Wider Boundaries of Daring

Description

Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry announces a bold revision of the genealogy of Canadian literary modernism by foregrounding the originary and exemplary contribution of women poets, critics, cultural activists, and experimental prose writers Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Miriam Waddington, Phyllis Webb, Elizabeth Brewster, Jay Macpherson, Anne Wilkinson, Anne Marriott, and Elizabeth Smart. In the introduction, editor Di Brandt champions particularly the achievements of Livesay, Page, and Webb in setting the visionary parameters of Canadian and international literary modernism.

The writers profiled in Wider Boundaries of Daring are the real founders of Canadian modernism, the contributors of this volume argue, both for their innovative aesthetic and literary experiments and for their extensive cultural activism. They founded literary magazines and writers’ groups, wrote newspaper columns, and created a new forum for intellectual debate on public radio. At the same time, they led busy lives as wives and mothers, social workers and teachers, editors and critics, and competed successfully with their male contemporaries in the public arena in an era when women were not generally encouraged to hold professional positions or pursue public careers.

The acknowledgement of these writers’ formidable contribution to the development of modernism in Canada, and along with it “wider boundaries of daring” for women and other people previously disadvantaged by racial, ethnic, or religious identifications, has profound implications for the way we read and understand Canadian literary and cultural history and for the shape of both national and international modernisms.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554586905
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

WIDER BOUNDARIES OF DARING
WIDER BOUNDARIES OF DARING
The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women s Poetry
DI BRANDT BARBARA GODARD , editors
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wider boundaries of daring : the modernist impulse in Canadian women s poetry / Di Brandt and Barbara Godard, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55458-150-4
1. Canadian poetry (English)-Women authors-History and criticism. 2. Canadian poetry (English)-20th century-History and criticism. 3. Canadian poetry (English)-21st century-History and criticism. 4. Modernism (Literature)-Canada. I. Brandt, Di II. Godard, Barbara
PS 8103. W 6 W 44 2009 C 811 .5409112 C2008-904549-1
Cover image: The Dance by P.K. Irwin (1962; egg tempera, 36.5 cm 32 cm), from the collection of P.K. Page. Cover design by Angela Moody, Moving Images. Text design by C. Bonas-Taylor.
2009 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
CONTENTS
A New Genealogy of Canadian Literary Modernism Di Brandt
T HE M AKING OF C ANADIAN L ITERARY M ODERNISM
The Writing Livesays: Connecting Generations of Canadian Modernism Ann Martin
Feminist and Regionalist Modernisms in Contemporary Verse, CV/II , and CV2 Christine Kim
P.K. Page: Discovering a Modern Sensibility Sandra Djwa
Tradition, Individual Talent, and a young woman / From backwoods New Brunswick : Modernism and Elizabeth Brewster s (Auto)Poetics of the Subject Bina Toledo Freiwald
And we are homesick still : Home, the Unhomely, and the Everyday in Anne Wilkinson Kathy Mezei
Anne Marriott: Modernist on the Periphery Marilyn J. Rose
Discontinuity, Intertextuality, and Literary History: Gail Scott s Reading of Gertrude Stein Lianne Moyes
L ITERARY M ODERNISM AS C ULTURAL A CT
They cut him down : Race, Class, and Cultural Memory in Dorothy Livesay s Day and Night Pamela McCallum
Dorothy Livesay and CBC Radio: The Politics of Modernist Aesthetics, Gender, and Regionalism Peggy Lynn Kelly
Phyllis Webb as Public Intellectual Pauline Butling
A Collection of Solitary Fragments : Miriam Waddington as Critic Candida Rifkind
Our hearts both leapt / in love with metaphor : P.K. Page s Professional Elegies Sara Jamieson
The Passionate and Sublime Modernism of Elizabeth Smart Anne Qu ma
Jay Macpherson s Modernism Miriam Nichols
Word, I, and Other in Margaret Avison s Poetry Katherine Quinsey
Reading P.K. Page in English/Italian; or, On the Politics of Translating Modernist Gender Elena Basile
C ONTRIBUTORS
I NDEX
A New Genealogy of Canadian Literary Modernism
DI BRANDT
We Are Alone
We are alone, who strove to be
Together in the high sun s weather.
We are bereft, as broods a tree
Whose leaves the river sucks forever.
We are as clouds, which merge and vanish
Leaving breathless the dead horizon-
We are as comrades, whose handshake only
Comes rare as leap-year and mistletoe morning.
Each one ploughing a one-man clearing
Neither one alive to see
In wider boundaries of daring
What the recompense might be.
-Dorothy Livesay
Dorothy Livesay s poem We Are Alone, written in the 1930s, expresses simultaneously dismay and hope: dismay that the grandly conceived collective cultural project she and her colleagues are engaged in has become a fragmented, isolating one; and hope that its benefits will nevertheless be recognized and valued beyond their place and time, and beyond the realm of current influence and experience of its members. Livesay was engaged in many collective cultural projects in her long career; by the time she wrote this poem (probably still in her twenties), she had already published two well-received volumes of poetry, studied French Symbolist poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris, joined the Communist Party, trained as a social worker at the University of Toronto, and become a caseworker and political activist in Montreal and New Jersey. She would go on to write many more books of poetry, essays, and reviews, frequently announcing subjects and strategies that would become mainstream attentions in Canadian poetry a decade or two later, winning the Lorne Pierce Gold Medal of the Royal Society in 1947, and the Governor General s Awards for Poetry in 1944 and 1984. She established two literary magazines, Contemporary Verse in Vancouver in 1941 (together with Anne Marriott, Doris Ferne, and Floris Clark McClaren, appointing Alan Crawley as editor); and Contemporary Verse II in Winnipeg in 1975 (later renamed Contemporary Verse 2 ). Livesay was the self-appointed mentor of several generations of poets across the country for many decades, actively overseeing the development of an internationally inflected Canadian poetry scene and going out of her way to encourage younger women and men in every region to explore their poetic talents as deeply as possible. Her prolific, outspoken, and influential career spanned nearly the whole century, inhabited numerous locations and intellectual engagements across Canada and internationally, and addressed an impressive array of subjects-from romance to nationalism, racism, war, ecology, eroticism, reproduction, feminism, intergenerational relations, and aging-in a range of genres and poetic forms, from precise imagist portraits to energetic agitprop chants to politically astute radio dramas, to influential critical essays, to rhythmically charged, visionary, documentary long poems, prose autobiography, and fiction.
With so dazzling a track record, Lee Thompson asks in her 1987 critical study of Livesay s work, why has Livesay been comparatively neglected by literary critics in her homeland? Thompson cites the omission of Livesay from F.R. Scott s 1936 anthology New Provinces , which claimed to illustrate the new directions Canadian modernists were taking ; from Gary Geddes s 1970 first edition of 15 Canadian Poets ; and from the very male-dominated 1983 York University conference on the Canadian long poem, where Livesay, one of its senior and most accomplished practitioners, was noticeably unf ted and even slighted while a tight circle of male poets and critics gave congratulatory papers upon one another s work (147). Gender discrimination, asserts Thompson, along with a good dose of Ontario and Quebec centric regionalism, must be considered the basis for these omissions: how could a woman, a social worker and mother from Winnipeg and Vancouver, be the leader of one of Canada s most important and innovative literary movements? The same pattern of neglect continues into the present. Brian Trehearne, in his otherwise fascinating history of the rise of literary modernism in Canada, Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (1989), makes the astonishing claim that Canadian modernism began in part in the early volumes of Livesay (252), and then mentions her only two more times in his 370-page book! Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski never mention her in their pioneering history of the rise of modernism in Canada, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1947).
Dean Irvine, whose archival and editorial work has brought Livesay s and Anne Wilkinson s unpublished and uncollected works to recent critical and public attention, nevertheless reverts to the same masculinist genealogy in his 2005 anthology of essays, The Canadian Modernists Meet . The title is an overt nod to F.R. Scott s satirical poem, The Canadian Authors Meet (1927), which posited a muscular and implicitly masculine rebellion against the (feminine) tea party aesthetics of the Canadian literary establishment of the period. The poem is often cited as the birth announcement of Canadian modernism; one can read in it a subtext of a masculinist self-birthing, bootstrapping, as is the fashionable term among scientists, through the rejection of maternity and women s collegial presence and influence: T.S. Eliot s daunting women talking of Michelangelo are reduced here to twittering Miss Crotchets. It is a narrative of origins that has been obediently adhered to by most Canadian literary historians into the present, even though it is, as Carole Gerson characterized it in an essay on literary canon formation in Canadian Literature in 1992, a nasty [if witty] poem by an otherwise progressive poet (62), that effectively dismissed the growing influence of women writers in the Canadian literary scene at the time. (From 1924 to 1933, the p