Choosing the Best Canadian Poetry

Perhaps you have a copy of Margaret Atwood’s New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English on your bookshelf. (Go ahead, blow the dust off it: ah, there it is.) This last real attempt to formulate a canon of English-language Canadian poetry for the common reader was published three decades ago, in 1982. It is true that a handful of classroom anthologies have appeared since then, but they are as full of howling gaps and bewildering misjudgements as a pre-Mercator map of Nouvelle France. A reader in a hotel in the city of Canadian poetry will wake up tomorrow morning not only without a concierge, but without so much as a Baedeker, and will have to rely heavily on a rack of pamphlets advertising local attractions and tourist traps. It is an intolerable situation. A very few clear-eyed poet-critics are out there visiting the museums, sampling the new restaurants and publishing their reports—Carmine Starnino’s book of essays and reviews, A Lover’s Quarrel, is the most valuable collection of such reports to appear so far—but we are still a long way from having any guidebook that is both reliable and comprehensive.

We have our excuses. It is hard to know what is happening overall, people say, because so many new poets and new books are published every year—although we have a mere market garden compared to the annual industrial farm crop in the United States. The truth is we need more good critics. There is also a desperately needed re-evaluation of our older generations just getting under way, and this complicates things further. For every reputation that remains strong—P.K. Page’s, for example—there are, or ought to be, half a dozen teetering on the brink: I am thinking of George Bowering, Eli Mandel, bpNichol, Raymond Souster and Fred Wah, among others. And, excitingly, there are a few excellent older poets, such as Daryl Hine and Richard Outram, who are only recently beginning to get the critical attention they deserve. There is no widespread agreement about all this; what looks obvious to me will probably be hotly disputed by others. In order to sort this all out, what we need is a huge critical effort—excuses be damned—and a furious debate.

Two generations of poets have come of age since Atwood’s anthology appeared. In the older, middle-aged group are several poets who have achieved a pair of rare and beautiful things: technical mastery and an authoritative engagement with international poetic traditions. Atwood more or less predicted that the first of these things would happen when she wrote in her introduction that “there is a renewed interest among many of [the younger poets] in the intricacies of rhetoric, and an emphasis on the poem as consciously crafted.”

I remember laughing out loud when I read this for the first time: it was as if she had announced that, among the new generation of hockey players, there is a renewed interest in skating. It helped prepare me for my gut-wrenching disappointment in reading the poetry of so much of Atwood’s celebrated generation, many of whose poets turned against rhetoric and conscious craft with a vengeance. What is astonishing to me now is who the supposed young virtuosos were that she was talking about: not Anne Carson, Eric Ormsby, Jeffery Donaldson or George Elliott Clarke—masterful poets who would come along a decade later, often publishing their first books relatively late—but mostly middling talents or worse, like Susan Musgrave and Christopher Dewdney.

The younger generation, more or less in its twenties and thirties, is, I am happy to report, full of excellent poets—many of whom you have probably never heard of because they have yet to publish a first book, or have produced just one or two. The more prolific and well-known include Ken Babstock, Stephanie Bolster, Tim Bowling and Karen Solie, but there are plenty of others who are, for the moment, more obscure, although no less gifted. What they all have in common is a deeply informed deployment of the whole magical repertoire of rhetoric and prosody, and a strong engagement with poetic traditions, including those of the best poets in other countries. Like the older generation, Carson, Ormsby & Co., they have sloughed off at long last that inbred provinciality and proud disdain for the art of poetry that has crippled the work of so many Canadian poets in earlier generations, although, thank God, not all of them. It is a very exciting time to be a reader of poetry in Canada. But for this to be sustained and not wasted, what we need now, urgently, is an honest, energetic and clear-eyed critical response.

One of the most exciting of the new critical projects to take up this challenge is the inaugural anthology of a promised annual series of The Best Canadian Poetry. The series editor is the poet Molly Peacock, who will work with Tightrope publisher Halli Villegas to choose a poet as guest-editor each year. The guest editor of the first volume in the series (2008) is Stephanie Bolster, who, as an accomplished poet of the younger generation, was a superb choice. I do not agree with all her judgements, but I have the highest respect for her avowed principles of selection: “good writing,” “depth and challenge” and “an interesting, even strange, sensibility or imagination.”

There are, I am afraid, two serious conceptual flaws in the project, and the editors offer little or no explanation for them. Following certain rules she established in collaboration with Peacock and Villegas, Bolster chose 100 poems by 100 different Canadian poets published in Canadian journals in 2007, of which the top 50 poems were printed in the anthology and the rest listed in a section at the back. But because the editors decided to choose no more than one poem per poet, no doubt some of the best poems by the very best poets were excluded from consideration, and that is a shame. And since the selection was limited to poems in Canadian journals, the best Canadian poetry published in journals in other countries was not included. As Bolster herself explains, few of Canada’s established poets publish in Canadian literary journals much anymore, for one reason or another, and so this decision limited her pool fairly drastically. Granted, much of this was out of the editor’s hands, since some of these poets seem to have eschewed journal publication altogether in 2007. But why make the problem worse? The reduced pool explains the disappointing absence of Anne Carson, Don Coles, George Elliott Clarke, Eric Ormsby, Dionne Brand and several others whose poems many readers would have expected to see.

All this helps explain why, of the 50 poems printed in the book, I find just 16 to be first rate, although another five come close; the latter are extremely good but could benefit from some further revision. The other 29 range in quality from the talented to the truly bad.

So why do I find this anthology so exciting? Because I discovered so many fine new poets in its pages, no less than 15 in all. Of my favorite 16 poems, just five are by poets I knew: Ken Babstock, Tim Bowling, Jeffery Donaldson, A.F. Moritz and Todd Swift. The other twelve were new to me: Maleea Acker, John Wall Barger, Brian Bartlett, Yvonne Blomer, Heather Cadsby, Anne Compton, Susan Elmslie, Iain Higgins, Amanda Lamarche, Craig Poile, Anna Swanson and J.R. Toriega. And of the five near-first-rate, just one was by a poet I knew, Carmine Starnino; the others, Jason Heroux, Michael Lista, Heather Sellers and David Seymour, were also new to me. For these discoveries I am exceedingly grateful to Bolster for her industry and critical acumen.

I do have a suggestion, however, for future volumes in the series, which, if adopted, might do its part to help us build the critical effort we so desperately need. A critical judgement is only as good as it is persuasive; that is, it depends, or ought to depend, not on the inertia of tacit and passive agreement, the sort that keeps anthologizing our dear bad poets, but on the force of the critical argument that can be made for it. Therefore, I propose that in future volumes the guest editor write a brief critical argument, say one page, on behalf of each chosen poem. If that means choosing fewer poems, so be it. The current volume includes a section of sometimes self-indulgent comments by the chosen poets on their poems, only some of which are useful or interesting, and none of which contributes much to our critical response. I’d like to see them replaced with the guest editor’s arguments. The series editor would need to bar the door to book-jacket–blurb puffery and pseudo-intellectual theory–laced mumbo-jumbo, and demand well-chosen evidence and clear reasoning. But if every year this project turned one of our best poets, the guest editor, into a better and more prolific critic, it would not be a bad thing at all. And those critical responses, if well written, would be invaluable in themselves.