| Home | Review | Essay | Board | Misc | About |
| . |
|
Books in Canada - October 2003: |
|
|
||
|
A Light Blaze in Rare Air: Richard Outram Dove Legend "Her
Kindled Shadow..." by Jeffery Donaldson Dove Legend is a pungent pot pourri for Outram readers. It binds together the shorter poem cycles, festive holiday broadsheets, occasional verses and love poems, and a number of highly disguised and thus revealing autobiographical pieces, all written over the past ten years (roughly since Outram's retirement from stage production at the CBC). In a sense, these are only the decade's leftovers. In the same span, we have been treated to a series of book-length poetry cycles, Hiram and Jenny, Mogul Recollected, and Benedict Abroad. A reader of Dove Legend cannot help but think of the book's relationship to all the other work Outram has published in these same years, if not to his career in general. In short, to come across this ample inventory is to find yourself wondering, as others have before, why Outram isn't better known than he is. Peter Sanger opens his introduction to the work of Richard Outram with the comment that “This essay should not be possible or necessary.” English departments in Canada should blush to acknowledge that up until now there have been no extended studies, books, or doctoral theses written on the poet whom Alberto Manguel has described as “one of the finest poets in the English language,” a poet whose prodigious career now spans four decades. The mind scrambles for an equivalent critical omission. Sanger himself writes that “a comparable situation would have been one in which a reviewer of Auden's City Without Walls in 1969, had no choice but to read him as an unknown.” What does sell in English studies today? (One should hasten to propose that the readership outside the university is a good deal more sophisticated than inside; all the more reason to focus on the weak link in the chain). The rustle of cultural and political debate and the process of a people's cultural evolution are our worthy preoccupations. It seems all the more ironic then that a poet of Outram's stature and range, with his divergent cultural engagements, his historical and political savvy, and his unique evocation of an indigenous rural Canadian dramatis personae should so egregiously have escaped the attention of our readers and critics. Outram even obligingly stayed clear of the academy, a fact which ought to have set him abreast of Milton Acorn as most-favoured among our self-loathing academics. Mind you, a critic would have to answer for the troubling detriments to Outram's reputation: his formal virtuosity, his exotic mastery of the language, his dazzling metaphoric sleights-of-hand, his brisk idiomatic twang, his street smarts, his surprising bawdy wink, his untrappable and exacting spiritual vision. These attributes evidently will win you neither a spot on a university course syllabus nor the front table at Chapters. Then there is the agonized matter of Outram's difficulty. Any reader of Outram will quickly acknowledge that the poems invite and reward careful attention; they hope – as what poem does not – to be read, reread, sorted through, puzzled, daydreamed over, and studied. It appears that there are more readers outside the academy equal to the task than in. You wouldn't on a first reflection think that the poems' impressive wager would disqualify them from scholarly exegesis; indeed one could almost imagine an academic industry based on how the poems inspire strong readings (the likes of which has not been seen since the critical wagons circled around Wallace Stevens's metaphysics in the 70s and 80s). One can easily go too far in the characterization: Outram's effervescent – and often erotic – word-wit and his dramatic impersonations offer immediate gratification for anyone favouring the pleasure side of the poet's instruct-and-delight imperative. The fact that Outram is a challenging poet should only bring the more shame to any academic apologist. It seems nowadays that the only people who have an innate right to difficulty, or resistance to easy paraphrase, are the critics themselves. Wallace Stevens said that a poet must resist the intelligence almost successfully; he didn't say the critic should, nor, as they seem inclined, should they resist those who do. As for difficulty, there are those in Canada whom we prize for their elusiveness (Anne Carson for one comes to mind), yet they have the readership and commentary they deserve. You have to wonder too what, in Canada, would have become of a poet like Britain's Geoffrey Hill, Cambridge and Boston College guru at whose feet those readers with a taste for mystic prophecy and historical erudition have listened for years. Where, then, could this absent literary and academic commentary begin its work? One suggestion might be the way Outram's worlds embody a human-centred spirituality, a marriage of the secular and sacred, dramatized in ready-to-hand historical scenes and circumstances. Outram's vision points to nothing like a dogmatic religious principle, nor to a god who is seen to be out there, but to the god in us, a god manifest in our every creative act and potential. Consider the exemplary Ned Gladson – a character in Hiram and Jenny – perennial sitter on porches in the rural Maritimes, who oversees the rise and fall of each ordinary day:
A wizened little old bugger, but ………………
Could still haul lobster pots all day,
Offered, one warm night, to arm wrestle The farcical Ned holds court over a small-town maritime community that for all its secular spit is no less apocalyptic in its imaginative reach. Outram has Gladson invite or challenge the prophet Isaiah to an arm wrestle: “two out of three” captures just the right note of audacity and a no-doubt well advised hedging of his bet. There is something otherworldly, and yet no-nonsense and casual about his dare. From our perspective, either Ned is mad and hallucinating, or we must re-evaluate the nature of the reality we visit. Outram's unique brand of unapologetic magic realism toys with our uncertainty as to whether we inhabit here a wholly metaphoric and symbolic world, or just a place where a guy is off his rocker. In the present scene, Isaiah knows too much about the shortcomings of Ned's fallen world – for see how his prophecy still stands – to be duped by the trickster's bid for apotheosis. Refused, Ned just spits and gets on with the job, “waxing the cuticle moon.” Whatever prophets choose not to wrestle with us, the imagination has to get on with its work – since we are here nonetheless – getting the moon to rise to its proper place somehow. I love that sense that someone has to do it, that Ned's sad ubiety notwithstanding, the moon wouldn't be the moon if he didn't watch over it. Our secular world, as everywhere in Outram, both suffers a refusalăit not being what it isn't – and yet stubbornly insists on the audacity of its spiritual gambit, its peculiar divinity. Ned has as much right to it as the poem itself that ever so subtly crosses the line where real and unreal meet. It is Isaiah, after all, who backs down. A review of this length can only dip a small cup into the vast waters, but no one should be surprised to learn that the first scholar to offer a full book-length treatment of Outram's work is a poet himself, and a very fine poet at that. In his own poems and in his other critical commentary (on John Thompson for instance), Peter Sanger shares with his subject Outram a love of words, an appetite for the linguistic or semantic foxhunt, a jeweller's eye for the intricacies of literary form, a midwife's gentle handling of the freshly delivered literary-historical curio or bibliographic treasure. Sanger's essay has had to map out, for the first time, and with scant help, the arc of Outram's varied career, its formal and stylistic attributes, its areas of concern, its coherent patterns, complexities, unities and preoccupations. While Sanger never strays too far from a reassuring chronological order in his discussion of the poems, his speculations are those of a map maker, with their prospective and spatial unities, where everything is oriented in relation to everything else. Unified perception (as ironic illusion, and as revelation), is indeed one of the themes of Outram's poetry, and the challenge of anyone who would try to see it whole. On the book-title phrase “her kindled shadow” (extracted from “At the Bijou”), Sanger writes that the nature of the subject, here the shadowy trace of a bird taking flight, “is not double and divided, but single.” He goes on: “For the dove exists in the instant moment, not in the before and after of chronological time; and she exists at the intersection of all places, not in a place here and another elsewhere, despite her apparent flights to and from.” The passage might also characterize the elusive spar, the flighty thereness of Outram's poetry that Sanger captures. Sanger's writing here, with its wide discursive meander, beautifully mirrors the subject he describes and offers something very close to a prose version of Outram's own erotic make-'em-wait-for-it teasings of revelation in his poems. Elsewhere Sanger will track recurrent Biblical references, literary echoes and allusions, or find cross-fertilizing correspondences in and among Outram's own abiding dramatis personae. He will even risk the peril of paraphrase and return to tell of it. In short, Sanger's volume is a faithful and philosophically engaging introduction to the poems, a kind of guided tour through a retrospective exhibition. Sanger offers a careful description of the artifact itself, its chronology, sequence, historical circumstance, its relation to pieces he might point to on other walls: he takes a watchful step closer to the painterly detailing, a step back with a sweep of the arm around the room. If a reader gets tired on his feet it is only that so much careful attention is paid and in turn encouraged. It may be that the best way to approach Sanger's Outram is in a series of visits, where certain pages – like postcards of the solitary originals – may be fastened upon, say, no more than two or three of one's favourites, and brought away for further reflection under a private lamplight. To think of the afterlife of these two books, that is, their life in the hands of readers from here on, but also to ask the question of what-next in relation to Outram's on-going career and reception, begs a reading of the closing poem in Dove Legend, the title poem itself. It calls to mind all the issues of continuance, conclusion, resolve, resignation and determination that are the abiding concerns of this book and that seem appropriate to any dreaming about afterlife, poetic or otherwise: I
batter upward my
marvelous chambered heart a
crimson fleck a vermilion iota through
pillared fire of mansioned clouds below
my marvellous heart settles feathered
nest of a vivid resplendent quetzal. set
as a ruby & reckoned priceless, turban
of one of the lesser steadfast by
some who have eyes to see still What is at stake might be summed up in a simple question: has the bird already fallen, to have its afterlife as a rare ruby in a turban, or is it still rising in flight? The syntax is ingeniously fork-tongued. We might on the one hand be looking at a sentence argument along these lines: my marvellous beating heart by some who have eyes to see is still marvellous still beating. On the other hand, if you sort through the subordinations and wave your requirement of a main verb to complete the subject “heart”, you might conclude that the heart has indeed fallen, that it has ended up in the rather unpromising “nit-infested” silk turban of a lesser prophet (it is hard not to feel that the passage itself prophesies a certain kind of bad criticism; only there, in its fallen state, as a ruby in a turban, can it be seen as still marvellous still beating, enjoying some kind of afterlife for those who have eyes to see it for the still living gem it is.) We are left with two equally accommodated alternatives. Either the heart still beats, thank god, for those who have eyes to follow it upwards, or it has died and been redeemed into at least some kind of afterlife, thank god, for those who have eyes to recognize it there. A reader might find something in the argument of a struggle and self-accounting in Outram's own poetic style. There is an imperative to verbal excess and intensity in Outram's work (“an upward / spiral to lightblaze in rare air”), an intensity that sustains itself lest in letting down its guise and guile it come to be seen as a poor decorative accessory in the costuming of a mere “prophet of mundane doom.” The gambit of intensity resonates for both the speaker and the poem he speaks in. I find this poem deeply moving as a closing word on a decade of extraordinary work, culminating in Dove Legend, and promising continuing successes to come. Consider that the “chambered heart” here both comprises chambers still beating, and is chambered itself, i.e., imprisoned at last in its long-foretold resting place. Even the phrase “batter upwards” beautifully captures the kind of grappling scramble into spirit that we find everywhere in Outram. There would be nothing so spiritually liberating as to fold the terms of continuing life into those of an afterlife continuing to the point where you could not tell which was which, and so in a sense had to claim your portion in both. In Dove Legend, Outram offers a poetry that struggles marvellously to stay above the plundered nest, and a poetry that accepts and makes peace with the afterlife it can already foretell, and be seen as thriving in still, by those – like Peter Sanger for instance – who haveeyes to see. Jeffery Donaldson's last collection of poems was Waterglass (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998)
Want to comment on this essay? (discuss) |
||
|
|
||
|
Essay Links:
Dove Legend
at Indigo |
||
|
|
||
| Books in Canada Archive | ||
| . | ||
| Home | Review | Essay | Board | Misc | About |
|
Bookninja © Copyright 2003 |
|||||
