Poetry

POETRY 245 Poetry MICHAEL BOUGHN In his introduction to The New Canadian Poets, 1970-1985, Dennis Lee writes of the remarkable diversity of Canadian poetries written in English which emerged after the 19605. The tendency that Lee notes has if anything become more marked in the years since 1985, as has the sheer volume of verse being written and published in Canada. While this diversity can (and frequently does) result in a proliferating contentiousness among writers who, as Bob Dylan once put it, want you to be just like them, it also can be seen to reflect a growing maturity, a desire and willingness to see Canadian letters celebrated in a camivalesque performance of the incommensurable facticities, the actual lives, that daily-constitute this as yet unplumbed, and perhaps unplumbable, place. While a certain pedagogical impulse continues to try and keep this writing disciplined within recognizable boundaries , the writing itself, like June in that old song, is bustin' out all over. The problem of evaluation in this carnival remains a difficult one. While the issue of 'material' will,I suppose, always haunt a discussion of art in a world that is tom by divisive notions of the institutional and the non- or anti-institutional (either to embrace or reject one or the other), it seems increasingly useless as a measure of value, if not downright irrelevant. There is neither an advanced 'material' nor some culturally regenerative Jmaterial' that can infallibly orient us towards the value of the work (from either side ofthebinary divide), effectively relieving us ofthe responsibility ofhaving to read it, ofhaving to think and rethink reading. The multiplicity of approaches to the poem we see today reflects the multiplicity ofsyntaxes alive within a language increasingly shaped by the explosive pressures of a life-world formed by the inescapable fact ofourheterogeneity. Within this context, the only thing that matters, the only thing that can matter, is whether or not the poem brings us the news. I begin this review of the po"etry of 1995 with a book from 1993, as yet unreviewed in these pages. Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest (Coach House, 396, $24.95) brings together all of Blaser's poetry from 1959 to 1993. Thls is a big book in every way. One is struck by the sheer range of the work gathered here, a range that includes shifting senses of the line's possibility as much as shifting senses of the mind's possibility. During his life in poetry, Blaser, as much as anyone of his generation, has struggled to overcome antique taxonomies of the faculties of the self and their meagre prescriptions of the poem to some bleak imagination of 'feeling,' to push the poem back, which is to say forward, to where it belongs as active testimony of the passionate thinking of the world. One name for it is cosmology, the weaving of worlds. Blaser sometimes calls it discourse, that is poetry as discourse, by which I take him to mean that poetry is an arranging of language that says what can only be said in that arrang-ing which is the breed- 246 LEITERS IN CANADA 1995 ing of worlds. Entering this book one enters a unique and ever-unfinished . world rich with laughter and revelation, splendour and raunchiness, truths and lies, but, above all, with the integrity of a mind in love with the mind's imperfect but indefatigable energies, and especially with its body of language. As Blaser writes in a poem for Daphne Marlatt called 'stop': wanted so to enter the brightness, mother the word-robes I forget with impatience I believe I heard language through my mother's belly both violent and sweet and wanted to get to it I listen to the train whistle, the skirt of love flap against wind and locomotive steam and do not understand my escape from the dear over-again whistle and crossing Jed Rasula has recently proposed in The American Poetry Wax Museum that 'poetry can - and should be - our term for language in crisis/ a way for rum around the impasse of what he calls the 'enshrinement of the selfexpressive subject.' This is an apt description of the heart...