It could be that attempting to define the term “Poet” is as misguided as trying to define what it is to be “Canadian”. I am frequently misguided, and I am a poet as well, so there you have two factors tricking me into the foolish act of explaining slippery abstractions. Sometimes it seems that touchy questions like “Who am I (as a person or people)?” and “Where am I? (as a person or people)” and even “Why am I (this person or that people)?”, are not posed so much in town squares these days. Except for those squares in which Poets and Canadians smoke their pipes and cigars. Poets and Canadians are constantly re-assessing, reevaluating, and doubting their importance within the global mainframe. Poetry is the Canadian condition. We are all poets who don’t know it.

Canadians and Poets frequently come across as polite ignoramuses; they let others spit on their shoes and tend to hibernate. Yet at the same time Canadians and Poets are fiercely lyrical at heart. Just think of the opening to our national anthem, “Oh Canada glorious and free…we stand on guard for thee…” These lines stir everyone’s bowels at least slightly (to use the word bowel in the archaic sense of “the seat of gentler emotions”). Or take Leonard Cohen’s stanza from Tower of Song, “I was born this way, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice”. Canada is blessed with a beautiful voice, like Leonard Cohen, and also smitten with the idealized romanticism of our national anthem.

Poetry and Canada are at the same time fractured entities for which federal or poetical totality glue will always seem weak and unwise to squeeze on unless you possess the sticky vision of a Pierre Berton, or Margaret Atwood, or Northrop Frye, or Sir John A Macdonald. Diversity and spatial fragmentation hold sway over vain universals; which is a blessing, indeed, so long as we negotiate our differences to the best of our imagination and come up with some common ground upon which to make a stand. Nationalism can become violent and fascist - but it doesn’t have to. It may in fact be a necessary mode of expression for avoiding involvement in other forms of hegemonic nastiness.

“We are poetry!” shout the wolves, and the members of the outdoors club howl back: “We are Canadian!”

Sometimes in our weaker moments we dream of a national or federal identity, a working foundation upon which we can agree to B, and build our B-eing. We might hazard a definition for Canada…“a post colonial, Westminster-model style of newish nation comprised of 10 provinces and 3 territories, as outlined in the constitution”. And so do the poets sometimes risk a totalizing definition of their vocation, maybe something along the lines of Poetry: “a compact form of expression employing words, with an emphasis on hidden meaning, sonic resonance, and metrical rhythm as outlined in the holy canon”, or some such.

Yet definitions limit and lock. They narrow and then strangle us. Most poets, even, tend to deny the experiments of their colleagues the status of poetry. “This picture of words is no poem,” the Sonneteer says in response to a piece of Concrete Poetry, “It is a painting!”; because the manipulation of material language in a visually conceptual way can be repugnant and confusing to the traditionalist who feels that poetry should best be written in metre and rhyme. (For a more nuanced treatment of this topic check out Pearly Pearl’s article, http://www.pagehalffull.com/rhyme.html.)

Of Spoken Word: “This oracular incantation be no poesy! This be public address of the raunchiest kind! This be immoral ego performance!” Decries the traditional Concrete Poet in turn when attending a poetry slam, because Spoken Word challenges their notion of what poetry should be. Poetry has traditionally been taught as something to be read or viewed on the page. Take away the notation and composition no longer involves “writing” as Mr. Guttenberg knew it. Then of course there is the outcry about the competitiveness of the form.

“All these funny nonsense sounds are balderdash, if you ask me!” Says the Spoken Word artist, in turn, when they hear Sound Poetry.

The different factions have trouble accepting each other – how human!

The result is like multiculturalism gone horribly awry, a Tower of Canuck Babel, different contingents hardening into discrete communities like misanthropic spruce sap, with little cross over ever happening between the groups – and sometimes wicked battles waged between opposing poetic or ethnic camps. The Anglo-Saxon projects their xenophobia and protectionist paranoia, born from northern emotional malaise, onto the transformative spirit of immigrants. Debate and conviction are important, but shouldn’t we at least assess each cultural product or practice on its own terms?

Our definition of national space has been narrowing to view the city as the dominant unit of geopolitical expression, with Federal/National organization as the most vulnerable because it is frequently founded upon what are perceived to be fanciful or wrong-minded universalisms, which although projecting the façade of inclusivity always leave some group in the dark. For instance the notion of “two official languages”, as if to ignore all the other ones, both foreign and indigenous. Or the narcissistic human failure to represent animals, trees, natural resources, in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Constitution.

As Canada becomes a nation known mainly for its dirty oil and military bodybuilding it can be disappointing to realize that programs such as peacekeeping and universal health care are fading like an old Utopian dream. The self-conscious nationalism which strove to create a unique geo-social space is deteriorating from the acidic cynicism of a supergeneration of both young and old who don’t have much to believe in any more; whose dreams, aspirations, sense of belonging and comfort are kept afloat by the all-pervasive value systems of capital.

If Poetry and Canada are to find themselves it’s going to take some serious meditative cross country ski trips into the soulful snowdrifts to clear the mind of all the clutter of this techno crazy super stimulated world in which the only logic is that of material fulfillment and Self-realization.

We have to get Native about this! That’s right, we must forget our fears of cultural appropriation and dive into the holistic mindset of the tribal awakening! That is if we desire a fluid, righteous definition – a definition to end all definitions - there are no alternatives. It becomes like making the mental leap, as John Newlove does in this following poem, to know that we are somehow, through dust and bone…descended from those who came before.

…the Indians

are not composed of

the romantic stories

about them, or of the stories

they tell only, but

still ride the soil

in us, dry bones a part

of the dust in our eyes,

needed and troubling

in the glare, in

our breath, in our

ears, in our mouths,

in our bodies entire, in our minds, until

at last

we become them

 

in our desires, our desires,

mirages, mirrors, that are theirs, hard-

riding desires, and they

become our true forbears, molded

by the same wind or rain,

and in this land we

are their people, come

back to life again.

(from “The Pride” by John Newlove, originally published in the collection Black Night)

A strange thought….that “white” “man” is descended from the natives. But maybe these kind of leaps are exactly what is needed to continue rewriting this country.

Poetry as a Boundless Category

Instead of narrowing our definitions, perhaps we should widen them until they disappear altogether. Poetry can be seen as a force, let me put it that way, a fundamental energy for all kinds of expression, which only becomes recognizable as poetry (per se) once it’s been vocalized, either with a pen or one’s voice. But poetry doesn’t necessarily need to be written. It need not be spoken. It exists without our meddling. The poem itself is not essential to poetry.

There exists the potential for poetic expression in everything, anywhere. As bp Nichol puts it:

POETRY BEING AT A DEAD END POETRY IS DEAD. HAVING ACCEPTED THIS FACT WE ARE FREE TO LIVE THE POEM. HAVING FREED THE POEM FROM THE NECESSITY TO BE THE POEM IS NOW CONSTANTLY HAPPENING IN OUR LIVES. WHAT HAS BEEN CONSTANT TILL NOW HAVE BEEN THE ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARIES WE HAVE PLACED ON THE POEM. WE HAVE PLACED THE POEM BEYOND OURSELVES BY PUTTING ARTIFICIAL BOUNDARIES BETWEEN OURSELVES & THE POEM WE MUST PUT THE POEM IN OUR LIVES BY FREEING IT FROM THE NECESSITY TO BE…

(From ABC: The Aleph Beth Book, by bpNichol)

Poetry is above us and below us, under us and on top of us; it is hovering on the other side of the hill or sealed inside the bag of potato chips. It is within us, all around us. An old shoe is a poetic old thing. The light reflecting in a million scales on the water is poetic in a way which defies the cliché. Adbusters being sold in Wall-Fart is poetic. Irony is a level of the poetic. “Poetry in motion” is an expression of the same idea - that some things are poetry. Like Canada.

Poetry always hits the mind closest to the rainbow radiant. Our ability to receive poetic information is a sense that must be developed through the nerves. Poetry is in the printer and the micro-chip. Poetry conquers the musician who is nothing without it. Poetry is a fundamental unit of creation. It is a lever and a plug-in. It is part of the necessary components of the imagination. People won’t always understand it or even necessarily perceive it. Words magnetize the poetic charges which flow and weave all around us. Poetry is a license not to make sense.

Yes, poetry is the Canadian condition, but we cannot say that Canadian is the Poetic condition. There is, finally, a point where Canada and Poetry part ways, become absolutely unrelated. The only thing to do, in these moments when poetry is lost, alone in an uncaring universe, is write another poem. Or at least reflect upon its presence. No wonder Canadian poets are so renown (within Canada) for their obsessions with place. As if true Canadian history were in fact something like a haiku.

… …

Why The National?

Canadian-ess can be seen in the same perspective. Perhaps the term “Canadian” is just a façade concealing the spirit within the word. The spirit of Canada. The spirit, quite possibly, of the earth which predated our urban conglomerations. Peter Mansbridge becomes emblematic within the immanence, as if he were a shaman divining messages from Teleprompter. When poetics leads one into conspiratorial schizoanalysis Canadian culture may just appear to be a tidy concept - the national flag as a kind of matador’s cape waved by the government to divert the raging masses. The modern world sometimes seems best viewed through this conspiratorial lens, as if it worked according to certain social agencies much larger than individual understanding and influence. Poems can help decipher those codes.

Like wingless birds our desires migrate into a horizon without oxygen – our internationalism is a web of desire oscillating to other countries and coming back like a tide upon which beautiful influences are borne. Within this motion you can sense the tropicalization of Canada – that warming of the soul. Like electrons escaped from their atoms we bond with the foreign and form new chains of being. As if all the physical features floated on the pool of the soul and we were reaching ourselves across the intermingling currents. In the ice palace of the north southern spectres flicker upon gelid cubes raising ancient philosophical questions about essence and form. So much to learn from Cuba - them from us. The need to rise strong against what is coming; to say no to that which will be proposed; to stand tall against the shortness of the bill upon the table.

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