Phyllis Webb and the Common Good: Poetry/Anarchy/Abstraction (review)

Stephen Collis wishes to ‘pay tribute to one of the most startling poets the Canadian West Coast has produced,’ and his book is a welcome addition to the literature for a couple of reasons. Aiming to write interested – as opposed to disinterested – poetic criticism, in the tradition of Howe on Dickenson, Duncan on H.D., and Webb on Blaser, Collis’s criticism ‘humbly aspires to the condition of poetry’ and responds to Webb’s own dictum that the ‘proper response to a poem is another poem’ (Hanging Fire). So his prose is permitted a ‘certain opacity of texture’ and his style exhibits a poetic or paratactic freedom, with ornaments often replacing transitions and paragraphs giving way to note form at certain points. Particularly since Collis is himself a poet, this is legitimate, and the freedom from strict scholarly style allows him some nice moments: for example, he writes of ‘the material shiftiness of the signifier’ and suggests that ‘Hanging Fire is a chrysalis the poet forms, birthing the painter.’ On the other hand, there are several sentences and the odd paragraph that we would have been better off without, a point to which I shall return at the end of this short review.

The second reason that we must welcome this book is for its ‘provocative re-contextualizing of Phyllis Webb’s poetry within the twentieth century discourses of anarchism and abstraction,’ as Pauline Butling writes on the back cover. Collis reads Webb’s work in relation to the cultural and political contexts that framed and formed her; he reads it side by side with her important public intellection for the cbc and seriously explores her transition into abstract painting. In so doing, he enriches our appreciation of Webb’s artistic stature and accomplishments. Linked to this re-contextualization is his discussion of Jean Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, which offers a philosophical interpretation of Webb’s richly allusive response poetics: her ‘wonderfully alert, locative . . . humming between,’ as Daphne Marlatt muses in one of her poetic responses to Webb (‘You Devise, We Devise’: A Festschrift for Phyllis Webb).

Having welcomed this book, I will mention several reservations. The first chapter elaborates connections between Webb’s work and H.D.’s, but Collis’s arguments are unconvincing and suffer, in my view, from wishful thinking. I know how deeply consonances can sound in the ear of a reader who has loved two poets’ work, but scholarly discipline here usefully requires us to identify with some precision the nature of the correspondences between texts. Collis riffs on the fact that H.D. and Webb both name the sea as mother, mer/mère, but this association is deeply and widely distributed in our culture and is also strongly present in the work of other Canadian feminist poets who are Webb’s younger contemporaries. The point is not so much that Webb responded to H.D., but that H.D. and Webb, and Marlatt, Nicole Brossard, Virginia Woolf, and many others have contributed to a deep groundswell, the oceanic current of feminist poetics in the twentieth century.

Collis makes much of Webb’s reversal of the line ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes,’ which she recasts as ‘those are eyes that were her pearls’ in the poem ‘Beachcomber.’ T.S. Eliot famously cites this line in The Wasteland, but it comes from Ariel’s song in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1.2.400–5). Collis’s discussion goes on for five or six pages, focusing on Webb’s use of Eliot and mentioning H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukovsky, while never acknowledging that the line originates with Shakespeare.

I could go on; there are other oversights, misspellings and infelicities, which could have been corrected, but were not. Critique of allusion and intertextuality is difficult, requiring a very large range of reference. No one knows everything, and inevitably what resonates for one reader will not do so for another, for each of us reads within the framework...