Witches and Idiots

Roger Nash is Academic Vice-President of Athabasca University and author
of Night Flying.

The first section of Mitchell’s book of poems springs mainly from his
childhood in the Prairies; the second, which includes three translations
from the Chinese of Zhang and Hu Bei-li, from his encounters with other
cultures in China and the Mediterranean.

Mitchell is committed to making poetry never far removed from the
vocabulary and cadences of ordinary speech; and, often, to speaking on
behalf of the inarticulate and outsiders: a mongoloid boy, a recluse, an
unsuccessful prophet at a speaker’s corner, the village idiots of
Greece, a cow on the way to slaughter. Writing from the heart of this
paradox—that poetry can, and should, speak to all, for those who
cannot speak for themselves—Mitchell shapes some powerful poems
(“The Great Divide,” “Mr. Groome,” “The Village Idiots of
Greece”).

For Mitchell, the poet puts on an “artist’s mask.” Notoriously,
this metaphor can lead to insight or to confusion in a poet’s craft.
Mitchell’s mask does both. Putting on the mask can be a matter of
seeing the world empathically and imaginatively, like the “other”
that one was as a child, as in “Loft.” Conversely, it can mean the
poetic speaker assuming a persona who draws apart from the pulse of the
poet’s own imagination, and sees the world in contrived or even stale
ways. A number of poems move through images that are stereotypes and
clichés: “invisible minions,” “silently as wraiths,” “hips /
so perfect for childbearing.” Surely, in this dimension, poetry cannot
consistently aim at never being far from ordinary speech. In the former
case, language comes freshly to the poet, so that his Buddhist image of
creativity is apt: “I begin to select words / that flow from the Great
Void / like rubble from the Himalayan slopes.” In the latter case,
words do not flow, but arrive by that kind of mechanical preselection
controlled by cliché and stereotype.

Mitchell has published fiction and drama as well as poetry. Two of his
poems cross between genres, creating poem-fables (“A Prairie Fable,”
“The Wolf of Jong Mountain”). A narrative voice, warm but wry,
permeates his poetry.