology as a beginning, an opening into further
reading. If you know nothing at all of Canadian writing, you can at least get
a taste of it, and then move further into specific names, picking up, for
example, other anthologies such as Breathing Fire and Breathing
Fire II (Harbour
Publishing, 1996 and 2005) if you care for the work of Karen Solie, Ken Babstock
and Lorna Crozier; picking up a copy of Writing Class: The Kootenay School
of Writing Anthology (New Star Books, 1999) if you care for
the work of Lisa Robertson, or looking through the catalogues of Coach House
Books and Talonbooks if you are more interested in the works of bp Nichol,
Fred Wah, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt and Christian Bšk. As editor
Queyras writes in her introduction:
Discussing
literature (or art, or film, or music, or anything you love) with people
whose influences, or preferences, you are familiar with, but who have little
awareness of your own, can be disorienting. It's fine if you are both equally
unfamiliar, but for those of us living north of the one-way mirror that the
US/Canada border can sometimes be, the experience is more like: we can see
you, you don't see us. Most poetic dialogues assume a certain amount of
shared knowledge and this imbalance flamed my passion: You haven't read? You
haven't heard? Fortunately, Gabe was open to my exuberance (as have found
most Americans to be). After two years of meeting in various bars and cafes
in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Gabe usually walking away with one or two books of
Canadian poetry under his arm (and I with his favorites, or those newly
discovered) the idea for this anthology arose.
The foreword by Molly Peacock gives a good balance to Queyras' introduction,
about the joy of discovery of a body of work that she realized was more
foreign than she had imagined. As she writes:
The disparate poets in this volume all partake of the very strong notion that
Canadian literature defines the Canadian identity, and this idea is shared by
broadcasters and government officials, who speak of how Canadian literature
creates (both among Canadians and on the world stage) powerful images of what
this country is and means. Canada is immensely proud of its poets.
Legislators understand that the making of literature is the making of a
national identity Đ they have put their money on it. Canadian poetry
publishers have taken on the task of creating the national imagination,
devoting themselves to promoting poets like vowel-obsessed Christian Bšk, who
stretches the poetry toward acrobatics of sheer language (and gets on the
best seller list in doing so), and sense-obsessed Lorna Crozier, who roots poetry
in the national tradition of horticulture that she versifies it for its
citizens. On the surface these poets haven't a shred in common, but they are
the ears and eyes on the national face.
Not that it's as bad as that, there are Canadian poets that have made headway
into the United States, but only here and there. I'm thinking specifically
of SUNY-Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center, that has author pages for Darren
Wershler-Henry, Christian Bök and Steve McCaffery (who is now the poetry
chair at SUNY), and their poetics e-mail list has piles of Canadian poets
from Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, Newfoundland and even Ottawa. But Buffalo
is not the entire United States, not by a long shot. Still, I can only hope
that, as has been suggested, there might be a second volume down the road of
Sina Queyras' Open Field. What is that informative spot they
keep putting on NBC? The more you know...
© rob mclennan 2005
Canadian
poet rob mclennans 11th poetry collection, name , an errant, is
forthcoming with Stride in 2006. A prolific writer, editor and publisher, he
is all over the internet (see also: www.robmclennan.blogspot.com).
|