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.

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.

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 ... “