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.