Confession: Newfoundland

They call this place “new found land” and in a way, it is and was, for me, even in the brief three days I was in the province. Today in my lectionary meditation, I wrote – “back from Newfoundland, now where next?” For over a month I’d been on a steady voyage to this unknown shore through the wideness of our country – from my edge of prairie in Manitoba through to Canadian Shield down to Niagara Peninsula and then up again past the hump of New Brunswick onto Nova Scotia and past the wee crescent isle of P.E.I onto the rocky banks that form the narrow cove that is St. John’s Harbor. I came because I was invited, and I was invited because I interviewed Margaret once, and we had the kind of exchange that left a lasting impression. My fellow panelists Barb Nickel, Stan Dragland and Maureen Scott Harris are also familiar with Margaret or her work as editors, readers, poets and collaborators. Together we celebrated her life and her art.

Of course, I was on another kind of journey as well. And that is the parallel one that mirrors the literal, the one Margaret might refer to as ‘anagogic.’ That word ‘anagogic’ has been a touchstone for me for my own poetry ever since I encountered the term somewhere in my readings about or by Margaret. Fond as I know Margaret was of being etymologically precise, I decide to look up the word ‘anagogic’ on my generation’s equivalent of Margaret’s favorite dictionary (Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological dictionary of the English Language) which is the Internet. Here is what I found from various sources:

Anagogic: “pertaining to the moral, uplifting, progressive strivings of the unconscious.”; “relating to literature as a total order of words”; “leading on high; or that which draws towards divinity” or as referring to ‘anagoge’ which is “a mystical or allegorical interpretation (especially of Scripture.)"

I think somehow all these definitions, disparate as they appear, do define the word precisely enough in the context in which I use it in my journey with Margaret’s poetry. Thus it is, I end with this poem, a summation of my experience:



To Margaret from St. John’s, Newfoundland.


Confession: I came to dwell on your words once more
so I might catch glimpse of the sea. However, two days in,
the mist is so heavy, the only sight from Signal Hill are the
cannon ends of the Queen’s Battery – cannons, the sign says,
which have never fired “angry at an enemy.”

Mist obscures and has no face, but the sea is certain beyond it.

By the hotel bed, the Gideon Bible with its cloud of witnesses
blankets the page and I am stymied again by what veils
the hidden, yet obvious. Mere mortal record,
in language that lisps, God meets Time as mist to hillside;
still I am left, gaping at the edge.

On the third day, my last, the clouds clear
and ocean, blue and undulating, palpable as air and wind,
is glimpsed.

It is the sight I have been waiting for, longing in your words
to find it.

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)

Doubly Smitten: Margaret and The Word

This post is about Margaret and scripture. One of the newer things added to Margaret’s archive that I noticed on my more recent visit was the addition of her Bible study notes. There were a number of files containing years’ worth of Bible study notes in the form of scribblers, notebooks, and yes, even just plain scrap paper. I was amazed to open up one file with her notes from June 2001. It contained her daily meditations on Ezekiel, written in tiny crabbed print on scraps of paper, the backs of which read a sampling of her daily life’s mental activities – promotional letters from publishers, donation cards for various charities, handbills for concerts, royalty statements, old typed out poems with crossed-out lines, photocopies of poems printed from literary magazines, and even housekeeping notices from the residence she lived in. I could hardly read the tiny print of the meditations but these daily notes were a true testament to Margaret’s intense devotional life.

On the day I saw these notes, I drove home past Elim Chapel. On its billboard was the message: THE BIBLE AS IT IS FOR PEOPLE AS THEY ARE. How true of Margaret! I thought, for reading and meditating on scripture was an integral part of Margaret’s life and of her poetry. Working as I am now through the lectionary in my own devotional practice, I see how lively scripture is, how a few choice lines of this or that can quicken the intellect and spark certain images and ideas, perfect for translating into a poem. Poems can also be a way of teasing out meaning in a text in a kind of question and answer method. Clearly, I see that happening with Margaret’s long poem on Job. There’s a thesis to be written on Margaret’s poetic interpretations of scripture but the object lesson for me in seeing Margaret’s notes was about her enduring and abiding habit of reading the Bible. The same sharp-eyed attention Margaret gave to the natural word, the urban landscape, she gave also to the scriptures. She read the Word, and then with her own natural gift for words re-interpreted it for the reader.

In my short story about my encounter with Margaret, I say of my character, Elizabeth, "She did not know what she loved more: literature or God." Thus it is when Elizabeth encounters the work of a godly poet, she is doubly smitten. That is the way I feel when I read Margaret’s poems. I can’t help but feel doubly smitten by Margaret’s focus on both word and the Word.

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.

Community of Readers

Poet Sarah Klassen and I are friends. Early on in our relationship - we met about a year after I moved to Winnipeg – we found we had a shared interest in the poetry of Margaret Avison. In fact, Sarah has reviewed Margaret’s books and is quoted on the back of Always Now, Vol. 2. When I told Sarah I was writing this blog, she told me about articles she had about Margaret and her poetry that might help me. We agreed to meet at Stella’s café in my neighborhood. On Thursday afternoon, I rode my bike down to Stella’s and parked it in a rack by a nearby grocery store.

Sarah had a few articles for me like John Barton’s essay “Fluid Epiphanies: Margaret Avison’s “The Swimmer’s Moment,” from Arc and an interview with Margaret entitled “A Conversation with Margaret Avison” conducted by D.S. Martin for Image magazine. There was also another essay of literary criticism on Margaret’s poem “Dispersed Titles,” a poem which deals with Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. Looking at the latter made me feel a little overwhelmed and reminded me of the day I had spent at the archive a week earlier. There was so much stuff on Margaret’s poetry – theses, articles, essays – because Margaret’s poetry is, to put it bluntly, dense. For the literary scholar, there is much to dwell on and one could be drawn tantalizingly into an analysis of the work without end. And to somehow not do so, might make one appear slight in one’s admiration for the poems and poet – sycophantic and deferential – in ways that had not fundamentally grappled with the art and intent of the work. Sarah recounted to me a story of a friend who had seen Margaret once and told her that on occasion, she found Margaret’s poems difficult and sometimes hard to understand. And Margaret replied that in that case, the poems had failed. By ‘failed’, I imagine she meant failed in its intent to communicate meaning. I myself have not ‘understood’ all of Margaret’s poems and don’t pretend to. Some of them are obscure and difficult. But there are ones, when they’re just plain good, that sing with poetic clarity. In one of Margaret’s correspondences with a writer, she speaks of wanting to be known for those poems that strike a chord in the reader that begets awe – a sort of self-less silent awe – as if the poet has simply said it and there is nothing more to add. A moment where poet and reader have communed. That was what happened to me when I read “The Swimmer’s Moment,” and evidently, the same poem struck John Barton. “Margaret Avison’s “The Swimmer’s Moment” has haunted me for thirty years.” he writes.

Sarah herself writes in her review of Always Now, Vol. 1 that Margaret’s work “challenges her readers, who, unless, they are as willing as the poet to be rigorously attentive may get bogged down in ideas often conveyed through allusion and expressed in tightly compressed syntax.” It’s the getting-bogged-down-in-ideas that is the scholar’s particular predicament, but for a poet reading the poetry, this may not be so much of a concern. Either the allusions or images strike a chord, or they don’t. There’s no argument that Margaret’s work can be exceedingly ‘intellectual,’ as in “Dispersed Titles” but the poet there – to rob deliciously from that poem these lines – is “an intellect/created into world, [was] wounded with whispers from a single oak tree.” (AN, vol. 1, p. 57) There’s that lovely Avisonesque syntax again – oh, to be an ‘intellect/ created’ and alliteratively ‘wounded with whispers’!

D.S. Martin’s interview with Margaret in Image was published after the appearance of Always Now and is therefore more recent than mine. There’s much to be gleaned from the article about Margaret’s faith and poetics. I found there a recounting of her conversion experience in which she threw her Bible across the room, telling God “Okay, take everything then!” when she at last, was compelled to give up what was so precious to her, her poetry. But later, she discovers that such a sacrifice is unnecessary, experiencing that ‘added unto you’ aspect of scripture that so aptly follows Christ’s command to “Seek ye first the kingdom.” And so, the poetry was not given up, but further enhanced and enriched. And now, too, there was a fresh new audience for it – those who sought after an articulation of their Christian experience in poetic terms that were not ‘sentimental nor preachy’ as Sarah Klassen puts it. Here now was a new community of readers for Margaret’s work.

Sarah and I are part of that community of readers. And together, we met and ‘communed’ over Margaret as I had with Tim Lilburn a week previous. I thank Margaret for these moments of companionship instigated by her poetry. I came out of that coffee shop exhilarated by our talk and eager to read the articles. When I got back to my bike, I discovered to my delight that someone had stuck a flower in my handlebars. I tossed the articles Sarah had given me into my basket and rode off, happily feted on my journey by that one gracious act by a stranger.

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.

Of Momentary Dark

Today, Momentary Dark is missing. After I send the kids off to school, put in the laundry, pull off the plastic on the garden beds, I sit down at my desk, intent on writing about something that happened to me in the archive on Thursday. One of the first boxes I opened contained a correspondence that seemed meant for my eyes only – not my own which I found later and which I did not care a whit to look at – but something else. It was a short correspondence between Margaret and another writer, both of whom were Christians, and who were struggling with each other, and also with a great darkness that perplexed, troubled, and saddened both of them. I read the correspondence furtively and then later, recounting it to my husband, I wept.

Momentary Dark was in that box. One copy alone, nothing else. All weekend long, I thought about that correspondence, and about that book in that box. I’d taken out Momentary Dark in my raid on the library for Margaret’s poetry, and quoted from it already in a past blog posting. I decided that on Monday (today) I would read more of that book and perhaps glean from it the wisdom in it that must somehow have grappled with the darkness I read about in the correspondence. I also wanted to read this book because its title was different than the others. For yes, in the lives of all – pessimist or optimist, believer or non – there is momentary dark.

Strangely, the book this morning is missing. I clear off my desk in an attempt to find it, but it's disappeared as if whisked out of sight. All the other of Margaret’s titles I’ve taken out of the library are here – the three volumes of Always Now, Not Yet But Still, Concrete and Wild Carrot, Winter Sun, and the Pascal lectures monograph. But no sign of Momentary Dark, anywhere. I wonder where it’s gone.

I flip through Always Now, thinking that Momentary Dark might be in there, but Momentary Dark came after Always Now. Momentary Dark was Margaret’s last published book. It appeared in 2006, a year before her death. In fact, its title does not even appear on Margaret’s list of published works on the Margaret Avison website that I’ve put on my list of links. I find one link from M & S that contains a synopsis of the book and a list of the poems, but I dearly want the book in hand. Momentary Dark, where are you? What hand has hid you from my sight this day?

Finding Margaret: The Archive

When I first heard about Margaret Avison’s death, I began a short story. It was about a pregnant woman, Elizabeth, who hears the news of a death of a famous poet on the radio while washing beets in the kitchen sink. As the beets bleed red into the water, Elizabeth recalls her correspondence with the poet when she, Elizabeth, was a young English major at a university on the west coast. Elizabeth is gently rebuffed by the poet when she asks if she can work on the poet’s poetry for her Masters thesis, the poet telling her that it would be better if Elizabeth work on someone dead. Elizabeth suffers a kind of hurt joy at receiving this reply for she is happy on the one hand that the poet has even corresponded with her at all, but sad that the poet doesn’t want her to study the poems further.

Anyone who knows me will know this story is somewhat autobiographical – something I needed to write to ‘process’ the relationship I had with the actual Margaret Avison during my interview with her in 2001 as opposed to the relationship I had with Margaret’s poetry. Writing that story put me in the awkward but illuminating position of seeing Margaret in the third person. And that, to get to the point, is exactly what visiting Margaret’s archive will do to anyone who has only known Margaret through her poetry.

Now that Margaret is gone, there is no way to speak of her but in the third person and that is a daunting thing to do if one really loved and revered her work. Margaret was a giant in her way in the world of Canadian letters – she loomed paradoxically because she eschewed the limelight. In reading her correspondence for the interview, I could see that she was uncomfortable with the idea of celebrity, aggressively modest, and fiercely protective of her privacy. She did not want an ‘industry’ of scholars and biographers to pop up around her work (hence the donation of her papers outside of her hometown of Toronto) and yet, she was a scrupulous and fastidious ‘keeper’ of all her written work. By the time I interviewed her, she was quite happy to let me loose on her papers that just happened to be (or providentially were) in my hometown. The letters and papers revealed so much, even then, and there has been much more donated in the seven years since.

Margaret was not perfect. She was creaturely, with faults, and she knew it. But she was mindful of her legacy, as a poet and a Christian, to the world. The archive materials come with restrictions of two kinds: restriction of access and restriction of use. Most of the file boxes fall into the latter category which states at the beginning “Open to All” but is followed with other more restrictive caveats on publication, in particular. The correspondence cannot be published in full, neither can any of the unpublished poems. Quotations of excerpts are allowed as long as the source is provided and it is mentioned that Margaret has judged that the quotation is ‘unpublishable.’ Any publishing in full or in part of archival material cannot proceed until twenty years after Margaret’s death.

A student and aspiring poet from the U of W who came with me to see if she could glean anything from Margaret’s papers about ‘creative process’ for a professor she is working for felt disappointed by the restrictions. She was looking for some evidence of a poem taking shape through revisions or drafts, but the restrictions of use on Margaret’s work put her off. That was too bad, I felt. There was now one less person to be potentially inspired by Margaret’s work, her' creative process.' In looking at many of the unpublished poems in the archive, I noted the words “NO” or “OUT” or “NOPE” scribbled in pen in the corners of typed work. Perhaps Margaret, at least in the earlier stages of her writing career, was her own harshest critic.

Each person coming to an archive has his or her own agenda. I think mine was to reacquaint myself with Margaret the person, and Margaret has clearly shaped the way people will approach the archive with that in mind. Open to all, the words say, as if Margaret has laid her soul bare, but only to you, she adds in a fierce whisper to those who make the visit and take the time.

Wonder: Down to Bone and Awe

In Barbara Nickel’s essay on Margaret Avison, she speaks of Margaret’s work allowing ‘children, and even smaller beings and things ... to loom large.’ Her famous ‘optic heart’ saw, as Elise Partridge noted, with “zoom-lens precision of small details.” When those lens were fixed on children, the one aspect she noted of them that struck me was wonder. She, the poet, could see the wonder where others, often the distant and distracted parent, could not. In “From Age to Age: Found Poem,” (AN, vol 2, p. 107) the poet sees a child suddenly excited by a glimpse of the fountains at city hall from his vantage point in the back of the streetcar. The child cries out “WAH-TEE!” and “LOOKIT the Watee mommy!” The poet compares the voice to Adam naming the animals; she calls the boy “shaman-didactic” making that remarkable breathless leap of the observed into anagogic word-event.

Again in the street-car in the poem “Wonder: A Street-car Sketch” (AN, vol. 2, p. 109), the observed becomes a meditation on the difficult theological question of how God can be both just and merciful. The answer I find is not easily teased out of the poem, but the girl who “all alerted....unable to bear alone the pour of wonder” is given a glimpse of her weeping mother, and is suddenly made intimate with a parent’s distracted grief, and in that moment, mother and child are together. ‘Then the hand closes down.’ and all is veiled again, ‘but the little one’s face does not crumple/or burrow.” Instead, the child “snuggles confidently back,/absorbed with the now/limited wonder still.” Creaturely wonder has met with Divine grief and a kind of intimacy has been achieved. And perhaps that is all we can expect for answers to theological questions, a moment of intimacy interpreted by the poet in her act of observation, her act of ‘fusing’ the seen with the unseen, as the poet herself uses the word in the opening stanza: “Judgement as well as mercy:/that these could fuse/is staggering.”

Wonder. The poet Don Domanski asks for a ‘wonder unavenged’ – a wonder pure and unfettered by the only language we have for invisible things – the spiritual, from whatever tradition. Margaret’s wonder is in unabashedly Christian territory – perhaps even too much so, some might argue, but it is wonder nontheless. “I’m down to bone and awe,” the poet says in “Creative Hour” (AN, vol. 2, p. 104).

The greatest gift I received in having children was having the ‘wonder restored.’ Too often I am that parent on the streetcar whose arm or hand reaches down, unthinking and distracted, and it takes a lot to jump out of that skin and observe from another angle the view of oneself that way. Margaret’s poems do that for me. She restores the wonder.

Looking to the Sunblue

On Saturday, I meet poet Tim Lilburn for coffee when he is in Winnipeg so we can talk about Margaret. When I interviewed Margaret in 2001, I went to the archive and discovered that all of the correspondence she had received from other writers was in her papers. Among them were letters from a young poet from Saskatchewan named Tim Lilburn.

Tim tells me that he began writing to Margaret after he had read sunblue. Sunblue was published in 1978, and came after a long hiatus of 12 years (The Dumbfounding came out in 1966). The book fell into Tim’s hands around the time he was about to enter the priesthood. Sunblue made a strong impression on him. It was a kind of poetry that he’d not really encountered thus far in Canada – and was unlike the verse his peers were writing in the prairies at the time. "What I admired about Margaret’s poems was their ambition," Tim said. There was a certain scale, a robustness, in the writing and language that strongly appealed to Tim that was reminiscent of Hopkins, and while I found Margaret’s poems to be surprisingly selfless in that they were not pre-occupied with confession or lyric identity-seeking, Tim found the self in the language to be interesting – engaging and acutely perceptive. It was this ‘self’ that made Tim want to meet Margaret.

He got his chance later when he moved to Toronto during his priest’s training. The Margaret he met was busy with everyday cares; in particular, she was tending her ailing mother while holding down a full time job at a mission’s office. Tim witnessed a genuinely and abidingly compassionate woman, humane and moral, but also intensely private. I long held the suspicion that this might have made Margaret a lonely woman, but loneliness is a state of being poets know well.

Looking at the poems of sunblue now, they strike me as being more firmly grounded in faith. Many of the poems are meditations on scripture: “Embezzler (Luke 16)”, “Dryness and Scorch of Ahab’s evil rule”, “He Couldn’t be Safe (Isaiah 53:5)”, “As a Comment on Romans 1:10", “The Circuit (Phil. 2:5-11)”. In “The Bible to Be Believed,” we see the pre-eminence of the poet’s belief of Christ as the Living Word – the Christ who as he reads the scriptures transforms it and eventually ‘seals’ it. Reading these poems, I feel like I’m doing lectio divina with Margaret. In lectio, one dwells on a passage of scripture, embeds oneself in it, and is thus transformed by it. In “The Bible to Be Believed,” the poet points out the reverse – that Christ in reading the word thus transformed it. Indeed, and since His appearance in the world (and in the word,) we read the world and the scriptures before it, differently. That is the Bible, the poet would say, that is ‘to be believed.’

The poem from which the title Sunblue originates is called “Light.” I’ve mentioned before how the sun is a central image in many of Margaret’s poems. Sunblue seems to refer to the color of shadow created by the sun; when the poet looks to the ‘sunblue,’ she looks both at herself cast in shadow and also at the sun who creates the shadow. Here is section II of “Light.”


II.

That picture, taken from the
wing window, shows a shadow.

High up, between
the last clouds and the airless
light/dark, any shadow is
– apart from facing sunlessness –
self, upon
self.

Nights have flowed;
tree shadows gather; the sundial
of a horizoning hill in Lethbridge measures the
long grassy afternoon.

Still, freed from swallowing downtown blocks of shadow,
I note self-shadow on
stone, cement, brick,
relieved; and look to the sunblue.

So, now.


(From Always Now, Vol. 2. p.66)

Heaven's Guest

I pick up Momentary Dark at the library today. Flipping it open after a night snack, I read this poem:


Where is Everybody? (a dream)

Where is the typical little town I knew
with the dark little store
by the stone clock tower?
Had there been some hullabaloo?
Why did it seem
before I came
they had all run on,
gone home? Alone,
my gliding shadow
was all I saw.

Up from the unseen
park they come,
musicians in golden
outfits. Oh I
was happy to be
there to cheer as they
solemnly play-
ing went by,

but what if they are the enemy!

No wonder everyone else is hidden
but one unknowing and unbidden
here without motive, without reason
overwrought – because caught – in treason?
Worst of all if the residents heard
and the enemy proffered me some award!

(“Where Is Everybody?” from Momentary Dark by Margaret Avison © 2006. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission of the publisher.)

It seems here the poem is written as a verbatim description of a dream. The poet is trying to find out what the dream means by writing it out. When Margaret died, I had a very similar dream which I wrote about in a poem:



Bisque

After hearing of the death of Margaret Avison,
you have a dream. You are with her in a mountain town
she recollects from her young womanhood. You are
walking down a road. She is looking for a house – bisque-colored,
she says. (Bisque – a word that would have found favor with her.)
She once lived there.

That old town is gone, you think ... but not so much.
Some things are still there, like the big sign
for a hotel, shaped like a star. It had some words
on it. You recognize that sign;
you read about it once in her poems.

Everything is bathed in a golden light – of
a time more innocent, bygone. You think
you are traveling back in time with her
when in fact, she is leading you to the heaven
she remembers poetry was for her;
she is returning to the bisque colored house
she once lived in – she is showing you
the end of poetry, the end of a line in time.



Instead of the ‘dark little store’ and the ‘stone clock tower,’ I had in my dream a hotel and even a schoolhouse where Margaret the teacher had once taught as a young woman (which I didn’t mention as it seemed too obvious a symbol.) Like Margaret’s dream town, mine too was completely devoid of citizens. All I could see was her as a younger woman leading me up the main street to a house where she had once lived when she taught in this town. A long time ago, she had been its resident and now she was returning. I could not help but interpret the image as a return of Margaret to the ‘heaven’ she knew as a poet, the ‘heaven’ of which she or other poets could occasionally be a Star Hotel guest of, the ‘heaven’ she could teach other people about in the schoolhouse, the ‘heaven’ of which consciousness she had finally reached in death.

In “Where is Everybody?” the poet has arrived too soon to a town occupied only by ‘golden’ musicians and is afraid. But aren’t the musicians really only angels in disguise? Instead of ‘golden’ musicians, my poem had 'golden' light – that sun-buttery light that appears often as an image in Margaret’s poems.

Do poems cut across individual consciousnesses into a deeper sub-conscious that is somehow connected – a chthonic ‘small town’ as it were where one might meet a fellow sojourner? I wonder, I really do.

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 ... “

Finding Margaret's Poetry

The first thing I do is go out and find Margaret's poetry. I go to the Winnipeg Public Library and take out whatever they have of her work. In her lifetime, Margaret wrote 9 books of poetry, and there are 3 books of 'selected and collected's.' My library search yields Winter Sun (1960), Not Yet But Still (1997), one of the 'collecteds' Always Now and the Pascal Lectures monograph A Kind of Perseverance: On Christianity and the University (1994). In Winter Sun, I find a torn out page of The Canadian Mennonite from April 2002 with Margaret's poem "April" re-printed in it.


April

Dark like a handful of cool gray silk.
Clocks strike the hour. Out in the clear-gleaming sky
a robin's song, silence unravelling.

The trees with tremulous-aching fingers
shaping the quiet airflow.

Sick-faint dark
limp in the arms of the infinite.


"Limp in the arms of the infinite" strikes me as the kind of line that would find its way into the hearts of the readers of The Canadian Mennonite, a line that indicates that unabashed and persistently religious sensibility that infuses Margaret's poetic voice and what fundamentally has attracted me to her work. I therefore, begin with a confession. Sometime after my own conversion in 1988, I was in the basement of Duthie's Bookstore in Vancouver (poetry being relegated to the 'dungeon' as it were) when I stumbled upon a book of Margaret's poems in one of those rotating metal wire racks that usually contain trade paperbacks. Vaguely aware of the fact that Margaret was a Christian, I took the book off the rack and began to read. I opened to the poem "The Swimmer's Moment" and was struck dumb. Here was the poem that gave voice to the 'plunge of faith' I had just taken myself. I remember the impact of that poem so vividly I was having my own 'swimmer's moment' reading it. Of course, my immediate and facile response was adulation for the poet. Who was this Margaret Avison? Where could I read more of her work? And so began my own peripatetic wanderings into the world of Margaret's poetry.

"The Swimmer's Moment" is in Winter Sun which was published in 1960, ironically before Margaret's conversion to Christianity in 1963. And yet did I find in that poem, a coalescence of all that inchoate yearning in myself that yielded itself finally to faith.


The Swimmer's Moment

For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
"This is the whirlpool, then."
By their refusal they are saved
From the black pit, and also from contesting
The deadly rapids, and emerging in
The mysterious, and more ample, further waters.
And so their bland-blank faces turn and turn
Pale and forever on the rim of suction
They will not recognize.
Of those who dare the knowledge
Many are whirled into the ominous centre
That, gaping vertical, seals up
For them an eternal boon of privacy,
So that we turn away from their defeat
With a despair, not for their deaths, but for
Ourselves, who cannot penetrate their secret
Nor even guess at the anonymous breadth
Where one or two have won:
(The silver reaches of the estuary).

(From Winter Sun and Other Poems, 1960)

A Month With Margaret

This blog is intended for readers of Margaret Avison's poetry. I am writing this blog because I am going to spend a month with Margaret, reading her work and researching her archives at the University of Manitoba in preparation for the League of Canadian Poets annual conference and festival to be held this year (2008) in St. John's, Newfoundland.