Tag: canadian poetry

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The Non-Identity of the Permanent Tourists

In The Permanent Tourists, P.K. Page explores the contradictory identity of those without identity. The very title, “The Permanent Tourists”, suggests the irony of their situation. As permanent tourists, they are in constant juxtaposition against the “foreign cities”, continually being relegated to the Other. Hence, their permanence stems from their transient and alien status as “tourists”. Their identity is non-identity. Such a quandary is at the crux of the poem, and Page seeks to explain the motivations and actions of the tourists.

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Essays

Poetry is Truth, Speaking is Science, Sex is Natural

Leonard Cohen’s How to Speak Poetry is an instruction manual of sorts on how to speak poetry. Cohen takes a comprehensive approach, exploring the relationship between the poet and his audience, and why poetry and public speaking can be antithetical if done wrongly. Cohen sees poetry as truth. It is authentic, private and universal. The purpose of speaking poetry is to forge a connection between the speaker and the audience sharing this truth. However, speaking poetry can also introduce the speaker’s ego, contaminating the poetry and making it inauthentic, superficial and egoistic. There is an underlying thread of sex throughout the essay, espousing a sustained goal: above all, Cohen prizes truthfulness and authenticity. In approaching poetry and speaking along the lines of sex, Cohen emphasizes the innate and natural connection between speaker and audience that is required when speaking poetry.

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Essays

Ten Thousand Years: The Punishment of I Have Not

While it may seem that Leonard Cohen’s I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries is a clear rejection of external institutions for an internal individualism, a closer reading sees a more conflicted persona that does acknowledge—and even yearn for— external dogma. Central to the poem is the negative refrain, “I have not”, which the persona uses in the first three stanzas to dismiss various institutions: European culture, mysticism, religion and so on. However, these negative refrains are superficial: they secretly have an affirmative subtext that celebrates their respective external dogma. It is only with the refrain in the final stanza that this becomes clear.

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Essays

The Space In-between the Swimmer and the Sea

Irving Layton’s The Swimmer can be interpreted as an exploration of the contrary connection between the artist and his art. The poet is simultaneously witness and participant; the art is simultaneously expression and mimesis. It is precisely this clashing relationship that makes the swimmer metaphor so apt: the swimmer is both apart from and within the water. The Swimmer can be read as the same emergent space in-between the swimmer and the sea: poetry is what is created from the poet and his art.

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Poetic Omnipresence from the Micro and the Macro

In The Fertile Muck, Irving Layton explores the physical and metaphorical dichotomies between the micro and the macro in the natural and artificial worlds. In doing so, Layton reveals a poetic omnipresence, accessible through love and imagination, which dominates reality.

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The Three Emilys as an Extension of Livesay

Dorothy Livesay’s The Three Emilys explores the contrary roles of an artist and a mother. Livesay compares the poem’s persona, presumably herself, to the Emily’s, a synecdoche for Bronte, Dickinson, Carr and other female poets who forsook the domestic life. While Livesay initially sees the Emily’s lack of domesticity as pitiful, she eventually comes to envy their creative freedom.

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The Rocking Chair, the Rocking Chair and Quebec

In The Rocking Chair, A.M. Klein layers deep meaning upon a rocking chair by making it a symbol of the continuous identity and traditions of Quebec. This is cleverly done through subtle metafiction, particularly regarding The Rocking Chair’s stanza form. Klein deftly draws the The Rocking Chair, the actual rocking chair and Quebec together to emphasize regularity through emergence.

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The Identity of the Modern Poet as Landscape

In Portrait of the Poet as Landscape, A.M. Klein engages with the identity of the poet and the role of his art. The poem is a künstlerroman, which sees the maturity of an artist against the decaying modern society around him. The insignificance and irrelevance of the poet in the modern age is stressed. It is not clear if the poet is living or dead—it does not matter for “We are sure only that from our real society / he has disappeared; he simply does not count” (Klein 15-16). Klein places the poet in juxtaposition with the public and the reader by using the plural person pronoun: “we” and “our” against the disappeared poet. The public does not care about the poet, nor does the poet appear to care about himself: he is “incognito, lost, lacunal” (Klein 28).

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