Be-wildering: The Poetry of Don McKay

university of toronto quarterly, volume 70, number 4, fall 2001 STAN DRAGLAND Be-wildering: The Poetry of Don McKay Our deepest passions push us way outside ourselves. Robert Bringhurst To European explorers and settlers, North America was one of the waste places of the earth that the book of Genesis encouraged Christians to subdue . Subduing and naming, Adam's task in Genesis, went hand in hand. The whole continent was in stages mapped, ordered with arbitrary names, as though correspondence between place and name was never a question. Ironically, non-Native peoples are coming around to the view of those suppressed First Nations, that the earth and its creatures are family, that the earth is our only home and its resources are exhaustible. Since Canada is an underpopulated anomaly in a crowded world, it still has large tracts of >that strangely depopulated richness we like to call wilderness= (Bringhurst, Pieces, 52), and the land is as significant an issue now as it was in colonial times. Much of it is relatively unchanged; some of the poorer settled areas have in fact been abandoned and have reverted to bush. But its meaning has transformed, which means that changes in human attitude may be charted against it. For a number of contemporary Canadian poets, Don McKay prominent among them, wilderness is anything but wasteland in need of stamping with the human imprint. Hard thinking about wilderness has drawn them into the space between name and thing, into thinking of language as a threshold that you can never quite step across into a wilderness of desire. Poetry and Knowing, a volume of essays edited by Tim Lilburn, is the most visible sign so far of the recent coalescence of a community of Canadian poets concerned with relationships among poetry, philosophy, and the environment. At the core of this group are Robert Bringhurst, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, and Jan Zwicky. These writers are linked by their search for responsible ways of being in the world, a simple desire with complex ontological and practical ramifications. They understand that the road to change lies through redirection of ingrained ways of thinking that have split humans from their environment. >A style of knowing shapes the world technology has wrought,= says Lilburn, 882 stan dragland introducing the essays in Poetry and Knowing. >The ghost of Descartes hovers over the waste dump, the clear cut= (>Preface,= 8). Waste dump and clear cut are by-products of a North American economy of relative comfort, even luxury, in which threats to the global environment often seem distant and abstract, in which consumers serve the interests of big business by implicitly agreeing to live only for themselves and for the present. Lilburn and the others are trying to recover traditions of thinking that do not feed that mindset, that do not set culture and nature, mind and body, thought and emotion, at odds. These writers attend with all their senses to a real, a whole Being, of which the human is merely a part, hoping to chasten the human impulse to control and ownership. In ecological terms, divide and conquer is a selfdefeating strategy. Each of them offers thinking which will not detach from the forms of its expression; each would say that their thinking is purest when it takes the form of poetry. An argument inseparable from its vehicle is a sort of ecology, of course, even when the argument is not about ecology. The argument of each of these writers draws much of its energy from intuitions of life beyond language. This is one of the sources of their >courtesy,= to use Lilburn's term (>How to Be Here,= 174), towards an environment from which, contrary to the common Western objectifying view, humans cannot be detached. Lee says that he is >summoned to a knowing outside of language altogether= (Poetry and Knowing, hereafter PK, 35). For McKay, >The first indicator of one's status as nature poet is that one does not invoke language right off when talking about poetry, but acknowledges some extra-linguistic condition as the poem's input, output, or both= (PK, 24). These writers are all languaged, locked inside words, as they know all...