Director's Cut

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Director’s Cut is a brilliant yet decidedly independent Canadian
poet’s report on the state of Canadian poetry, and the news
(inevitably) is not good. It consists, for the most part, of articles
and reviews collected from newspapers and magazines, and the impact they
make when gathered together is devastating. Solway insists, in his own
phrase, not so much that the emperor has no clothes as that the emperor
doesn’t even exist. He offers weighty evidence of “the banalization
of the craft” and quotes numerous examples of “all the drivel and
gloop one has to contend with in the poetry of this country.”

Many of the essays focus on specific topics—the absurdity of
referring to white- and black-authored texts, the damaging narrowness
that penalizes genuine poets who refuse to be confined to nationalistic
barriers, the sick joke of the recently instituted poet laureateship,
etc. But he also names names. Fred Wah is described (at last, some will
exclaim) as “the author of arguably the most awful lines in all of
Canadian poetry.” The pretensions of bill bissett are also exposed, as
are those of the officially unassailable Margaret Atwood and Michael
Ondaatje. Anne Carson is succinctly categorized as “the higher
Oprah.”

All this will be enthusiastically welcomed by some, and rejected by
others (probably many) as heresy. But two important points need to be
made. First, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Anyone who wants to
respond must produce counterarguments as convincing as Solway’s.
Second, as my brief quotations should have established, Solway writes
(when his extraordinarily wide reading doesn’t distract him into
wayside thickets) with a wit and panache that is itself of high literary
quality. What ought to be depressing becomes exhilarating.

And the commentary is not all destructive. Some poets—Peter Van
Toorn, Eric Ormsby, Mary Dalton, Ricardo Sternberg, Elise Partridge,
etc.—are accorded high praise for keeping the art alive in
unpropitious times. Unfamiliar names? Perhaps. But this may mean that, a
generation from now, the assumptions about our current poetry will have
to be radically revised. Coming from a fine poet, Solway’s charges
should not be dismissed lightly.