The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology

Elizabeth Stieg taught English in Toronto.

This seems to be an anthology with a message, beginning with the title. First, this is The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology, not one of a possible several, but the definitive collection. Second, this is a poem anthology, suggesting that not poetry but individual and particular poems are the intended focus. The focus is still more narrowly defined in Bowering’s introduction, in which he urges a “close, practiced response to each syllable.” The anthology covers a 20-year period, beginning in the early sixties, and includes the poetry of 20 poets who, diverse as they are, Bowering finds unified in an over-riding concern with language, a conviction that “the centre and the impetus, the world and the creator of poetry is language.”

We are clearly in the realm of post-modernism with its open-ended discourse and its emphasis on technique rather than theme. The introduction closes with a quotation from Frank Davey that drives the point home: “the post-modern artist does not believe that he can absorb, structure, organize, and discourse definitively on the universe.”

Bowering did not call the collection The Post-Modern Canadian Poem Anthology, perhaps because the work of a number of these poets simply does not conform to a post-modern aesthetic. Yet his introduction suggests a uniformity of purpose and concern which he directly relates to the post-modern movement, and the “Statements on Poetics” with which the volume closes constitute a primer for reading post-modern verse, thus reinforcing the impression that the poetry that falls between is fundamentally post-modern.

This is, I believe, a misleading and somewhat procrustean procedure. By including poets such as Phyllis Webb, D.G. Jones, and Margaret Atwood in what clearly purports to be a post-modern collection, Bowering is making a strong statement concerning the centrality of the post-modern movement in contemporary poetry.

In doing so, he offers a provocative and stimulating approach to poetry that has typically been understood in other contexts. If some of these poets make strange bedfellows (Atwood and bissett, for example), some of the juxtapositions the volume affords lead to fresh evaluations and new insights. Understood as polemic, the anthology is interesting and valuable, but it is to be hoped that it is perceived not as the definitive statement concerning Canadian poems, but rather as one of many possible avenues of approach.