Speaking Notes: Write Around Alberta event

Stanley Milner Library, Edmonton, Alberta

October 2, 2005

…. So now I’m the first poet laureate for Edmonton. And Leanne asked me to talk a little bit about that experience.

When I began to think what to say to you, I found it a little difficult. People ask me all the time,  “So how’s this poet laureate gig going?” I smile and say (vaguely, enthusiastically) that it’s just great, very exciting, there’s so much to do… But it’s still a bit shapeless. I feel like I’ve been given a big lump of clay and a potter’s wheel and told, “make something nice.” Sometimes it seems that my main job is to help people figure out how to pronounce the word. (Think of the rhythm of ‘graduate’ and you’ll get it.)

The role of poet laureate is a strange one, in ways. The British tradition goes back to the Middle Ages. The position has been held by some of the finest poets in our language – from Chaucer to Tennyson. And also by some of the most spectacular mediocrities. Kings aren’t always the best judges of poetry, I guess. And coughing up obligatory odes for royal marriages doesn’t necessarily lead to the best literature.

So historically, there have been conflicted attitudes to the idea of an official poet – after all, aren’t poets supposed to be free spirits, unconfined by expectation, smoking in grungy cafés instead of hanging around the corridors of power. In fact, this bohemian picture is a rather recent view of artists – one that goes back to the symbolist poets in the late nineteenth century. The Romantics felt that the poet speaks for the rest of humanity. But the symbolists came up with the idea that poetry should exist independently of society – that it should ‘épater les bourgeois.’ Otherwise, you’re just part of the philistines and the status quo. This has been a remarkably persistent idea. 

In a way, I think the current trend to appoint poets laureate is an attempt to redress the balance a little. And laureates are certainly becoming more common – even if Edmonton is the first city in western Canada to create this position. 

Certainly poets should be free to point out things that society would rather not pay attention to. We should occasionally blow up the bourgeois. But we don’t do it from another orbit. We are part of the world, part of society, part of traditions that go back thousands of years, part of an ongoing dialogue about the nature of the human experience. 

However, I think there is a hunger for poetry and for poets to help us understand our world and delight in our birthright of language. The human environment is asking for a poet laureate – and I feel that’s the reason for the rather surprising degree of interest that this position has created. It feels almost as though a catalyst has been dropped into a supersaturated solution, and all these lovely crystals are emerging.

So here I am as the first course. But before reading my own work, I want to talk about another Alberta writer, Georges Bugnet.

In the microfiche filing cabinet up on the second floor of the library, in envelope 3600, you can find two microfilm negatives covered with tiny images of the pages of Voix de la solitude. It was book of poetry published in 1938 – 500 copies printed by Les Editions du Totem, Montreal. (Clearly, poetry print runs haven’t changed much in 70 years.)

Georges died in a St. Albert nursing home, at the age of 102, in 1981. That was just a year after the founding of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and a few months before I arrived in Alberta. His life didn’t so much overlap mine as adjoin it, like linked stamps on a perforated sheet.

He had been born in France in 1879. He was educated there and studied for the priesthood. But then he had a major change in his life – he married, and in 1905, he came to Alberta. He took up a homestead near Lac Majeau, 80 km northwest of Edmonton, in an area later named Rich Valley, which is part of the Glory Hills. There he raised his family of nine children, and from 1924-29 he was editor of the Alberta French language paper, l’Union,

After the age of 40, he began to publish creative writing. Novels at first – he published three – and then this volume of verse. Then he stopped publishing – at least as far as fiction and poetry go. People largely forgot the books he wrote back before World War 2, although some recognition of his remarkable talents dawned in his later years and the University of Alberta granted him an honorary doctorate when he was 100 years old.

Not long after his death, the Guild named its new annual award for fiction after him. I was a little slower to catch on. It took me a long time to realize that the rose I had planted in my garden, the Thérèse Bugnet, was the work of a poet. He bred this rose carefully, crossing a double wild rose from Russia with the Alberta single variety to produce the famous Thérèse Bugnet rose, named after his sister and now grown all over the world. 

There is an article by him in American Rose Annual (1941), called “The Search for Total Hardiness.” In it, he talks about the patient process of pollenizing his hybrids, trying out the resulting generations for hardiness and colour and scent. In some respects, he sounds very practical:

My idea is not so much to add new varieties to the gardens of the city‑dweller as to produce tough stuff for my fellow farmers who have no time to coddle tender plants.

But the poetry of it shines through. This is how his article concludes:

At the present time no one can tell how long will be this work. Fair success might come out of just one mating; more likely it will require a great many. … I may be able to hasten the hour of victory. Be that as it may, one can hardly wish, in these years of terrible wars, for a more pleasant “job” than that of endeavoring to obtain, for the benefit of man, new favors, new clean and long-lasting gifts, through patient cooperation with that mysteriously and magnificently creative power which some call God, and some others Nature, meaning, after all, the same thing, the same unfathomable entity.

I suspect that I might have had some spectacular disagreements with Georges Bugnet on subjects like religion and politics. But I still feel an immense fellow feeling for this man as a writer – for several reasons.

First, he decided to become a creator here. Some people feel a need to go to the centre to become an artist. Others, like Georges and I, get on better when we’re further away from its pull. It seems to give us some breathing room.

At the same time, he was aware of the intellectual currents of his time. In the preface to Voix de la solitude, he talks about the influence of Verlaine, and the efforts of modernist innovators to make verse more subtle. He comments, “I have little doubt this pleases an elite. … However, … most readers are cast afloat on unfamiliar waves.” His attitude can be interpreted either as the stubborn conservatism of the provinces or thoughtful independence from fashion. I like to think of it as the latter.

Another thing I like is the fact that he didn’t publish his books until relatively late. He was dedicated as an artist. But he was a citizen as well. For thirty years he served as secretary of the Rich Valley School District, and for thirteen years as a school trustee at Lac Ste Anne.

And I love the roses – the way that hybridizing roses seems so wonderful a metaphor for poetry itself. Something that is patiently pulled together from roots in different parts of the world. Something that can flower into a new form from modest ancestors. Something that is always “a search for total hardiness.”

But most of all, I like how this place seeps so thoroughly into his work. His novels are set in the region, and treat aboriginal people and the Riel rebellion with respect. But most of all, it’s the details of forest and animal life, muskeg and marsh hay that set his work apart, and make me feel as though I’m reading work by a friend. 

I think the best way of giving you a flavour of it is to read you one of the poems. I’ve done a translation of Le Coyote, which I’d like to read. And then, so that you know what it really should sound like, I’m going to ask Pierrette Requier to join me and read it in the original French.

Le Coyote is a somber piece – the coyote dies of strychnine poisoning, and Georges draws a religious comparison with the human inability to resist temptation. But it is the details about the animal itself that I love in the poem. There is even a little footnote in the book to explain that the characteristic trail of the coyote forms a narrow line. That, more than anything, reminds me that coyotes had probably found their way into very few poems up until this one, and that the French literati were being presented with something new.

Here it is in translation:

Le Coyote

 

Under the fall of night, out of the rough brush,

the coyote comes silently.

He lengthens his neck, watches, sniffs the wind.

He points his ears and quivers.

 

In his veins, this night, blood has fermented.

This night, the power of instinct pulled him towards his fate.

This night, he felt his strength at the full

and came forth, to consume harsh death.

 

He traces a narrow line in the snow.

No sound startles the dreamy silences.

He glides, living shadow, in the glimmer of death,

and his step quiets itself in the quilted ground.

 

A light glitters on the far horizon …

hoping, with a wild, unstoppable desire

to face this formidable being

the coyote sniffs human effluvia.

 

Suddenly he stops and collapses in the snow.

A new smell strikes his nostrils.

He listens a moment, shudders to the bone

in terror at the snare.

 

He readies himself for the supreme effort.

No noise … the coyote disdains funeral obsessions

and, dizzy with vertigo, crawls through the shadows

towards the inescapable command.

 

It is done. At the forest’s foot, in the somber ravine,

he rattles heavily, stretched on the snow.

The heart weighted, ulcered by forbidden fruit,

the body arcing with the bitterness of strychnine.

 

***

 

And, like him, seeking ceaselessly your threshold,

Lord, and trembling at your mysterious call,

exhausted by uncertainty, crushed by misery,

finding nothing here but night and the devil,

 

humanity hurls itself into the eternal fog,

hoping to find a modern Noel …

But our dreams are aborted, like another Babel

and our hearts run over with vast bitterness.

In conclusion … One of the things I would like to do in this role as Edmonton’s first poet laureate is to make it clear that I’m not ‘the’ poet of Edmonton. I’m just one of a great number of people here who love practising this art.

I’m like one tree in an aspen stand. An aspen stand is actually the world’s largest single organism – a whorl of trunks and branches that arise from a single interconnected root system that is constantly generating and regenerating. The laureateship is not a lump of clay on the potter’s wheel to be thumped and shaped into something I consider ‘nice.’ As poet laureate, I’m wearing a temporary tiara of birds and I’m the closest tree to the highway where cars are driving by. But I’m just part of what is growing and spreading here, in this city, this century, this human place…