You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada by James Pollock (review)

A collection of review essays written, for the most part, between 2005 and 2010, James Pollock’s You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada concludes with an eloquent and impassioned ars poetica entitled, appropriately enough, “The Art of Poetry in Canada.” The piece might usefully have been placed at the beginning of the collection insofar as it outlines, in the clearest terms possible, the standards and values that guide his criticism of the poets (in part 1) and poetry anthologies (in part 2) – most of which are worthy of the careful attention Pollock gives them. “The theory of poetry I have been uncovering,” writes Pollock, “places poetic art at its centre, and establishes the intimate connection between the art of poetry and five poetic values: aesthetic pleasure, moral sources, human truth, performative power, and contact with something higher or deeper than the self.” A truly great work of poetic art, Pollock argues, will have succeeded in each of these categories, and it is the task of the critic to show how. True to his word, Pollock judges the work of individual Canadian poets and editor-anthologists against a standard of poetic excellence drawn from a thorough study of the Western literary tradition and its reservoir of myths, tropes, structures, and forms – the mastery of which any individual writer can forgo only at his or her peril.

Personally, I must say I find this problematic. The readings Pollock offers are thoughtful, knowledgeable, and precise. He is truly an excellent close reader of poems, his technical vocabulary is superb, and his command of the tradition enables him to tease out allusions and echoes of other works that are likely to be missed by the more casual reader. It seems to me that little is to be gained from trying to catch Pollock in a mistake or a misattribution or what have you. Frankly, it’s the whole enterprise that’s a little off-putting. I want to be fair: Pollock’s call for a more cosmopolitan poetry in Canada is entirely defensible, even welcome. Ditto his efforts to recuperate certain poets, like Daryl Hine, and to promote others, like Jeffery Donaldson, who have been or are being unjustly ignored by teachers and students of Canadian poetry. Likewise, his insistence on the importance of technique and the poet’s need to apprentice himself as a literary worker of sorts, to learn from and even surpass in skill and linguistic sensitivity his precursors, seems like reasonable, if tough, advice for the aspiring poet. But the limitations and liabilities of a belle lettriste evaluative criticism – specifically one based on a fairly narrow and ultimately mystical set of values – are writ large on every page of You Are Here.

But how can an appreciation for the “order of words” (to use a phrase from one of Pollock’s favourite critics, Northrop Frye), which contains everything, possibly be narrow? First, it is narrow in the sense that its particular brand of universality cannot accommodate writing that departs (wilfully or symptomatically) from the received Western tradition. The analytical dexterity, the deftness, the nuance Pollock demonstrates in his readings of more traditional poets like Eric Ormsby and Marlene Cook-shaw begins to abandon him when he turns to less conventional poets – to the extent that he does so at all – so that he must resort to categorical dismissals of the work in kind rather than degree. Of Christian Bök, sections of whose Eunoia appear in Sina Queyras’s Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, which Pollock reviews (harshly), the author writes that Bök’s Oulipian experiment is nothing “but an elaborate parlour game, a fun but ultimately empty rhetorical exercise, and … unbearably claustrophobic.” I choose this example from among the many other remarks dismissing experimental or otherwise avant-garde writers (Steve McCaffery, bpNichol, Erin Moure, Fred Wah, Lisa Robertson, and Daphne Marlatt are each dispatched in a sentence or less) because I...