Inward of Poetry: George Johnston & Wm Blissett in Letters ed. by Sean Kane (review)

This engaging book is the record of a conversation that took place over some forty years between the late George Johnston, the poet and medievalist at Carleton University now perhaps best known for his poetry collection The Cruising Auk and translations of Norse and Icelandic saga literature, and William F. Blissett, scholar and teacher still very active at (even though now some twenty-five years retired from) the University of Toronto. Blissett’s own book The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones likely serves as a model for the blending of letters, background, and reminiscence that is the approach chosen by the compiler, Sean Kane, who is a former student of both and now himself an emeritus professor from Trent University. It is a strategy that serves far better than a standard volume of correspondence might to reveal the poetic, scholarly, and personal concerns of Blissett and Johnston, to preserve their love of knowledge, expressiveness, and ideas as well as the gentle, sprightly, and humane tenor of their speech, and to cast a sidelong glance at the intellectual and professional environment in which each in his own manner managed to thrive.

As conversations do, this one drifts insensibly from the personal to the professional to the intellectual and back again. Kane has done us a valuable service not only in preserving Johnston and Blissett’s discussion of poetic practice and experiences, but also in providing a picture of what it was like to live and work in the post-war Canadian university environment, when seemingly every professor of English literature in the country had come through the University of Toronto’s doctoral program. There are revealing portraits by Kane of his subjects’ contemporaries and teachers, including A.S.P. Woodhouse, Norman Endicott, and Northrop Frye. It feels very remote from our own age of academic professionalization in its tenured self-assuredness, its capability and willingness to attempt unusual manoeuvres in discussion and occasionally to come up empty-handed knowing that one will not always be judged harshly on the results.

This willingness to experiment and sometimes to fall short is essential to the creation of good poetry, and here in the conversation between Johnston and Blissett we have the most important contribution this volume makes. Not only do we find numerous examples of a telling ear on the part of both correspondents for what sounds and means right (the oral performance of poetry rings through these written documents), we also see two writers who rejoice in reading new work, who are unfailingly polite and encouraging to each other, and who also trust each other’s honesty and judgment. As a result, Inward of Poetry contains an invaluable record of some of Johnston’s poems in process: thus a poem like ‘The Day that Would Never Come,’ about his daughter Peggy’s departure for Europe, appears in at least three successive startlingly distinct forms, and ‘Weather Troll,’ from the Faroese of Christian Matras, appears first as a rough translation and then in several versions, each with its own felicities and missteps (‘it turns out,’ writes Johnston ruefully to Blissett in recounting a talk with Matras, ‘that I misread two stanzas’).

Also as conversations do, this one drops and picks up threads and new interlocutors; it has its fair share of in-jokes and repetition of phrases worth repeating (‘Read it tonight!’). Finally, also in the manner of conversations, the interlocutor or editor is very much a part of the conversation. Sean Kane shows a deft touch for negotiating the balance between the words of his two subjects and the background necessary to understand their personal and intellectual milieu; he himself appears as a character in the narrative, travelling or attending the opera with Blissett or reading Anglo-Saxon with Johnston. No doubt a number of readers, myself included, will flash on memories of doing the same. On occasion it becomes a little difficult to tell who is speaking – the extracts sometimes...