Breathing Embroidery: Hearing Margaret Read

Thinking about doing a reading made me uneasy. Each time I do it I don’t know what order to do things in and it struck me that the thing that bothers me is that poetry is not a personal statement and yet you present yourself as a person when you read it, and reading more or less in sequence – using your personal sequence of writing tells something about your discovery, I suppose – so you may as well just give in and let it happen in an autobiographical kind of order.

This is the voiced Margaret I heard for the first time from a recording made in 1972 by Regent College recently given to me by David Kent. (David, by the way, has an excellent article on Margaret in a recent CNQ – see Links.) It’s extraordinary for me to hear Margaret’s voice live for I have never met her. She’s got a low, almost monotone voice that sounds ponderous and deliberate, but still exhibits her characteristic flair for words. In 1972, Margaret was between books – namely The Dumbfounding which came out in 1966 and sunblue which would not be published until 1978. In between those years, she was published curiously enough in an anthology called The Cosmic Chef Glee & Perloo Memorial Society under the direction of Captain Poetry presents an evening of concrete poetry edited by bp nichol. Bp was a good friend of Margaret’s; she met him when she was working at the University of Toronto library. The two poets shared a real love for the language, although for bp, this love would take him in an entirely different direction than Margaret. Although I am no Canlit historian, I sense that Margaret occasionally partook of the times in the Canadian poetry scene as it was in those heady days which included the now ubiquitous event known as the ‘poetry reading.’ Margaret was in her early fifties in 1972 and almost a decade past her conversion, so she was well entrenched in her identity as a Christian and a poet by the time this recording was made. Nontheless, as the recording shows, Margaret was still philosophically at some unease with the notion of reading her poetry aloud.

To my delight, I got to hear Margaret read her famous poem “The Swimmer’s Moment” which by that time already had a reputation for ostensibly being about conversion when it wasn’t written with that intent at all as Margaret makes clear in her prefatory remarks. After she reads the poem, she reflects upon it, saying “It’s very language-bound language, isn’t it? Hard to project. There wasn’t any reading-aloud poetry that I knew of in those years – it was just beginning – and I feel as if I’m breathing embroidery or something when I’m trying to read it.”

Breathing embroidery, indeed! There’s another lovely Avison-ism for you.


P.S. I will add a link to the recording once it is made available on-line.