For me, what's important is the poems: how do they stack up in 1992, as compared with the timeless best (Yeats, Lawrence, Jeffers, Housman and good old Anonymous)? That isn't an easy question since I ...feel myself strongly rooted in the here and now. Malcolm Lowry seems to me from another place and time. Sure, I was fascinated by him as a person in 1953. Lowry's style and methods of writing poems are the English metrical and rhyming methods, and quite conventional (although not invariably so). I am not saying that metrical and rhyming poems aren't worth reading, just that some of these poems are very strange and outre: "No Kraken shall depart till bade by name,/No peace but that must pay full toll to hell." Earle Birney edited a Lowry Selected Poems for City Lights Books in 1962, and was also responsible for having some 200 Lowry poems published posthumously. Kathleen Scherf's "Note on the Text" claims that Birney had an editorial policy of "silently emending so many of the poems." (The Oxford Concise defines "emend" as "to remove errors") Scherf also refers to "Birney's revisions." Perhaps Birney did revise and retitle some of Lowry's poems, but Sherf ought to provide proof of her accusation a little more incontrovertibly.
Terry Pindell's adventures along the way, personal reactions to people and landscape, are interspersed with stories from Canadian history, most of the latter connected with the building of the ...railways themselves. Pindell, author of an earlier book about American railways, set out to read Canadian history at the same time as he rode our trains from coast to coast. Pindell is riding the observation car when he describes the run from Golden over the Selkirk Range and the climb over Kicking Horse Pass - a section especially meaningful to me. Riding the freights in 1936 at age 17, I was kicked off the train by a railway cop at Golden, and had to walk 38 miles to Field, B.C. Hungry and tired, I found a piece of buttered bread along the tracks, thrown away by a passenger in the observation car. It tasted delicious. Pindell's is a fairly interesting narrative, especially at a time when the past seems the only anchor we have in the present. However, this book abounds with errors. For example, on Page 53, there are three mistakes in spelling the names of historical personages John Palliser, Henry Youle Hind and Sandford Fleming. Even John A. Macdonald's monicker gets mangled. It doesn't surprise me that an American writer would misspell a few Canadian names, which might escape his American publishers' notice. But surely the Canadian Douglas & McIntyre should have caught errors in such words as Doukhobor and Maclean's.
In the early 1960s, Black Mountain and Tish converged when Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan came to read, and convert the heathen, at the University of British Columbia. They were strikingly ...successful in this missionary endeavor, infecting a whole generation of West-coast poets. George Bowering, Frank Davey, Fred Wah and Jamie Reid were the Tish Movement originals, publishing their magazine while attending UBC creative writing classes. Beyond Tish, edited by U of A English professor Doug Barbour, is largely a summary of what happened to the Tish writers after UBC, when they ventured out into the great world armed with Charles Olson's theories of Projective Verse to help them earn their daily bread. The book includes what some of them are writing now, nearly 30 years later. It's divided into three sections, New Writing, Interviews, and Critical Essays. It must be said: Beyond Tish is for the converted, readers (who are mostly writers) who are already hypnotized by the Black Mountain ethos. An unbeliever myself, I found Lynette Hunter's piece on Frank Davey and George Bowering, which focused on "fear of referentiality," most interesting as entree into some fairly convoluted thinking and language. Among the articles, Janice Williamson's It gives me a great deal of -- is about the lesbianism in one piece of Daphne Marlatt's writing. This article mentions that the Tish group was dominated by a body of male writing and male writers. Since Bowering and Davey were the leading exponents of Tish 30 years ago, I feel like asking them: "Why were there so few women writers in the group?"
Sand banks Purdy, Al
Canadian geographic,
03/1998, Letnik:
118, Številka:
2
Magazine Article
Sandbanks Provincial Park along Prince Edward County in Ontario, Canada is the world's largest freshwater sand barrier. The geology of the place shows the probability that the area was once a massive ...ice sheet which receded over time. Other famous tales are attached to the land formation.
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29.
Collected Poems King, Bruce; Purdy, Al; Brown, Russell
World literature today,
1987, Letnik:
61, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Al Purdy is mythic. Poet - genius he may be, but as Al Purdy, Myth, he embodies a powerful narrative. His is a narrative of attachment, of connectedness. We can see it writ large in the travel pieces ...and literary reviews that editor Sam Solecki has brought together in Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy. As these essays and reviews make clear, Purdy takes his function seriously. From the creation myth of his days in the Depression 'riding the freight trains west' out of 'the green country of childhood' to the stories of quests with his wife, Eurithe, through the ghost towns of British Columbia, or in search of the lost Vikings and Beothuks of Newfoundland, Purdy's prose mythologizes a birth of the imagination - a birth that takes place around 1960 when Purdy was forty - two, and moved with his wife to Ameliasburgh, Ontario to 'start out' again - pioneers, makers of land, and rock - busters of poetry. There, on the earth of Prince Edward County, as in the essays themselves, Purdy gives voice to that enduring desire to connect with something authentic, some core experience that has for Purdy deeply personal, political, and poetic implications.
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