Specks

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.

The back cover informs us that Michael McClure is an American now living in San Francisco. This book is published in Canada because, the blurb continues enigmatically, “McClure’s archive, housed at the Simon Fraser University Contemporary Literature Collection in Vancouver, yielded the manuscript in publishable form.” Whatever that means. It also drops the name of Rabelais, which seems rather pretentious, but more of that later. And it tells us that McClure’s work “creates an unparalleled sense of the body moving it.” Whatever that means.

Specks itself is, if anything, a little clearer. It is made up of a collection of poems, aphorisms, dictionary definitions, quotations from learned works, photographs, and drawings. The order is by no means obvious, but echoes of words and concepts play across the pages. Some of the balancing axioms seem merely banal: “Wisdom of the body — the body’s wisdom. / Wisdom of the system — the system’s wisdom.” Or: “All systems and dimensions interpenetrate. / All systems and dimensions do not interpenetrate.” Occasionally, a single sentence stands on its own: “Emerson speaks of the transcendental Oversoul.” Well, yes, I know. Or: “The sea urchin is a great philosopher.” Really?

I find the exclamation-mark-riddled prose-poems rather irritating, and the (apparent) abrupt changes of subject bewildering. On the other hand, the book is readable (though it encourages dipping rather than sequential study). And I have to admit that the occasional insight has the sublime — though perhaps imitative — naiveté of a Blake (“Bless intuition. Right or wrong.”) or a Whitman (“Everything I touch is spread through me and reverberates.”). So perhaps the back cover’s name-dropping can be forgiven.

McClure tries to convey the visionary possibilities of expanding science in a way that recalls the Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney, though Dewdney seems to me to display a far more interesting mind and imagination. Dewdney makes something out of his visionary forays; McClure does little more than juxtapose. Dewdney has absorbed what he learns; McClure shows it off. Or, perhaps, Dewdney reveals a Canadian reticence, McClure a south-of-the-border expansiveness. Chacun a son gout.