Dear Margaret: Going to Newfoundland

Dear Margaret:

Your death made little fanfare in the world as David Kent notes, and that is perhaps as you wished it, but your memory lingers on in the minds of many poets -- kindred spirits of the word -- and I am one of them. Tomorrow I will board a plane to Newfoundland to meet other such spirits, friends who knew you in person or through your poems. We will meet in one of those 'person-freeing' silences you speak of in the paradoxical act of remembering you, you, who eschewed the limelight in every way! A group of poet-friends will gather together to talk about you and your work; I hope you don't mind. I traveled a journey with your poetry and archive this past month that was at times exhilarating and exasperating, but always revealing of a fierce intelligence and a dogged devotion to the art of poetry and the art of seeking God. In Newfoundland, I look forward to seeing that place you call "Ajar" --

A glistening sea spread under
the teal-blue sky,
level horizons all around. By
some eerie miracle
everything tilted towards the
edge-of-nothing end.

where:

The forecasts, all:
fair weather.

(AN, Vol 3, p.201)

Re-reading the World

Yesterday, I spent an hour reading the third volume of Always Now. And then I took a bike ride down a street lined with blossoming apple trees. In spring in Japan, the viewing of the cherry trees in bloom is an almost sacred event. The whole nation is primed for it with even the weather broadcasters showing maps of the country in graduated shades of pink indicating when the blossoms will be at their peak throughout the land. June is the month of blossoms in Winnipeg, I find, especially of crab apple and lilac. From a neighbor’s deck, I saw a faraway apple tree, rife with blossoms, like an explosion caught in mid-frame, wads of white fisted flowers punching the blue air.

A good poet makes a person re-read the world. So spoke a voice in my head as I biked along the trail by the river. Because I’d read Margaret’s poetry, every living thing I encountered hummed and buzzed with meaning – the burdock lining the banks of the river with the spindly grey shadows of their former selves rising ethereally above the riotously elephantine eared new growth, the roar of the jet plane overhead as my wheels crunch over the gravel below the underpass, the thrust of a branch studded with flowers into the stark lined symmetry of telephone wires against the blue sky, and then suddenly that lane full of blossoming trees so lovely it makes one stop and gape in awe.

I read the world I saw that day because I read Margaret read the world in her poems. Her ‘concrete and wild carrot,’ her ‘snowflakes in starlight/obliterated into weft and stippling,’ her ‘young medalioned trees’ her leaves ‘blossomy in frills and lace,’ her ‘still angora mist,’ her ‘rollicking orb’ – all these descriptors bespeak a gift with language for the well-observed. It’s as if these things named themselves to her. In “Knowing the New,” the poet declares “Suddenly utterance is everywhere.” and that is exactly right. In spring, utterance IS everywhere. I had half a mind to find all of Margaret’s spring poems – she has quite a few, for example, set in April which is a favorite month for poets – and put them in a home-made calendar. Of course, her linguistic acuity is not simply limited to observation of the natural world but to other things like the unseen and the invisible that have only the fingertips of words to probe them. There are her meditations on death, for example, and her many poems on scripture – words reading the Word, as it were, but today, because it is spring, I want to celebrate it the way Margaret did in her poems so often and so marvelously in those moments when her sheer gift with language truly lit up the terrain.

Steward of God's Mysteries

Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries.

I Corinthians 4:1


I always try to begin my writing days with a lectionary reading, and part of today’s reading seems appropriate to Margaret. I’ve selected the opening line from one of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. It’s easy to dismiss these opening lines as stock greetings, but now and then, a line like ‘stewards of God’s mysteries’ can catch your eye and make you pause.

I think of Margaret as a steward of God’s mysteries. In the foreword of volume one of Always Now, Margaret makes this comment. “At times one is blessed with poignant awareness of things seen. Exact rendering of those heightened moments can evoke the right word now and then – and create an appetite for more such word-events.” Her language here is typically restrained but the key word is ‘blessed.’ Are poets not ‘blessed’ with poignant awareness of things seen? Is not this awareness given, bestowed? And in that blessing – that dispensation given to the artist – is awakened ‘an appetite for more such word-events?’

In Margaret’s poetry, I see ‘exact rendering’ at work, the finer technicalities in ‘evoking the right word.’ Margaret used forms like the sonnet and had an ear for rhythm although she speaks of that ‘ground bass, iambic pentameter, taking over.’ Poet Barb Nickel comments on the musicality of Margaret’s poems in an essay entitled “For Margaret Avison, a Pianissimo Threnody.” She notes the rhyme and the half rhymes in her work, the meters and beats. She notes also the ‘odd dictions’ and ‘leaps in scale’ – something I note, too (I have a tin ear, so much of the sound of Margaret’s work is lost on me except in its seamless union with the content and meaning of the words.) Perusing the poems of volume two of Always Now, I jot down the many ‘word-events’ she has concocted around the word ‘sun.’ There are of course, the two titles of her books – Winter Sun and sunblue – but there are many other ‘sun’ words like ‘oils of sun,’ ‘sun’s butterfat,’ ‘the sun uncaring,’ or ‘sunward,’ ‘sunsplash’, ‘sun-striped,’ ‘sun blue’, ‘sun buttery,’ ‘sun-wash.’ These are the odd dictions, the word-events, that arise in the exact rendering of things perceived in heightened moments.

Always Now, the title of Avison’s collected works, is itself a paradoxical word-event. Published in successive volumes in 2003-2005, Always Now is a good title for a collected work of poetry. As Barb Nickel notes of Margaret’s poem “The Fixed in a Flux,” the poet speaks of a ‘now that is nontheless not quite here’ – the ‘nowness’ that one might perceive in a moment’s observation to be recollected later in words in time. I did not know at first that Always Now was a three volume collection of Margaret’s work and took out only the first volume in my foray to the public library. Later in the week when my eleven year old son had the day off school, he begged me to take him to the library in the afternoon like I used to when he was a pre-schooler. Remember, Mommy? You used to take me and we would read books together and afterwards we’d have a snack you made for me? We went to the library in this ‘always now’ moment of parent-child intimacy, and while he read Calvin and Hobbes, I got out the other two volumes of Always Now and read “The Fixed in a Flux” with the lovely opening line “From the back seat, barley fields and sky ... “