Making Waves: Reading BC and Pacific Northwest Literature (review)

Introducing this collection, Trevor Carolan hopes that besides adding to a too-small body of critical writing about Pacific Northwest literature, its fifteen essays might also ‘serve as a kind of “nurse log” compendium,’ to nurture future creative and scholarly growth. He also suggests its limitations: describing as ‘idiosyncratic’ the work needed to ‘to thicken our foundational knowledge . . . of the region’s literature,’ Carolan names several important influences: Gary Snyder, Robin Blaser, George Stanley, and Stan Persky. He emphasizes powerful cross-border connections throughout an ecosystem extending along the West Coast to San Francisco. The title’s ‘Making Waves,’ then, not only indicates the volume’s privileging of coastal writers but also refers to wave-making with social, political, and aesthetic dimensions. The majority of the essays focus on a pivotal 1960s–80s period in which a California tsunami of spirituality and poetics transformed a nascent community of Vancouver writers impatient with sociopolitical conservatism and worn-out aesthetic form.

An idiosyncratic collection fits well within that small body of West Coast literary criticism. Most recently, Laurie Ricou’s Arbutus/Madrone Files and Salal and earlier (1984–95) essays by Ricou, W.H. New, and Allan Pritchard articulate the difficulties of offering an integrated narrative of BC and/or coastal writing. All point to the anthology as the form best suited to capturing our region’s diversity. And in pointing to the ‘files’ that compose his own idiosyncratic approach, Ricou cites Kim Stafford: ‘Coherence is born of random abundance.’ This patient trust in the anthologizing process, like Carolan’s ‘nurse log’ analogy, defers more comprehensive readings and puts my smaller quibbles with the collection in context.

The joys of this collection reside primarily in its archival work: poet Judith Copithorne’s account of her involvement in Vancouver’s literary community; Mike Doyle’s recollections of working with George Woodcock; the mini-memoirs of poet/publisher Carolyn Zonailo and Vancouver’s inaugural poet laureate, George McWhirter. Other complementary narratives include Michael Barnholden’s history of the Vancouver inter-weaving of poetry, radicalism, and alternative print media; he traces this to the ‘time-controlled release’ of thousands of conscientious objectors from US prison camps post–World War II, and his article includes a valuable list of works published (most in 8.5x11 mimeo) by the radical press in the early 1970s. Colin James Sanders outlines involvement in West Coast writing beginning with his 1970 discovery as a precociously literate Winnipeg sixteen-year-old of west coast seen, a Talonbooks publication ‘dedicated to someone named Warren Tallman.’ Sanders’s intimate connections with Vancouver literary circles influenced by American Black Mountain, Beat, and San Francisco–Berkeley Renaissance poets enliven his narrative. As well, his self-proclaimed literary auto-didacticism makes his article an apt antidote to the preceding piece in which Hilary Turner draws on Elspeth Cameron’s and Sandra Djwa’s books to explain the hostile beginnings of UBC’s creative writing department. Indeed, the hostility between academics and creative writers is a theme which echoes throughout this collection; so, too, does the hostility between nationalists and anarchists as Ron Dart outlines – more wave-making.

The quibbles I am willing to dismiss in accepting the volume’s idiosyncratic approach? While it makes no claim to be representative, I would have liked to see the voice of a First Nations writer; if wave-making is the criterion, I think, for example, of Lee Maracle, whose Ravensong created a few ripples. Instead, Paul Falardeau writes about Robert Bringhurst’s translations of Haida ‘Oral Literature’ which allow welcome and valuable access to foundational stories of the Northwest. Their translated presence here, however, repeats the unfortunate colonizing mythology of the disappearing Indian. Another quibble is the near-exclusion of Vancouver Island (which gets a nod in Joseph Blake’s interview with P.K. Page). What of Jack Hodgins’s tide-shifting magic realism? Or Randy Fred’s establishment of Theytus Books? Acknowledging the collection’s idiosyncratic focus, I nonetheless bridle at any implication that Vancouver’s 1960s...