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.
No comments:
Post a Comment