Narrowcast by Shaw Lytle

Author:Shaw, Lytle [Shaw, Lytle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

The Strategic Idea of North

Glenn Gould, Sergeant Jones, and White Alice

Imperialism is the word used to refer to the extension of an empire or ideology to parts of the world remote from the source. It is Europe and North America which have, in recent centuries, masterminded various schemes designed to dominate other peoples and value systems, and subjugation by Noise has played no small part in these schemes. Expansion took place first on land and sea (train, tank, battleship) and then in the air (planes, rocketry, radio).

—R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape

Frederick George Scott’s poem “Quebec” begins: “Like some grey warder who, with mien sedate.” Little known today, Scott (1861–1944) was, during his lifetime and shortly after, noted for his Christian, patriotic poetry; for his support of British imperialism (he enlisted to fight in World War I at more than fifty years old); and for his attachment to the Laurentian Mountains in southern Quebec.1 Taking exception to the “grey warder” line (which he does not deign to credit to a proper name or associate with a poem title), Robert Creeley goes on what we might hear today as something of an excessive rant against Canadian poetry as a whole:

Canadian poetry might always be this attempt, not so much to fit, say, into an environment but to act in the given place. If there is no “major” poet in Canada, if there never was one, etc., I think it is a part of this same problem. A theoretic embarrassment of “culture,” all the tenuosities of trying to be local and international at the same time, etc., take an energy otherwise of use in the making of an idiom peculiar to the given circumstances. In this way Canadian poetry, in its earlier forms, has much in common with the American poetry of Lowell, Longfellow, et al. The model is English, and it is precisely the English which is of no use whatsoever.2

One wonders how much Canadian poetry Creeley had actually read in 1953 when he made this comment and thus what gave him the sense that Scott might stand in for the nation’s output as a whole. It helps somewhat to know that this blurt was printed before the emergence of many of the better-known Canadian experimental poets of the 1960s and early 1970s. Fred Wah was fifteen years old; George Bowering, eighteen; Daphne Marlatt, eleven; bpNichol, nine; and Steve McCaffery, six. These are all poets that Creeley will later know and respect. A decade later, in 1963, Creeley will be at the Vancouver Poetry Conference, and from about that time on his work, like that of Olson, will be part of an international poetic dialogue with these Canadian poets.

This is perhaps somewhat surprising given the gauntlet Creeley laid down in his initial rant: “The impact of the place is dulled,” he continues, “in the overlay of the English rhythms, and the politeness which couldn’t have been actual.” Affectedly polite English rhythms mute poetry’s possible relation both to spatial and idiomatic dimensions of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.