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Remembering Robert Kroetsch
- The University of Akron Press
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285 Remembering Robert Kroetsch robert Kroetsch, who died in a car accident at the age of 84, was one of the most important Canadian writers of his generation. I had the privilege of knowing him a little when I was an undergraduate . Though I never took a course with him, he was a presence on the local literary scene, and a few times I found myself having a drink with him. He was a novelist, and something of a critic, and one of the founders of the journal boundary 2, but for me he’ll always be two things: a poet, and a benign godfather of a movement in Canadian literature that suffers the fate of all movements in Canadian literature: utter invisibility in the non-Canadian world. But it was a real movement, with its own journals and presses and contretemps and aspirations, and it made a difference where it wanted to make a difference, in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. As a poet, Kroetsch was many things. Sometimes he was a proceduralist , foregrounding the artificiality of writing, and the agility of the poet, by adopting an arbitrary restriction, Oulipo-style, and forcing himself to work within its constraints. In The Sad Phoenician, for example, Kroetsch writes a long meditation in which new lines of poetry begin, alternately, with “and” and “but,” making for an ode-like snakingthrough of strophe and antistrophe. At other times Kroetsch was a master of found texts, writing through his family’s account books in The 286 The Poet Resigns Ledger and through a ubiquitous document of the Canadian prairies in Seed Catalog. In both cases, he was concerned with the way written documents were the binding agents of a collective, of family and of region. The best way I can describe the effect of reading these poems is to say that it’s like encountering a secularized version of scribal commentary on religious texts. What a poet like Norman Finkelstein does with the Jewish textual tradition in a book like Scribe, Kroetsch did with the ordinary found texts that bound together his family and the rural communities of the Canadian prairies. Kroetsch was also a serialist poet, who kept a long project called Field Notes simmering for years, adding and inserting sections in the manner of Olson’s Maximus Poems or Duncan’s Passages. There was none of the history and grandeur of Olson, and none of the mysticism of Duncan, though. Instead, there was a kind of constant, amused intellectual probing of the everyday. And Kroetsch was always ready to surprise his long-time readers. After developing a theory of the ever-incomplete, constantly-ongoing poem, and inspiring a host of other Canadian poets to begin ambitious serial projects, he suddenly called his poem to a halt, issuing his Completed Field Notes in 1989. I remember the arguments in the student pub about whether that word, “completed,” represented a transcendence or a betrayal of Kroetsch’s project: I left in a huff, consoled by a young woman who wore even more eyeliner than I did back then. She gave me a peck on the cheek and one of her earrings before ditching me over a midnight cappuccino. Kroetsch was also a postmodernist. For me, he’ll always belong to that generation of poet-professors whose natural habitat was the brutalist concrete campus office lined with books by Robert Scholes and Jonathan Culler. I picture him now as he appeared on the cover of a 1987 issue of Border Crossings magazine: tweed jacket, beard, Remington typewriter on the desk in front of him, ready for a fresh sheet of paper and a new page of poetry composed by field in the manner of the Olsonite wing of Black Mountain poetry. One reason to think of Kroetsch as a postmodernist was what I can only call his loving suspicion of language and of the apparent coherence of narrative truth. Jean-François Lyotard’s distinction between the grand [54.226.222.183] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 11:00 GMT) 287 Poetry in a Difficult World récit and the petit récit, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, gets at the kind of thinking that informed Kroetsch’s writing. For Lyotard, the grand récit was a kind of authoritative story that purported to offer a comprehensive explanation of the world. For example, certain hard-core vulgar Marxists might think of Marxism as a grand récit, and...