Bolder Flights: Essays on the Canadian Long Poem

The Voices of Elegy: or, Hurtin' Songs for Bronwen Wallace

The Voices of Elegy: or, Hurtin' Songs for Bronwen Wallace STEPHEN SCOBIE HAVE TO BEGIN this paper with some kind of disclaimer . The work that I am going to be dealing with here may well seem not to qualify for the category "long poem"; indeed, it is neither long nor, strictly speaking, a single poem. Rather, it is a sequence of ten fairly short prose-poems. But, in the same way as Robert Kroetsch claimed the privilege of treating Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems as a mini-prototype of the contemporary Canadian long poem, so too I would claim that embedded in this work are many of the key issues of structure and theme that have defined the Canadian long poem over the past twenty-five years or so. What distinctions can in fact be made between a long poem, a continuing poem, a poem-sequence, a serial poem, and all the other ways in which authors have attempted to contain and name their burgeoning products? Perhaps we can coin a newgenre: the short long poem. The work I refer to is Bronwen Wallace's "Keep That Candle Burning Bright." The full title of the book is Keep That Candle BurningBright and Other Poems, but I am concerned only with the title section, which is a sequence of ten prose-poems addressed to the American country-andwestern singer Emmylou Harris. The book was published posthumously by Coach House Press in Toronto in 1991; BronwenWallace died of cancer in 1989. Wallace learned of her diagnosis after the sequence wasbegun but before it wascompleted. Certainly, there is no overt mention in the text of her own impending death. But equally, the knowledge of her death is an inescapable part of our response now, as readers of a published text that is I 152 copyrighted to "The Estate of Bronwen Wallace." Her death is both present and absent in these poems; it is there as a ghost, a shadow, a displacement. Indeed, I want to propose that the text is structured by a series of displacements, deferrals, relays, or substitutions—and, further, that such displacements are highly characteristic of the Canadian long poem, in its structural and thematic preoccupation with questions of documentary and identity. In her invocation of Emmylou Harris, and of country music generally , Wallace repeatedly performs this kind of sidestep. One thing is substituted for another—prose for poetry, poetry for music, America for Canada—and ultimately, the figure of the living singer, Emmylou Harris, for the figures of both a dead singer, Gram Parsons, and a dead poet, Bronwen Wallace. This displacement begins in the music itself, which has at various stages been called Hillbilly music, or Country and Western, and now most often just plain Country. In the early and middle decades of this century, it was the music of the rural poor of the American south and west, stretching from Kentucky and Tennessee through the mid-Westwheat belt to the cowboy ranges of Texas; it found its centre and shrine at the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville. But increasingly, in the past few decades, "Country" music has become more and more a city music, and in its latest incarnations it is slick, sophisticated, and high tech—just check out the Garth Brooks home page on the World Wide Web. It has become not so much the music of the genuine country as the music of a nostalgic, idealized, and lost country. It has often been characterized as a conservative or "redneck" music, since it evokes a wayof life that has largely disappeared; it offers the vision of a simpler , purer America, where social roles had not yet entered the flux of contemporary society—where, that is, the men drove fence posts or trucks, and the women stood by their man. In the late 1960s, however, as Country music began to broaden its appeal and move more into the mainstream of American popular music, it became an available style that could be adopted and used by singers whose backgrounds were far removed from traditional country roots. Emmylou Harris was born in Alabama, but her father was an officer in the U.S.Marines ; her early singing career was based in New York and Baltimore. Her partner, Gram Parsons, came from a wealthy fruit-growing family in Florida . For both of them, country music was a style they consciously chose: an attitude, a persona, an ethos. For a Canadian, country music exists at a further level of displacement . Country...