The Long Landscape

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University. He
is the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Sadness pervades these interesting, well-crafted poems. The poet adopts
the personae of various historical figures, including Django Reinhart, a
mistakenly executed acquaintance of Marat Sade, Claude Monet, and Pieter
Breughel; in his own voice, Wilson writes about the ghastly experience
of witnessing his daughter’s brush with death by disease. In spite of
the happy endings of many of these works, none of Wilson’s poems ends
affirmatively. Instead of joy one might expect with a daughter’s
recovery, the poet notices that his daughter’s “eyes look past me as
if to a sadness she has learned / in fever.” As for Monet’s “Water
Lilies,” a joy to behold if there ever was one, the poet concludes:
“There is a sadness in this seeing / that you could not confide in, a
frailty / the pond remembers.” Similar examples abound.

The poem “Pseudonym” has an epigraph by Georgio Agamben: “Every
lament is a lament for language.” The poet illustrates with a yellow
bird “that cannot be named with the machine of language.” Instead of
trying harder, the poet, like a Zen Buddhist, opens himself: “Dead
tired I wait for it to appear again, for its name to fall / from my
tongue..” The poem concludes with the poet’s lying on the ground:
“exposed, neutral, I cross my arms / at the wrists and inscribe wings
onto the exhausted sky.” The poet is “Dead tired” and the sky is
“exhausted.” Is this a case of projection or anthropomorphism? Or is
it claustrophobia, a sense of being locked into himself?

There is much about Sesshu, a Japanese painter who created lengthy
scrolled landscapes. Wilson admires Sesshu’s spiritual and artistic
mastery: “in the swirl of your finger tips / write your landscape /
where you see it in air.” The parallel between Wilson’s inscribing
wings onto the exhausted sky and Sesshu’s delicate ability suggests
that Wilson understands his poetic work as absorbing into himself
experience in all of its rich complexity and then—again, in a Zen
Buddhist way—emptying his self, creating a state of existence both in
unity with and detached from creation: “The worm in its cherished
earth, / the worm of being worm.”

As for the sadness, perhaps it is important to the philosopher-poet
because it is true; at the same time, like all feelings in the big
picture/long landscape, it is ultimately irrelevant. For readers who
prefer to laugh, this transcending may be a hard and bitter pill to
swallow.