酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

The Poetic Lens

(The following piece is an excerpt from Chapter 3, From Vico to Pico: New Paths for People’s Poetry, of Mr. barker's unpublished book entitled Continuing Chesterton, a report on the fourth in the series of Controversies of Poets in which it begins to address the finding of the previous three that the ideological resources of the tradition were exhausted, requiring an examination of its deeper “spiritual,” i.e. philosophical or religious, underpinnings in order for People’s Poetry to revive and make progress)


Section IV: Restoring the Mosaic’s Marbles by Terry Barker

A report on the fourth CONTROVERSY OF POETS

Public Library
Marmora, Ontario, August 4, 2007


He sat upon a marble sepulchre
Massive and huge, where at the Monarch’s feet,
The righteous Baly had his Judgement-seat.
A Golden Throne before them vacant stood;
Three human forms sustain’d its ponderous weight,
With lifted hands outspread, and shoulders bow’d
Bending beneath the load.

-- Robert Southey
"The Curse of Kehama”


Long considered, with the rest of Robert Southey’s “epics”, to be bad poetry, and largely irrelevant to the canon of English High Romanticism, this Hindu-inspired spiritual tale by the colleague and friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth may offer, along with others of his similar productions, such as “Madoc” (1805), about a Welsh prince who, legend asserts, voyaged to the New World about 1170 A.D., and “Roderick, the last of the Goths” (1814), a few helpful clues in understanding the genesis of the modern Canadian “mosaic” identity, and thus of Canadian People’s Poetry, after the War of 1812. For, of course, in its second avatar (the first being New France) before the Age of Ideology, Canada was British North America, conceived of in 1791, but not realized until the test of arms of 1812-1814 that united the multi-national Loyalist refugees from the Thirteen Colonies with French Canadians, First Nations, and settlers from the British Isles against the expansionism of the United States (under the aegis, of course, of the Mercantilist British Empire).

It was thus highly appropriate that the fourth in the series of Controversies of Poets, originally conceived by the late Al Purdy and Hamilton, Ontario poet James Deahl to discuss the present state and possible future of People’s Poetry in Canada, should have been held at Marmora on what is known in Toronto as Simcoe Day weekend. For it was in the area of Marmora (named for the many marble outcroppings in the vicinity, and particularly for the huge marble rock found on Crowe Lake there) and the adjoining township of Madoc, named for Southey’s prince, that the Upper Canadian mining industry (in the latter case eventually involving gold) first developed in the 1820s, and it is this area of the Canadian Shield, stretching down into the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence lowlands, that Purdy writes of so poignantly in “The Country North of Belleville” as “the country of our defeat”, a frustration of the subsistence farming, resource-extraction, and local industrial efforts of Purdy’s “degenerate Loyalist” ancestors, well symbolizing the downfall of the vision of Canada of Lieutenant-General John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (Ontario), by mid-twentieth century.

The focus of this fourth Controversy was the spiritual underpinnings of People’s Poetry, an emphasis derived from the deliberations of the previous three discussions, which had concluded that populist poetry’s attachment to ideological movements (particulary socialism) was no longer viable because of the disintegration of these movements. This, too, made Marmora an ideal locale for these further reflections, as “the country north of Belleville” (mid-Hastings County) has become in recent decades the site of many and varied “retreats” for the renewal of spiritual experience, from Roman Catholic Marian Place, near Marmora, to the Esotericist Bartonian Metaphysical Society school near Madoc, thus functioning somewhat as “the country south of Belleville” (such as around Consecon, where the originators of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist Movement, the Fox sisters, were born) did in an earlier age.

As in Southey’s quasi-Hindu Romantic epic, where Yamen (Yama), the King of the Dead, a sort of spirit of human history, sits above the judgement seat of Baly (Bali), the demon who rules the world through ethical systems and will, so the three speakers on the spiritual foundations of People’s Poetry at the Marmora Controversy were preceded by an account of People’s Poetry’s past, delivered by Hamilton poet Jeff Seffinga. Entitled “Poetry in Performance: Oral Tradition and the Roots of People’s Poetry,” Seffinga’s paper outlined an historical sociology of poetry in general, and populist poetry in particular, detailing the origins in early tribal life of the peoples of Northwest Europe of “the authority of the bard” in the memorializing and entertaining function of the office, and its transmission through the Dark Ages (e.g. in Beowulf) and the Middle Ages (e.g. in the Arthurian corpus) to Shakespeare and the later poets of the common man, such as Burns and Clare, and of nationalism, Romanticism, and democracy (at least in part), such as Wordsworth, Whitman, and the Canadian Confederation Poets. Noting that similar cultural developments to the ones described occurred in other civilizational areas, Seffinga’s presentation nevertheless, in effect, asserted that Northwest European humanity (and its American extension) most completely articulated this representation of common human life and experience, for, as Seffinga pointed out, the American and French Revolutions (which came at the end of a long cultural, including theological, controversy) were “people’s revolutions” in a way new to history. Accordingly, in the realm of English-language poetry, the clearest formulation of a People’s Poetry with its greatest literary effectiveness, Seffinga argued, occurred in the United States after Whitman, whereas in the still partially traditional social situation in Britain, it was not until the late Victorian period that, with Thomas Hardy’s poetry, “the beginning of modern People’s Poetry” can be seen in “his consistent use of populist language and images”. As Seffinga concluded that Canada and Canadian People’s Poetry “developed under the influences of these two peoples” (the Americans and the British), it might be thought that he is suggesting that the ethos of our populist poetry is a mixture of Whitman’s optimism (or, as Malcolm Cowley calls it, mystical “self-inflation”) and Hardy’s pessimism (or, as R.P. Blackmur more accurately names it, “privation of his humanity”, brought about by the influence of the ideas of a wholly secular science), a quite convincing observation if something like this historical account be accepted, one which, however, perhaps not as obviously, describes a basis for further reflection that is compact, circular, and effectively closed against transcendence, and in this sense marmoreal like the sepulchre of the Southey poem.

This closure of the life of the spirit, and its substitution with inner-worldly mysticisms of the self, is, arguably, represented in Southey’s myth by the “Judgement seat” of “righteous Baly” (or Bali, from Sanskrit “power”), which might be identified with the empty “Golden Throne”, supported by mankind, Bali being the grandson of the demon Ravana’s first incarnation, the virtuous rival of the gods, and usurper of Indra’s power, defeated only by Vishnu incarnated partially as Krishna, a notion parallel to the Pauline description of a spiritual battle against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12 KJV). In the more complex (in the sense of complicated) context of the modern world, of course, new expressions of the fundamental perennial struggle between reality and illusion in the life of the spirit, beyond those symbolized in Hindu mythology, Pauline theology, or Romantic “poetic theology”, might be expected to be attempted, particularly in the present era of the breakdown of the ideological dream-worlds put in place as “ersatz religions” (as Eric Voegelin calls them) by earnest moralists (and immoralists) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The three presenters of papers at the Marmora Controversy of Poets, who followed Jeff Seffinga’s overview of People’s Poetry’s course to date, were engaged in just such an enterprise, one which holds promise of the possible recovery of the lost marbles of the Canadian mosaic.

The fourth in the series of Controversies of Poets was convened, as was mentioned, to begin to address the finding of the previous three that the ideological resources of the tradition were exhausted, requiring an examination of its deeper “spiritual” (i.e. philosophical or religious) underpinnings in order for People’s Poetry to revive and make progress. Although this was not stated, the precedent within the tradition for such a move is historically clear ‹ in the Canadian context, the most obvious prototype being the decades-long great debate between Milton Acorn and Al Purdy concerning (in the first place) Marxism-Leninism versus Liberal Existentialism, and then (implicit in their work) theism versus agnosticism/atheism. As this pattern makes plain, when ideological solutions to the problems of human existence lose their explanatory power, thinking is forced to the level of theology/philosophy. In thus reconsidering fundamental insights, customary symbols come into question, in the case of People’s Poetry, the symbol of “the People” itself.

The first of the controversialists, Brighton, Ontario poet, small press publisher, and President of the Canada-Cuba Literary Alliance, Richard M. (Tai) Grove addressed this basic issue head-on. Noting the terminological (and even orthographic) imprecision of usage of the expression “People’s Poetry”, and its applicational ambiguity (regular employment to denote both an historical “people” and the toilers, powerless, “ordinary people” of a society) he concluded that People’s Poetry can be defined as (following Merriam-Webster’s definition of “people”) a poetry embodying “the expression and reflection of a common interest, culture or tradition”, a “concept” inclusive, perhaps, of the “common plight and solidarity” of ordinary people, suggested by discussant R.D. Roy, a religious tradition (such as the Anglicanism of Milton Acorn and John B. Lee, noted by moderator, James Deahl) or his own former atheism or present Christian belief, both of which express a philosophical or spiritual tradition.

The second controversialist, Marmora poet and co-organizer of the Purdy Country Literary Festival (of which this Controversy was a part), Chris Faiers, took a different tack, strongly acknowledging the current irrelevance, and, indeed, destructiveness of “such dialectical humanist political philosophies as Marxism”, with which People’s Poetry often was formerly associated, but focussing on the “poetry” aspect of the tradition in question, arguing that its renewal lies not in seeking religious or philosophical bases for it, but in recognizing that “the act of writing and publishing poetry has served as a spiritual and philosophical function in our [poets’] lives, perhaps the dominant one”, so that “the very practice of thinking critically, observing our lives, and attempting to produce art [as well as] some traces of wisdom through reflection, is perhaps our truest and most defining spirituality and philosophy ‹ in fact, our religion.” The sources of and standards for such critical thinking, observation, artistic production, and “wisdom through reflection”, are, Faiers suggested, “whatever helps a People’s Poet challenge the negatives in the status quo: imperialism, class hierarchies and social injustice in general”, and recognize that “the need for Canadian independence from the American empire has reached a crucial point.” The Anglican background of Milton Acorn, John B. Lee, and other People’s Poets in Canada, noted by moderator Deahl, was understood by Faiers as either (as Richard Grove had suggested) an unimportant sociological accident or a liability for the poets in question, as “being Anglican entails a tradition of being part of the power structure, whether in a big city or a rural village”, so that “those [Anglicans] who choose not to be part of the class elite still inherit a tradition of enablement, a perhaps subconscious sense that they have inherited from their Anglican ancestors access to the keys of power, perhaps even a distant sense of noblesse oblige.” In short, Faiers concluded that “it is to the credit of People’s Poets that they have chosen Shelley’s role of Unacknowledged legislators’ rather than inheritors of power through their church connections”, offering as a description of “the spirituality of creating poetry” the following communication from Rockwood, Ontario, People’s Poet Katherine Gordon (quoted in part):

“ . . . poetry in its pure form is like meditation. It connects one
to the source of all the particle waves of manifestation. The poet
becomes one for a brief while with creation and clear sightedness,
stark truth and dark truth but the light beyond that explains the
constructive and destructive forces swirling on this plain [sic].
At the present time dark forces appear strong until we learn that
together we can change the world to a harmonious balance where
greed and materialism are the ugly twins of compassion and sharing .”

The third controversialist, Egbert, Ontario poet Anna Plesums, who confessed that she had not thought about the topic of People’s Poetry before being asked to make this presentation, and had not realized that she was herself a People’s Poet until now, read four of her poems that she believed addressed the spiritual substance of the tradition. The first, “My reasons for writing”, catalogued these reasons as follows:

. . .
Reflecting immaterial perceptions
Life and death and Light and darkness
Not measurable by any kind of scale
Wanting to give the inner self
To friends who don’t exist
. . .

The second, “Am I there?”, expressed the self-analytical basis for her ethical critique of contemporary society:

The most contagious diseases
(Silent killers of soul)
Are greed and bureaucracy.
We don’t even know that we have them
How to cure it?
Start with yourself
Dusting your soul to find them
. . .
To cure any
You can do only yourself for yourself
It isn’t an easy process
Because these pests have food around
To survive and grow
Socially promoted by advertisements.

In a similar aphoristic style, Plesums went on to outline her cosmology and metaphysics (in “Grace”):

Cosmos is regulated
Sun, moon, stars and planets,
. . .
We ‹ but a dust or a drop in it
Don’t pay a moments [sic] thought
That we too belong in this universal order.
No matter how we search
No matter what we do
No matter what we think or create
Universe is still in its own order and balance
Kept by Hand we never see.

Stop meddling and stirring up parts
That are not ours to conquer
And never will be!
. . . Grace is not possible to explain
Now or ever . . .

Finally, the poet gave us a sample of her political musings, presumably based on the philosophical anthropology/theology detailed in the first three poems read (as sketched above):

Thought

News on TV -- scandals or seed for thinking?
What to do with the garbage?
Wasted time on disputable solution
Instead of how to cure
Why not try to figure out
How to stop the production of it
Well --
That is touching some one’s financial growth
Where is the limit for financial growth?
Who are the individuals needing it limitless?
What for?
Politics? Power? Research to have more of what?
We have lost the base.
. . .

. . .
The End is Death
What do we leave behind? ? ?
Money, drugs, new generation which does not know
That work is the best medicine
To eliminate poverty, depression, loneliness, boredom
And other contemporary diseases . . .
To begin with give and take the only pill you need
LOVE

At the conclusion of the presentations by the three controversialists, there was general discussion (although not really a debate) about various points raised. The notion of an atheist (and specifically a Marxist) spirituality was canvassed, Katherine Beeman of Montreal pointing out the great interest of contemporary Marxists in Native American beliefs. R.D. Roy of Belleville took up the matter of the identity of “a people”, citing Doris Lessing (in her Massey Lectures) as noting that an articulate people have responsibility. Anna Plesums remarked that in getting to the bottom of this question of “the people”, she had “never stopped asking Why?’”, an attitude developed in discussion with her pastor, whose rejoinder had been “Why not?”, an inquiry that had convinced her that “people always want community”, a place where they can be “open, honest, and accepted.” Ms Beeman stated that in her view, the stories of People’s Poets needed to be heroic, as in Ms Plesums’ poems, showing that what had been achieved had been through will. The spirit of Cuban poet and patriot Jose Marti appeared present at this amiable Controversy, all participants seeming to agree with Marti’s sentiment, cited near the outset of the “dispute”: “Who’s the idiot who thinks the people don’t need poetry?”.

The variety of spiritualities explicated in this discussion, and by the preceding presenters, might have been taken to be illustrative of the modern “multicultural” nature of Canada, but a better analysis, in my view, would have seen this plurality of philosophies of being as a poetic recovery of the original Canadian “mosaic”. For, as many commentators have noted, the contemporary ideological concept of “multiculturalism” is drawn from U.S. sociology and politics of the 1960s (Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, 1963), a period during which the older “mosaic” concept of Canada was disappearing because of (among other factors) the influence of U.S. Positivistic social science in Canadian universities. The American foundation (as the doyen of U.S. Populist Poetry Carl Sandburg recognized) had been Puritan, while Canada’s beginnings had included Native, Roman Catholic, Palatine German Brethren, Quaker, Mennonite, Methodist, Lutheran, and Protestant Reformed (as well as the Puritan version of this) elements, placed in the relatively weak colonial setting of a Romantically-influenced Anglicanism, a branch of Christianity which has claimed to incorporate the essentials of Roman Catholic philosophy and tradition, Protestant theology, and the mystical theology of the Eastern Fathers, while acknowledging modern discoveries in the natural and social sciences, although not uncritically.

Anglicanism was a response to the “Great Confusion” (as Eric Voegelin calls it) of the Reformation period (and the preceding Renaissance) in European history, out of which multiple competing claims to be “The People of God” emerged, the precursors of the modern ideological movements. The “demonism” (as sociologist Max Weber called the closed and destructive nature of ideological thinking) of the movements can be exorcised, and the good that they claim to seek achieved, through the opening of the soul, i.e., through the experience of transcendence, as Voegelin notes.

The catalyst for the Renaissance, and its “mosaic” (from Greek mousaikos, “of the Muses”) of spiritualities, was the work of Eastern Christian polymaths such as Michael Constantine Psellus (1018-1079 A.D.) and George Gemistus Pletho (1355-1452 A.D.), who came from the vicinity of the original Marmora (Latin: “marbles”), an island in the Sea of Marmora between Europe and Asia that provided much of the marble used in Classical art and architecture. As Byron fought for the restoration to Greece from Britain of the Classical “Elgin marbles”, so it is to be hoped that the Canadian poets gathered at the new Marmora have, through their spiritual deliberations, helped in the struggle to restore the Mosaic’s lost marbles.


Terry Barker studied political theory at McMaster and Oxford Universities. He currently teaches Humanities at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, and Canadian studies and Ethnics in a Market Economy at the Business School of Humber in the Ningbo, China Program. He is the author of two collections of essays on the People's Poetry tradition, After Acorn (Mekler and Deahl, Hamilton and Pittsburgh, 1999) and Beyond Bethune (Synaxis Press, Dewdney, British Columbia, 2006). He is currently working on a sequel volume, Continuing Chesterton.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

The Poetic Lens

(The following piece is an excerpt from Chapter 3, From Vico to Pico: New Paths for People’s Poetry, of Mr. barker's unpublished book entitled Continuing Chesterton, a report on the fourth in the series of Controversies of Poets in which it begins to address the finding of the previous three that the ideological resources of the tradition were exhausted, requiring an examination of its deeper “spiritual,” i.e. philosophical or religious, underpinnings in order for People’s Poetry to revive and make progress)


Section IV: Restoring the Mosaic’s Marbles by Terry Barker

A report on the fourth CONTROVERSY OF POETS

Public Library
Marmora, Ontario, August 4, 2007


He sat upon a marble sepulchre
Massive and huge, where at the Monarch’s feet,
The righteous Baly had his Judgement-seat.
A Golden Throne before them vacant stood;
Three human forms sustain’d its ponderous weight,
With lifted hands outspread, and shoulders bow’d
Bending beneath the load.

-- Robert Southey
"The Curse of Kehama”


Long considered, with the rest of Robert Southey’s “epics”, to be bad poetry, and largely irrelevant to the canon of English High Romanticism, this Hindu-inspired spiritual tale by the colleague and friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth may offer, along with others of his similar productions, such as “Madoc” (1805), about a Welsh prince who, legend asserts, voyaged to the New World about 1170 A.D., and “Roderick, the last of the Goths” (1814), a few helpful clues in understanding the genesis of the modern Canadian “mosaic” identity, and thus of Canadian People’s Poetry, after the War of 1812. For, of course, in its second avatar (the first being New France) before the Age of Ideology, Canada was British North America, conceived of in 1791, but not realized until the test of arms of 1812-1814 that united the multi-national Loyalist refugees from the Thirteen Colonies with French Canadians, First Nations, and settlers from the British Isles against the expansionism of the United States (under the aegis, of course, of the Mercantilist British Empire).

It was thus highly appropriate that the fourth in the series of Controversies of Poets, originally conceived by the late Al Purdy and Hamilton, Ontario poet James Deahl to discuss the present state and possible future of People’s Poetry in Canada, should have been held at Marmora on what is known in Toronto as Simcoe Day weekend. For it was in the area of Marmora (named for the many marble outcroppings in the vicinity, and particularly for the huge marble rock found on Crowe Lake there) and the adjoining township of Madoc, named for Southey’s prince, that the Upper Canadian mining industry (in the latter case eventually involving gold) first developed in the 1820s, and it is this area of the Canadian Shield, stretching down into the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence lowlands, that Purdy writes of so poignantly in “The Country North of Belleville” as “the country of our defeat”, a frustration of the subsistence farming, resource-extraction, and local industrial efforts of Purdy’s “degenerate Loyalist” ancestors, well symbolizing the downfall of the vision of Canada of Lieutenant-General John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (Ontario), by mid-twentieth century.

The focus of this fourth Controversy was the spiritual underpinnings of People’s Poetry, an emphasis derived from the deliberations of the previous three discussions, which had concluded that populist poetry’s attachment to ideological movements (particulary socialism) was no longer viable because of the disintegration of these movements. This, too, made Marmora an ideal locale for these further reflections, as “the country north of Belleville” (mid-Hastings County) has become in recent decades the site of many and varied “retreats” for the renewal of spiritual experience, from Roman Catholic Marian Place, near Marmora, to the Esotericist Bartonian Metaphysical Society school near Madoc, thus functioning somewhat as “the country south of Belleville” (such as around Consecon, where the originators of the nineteenth-century Spiritualist Movement, the Fox sisters, were born) did in an earlier age.

As in Southey’s quasi-Hindu Romantic epic, where Yamen (Yama), the King of the Dead, a sort of spirit of human history, sits above the judgement seat of Baly (Bali), the demon who rules the world through ethical systems and will, so the three speakers on the spiritual foundations of People’s Poetry at the Marmora Controversy were preceded by an account of People’s Poetry’s past, delivered by Hamilton poet Jeff Seffinga. Entitled “Poetry in Performance: Oral Tradition and the Roots of People’s Poetry,” Seffinga’s paper outlined an historical sociology of poetry in general, and populist poetry in particular, detailing the origins in early tribal life of the peoples of Northwest Europe of “the authority of the bard” in the memorializing and entertaining function of the office, and its transmission through the Dark Ages (e.g. in Beowulf) and the Middle Ages (e.g. in the Arthurian corpus) to Shakespeare and the later poets of the common man, such as Burns and Clare, and of nationalism, Romanticism, and democracy (at least in part), such as Wordsworth, Whitman, and the Canadian Confederation Poets. Noting that similar cultural developments to the ones described occurred in other civilizational areas, Seffinga’s presentation nevertheless, in effect, asserted that Northwest European humanity (and its American extension) most completely articulated this representation of common human life and experience, for, as Seffinga pointed out, the American and French Revolutions (which came at the end of a long cultural, including theological, controversy) were “people’s revolutions” in a way new to history. Accordingly, in the realm of English-language poetry, the clearest formulation of a People’s Poetry with its greatest literary effectiveness, Seffinga argued, occurred in the United States after Whitman, whereas in the still partially traditional social situation in Britain, it was not until the late Victorian period that, with Thomas Hardy’s poetry, “the beginning of modern People’s Poetry” can be seen in “his consistent use of populist language and images”. As Seffinga concluded that Canada and Canadian People’s Poetry “developed under the influences of these two peoples” (the Americans and the British), it might be thought that he is suggesting that the ethos of our populist poetry is a mixture of Whitman’s optimism (or, as Malcolm Cowley calls it, mystical “self-inflation”) and Hardy’s pessimism (or, as R.P. Blackmur more accurately names it, “privation of his humanity”, brought about by the influence of the ideas of a wholly secular science), a quite convincing observation if something like this historical account be accepted, one which, however, perhaps not as obviously, describes a basis for further reflection that is compact, circular, and effectively closed against transcendence, and in this sense marmoreal like the sepulchre of the Southey poem.

This closure of the life of the spirit, and its substitution with inner-worldly mysticisms of the self, is, arguably, represented in Southey’s myth by the “Judgement seat” of “righteous Baly” (or Bali, from Sanskrit “power”), which might be identified with the empty “Golden Throne”, supported by mankind, Bali being the grandson of the demon Ravana’s first incarnation, the virtuous rival of the gods, and usurper of Indra’s power, defeated only by Vishnu incarnated partially as Krishna, a notion parallel to the Pauline description of a spiritual battle against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12 KJV). In the more complex (in the sense of complicated) context of the modern world, of course, new expressions of the fundamental perennial struggle between reality and illusion in the life of the spirit, beyond those symbolized in Hindu mythology, Pauline theology, or Romantic “poetic theology”, might be expected to be attempted, particularly in the present era of the breakdown of the ideological dream-worlds put in place as “ersatz religions” (as Eric Voegelin calls them) by earnest moralists (and immoralists) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The three presenters of papers at the Marmora Controversy of Poets, who followed Jeff Seffinga’s overview of People’s Poetry’s course to date, were engaged in just such an enterprise, one which holds promise of the possible recovery of the lost marbles of the Canadian mosaic.

The fourth in the series of Controversies of Poets was convened, as was mentioned, to begin to address the finding of the previous three that the ideological resources of the tradition were exhausted, requiring an examination of its deeper “spiritual” (i.e. philosophical or religious) underpinnings in order for People’s Poetry to revive and make progress. Although this was not stated, the precedent within the tradition for such a move is historically clear ‹ in the Canadian context, the most obvious prototype being the decades-long great debate between Milton Acorn and Al Purdy concerning (in the first place) Marxism-Leninism versus Liberal Existentialism, and then (implicit in their work) theism versus agnosticism/atheism. As this pattern makes plain, when ideological solutions to the problems of human existence lose their explanatory power, thinking is forced to the level of theology/philosophy. In thus reconsidering fundamental insights, customary symbols come into question, in the case of People’s Poetry, the symbol of “the People” itself.

The first of the controversialists, Brighton, Ontario poet, small press publisher, and President of the Canada-Cuba Literary Alliance, Richard M. (Tai) Grove addressed this basic issue head-on. Noting the terminological (and even orthographic) imprecision of usage of the expression “People’s Poetry”, and its applicational ambiguity (regular employment to denote both an historical “people” and the toilers, powerless, “ordinary people” of a society) he concluded that People’s Poetry can be defined as (following Merriam-Webster’s definition of “people”) a poetry embodying “the expression and reflection of a common interest, culture or tradition”, a “concept” inclusive, perhaps, of the “common plight and solidarity” of ordinary people, suggested by discussant R.D. Roy, a religious tradition (such as the Anglicanism of Milton Acorn and John B. Lee, noted by moderator, James Deahl) or his own former atheism or present Christian belief, both of which express a philosophical or spiritual tradition.

The second controversialist, Marmora poet and co-organizer of the Purdy Country Literary Festival (of which this Controversy was a part), Chris Faiers, took a different tack, strongly acknowledging the current irrelevance, and, indeed, destructiveness of “such dialectical humanist political philosophies as Marxism”, with which People’s Poetry often was formerly associated, but focussing on the “poetry” aspect of the tradition in question, arguing that its renewal lies not in seeking religious or philosophical bases for it, but in recognizing that “the act of writing and publishing poetry has served as a spiritual and philosophical function in our [poets’] lives, perhaps the dominant one”, so that “the very practice of thinking critically, observing our lives, and attempting to produce art [as well as] some traces of wisdom through reflection, is perhaps our truest and most defining spirituality and philosophy ‹ in fact, our religion.” The sources of and standards for such critical thinking, observation, artistic production, and “wisdom through reflection”, are, Faiers suggested, “whatever helps a People’s Poet challenge the negatives in the status quo: imperialism, class hierarchies and social injustice in general”, and recognize that “the need for Canadian independence from the American empire has reached a crucial point.” The Anglican background of Milton Acorn, John B. Lee, and other People’s Poets in Canada, noted by moderator Deahl, was understood by Faiers as either (as Richard Grove had suggested) an unimportant sociological accident or a liability for the poets in question, as “being Anglican entails a tradition of being part of the power structure, whether in a big city or a rural village”, so that “those [Anglicans] who choose not to be part of the class elite still inherit a tradition of enablement, a perhaps subconscious sense that they have inherited from their Anglican ancestors access to the keys of power, perhaps even a distant sense of noblesse oblige.” In short, Faiers concluded that “it is to the credit of People’s Poets that they have chosen Shelley’s role of Unacknowledged legislators’ rather than inheritors of power through their church connections”, offering as a description of “the spirituality of creating poetry” the following communication from Rockwood, Ontario, People’s Poet Katherine Gordon (quoted in part):

“ . . . poetry in its pure form is like meditation. It connects one
to the source of all the particle waves of manifestation. The poet
becomes one for a brief while with creation and clear sightedness,
stark truth and dark truth but the light beyond that explains the
constructive and destructive forces swirling on this plain [sic].
At the present time dark forces appear strong until we learn that
together we can change the world to a harmonious balance where
greed and materialism are the ugly twins of compassion and sharing .”

The third controversialist, Egbert, Ontario poet Anna Plesums, who confessed that she had not thought about the topic of People’s Poetry before being asked to make this presentation, and had not realized that she was herself a People’s Poet until now, read four of her poems that she believed addressed the spiritual substance of the tradition. The first, “My reasons for writing”, catalogued these reasons as follows:

. . .
Reflecting immaterial perceptions
Life and death and Light and darkness
Not measurable by any kind of scale
Wanting to give the inner self
To friends who don’t exist
. . .

The second, “Am I there?”, expressed the self-analytical basis for her ethical critique of contemporary society:

The most contagious diseases
(Silent killers of soul)
Are greed and bureaucracy.
We don’t even know that we have them
How to cure it?
Start with yourself
Dusting your soul to find them
. . .
To cure any
You can do only yourself for yourself
It isn’t an easy process
Because these pests have food around
To survive and grow
Socially promoted by advertisements.

In a similar aphoristic style, Plesums went on to outline her cosmology and metaphysics (in “Grace”):

Cosmos is regulated
Sun, moon, stars and planets,
. . .
We ‹ but a dust or a drop in it
Don’t pay a moments [sic] thought
That we too belong in this universal order.
No matter how we search
No matter what we do
No matter what we think or create
Universe is still in its own order and balance
Kept by Hand we never see.

Stop meddling and stirring up parts
That are not ours to conquer
And never will be!
. . . Grace is not possible to explain
Now or ever . . .

Finally, the poet gave us a sample of her political musings, presumably based on the philosophical anthropology/theology detailed in the first three poems read (as sketched above):

Thought

News on TV -- scandals or seed for thinking?
What to do with the garbage?
Wasted time on disputable solution
Instead of how to cure
Why not try to figure out
How to stop the production of it
Well --
That is touching some one’s financial growth
Where is the limit for financial growth?
Who are the individuals needing it limitless?
What for?
Politics? Power? Research to have more of what?
We have lost the base.
. . .

. . .
The End is Death
What do we leave behind? ? ?
Money, drugs, new generation which does not know
That work is the best medicine
To eliminate poverty, depression, loneliness, boredom
And other contemporary diseases . . .
To begin with give and take the only pill you need
LOVE

At the conclusion of the presentations by the three controversialists, there was general discussion (although not really a debate) about various points raised. The notion of an atheist (and specifically a Marxist) spirituality was canvassed, Katherine Beeman of Montreal pointing out the great interest of contemporary Marxists in Native American beliefs. R.D. Roy of Belleville took up the matter of the identity of “a people”, citing Doris Lessing (in her Massey Lectures) as noting that an articulate people have responsibility. Anna Plesums remarked that in getting to the bottom of this question of “the people”, she had “never stopped asking Why?’”, an attitude developed in discussion with her pastor, whose rejoinder had been “Why not?”, an inquiry that had convinced her that “people always want community”, a place where they can be “open, honest, and accepted.” Ms Beeman stated that in her view, the stories of People’s Poets needed to be heroic, as in Ms Plesums’ poems, showing that what had been achieved had been through will. The spirit of Cuban poet and patriot Jose Marti appeared present at this amiable Controversy, all participants seeming to agree with Marti’s sentiment, cited near the outset of the “dispute”: “Who’s the idiot who thinks the people don’t need poetry?”.

The variety of spiritualities explicated in this discussion, and by the preceding presenters, might have been taken to be illustrative of the modern “multicultural” nature of Canada, but a better analysis, in my view, would have seen this plurality of philosophies of being as a poetic recovery of the original Canadian “mosaic”. For, as many commentators have noted, the contemporary ideological concept of “multiculturalism” is drawn from U.S. sociology and politics of the 1960s (Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, 1963), a period during which the older “mosaic” concept of Canada was disappearing because of (among other factors) the influence of U.S. Positivistic social science in Canadian universities. The American foundation (as the doyen of U.S. Populist Poetry Carl Sandburg recognized) had been Puritan, while Canada’s beginnings had included Native, Roman Catholic, Palatine German Brethren, Quaker, Mennonite, Methodist, Lutheran, and Protestant Reformed (as well as the Puritan version of this) elements, placed in the relatively weak colonial setting of a Romantically-influenced Anglicanism, a branch of Christianity which has claimed to incorporate the essentials of Roman Catholic philosophy and tradition, Protestant theology, and the mystical theology of the Eastern Fathers, while acknowledging modern discoveries in the natural and social sciences, although not uncritically.

Anglicanism was a response to the “Great Confusion” (as Eric Voegelin calls it) of the Reformation period (and the preceding Renaissance) in European history, out of which multiple competing claims to be “The People of God” emerged, the precursors of the modern ideological movements. The “demonism” (as sociologist Max Weber called the closed and destructive nature of ideological thinking) of the movements can be exorcised, and the good that they claim to seek achieved, through the opening of the soul, i.e., through the experience of transcendence, as Voegelin notes.

The catalyst for the Renaissance, and its “mosaic” (from Greek mousaikos, “of the Muses”) of spiritualities, was the work of Eastern Christian polymaths such as Michael Constantine Psellus (1018-1079 A.D.) and George Gemistus Pletho (1355-1452 A.D.), who came from the vicinity of the original Marmora (Latin: “marbles”), an island in the Sea of Marmora between Europe and Asia that provided much of the marble used in Classical art and architecture. As Byron fought for the restoration to Greece from Britain of the Classical “Elgin marbles”, so it is to be hoped that the Canadian poets gathered at the new Marmora have, through their spiritual deliberations, helped in the struggle to restore the Mosaic’s lost marbles.


Terry Barker studied political theory at McMaster and Oxford Universities. He currently teaches Humanities at Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, and Canadian studies and Ethnics in a Market Economy at the Business School of Humber in the Ningbo, China Program. He is the author of two collections of essays on the People's Poetry tradition, After Acorn (Mekler and Deahl, Hamilton and Pittsburgh, 1999) and Beyond Bethune (Synaxis Press, Dewdney, British Columbia, 2006). He is currently working on a sequel volume, Continuing Chesterton.
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Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

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[anna]

Good.

Thanks for sharing.
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Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

[[星子安娜]]

Good.

Thanks for sharing.
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Anna Yin

《爱的灯塔-星子安娜双语诗选》
<Nightlights> <Seven Nights with the Chinese Zodiac> ...

http://annapoetry.com

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