The silence of AM Klein: an essay by Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino has written a fascinating essay on the important Canadian poet AM Klein, for The New Criterion, which you can read here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/4/the-silence-of-a-m-klein

The essay is also extremely interesting for its exploration of the role of a poet in society and how this affected Klein and his work. Also, I must admit I was delighted to learn that Klein authored a spy thriller (apparently called That Walks Like a Man, about the Gouzenko affair in Ottawa which helped to start the Cold War) but saddened that it was never published.

AM Klein (1909-1972) was one of the Montreal Group of modernist writers whose literary innovations created radical change in Canadian literature from the 1920s on. He was an associate of poets such as FR Scott and PK Page. (My Montreal grandparents had some connections to FR Scott, while PK Page is one of my most important influences all the way back to my teenage years. She lived in Sidney, BC, near where I grew up in Victoria, and I was privileged to go to one of her readings and meet her some years before she died. I like to think that these slight connections give me a cool "degrees of separation" angle on AM Klein...)

More significant than those degrees of separation was the Canadian poetry class I took at UVic at the end of the 1990s, taught by another Canadian poet, Doug Beardsley. I have mentioned this class before on the blog; I took it rather reluctantly with much eye-rolling over a Canadian literature requirement. It turned out to be absolutely life-altering for me in a literary sense, particularly (but not only) in my discovery of PK Page. The great Al Purdy also came to speak and read to us, once. I loved AM Klein's poetry too.

You can read some of Klein's poetry here: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/klein/index.htm


Photo: AM Klein in the 1940s. Library and Archives Canada. Public domain

"Archetypal Dreams": Anne Wilkinson's 'TV Hockey' and the Canadian Obsession

I took this picture in 2009, at the World Hockey Championships in Bern, Switzerland. It was during the gold medal game between Canada and Russia, one of the most classic rivalries in hockey history. Canada lost, but it was still a great game (said the Canadian, graciously.)

It is not really possible to describe to people of most nationalities - except for the Finns, the Swedes, the Russians, the Czechs, and a handful of other nations - what hockey represents to Canadians. For one thing, in most countries you have to call it "ice hockey", and if you're Canadian, that just doesn't seem right. What the English call "hockey" is not hockey, for one thing - it is grass hockey or field hockey.

Most of the teams of the NHL (the confusingly named National Hockey League, the world's number one professional ice hockey league) are now in the United States, with a relatively small number left in Canada, but most Canadians are of the opinion that Americans just do not get it. Some years ago, American TV channels trialled a way to get the tiny black puck to show up better: every time a player shot it at speed down the ice, it left a little fiery trail on the screen, like a miniature comet. It was absolutely ridiculous and Canadians were amused no end. But I've been told by the English as well that they find the play (and the puck) very hard to follow. I was completely bewildered by this when I first heard it. I think that the eye muscles of a Canadian simply develop in such a way that you have no problem following play in the average game, although occasionally the action moves so fast that you don't quite know what is happening - but that's all part of the excitement.

I believe that every single Canadian grows up with hockey at least to a certain extent and it seeps into your personality whether you are aware of it or not. I have very early memories of our old black and white TV, with a rotary channel dial that had to be held in place by (appropriately) black hockey stick tape. The jumpy, joyous theme music for Hockey Night In Canada sometimes races through my head unbidden - I must have heard it played thousands of times. My brother, Lucas Aykroyd, played hockey for several years like most Canadian boys do. He didn't go on to become a hockey player, but he is now a sports journalist and a leading world expert on hockey. Something like it was bound to happen.

I realised after I moved away that I was more Canadian than I previously thought. Given that I have one European parent and grew up going to Europe regularly - and also perhaps because I was the kind of child who doubted her own ability to "fit in" - I always felt at least semi-European while growing up. Having now lived in England and previously Ireland for many years (well, it's sort of Europe...) I feel more Canadian than I did before. I suppose this is all inevitable. But I certainly have a rosy nostalgia around hockey that I never thought I would have. I love the rare opportunities I get to watch the game, especially when my brother has given me tickets to see the Worlds. I thrilled to the gold medal game from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, where a lightning-fast goal from the Canadian star Sidney Crosby sealed the game in overtime against the Americans. (Apparently the entire country exploded at that moment, particularly in Vancouver.) Perceptively, an English commentator said: "To understand what this game means to Canadians, you have to imagine the World Cup final, with England as one of the teams, at Wembley Stadium." I don't think he could have put it much better.

Hockey poetry seems like an unlikely concept, but it is out there and some of it is quite good. In his poem 'Hockey Players', the great Canadian poet Al Purdy called it 'this combination of ballet and murder'. Michael Ondaatje and other poets have also explored the area.


TV HOCKEY (Anne Wilkinson)


I wasn't too familiar with Anne Wilkinson, although her name is ranked alongside that of Dorothy Livesay and P K Page, both Canadian legends. However, this poem really captured me. I realised that there was something about its sensory details and the shape of its movements that struck very deep. This is what I mean about hockey seeping into the personality of every Canadian; it's there even if you hardly think of it. The players do indeed "brood in boxes" and "stumble from their cages", and then they become birds - it is one of the fastest team sports in the world and I find football (soccer!) slow and hard to watch in comparison.

This poem, with its multitude of natural images including the "little black moon" of the puck, seems to invoke a primal spiritual ceremony or the movements of animals in the wild. And yet, if you are familiar with the sport, it is very recognizably about hockey. I love the way that it is familiar, but still casts a new and strange light on something that we Canadians think we know so well.

P K Page's 'Stories of Snow': "Where Silent, Unrefractive Whiteness Lies"

A non-definitive list of the ten poems which have been particularly significant in inviting me into the world of modern, almost-modern, post-modern and contemporary poetry would likely include the following:

Byzantium (W B Yeats)
The Waste Land (T S Eliot)
Foal (Vernon Watkins)
The Convergence of the Twain (Thomas Hardy)
Homecoming (Paul Celan)
At the Quinte Hotel (Al Purdy)
The Tollund Man (Seamus Heaney)
Bagpipe Music (Louis MacNeice)
The Shadow of Cain (Edith Sitwell)
Stories of Snow (P K Page)

I've written about some of these before, and they could probably all be an essay in themselves. To use one of my favourite over-used words, it is a pretty random list. Poems discovered by chance, poems studied in high school or university, poems which I wasn't sure I liked at the time but which ultimately took on greater meaning, poems I heard read by the poet themself (T S Eliot, I wish! In this case, Al Purdy), poems which led me on to poems I preferred by the same poet...and so on.

I've written before about the modern Canadian poetry class which I took in university and which turned out to be very pivotal in my literary life. Among other significant moments, I discovered P K Page in this class, and that was hugely important for me. 'Stories of Snow' can lay claim to being one of the greatest Canadian poems of all time, and simply a great poem, and you can read it here. (Due to the way the poem is reproduced, be prepared to page over a couple of times - it's a long-ish poem.)


STORIES OF SNOW (P K Page)


The Canadian landscape, the landscape of the West Coast rainforest I grew up in, the tropics, Northern Europe - all of these are invoked. More than this, these are emotional and metaphoric landscapes, snowy and blossoming worlds of poetry.

In that forwards/backwards/memory/premonition way which I've come to recognise, it seems as though this poem ties in with my Antarctic fascination (although that came a little later than my first reading of this poem). In the end, the reader is invited to "unlock/the colour with its complement and go/through to the area behind the eyes/where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies." P K Page was also a talented artist, and her poems are often powerfully visual, so there is an element of artistic curiosity and exploration here.

I feel, though, that these are mainly emotional landscapes and that this has something to do with my metaphoric/semi-realistic desire to escape the twittering and the human difficulty of the modern world and to go to Antarctica - somewhere more peaceful, where access to what is truly important becomes more direct and less encumbered. "Souvenir of some never nether land": this could be ancestral memory, too, or something that I'd pass on if I ever had descendants; again, forwards/backwards/memory/premonition. I'm just waiting to find out that I had an ancestor who went to Antarctica, though I would likely have heard about it by now.

The painting is by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the magnificent Finnish artist.

Earle Birney's 'Vancouver Lights': "A Spark Beleaguered By Darkness"

Photo of Vancouver by keepitsurreal. Used under Creative Commons license


The following link will take you to 'Vancouver Lights' by Earle Birney, as well as other poems and biographical information, on the University of Toronto Canadian Poetry website:


VANCOUVER LIGHTS (Earle Birney)


I returned from my holiday on the West Coast of Canada a few days ago (and so far have failed pretty miserably with the jet lag). Most of my time was spent in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, a few hours by ferry and car from Vancouver. My parents live in Victoria, where I grew up, and I spent time with them and catching up with some friends. My brother lives in Vancouver, so I usually spend at least a day there as well.

Although I didn't take the above picture - which vividly captures Vancouver by night - I have seen this view or very similar views. I particularly remember my cousin's wedding reception on Grouse Mountain. I have never skiied Grouse, but it is reckoned to have perhaps the best night skiing in the world, and I can believe it. Even just standing on the deck of that restaurant, looking out over the city, I felt as though the eternal dream of flight was not far away. Skiing down towards that "winking/outpost" - yes, that would be flight. Perhaps I will try it some day yet.

I bought Earle Birney's Selected Poems (One Muddy Hand) at the wonderful Munro's Books in Victoria, and I've already loved what I've browsed. I had not yet read many of his poems, although he is one of Canada's most significant poets and an influence on the likes of Al Purdy. His poems tend to run in long loose lines, but still with a sense of tautness and structure. He wrote love poems, poems about Japan and South America, and great poems about Canada. 'Vancouver Lights' is one of his best-known works.

I've seen that throbbing glow of cities by night, and Vancouver surely is "this twinkle we make in a corner of emptiness", relatively speaking. It is far away from most of the rest of the world. I now live in a city at the centre of the world (also relatively speaking), and so I'm acutely conscious of how far away the place I grew up is. Not by the standards of Australia or New Zealand, perhaps, but the Pacific Rim towns and cities certainly have an edge-of-the-world vibe. On the flip side of this poem's darkness, there is a Pacific light that is like nothing else. I saw it in Japan, too, where I was frequently and sharply reminded of where I grew up. Architecture and Asian culture, yes; but also the light.

In this poem, Birney primarily conjures the light of humanity. "These rays were ours/we made and unmade them". I love the West Coast for its natural beauty and laid-backness, for the mountains, and for the sea, perhaps above all in terms of nature. The older I get, though, it seems that people have grown more and more important to me, in all their complexity. In moments of extreme complexity I wish I could free myself from this, but I can't, and wouldn't really want to. The lights of this poem remind me of the people I'm so far away from and love so much.

Al Purdy, Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, and Canada: "A Country That No Man Can Comprehend"

Preface and Last Poem, HER GATES BOTH EAST AND WEST (Al Purdy)


The above link will take you through to a page on the website of Harbour Publishing, Al Purdy's publishers. It contains the preface to his Collected Poems and a 'last poem', 'Her Gates Both East And West'.

The painting is The Jack Pine by Tom Thomson, a great Canadian painter. It was completed in 1917, not long before Thomson's death. He died under mysterious circumstances in Algonquin Park, Ontario - his canoe was found floating empty and his body discovered over a week later. Thomson was the principal inspiration for the Group of Seven, who are remembered alongside his name and art. Along with Thomson, these seven - Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A Y Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J E H Macdonald, and Frederick Varley - left an extraordinary legacy to Canadian art. They celebrated the country's grandiose, cutting mountainscapes, its astonishing colours and contrasts, and its vastness. While they were principally based in Ontario, they also travelled and found inspiration from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, and even in the Arctic.

At the end of 2011, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London hosted a wonderful exhibition of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Of course, every Canadian art lover in town headed down to see it, including myself; but it was great to see so many Londoners curious about what Canadian art had to offer. I suspect a lot were thinking "not much". It was amazing to see so many of these great paintings together, though I was struck by homesickness and also had the inevitable "The rest of the world doesn't know what they're missing, eh?" conversation with another ex-pat. The exhibition was very well reviewed by the media and was a success. But the comment I was happiest to hear was overheard from a surprised-sounding art lover in the Lawren Harris room. Surrounded by monolithic, glowing, semi-deified icebergs and lakes, she said: "I've never seen anything like this before." Coming from hard-to-impress Londoners, that kind of comment is quite something.

I think that Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven go well with Al Purdy's poems. In so many respects, Purdy is the great voice of modern Canadian poetry. His poems are funny, irreverent and a bit rude; they celebrate Canada's vastness and beauty and tell us not to worry about that silly quest for national identity we're so hung up on. This is Canada - massive, diverse, harsh, lovely, self-celebrating but self-deprecating.

I heard Al Purdy read twice and met him once, probably in the space of about a year - maybe two years before he died in 2000. He came to read and chat with my modern Canadian poetry class. He was very tall and had a foghorn voice and an enormous personality. I was obviously being a bolshie 18 (19?)-year-old intellectual that day because I asked him how he could explain placing D H Lawrence's poetry ahead of Yeats's - he cited both of them as massive influences but loved Lawrence the most. (At the time, I was a total Yeats devotee.) He boomed "I'd have a hell of a time explaining it!" and then, as I recall, fixed his piercing eyes on me and recited a bit of Lawrence. There wasn't much I could say in response to that. Some months later, I went to one of Purdy's readings at the university. I remember he had an auditorium-full of students and others howling with laughter as he read some of his best-loved poems:


Now I am a sensitive man
so I say to him mildly as hell
"You shouldn'ta knocked over that good beer
with them beautiful flowers in it"

(from 'At the Quinte Hotel')


Purdy is funny on the page, but hearing him read was unforgettable. It's such a loss that he is no longer around to read his own poems, as they're not quite the same coming from anyone else.

Purdy lived and travelled all over Canada, though his later years were spent in Sidney, BC, just outside of my hometown of Victoria. Much of his inspiration seems to have come from Ontario, and from the Arctic, but it appears that he touched down almost everywhere. He hears the same voice everywhere, something which holds the country together:


Listen:
you can hear soft wind blowing
among tall fir trees on Vancouver Island
it is the same wind we knew
whispering along Côte des Neiges
on the island of Montreal
when we were lovers and had no money

(from 'A Handful of Earth')


I love the range and sweep of 'Her Gates Both East and West'. Purdy calls Canada "a country that no man can comprehend", and I think I know what he means. It's too big, it's too empty, its people are diverse but distinctly Canadian; it boggles the mind as much as it seduces. People in Europe sometimes ask why I've only been to Toronto a couple of times, given that it's the country's major city. I explain that I grew up almost a five-hour plane flight away. Then they understand a little more, but unless they have been to Canada (or at least North America) they don't really understand. From the UK, five hours would take you beyond Turkey. Flying that far and still being in the same country is hard to understand if you come from a small nation. I still can't help laughing when I overhear comments like "France and Germany are SO BIG!". Er, really?

I've travelled in Canada; fairly large parts of British Columbia, quite a lot of Alberta, bits of Ontario and Quebec. Is that really all? A lot of it was a very long time ago, too. It still takes in a lot of sights and memories. I think of the west coast of Vancouver Island, endless sand and ocean at Long Beach, world's end. The Rocky Mountains, lakes a blue you can't believe, postcard scenes beyond anything the human mind could imagine. The top of the CN Tower at night in November - COLD. Seeing the house where my father grew up in Westmount, Montreal. Flying home from Europe for a visit, watching hours and hours of rock and ice and snow unfolding beneath me and marvelling at it. The ferry between the mainland and Vancouver Island - the islands, the calm, the beautiful horizons. Road trips where you fall asleep and wake up hours later and the landscape has hardly changed, because it's just so big, and so far.

Unsurprisingly, I probably didn't really appreciate Canada until I left. People tell me how fortunate I was to grow up there, how beautiful it is, and wonder how I could have left. I tell them there was a big wide world waiting out there, and I love London, and I love Europe. But Canada was a special place to grow up. It is unusual to grow up in a city and still feel so close to nature, and in Canada you can easily do that, especially somewhere like Victoria or Vancouver. I miss the familiar mountains, their shapes and names, their changeable yet constant nature, colours shifting from day to day, sometimes disappearing behind cloudcover. I miss the sea and I miss knowing that not far away are lakes and forests. I miss knowing that I could be in a car for hours and there would be just an endless pour of dark green trees past my window and it would hardly change for hours. When I was younger, I found that a bit boring. I now know how wrong I was. Constant and exciting and magnificent, Canada is - not boring.

The Sharper Lens

The tear, half,
the sharper lens, movable,
brings the images home to you.

-'An Eye, Open' (Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger)


Perhaps it's the ubiquitousness of blogging in the 21st century; perhaps it's the fact that I can't stop posting poetry quotations on Facebook; or the fact that I simply don't write enough these days; but the idea occurred to me some time ago that I would like to start a blog to post some of my favourite poems (written by others, not myself...at least at this point) and to share my ideas about them. As Sherlock Holmes once (or possibly more than once) said: "We can but try - the motto of the firm."

I am open to suggestions, of course. I may at some point post some of my own poetry, but have concerns about copyright (more about that later) and would like to try to 'publish' some of my poems before choosing to 'self-publish.' I imagine that I might not stick rigidly to the poem/discussion format, but I also imagine that poetry will be the central theme.

I don't remember reading much poetry as a child, and thus am still a bit lost when it comes to the world of children's poetry, although there is some marvellous work out there, and my current job demands that I look at it on a fairly regular basis. This has been an education in itself; but my "eureka" moments regarding poetry, and especially modern poetry, came mainly during my studies at university. A modern British poetry class was especially good, introducing me to the likes of Vernon Watkins and Louis Macneice, among many others. A cynical attempt to dash off my Canadian literature requirement in the minimum amount of time possible led me to a summer course in Canadian poetry and the delights of P K Page, Al Purdy - who came and spoke to my class and filled the room with his humorous and overwhelming presence - Irving Layton, and others. W B Yeats was one of the many people, living or dead, who led me to live in Ireland for a few years. Now in London, I have an embarrassment of riches at my doorstep where poetry is concerned. Again, the living and the dead are both abundantly represented.

I do have one outstanding concern: the issue of copyright. I'm likely to post some work by poets who are out of copyright (more than 70 years dead) and will probably start with a couple of those. However...most of the poets whose work I particularly love have not been dead for more than 70 years, or are still with us. And though I know that most people merrily post away where copyrighted work is concerned, I'm not entirely happy with that. This may mean dashing off emails to various publishers ask if I can please please please post a particular poem, but I can't help wondering if I'm going to make myself look like an idiot in the process. I suppose it might provide a bright spot in the Rights department's day: "Can you believe this? This dear sweet over-honest poetry lover asked if she can use this poem in her blog... If only she hadn't asked...now I have to say no." Well, I will cross that bridge when I come to it, probably after a bit of Yeats and Hardy to start out.

Enjoy, comment, suggest, and above all, please seek out more work by these poets. If I recommend them, obviously they are well worth reading...